“When I arrived in the provinces west of the Euphrates, I presented the governors with the royal credentials.” In this passage from the book of Nehemiah, which deals with the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem, is one of the oldest mentions of what we know today as a passport.
Nehemiah was in the 5th century BC. a high official of the Persian king Artaxerxes. In the story, he asks the monarch for permission to help rebuild his ancestral city, which Babylon conquered in the previous century.
“May Your Majesty deign to give me letters to the governors west of the Euphrates, that I may pass through their lands on my journey to Judah,” he wrote.
Letters of safe conduct such as that of Nehemiah served for many centuries as an instrument of a person’s safe passage entering and leaving a kingdom. In practice it was little more than a written gentlemen’s agreement in which two rulers, recognizing their mutual authority, agreed that the passage of that subject across their borders would not provoke unnecessary war.
The Briton Martin Lloyd explains this in the book “The Passport” about the history of the document.
French passport issued in Berlin to the personal cook of the Russian Imperial Minister in Prussia in 1815. Image: Reproduction Twitter @ourpussports
In the 16th century the term “passport” was used. The word comes from the Old French “passeport” because it means the document that authorizes the person to pass through a port and leave the country.
The other version of the origin of the term is very similar, citing the same function, but instead of going through the port, the person exits the city walls, which the French also called “porte”.
As the international community, modern states, better defined borders, trade and international relations, and cultural exchange took shape, the document became more important.
Passport of the slave Manoel, issued in 1876, allowing movement for sale. Image: Public Archives of the State of São Paulo
In 1820, in connection with the opening of ports to Portuguese friendly nations in 1808, Brazil began demanding the following:
“As I deem it imperative, under the present circumstances, to the safety and security of public order in this kingdom, I am issued the following orders:
That no person, whether resident or foreign, of any class or situation, shall be permitted to disembark and enter any part of this Kingdom of Brazil without being properly equipped and presenting the appropriate passport or ordinance that its quality is demonstrated by the place it came from and the destination to which it is going.
Decree of December 2, 1820
By the end of the century, the immigration flow was so great that the 1891 Constitution dispensed with the document.
In peacetime, anyone with their property and goods can enter or leave the national territory as and when it suits them, regardless of passport. Article 72, paragraph 10
Passport of Santos Dumont from 1919. Image: National Archives/Public Domain
The passport as we know it
In 1914, with the First World War, the document became binding again. After the conflict, the world was different and so was the passport.
The League of Nations, founded in 1920 with the far from peaceful mission of maintaining world peace, suggested the idea of creating a global standard for passports, but it would take some time to materialise.
Today we recognize such a document from afar: a small notebook with an embossed coat of arms, a person’s photo, his name and other basic information, stamps of the countries visited, etc.
One of the first German passports issued in 1935 after reunification. Image: Reproduction Twitter @ourpussports
But a hundred years ago, passports had, shall we say, much more editorial freedom. The British passport, for example, consisted of a page folded eight times and enclosed in a cardboard sleeve. In addition to the citizen’s photograph and signature, it included physical descriptions such as a large nose and blond hair, and distinctive features such as a crooked mouth or a scar.
Such descriptions were a holdover from the days when documents did not contain images. “I don’t know how people could understand that the person before them was the person described in the passport,” collector Neil Kaplan tweeted. who maintains a website and a Twitter account exhibit and explain his vast collection of old passports, amassed over more than 20 years.
When photographs were incorporated into passports, there was nothing resembling the rigid standardization we conform to when creating documents.
The photos initially had no standard, so images like this German passport from 1919 were created. Image: Reproduction Twitter @ourpussports
Since there were no rules, people just had to submit a photo, and they did. They posed in hats, veils, played guitar and rowed. They reused an old photo, cut out their own face, or extracted the photo from another document.
According to Kaplan, this was common among refugees, who had every reason to be afraid to go out to order a photograph. After all, it was something much more complex, laborious and expensive than the actuality of today’s digital images, created with devices that fit in your pocket and were stored digitally in the cloud. A lot of people just didn’t have the money to do it.
In times of black and white photos or no photos at all, descriptions of people helped with identification. Image: Reproduction Twitter @ourpussports
control and control
While the passport may carry a good symbolic dose of freedom, the right to come and go, many people didn’t see it that way.
In the United States, legislation was enacted in 1924 to deal with an “emergency”: the high influx of immigrants from countries that threatened the “American ideal of hegemony.” The best way to control this and filter out people who could enter the country was a document showing their country of origin. A hundred years ago, the passport was an instrument of control.
Furthermore, the notion of individuality was not universal. Married women, on the rare occasions when they were traveling alone, were not entitled to a passport in their own name, but in that of their husband: Senhora Fulano de Tal.
This did not change in the USA until 1937. In Brazil, where they also needed their husband’s permission to travel, the regulation only came into force with the statute for married women in 1962.
Group passes were also common at certain times; here that of a Serbian family, from 1920 Photo: Reproduction Twitter @ourpussports
Group passes were also common, particularly for groups of refugees who needed to leave the country quickly, such as the Jews of interwar Europe. But the collection pass was also used in nontragic realities, such as groups of workers and sports teams who had to travel.
For the usually privileged, the news of having to prove one’s identity was often insulting. In 1929, The New York Times reported that obtaining a passport was “an arduous ordeal” and that foreigners were better off because they were accustomed to the bureaucracy that annoys American citizens.
US passport issued to Attorney Robert Yenney Thornton for his trips to Japan and Britain in 1960. Image: Reproduction Twitter @ourpussports
The following year, the newspaper reported that passport photos were “notoriously uncomfortable and unflattering.”
An educated man looks like a criminal, a radiant young lady becomes a heavyfaced idiot. Few travelers feel more than a tinge of dreadful surprise, almost disbelief, when they first look at the photograph that identifies them in a foreign land.”
Apparently, the almost widespread dissatisfaction with document photos is something old. In the same article, the newspaper said that obtaining a passport is an ordeal that inspires fear in the middle class.
However, with the consolidation of a set of documents requiring a photo ID, driver’s license and club card, the issue lost its controversy in the years that followed and became integrated into everyday life. All that was left was the frustration of seeing your photo in a new document.