Venezuela and the Jews

Venezuela has been home to a Jewish presence for nearly half a millennium. Here’s a brief history of Jews in Venezuela and the crucial role Jews have played in Venezuelan history. That history is especially relevant today, as Venezuelan officials once again recycle an old antisemitic trope, falsely claiming that the recent capture of Nicolás Maduro has “Zionist” motivations—echoing centuries of conspiratorial accusations used to scapegoat Jews during moments of political crisis.

Secret Jews

Jews likely settled in the territory of present-day Venezuela close to 500 years ago. Before European conquest, the coastal areas of Venezuela were home to native Americans who built their houses on stilts to protect them from the area’s frequent floods. When Christopher Columbus and later explorers sighted Venezuela in 1498, it reminded them of buildings along the canals of Venice in Italy; they dubbed the area “little Venice,” or Venezuela.

After a period of German exploration, Spain began settling the area, eventually forming the Kingdom of New Grenada, made up of present-day Columbia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Spain imposed their harsh Inquisition on colonies in Latin America, forbidding Jews from living in Spanish territories and imposing the death penalty on anyone found to be practicing Jewish rites in secret. Nevertheless, historians believe that some crypto-Jews, Jews who converted to Christianity yet maintained their Jewish practice and identity in secret, lived in South America. In 1601, King Felipe III gave permission for Jews who’d converted to Catholicism in Portugal, likely including crypto-Jews, to settle in Spanish colonies; many moved to the Venezuelan towns of Maracaibo and Caracas.

Early Venezuela was particularly exposed to Jews given its proximity to the island of Curacao, just 40 miles off its coast. Originally settled by Spain, Curacao fell into Dutch hands in the 1630s and – free from the strictures of Spain’s Inquisition – began to develop a vibrant Jewish community which continues to this day.

Murdered by the Inquisition

There is one known case of a crypto Jew being killed by the Spanish Inquisition in Venezuela: a man named Joseph Diaz Pimienta who was executed for being a Jew in 1720.

Tucacas, a Jewish Town

In the late 1600s and early 1700s there was one part of present-day Venezuela that wasn’t bound by Spain’s draconian Inquisition: the town of Tucacas near Venezuela’s coast, which was governed as a separate Dutch territory for a time.

In 1693, a group of Jews moved to Tucacas from Curacao and built a largely Jewish town. Tucacas Jews cultivated land, raised cattle, and traded a wide range of goods with merchants from throughout the area, including from modern day Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. Tucacas became a major hub of the cacao trade and a bustling merchant town where visitors came to shop for European goods. Its synagogue was named Santa Imandad, “The Holy Brotherhood”, and its president, Samuel Hebreo, also served as the town’s mayor, under the title “Senor de las Tucacas.”

Tucacas was never safe from Spanish attacks. The Jews living there built a fortification around the town and fought off Spanish sorties with the help of other local residents and the Dutch navy. In 1717, Tucacas was incorporated into the rest of Venezuela in Spanish-run New Grenada, which announced its new priority: eliminating what they called the Jews’ “illegal” trade in Tucacas.

New Grenada’s Viceroy appointed a special official to capture Tucacas; he attacked the town with 40 ships and a specially built army dedicated to eradicating the region of Jews. Tucacas finally fell in 1720. Spanish troops destroyed the synagogue. Tucacas’ Jews burned their own houses down rather than have them fall to Spanish hands. Tucacas’ sizeable Jewish majority fled to nearby Curacao; it took dozens of boats – 40 ships by one count – to ferry all the Jews to safety from the marauding Spanish troops.

Jews Fighting for Independence

Simon Bolivar, a Spanish military officer from Caracas, is known in South America as El Liberatador - the Liberator of the Americas. He fought Spanish troops, eventually creating an independent state in present-day Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. Some of his earliest and most ardent supporters were Jews. Richard and Abraham Meza, brothers who lived in nearby Curacao, financially supported Bolivar’s army.

When Spanish forces forced Bolivar out of Venezuela in 1812, he retreated to Curacao, where another Curacao Jew, Mordechai Ricardo, came to his aid, offering houses for Bolivar and his family to stay in. One of these houses still stands: it has a distinctive octagonal shape and is today known as the Octagonal Museum in Curacao.

Bolivar eventually returned to continue fighting Spain. Two Jewish Generals – Gen. Benjamin Henriquez and Gen. Juan Bartolomeu de Sola – fought with Bolivar with distinction. In 1821, Bolivar created a massive country called the Republic of Grand Colombia, which gave religious freedom to Jews for the first time in the region’s history. In 1830, after Bolivar’s death, Venezuela withdrew from this project and declared itself a separate republic. Amidst the excitement of this new political experiment, a group of Jews once again moved to Venezuela from Curacao, this time setting up a Jewish community in the coastal city of Coro.

Venezuelan Pogrom

By 1831, Coro was home to about 20 Jewish families who prospered in the new nation of Venezuela. Local non-Jewish inhabitants resented the Jews’ success and rose up to attack the Jews of Coro. Local Venezuelan officials intervened and put down the uprising, but told Coro’s Jews that they would have to pay twice as much in business taxes to reimburse the new country of Venezuela for protecting them.

Synagogue in Coro

The Jews of Coro paid this tax until 1855 when locals once again turned on the Jews in their midst and attacked them. This time, city officials refused to protect their Jews and demanded that Coro’s Jewish community leave. All of the Jewish residents of the city - 168 people - fled Venezuela, moving to the safety of nearby Curacao.

Restricting Jewish Immigration

For generations, the Jewish population of Venezuela remained tiny. An 1891 census found there were 247 Jews in the entire country; the population was 475 in 1917 and 882 in 1926. With the rise of fascism in Europe, some German and eastern European Jews began to move to Venezuela, a development that seemingly angered the nation’s non-Jewish population. While threats to Jews were rising in Europe, Venezuela authorities decided to drastically restrict Jewish immigration.

In 1938 Venezuela was one of just 33 nations that participated in the Evian Conference in France, devoted to finding countries around the world that were willing to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. The Evian Conference was called after the Anschluss, Germany’s absorption of Austria, which saw spontaneous orgies of antisemitism across Austria. Crowds of victorious Austrians rushed into Vienna’s Jewish neighborhood, where they dragged Jews out of their homes and forced them to scrub the streets. Thousands of Jews were beaten up, killed, and deported to concentration camps. At Evian, in France, 33 nations debated whether any might be willing to open their doors to save fleeing Jews.

The answer was no. One by one, the 33 participating countries explained why they were prepared to admit only small amounts of Jews. Venezuela declared that they could take only Jewish agricultural workers. In reality, they restricted nearly all Jewish immigration until long after the conclusion of World War II.  Only about 600 German Jews were able to move to Venezuela during the Holocaust.

Welcoming Sephardi Jews

Jews began to move to Venezuela in greater numbers in the late 1940s. By 1950, about 6,000 Jews called Venezuela home. From 1950 to 1958, Venezuela was governed by the dictatorial President Marcos Perez Jimenez and wasn’t seen as an attractive destination to which to move. With Pres. Jimenez’s fall from power in 1958, about a thousand Jews moved to Venezuela from throughout the Sephardi world, including Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey.

Holocaust Memorial at the Jewish Cemetery in Caracas

After the Six Day War between Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria and Israel, life became even more difficult than it already was for Jews in Morocco, and some began moving to Venezuela. Rabbi Pynchas Brener, Venezuela’s Chief Rabbi from 1967 until his emigration to Miami in 2011, recalls that “after the 1967 War, there was an influx of Sephardic Jews came from the Middle East and North Africa, primarily from Morocco.” They were drawn to Venezuela’s because of the nation’s then “burgeoning economy, stable political life, and thriving civil society. The tolerant nature of Venezuelan society added to the attraction Venezuela held for Jews.”  By the mid-1990s, about 25,000 Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, called Venezuela home.

Growing Hostility to Jews Under Pres. Hugo Chavez

Populist President Hugo Chavez’s election in 1998 marked a major turning point for Venezuela’s Jews. Pres. Chavez was outspokenly antisemitic. In his 2005 Christmas address, Chavez said that “the descendants of those who crucified Christ” have taken the world’s “riches” from those who are meant to have them and are hogging them for themselves. It was the rawest form of antisemitism and one that Chavez encouraged during his long rule from 1999 until his death in 2013.

"Judíos (Jews) Go Home" graffiti on the wall of the Israeli Embassy in Caracas.

Rabbi Brener recalled: “Before Chavez, every president of Venezuela visited my home on one occasion or another, and also visited my synagogue…Under Chavez, things began to change as the government began to make alliances with states such as Iran and related non-state actors such as Hezbollah, which historically have been hostile to Israel and Judaism, and because of these relationships the government under Chavez became more rhetorically hostile to us.” Chavez began accusing Jews and Jewish institutions, including Rabbi Brener, of being spies for Israel or the United States. Even as his country fell apart because of his disastrous economic policies, Chavez directed his spy agencies to spy on Venezuelan Jews.

Meanwhile, Pres. Chavez turned his back on the West and embraced Iran. Between 2001 and 2013, Chavez and his Iranian counterparts exchanged two dozen diplomatic visits, signed about 300 agreements, and Iran had invested approximately $15 billion in Chavez’s Venezuela. In 2008, Pres. Chavez broke off Venezuela’s diplomatic contact with Israel. This new political tilt affected ordinary Venezuelans’ views of Jews. Antisemitism skyrocketed and Jews began eyeing the exits, leaving Venezuela for Miami, Israel, and elsewhere

Antisemitic Slurs Against an Opposition Politician

Pres. Chavez’s main political opposition came from Henrique Capriles, who co-founded the Primero Justicia political party in 2000 and ran against both Pres. Chavez and his successor Pres. Nicolas Maduro. Though both of Capriles’ parents are Jewish – his grandparents perished in Nazi concentration camps – they raised Henrique and his siblings as Roman Catholics. That didn’t stop Presidents Chavez and Maduro from stirring up anti-Jewish animus towards Capriles.

In 2009, Caracas’ pro-Chavez mayor led a mob through the streets to attack Capriles’ campaign headquarters, ransacking the building and spray painting “Nazi” on the walls. Chavez repeatedly, and baselessly, claimed that Capriles “represents Israel covertly.” After Pres. Maduro competed for the presidency against Capriles in 2013, the World Jewish Congress recorded a record number of 4,033 antisemitic instances, a rise they attributed in part to the bitterly antisemitic slurs that Pres. Maduro and his supporters flung against Capriles.

Raiding Jewish Institutions

In the early morning of November 29, 2004, over two dozen armed police officers descended on the Centro Social, Cultural y Deportivo Hebraica, a Jewish school and community center, just minutes before about 1,500 students were due to arrive. The officers were ostensibly there to search for “evidence” that local Jews had murdered State Attorney Danilo Anderson, who’d been killed a week and a half earlier in a car bombing.

The police occupied the building for hours. Salomon Cohen, president of Venezuela’s central Jewish organization the CAIV (Confederacion de Asociaciones Israelitas de Venezuela) later recalled the raid as “a direct attack on Venezuela’s Jewish community. They wanted to let us know who is in charge.” (Though the police didn’t find any weapons or evidence, they nonetheless filed a complaint against the center.)

Three years later, Venezuelan forces raided the Hebraica building again, ostensibly looking for weapons. The raid came on the eve of a major national political referendum and seemed clearly designed to terrify the 900 Jews who were attending a wedding nearby and to send them a strong signal that Jews weren’t welcome in Venezuela.

Synagogue Attacks

Caracas’ Tiferet Israel synagogue is one of the oldest in the city, and has been the site of several terrifying attacks.

Caracas’ Tiferet Israel synagogue

In 2004, and again in 2009, Pres. Chavez openly took Hamas’ side in their conflicts with Israel and held public demonstrations to excoriate Israel. He baselessly accused of orchestrating a “Holocaust,” of being evil, and of seeking to harm Venezuela. In the midst of a febrile atmosphere, demonstrators marched on Tiferet Israel in 2004, calling then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a war criminal. In 2009, in the midst of Hamas attacks on Israel, Pres. Chavez broke off diplomatic relations with Israel and held anti-Israel rallies in Caracas.

On Shabbat, January 31, 2009, a large group of armed protestors, including a dozen police officers, once again attacked Tiferet Israel, breaking into the synagogue and tying up the building’s two security guards. The intruders then rampaged through the building, occupying it for hours. They destroyed the synagogue’s Torah scrolls, wrote graffiti saying “death to Jews” and “property of Islam,” and calling for Jews to be expelled from Venezuela on the walls, and stole a list of Jews living in the city.

A month later, Tiferet Israel received a bomb threat. When synagogue members later cleaned up, they did so under armed guard. Pres. Chavez had clearly ratcheted up the tension and anti-Jewish hatred in Venezuela, yet he baselessly insisted the synagogue attack was the work of his political opponents.  A month after the second Tiferet Israel attack, someone threw a bomb into a residential area in Caracas with a large Jewish community; luckily, no one was hurt, though the Jewish community in Caracas was left terrified.

Fleeing Venezuela

Given this long history of extreme antisemitism, Venezuelan Jews have been fleeing in droves. Today, just 4,000 Jews remain in Venezuela.

Yet Jewish life still goes on. There are 18 synagogues, schools, and Jewish charities. Even though Venezuela currently has no diplomatic ties with Israel, residents note that Venezuelan Jews are highly Zionist, and support a range of Israel-related causes.

Blaming Israel for Pres. Maduro’s Arrest

These days, blaming Jews and Israel for perceived wrongs is baked into Venezuelan politics. When Pres. Maduro claimed victory in his disputed 2024 presidential election, crowds took to the streets protesting his obvious theft of the election. Pres. Maduro baselessly blamed “international Zionism” for “supporting” and financing the protestors and Venezuela’s opposition parties. “All the communication power of Zionism, which controls all the social networks, the satellites and all the power is behind” the protests, he implausibly claimed.

In the days since Pres. Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were captured by the United States, Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, has again blamed Jews for Venezuela’s misfortunes, baselessly blaming “Zionist”s for their arrests.

As Venezuela contemplates this new political chapter in their country, they will have to address the deep-seated hostility to Jews that has long infected their politics if it wishes to move on and restore a more moderate era of political discourse.