During the Second World War, Portugal was called upon to exercise its duties of protection towards the Portuguese Jews in the territories under the German Reich. Known as “Oriental Jews of Portuguese Origin”, most of these people had received Portuguese documents as a result of a 1913 decision to grant provisional nationality to a number of Ottoman Jewish families from Salonika at the time of the Balkan Wars.

Thus “Oriental Jews of Portuguese Origin” became a label applied to all those Jewish subjects of the Ottoman Empire who had been issued with Portuguese papers from 1913 onwards. In the following decades, Portuguese governments tried several times unsuccessfully to rescind such titles. The result was that during World War II, Portugal was called upon to protect these nationals from the anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich and of the Vichy government and ended up allowing some three hundred to come conditionally to Portugal.

The many questions raised by the files of the Second World War period led me to further research the circumstances and terms under which the First Republic had granted such certificates of nationality. It turns out that instead of just the few hundred people repatriated between 1943 and 1945, papers were originally given to some 500 families. Moreover, during the 1913-57 period, archival documents echo the difficulties that Jews were experiencing in Europe and allow us to follow the attitudes of the Portuguese authorities in a question that appears linked both to Portugal's foreign policy and to the juridico-political conditions for granting and/or holding Portuguese nationality.

THE RETURN OF THE “PORTUGUESE NATION” TO THEIR FIRST HOMELAND

Let us now look at how the subtle web of history is woven in this story over which, and above all else, hovers the idea of a backward flow – the link to those Jews who fled the Portuguese Inquisition, the notion of “restoring justice”, the granting of certificates of nationality which returned them to their “original nationality”. “Original” for some; “a myth”, others argued.