The largest migration of Sephardic Jews occurred in the nineteenth century from Panama, Jamaica, Curaçao and Saint Thomas, the majority settling in Alajuela and San José and prospering in trade.
[3] The second great emigration occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially due to the rise of Nazism in Europe and mainly from Poland.
Notable anti-semites included Otilio Ulate Blanco, owner of the Diario de Costa Rica newspaper and future president, and poet Luis Dobles Segreda.
[5] During the 1930s the nationalistic government of León Cortés Castro (1936–1940) was hostile to the Jews and restricted their entry into the country as well as implementing policies that limited their economic development.
The relations improved definitively during the subsequent administration of Teodoro Picado Michalski (1944–1948), himself the son of a Polish mother, who lifted economic restrictions from the time of Cortés.
Ulate was the presumed winner of the elections, although with mutual accusations of voter fraud, which caused rejection of the results by the ruling party and finally the outbreak of a revolution.
The rebellious side, led by José Figueres and Ulate (and in which many Italians and Germans served, for obvious reasons opposed to Calderón) was the victor.
This was modified in 2007 when, during the second Óscar Arias administration, the embassy was moved to Tel Aviv and Costa Rica established diplomatic relations with the Arab world.
Other notable anti-Semites were Otilio Ulate Blanco, Luis Dobles Segreda, and to lesser extent Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia, according to Jacobo Schifter, Lowell Gudmundson and Mario Solera.
[11] Despite the existence of an Anti-Zionist component of the far-right Free Costa Rica Movement active between the 60s and 90s, no major anti-Semitic controversy was notable until the 2002 Costa Rican general election in which Vice-Presidential nominee Luis Fishman Zonzinski assured that after being fired by Abel Pacheco de la Espriella's campaign team Pacheco and collaborators made anti-Semitic comments.
[12] The deputy for the 2010–2014 period Nestor Manrique Oviedo Guzmán then of the Citizens' Action Party (although later he defects to National Restoration), accused then Vice President of the Republic, Luis Liberman, of benefiting his Jewish co-religionists in a network of corruption.
[23] In 2015, the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked the Costa Rican government to close a store in San José that sells Nazi paraphernalia, Holocaust denial books and other products associated with Nazism.