Santa Comba Dão
António de Oliveira Salazar, who was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968 and leader of the "Estado Novo", was born in Vimieiro, Santa Comba Dão on 28 April 1889.
António de Oliveira Salazar
Portugal's official nationalism was not grounded in race or biology. Salazar argued that Portuguese nationalism did not glorify a single race because such a notion was pagan and anti-human. In 1937, he published a book entitled "Como se Levanta um Estado" ("How to Raise a State"), in which he criticised the philosophical ideals behind Nazi Germany's Nuremberg laws. In 1938, he sent a telegram to the Portuguese Embassy in Berlin, ordering that it should be made clear to the German Reich that Portuguese law did not allow any distinction based on race, and that therefore, Portuguese Jewish citizens could not be discriminated against. In the previous year, Adolfo Benarus, Honorary Chairman of COMASSIS and a leader of the Lisbon's Jewish Community, published a book in which he applauded the lack of anti-Semitism in Portugal. In 2011, Avraham Milgram, Yad Vashem historian, said that modern anti-Semitism failed "to establish even a toehold in Portugal", while it grew virulently elsewhere in early 20th-century Europe.