At the beginning of the new Jewish year 5787, hundreds of students from Portuguese schools, especially from central Portugal, have learned an important historical lesson that they were completely unaware of. What are regimes and rulers who hate Jews?

First lesson.
Laws, words and political speeches are not important, but facts are. Antisemitic rulers always target, discriminate against, or persecute Jewish communities, often hiding their prejudice behind beautiful words like human rights, legality, social justice, or public health.

Second lesson.
Systematic public humiliation and the infliction of immense suffering—especially targeted at community and religious leadership—have been central tactics used by any kind of antisemitic governments across centuries.
The perpetrators always feel they are "proving" their own false theories of ideological superiority, while managing to dismantle years, decades or even centuries of Jewish labo.

Third lesson.
Antisemitic rulers have heavily relied on the integration and weaponization of political, judicial, and media institutions to execute state-sponsored persecution. State corruption prevailed.
As a step one, state-controlled media and propaganda apparatuses were deployed to systematically dehumanize the targeted group, manufacture public consent, and suppress dissenting voices.
As a step two, police and courts were used to legitimize political decrees, ensuring that persecution is carried out under the guise of the "rule of law" rather than arbitrary violence.

Fourth lesson.
While this alignment of power allowed regimes to execute complex, large-scale persecutions with high bureaucratic and technical efficiency, historians and political scientists describe these operations as catastrophic human rights failures, widespread devastation, and systemic terror.

Fifth lesson.
These regimes did not just seek to exploit or eliminate Jewish populations; they deliberately used degradation to break community cohesion, reinforce their own ideologies of supremacy, and strip victims of their human dignity.

Sixth lesson.
In the USSR, the Soviet regime always discovered "collaborators" who were determined to "tell everything" about their rivals, and the satisfied authorities found in this the "evidence" to carry out the work of community destruction they intended.

Seventh lesson.
The Nazis established the Judenräte (Jewish Councils) to force trusted community leaders into the impossible position of executing Nazi commands, effectively using them as tools to issue catastrophic decrees to their own people, designed to destroy community trust and inflict severe psychological torture.

Eighth and final lesson.
Recent years have witnessed unprecedented antisemitic scenarios because of Palestine questions. Even in the case of fiasco, the press was blaming the courts for their failures, the courts were blaming the press for starting the crazy persecution, and the government was attributing to both of them the scandalous errors it had itself ordered to be committed.

The Jewish Museum in Porto—alongside its sister institution, the Holocaust Museum of Porto—has been highly successful and widely recognized for its educational impact on Portuguese teenagers, turning its focus entirely toward fighting antisemitism, and teaching how Portugal can be great again.