Sephardic Jews of France: Bordeaux, Bayonne and the Villages

France’s Sephardim were concentrated in the south-west, in a cluster of towns between Bordeaux and the Spanish border.

Portuguese families began arriving in the 1550s under royal letters patent that described them as merchants rather than as Jews. For roughly a century and a half they lived outwardly as Catholics — baptised, married and buried by priests — while maintaining a Jewish communal life that the authorities tolerated so long as it was not public.

The transition to open Judaism was gradual and happened at different speeds in different towns. Bordeaux and Bayonne became substantial communities and survive today. The village congregations — Peyrehorade, Bidache, Labastide-Clairence, Dax, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Tartas — flourished in the seventeenth century and were gone by the nineteenth.

Which Sephardim settled in France?

Nearly everyone described here is Western Sephardi: families from Portugal and Spain who came north over the Pyrenees or by sea, connected by trade and marriage to Amsterdam, Hamburg, Livorno, London and the Caribbean.

Later arrivals were different. Jews from Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, the papal territories, were a distinct community with its own rite, and settled in Bordeaux from the eighteenth century. The Portuguese kept themselves apart from them.

Eastern Sephardim came from the Ottoman lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Megorashim arrived in very large numbers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia between the 1950s and 1970s, and today constitute the majority of French Jewry — a community many times larger than the one this page describes, and with an entirely separate history.

Two things that make France different

Both follow from geography. The Pyrenees are crossable at their western end, and Bayonne and Bordeaux are the first substantial towns a traveller reaches from Spain.

These communities were therefore never fully in exile. Business, family and news moved across the border continuously, and news from Spain reached the south-west before it reached Paris.

And their legal position was never secure. Louis XIV’s permission of 1656 had to be renewed annually. Recognition as Jews came only in 1723, and full rights in 1790.

Where they came from

Directly from Iberia, and much earlier than in northern Europe.

Henry II’s letters patent of 1550 gave Portuguese merchants the right to settle in Bordeaux, and similar arrangements followed at Bayonne and in the smaller towns. The region had been English until the end of the Hundred Years War and the settlers were welcome.

The attraction for France was commercial: these were families with capital, Atlantic trading connections and correspondents in Lisbon, Antwerp and Amsterdam. The attraction for the families was proximity. They knew the Iberian market, the right people and the notaries, and they had relatives on the other side to trade with.

That closeness defines the south-western communities. They did not arrive as a community in exile; they arrived as a commercial network with one foot still in Iberia.

It also made them vulnerable. The Inquisition was not active in France as it was in Spain and Portugal, but in 1632 a Spanish Inquisition emissary was arrested at Bordeaux after the New Christians had him framed as a spy. He was later released, and seventy New Christians were extradited to Spain. This is the difference between Bordeaux and Amsterdam: in Amsterdam the community was safe, and in the south-west it was useful.

How they made a living

In the villages, in the earliest period, probably local trade across the Spanish border, and quite possibly the movement of contraband and of people. This is inference rather than evidence, but it fits the geography and the dates.

In the cities, Atlantic and global commerce. Bordeaux was one of the great colonial ports of the eighteenth century, and Portuguese Jewish houses were substantial participants.

Bayonne developed a distinctive specialism in chocolate. Portuguese Jews are credited with introducing chocolate manufacture to France through Bayonne, and it remained a Jewish trade there for generations, though the claim is repeated more often than it is documented. They were also shipowners, brokers and wholesale merchants, being barred from retail trade in Bayonne proper.

By the later nineteenth century the pattern had changed completely. Léon, writing in 1893, describes young Bayonne Jews abandoning commerce for law, engineering and the professions, and leaving the town because there was no work to hold them.

Where they went

In three directions.

Inward, to Bordeaux and Bayonne, which absorbed the village communities as those declined. Peyrehorade had one rabbi counting seven heads of household in 1777; a century earlier it had perhaps 450 people.

Outward, to the wider Western Sephardi world: Amsterdam, London, Hamburg and the Caribbean. Jamaica in particular, where many Portuguese families claimed Bayonne origin, and the Lindo family went directly from Bordeaux and Bayonne.

Isaac de Castro of Tartas reached Brazil in the 1640s by way of Holland, was taken to Lisbon by the Inquisition, refused to recant and was burned alive, calling out the Shema as he died. The event was remembered in Lisbon for weeks, and after it the condemned were gagged. His brother David Castro Tartas became a printer in Amsterdam and carried the village name with him.

Outward again, to Paris, from the nineteenth century onward. Pierre Mendès France, prime minister in the 1950s, descended from these communities.

If you lose a south-western French family, look next at Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Paris, Livorno, London, Jamaica and the Portuguese Inquisition records.

Bordeaux

The largest and wealthiest of the French Sephardi communities, and the best documented. The chronology of its emergence into openness matters, because it determines which archive holds a given generation.

1550: Henry II grants Portuguese merchants the rights and privileges of native inhabitants. Ordinances of 1604 and 1612 forbid speaking ill of or harming them, and in 1574 the Parlement de Bordeaux intervenes to protect them.

Through the seventeenth century they live in the parishes of St Eulalie and St Eloy, are buried in Catholic parish grounds, and are married by priests. The registers sometimes note that the ceremony followed Portuguese custom. A charitable body, the Sedaca, supports the poor, travellers, and Sephardi communities in Eretz Israel.

1656: Louis XIV permits Portuguese merchants to settle, but the right is renewable annually.

1685: the revocation of the Edict of Nantes withdraws Protestant rights, with obvious implications for other tolerated groups.

1710: part of the Catholic cemetery is set aside for the Portuguese. Some begin to profess Judaism openly.

1719: Joseph Falcon is appointed first rabbi, followed by Jacob Ḥayyim Athias and his son David.

1723: letters patent name them for the first time, as Jews known and established in the kingdom under the title of Portuguese, otherwise New Christians.

1730s: synagogues and institutions are established. A report of 1753 calls the practice of Judaism in seven private prayer rooms a scandal.

1753: letters of naturalisation give the rights of other French subjects.

1785: the poll tax on Jews is abolished and residence restrictions eased.

1790: the Revolution emancipates the Portuguese Jews, more than a year before the Ashkenazim of the east.

1812: the Great Synagogue is inaugurated.

Bayonne and Saint-Esprit

A community established from about 1550, which has to be understood geographically.

Jews were excluded from Bayonne proper and concentrated in Saint-Esprit, a separate parish across the Adour that was only later absorbed into the city. Records appear under either name, and the parish of Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne is where the Catholic registers of the community are.

They were barred from retail trade and built their position in wholesale commerce, shipping, brokerage and chocolate. The community survives today. Of those deported during the Second World War, most never returned.

The village communities

Bidache and Labastide-Clairence are a special case, and the reason they matter is jurisdictional: they were the personal property of the ducs de Gramont and were not part of France.

Under the duke’s authority Jews could live there openly as Jews as early as 1600, more than a century before Bordeaux. Cardinal Richelieu had unfriendly things to say about the Jews of Bidache. Anyone tracing a family that appears to be practising Judaism openly in France before 1710 should check whether the place was actually in France.

Peyrehorade, in the French Basque country and historically part of Navarre, was the largest of the villages. Around forty Portuguese families were reported there in 1633. In 1655 the bishop of Aire told the assembly of the Gascon clergy that 300 Portuguese families were openly practising Judaism at Saint-Esprit and Peyrehorade. Nahon’s calculation from the first cemetery suggests over 400 people at the peak in the 1670s and 1680s.

Dax had ten Portuguese families in 1633, expelled in 1684; the names recorded are Fernandez, Fernandes Villareal and Flores. A contemporary trade directory records the town.

Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on the border, had New Christians reported in 1612. In 1619 Catherine de Fernandés was burned alive by a mob, accused of desecrating the host, and a priest of Portuguese origin was accused of being a Jew. The community left for Saint-Esprit.

Tartas is notable chiefly for the Castro family.

Elsewhere in France

Nantes had a small community at St Nicholas in 1592 and ten Portuguese families reported in 1630. A. Vaz was naturalised that year. They were attacked in 1636 during the Spanish invasion; from 1637 those holding Dutch citizenship could live in the city unharassed. Nantes was a transit point for American silver moving from Bilbao to the Netherlands.

Rouen held a significant group of Portuguese merchants in the early seventeenth century. Szajkowski’s list of names in Rouen letters includes Antoine Rodrigues Lamego, Diego Henriques Cardoso, Philippe Henriques, Louis Dias de Lemes, Gracia Denis and her son Dominique Pereira, Antoine Fonseca, Fernande Loppe de Paz, Barthelemy and Martin Rodrigues, Domingo Alvares, Diego Fernandes Penso, Simon Loppe Manuel, Fernande de Castro, Manuel Dacosta Borges, Alienor Pimentel, Leonor Rodrigez, Antonio and François Acosta, Rodrigo de Morais, Henrique Mendez de Quaros, Jerome Mendes, Antoine Mendez Dacosta, François Acosta de Pas, Elisabeth Mendez, Diego Henriques Lamego and Anthoine Fondea Henriques.

Toulouse had a medieval community destroyed in 1321 and none again until the nineteenth century. Balthasar, later Isaac, Orobio de Castro, born at Braganza and raised at Málaga, practised medicine in Spain, was arrested and tortured by the Inquisition, then taught medicine at Toulouse before leaving for Amsterdam to live openly as a Jew.

Martinique had Portuguese Jews attempting to establish themselves in 1683; they were expelled.

Paris had no organised Sephardi congregation in this period, but became the destination for south-western families from the nineteenth century onward.

Cemeteries

The south-western burial grounds are the richest surviving evidence for the seventeenth-century communities. Gérard Nahon surveyed three of them for the Revue des études juives in 1968 and 1969, and this is the essential work.

Peyrehorade, first cemetery, rue des Chapons, was bought on 6 January 1628 by Simon Vas, Anthoine Gomes and Jean Fernandes Coaillou, acting for the Portuguese, from Esther de Saint-Geniès, vicomtesse d’Orthe, for 165 livres tournois. It was in use until about 1739.

Nahon’s clearance in July 1967 found 51 legible stones and 22 illegible, of which 41 had never been recorded. With burials known from earlier authors the documented total is 118, against an estimated thousand actually buried there. A second cemetery was bought in 1737.

Bidache has 131 dated burials recorded, of which 75 carry a Jewish date. The cemetery has been restored.

Labastide-Clairence opened in 1659, and 62 inscriptions have been recorded. Nahon notes burials of Da Costa, Henriques and Lopez. It is owned by the Consistoire israélite de Bayonne.

At Bordeaux there is the Portuguese Jewish cemetery on the Cours de la Marne.

What the Peyrehorade stones show

Nahon’s report is unusually informative about how the community’s religious life changed, because the stones record it directly.

The earliest inscriptions, from 1633, are in Spanish and Portuguese with Christian given names and Christian dates. A Hebrew given name first appears in 1650, on a child’s stone whose father still bears the Christian name Pedro. The first Jewish-calendar date is 1673. Between 1691 and 1722 the Jewish calendar is used almost exclusively. The first wholly Hebrew inscription is 1713.

Of 58 inscriptions Nahon read, 49 are in Spanish, 6 in Portuguese, 2 in Hebrew and 1 in French.

He also notes something a genealogist should know. Women outnumber men on the stones, at Peyrehorade 62 per cent to 38 per cent, and similarly at Bidache and Labastide-Clairence. His explanation is that wives and sisters took refuge in France while husbands and brothers remained in Iberia, or that the men moved on to larger centres in search of a living.

Families in the first Peyrehorade cemetery, 1633–1739

These are the families named on the stones, from Nahon’s index. The list includes those buried there, spouses named on their wives’ stones, and parents named on children’s stones. It is a small community and a nearly complete record of it.

Aboab · Acosta · Acosta-Cardoso · Acuna · Alvares · Antonias · Bais · Bais-Franco · Bais-Pardo · Baes de Leon · Cardoso · Castro · Cohen · Correa de Acosta · Costa · Dacosta · Dias · Fernandes · Fernandes de Pas · Fernandes-Dias · Fernandez · Ferreira · Gomes-Franca · Gomes-Silva · Gomez · Gomez-Dias · Henriques de Fonseca · Henriquez · Lasena · Leon · Leon-Mendes · Lopes · Lopes-Colaço · Lopes-Fonseca · Lopes-Leon · Lopez · Lopez-Gomez · Lopez-Maio · Lopez-Moreira · Lucena · Luis · Mendes · Mendez · Mezquita · Mocata · Morais · Moymanel · Nuñes · Nuñes-Peña · Nuñez-Péreira · Olivera de Moymanel · Peixoto · Puita · Raitona · Rivero · Rodrigez · Rodrigues · Rodrigues-Péreira · Rodriguez · Sosa · Soza · Spaelmans · Torres · Vaes · Widiente

Nahon’s count of the commonest names: Rodriguez and Gomez, 8 mentions each; Acosta or Costa, Dias, Lopez and Nuñes, 7 each; Mendez, 6; Bais or Vaez, 5; Aboab and Soza, 4; Fernandez, 3; Cardoso, Henriquez, Mocata and Péreira, 2 each.

Szajkowski records the Sephardi family names of Bordeaux as Alvarez, Cardoze, Dias, Dacosta, Gomes, Lameyra, Lopes, Mendes, Pas, Pereyre, Rodrigues and Silva.

A caution about coats of arms. Armorial bearings are attached to a number of French Sephardi families, mostly dating from the nineteenth century, and they are frequently identical to those of Spanish and Portuguese noble houses of the same surname to which the families were in no way related. Anyone can adopt and register a coat of arms, and doing so is not evidence of descent.

Records

The most important thing to know about Bordeaux is that the Jewish registers begin in 1706, but the community had been there since 1550. For the earlier period the records are Catholic parish registers, and the families are recorded under Christian names.

The surviving registers of the Israélites Portugais have been digitised by the Bordeaux city archives.

Register	Reference	Years
Births	GG 844	1738–1792
Circumcisions	GG 842	1706–1775
Circumcisions	GG 843	1732–1793
Circumcisions	GG 846	1750–1784
Circumcisions	GG 847	1773–1793
Circumcisions	GG 848	1774–1793
Circumcisions	GG 849	1774–1793
Circumcisions	GG 851	1785–1793
Marriages	GG 850	1775–1792
Deaths	GG 845	1739–1792

Note the imbalance: eight circumcision registers against one marriage register, because before 1723 marriages were performed by priests. Bordeaux had six Catholic parishes, and the method is to work through them year by year looking for Spanish and Portuguese names, remembering that not everyone bearing one was a New Christian.

The Archives départementales des Pyrénées-Atlantiques have digitised the Bayonne registers. Individual sections open directly: circumcisions 1725–1773, circumcisions by Jacob Silva 1752–1759, the birth, marriage and death register 1751–1788 and within it births, marriages and burials; the 1808 register of declarations and its transcription of Jewish names; and the Catholic registers of Saint-Étienne d’Arribe-Labourd, with baptisms and marriages. There is also a departmental guide to genealogical sources.

For the Gironde, the departmental archives hold passports to the Americas, 1650–1715, certificates of identity and Catholicism, and passports for foreign travel, 1800–1889.

French archives are organised by département. Material for Bordeaux is split between the city archives and the Archives départementales de la Gironde, which hold the notarial records. Material for Bayonne is in the Archives départementales des Pyrénées-Atlantiques.

The 1808 name declarations

These deserve particular attention. Napoleon’s decree required Jews to adopt and register fixed surnames, and the declarations record what each family had been called and what it became. For any family whose name appears to change around that date, this is the document that explains it. Claude Geudevert’s study of the Bordeaux name-takings covers that city.

An unexpected source

The Bevis Marks archive in London holds photographs of the minute books of the Bordeaux Kahal Kadosh, 1710 to 1789, apparently commissioned for a printed edition that never appeared. They can be consulted there, and they are of better quality than the microfilm copies available at Bordeaux itself, where the originals are not produced to readers.

Records elsewhere

Amsterdam City Archive, inventory 334, is the most important external source. The marriage banns give each party’s place of origin, and Bordeaux and Bayonne appear repeatedly.

The estate papers are exceptionally rich. Dossiers can run for a century as an inheritance passes down, and they sometimes contain commissioned genealogies drawn up to establish who was entitled to a share. One made in 1795 traces the descendants of David Israel Bernal, who made his will at Curaçao in 1705, through his brother Isaac Bernal’s family at Bayonne, down four generations.

The Dotar records list brides who applied for the annual dowry lottery. Seven candidates from Bordeaux appear in 1735 alone, with two from Bayonne.

The Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, and the Spanish and Mexican Inquisition tribunals. Spanish files naming individuals from this world include those of Jorge Fernández de Castro and Mateo Méndez de León and others.

Archives nationales, Paris, for letters patent, naturalisations, and the 1684 expulsion order from Peyrehorade, which survives as a list of 36 names.

Centre des Archives diplomatiques, Nantes, for French diplomatic correspondence from the sixteenth century onward with Tunisia, Italy, Egypt, Libya and Morocco, naming Jewish merchants throughout.

Sephardic World lectures on France

Sephardim in ancien régime France — Ton Tielen and David Mendoza
The Cercle de Généalogie Juive: Jewish genealogy in France — Alain Nedjar
De Megorashim à Dhimmis aux citoyens français — Sylviane Serruya
Merchants, Migrations and Memory: the Pariente family from Tetuan to Nice — Jacob Marrache

What has and hasn’t been researched

France is better served than most, and unevenly.

Bordeaux has a genuine scholarly literature — Malvezin, Detcheverry, Cirot, Nahon, Malino, Cavignac, Schwarzfuchs, Marzagalli — covering the community’s history, governance, trade and emancipation. Cavignac’s dictionary is the kind of reference work almost no other Sephardi community on this site possesses.

Bayonne has Léon’s 1893 history and Francia de Beaufleury’s earlier work, both still useful and both now well over a century old.

The village communities have Nahon’s cemetery surveys and very little else. Dax, Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Tartas are barely studied at all.

What is missing everywhere is the systematic linkage of the French records to the Amsterdam, London and Iberian material. These were nodes in a network, and the French half of the evidence has rarely been read alongside the rest.

Organisations and repositories

Cercle de Généalogie Juive, 45 rue La Bruyère, 75009 Paris. Anyone researching Jewish families in France should begin here. It was founded forty years ago, is run entirely by volunteers, and holds a library of around 1,000 books and 5,000 to 6,000 documents. [LINK NEEDED]

GenAmi, Association de Généalogie Juive Internationale, 76 rue de Passy, 75016 Paris. [LINK NEEDED]

JewishGen French Special Interest Group. [LINK NEEDED]

Archives Bordeaux Métropole; Archives départementales de la Gironde; Archives départementales des Pyrénées-Atlantiques.

Archives of the Jewish Consistory, 17 rue Saint-Georges, 75009 Paris.

Centre des Archives diplomatiques, Nantes.

Archives nationales and Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris.

Consistoire israélite de Bayonne, owner of the Labastide-Clairence cemetery.

Mémorial de la Shoah and the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris.

[NOTE: the live Bayonne and “other French towns” pages link to the old Google Sites version of this website for Peyrehorade, Bidache, Labastide-Clairence, Dax, Tartas and Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Those links have not been carried over. Please confirm whether the old pages are to be retired or migrated.]

Help us find records

We are looking for:

An index or transcription of the Bordeaux Israélites Portugais registers, GG 842–851
Transcriptions of the Bayonne and Saint-Esprit circumcision and vital registers
Any transcription of the Bordeaux Kahal Kadosh minute books, 1710 to 1789
A survey of the Peyrehorade second cemetery, opened in 1737
Any record of the 45 Peyrehorade burials known to earlier authors but not found by Nahon in 1967
The 1684 expulsion list from Peyrehorade, which names some 36 families
Marriages of Portuguese families in the Catholic parish registers of Bordeaux and Saint-Esprit before the Jewish registers begin
Evidence for or against the claim that Bayonne’s Portuguese Jews introduced chocolate to France
Material on Bidache and Labastide-Clairence under the ducs de Gramont
Material on the communities of Dax, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Tartas and Nantes
Family papers from any south-western French Sephardi family

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].

Research services

French Sephardi research means Catholic parish registers for the period before the community could record itself, Jewish registers only from 1706, a compulsory change of surname in 1808, archives split between city and department, and families that appear simultaneously in Bordeaux, Amsterdam, Jamaica and the Portuguese Inquisition. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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