It is not just a film. "The 2000 Jewish Kidnapped Children" is a historical document. It records, with high and moving rigor, a cruel, tragic and practically unknown episode. It tells how two thousand, Jewish children, aged up to eight years, were torn from the hands of their parents without the slightest mercy. They were forcibly baptized in 1493 in Portugal, by order of the Portuguese king John II and deported to the island of São Tomé, 7,500 kilometers away. It had a hostile climate and was infested with crocodiles. Many of the children were eaten by the animals. Only 600 survived the unsanitary conditions.

It was not overseas policy that stimulated the king, poorly nicknamed the Perfect Prince, to order this unimaginable cruelty. It was anti-Semitism. The haham Samuel Usque, born in Lisbon, around 1495-1500, and who died at an uncertain date in Italy, wrote the work ‘Consolation to the Tribulations of Israel’. It was published by his brother, Abraham Usque, in Ferrara, in the year 1553. It records the kidnapping of Jewish children and their exile to this terrible island. Abraham Usque also mentions that, despite the efforts of Catholic priests, the few surviving children remained faithful to the religion of their parents.

Two hundred years after the kidnapping, the Catholic bishop of São Tomé, Pedro da Cunha Lobo, continued to complain that the island of São Tomé had a Jewish problem. The film also conveys the continuity of the Jewish people, despite the attempts at genocide.

The Jewish Community of Porto and the Hispanic Jewish Foundation have created an extremely important document. We live in a time of trial, again. Antisemites point in the direction of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. Today they have power, but one day it will change.

In the meantime, it is important to show the context of anti-Semitism that is unfortunately alive today as a continuation of what has already happened. The children kidnapped and killed centuries ago and the children who took the same fate in 2023, show the importance of this production. All these children were forcibly taken by antisemitic hands.