Portugal welcomes Jews 500 years after Inquisition
You can go in search of your history. This month, I learned that history can also come to you — and bring with it a timely message. Last week I became one of the first Americans — the first on the West Coast — to be granted a Portuguese passport under a new law offering citizenship to the descendants of Jews who were persecuted during that country’s Inquisition five centuries years ago. (Spain is doing something similar.)
In 1989, in a remarkable public statement, President Mario Soares of Portugal apologized to Jews who had been tortured, burned at the stake or massacred by mobs, or were expelled, during the country’s horrific Inquisition period some 500 years ago. He requested forgiveness for the persecution of Jews as well as Cristãos-novos, “new Christians,” who had been forced to convert but secretly continued to practice Judaism. In his statement, Soares said that “the Inquisition had run directly counter to traditional Portuguese ideals of tolerance and coexistence.” In 2013, the Portuguese parliament passed legislation offering dual citizenship to those who could prove bona fide descent, calling the persecution of Jews a “stain” on Portuguese history; application procedures were finalized in 2015.
I jumped at the chance. To my amazement, I am now a naturalized citizen of Portugal and the European Union. Soon, my children will be, too.
But when the red passport finally arrived from Lisbon after two years, I never expected that America itself would be moving toward darkness and intolerance, with the Trump administration looking to ban immigrants based on their religion or national origin; deportations of people of a particular ethnicity; talk of “extreme vetting” of religious beliefs; , open discussions about a domestic Muslim registry and the slashing of the total refugee quota for 2017 by more than half — thus capping it at only 50,000.
Like most American Jews, my ancestors were mainly Ashkenazic —Yiddish or German speakers from central and eastern European cities and villages who fled the threat of pogroms or conscription in the Czar’s army. Luckily for me, they reached these shores before 1921, when the xenophobic Emergency Quota Act sharply limited the influx of eastern and southern Europeans, lest they sully the national character. The act wasn’t abolished until 1965.
But as my father often reminded us, his great-grandfather, Henry Ferris, had been different. Ferris had been Sephardic — a descendant of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who practiced a variant flavor of the faith, with different Hebrew pronunciation, rituals and customs. He and his parents were buried in Brooklyn under flat, horizontal tombstones, Sephardic style.
During my 20s, I became possessed by acute genealogy mania. On a trip to Europe in the 1980s, I visited the Municipal Archives of Amsterdam, where I knew Henry Ferris had been born in 1848. Thanks to the Dutch city government’s careful preservation of all vital records, I found his birth notice within 15 minutes. Except I didn’t find Henry Ferris. I found that he was born Aron Ferares; his parents were Judah Ferares and Miryam Rodrigues Lopes, descendants of the many Portuguese Jews who had fled to tolerant Amsterdam during the 16th and 17th centuries, and whose famous Esnoga (synagogue) still stands not far from where the painter Rembrandt once lived on Jodenbreestraat. They had spoken a mixture of Portuguese and Hebrew, and wrote poetry in Ladino — the better-known mixture of Spanish and Hebrew. Their unusual folk music and cuisine mixed Iberian, Ottoman and Arab influences.
I spent six weeks there researching my ancestors, photocopying records handwritten in Dutch, Portuguese and Hebrew, getting translation help from the Brazilian and Israeli backpackers also staying at “Bob’s Youth Palace” near the Central Station.
I traced back 11 generations, to people with names like Jakob de Pinto and Sara Jesurun d’Oliveira, Hanna Sacuto, Judith Cohen Belinfante and others who had lived in the same small neighborhood and were all buried in the same cemetery outside the city walls.
The signatures on their documents were the flourishes of educated people who had been traders, theologians and physicians, even the granddaughter of an astronomer who had advised explorer Vasco de Gama. The earliest records named their birthplaces — Lisbon, Vila Real and Porto, Portugal.
I also learned that relatives of my ancestors had fled instead to the New World — the Dutch colony in Brazil called Recife. And when the Portuguese gained control over the Brazilian colonies and brought over their Inquisition, the Jews fled north, founding the two oldest Jewish communities in the United States — in New Amsterdam and tolerant Newport, R.I. In 1790, when George Washington was visiting Newport, the Jewish community’s leader, Moses Seixas, delivered a public letter to Washington, expressing hope that the young country would accord respect and tolerance to all of its citizens, regardless of their background and religious beliefs. Washington replied in an Aug. 18, letter, reassuring Seixas that the new government guaranteed religious liberty for all:
“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support . ... while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
And I learned that in 1848, infant Aron Ferares was carried by his parents onto a ship, over the ocean and eventually into Brooklyn. At 16, he changed his name to Henry Ferris and joined the New York Militia, which was dispatched to Texas to root out Comanches and Kiowas along the frontier. Oh, the terrible irony.
As for the Ferares and Rodrigues Lopeses who stayed behind in Amsterdam, eventually the whole community was rounded up and sent to Auschwitz and Sobibor.
Fast forward to 2015. While surfing the Internet at home in Portland, Ore., I stumbled across the astonishing news that Portugal was offering passports to those who could prove Portuguese Sephardic ancestry via names, customs or lineage. Which I could.
As the Dutch records were now online, it took only a few hours. The rest of the paperwork took two years, many euros and several trips to the regional Portuguese Consulate in San Francisco.
I never expected that while I waited for a passport from a country atoning for officially sanctioned religious and ethnic persecution, the United States of America itself would soon take a turn back in that hateful direction, stepping away from the foundational notion of tolerance expressed by Washington. President Trump’s xenophobic policies and pronouncements have encouraged those who harbor the least tolerance, bringing predictable, miserable results: fires at mosques in Texas, Washington and Florida; widespread fear among Latinos that their families might be torn apart; bomb threats at Jewish community centers; refugees who had sought sanctuary here from persecution now fleeing to Canada in the dead of night.
I fear the history this country is now making.