The following study is a first cautious attempt to investigate an aspect of recent Jewish history which has so far been neglected in research - the action taken by Sephardic Jews to rescue the endangered Portuguese-Spanish communities in Europe taking the fate of the community in Hamburg as one example.
The records of the Amsterdam World Conference of Sephardic Communities in 1938, documents owned by the Hamburg Portuguese families Cassuto and Sealtiel and the recently discovered emigration records of the Hamburg tax and finance authorities now make it possible to begin tracing the efforts of the Sephardic communities throughout the world to save the threatened Portuguese-Jewish community in Hamburg. Furthermore, I shall briefly deal with the question as to what the Marranos in Portugal, who themselves had been so selflessly helped by the English, Dutch and German Marrano committees to find their way back to normative Judaism in the 1920s and 1930s, undertook to help the Portuguese Jews in Hamburg.
At the beginning of the national socialist tyranny there were about 250 Sephardic Jews living in Hamburg. In the Jewish community in Hamburg, which was a unique model of inter-Jewish tolerance, the Portuguese played an unimportant role in the 20th century, not only with regard to their numbers but also economically and socially. Since the middle of the 19th century there had been a growing number of marriages with Ashkenazic Jews, a disproportionate number of old people in the community and an increasing readiness to relinquish Judaism or convert to Christianity - all factors which weakened the position of this tradition-conscious community. Even though the Portuguese in Hamburg no longer had any connection to Portugal or Spain, there were still some Sephardic Jews from the Azores and North Africa (particularly from Morocco) who settled in Hamburg and Altona in the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century the community was unexpectedly reinforced by a large influx of Sephardic Jews from Turkey.
Although there is no record of Sephardic Jews from Hamburg visiting Portugal before 1933, the community still took a serious interest in the Marrano movement in Portugal. One of the most active in this respect was Alfonso Cassuto, a young student of Romance languages and literature, who followed the examples of Amsterdam and London and founded a Marrano committee. He supported the "Apostle of the Marranos", Artur Carlos de Barros Basto, with several donations of money and also published several articles in his journal Ha-Lapid. The important and still not fully appreciated role of Rabbi Dr. Benjamin Cohen also deserves attention. Benjamin Cohen, grandson of Rabbi Benjamin Cohen of Morocco and son of Rabbi Jacob Cohen of Altona, who for a short time was a rabbi in the Sephardic community in Berlin, was even invited to go to Portugal in 1930 to lead the Marranos back to normative Judaism.
As a result of its geographical location at the edge of the European continent German emigrants did not focus their attention on Portugal as a possible country of refuge until quite a late stage. The poverty of the country and its dictatorial regime also did not make it a very inviting place to settle in. Even so, as early as 1933 a few dozen mostly Jewish emigrants came to Lisbon and Porto, among them some Portuguese Jews from Hamburg. Immediately after the Nazis seized power many of the influential Portuguese families left Hamburg. For those who left with a premonition of future developments although they were not in any immediate danger, Palestine was seldom their first choice when it came to looking for a new home or even only temporary refuge, as very few of them were committed Zionists. The argument often repeated by German Jews that the Portuguese Jews had nothing to fear from the Nazis, because being "Portuguese" they stood under the protection of the Portuguese government, is completely unfounded. Tis raises the question whether the government in Lisbon knew anything at all of the existence of Portuguese Jews in Germany and, if it did, whether it had taken any measures to protect them. If, despite this, Portugal was considered as a possible country of exile, it was due to personal, professional or business contacts. A prominent example is the Cassuto family, who were to play an important role both in Hamburg and their country of exile.
In the case of the Cassuto family it was just such personal contacts and the prospect of being given employment which made the Cassutos settle in Porto. In the summer of 1933 Jehuda Leon Cassuto was even elected President of the Jewish community of Porto and his son Alfonso became director of the Yeshiva Rosh Pinna, a position which had already been offered him while still in Hamburg and which was probably decisive for the family's emigration to Portugal. Wolf [Willy] Delmonte, his wife Anna, née Selig, their daughter Gertrud Rosalie and Hans Delmonte settled in Lisbon, as did Helene Jessurun, née Kronheimer. In February 1942 (?) Walter Jakob Delmonte travelled further from Lisbon to the USA on one of the eight transport journeys by ship between January and July 1942 organised with the help of the Joint. Dr. Eduardo Meldola, a Hamburg physician originally born in Brazil, visited the Cassutos several times in Porto to inquire about possibilities of settling there. After giving up his German nationality on 24t April 1939 he emigrated in 1941 to Blumenau in Brazil.
In addition to Portugal and the island of Madeira, the Portuguese colony of Angola also offered hope for a short time as a country of refuge and transit - although Portuguese colonial policy was firmly against allowing Jewish settlement there. On 30th April 1934, when the British newspaper Daily Herald reported on its front page that the Portuguese government intended to settle over five million Jews in its West African colony, this surprising offer was not even acknowledged by the Sephardic communities and their supporting committees. This future "Jewish State" would offer a new home not only to the 60,000 Jews who had already fled from Germany, but also to about five million Jews from Austria, Poland and Rumania. In view of the restrictive entry policy of most European and overseas countries, not only various refugee organisations contacted the Portuguese Colonial Office with the request that it grant permission for small groups to enter the country, but also a number of individuals. In the Spring of 1939 he Illinois Foundation of Chicago contacted the Portuguese Consulate in Hamburg requesting entry to Angola for 25 persons. On 16th May 1939 the General Directorate of the Colonial Office (Agencia Geral das Colonias) instructed the Governor of Angola that in accordance with a ministerial decision of 10th May 1939 "no Jews are to be permitted to enter the colony" without prior permission from Lisbon.
While the half-hearted attempts of the Spanish government to rescue the Sephardic Jews in the Balkans are relatively well documented, there have so far been no intensive studies of the situation of the Portuguese Jews in Nazi-occupied countries. Until 1943, when the systematic mass murder of Jews had already been in progress for over a year, the Portuguese Jews inside the sphere of German control were protected by their passports and nationality. On 12th February 1943 The German Foreign Office contacted the Portuguese legation in Berlin with the request for a list of all Portuguese citizens of Jewish origin living in the Reich. As the legation was not able to comply with this request, the government in Lisbon was asked by the German legation there to withdraw all Portuguese citizens of Jewish faith and origin from Germany, the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the occupied countries in Western Europe by 31st March 1943. On 21st April 1943 the Portuguese government produced a first list of eight Jews liing in Belgium whose return was already planned and later a further list with 53 names and 47 relatives. At the end of 1943 the problem regarding the return of Portuguese Jews had still not been concluded. Thanks to these delaying tactics, however, all 245 Portuguese citizens of Jewish faith and origin living within the sphere of German control were saved. According to the known sources, however, this number did not include any Portuguese Jews from Hamburg or Berlin nor German-Portuguese Jews from these cities who had gone into exile after 1933 in the Netherlands, Belgium or France.
In contrast to the larger, and above all better organised Ashkenazic communities, the Sephardic communities had been very late in founding their own organisation. The idea of uniting the Sephardic Jews living mainly in small communities in North and South Europe, North and South America and North Africa under one umbrella organisation came largely from the members of the small but influential communities of Amsterdam and London. So it was no coincidence that the Portuguese- Spanish communities of Amsterdam and London were given the honourable task of organising the first and second World Congresses of the Union Universelle des Communautés Sepharadites.
In 1925 a congress had been held in Vienna to found the Union, and since 1931 the organisation had had its headquarters in
Paris. Its first conference took place in May 1935 in London under the auspices of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews'
Congregation Bevis Marks with the intention that a joint effort would lead to better representation of the interests of the
ephardic communities. The delegates celebrated the founding of the Union unanimously as an
At the Congress in Amsterdam Joseph Sealtiel of the community of Portuguese Jews in Hamburg was listed as a
representative from the
On behalf of the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam Henriques Pimentel replied that for Amsterdam there was a special duty to
help the Sephardim in Hamburg as the community in Amsterdam considered itself to be the mother community for the
Portuguese Jews in Hamburg. They would therefore try without delay to urge the Dutch government to find a way of starting
a settlement in the Dutch colonies. He proposed the formation of a commission devoted to this issue. Paul Goodman of the
London Marrano committee reminded the congress of a letter from Dr. Alfred Klee of Berlin who wanted to work for this
project together with the ICA. While the delegate from Paris, A.H. Navon, urged the wealthy London Sephardim to make
funds available from the Austrian Aid Fund intended for Austrian and German Sephardim, Henriques Pimentel persisted in
his demand that a commission should be set up to provide the necessary means, so that at least 25 Hamburg families could
immigrate to Surinam. The delegates decided on a commission consisting o six members - two of them Dutch, two French
and two English. These commission members announced after a brief meeting that they first of all wanted to consult their
governments in order to make better preparations for the proposed settlement programme. Not until then would it be possible
to make constructive proposals to the Portuguese Jews in Hamburg. Some time later the newspaper of the Hamburg Jewish
Community, no doubt informed by Joseph Sealtiel about proceedings at the Congress, announced the following good news to
its readers:
In accordance with the resolution made during the 2nd World Conference of Sephardic Communities an attempt will be made
to found a settlement based on Orthodox religious law in a Dutch or British colony. This settlement can accommodate up to
about 50 Sephardic and Ashkenazic families. Anyone interested can obtain a questionnaire and further information from the
office of the Portuguese-Jewish community in Innocentiastrasse 37.
The question as to whether and how the commission took any action must today remain unanswered. From the few
documents available we must draw the conclusion that the Union Universelle des Communautés Sephardites was not able to
give the Hamburg community any justified hope of rescue. Only a few weeks later the committee of the Portuguese Jewish
community informed its members that “Applications for the planned joint emigration programme are no longer being
accepted”. This blunt announcement was accompanied by rumours from Portugal that the Portuguese government had
decided not to permit any Jewish refugees to enter the country of Portugal or its colonies. A short time later, however, other
Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities, predominantly in England, began intensive support for the Portuguese Jews in
Hamburg. English Sephardim gave repeated and generous donations for Jewish emigrants from Germany. The later support
efforts and announcements of the Union make the failure of the Amsterdam Conference seem incoprehensible in retrospect.
In a number of articles for the journal “Le Judaisme Sépharadi” O. Camhy described this aid in detail : -The tasks of the
committee are as follows : to set a commission to investigate the situation of Sephardic refugees who have had to leave
Germany and Italy; to undertake negotiations with governments to obtain permission for refugees to enter these countries; to
create a special fund; to enable emigration to Dutch Guyana.-
The lack of concrete results at the Amsterdam Conference led to the increasingly widespread view among the members of the
Union Universelle des Communautés Séphardites that something must be done for the Austrian and German Sephardim
urgently. So, in 1939 they decided to set up a commission to examine the situation of Sephardim who had had to leave
Germany and Italy. They tried desperately to find countries which would grant them asylum. But the community
representatives pointed out again and again that the idea of emigration was a special problem for Sephardim because they
were too unaware of the threat to their existence. After all, they had always lived peacefully and unmolested in their adopted
countries since their exile from Spain in 1492.
From their safe exile in Porto, Jehuda Leon and Alfonso Cassuto watched these efforts without, however, taking any
initiative themselves. From today's point of view this seems more than strange. Since their emigration to Porto at the
beginning of 1933 they had been in constant contact with members of the Jewish communities in Hamburg, both Portuguese
and German. They knew a great deal about the threatening situation through frequent correspondence and visitors from
Hamburg. From visits by Portuguese Jews from Holland - among them for example the librarian Jacob S. da Silva Rosa, who
was well known to them from their days in Hamburg and who himself was later a victim of the German extermination policy
- they were also surprisingly well informed about the difficulties in the Netherlands confronting both emigrants from
Hamburg and Portuguese Jews there. Why the Cassutos undertook nothing to help the Portuguese Jews in Hamburg to escape
is a question which can only be explained by the personal difficulties expeienced by the family at that time. As a consequence
of differences with Captain Artur Carlos de Barros Basto the family felt isolated in the community in Porto after 1935, and
after serious disagreements they were even expelled from the community by the committee. In a letter dated 29th May 1938
Raphael Cassuto told his brther Jehuda Leon Cassuto in Porto of his opinion about the Amsterdam Congress:
Neither you nor I attended the congress (of the Sephardic communities) so neither of us are able to judge whether the motion
to find possibilities for emigration was accepted or not. The reports I received from you may be just as untrue as parts of the
report in the community newspaper in which one of the chairmen was given a completely wrong name. Well, these are only
minor issues. But I am not one of those who act as if their purely personal opinion is the opinion of all Jews or all Portuguese
Jews. [...] As long as we are not thrown out we are not going anywhere.
I was informed by several people, among them some who had themselves attended the meeting, that the motion put forward
at the Amsterdam Congress to set up a commission to investigate further the re-settlement issue was indeed accepted.
However, there has not been very much progress, firstly only the commission is in a position to make concrete proposals and
secondly the financial question is nowhere near a solution, and in my opinion this is the essential problem.
On 3rd August 1938 Raphael Cassuto, who for a long time had refused to emigrate but was now considering emigrating to
Chile to stay with relatives of his wife, a convert to Judaism, wrote to his brother in desperation:
Our situation is becoming intolerable, so that all of us without exception are willing to participate in the transfer of our
community to [...].
This letter, devoid of all hope, was answered by Jehuda Leon on 6th July 1938 in his usual cool and patronising manner:
After careful consideration you will no doubt also come to the conclusion that the project to transfer the entire Portuguese
Jewish community in Hamburg to a new location has no hope of success. The only common bond among the members is the
traditional ritual which is only observed by very few, as far as they are religious and understand anything at all of the ritual
[...]. Qui trop embrasse mal étreint. Those who indulge in grand dreams of the future suffer the bitterest disappointments. [...]
I hope you can be convinced to abandon this plan before it is too late and you have made a final decision, as in my opinion it
is doomed to complete failure [...]
In 1938 many countries were very sympathetic to the plight of refugees from Germany, but no country was willing to commit
itself to allowing entry to an exact number of emigrants. Raphael Cassuto placed a great deal of hope in the International
Refugee Conference in Evian. He wrote to his brother on 12th July 1938:
With respect to Sealtiel I would like to say the following: when a house is on fire you do not ask questions about the identity
of the rescuer. If Sealtiel achieves no more than that we can enter a foreign country then he has already achieved something
of infinite importance. In the meantime the situation has changed somewhat in that a conference is taking place in Evian
(Switzerland) which will definitely produce some results, although we should not hold out too much hope.
After the war began, the chances of the Portuguese Jews in Hamburg to emigrate individually or as a group diminished
drastically, although between the outbreak of war and the end of 1941 about 70,000 Jews were able to leave the ‘Deutsche
Reich'. Why the Portuguese Jews did not manage to leave in time is a question to which the few sources available do not
(yet) give an answer. Perhaps the community was exhausted and no longer able to master the situation, because after the most
prominent Portuguese families had already left in the first years after the Nazis came to power to re-settle in Portugal,
Palestine, Sweden, the Netherlands, France or the USA, there was nobody left who could have successfully organised this
rescue. Left to fend for themselves and organisationally and financially dependent on the Ashkenazic Jews, all Portuguese
Jews in Hamburg who were not able to emigrate or did not want to, fell victim to the extermination policy of the Nazi régime
after 1941.
"Sephardism is not separatism" The Congress of Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam.
Correspondence between Hamburg and Porto
Jehuda Leon Cassuto replied to this letter on 23rd June 1938