Inquisition – Sephardic Genealogy

The Inquisition is the single most important record-generating institution in Sephardic genealogy, and it is the one most widely misunderstood.

It is also the source of the commonest error in this whole field: the belief that Sephardi families “fled the Inquisition” in 1492. Almost nobody did, because in 1492 the Inquisition had no power over them whatsoever.

What is the one thing to understand first?

The Inquisition had no jurisdiction over Jews.

Its authority was over baptised Christians suspected of heresy or apostasy. A practising Jew was not a heretic — he was outside the Church altogether, and the Church claimed no disciplinary power over him.

A Jew could not be tried by the Inquisition for being a Jew. He could be tried only if he had been baptised — and then he was, in the Inquisition’s eyes, a Christian who had abandoned the faith.

Everything else follows from this. The Inquisition existed because of the conversions, not the other way round: its target population was created by the mass baptisms of 1391 in Spain and 1497 in Portugal. It was concerned with converts and their descendants — the New Christians — not with the Jewish communities. And it had a structural problem: as long as open Jewish communities existed alongside converso ones, converts had somewhere to learn Judaism and someone to learn it from.

That problem is what produced the expulsion.

Who expelled the Jews of Spain in 1492?

Ferdinand and Isabella did. Not the Inquisition.

The Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492 was a royal edict, signed by the Catholic Monarchs at Granada, giving the Jews of Castile and Aragon until the end of July to accept baptism or leave.

Torquemada, as Inquisitor General, is traditionally said to have pressed for it, and the Inquisition’s institutional interest is plain enough in the decree’s own reasoning: it states that the presence of Jews was drawing converted Christians back to Judaism. The expulsion was a solution to the Inquisition’s problem. It was not an act of the Inquisition.

This distinction is not pedantry, because it changes what happened to your ancestors.

Those who left in 1492 left as Jews, by royal order. They were expelled. They were not fleeing the Inquisition, which had no power over them and never had.

Those who accepted baptism to stay became subject to the Inquisition the following morning. They are the people the Inquisition existed for.

The choice was between expulsion and jurisdiction, and which one your family took determines everything about what records exist for them.

Estimates of how many left vary enormously, from around forty thousand to well over a hundred thousand, and a large proportion of those who stayed converted. Many who left returned within a few years and converted then.

Why is Portugal different?

Because Portugal did not expel its Jews. What it did was worse, and it created the Western Sephardi world.

King Manuel I ordered an expulsion in December 1496, then changed his mind — he wanted the community’s skills and capital, not its departure. In 1497 he prevented them from leaving and had almost the entire Jewish population, together with the Spanish refugees who had crossed the border in 1492, forcibly baptised.

The consequence is the whole subject of this site.

From 1497 there were, officially, no Jews in Portugal at all — only New Christians. Every one of them, and every one of their descendants, was legally a baptised Catholic and therefore fully subject to the Inquisition when it arrived in 1536.

They could not leave, either: emigration was restricted, and for a New Christian to depart the kingdom was itself an offence.

So the people who left Portugal over the following two centuries genuinely were fleeing the Inquisition. They went to Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Livorno, Venice and the Ottoman lands, and it is from them that the communities described across this site descend.

“Fled the Inquisition” is wrong for Spain in 1492 and broadly right for Portugal after 1536. If your family tradition says it, ask which one it means.

What was the Inquisition not?

Five things, because the popular image is largely wrong in ways that matter.

It was not a mob, and it was not a pogrom

This is the misconception worth correcting most firmly.

The Inquisition is often imagined as a precursor of the Russian pogroms — a machinery of indiscriminate mass violence against Jews. It was structurally the opposite.

A pogrom was mob violence: spontaneous or incited, indiscriminate, aimed at Jews as Jews, and outside the law. The Inquisition was a court: bureaucratic, procedural, obsessively record-keeping, operating under written rules, with an advocate for the accused, a system of appeals, and a jurisdiction that excluded Jews by definition.

Spain did have pogroms — in 1391. Mob violence swept the Jewish quarters of Seville, Córdoba, Toledo, Valencia and Barcelona; thousands were killed and many more converted under immediate threat of death. Those massacres created the converso population.

But they happened eighty-seven years before the Spanish Inquisition was founded, and they were not its doing. The popular image conflates the mob of 1391 with the tribunal of 1478, and they are entirely different things.

None of this makes the Inquisition less terrible. It makes it terrible in a different and more modern way: a bureaucracy that destroyed families over generations through confiscation, imprisonment, social exclusion and fear, and that wrote everything down.

It was not medieval

The Medieval Inquisition — papal, from the twelfth century, against the Cathars — is a different institution and is not our subject.

The Spanish Inquisition was founded in 1478 and abolished in 1834. The Portuguese Inquisition ran from 1536 to 1821. These are early modern institutions, contemporaries of Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton and the Enlightenment. The Goa tribunal closed in the nineteenth century; the Malta tribunal ended with Napoleon in 1798.

It did not kill millions

The figures in the older polemical literature are fantasy. Modern scholarship — Henry Kamen’s work above all — puts executions by the Spanish Inquisition across its entire 350-year existence in the region of three to five thousand, out of perhaps 150,000 people tried.

We give the figure not to minimise but to be accurate. The Inquisition’s principal instruments were not the stake. They were confiscation, imprisonment, the sanbenito, the limpieza de sangre statutes and the permanent disgrace of a family name — mechanisms that ruined descendants for generations without killing anybody.

A precise account is more damning than an exaggerated one, because it describes something that actually happened.

Most of those tried were not executed

Outcomes ranged across acquittal (rare), suspension of the case, penance, and reconciliación — reconciliation with the Church, which normally carried confiscation of goods, the wearing of the sanbenito, and often imprisonment or the galleys.

Relajación, “relaxation” to the secular arm, meant execution — the Church maintaining the fiction that it did not shed blood by handing the condemned to the civil authorities. Relajado en estatua means burned in effigy, the person having died in prison or escaped.

The great majority of cases ended in reconciliation or penance.

The elaborate torture devices are largely invented

Torture was used, and it was real. It was also regulated: limited in duration, conducted with a physician present, formally not repeatable, and used in a minority of cases. The iron maidens and ingenious machines of the museums and the popular imagination are overwhelmingly later fabrications.

Where were the tribunals?

Three separate institutions, frequently confused, and a set of overseas tribunals whose jurisdictions govern where you look.

The Spanish Inquisition was established by papal bull in 1478 at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella, operational from 1480 with its first tribunal at Seville. Unusually, it was under royal rather than papal control, which is why it survived so long and behaved as an instrument of the crown. Abolished 1834.

The Portuguese Inquisition was established in 1536 after long negotiation with Rome, first auto-da-fé 1540, with tribunals at Lisbon, Évora, Coimbra and, from 1560, Goa. Also crown-controlled. Abolished 1821.

The Roman Inquisition — the Congregation of the Holy Office, founded 1542 — operated in Italy and, from 1574, in Malta.

The American and Asian tribunals:

Tribunal	Founded	Jurisdiction
Goa	1560	All Portuguese Asia — Macau, Hormuz, Malacca, Cochin
Lima	1570	Spanish South America
Mexico	1571	New Spain, Central America and the Philippines
Cartagena de Indias	1610	New Granada, Panama, Venezuela, the Spanish Caribbean

Where there was no tribunal, and why this matters constantly

Most territories had none, and their cases went elsewhere. This governs where you look, and it is the single most repeated practical point across this site:

Macau, Hormuz, Cochin → Goa, and thence Lisbon
The Philippines → Mexico
Cuba, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela → Cartagena, whose surviving records are largely in Madrid
Brazil → no tribunal; visitations from Lisbon, and cases sent to Lisbon
Cape Verde, Guinea, São Tomé, Angola → Lisbon
Malta → its own tribunal, and its archive survives in place at Mdina, which is the exception on this site

The consequence: if your family was in a territory with no tribunal, absence from local records proves nothing. Look in Lisbon, Madrid, Mexico City or Goa.

How did a case work?

The Edict of Grace or Edict of Faith. A tribunal arriving in a district proclaimed a period during which people could denounce themselves — with lighter penalties — and denounce others. It also read out a list of the practices to look for: changing linen on Friday, refusing pork, washing the dead, turning the face to the wall.

Denunciation, and it was anonymous. The accused was never told who had denounced them, which is the procedural feature that made the system so effective and so open to abuse. Denunciation was a commercial weapon and a way of settling family quarrels as often as an act of piety.

Arrest and sequestration. The accused’s property was seized at arrest and used to fund their own imprisonment.

The genealogy — and this is the part that matters to us. The accused was required to state their ancestry: typically three or four generations, with names, birthplaces, occupations, marriages, and which relatives were New Christians and which were not.

Interrogation, initially without being told the charge; the accused was invited to guess what they had done.

Torture, where the tribunal judged the evidence insufficient without a confession.

Defence. The accused had an advocate, appointed by the tribunal.

Sentence, announced at the auto-da-fé, a public ceremony that could take a whole day.

And afterwards, the sanbenito. The penitential garment was hung in the parish church bearing the family name, and left there. In Mallorca the boards in the church of Santo Domingo fixed the fifteen Chueta surnames in public view for generations. The punishment was designed to outlive the person.

How was it funded?

From the confiscated property of those it convicted.

This is not a minor administrative detail. It gave the institution a direct financial interest in convictions, and a particular interest in convicting the wealthy — which the New Christian merchant class conspicuously was.

It is one reason to treat the charge of judaizante with care. “New Christian” in these records is very often an accusation made by a rival, and a tribunal with an incentive to believe it.

Why is this the best genealogical source for New Christians?

Here is the grim irony at the centre of this subject. A single Inquisition processo can contain more genealogical information than a lifetime of parish registers.

It contains the genealogy the accused was required to give — three or four generations, with places and occupations. The inventory of goods taken at arrest, describing a household in detail. Witness testimony about the family’s habits, associates and reputation. Cross-references to relatives, in-laws and business partners, many of whom were tried themselves. And, in the limpieza de sangre investigations that ran alongside, formal enquiries into four grandparents and beyond.

These records exist because the Inquisition was trying to destroy these families, and they are now the principal means of recovering them. There is no comfortable way to say that.

Two cautions. Testimony given under duress is not reliable as to belief — a confession of Judaizing may record only what the tribunal wanted to hear. And absence proves nothing: several tribunal archives were destroyed, including most of Goa’s.

Where are the archives?

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — the Portuguese Inquisition, catalogued and largely digitised through Digitarq. Much the largest body of New Christian documentation anywhere, and the first place to look.
Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid — the Spanish Inquisition, including the surviving Cartagena material.
Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City — the Mexican tribunal, including Philippine cases.
Archivo General de Indias, Seville — limpieza de sangre investigations and licences to emigrate to the Indies.
Cathedral Archives, Mdina, Malta — the Archivum Inquisitionis Melitensis, substantially intact.
For Goa, the tribunal’s own archive was largely destroyed. What survives is at the Torre do Tombo, together with João Delgado Figueira’s 1623 Reportório, a manuscript index of some 3,800 Goa cases which is, for many individuals, the only trace remaining.

What about “we fled the Inquisition”?

It is one of the most widespread family traditions in the Jewish world, and it is worth unpicking gently rather than dismissing.

It may mean the family left Portugal after 1536 — in which case it is probably literally true, and the family is Western Sephardi. Or that they left Spain in 1492, in which case they were expelled by the Crown, which is a different and equally real thing. Or that they converted and stayed, in which case the Inquisition records may name them. Or simply that they left Iberia at some point, which is true of every Sephardi family and tells you nothing in particular.

All four are worth researching. Only one of them is fleeing the Inquisition.

Research services

Inquisition research means Portuguese and Spanish manuscript sources, and a careful hand in distinguishing a New Christian by descent from a person who actually continued to practise Judaism. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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