Bruna Frascolla
The transatlantic slave trade's return to Western Christendom intertwines with Portuguese commerce, New Christian networks, and shifting definitions of identity that complicate modern narratives of victimhood and perpetration.
Stereotypes have some basis in reality; and since the realities of Jews vary greatly, so too do their stereotypes. One positive stereotype is that of the sensitive soul who suffers from persecution or prejudice. This image is rooted in the Europe of the 18th to the 20th centuries-a period marked by the secularization of Jews and their partial rejection by Christian society. Primo Levi embodies this positive stereotype. While his biographical profile alone suffices to convey this (he was the idealistic poet sent to Auschwitz for fighting against fascism), reading his autobiographical writings further reinforces the image of a sensitive man of letters. And nothing illustrates this better than the contrast with the Greek Jew Mordo Nahum.
This character appears in The Truce, the lesser-known sequel to the classic If This Is a Man. In that notorious work, Primo Levi recounts his imprisonment and life in Auschwitz - that included a stock market where bread served as currency, an idea that surely not every ethnic group would have. He told that Spanish slang was prevalent in Auschwitz due to the Greek Jews from Thessalonica, who spoke Spanish-being descendants of Jews expelled from Spain-and had arrived at the Nazi camp before others. There were so many Jews in Thessalonica that they could not be hidden, and the Nazis caught a many of them.
In The Truce, Primo Levi tells the story of his journey home from Poland under Soviet guardianship. The Russians are portrayed as the antithesis of the Germans: warm, cheerful, and chaotic. While the Germans had built a deadly machine to transport him from Italy to Poland, the return journey under the Russians would take nearly a year of crisscrossing Eastern Europe, amidst bureaucratic entanglements with the UN. While still in Poland, he met Mordo Nahum, a Jew from Thessalonica who, for some reason, chose him as an ally in the struggle for survival. Primo Levi was excited; he confessed to "having considered primarily his large rucksack and his status as a citizen of Thessalonica - which, as everyone in Auschwitz knew, was synonymous with refined mercantile skills and the ability to handle any situation. The liking, which was mutual, and the esteem, which was one-sided, came later." Primo worked for Mordo carrying his rucksack, scouting prices, speaking German and even Latin (with a priest).
Mordo treated him like a simpleton, attempting to school him in the ways of the world: he taught him that the most important thing (more so than food) was one's shoes (since they were needed to go out and find food), and that living off handouts was dishonorable. Thus, he tried to teach a bewildered Primo Levi how to "earn his bread" by using the rucksack's contents as starting capital and trading at the fair. At one point, a demoralized Primo tried to impress him with a practical skill he took great pride in, asking Mordo if he knew how to distinguish a raw egg from a cooked one without breaking the shell. The Greek, however, was offended; as a seasoned merchant who had sold everything under the sun, he considered distinguishing between eggs to be elementary knowledge.
Primo and Mordo parted ways early on because Greece, unlike Italy, was a UN member, which facilitated repatriation. The Italian encountered him again many months later in Belarus, "almost unrecognizable due to his massive obesity," offering him Bessarabian prostitutes-small and light-skinned, to suit Russian tastes (which he had already researched). The Greek boasted that he no longer had money troubles, that he slept with his "protégées," and that he had organized the whole place. Primo Levi noted: "The episode of the boiled egg and the disdainful Greek's challenge came back to me in a new light: 'Come on, name an item I haven't dealt with yet!'"
Naturally, Mordo Nahum fits the Jewish stereotype that attracts anti-Jewish sentiment, whether medieval, Nazi, or even contemporary - for nowadays Pornhub, a platform heavily associated with sexual exploitation and violence, has been owned by a rabbi since 2024. Yet, Mordo Nahum also demonstrates the very quality that led many rulers, despite loathing Judaism, to want Jews in their territories: the notorious ability to multiply wealth and, consequently, the capacity to lend it out.
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There is a natural connection between these three things: mercantile skill, slavery, and wealth generation. Slavery is omnipresent in the early stages of human history; and unless we make a moral effort to abolish it, the natural tendency is for slaves to be used to multiply their owners' wealth-whether through their use-value (in a sugarcane field, for instance) or their exchange-value (in the hands of merchants). It makes no sense, therefore, to claim that a specific people or ethnic group is uniquely evil because of a history involving slavery.
Yet, this is precisely what is done today in the West regarding the "white man," who is portrayed as the embodiment of evil on earth. The transatlantic slave trade is often portrayed as an expression of racism and white supremacy; yet, in the 16th century, racism had not yet been invented, and this form of slavery was merely one among several existing in Africa and the Americas. Being shocked with that is only possible within the parameters of Christendom, which possessed the distinctive feature of having gradually and imperceptibly abolished slavery during the Middle Ages. As we have seen in recent articles, slavery returned to Western Christendom through the "just war" waged by Portugal against the Moors, who could legitimately be enslaved. In practice, however, Portugal operated in Africa not as a warrior of the faith subjugating Muslim infidels, but rather as a merchant trading in infidels who had already been enslaved by other infidels during internecine conflicts. It was Portugal that reintroduced slavery to Christendom, and did so quite cunningly.
Was the Portuguese man, then, considered "white" ? Well, the Portuguese are not regarded as such by the epicenter of this narrative, the Anglophone world. Yet there is a further complication: in the modern period (16th-18th centuries), outside of Portugal and its territories, the terms "Portuguese" and "Jew" or "New Christian" were treated as virtually synonymous.
In the doctoral thesis Homens de Nação e de Negócio: redes comerciais no Mundo Ibérico (1580-1640) [Men of Nation and Business: Commercial Networks in the Iberian World (1580-1640)] by Ana Hutz, we read that at the time of the expulsion, between 100,000 and 160,000 Jews left Spain, with approximately 50,000 of them heading to Portugal. Only between 25,000 and 50,000 accepted baptism and remained in Spain. Thus, we can say that Portugal absorbed a vast number of Jews into its small territory and small population-Jews who would later, in 1497, be forcibly baptized (because the King of Portugal valued the kingdom's wealth more than its purity of faith).
Another relevant point is that, in Portugal, "there was never an official statute regarding this matter [i.e., 'purity of blood'], as there was in Spain. Furthermore, mixed marriages between New and Old Christians were a constant occurrence following the conversions of 1496-97, despite legislation prohibiting them" (Hutz, p. 120). In Spain, by contrast, the legislation dated back to the Statute of Toledo (1449)-which barred New Christians from municipal offices-and was only approved by Pope Paul IV and ratified by Philip II (the first king of the Iberian Union) in 1555. Although these statutes amounted, in practice, to what we now understand as racism, it should be noted that Spain had been dealing with mass conversions since the late 14th century and harbored suspicions that they were motivated solely by worldly benefits (which included not being beaten by Christians).
Although the Iberian Union was generally a tragedy for Portuguese New Christians (because the Portuguese Inquisition faced Spanish pressure to operate in earnest), the wealthiest among them welcomed the prospect of accessing the Spanish market. Indeed, that is precisely what happened. In 1580, Portugal dominated sub-Saharan African trade and, consequently, the sale of Black slaves to Christendom. In 1595, Philip II signed the first asiento contract with Portuguese New Christians, and this kind of monopoly lasted until the end of the Iberian Union. Thus, from 1595 to 1640, all black people legally transported to Spanish and Portuguese America were sold under this monopoly, which was controlled by Portuguese New Christians. (During this period, Dutch Calvinists emerged to vie with the Portuguese for trade and territory, but that is another story-one that also involves Portuguese-Jewish capital.)
Portuguese New Christians were inextricably linked to the transatlantic slave trade, and Brazil became the largest center of slavery in Christendom. Indigenous slavery was not foreign to them either; as historian Anita Novinsky demonstrated, a significant number of the bandeirantes, who enslaved Indigenous people, were New Christians.
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Anita Novinsky is quite right to link the iconoclasm of the bandeirantes to their status as forced converts. It makes no sense to believe that mere banditry or violence turns someone into an iconoclast. A glance at the history of Mexico-where there is no shortage of banditry-shows iconoclasm linked solely to ideological motives. Iconoclasm is also economically irrational: it is more profitable to sell a sacred object than to destroy it. (It appears this very reasoning saved the Madonna of Nettuno.)
It does not follow, of course, that every New Christian was a marrano. Anita Novinsky herself discovered that Saint José de Anchieta was Jewish according to Jewish law, yet she never questioned his faith. She notes: "According to Jewish law, anyone born a Jew remains a Jew forever, even after conversion, because it is a matter of the soul-something that, in the eyes of God, can never change. The Nazis held the same view; indeed, Edith Stein-canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross by the very same Pope John Paul II who beatified Anchieta in 1980-was killed at Auschwitz because she was Jewish, despite having converted and become a Catholic nun." (In reality, the Nazis agreed with the Jewish perspective only regarding the immutable nature of Jewishness; their reasoning was based on racial grounds that did not align with matrilineal descent, making it possible for someone whom the Jewish community did not consider Jewish to be incinerated as a Jew.)
If we define a Jew solely as someone who demonstrably practiced the Jewish religion, then the claim that six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis becomes highly controversial. Conversely, if we define a Jew as anyone of Jewish descent, then New Christians were Jews-and Jews were primarily responsible for modern Western slavery. What we cannot do is apply the definition of "Jew" inconsistently, attributing the martyrdom suffered under the Nazis to Jews while assigning the practice of modern slavery to the "white man." From all this, we learn that there are no such things as "victim peoples" and, provided we condemn slavery, that not all religions are equally good.