Patrick Comerford
The kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moro claimed Sephardic Jewish ancestry 13 years ago, although he has never identified himself as Jewish in terms of religion, nor has he ever practised Judaism. In an interview in 2013, Maduro spoke of how his grandparents were descended from Sephardic families but had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in Venezuela.
The Antilles and the Caribbean have long had an important Jewish presence, and a large proportion of the Jewish families in the region are Sephardic in origin, as I learned during a course in Sephardic genealogy and history that I took during the Covid-19 lockdown. The series of weekly Zoom seminars or webinars on Sephardic history was organised by the Bevis Marks Synagogue and the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community in London in May and June 2020.
Researchers recently claimed Christopher Columbus may have been a Sephardic Jew from Spain rather than being from Genoa. They announced their conclusions in October 2024 after 20 years of DNA and genetic tests on part of his remains that are said to be held in a tomb in the Cathedral in Seville.
Maduro’s claims to Jewish ancestry are not unique for a Latin American president: President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo of Mexico, whose 83% approval ratings make her one of the most popular leaders in the world today, is the first Jewish president in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations. Although she is not a religiously observant Jew, Dr Sheinbaum identifies as culturally Jewish and has spoken proudly about her heritage. Her father Carlos Sheinbaum was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, from a family who emigrated from Lithuania in 1928; her mother Annie Pardo is from a Sephardi Jewish family who fled to Mexico from the persecution of Jews in Bulgaria during World War II.
The first Jewish immigrants to Venezuela were found in the Dutch colonies in South America in the 17th century. Jews escaping the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions found refuge and freedom of worship in places such as Recife in Dutch Brazil, although, even after Simon Bolivar’s wars of liberation, Jews faced anti-Jewish discrimination.
Maduro is a classic Sephardic name and is a common name on the island of Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles, which has an extensive Jewish heritage. Both of Nicolás Maduro’s parents – Nicolás Maduro García (d. 1989), and Teresa de Jesús Moros (d. 1994) – were descended from Sephardic families whose ancestors were among Iberian Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century and who moved to the Netherlands.
The Maduro family moved from Amsterdam to the Caribbean in the 18th century, first to Curaçao and then to Aruba in the Dutch Antilles, where they were among the islands’ earliest settlers. Over generations, members of the family migrated from Aruba to Colombia and later to Venezuela, through the coasts of Falcón state and then on to Lara and Zulia states, where some family members converted to Catholicism.
The first family member to move to Aruba, Moses Solomon Levy Maduro, arrived in 1754 while working for the Dutch West India Company. Salomón de Moisés Levy Maduro and his wife Sara, daughter of Jacob de Samuel Levy Maduro, were living in Aruba in 1764.
The Mongui Maduro Museum is housed in the former Rooi Catootje plantation house in the Dutch Antilles island of Curaçao. The house dates from 1735, and the museum tells the story of four generations of the Levy Maduro family and its Sephardic Jewish ancestry, with displays that include the family tree of Salomon Abraham (Mongui) Levy Maduro.
Their stories and influence on the social and economic history of Curaçao are told in the museum, and the displays include antiques and heirlooms. Mongui Maduro’s grandfather Salomon Elias Levy Maduro (Papa Monchi) was a businessman who bought Rooi Catootje in 1853 and built a legacy that continues today. Mongui Maduro was raised by his uncle Manchi and spent a lifetime collecting Judaica and Antillana books and newspaper clippings. His collection evolved into a fully functioning reference library through the efforts of his daughter Ena in 2010.
The history of the Jews in Venezuela dates from the mid-17th century, when groups of marranos or Spanish and Portuguese descendants of baptised Jews who may have secretly continued to adhere to Judaism, lived in Tucacas, Caracas and Maracaibo. The Jewish Cemetery in Santa Ana de Coro is the oldest Jewish cemetery in continuous use in the Americas.
The vast majority of Venezuela’s Jews left during the past two decades, under Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez. They left for Israel and the US, as well as Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala. Maduro may have been anxious to assert his claims to Sephardic ancestry in an interview in 2013 as a response to accusations that his regime tolerated or even encouraged antisemitism in Venezuela.
After Chávez was elected in 1998, he began to engineer a campaign against Venezuela’s Jews, and his anti-Zionism often descended into antisemitism. During a demonstration outside the main Sephardi synagogue in Caracas, the wall was scrawled with the words ‘Jews, killers – leave’. Police raided the Club Hebraica in Los Chorros, an upmarket neighbourhood in East Caracas, in November 2004, after the murder of a public prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, and accused the club of storing Mossad weapons alleged to have been used in the killing. Chávez later said ‘the descendants of those who killed Christ had taken possession of all the wealth in the world.’
Maduro was Foreign Minister and then Vice-President under Chávez. At times, Maduro publicised his contacts with Jewish figures in Venezuela. When he announced in 2013 that his grandparents were Sephardim and had converted to Catholicism, he may have been anxious to counter accusations of antisemitism made against his regime. He met Jewish leaders in Caracas, including Rabbi Isaac Cohen of the Asociación Israelita de Venezuela, in 2017 framing the meeting as a dialogue on coexistence. In Maduro met Rabbi Shlomo Moshe Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi, who was visiting Venezuela in 2018, and during that visit awarded a medal to Rabbi Isaac Cohen.
On the other hand, Maduro’s recent election rival, Henrique Capriles Radonski, who was raised a Catholic, also has Sephardi Jewish and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry: his maternal grandparents, Andrés Radonski and Lili Bochenek, survived the Holocaust and emigrated from Poland with his mother to Venezuela in 1947. His great-grandparents were murdered in Treblinka during the Holocaust; his maternal grandmother, Lili Bochenek, lived for 20 months in the Warsaw Ghetto; and his paternal grandfather, Armando Capriles-Myerston, was a Sephardi Jew.
The attacks on Jews lessened during Maduro’s presidency, but by then many Jews had left Venezuela. After his kidnapping, the now acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, alleged his capture of Maduro and the US attack were a ‘Zionist’ attack. Her claims were seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to scapegoat to the ever-shrinking Jewish community in Venezuela. Venezuela had a Jewish community of about 22,000 people when Chávez took office in 1999. Today there are fewer than 6,000 Jews in the country.
• These links offer closer looks at the family tree of the Maduro family in Curaçao: a genealogical profile of Susana Maduro, grandmother of Nicolás Maduro on Geneanet and her ancestral connections HERE; and the story of Sephardic Jews in Aruba, with details of the arrival of the Maduro family in Aruba HERE.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
