Sephardic Jews of Cape Verde

Cape Verde, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau are one subject: one trading population, one base in the islands — and three different answers to whether a New Christian could live openly as a Jew. The difference was jurisdiction. Read the three pages together.

Cape Verde has two Jewish histories, three hundred and fifty years apart, and they have nothing to do with each other.

The first history belongs to the New Christians — Portuguese converts and their descendants — who were sent to the islands as exiles from the 1460s and who ran a great deal of the Guinea trade from them for the next two centuries. The second belongs to a few dozen Moroccan Jewish merchants who arrived in the nineteenth century from Tangier, Tetouan, Rabat and Mogador, married Cape Verdean women, and left descendants who are Catholic Cape Verdeans today and who generally know exactly where they came from.

The second layer is the one this site can help with, and it is unusually well served: the graves survive, they have been restored and documented, and the Moroccan end of the trail is one of the best-recorded in the Sephardi world.

Who were the New Christians of the islands? (1460s–1600s)

Exiles, and then the traders who ran the Guinea coast from them.

The islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese reached them around 1460, and had to be populated deliberately. One of the ways Portugal populated them was with degredados — people sentenced to exile — and New Christians were disproportionately among them, both as convicts and as families removed from the kingdom under pressure.

Ribeira Grande on Santiago, now Cidade Velha, became the first European city in the tropics and the base for the trade with the Upper Guinea coast. That trade — in enslaved people above all, and in hides, wax, ivory and cloth — was substantially in New Christian hands, working with the lançados, Portuguese traders who settled among African communities on the mainland. Some of them lived openly enough as Jews on the coast that the Inquisition took an interest. That story is told on our Senegal page.

Where the records are. Cape Verde fell under the Lisbon tribunal of the Portuguese Inquisition — there was no local tribunal — so cases and denunciations went to Lisbon, and the surviving material is at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo. This is the same structure as Macau, Hormuz, Manila and Cartagena elsewhere on this site, and it carries the same warning: absence from Cape Verdean records proves nothing.

There is no continuity between this layer and the nineteenth-century one.

Who were the Moroccan merchants?

A few dozen Jewish trading families from northern Morocco, mostly arriving by way of Gibraltar between the 1820s and the 1860s.

They came from Tangier, Tetouan, Rabat and Mogador, and they went to Santo Antão, Boa Vista, Maio, São Vicente and Santiago. They went for commercial reasons: the islands were a provisioning and coaling station on the Atlantic routes, and there was money in supply, shipping and general trade. They were never numerous.

The surnames are recognisably Moroccan and Gibraltarian Sephardi: Anahory, Auday, Benathar, Benoliel, Benros, Cohen, Levy, Pinto, Seruya, Wahnon and others of the same stock. Anyone who has worked in the Tangier or Tetouan records will recognise them immediately.

What happened to them?

They did not leave and they were not persecuted. They married Cape Verdean women, and their descendants became Catholic.

There was no rabbi, no congregation and no realistic prospect of Jewish marriage on the islands. Within two or three generations the families were Cape Verdean Catholic families of Jewish descent, and that is what their descendants are today — numerous, prominent in some cases, and generally well aware of the descent.

This is exactly the pattern described on our Panama and Colombia page for the Curaçao families of the Colombian coast, and it produces the same three consequences:

The records are Catholic parish records. Baptism, marriage and burial. For most of these families the parish register is the only documentation of the generation that arrived.
The descendants know, and their tradition is usually accurate. Jewish descent in Cape Verde is a matter of family pride rather than concealment.
They are invisible in Jewish genealogical sources, because they stopped being Jewish before those sources existed.

Do the cemeteries survive?

Yes — and this is where Cape Verde is better served than almost anywhere comparable.

Jewish burial grounds and individual graves survive on Santo Antão — at Ponta do Sol and Penha de França — and on Boa Vista, Maio and Santiago. They were neglected for a century and have since been documented and restored through the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project, founded by Carol Castiel, whose lecture on the Moroccan Jews of Cabo Verde is listed on our video pages.

The stones are inscribed in Hebrew and Portuguese, they name individuals and often their fathers, and for several of these families they are the only Jewish record that exists. For a subject this small, that is an unusually complete surviving epigraphic record, and it is the first thing to check.

What records can you actually reach?

Cape Verde

Arquivo Nacional de Cabo Verde, Praia.
Catholic parish registers — the principal source for the nineteenth-century families and their descendants, and the place where a Jewish merchant’s marriage and his children’s baptisms will be found.
Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project — the cemetery documentation and restoration.

Portugal

Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon — the colonial administration of Cape Verde, and the natural home of commercial, shipping and official records naming merchants. Note that it also holds the pre-1879 administration of Portuguese Guinea.
Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — the Inquisition material for the first layer, catalogued through Digitarq, and the Conselho Ultramarino series.

The Moroccan and Gibraltarian end

This is where the nineteenth-century families come from, and our Morocco and Gibraltar pages set out the sources in detail. In particular:

Tangier and Tetouan cemetery databases, and the Tetouan Libro de Metim (1897–1971)
the circumcision register of R. Yitzhak Bar Vidal Ha-Sarfaty, Tetouan, 1881–1940
Mogador/Essaouira records, including the Bendahan circumcision registers
the Gibraltar censuses, 1777–1914, which will often catch a family in transit

Where are the descendants now?

Substantially in New England — and they do not appear in Jewish genealogical sources at all.

Cape Verdean emigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went overwhelmingly to New Bedford, Providence and Boston, and also to Portugal, the Netherlands and Senegal.

So the descendants of Cape Verde’s Moroccan Jewish families are largely in the United States, in a community that is Cape Verdean American rather than Jewish American. US census, naturalisation and immigration records apply, and the surnames above are the ones to search.

Sephardic World lectures

Carol Castiel, The Moroccan Jews of Cabo Verde: Preservation of Memory — on the cemeteries, the families and the restoration project. Our Morocco page carries the lectures covering the other end of the same trail.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Moroccan families have never been traced back to Morocco. The Cape Verde end is documented — the graves, the parish registers, the Castiel project. The Tangier, Tetouan and Mogador records are indexed and searchable. Nobody has joined them, and the numbers are small enough that one person could.
The New England descendants are unstudied. A Cape Verdean American family carrying the name Wahnon, Benoliel or Anahory is very probably descended from a Moroccan Jewish merchant, and almost certainly does not appear in any Jewish record.
Toby Green’s work on New Christians in Cape Verde and Guinea has not been used genealogically. It is a historical study of a population, not a reconstruction of families, and the Torre do Tombo material behind it names individuals.

Organisations and repositories

Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project.

Arquivo Nacional de Cabo Verde, Praia.

Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino and Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Digitarq), Lisbon.

Cape Verdean American community organisations in New England, for the descendants.

Help us find records

Cape Verde is a small subject where the two ends are documented and the middle is not. We are looking for:

Anything connecting a Cape Verde family to a named individual in Tangier, Tetouan, Rabat or Mogador — this is the single missing link
Parish register entries recording the marriages and baptisms of the Moroccan merchants and their children
Further cemetery transcriptions, particularly from Boa Vista, Maio and Santiago
Gibraltar census entries for families en route
Family papers or traditions among Cape Verdean American descendants in New England

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Cape Verde is a short problem with a long answer. The islands’ records will identify the merchant and his Cape Verdean family; the work then moves to Tangier, Tetouan or Mogador, where the records are good, and often through Gibraltar on the way. If your family is Cape Verdean and carries one of the surnames above, the descent is very likely real and it is traceable. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application — for which these families are frequently strong candidates — you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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