by Dish Staff
Daniel Lansberg-Rodríguez provides some background on anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Venezuela:
Recently, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro organized a rally labeled the “March Against Israeli Genocide.” There, the Venezuelan president called upon “the Jews that live in our lands” to “stop the massacre, and the murder of those innocent boys and girls.” It’s a tall order. In the words of one community member: “When the president himself calls out Venezuelan Jews to rein in the ‘Zionist’ government and stop the Gazan genocide – as if we could even do that – you think to yourself, ‘How is it that the country I grew up in feels the need to single me out? When did the open society I used to live in turn into this?'”
According to Lansberg-Rodríguez, Venezuelan anti-Semitism results from the conflation of Zionism with a number of other ideologies with more direct relevance to the country itself:
In Venezuela’s pro-government rhetoric, both regime officials and state media often group together loaded terms that, in effect, become synonymous: “Imperialists,” “International Elites,” “Ultra-rightists,” “Fascists,” and “Zionists” can be used interchangeably, or paired together, to denote any enemy that criticizes or meddles in Venezuelan government affairs. The indistinctness of these terms can make them difficult to keep straight in practice. When an anchor on Venezuelan state television recently derided former Venezuelan Trade Minister (and former Foreign Policy editor) Moisés Naím for signing a letter condemning certain Venezuelan regime practices, he dismissed Naím’s perspective as that of “a believing Jew.” He probably meant to say “Zionist,” but no retraction or clarification was forthcoming.
At present, most Venezuelan Jews do not face open discrimination from their neighbors. Even so, a sense of dread and isolation is pervasive among much of the community, and some worry that, with diplomatic relations severed between the government and Israel, there may be nobody to protect them in a pinch. While researching this story, absolutely nobody I spoke with who still resides in Venezuela was willing to let me use their names.
The scholar Jonathan Israel has described this early migration to the New World and its effects. These educated exiles established an impressive financial and commercial net that spanned continents. But when they were cut down in the 17th century by the Inquisition, these generations vanished from popular memory, leaving only a few cultural traces, like the many largely Portuguese Jewish names that are scattered across Latin America. Perhaps because of their rapid disappearance into the general population, no native variety of anti-Semitism toward them ever developed.
In Spain, the story is somewhat different. There were Jews in Spain before the birth of Christ and, though they were officially expelled in 1492, their presence had been so vital to the country that it continued to impress itself on Spain right down to the present. The old anti-Judaism is still alive in daily speech, in popular legend and among influential sectors of public opinion, but its positive counterpart is no less alive in a cult of respect for the heritage of the Sephardim (the ancient Spanish Jewish community) and a liberal tradition of interest in Jewish traditions.
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