Sephardic Jews and New Christians in Macau (Macao), China

Macau never had a Jewish community. What it had, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was a scattering of New Christians — cristãos-novos, the descendants of Jews forcibly converted in Portugal in 1497 — who reached the far eastern edge of the Portuguese trading world as merchants, and who occasionally came to the attention of the Inquisition.

This page sets out honestly what the records show and, just as importantly, what they do not. The romantic picture of a hidden congregation with a secret synagogue at the mouth of the Pearl River is, on the best current scholarship, a fantasy of the period’s own inquisitors rather than a fact the genealogist can build on.

For the family historian this is nonetheless a real, if narrow, thread of the Western Sephardi diaspora. A New Christian who surfaces in Macau belongs to the same Lisbon-rooted merchant world as the conversos of Goa, Malacca, Manila and Nagasaki, and almost always connects back to Portugal and to the great trading families of the Estado da Índia.

Why are there no Macau Inquisition records?

Because Macau never had a tribunal of its own — and because the tribunal that did have jurisdiction had most of its archive destroyed.

Macau was a Portuguese settlement on the south China coast, established with Chinese tolerance from 1557 as an entrepôt for the China trade and the staging post for the hugely profitable silk-for-silver voyage to Nagasaki in Japan. A bishopric of China, seated at Macau, was created in 1576.

It fell within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition of Goa, founded in 1560, which covered the whole of Portuguese Asia. Cases arising in Macau were tried at Goa, or referred onward to Lisbon.

That single fact shapes everything. There is no Macau inquisitorial archive to search; the paper trail runs to Goa and to Lisbon, and it is fragmentary because the Goa tribunal’s own records were largely destroyed after the Inquisition was abolished in the early nineteenth century. What survives is a thin residue, not a complete register — which means both that the community can never be fully reconstructed and that the absence of a person from the record proves nothing.

Note also that a settlement without a tribunal was not beyond the Inquisition’s reach. The Holy Office extended its authority into Macau first through the Bishop of China as its agent, and from about 1599 through a resident commissary — a comissário — drawn from the local religious orders. New Christians in Macau were watched, occasionally denounced, and, rarely, arrested and shipped to Goa for trial.

Why were New Christians there at all?

Because converso capital was central to the Portuguese Asian trade, and Macau sat at the end of the artery.

As James Boyajian showed, New Christian merchant capital was central to the carreira da Índia, the Crown’s Asian trade, across the Habsburg period of 1580 to 1640. The route ran Lisbon to Goa to Malacca to Macau to Nagasaki. Macau’s distance from Goa, its lack of a resident tribunal, and its dependence on merchant money gave it a reputation as a place where a family of converso descent might trade with less scrutiny than at home.

That reputation is the origin of the phrase Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço uses, with a deliberate question mark, as the title of his study: Macau, porto seguro para os cristãos-novos? — Macau, safe haven for the New Christians? The honest answer is: less safe than the phrase suggests.

Was there really a secret synagogue?

Almost certainly not — and the numbers are the reason to doubt it.

Much of the modern interest in Jewish Macau traces to two alarmist reports. In 1579 the Jesuit Francisco de Meneses wrote to the head of his order in Rome that Macau held “more than 300 New Christians who usually are not good Christians”, and that certain Portuguese had secretly asked the Chinese authorities for a hidden place in which to worship. In 1585 the Goa inquisitor Rui Sodrinho de Mesquita complained that China and Malacca were “reputed to be aflame” with heresy yet had sent his tribunal not a single prisoner or denunciation for years.

These reports have often been read as evidence of an organised community of practising Jews. The most recent scholarship treats them very differently. François Soyer, in his 2018 study of exactly these claims, sets them within a well-documented Iberian habit of wildly exaggerating the number of New Christians and the extent of Judaizing, and concludes plainly: there were conversos in Macau, but it goes too far to cast them automatically as committed Jews frequenting a secret synagogue. The alarm tells us more about the anxieties of the men who raised it than about the religious life of Macau’s New Christians.

The hard numbers support the caution. From the surviving Goa records, Lourenço identifies 45 cases of Macau residents tried by that tribunal between 1582 and 1653. Of these, only 7 involved an accusation touching Jewish practice. That is a very small figure, and it is the number to hold onto: real evidence of individual New Christians, and thin evidence of any organised community.

Who can we actually name?

Very few — and a genealogist should treat named individuals, not the secret synagogue, as the solid ground.

Leonor (Lianor) da Fonseca — the best-documented case

A native and resident of Macau, born about 1567, Leonor da Fonseca was arrested in 1594 and sent to Goa for trial, where her case has been studied in detail by Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço.

She came under suspicion not for anything she was seen to do but for who her family was: her father was a New Christian, and a sister had earlier been arrested on the same grounds. She was married to an Old Christian, Marçal Fernandez. The testimony against her — much of it from household servants and slaves of Asian or mixed origin — did not fit the standard checklist of “Jewish ceremonies” that recurs in Portuguese trials; the substance of it concerned her perceived immorality, poor church attendance, and recourse to popular healing-magic, with the one clearly religious charge being that she rested on Saturdays and worked on Sundays. She refused to confess, abjured de vehementi — the formal renunciation required where suspicion was strong but proof incomplete — served a short detention, and was freed in 1595 or 1596.

The genealogical particulars that circulate for her derive from Boyajian: born Macau 1567; daughter of Manoel Teixeira and Ines Gomez; a deceased first husband, Miguel Correa; wife of Marçal Fernandez, sometimes identified with Pêro Fernandes d’Aires; sisters Meçia Leitoa and Francisca Teixeira. These are broadly consistent with the trial record, though the spelling “Leonor” and the 1594 arrest are the points fixed by the archive. She sits within the Fernandes d’Aires commercial network, the frame in which the Inquisition’s rare intervention in 1590s Macau is usually discussed. The Old Christian Alvares Botul family appears in the same investigation, by connection rather than as evidence of Jewish practice.

Two further cases — reported, and to be verified

Two names appear in genealogical compilations but could not be confirmed against the Lourenço and Soyer scholarship, and should be checked directly in Lourenço’s documentary volumes or the Torre do Tombo catalogue before being relied upon: António Nunes de Paz, said to have been arrested in Macau in 1616 for practising Judaism; and António Díaz d’Almeida, said to have been accused of Judaizing practices in Macau in 1587. Both are plausible — they may well be among the 45 Macau cases at Goa — but they are best presented as reported rather than established.

Beyond these, the alarmist figures name no one. Meneses’s “300 New Christians”, and the 1642 Jesuit warning, raised amid clerical infighting, that Macau might see “public synagogues opened” — which even its author admitted rested on rumour — are atmosphere, not evidence.

Are there Jewish graves in Macau?

Not from this period, and the one report that circulates should be treated as unverified.

A note reported to JewishGen’s Cemetery Discovery Project in 2002 stated that Jewish graves had been located at Macau. This appears never to have been substantiated or published, and on the evidence it cannot refer to the early period: New Christians in Counter-Reformation Macau were baptised Catholics, buried in consecrated Catholic ground, and a marked Jewish grave would be an anachronism no source supports.

Any genuine Jewish burials in Macau would belong to the nineteenth or twentieth century and to the later China-coast Sephardi and Baghdadi mercantile world centred on Hong Kong and Shanghai, or to transient refugees of the Second World War. The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry is the place to check before repeating the claim.

What records can you actually reach?

Because there was never a tribunal in Macau, the records are Goa and Lisbon records, and they are a fragment of what once existed.

Start with the printed transcriptions. Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço’s two-volume Macau e a Inquisição nos séculos XVI e XVII (2012) prints the key documents in transcription in its second volume — by far the fastest way to the actual texts without archival travel.

Then search the Torre do Tombo online. The Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Lisbon holds the Tribunal do Santo Ofício fonds, including residual Goa material. Much is digitised and searchable through the ANTT Digitarq catalogue; search a surname together with “Goa”, “China” or “Macau”. Reference codes take the form PT/TT/TSO-…

And treat silence as inconclusive. The Goa tribunal’s own archive was largely destroyed after its suppression in the early nineteenth century, so the fact that a person leaves no trace does not mean they were never there.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The scholarship is now good; the genealogy is thin by necessity. The history of New Christians in Macau has been carefully studied — but the surviving records name very few people, so there is no community to reconstruct, only a handful of individuals to document well.
Leonor da Fonseca is the one substantial case and the natural anchor for any family research; her network — Teixeira, Fernandes, and the Fernandes d’Aires trading complex — is the thread most worth pulling.
The two reported cases, Nunes de Paz (1616) and Díaz d’Almeida (1587), need direct verification in Lourenço’s documents or the Torre do Tombo before they are asserted as fact.
The Macau names belong to the wider Lisbon–Goa–Malacca–Macau–Nagasaki converso network, and that network, not Macau alone, is where a family line will actually run.

Organisations and repositories

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT), Lisbon — the Tribunal do Santo Ofício records, including surviving Goa material; searchable online through Digitarq.

Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas — the journal of the Cátedra de Estudos Sefarditas Alberto Benveniste, University of Lisbon, and the principal outlet for scholarship on the eastern New Christian diaspora. Soyer 2018 and Lourenço 2012 are freely available there.

Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau (CCCM), Lisbon — publisher of Lourenço’s volumes and a centre for Macau studies.

JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR).

Help us find records

Macau is a subject where the sources are few and dispersed, and we would welcome anything that adds to them. We are looking for:

Transcriptions or references for the Goa Inquisition processos of Macau residents — especially any confirming António Nunes de Paz (1616) and António Díaz d’Almeida (1587)
Family reconstructions of the Fonseca, Teixeira, Fernandes and Fernandes d’Aires connections in Macau, Goa and Lisbon
Material on New Christian merchants along the Lisbon–Goa–Malacca–Macau–Nagasaki route
Any documented Jewish burials in Macau, with dates, to settle the 2002 cemetery report

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

Research on New Christians in Macau means, in practice, Portuguese Inquisition sources: the transcribed documents in Lourenço’s volumes, the surviving Goa processos at the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, and the wider converso merchant networks of Portuguese Asia — with the family line almost always running back to Portugal and outward to Goa, Malacca and Nagasaki. It calls for work in Portuguese and in early modern 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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