International historians who have been immersed in the archives of Porto's Jewish community for months, state that "there is a strong historical continuity in the city". They are preparing two volumes on the long history of Jews in Porto.
The original persecution was rooted in religion and had its most remarkable moments in the 15th century and with the Inquisition that followed until the 19th century. Yet, the foundational stigma created in the long time centuries never entirely vanished, as the propaganda created a deep-seated cultural belief that Jews were a subversive element undermining Portuguese identity.
By the 20th century, this prejudice shifted into secular and racial antisemitism. When Captain Barros Basto attempted to revitalize open Jewish life, this historical conditioning resurfaced. He was declared a "mere pantheist" and the community was suppressed. The Portuguese Dreyfus case was born.
In the 21st century, the community became one of the strongest in Europe and yet, was again persecuted by political, media, and judicial powers, all working together, to the point that the community declared the Portuguese power system to be a "Corrupt Power of Soviet socialist inspiration."
The book Two Millennia of the Jewish Community of Porto: Chronology 1923-2023 offers a detailed year-by-year account of the organization. Later books published on Amazon accurately reflect later events.
For lovers of literature and primary-source research, the Porto Jewish community features robust institutional libraries with ten thousand books, and as the result of a massive digitization project from Lisbon's National Archives, shares the exact names and case histories of 842 local victims persecuted for "Judaizing heresies".
