 bring home to them the fact that they are not masters in our country; third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings be taken from them, fourth, I advise that their Rabbis be forbidden to teach on pain of loss of life and lives,; fifth, I advise that safe conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews, for they have no business in the countryside; sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasures be taken from them.”
A little under 400 years later, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were formulated along the same lines, basically making Judaism illegal. Those with the means and perhaps a keener sense of survival left Europe for the relative safety of the New World. By far the majority of emigré Jews went to the United States, many to Canada and some to South America. Bearing in mind the small Jewish community in Trinidad - if one can speak of a ‘community’ at all - it is surprising that we were host to so many. Trinidad had a relatively lax immigration law that allowed individuals entry without visa requirements (except some basic health requirements) and a payment of only £50 deposit. After one year, the deposit was returned.
The Jewish immigrants earned their living by peddling house to house, selling haberdashery, dying old clothes and reselling them. In the white French Creole and British-dominated society, they suffered very much the same type of social and racial prejudice as the Portuguese of the previous century, and their fellow Semitic, the Syrians and Lebanese. Looked upon as peasants of inferior status, coloured folks also despised them because they were poor and white. The Indians may not have noticed them, being themselves apportioned their share of racial prejudice in this segmented society.
Notwithstanding, or perhaps even because of all this, the Ashkenazi Jews of the 1930s prospered and formed small businesses. They raised families and put into place the religious apparatus necessary to sustain rabbinical Judaism.
By 1938, 125 Jewish immigrants had arrived. By 1940, inspite of stricter immigration policies, some 585 Jews had entered Trinidad. Some were merely passing through, others would stay and put down roots. But with the outbreak of the Second World War, life for the Jews was not easy in Trinidad as well. As soon as Britain had entered into the war in 1939, all Germans and Austrians residing in the colonies were regarded as having “enemy alien” status. All over the British Empire, they were rounded up and interned.
As Farah notes in her paper:
“The irony of it all was that many of these ‘aliens’ had fled the horror of Nazism to seek haven in lands such as Trinidad, and were now uprooted much in the same manner as if they were still living under the Nazi yoke. To Hans ‘John’ Stecher, it was ‘indeed a deep insult to us, the first and most savaged victims of Nazism’.”
The enemy aliens were put into a camp in what became later Federation Park, and inspite of the fact that their ‘treatment by the Colonial administration left much to be desired’, they were all set free after the war.