The Portuguese Dreyfus
The Ruin of Artur Carlos de Barros Basto
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was unjustly convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was innocent, a victim of antisemitism and his case became a cause célèbre. He was eventually acquitted and set free, but only after a public outcry led by some of the leading figures in French public life. The “Dreyfus Affair” is one of the most notorious examples of state-sanctioned antisemitism against an individual.
Artur Carlos de Barros Basto was treated in a similar fashion by the military in his country. People call him the Portuguese Dreyfus, though his story is far less well known that of the French officer.
Barros Basto’s story begins in 1496, when King Manuel of Portugal gave an ultimatum to the Jews in his country. They were either to convert to Christianity or to leave. Spain had issued a similar decree four years earlier and Portugal had become a haven for many Spanish Jews who had refused to convert. Now, under pressure from Spain, Portugal was adopting the same policy.
There was a difference though. In Spain the Inquisition aggressively policed those who had converted to Christianity, torturing and murdering those who they suspected of not being sincere in their conversion. In Portugal, no Inquisition had yet been established and King Manuel was more relaxed about the religious practices of those Jews who had converted to Catholicism.
The result was that, unlike in Spain, many Jewish converts continued to live a partially Jewish life. Nominally they were Catholic and had to be seen as such in public. Still, nobody inquired too deeply into what they were doing at home, whether they were lighting candles on a Friday evening, observing the festivals or not eating certain foods. They didn’t circumcise their children though; that would have been too much of a giveaway.
Eventually the Inquisition was set up in Portugal and life for these so-called crypto-Jews, or Marranos, became far more unpleasant. Many fled to the north of the country, to the hills around Belmonte, backwaters where the Inquisition rarely ventured. They formed themselves into communities, married among themselves and lived largely undisturbed, forgotten by most people, for the next few centuries. The religion they practised was eclectic, they had been out of contact with the mainstream Jewish world for so long that they had forgotten most of the rituals, and those practices they did remember they didn’t always get right.
Artur Barros Basto claimed to have come from their world. Actually, some researchers now believe that he didn’t, that he had Jewish ancestry but hadn’t been born into a crypto-Jewish community. But that is not the point. What matters is that he had Judaism somewhere in his background and it was soon to come to the fore. As a young man he took up a career in the army, was a leader of the Portuguese republican forces in the revolution of 1910 and became a highly decorated officer in the First World War. He developed an interest in Judaism. One legend is that when he walked into a fellow officer’s tent on a Friday evening during the war, he saw shabbat candles burning. It evoked a childhood memory of seeing his grandmother light candles. This was enough to spark off a yearning for the faith. In the 1920s he converted to Judaism.
Around the same time that Barros Basto was beginning to rediscover his faith, a Polish engineer, Samuel Schwartz, stumbled across the crypto-Jews living in the north of the country. They were astonished to meet him; they had thought they were the only Jews left in the world. When he told them about Jewish life elsewhere they were fascinated. And so, a year or two after Barros Basto converted, the President of the small synagogue in Lisbon wrote to the Chief Rabbi of Israel, telling him that there was a group of crypto-Jews in Belmonte, in the north of the country, who wanted to convert back to mainstream Judaism. The Chief Rabbi replied that they did not need to convert. Since they had always married among themselves, they were as Jewish as anyone else.
In England the historian Wilfred Samuel, heard about this correspondence. England was still an important place in those days and Samuel thought that British Jews should play a part in the revival of Jewish life in Portugal. He funded an investigation by Lucien Wolf, the secretary of the Anglo Jewish Association. Wolf, a respected historian in his own right with an interest in Sephardi history, travelled to Portugal, met the country’s President and Prime Minister and reported back. He recommended that an educational programme be set up in Portugal to help the crypto-Jews to learn about their heritage and return to Judaism. He suggested that the programme be run from the town of Porto, Portugal’s second largest city, the nearest large town to Belmonte. The English Jewish community, he insisted, should establish a Marrano committee to raise the money that the programme needed and build a synagogue in Porto. He noted that Artur Barros Basto was stationed in Porto, and recommended that he be asked to manage the programme.
And so it was that Artur Barros Basto, not long after converting to Judaism himself, was charged with helping Portuguese crypto-Jews to adopt fully Jewish lives. He threw himself into the project with gusto, he led synagogue services, encouraged timorous crypto-Jews to come closer, wrote a book, pamphlets and news sheets, taught, guided, advised and led the community. He established a school, and with the help of the wealthy Kadoorie family of Hong Kong and Shanghai, built a splendid new synagogue in Porto; a testament to his vision and energy. Visitors to Porto commented on his magnetic personality, his big open heart, his confidence and his leadership. When refugees began arriving from Germany in the 1930s, Porto had both the religious infrastructure in place to help them settle and a welcoming personality who, effortlessly, helped them to feel at home.
Unfortunately, Portugal was still a country that had no experience of Jews, one that, knowing no different, still held on to all the old medieval antisemitic prejudices and bigotry. Not many crypto-Jews responded to Barro Basto’s overtures; they thought of themselves as Catholics, not Jews; they held the same prejudices as everyone else. For them, lighting candles on a Friday night or not eating pork were just old family traditions. The idea of returning to Judaism was an anathema.
The Catholic Church too was affronted by the idea of the crypto-Jews returning to Judaism. As far as the Church was concerned these people were Catholics who were being seduced away from their faith. The new prime minister of Portugal, the fascist António de Oliveira Salazar, agreed. Creating a climate of religious fear was just one of the methods he was using to impose his dictatorial will upon the country. None of this was good for Barros Basto. Once a decorated member of Portuguese society, he was now viewed with suspicion, a subversive figure, a man to be avoided.
There was trouble within the Jewish community too. Barros Basto fell out with Isaac Cassuto, a German refugee who had become President of the synagogue. The cause of their quarrel, its extent and the rights and wrongs have never been convincingly explained, but the upshot was that Cassuto joined forces with Barros Basto’s enemies, to devastating effect.
In 1935 a local priest set out to discredit Barros Basto. He built a relationship with some of the boys from the Jewish school, asking them loaded questions and making insinuations. Eventually two boys accused Barros Basto of abusing them. The police became involved, the circumcisions that he performed were added to the dossier of evidence against him and Isaac Cassuto, whose son was a teacher at the school, became a prosecution witness. Barros Basto’s case was turned over to the army who court-martialled him.
The case dragged on for two years until it was eventually declared inconclusive. By then it was too late. The small, fragile Jewish community had collapsed; parents had withdrawn their children from the school, several of the crypto-Jews had returned to their original communities. Barros Basto had fallen from grace. In 1943 the army stripped him from his rank and issued him with a dishonourable discharge.
Like Dreyfus he was dismissed from the army. Like Dreyfus he had been the victim of antisemitism. And, like Dreyfus, his supporters rallied round. Not immediately, the climate of fear under the Salazar regime was too great. Barros Basto died in in 1961. And in 1975, when Salazar’s regime fell and Portugal became a democracy, his daughter Miryam began to campaign for his posthumous rehabilitation. The dossier she submitted to the Ministry of Defence showed overwhelmingly that he had been the victim of a conspiracy. The Ministry advised her to appeal to the President for a pardon. The President replied, sympathetically, that too much time had elapsed; the case could no longer be reopened.
For a long time that is how matters rested. Then in 2011, Barros Basto’s granddaughter, Isabel Ferreira Lopes presented a petition to the Portuguese Parliament. It called for his rehabilitation, saying that “Barros Basto was separated from the Army due to a general climate of animosity against him motivated by the fact of being a Jew.” Parliament agreed, they unanimously passed a resolution declaring him “morally rehabilitated” and called on the Ministry of Defence to tear up his dishonourable discharge. They told the Ministry to pay compensation to his family.
50 years after his death, Artur Carlos de Barros Basto was exonerated, his name cleared of any wrongdoing, his achievements once again valued. His family are still waiting for the promised compensation.
What a story!