Gibraltar Jewish Genealogy: Records and Community

Gibraltar is three miles of limestone at the mouth of the Mediterranean, and its Jewish community exists because of that geography and nothing else.

The British took the Rock in 1704 and could not feed the garrison. Spain would not supply it; Morocco would. The merchants who could move cattle, grain, fuel and building materials across the strait from Tetuan and Tangier were Jews, and so the Jews came, over the explicit objection of a treaty that forbade them.

The bargain was stated openly. The Jews of Morocco pressed the Emperor to secure facilities to supply Gibraltar, and the Emperor in turn pressed the British: accept Jews in Gibraltar as I accept Britons in Morocco, and we have a deal.

Elsewhere Sephardim were admitted despite being Jews, on sufferance. In Gibraltar they were admitted because they were Jews with Moroccan connections, and the British government breached an international treaty repeatedly rather than lose them.

The community has faced almost no official antisemitism in three centuries. Five of Gibraltar’s streets, lanes and alleys are named after Jewish merchants.

Who are the Jews of Gibraltar?

The core of the community is Megorashim: North African Sephardim, descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who crossed to Morocco, and who returned to Spanish soil three centuries later under a British flag, chiefly from Tetuan and Tangier.

But it was never purely Moroccan. In 1712 the chief engineer, Colonel Bennett, recorded that the Jews of Gibraltar came from Barbary, Leghorn and Portugal, and the records bear him out throughout.

For a genealogist, Gibraltar’s value is disproportionate to its size. It sits at the junction of the Moroccan, British, Italian and Iberian Sephardi worlds, and it is one of the few places where a Tetuan family and a London family can be watched becoming the same family. The difficulty is that most of the archive is neither indexed nor digitised.

Timeline

1356 — first record of Jews in Gibraltar, under Muslim rule, appealing for the ransom of Jews taken by Barbary pirates
1474 — the Duke of Medina Sidonia sells Gibraltar to conversos from Córdoba and Seville led by Pedro de Herrera
1476 — the Duke expels them; the fate of the 4,350 is unknown
1492 — the Alhambra decree
1704 — Anglo-Dutch capture of Gibraltar; most of the Spanish population leaves
1707 — Gibraltar made a free port under Moroccan pressure, and Jews begin to settle
1713 — the Treaty of Utrecht cedes Gibraltar to Britain; Article X forbids Jews and Moors to reside there
1713 — the oldest known document of the community: a note of hand, Mocatta versus Acris, concerning silver lace belonging to Isaac Bassan of Lisbon
1717 — the Spanish consul reports 300 Jews with a synagogue in the Calle de Juan de Sierra; Jews formally expelled
1718 — Britain declares war on Spain; the land supply closes and Morocco becomes indispensable. Jews readmitted
1721 — reciprocal treaty with Sultan Ismail Ibn Sharif
1724 — first synagogue, Sha’ar HaShamayim
1725 — first census: 111 males, 27 females
1729 — Britain and the Sultan agree the Sultan’s Jewish subjects may legally reside in the colony
1749 — right of permanent settlement; Isaac Nieto arrives from London as first rabbi
1753 — 575 Jews of about 1,800 civilians
c.1756–58 — the Jews are granted the Jews’ Gate burial ground
1759 — Es Hayim synagogue
1779–83 — the Great Siege. Jews shelter in huts in the south of the Rock
1781 — Sha’ar HaShamayim and Es Hayim destroyed by bombardment. Many Jews leave for London via Portsmouth
1781 — Nefusot Yehuda built, the Flemish or Dutch synagogue
1790 — the Hiram Lodge founded by Abraham Hassan, the first masonic lodge in Gibraltar
1801 — the Gibraltar Chronicle founded
1804–05 — yellow fever epidemic
1807 — community birth records begin
1820 — the land registry begins; Jews may legally own property
1828 — community death records begin
1848 — Jews’ Gate cemetery closed; North Front opens. Magistrates’ Court birth records begin
1858 — Jews permitted to hold public office
1868 — El Calpense founded. Magistrates’ Court death records and the earliest indexed marriage records begin
1940–44 — civilian evacuation to Madeira, Jamaica, London, Tangier and Northern Ireland; over 1,500 Gibraltar Jews in Jamaica
1954 — Sir Joshua Hassan becomes first Jewish Mayor; Chief Minister in 1969
1967 — Franco closes the frontier; not fully reopened until 1985
1990 — Jews’ Gate cemetery cleared and surveyed
2001 — 584 Jews

Where did the Gibraltar Jews come from?

Overwhelmingly from Morocco, and the 1791 census proves it in a way no narrative source can.

Kevin Martin’s index of the Jewish inhabitants gives 680 people with surname, given name, age, occupation, country of origin and years of residence. Of those, 459 were born in Gibraltar — 68 per cent of the community, only forty years after permanent settlement was granted.

Origin	Persons
Gibraltar	459
Barbary (Morocco, unspecified)	165
Minorca	13
Leghorn (Livorno)	10
Mahon (Minorca)	7
London	7
Tetuan	6
Tangier	2
Algiers	2
Tunis, Germany, Portugal, France	1 each

Barbary, Tetuan and Tangier account for 173 of the 221 immigrants, or 78 per cent. But the rest matters. Ten from Livorno, twenty from Minorca and Mahon, seven from London, one each from Tunis, Portugal, France and Germany. The surnames confirm it: alongside Abudarham, Benzaquen, Serfaty, Bendahan and Benoliel sit Carvalho, Oliveira, Pinto, Palache, Delmar and Cardozo. Colonel Bennett’s three origins of 1712 are still visible eighty years later.

The years-of-residence column dates arrivals individually. A man from Barbary aged 62 with 45 years’ residence arrived about 1746, before settlement was legal.

Why were there so few women?

The first census, of 1725, gives the most revealing figure in the whole record: 111 males and 27 females.

The Emperor of Morocco would not permit wives and children to leave, holding them as surety for the men’s return. Only women whose families were wealthy enough to buy them out could come.

Gibraltar began as a community of men whose families remained in Morocco, and that fact governs everything about the first two generations, including, very probably, where its dead were buried.

The Portuguese thread runs from the beginning. The 1713 Mocatta–Acris note concerns silver lace belonging to Isaac Bassan of Lisbon, who escaped Portugal to Tangier and then reached Gibraltar. The Diaz Arias family connects Cadiz, Gibraltar and Bevis Marks, where two Diaz Arias brothers married two sisters.

How they made a living

Supplying the garrison, and trading across the strait.

The census of 1791 gives 38 distinct occupations, and the profile is not that of a merchant elite: sixteen merchants and ten brokers, but 64 shopkeepers, 29 servants, 21 dealers, 13 shoemakers, 12 porters, 11 hucksters, seven sutlers, six boatmen, five tailors, four butchers, four rabbis, two cowherds, two tavern-keepers, a publican, a painter, a carpenter and a doctor.

Beyond provisioning, the trade reached south. Salé, on the Moroccan coast, was where merchants waited for the trans-Saharan caravans and exchanged goods for ostrich feathers, ivory and gold dust.

The legal records show the constraints. Jews could not act as brokers into Cadiz and Lisbon and had to use British brokers there, and the resulting disputes are among the commonest cases in the archive. They could act as attorneys, however. The first Jewish attorney, Henry Joseph, came from Plymouth, became a Commissioner for Oaths under royal patronage, and married into a Gibraltarian family.

Property was the sharper restriction. Only Protestant British subjects could legally own property. Governors Shrimpton, Hargrave and Clayton sold the abandoned Spanish properties and pocketed the proceeds, and the highest bidders were generally Jews and Genoese, which is why all three were eventually removed and why the Bland inquiry of 1749 had to ask the elders of Gibraltar to witness who actually owned what. Thereafter successive governors turned a blind eye, and Aaron Cardozo eventually secured the right formally, building a house in John Mackintosh Square. He had earlier owned the house where Nelson stayed before Trafalgar.

Where they went

Back to Morocco, onward to Britain, and outward across the Mediterranean.

The Great Siege scattered the community. After the synagogues were destroyed in May 1781 many left for London through Portsmouth, and some pursued their Gibraltar legal cases at Bevis Marks.

Families moved to London and Manchester throughout the nineteenth century — Samuel Hadida, a founder of Manchester’s Sephardi community, and the Conquy family, whose last hazan died there. Others reached Marseille.

Two dispersals were forced. In 1940 the whole civilian population was evacuated, to Madeira, Jamaica, Tangier, London and Northern Ireland, and some never came back. In 1967 Franco closed the frontier for eighteen years.

If you lose a Gibraltar family, look next at Tetuan, Tangier, Mogador, London, Manchester, Livorno, Minorca, Madeira, Marseille and La Línea.

The four synagogues

Four synagogues serve a community of a few hundred. They are not divided by sub-community in any formal sense, but their origins are distinct.

Sha’ar HaShamayim, the Great Synagogue, Engineer Lane, 1724, on land bought by the Nieto family and ceded by Governor Hargrave. Destroyed by flood in 1766 and by bombardment in 1781; Isaac Nieto, by then in London, sold bells and scrolls to pay for the rebuilding. It holds a sefer torah written by Rabbi Azariah Figo, rabbi of Venice in 1609.

Es Hayim, the Little Synagogue, 1759, begun as a yeshiva beside the butchers’ stalls on the town wall.

Nefusot Yehuda, Line Wall Road, built after 1781 by members who found Sha’ar HaShamayim too Moroccan in style and considered themselves Dutch in theirs. They bought the building from the Sequerra family and gave it a Dutch gable, the only one in Gibraltar, to say so from the outside. The Conquy family served as its hazanim for eighty-three years.

Abudarham Synagogue, Parliament Lane, 1820s, formerly Solomon Abudarham’s yeshiva, and made a synagogue once property could legally be held. Solomon Abudarham died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1805. The Abudarhams are the largest single family in the 1791 census, with 32 members.

Before any of these, from about 1705, Jews met in private houses and a warehouse in the Calle de Juan de Sierra, now Bomb House Lane, where the community offices still stand.

Cemeteries

Jews’ Gate Cemetery, Windmill Hill, on the Upper Rock, was granted about 1756 to 1758 when Governor Tyrawley ordered burials moved from Grand Parade. It closed in 1848 when the governor refused to extend it, on the grounds that water seeping through the graves would reach the barracks.

The stones themselves record the community’s origins. The oldest are volcanic stone brought from Tetuan, carved in the style of the cementerio de los castellanos there. Later stones are local shell-grit, and they have not survived: when the cemetery was cleared in 1990 the carving was found intact beneath a mantle of leaves and crumbled within a short time of exposure. Many stones are now illegible and the names lost.

About 690 burials took place between 1828 and 1848. Perhaps ten stones predate 1828, most from the yellow fever epidemics. This is a very small number for a cemetery said to have opened in the 1750s, and the likely explanation is that the early Moroccan Jews were carried back to Morocco to be buried beside their families — consistent with a community whose wives and children were still there. Regular burial at Jews’ Gate appears to have become normal only after the epidemic of 1804 to 1805 forced it.

Two earlier burial grounds are indicated: one near Grand Parade, and one beneath what is now the airport, marked by a plaque.

North Front Cemetery, Jewish section, opened in 1848 and is still in use. It has been inventoried.

Both cemeteries divide men from women, with a path between, an arrangement not found elsewhere.

Outside Gibraltar, the Jewish cemetery at Funchal, Madeira, belonged to the Abudarham family, and Gibraltarian evacuees found it in 1940. The two places were twinned in 2009.

Records

Gibraltar’s records are exceptionally good and almost entirely unpublished. A garrison town under military government counted its inhabitants carefully. The difficulty is that very little has been indexed or digitised.

There are two separate archives. The Gibraltar National Archives holds the civil censuses, court and land records. The Jewish community holds its own registers, which begin considerably later.

Censuses

Census	Jews	Detail	Names
1725	138	111 males, 27 females	—
1730	—	known to have been taken, untraced	—
1753	575	of c.1,800 civilians	—
1767	783	of 2,710	No
1777	863	of 3,201, with ages and years of residence	Yes
1784	776	of 3,386, heads of family, with professions	Yes
1791	680	of 2,874, ages, professions, years of residence	Yes
1814, 1816	—	—	Partly
1834	—	—	Yes
1868–71, 1891, 1921	—	1921 recently released	Yes

None is online. The 1777 census is the earliest that names individuals, and it is therefore the practical starting point for any Gibraltar family. It records, for example, Isaac Aboab, aged 65, of Tetuan, resident 67 years; his first wife, born in Gibraltar; and his second wife, fifteen years resident. The oldest person in it is Simha Senor, aged 90, resident 61 years, which places her arrival about 1716, the year before the expulsion.

A further census exists at La Línea, the Spanish border town, some of it lost in the Civil War.

Other series

Record type	Years	Where	Online
Gibraltar Inhabitants registers	1704–1915	Gibraltar National Archives	Yes
Legal cases, every volume	1730–1835	Gibraltar National Archives	No
Wills, c.100	c.1770s–1800s	Gibraltar National Archives	No
Land registry and plans	1820–	Gibraltar National Archives	No
Community birth records	1807–	Jewish Community of Gibraltar	No
Circumcision records	19th c.	Jewish Community of Gibraltar	No
Community death records	1828–1850	Jewish Community of Gibraltar	No
Magistrates’ Court births	1848–	Gibraltar National Archives	No
Magistrates’ Court deaths	1868–	Gibraltar National Archives	No
Marriage records	1868– (earlier said to exist)	Community / Magistrates’ Court	No
Ketubot, 18 from Gibraltar	1833–1929	National Library of Israel	Yes
Burials, Jews’ Gate and North Front	1829–1931	JewishGen / JOWBR	Yes

The community’s own registers begin only in 1807, which leaves a void of a century between settlement and self-documentation. For that period the Catholic community’s records, kept properly throughout, are a substitute worth knowing about.

The Gibraltar Inhabitants registers, 1704 to 1915, are digitised and are the one major series available online.

The legal cases are the richest untapped source. Joshua Marrache has worked every volume from 1730 to 1835, and the names that emerge include Joseph Benzaquen, Jacob Castro, Espinosa, Cansino, Nahory, Paz, Moses Gutierrez, and Ben Susan acting as attorney for Salomon Nunes of London. The early cases are terse; from the 1840s they become substantial and commercial, documenting trade with Spain, Portugal and Morocco directly.

The land registry from 1820 brings in names that are not Gibraltarian at all — Cansino, Pizzotto — because it records London property, and with it relatives elsewhere.

The newspapers are underused. The Gibraltar Chronicle, founded 1801, was written for the garrison and mentions civilians rarely. El Calpense, from 1868, is the genealogically valuable one: it reports weddings in full detail, and a near-complete run survives, the 1870s excepted.

The 1833 to 1929 ketubot at the National Library of Israel, indexed by Mathilde Tagger, name about 150 people and carry patronymic chains three generations deep. Read against the 1791 census they show the community becoming steadily more Moroccan.

A caution on spelling

Gibraltar records were kept by English-speaking clerks writing down names spoken in Haketía and Castilian. The 1791 census writes mefsias for Messias, hafsan for Hassan, azayol for Assayol, benzaquen where the ketubot write Ben Zaken, serfaty where they write Sarfati, and both ohveira and oliveira on adjacent lines. Names beginning “Ben” may be joined or separate in either source. Search on the stem.

Did Gibraltar’s Jews speak Ladino?

No. They spoke Castilian, because their connection was to Tetuan and Mogador, which are Spanish-speaking. Reference works that list Ladino among the community’s languages are repeating an assumption rather than a finding.

There is a related point of real research value. Commercial notes survive written in Rashi script but in Spanish, used deliberately so that a merchant’s correspondence could not be read by anyone who intercepted it. If you encounter a Gibraltar document that looks like Hebrew and yields nothing, try reading it as Spanish.

Records elsewhere

The National Archives, Kew, for Colonial Office records and the correspondence on the Utrecht question.

S&P Sephardi Community archive, London. The two congregations were linked from the outset through Isaac Nieto, families moved constantly, and after 1781 some Gibraltar legal cases were pursued at Bevis Marks.

Moroccan records for Tetuan, Tangier and Mogador, where two thirds of this community originates.

Portuguese Inquisition records, for the families who reached Gibraltar by way of Portugal and Morocco.

Sephardic World lectures

Gibraltarian Jews in the 18th and 19th Centuries — Joshua Marrache
Rabbis, Merchants and Consuls: the Marrache family of Morocco — Jacob Marrache
Merchants, Migrations and Memory: the Pariente family from Tetuan to Nice — Jacob Marrache

What has and hasn’t been researched

Gibraltar is unusual on this site in that the records largely survive and are largely unavailable.

The censuses exist from 1725 and are not online. The legal cases have been extracted by one researcher and not published. The wills have been indexed by two people and not published. The land registry has never been worked. The magistrates’ records are untouched. The pre-1868 marriage records are believed to exist and are not indexed.

Where the work has been done, it is good. Kevin Martin’s index of the 1791 Jewish inhabitants is exactly what most communities lack. Professor Sawchuk’s Gibraltar Explorer application opens the wider population registers. The National Archives of Gibraltar has digitised the Inhabitants registers. Mathilde Tagger indexed the ketubot. The North Front cemetery has been inventoried.

The historiography rests on two figures: Abraham Benjamin Serfaty, whose The Jews of Gibraltar under British Rule was the first history of the community written by a Gibraltarian Jew, and Tito Benady, whose work remains the standard. José María Bevaqua’s genealogical volumes are valuable and should be used with care: many of his dates are approximate, and he does not give wives’ surnames.

What is missing in both directions is linkage. On the Moroccan side, the origins in Tetuan, Tangier and Mogador have not been connected systematically to Moroccan records, so most Gibraltar lines stop at “barbary”. On the British side, the constant movement between Gibraltar, London and Manchester has never been traced through the congregational records at either end.

Organisations and repositories

Gibraltar National Archives, and the Inhabitants registers, 1704–1915.

Jewish Community of Gibraltar, 10 Bomb House Lane.

Gibraltar Genealogy, and the Gibraltar Family Genealogy group.

Gibraltar Jewish Tours, run by Joshua Marrache, who has worked the archives directly and holds copies of most of the Jewish material in them.

Professor Sawchuk’s Gibraltar Explorer.

JCR-UK, Jewish Communities and Records, Gibraltar pages.

JewishGen All-UK Database and JOWBR, for burials 1829 to 1931.

National Library of Israel, for the ketubot database.

The National Archives, Kew; and the S&P Sephardi Community, London.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

The 1730 census, known to have been taken and never since traced
Indexes to the censuses of 1777, 1784, 1814, 1816, 1834, 1868–71, 1891 and 1921
The marriage records said to predate 1868
Any transcription of the Jews’ Gate Cemetery inscriptions, particularly of stones legible before the 1990 clearance
Photographs taken during the 1990 clearance, before the shell-grit stones weathered
The completed index of Jewish wills
Records of the Hiram masonic lodge, founded 1790
The missing 1870s volumes of El Calpense
The La Línea censuses, and any record of what survived the Civil War
Records connecting Gibraltar families to Tetuan, Tangier and Mogador
Any evidence for Gibraltar Jews buried in Morocco before 1805
Records of Gibraltarian Jews evacuated in 1940–44, and of those who did not return
Material on the Abudarham cemetery at Funchal, Madeira
Family papers from any Gibraltarian Jewish family

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

Research services

Gibraltarian Sephardi research means an archive that is largely unindexed and undigitised, records in English, Spanish, Hebrew and Haketía, commercial notes written in Rashi script but in Spanish, surnames transliterated inconsistently by garrison clerks, and families that appear simultaneously in Tetuan, Gibraltar, London and Manchester.

For research and guided visits in Gibraltar itself we recommend Joshua Marrache of Gibraltar Jewish Tours. For wider Sephardic research, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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