Sephardic Jews of Peru: The Lima Inquisition

Peru’s Sephardi history divides into two unconnected parts.

A colonial presence of New Christians — conversos of Iberian, overwhelmingly Portuguese, origin — who were pursued and destroyed by the Lima Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And a small modern community, largely of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that has no descent from the colonial one.

What sets Peru apart is that Lima was the seat of one of only three Holy Office tribunals in the Spanish Americas, with Mexico and Cartagena, and its jurisdiction covered nearly all of Spanish South America. So the Lima records reach far beyond modern Peru, into what is now Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay.

For the researcher this means the colonial Sephardim of a huge swathe of South America are documented, if at all, through the Lima trial records. Those records are unusually good, and unusually studied, because Lima’s community of Portuguese merchants was numerous, wealthy and closely connected, and because the tribunal turned on it in one concentrated assault in the 1630s. The names, origins and occupations of well over a hundred individuals accused of Judaising survive.

Two populations

Colonial New Christians, roughly 1570 to 1700: Portuguese conversos, many of them merchants, some of whom kept a Jewish identity in secret, tried by the Lima Inquisition. They are the main subject of this page and the richer genealogical seam.

The modern community, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: later Jewish immigration, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, building the small living community in Lima and, briefly, the Amazon. It is not descended from the colonial presence.

What Peru means here

For the colonial period, the Viceroyalty of Peru, far larger than the modern republic.

The Lima tribunal of the Inquisition, established in 1570 and operating until 1820, held jurisdiction over Spanish South America. A person tried in Lima might have been arrested in Potosí, now Bolivia, in Tucumán or Córdoba, now Argentina, or in Santiago, now Chile.

Lima itself, the City of Kings, was the administrative and commercial capital of Spanish South America, which is why its Portuguese merchant community was so substantial.

As in all Spanish territory, practising Jews were barred from entry, so any New Christian who retained a Jewish identity necessarily concealed it.

The political trigger for persecution was the same as in Mexico. During the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, from 1580 to 1640, Portuguese New Christian merchants spread through Spanish America. When Portugal broke away in 1640 they became objects of suspicion, and the tribunal moved against them.

Independence in 1821 brought the end of the Inquisition and, in time, the religious freedom under which a modern community could form.

Where they came from

Overwhelmingly from Portugal.

The surviving lists of those tried in Lima for Judaising are dominated by Portuguese birthplaces: Lisbon, Coimbra, Braganza, Castelo Branco, Santarém, Guimarães, La Guardia, and above all the small border town the records spell Moncarbo or Montemor. There are a lesser number from Spanish towns with large converso populations, chiefly Seville, Badajoz and Valladolid, and a few from Portuguese Brazil.

The immigrant generation was often Portugal-born and the children American-born. The Lima lists show birthplaces recorded across Portugal for the older men and Peruvian or other colonial birthplaces for some of the younger.

Peru, El Piru, became in this period a diaspora byword for South America among Portuguese New Christians, so much so that in Amsterdam and elsewhere the men of the Peruvian nation meant this whole merchant network. A Lima line is therefore part of the Portuguese Atlantic diaspora and connects to Amsterdam, Brazil and the networks that reached the Caribbean and Mexico.

How they made a living

Commerce, on every scale.

The surviving occupation notes in the trial lists are dominated by the word merchant — wholesale traders, importers and financiers — alongside sailors, a surgeon or two, a tailor, an embroiderer, a lawyer, a writer and a presbyter.

The great figures were among the richest men in the viceroyalty. Manuel Bautista Pérez, a wholesale merchant and slave-trader whose Lima house was a centre of learning and of the community, was reputed one of the wealthiest men in the colony.

Their wealth, and their control of Lima’s trade, fed the resentment the tribunal exploited.

What was the Complicidad Grande?

The defining event of Peru’s Sephardi history. The Inquisition called it the complicidad grande, the great conspiracy: a wave of arrests beginning in 1635 that swept up the Portuguese merchant community of Lima on charges of Judaising.

It culminated in the Auto General de Fe of 23 January 1639, the largest such ceremony ever held in Lima. Of the individuals tried, around sixty were sentenced for Judaising and eleven were burned. The community as an organised body did not survive it.

Two figures anchor the episode.

Manuel Bautista Pérez, the merchant leader, was burned in 1639.

Francisco Maldonado da Silva, a surgeon born in Tucumán, now Argentina, was arrested in 1627 and held for twelve years. A learned man who circumcised himself and disputed with his judges, corresponded from prison and refused to recant, he too went to the stake in 1639, and he is the best-remembered of the Lima martyrs.

The nineteenth-century scholar George Alexander Kohut made these South American cases known to the English-speaking world in Jewish Martyrs of the Inquisition in South America (1895).

It is worth keeping proportion. Across the tribunal’s whole existence Judaising was only one of many charges — the same registers record Lutheranism, bigamy, blasphemy, false priesthood, witchcraft and superstition — but the assault of 1635 to 1639 was the one moment when the Inquisition concentrated its force on the Portuguese Jewish community specifically, and it is from that moment that most of the surviving Sephardi documentation comes.

Where they went

Those who survived reconciled to the Church and often left. Those who did not were killed or assimilated.

As an organised presence the Portuguese Jewish community of Lima ended with the 1639 auto and the smaller trials that followed into the eighteenth century. There were further Judaising cases in the 1730s and a last handful around 1800.

Some of the wider network moved on to Amsterdam, to Brazil, and to other parts of the diaspora. There was no continuous community carrying through to modern times.

The modern community

A small Jewish immigration resumed after independence. Sephardim from Morocco and the Ottoman world, alongside Central European Ashkenazim, arrived through the nineteenth century.

A distinctive episode was the settlement of Moroccan Jews in the Amazon rubber town of Iquitos from the 1870s, whose partly assimilated descendants have been the subject of later return-to-Judaism efforts.

The organised community today is centred in Lima, with Sephardi, Ashkenazi and German-Jewish congregations and a combined community structure. It is small, and it is not the object of most of the colonial-era records described here.

Records

The colonial and modern records are entirely separate bodies of material, and the colonial ones are the reason Peru matters to Sephardi genealogy.

Inquisition records

The trial records, procesos, relaciones de causas and auto de fe accounts of the Lima tribunal are the principal documentation of the colonial Sephardim.

The originals are dispersed. A large part is held at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, Sección Inquisición, with material also in the Archivo General de la Nación del Perú in Lima and copies and abstracts in various collections, because when the tribunal closed its papers were dispersed to Spain and elsewhere.

These are dense genealogical sources. A Judaising trial names parents, spouses, children, kin and business associates, because the tribunal set out to map the whole network. The relaciones of the 1639 auto, and the eyewitness and scholarly reconstructions built on them, name well over a hundred individuals with their birthplaces and occupations.

Published transcriptions and scholarship

Much of the raw material has been published. The classic guide is José Toribio Medina’s Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de Lima (1887), which transcribes and summarises cases. Kohut’s Jewish Martyrs of the Inquisition in South America drew on Medina to bring the cases into English.

Modern scholarship, for example Ana E. Schaposchnik’s study of the 1639 auto, works directly from the procesos. For anyone researching a name, these published works, together with the surviving lists of the accused, are the practical starting point.

Modern civil and community records

For the modern community the ordinary Peruvian record set applies: civil registration, notarial and municipal records in the Archivo General de la Nación del Perú, and the registers of the Lima congregations and the Asociación Judía del Perú. The Iquitos community has its own, partly reconstructed records and cemetery.

Sephardic World lectures

The Peculiar Case of Luis Méndez Chávez and the Cartagena Inquisition — Brian Hamm
Anatomy of Torture: torment as a tool of the Spanish Inquisition — Ron Hassner

What has and hasn’t been researched

The 1639 persecution is very well studied; the rest less so.

The 1635 to 1639 complex is thoroughly documented. Medina, Kohut and modern historians have worked the procesos closely, and the marquee figures are well known.
The wider tribunal jurisdiction is under-exploited genealogically. Because Lima judged cases from across South America, the records hold conversos arrested in what is now Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and Paraguay, material rarely mined for the family history of those countries.
The Portugal and Amsterdam links. The Lima merchants were part of a diaspora network reaching back to Portugal and out to Amsterdam and Brazil, and tracing individual Lima families back to their Iberian origins is largely undone.
The modern community is thinly documented in English, and the Iquitos Moroccan settlement in particular is under-served despite active community interest.

Organisations and repositories

Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Sección Inquisición, holding much of the Lima tribunal’s surviving records. [LINK NEEDED]

Archivo General de la Nación del Perú, Lima, for colonial, notarial and civil records. [LINK NEEDED]

Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Lima. [LINK NEEDED]

Asociación Judía del Perú and the Lima congregations, for modern community records. [LINK NEEDED]

The Iquitos Jewish community and cemetery.

For the Iberian and diaspora ends of a colonial line, the Portuguese Inquisition records at the Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, and the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish archives.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Transcriptions or abstracts of Lima Inquisition procesos naming New Christian families, especially those of the 1635 to 1639 complicidad grande
The full relación of the 1639 Auto General de Fe, with the birthplaces and occupations of all those sentenced
Records of conversos tried at Lima but arrested elsewhere in South America — Potosí, Córdoba, Tucumán, Santiago
Documents linking Lima Portuguese merchants back to their Portuguese and Spanish origins and out to Amsterdam and Brazil
Registers of the modern Lima congregations, and of the Iquitos Amazonian community

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

Research services

Peruvian research, for the colonial period, means the Lima Inquisition records: sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish palaeography, scattered between Madrid and Lima, and best approached first through the published transcriptions of Medina and Kohut, with lines running back to Portugal and the Atlantic diaspora. The modern community is traced through ordinary Peruvian civil and community records. Both are specialist work. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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