New Christians in the Philippines

There was never a Jewish community in the Spanish Philippines, and there could not have been. Spanish colonial law made an organised Jewish presence impossible, and it stayed impossible for three hundred and thirty-three years, until the Americans arrived in 1898.

What did exist was a scatter of Portuguese and Spanish New Christian merchants strung along the Manila galleon route between about 1590 and 1680 — men who lived and traded in Manila and who, in a number of cases, were observing Judaism in secret. We know their names, their birthplaces, their trades and in several cases their families, for the same reason we know most crypto-Jews: because the Inquisition wrote them down.

Why does the Philippines have no Inquisition archive?

Because there was never a separate tribunal of the Holy Office there.

The clergy of Manila asked for one repeatedly through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were never granted it, for reasons that remain unclear.

From 1590 the islands were dependent on the viceroy and audiencia of Mexico, and the Mexican tribunal’s own statement of jurisdiction runs from the archbishopric of Mexico through Tlaxcala, Michoacán, Guatemala, Guadalajara, Chiapas, Yucatán, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Honduras, Nicaragua and Nueva Vizcaya to “las Islas Filipinas”.

In practice this produced a two-tier system, and both tiers matter to a researcher. Minor cases of local heresy were heard in Manila by the archbishop, the bishops or the Inquisition’s comisario. Leading cases were dispatched to Mexico — the nearest seat of authority — for judgment and sentence. So a man might be denounced in Manila, examined in Manila, and then shipped seven thousand miles across the Pacific to be sentenced at an auto-da-fé in Mexico City.

The first public auto in Manila was held in 1585; no judaizantes appear in it, though seven other penitents do. Denunciations for heresy continued in the islands as late as 1800. The Inquisition was abolished throughout the Spanish dominions in 1810, briefly revived by Ferdinand VII, and finally closed by a royal decree of 9 March 1820 ordering the release, under pain of excommunication, of every prisoner in the Inquisition’s cells in the Philippine Islands.

The consequence for research is the same one we set out on our Macau and Iran pages. Look for these people in Mexico, and in Seville. Absence from Manila records proves nothing whatever.

Who are the men we can name?

Eight Judaizers, known to have lived in the Philippines between 1593 and 1677.

The foundational study is George Alexander Kohut’s paper of 1904, itself built on José Toribio Medina’s El Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en las Islas Filipinas (Santiago de Chile, 1899) and on the tablillas — the boards of penitents’ names hung in Mexico Cathedral — printed by Luis González Obregón.

Jorge and Domingo Rodríguez, reconciled 1593

Two brothers, also recorded under the surname Ríos, resident in Manila for many years, descendants of New Christians and described as strict observers of the Law of Moses.

The tablilla entries read: “Jeorge Rios Portuguez, moso soltero, natural de la Ciudad de Sebilla, residente en Manila Islas Felipinas, herege judaizante, reconciliado año de 1593” — and, for his brother, “Domingo Rios, Portuguez, hermano de Jeorge Rios, natural del Fondon en Portugal”.

So Jorge was born in Seville and Domingo in Fondón — almost certainly Fundão — in Portugal: brothers born in two different countries, which is itself a portrait of how these families moved. Jorge was tortured after confessing and then retracting. Both were reconciled with confiscation of their goods at the auto in Mexico City on 28 March 1593, and sentenced to the perpetual sanbenito and to prison.

Manuel Gil de la Guarda, reconciled 1601

Born in the city of Guarda, Portugal; a resident of Manila and an attorney in the service of the audiencia, aged thirty-five, and described in the report as “guilty of great conceit and strongly suspected of observing the religion of Moses”.

Nine witnesses denounced him. He denied everything until his second hearing, which was held in Manila, and then confessed that he believed the religion of Moses to be the only true faith and hoped for salvation in its precepts. Two details of practice survive: when reciting the Psalms he consistently omitted the Gloria, and he kept the Jewish Sabbath so far as he was able.

He walked in the auto at Mexico City on 25 March 1601 in a sanbenito with a taper, and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment and the sequestration of his goods. His judges thought this so light that they explained themselves: he had shown genuine repentance, and his relenting had induced others who had held out to confess.

Three men at the great auto of 1649

The auto-da-fé held in the Plaza del Volador in Mexico City on 11 April 1649 was the largest in the history of New Spain — 109 prisoners, of whom the great majority were Judaizers. Three of them had lived in the Philippines.

Manuel de Granada (or Granado), native of Seville, merchant, citizen of Mexico City, “residing in the Philippines, where he died, a child of Hebrew New Christians”. Relaxed in effigy. His wife María de Ribera, also of Seville, described in the tablillas as “daughter, sister, aunt and cousin of many who were relaxed”, was burnt in effigy with her bones.

Manuel de Granada matters more than the others because of his son. Gabriel de Granada’s trial of 1642–45 was published in translation by Cyrus Adler in 1899 and is probably the fullest printed account of an individual Inquisition process in any language. In it Gabriel describes learning of his father’s death in January 1643, and how he, his brother Rafael, and their relatives kept the fast of the seventh day — on a Monday which was Christmas Eve — while their Jewish neighbours brought them the appropriate food and told them not to leave the house for seven days, according to the Law of Moses. That is Manila crypto-Judaism reaching Mexico City as family news, and it is as close as this subject gets to a domestic scene.

Pedro López Núñez, native of Seville, merchant, citizen of Manila, brother of Isabel Tristán. Burnt in effigy.

Luis Fernández Tristán, native of Seville, merchant, son of Hebrew New Christians, burnt in effigy. The record describes him as “difunto en la mar de vuelta de Filipinas”. Kohut read “Mar de Buelta” as a place name and could not find it on any map; it is not a place. The phrase means he died at sea on the return voyage from the Philippines — which, for a galleon merchant, is exactly what one would expect. He was probably a close relative of Doña Isabel Tristán, who was tortured by the Inquisition and appears in the Granada trial, and possibly of Marcos Ríos Tristán, whose daughter was reconciled in Mexico in 1646.

Two more in 1677

Information was laid against two Portuguese Judaizers: Manuel Suárez de Olivera, who was tried and died “with tokens of a faithful Catholic”, and his nephew Don Lorenzo de Medina.

Medina’s case is the most human of the eight. He was a penitent of the Inquisition of Lisbon who had fled to the Philippines without serving his sentence — that is, he had crossed half the world to escape a Portuguese conviction. Somehow he learned that his arrest was coming, lost no time, and escaped to Mexico, where it was said he meant to take ship for Spain. What became of him is unknown.

What does the Acevedo cluster add?

Evidence that the canonical list of eight is incomplete.

A second body of material does not appear in Kohut, and therefore probably represents cases he and Medina did not see:

Antonio Báez de Acevedo, alcalde mayor of Pampanga, arrested for judaizing in 1647, his case still active in 1661
a possible brother, Sebastián Báez de Acevedo, perhaps the same man as Sebastián Vázquez de Acevedo
Beatriz Váz de Acevedo, wife of the licenciado Sebastián Méndez, a lawyer in Mexico
Beatriz de Acevedo, widow of Alfonso Báez de Acevedo
Nuño Rodríguez de Acevedo, her brother, who died in Nicaragua and may have been Portuguese-born

A note that resolves several of the “possibly the same person” entries. Váez, Báez, Vaz and Vázquez are the same surname — Vaz and Váez being the Portuguese forms and Báez and Vázquez the Castilian — and Inquisition scribes used them interchangeably, sometimes within a single file. So Sebastián Báez de Acevedo and Sebastián Vázquez de Acevedo may well be one man. Anyone working this family should search all four forms as a matter of routine.

That the Acevedos were also tied to Simón Váez Sevilla, the central figure of the Portuguese New Christian network in Mexico City, is probably not coincidence but kinship. Note also that an Antonio Báez de Acevedo holding the office of alcalde mayor of a Philippine province is a striking fact in its own right: a suspected Judaizer serving as a Spanish colonial governor.

Why were they there at all?

Silver, silk, and the annual galleon.

The Manila galleon sailed between Manila and Acapulco from 1565 to 1815, carrying Chinese silk brought to Manila by Fujianese merchants eastward, and American silver westward. A second route ran through Malacca between Manila and India.

New Christian merchants sat at both ends of that exchange. Portuguese New Christian capital was pervasive in the Asian trade — the same networks described on our India page — and Portuguese New Christians were equally embedded in the silver economy of Spanish America. Manila is where those two worlds physically met, and that is why New Christians turn up there. The recurring profile in the list above is exactly what you would predict: merchants of Seville and Portugal, resident in Manila, with relatives in Mexico City, dying on the return voyage.

The political hinge is 1580 to 1640. During the Union of the Crowns, Portuguese subjects could move freely within the Spanish empire, and Portuguese merchants — a great many of them New Christian — spread through Spanish America and out to the Philippines. When Portugal revolted in 1640, every Portuguese in the Spanish empire became suspect overnight. The Mexican tribunal’s great sweep against the Portuguese trading network followed almost immediately, running from 1642 to the auto of 1649.

That chain explains the shape of the evidence precisely. Three of the eight Philippine cases fall in the 1649 auto, and Antonio Báez de Acevedo was arrested in 1647. They were caught not because anything changed in Manila but because Lisbon declared independence.

What is probably not true

Two claims circulate and should be treated with caution.

Sephardi settlement in Northern Samar. It is sometimes asserted that Sephardi Jews settled there in the Spanish period, and some families in the province claim Sephardi descent today. We have seen no evidence for it beyond the assertion itself. Nothing in Medina, Kohut or the Mexican records places Judaizers outside Manila and the immediate colonial administration — with the single exception of Pampanga. Treat this as unverified.

The Rodríguez brothers as founders of anything. They were reconciled and imprisoned in Mexico in 1593. There is no evidence they returned to the islands, and no evidence of descendants there.

More generally: the number of individuals involved is very small, none of them founded a lineage in the Philippines, and no living Filipino family has, to our knowledge, been documented back to any of them. If yours can be, we would very much like to hear from you.

What about the modern community?

It begins in 1870, it is Ashkenazi in origin, and it is not this page’s subject — but part of it deserves recording.

Three Levy brothers from Alsace-Lorraine arrived in 1870, fleeing the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, and built businesses in jewellery, general merchandise and later pharmaceuticals and motor cars. Leopold Kahn, also of Alsace, ran La Estrella del Norte and Levy Hermanos and served as French consul-general.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 is what made this possible — the same hinge that appears on our Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Libya pages, here working in the opposite direction by shortening the route to Asia.

The Levys were joined by Turkish, Syrian and Egyptian Jews — an Eastern Sephardi and Mizrahi element, and the only part of the modern community with any connection to this site’s subject. Even so, the whole community numbered about fifty people by 1898.

After the American takeover, Judaism could be practised openly for the first time. Emil Bachrach arrived in 1901; Temple Emil and Bachrach Hall followed in the 1920s, funded by the Bachrach, Netzorg and Frieder families. By 1936 the community numbered around five hundred.

Then the part for which the Philippines deserves to be remembered. Between 1937 and 1941 the Jewish Refugee Committee of Manila, led by the Frieder brothers, working with High Commissioner Paul McNutt and President Manuel Quezon, brought in around 1,300 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria — with the Manila committee itself given authority to select who received United States visas. A larger plan to resettle 10,000 refugees on Mindanao was overtaken by the war.

The war then inverted everything. When the Japanese interned “enemy aliens” in December 1941, they did not distinguish German nationals from German Jews, so the refugees were largely left at liberty while their American and British benefactors — some 250 people — were interned at Santo Tomas, Los Baños and Bilibid. For three years the rescued fed the rescuers. Seventy members of the community died. Temple Emil and Bachrach Hall were destroyed, and with them, in all probability, the community’s records.

Around seventy families remain in Metro Manila today, with the Beth Yaacov synagogue in Makati.

What records can you actually reach?

For the New Christians

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico — Ramo Inquisición. This is the archive. Substantial parts are catalogued and digitised. Search under all surname variants.
Archivo General de Indias, Seville — the Filipinas section for colonial administration, and Contratación for passenger licences to the Indies. Note the structural point: a licence required proof of limpieza de sangre, so New Christians travelled on false or purchased papers or went without licence at all. Their stated origins in Spanish records may be fabrications, and that is not an accident of the sources but a feature of them.
José Toribio Medina, El Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en las Islas Filipinas (1899) — the indispensable book, freely available on archive.org.
Luis González Obregón, México Viejo, II Serie (1895) — prints the tablillas, the verbatim name-boards from Mexico Cathedral, from which most of the entries quoted above come.
Cyrus Adler (ed.), “Trial of Gabriel de Granada by the Inquisition in Mexico, 1642–1645”, AJHS Publications No. 7 (1899).
Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — for Lorenzo de Medina’s original Lisbon sentence, and for any New Christian whose case began in Portugal.
National Archives of the Philippines — Spanish colonial administration. Bear in mind that the Battle of Manila in 1945 destroyed an enormous quantity of archival material; the city was among the most comprehensively destroyed of the war.

For the modern community

JDC Archives, and the United States National Archives (State Department visa files) for the 1937–41 rescue.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for the refugees and for Santo Tomas.
Arolsen Archives.
Internment records for Santo Tomas, Los Baños and Bilibid.
Jewish Association of the Philippines.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Kohut’s eight is a floor, not a ceiling. He and Medina worked largely from published tablillas rather than from the full case files in Mexico City. The Acevedo material is already evidence of at least one case they missed. A systematic search of the AGN Inquisición series for “Filipinas” has, as far as we know, never been done, and it is a defined, tractable piece of work with a real prospect of doubling the known list.
The Acevedo family has not been reconstructed, and its link to the Simón Váez Sevilla network is asserted rather than demonstrated.
Nobody has connected the Manila names to the Asian trade, though four of the eight are merchants and the galleon is the obvious mechanism. Boyajian’s work on New Christian capital in Portuguese Asia and Jonathan Israel’s on the Spanish monarchy meet exactly here and have not been brought together on this point.
The Northern Samar claim needs someone to test it properly, one way or the other.

Organisations and repositories

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City — Ramo Inquisición.

Archivo General de Indias, Seville — Filipinas and Contratación.

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

National Archives of the Philippines, Manila.

JDC Archives; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Arolsen Archives.

Jewish Association of the Philippines.

Help us find records

This is a small subject where a modest amount of archival work would make a real difference. We are looking for:

Any case from the AGN Inquisición files naming a resident of the Philippines — the list above is certainly incomplete
Documentation of the Acevedo family in Manila, Mexico or Portugal
Evidence, either way, on the claimed Sephardi descent of families in Northern Samar
Anything on Lorenzo de Medina after his flight to Mexico in 1677
Records of the pre-war Manila community, whose own archive was destroyed with Temple Emil in 1945

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

Philippine New Christian research is Mexican Inquisition research with a Manila address. The archives are the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, and the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon; the languages are Spanish and Portuguese; and the surnames shift form between the two, which is the single commonest reason a search fails. We will tell you honestly whether a question can be answered before you commit to it. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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