Mozambique
The first Jews to arrive in the tortured Southern African country of Mozambique were likely ancient traders and explorers, but there are no records of Jewish presence until the Portuguese took control of the nation in the 1500s. The Portuguese asserted dominance over Mozambique for nearly five hundred years but they did very little to develop the country. The Catholic Church refused to teach "inferior" Africans to read and write, which led to a more than 90% illiteracy rate in the ‘70s when the nation finally shook Portuguese control. The Portuguese did not prevent Jews from settling in Mozambique, but they did not encourage them. Even after the Catholic Church stopped publicly persecuting Jews, an Inquisition mentality shaped the public attitude to Jewish settlers. Many Jewish settlers maintained their faith in private; some even went so far as to convert to Catholicism to appease their European neighbors, most of whom were landless farmers who the Portuguese government had shipped to Africa with the promise of great wealth. A small European Jewish community developed in the capital, Maputo, and in Beira, a port city on the northern coast. The Jews who settled in Mozambique were mainly merchants and businessmen who maintained very close ties with the South African Jewish community. They were literate and white in a primarily black, illiterate nation; in most respects they remained isolated. Most Europeans in Mozambique, including almost the entire Jewish community, fled the nation on the eve of independence in 1974. The new government seized religious property including the synagogue in Maputo, turning it over to the Mozambique Red Cross, which used it as a warehouse. The Red Cross maintained the building, but there were no public religious observances in Maputo for almost twenty years.mozambique
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