In the early 1940s, several hundred Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria found a safe haven in a remote but beautiful spot on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. With the explicit backing of the Roosevelt Administration, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee established, funded, and micromanaged an agricultural colony for Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany at a former banana plantation. At first glance, the history of the Sosúa colony might appear as an intriguing but almost irrelevant footnote of World War II and the Holocaust. Tropical Zion, however, represents a significant contribution to transnational history because author Alan Wells skillfully interweaves the story of the colony with several contexts that are often studied separately: United States diplomatic history, the Jewish refugee crisis of the late 1930s, the political and economic history of the Dominican Republic, and the protracted history of Jewish agricultural settlement schemes in the Soviet Union and the Americas.

Only a year before Tropical Zion, another detailed account of this story was published as accompanying volume of an exhibition about the Sosúa colony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York: Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa, 1940–1945 (New York, 2008). Author Marion Kaplan, an accomplished specialist of German Jewish history, tells the same story, and no less competently than Wells; however, she and Wells approach Sosúa from different angles. Kaplan has not used Spanish language sources. Yet Wells, as he openly admits, does not read German, the first language of most settlers into old age. Thus Kaplan, drawing on recorded German-language interviews, sketches a more intimate portrait of the everyday life on the colony—from the perspective of the settlers. Wells, a specialist of nineteenth-century Mexican history, has combed through various American and Dominican archives and gives a more multifaceted rendering of the different stages of the colony's development. His portrayal of the Dominican side of the story adds an important perspective that is only partly developed in Dominican Haven. Wells deftly shifts the focus between the colony and the different players who controlled its fate, ranging from FDR, to several high-ranking State Department officials, American Jewish leaders, and Trujillo; each is the subject of an extensive portrait. Wells conducted personal interviews with several older settlers, among them his father. In contrast to Kaplan's concise narrative, Tropical Zion is a much more extensive study that occasionally is mired in too much detail.

Why did American Jewish leaders invest huge funds into a quickly planned settlement scheme for a limited number of Jewish refugees, most of whom were not interested in or even capable of performing agricultural work? And why did they choose the Dominican Republic rather than channeling a relatively small number of refugees to the United States? In the late 1930s the Dominican Republic was the personal fiefdom of Rafael Trujillo, one of the most notorious dictators in twentieth-century Latin American history. In October 1937, he ordered the systematic slaughter of 15,000 Haitian civilians who allegedly were illegal settlers. The cynical purpose of “El Corte” (the cutting down) was to deter black Haitians from settling in the Dominican Republic. The early stages of the Sosúa project betray Trujillo's skills as a shrewd diplomat who knew how to sway important decision makers in Washington—and who cleverly instrumentalized American Jewish leaders. The surprising offer to open his country to potentially large numbers of (productive) refugees from Europe—made shortly after the massacre—was only superficially a humanitarian gesture. Trujillo wanted to regain the confidence of the Roosevelt Administration, which had condemned the massacre. And, a bizarre twist given the motivation behind El Corte, white Europeans refugees would not only contribute to economic development, but they were also expected to improve the racial stock of Dominican society.

In 1938, several thousand Spanish republicans left French exile for the Caribbean. They were funded by a Spanish exile organization; Trujillo provided accommodation and farmland. Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany (and Austria) were even more unlikely recruits for a settlement scheme in a country run by a racist dictator. But Trujillo's offer to take in large numbers of Jewish refugees came at the height of a worsening refugee crisis in central Europe. As the Nazis stepped up the pressure and alternative options for Jewish refugees were vanishing, the Dominican offer looked increasingly enticing to the White House and American Jewish leaders. Following the demise of American Jewish-funded colonies in the Soviet Union in 1938, the Joint Distribution Committee could draw on the expertise of several professionals to get the Sosúa project off the ground. The negotiations over the colony dragged on for almost two years, however.

In 1940/41 Jewish refugees in Europe found themselves in an increasingly precarious situation. Wells provides a differentiated analysis of the Roosevelt Administration's rigid policy toward refugees. Like Max Paul Friedman's Nazis and Good Neighbors (Cambridge, 2003), this study confirms how the State Department and White House massively overrated Nazi influence in Latin America. As western Europe came under Nazi control, the State Department insisted on additional screening measures, slowing down the evacuation of refugees, frequently with fatal consequences. Although Trujillo backtracked somewhat and raised additional demands, American intransigency largely explains why only a relatively small number of Jews eventually reached Sosúa.

The optimistic expectations for the actual colony were overblown from the start. Both volumes contain dozens of photographs taken during the early 1940s at the colony. Unfortunately, neither author sufficiently discusses the potential pitfalls of these illustrations. The official image of industrious women and men, who even found time to relax on the beach, only partly matches the actual story. Wells and Kaplan describe various challenges: Health problems forced the capable settlement leader Joseph Rosen to withdraw to New York at a relatively early stage. The soil was not well suited for farming, and the lack of training and the tropical climate constituted big challenges. Many settlers were tormented by worries about their families in Europe. The uneven gender balance created tensions. Quite a few settlers moved to neighboring cities soon after arrival, questioning the viability of the whole project. In 1945, especially single males were eager to leave Sosúa, and many succeeded. But even then stateless refugees could not easily emigrate to the United States. This background explains why the colony's leaders could recruit several dozen Jewish refugees from Shanghai in 1947, another unlikely safe haven for Jewish refugees from Nazism. Just when the colony had begun to prosper, Trujillo's assassination in 1961 and the political instability that followed in its wake prompted most remaining settlers to depart for the United States. Today Sosúa is a beach resort, popular not least with German tourists. A small Jewish museum commemorates the history of the colony.