HENRIQUE ZIMMERMAN: PORTUGAL’S DREYFUS…CAPTAIN ARTUR BASSOS BASTO
http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/justice-for-the-founder-of-portugal-s-jewish-community-1.413459
In the 1920s, Captain Artur Barros Basto, a Portuguese war hero, helped found his country’s first Jewish community in 400 years, but was later stripped of his ranks and forced into near penury due to his religion. Now this historical wrong may be set right.
It is a secret that has accompanied me for as long as I can remember: the secret of the Portuguese Dreyfus. But who even dreamed that this secret would now be the subject of a political disagreement in the Lisbon parliament, after 75 years and three generations of campaigns to clear his name.
I was born and raised in Porto, northern Portugal. One of the most significant places in the lives of the local Jews was the neighborhood synagogue, impressive and grand, but nearly empty. This is the Makor Haim Synagogue, one of the most beautiful in Europe. It was built in the 1930s by a man whose name was always mentioned in a lowered voice, to make sure nobody heard. This was Captain Artur Carlos de Barros Basto, also known by his Hebrew name Abraham Israel Ben-Rosh, who had always aroused my curiosity.
Barros Basta
Whenever I would ask about him, I would be told only that he was a man of vision, that he was born in 1887, and that he was descended from Marranos (Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity as a result of the Inquisition, but often secretly maintained Jewish traditions ). Barros Basto was a World War I hero who fought in Belgium. Before that he had belonged to the group that toppled the monarchy in Portugal and founded the republic in 1910, when he himself raised the flag of the new government. The republic was critical of the Church and carefully guarded religious freedom.
In the 1920s Barros Basto learned from his grandfather that he had Jewish roots. In the light of the new religious freedom in Portugal, he decided to return to his forefathers’ faith, and went to Tangier, Morocco, to convert. The rabbis at the local rabbinical court were surprised to learn that there were Marranos living in Portugal, and due to their objection to conversion, they tried to put Barros Basto to the test by suggesting he convert in Algeria. The officer replied that he would not leave without completing the process, which he believed was merely a technicality since he felt like a Jew; indeed, he was eventually converted in Tangier.
When he got back to his homeland he set about establishing a Jewish congregation for the first time in 400 years – the first since the expulsion of Jews from Portugal. He built and founded a yeshiva, a community newspaper called Halapid, and our synagogue, Makor Haim.
Discovery in the basement
In 1972, when I was preparing for my bar mitzvah, I asked for more information about Barros Basto. When all anyone agreed to tell me was that “he met a bitter end and was defamed,” I decided to descend into the basement of the synagogue that he built, where I found piles of old issues of Halapid.
Thus I learned about the community of Marranos who, nearly a century ago, had heard about Barros Basto – nicknamed “the prophet officer” – and began streaming to the place. “We too are Jews, even though our family converted to Christianity following the expulsion from Portugal in 1497,” they told him. Hundreds of people told him how for many years they had practiced their Judaism clandestinely.
Encouraged by the new congregants, Barros Basto began traveling all over northern Portugal, mainly in the Tras-os-Montes region (“Behind the Mountains” ), in search of lost Jews. And he found them. They were accustomed to marking the holidays in secret, with lookouts guarding the doors, and would fast on Yom Kippur while ostensibly playing cards lest an uninvited guest arrive. They were amazed by the Jewish captain. “Let us build a community openly, there is nothing to fear. We are a republic,” he told them.
Thus it was that hundreds of young people joined him and came to the yeshiva he founded in Porto, where they studied Judaism and Hebrew. A doctor descended from Marranos helped him to perform ritual circumcision ceremonies on the students, and there was a wealth of Jewish activity. The yeshiva he founded was called Rosh Pina; the girl’s seminary was called Eshet Chayil. Graduates of the yeshiva became teachers and went back to their hometowns to teach their Marrano neighbors.
In 1928 Portugal was rocked by another revolution that restored to the Church the power it had during the days of the monarchy. The priests did not look kindly upon the new movement that was trying to bring thousands of “new Christians” back to the Jewish fold. Furthermore, with the change of government, the Portuguese attitude toward the country’s Jews in general also changed. Barros Basto was astounded, for example, when his fiancee’s family called the wedding off upon learning he was Jewish. Later on, at a military ceremony dedicated to WWI heroes, somebody declared publicly that Barros Basto should not be given a medal because of his religion. He ultimately married a Jewish woman named Lea Azancot.
Tensions worsened in the 1930s, when a fascist government arose in Portugal. In 1937 Barros Basto was put on trial in two cases, one civil and the other military, and was found guilty of participating in circumcision ceremonies and of homosexuality. At the trials, the circumcisions were called “homosexual rituals with youths aged 17 and 18, who were forced to expose their sexual organ,” according to witnesses, who recounted Barros Basto would kiss men, mainly after religious ceremonies. He explained to no avail that in Moroccan Jewry, as opposed to Christianity, it is customary to display affection. After he was found guilty, the government stripped the officer of his military rank and repossessed his pension.
Barros Basto, the Portuguese Dreyfus, never recovered from the public humiliation. His movement lost its strength and collapsed. In the 1940s and 1950s he suffered many vicissitudes and frustrations, and became nearly destitute. People who encountered him in his final years describe a scrawny man, drowning in a suit that was several sizes too big for him, going from door to door with a flimsy suitcase to hawk sundry items such as costume jewelry.
Inacio Steinhardt, an Israeli who emigrated from Portugal, wrote a biography about the Portuguese Dreyfus. He relates that a visitor in Porto met with the dismissed officer and the latter showed him around the synagogue. At the end of the visit, Barros Basto asked the visitor to wait for him a moment. He went up to the holy ark, grabbed the door handle to keep from falling in his excitement, and cried out in a loud voice: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”
A short while after that, in 1961, Barros Basto died, far from the spotlight. His final request was to be buried at the cemetery in Amarante, the village where he was born, dressed in his military uniform, with his medals and the national flag.
Only a handful of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews from the Porto congregation, who knew his sad story, attended the funeral, which was held without any religious ceremony. At the last moment, when everyone had already gotten up to leave, a Jew of Polish origin named Finkelstein called everyone together and said Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer.
Clearing his name
On April 25, 1974, young army officers led a velvet revolution that removed the dictator Marcelo Caetano. In 1975, Lea Barros Basto, hopeful that democracy had been introduced, asked parliament to do her husband justice and clear his name, but the military intervened and stopped the initiative. In the opinion of the biographer Steinhardt, the entire story may not necessarily have been a case of anti-Semitism – rather fear on the part of a few senior officers that this initiative would expose their own Jewish ancestry.
After the widow’s death, the couple’s daughter petitioned parliament, but she too was unable to accomplish anything. In 1997, in honor of the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of Portugal’s Jews, then-Knesset Speaker Dan Tichon paid a visit to the country. In a speech to the Portuguese parliament, Tichon brought up the story of Barros Basto and likewise asked that his name be cleared, but was also rebuffed.
That same year, 1997, a synagogue called Beit Eliyahu was inaugurated in the town of Belmonte in northern Portugal, and most local residents apparently converted to Judaism. However, Steinhardt thinks that the term “conversion” may be inappropriate in this context, since the people had for centuries, in any case, been called judios – Jews – by their neighbors and priests. Now they worship in Hebrew, put on tefillin (phylacteries ) and wear prayer shawls, and sometimes you see women on the streets of Belmonte wearing hats similar to those in Bnei Brak and Mea She’arim. Nevertheless, they still light Shabbat candles, bake matza and light Hanukkiahs inside their houses, far from the neighbors’ eyes, just like their ancestors did for 500 years.
Steinhardt describes a movement to return to Judaism that is on currently on the rise among descendents of the Marranos – not only in Portugal, but in the United States, South Africa and other places to which Portuguese migrated. He says there are websites and online blogs devoted to this subject, and that some descendants of the Marranos have also come to Israel to convert or live.
One man from Belmonte, Portugal, whose grandfather studied at Makor Haim Synagogue with Captain Barros Basto, converted and now lives in Jerusalem. In the tradition of his ancestors, he prefers to remain anonymous, but, with glittering eyes, he says: “What the captain did in the first half of the 20th century was not in vain. He was, and always will be, our prophet.”
Hope
A few months ago, Barros Basto’s granddaughter, Isabel Ferreira Lopes, petitioned the Portuguese parliament again: “My grandfather was a victim of the anti-Semitism of the 1930s,” she says. “I asked parliament to reinstate him into the military in order to restore his name. I believe this will happen, because now there is a very broad consensus in Portuguese society – politicians, journalists, the bar association, and citizens in general – over the need to amend the anti-Semitic decision of the time.”
All of the political parties in Portugal, which seldom agree on anything, believe this request is justified: This includes the conservatives, the social democrats, the socialists and even the communists. The parliamentary committee on human rights has not made a decision yet, but may even determine that the 1937 verdict was perhaps even influenced by the rise of Nazism. The committee’s chairman, Fernando Negrao, says that clearing Barros Basto’s name is a matter of great importance. However, a senior figure in Portugal says, “Barros Basto was no angel and therefore clearing his name requires an in-depth discussion.”
Says Lopes, who hopes parliament will vote soon: “In my family we are very proud of my grandfather. If we succeed in clearing his name it would mean that we have won a battle that has been waged for three generations: by my grandmother, my mother and me. It means that we would finally get some compensation for my grandfather’s endless suffering, and that our love for him succeeded in doing justice.”
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