Haiti declares all Jews to be of African descent

In the 1930s the Haitian legislature declared that all Jews were of African ancestry, on the reasoning that they had come out of Egypt with Moses at the time of the Exodus. The finding had a practical purpose. The Haitian constitution permitted land ownership only to people of African descent, so the declaration allowed European Jews to settle in the country as enfranchised citizens. During the Holocaust some French and German Jews reached Haiti by steamship. Most moved on to North America or to Israel and a handful stayed to the end of their lives. Ashkenazi families had begun arriving in the late nineteenth century, and there were Jews among the Middle Eastern migrants of the early twentieth century who became known in Haiti as Siryen whatever their actual nationality. No synagogue is known to have existed in the country. One Jewish cemetery was laid out in the colonial period and was abandoned long ago.

Munro records the promotion as a demonstration staged to keep negotiations moving. The Vincent administration felt it had a mandate to insist on the earliest possible restoration of independence, though the president and his foreign minister Pauleus Sannon said they wanted the incoming Haitian administrators properly trained, which was what Washington also claimed to want. Progress in the Garde had been slow because few literate upper-class men wanted a police career; at the time of the Forbes Commission's visit only thirty-five to forty percent of officers were Haitian and none ranked above captain, though the commission approved a plan to replace all American officers by 1936. Early in December 1930 the Haitians were pleased when one of the five military departments was placed under Major Demosthenes Calixte, who had enlisted as a private in 1915.

Munro describes the compromise that averted bloodshed and the pressure that secured it. Both General Russell and the commission concluded there might be violence if the demand for a popular election were refused, so Russell worked out a plan with Borno and the commission persuaded the opposition leaders to accept it. Eugene Roy, a businessman who had not been active in politics, would be elected by the Council of State to succeed Borno on the understanding that he would resign once a Congress had been chosen by popular vote, after which that Congress would name a new president. Roy was duly elected in April 1930, but Munro records the decisive detail: only after the American government had made clear that it would install him in the presidency itself if the Council of State rejected him.

Munro treats the election of 14 October 1930 as the moment the occupation lost its preferred interlocutors. Roy worked reasonably well with Russell and the treaty officials while preparing for the vote, and the American government left the matter entirely in his hands, instructing all American officials to do nothing that might influence the outcome. The result was a victory for the radical nationalist groups over the more conservative candidates backed by the leaders of the Port-au-Prince elite. When the new Congress met in November it elected Stenio Vincent president of the republic. Just before it assembled, General Russell resigned and Munro himself arrived as American minister with instructions to direct the treaty services and to create conditions in which the United States could withdraw as far as possible from Haiti's internal affairs.