Sephardic Jews and New Christians in Iran: the Hormuz Story

There has never been an Iberian Sephardi community in Iran.

Persia’s Jews are one of the oldest continuous Jewish populations anywhere — at Isfahan, Shiraz, Hamadan, Yazd, Kashan and Tehran, speaking Judeo-Persian, with a documented history reaching back to the Achaemenid period. They are not Sephardim in the Iberian sense, and a Persian Jewish line does not run back to Spain or Portugal. If that is what you are researching, this page will not help you, and we say so at the outset rather than at the end.

What Iran does have is a single genuine point of contact with the Iberian world, and it is a more interesting one than its size suggests.

Hormuz — the island in the strait that bears its name, today in Hormozgan Province, eight kilometres off the coast from Bandar Abbas — was a Portuguese possession for over a century, from 1515 to 1622. Before that it was the place two Portuguese Jews reached in about 1488, on the reconnaissance that established that India could be reached by sea.

That mission is the reason Vasco da Gama sailed in 1497, and therefore the reason there is a Sephardi page on this site about India at all.

What does “Hormuz” mean here?

Two places share the name.

Old Hormuz (Hormuz-e Kohneh) was a mainland port on the Persian coast near modern Minab. Around 1300 it was abandoned for the island of Jarun, which took the name Hormuz and became one of the richest entrepôts in the world — the point at which the sea trade of India and the Gulf met the overland caravan routes to Baghdad, Aleppo and the Mediterranean.

The Kingdom of Hormuz was a maritime state controlling both shores of the Gulf. Afonso de Albuquerque’s campaign of 1507 took Muscat, Qalhat, Quriyat and Khor Fakkan before reaching Hormuz itself, so Portuguese Gulf possessions extended into what is now Oman, the United Arab Emirates (Julfar, modern Ras al-Khaimah) and Bahrain (Portuguese 1521–1602). Those are separate subjects. The capital, the fortress and the merchant city were on the island, and the island is Iran.

Crucially for records: Hormuz fell within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition of Goa, founded in 1560, which covered the whole of Portuguese Asia. There was no tribunal at Hormuz. Anything arising there went to Goa, and from Goa to Lisbon — the same structure set out on our Macau page, with the same consequences.

Did Portuguese Jews reach Iran?

Yes — and the story is usually told wrong.

It is often presented as two competing versions, one crediting two Portuguese Jews and one crediting two Catholic agents. They are not rival accounts. They are the same mission, and both sets of men were on it.

In May 1487 King João II despatched Pêro da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva from Santarém, overland, with two tasks: to find the Christian kingdom of Prester John, and to establish whether India could be reached by sailing around Africa.

They travelled by Barcelona, Naples, Rhodes and Alexandria to Cairo, where they separated. Paiva went toward Ethiopia. Covilhã went down the Red Sea to Aden and took ship for India, reaching Cannanore, Calicut and Goa, then crossing to Hormuz, then sailing down the East African coast as far as Sofala — establishing, by observation, that the Indian Ocean was open to the south and that Africa could be rounded.

Covilhã returned to Cairo around 1490 or 1491 to find that Paiva had died. Waiting for him were two more Portuguese emissaries, both Jews, sent out by the king to find him:

Rabbi Abraham of Beja
Joseph of Lamego, a shoemaker

Joseph had already been east on his own account: he had reached Baghdad and Hormuz, and it was partly the intelligence he brought back about Hormuz that had prompted the king to send him out again.

Covilhã wrote his report — the report that told Lisbon the sea route to India existed — and sent it home with Joseph of Lamego. He then took Rabbi Abraham with him to Aden and on to Hormuz, so that Abraham could see the place for himself as his instructions required, before sending him back and turning toward Ethiopia.

Covilhã reached Ethiopia around 1493 and was never permitted to leave. He was still alive there in 1520, an old man, when a Portuguese embassy under Rodrigo de Lima arrived, and he told his story to its chaplain.

So the answer is yes. Two Portuguese Jews, Joseph of Lamego and Abraham of Beja, travelled to Hormuz between roughly 1488 and 1491, and one of them carried home the document that sent Vasco da Gama to sea six years later.

Three cautions about this story

It rests on one late source. Almost everything we know comes from Francisco Álvares, the chaplain who met Covilhã in Ethiopia in 1520 and published his account in Verdadeira Informação das Terras do Preste João das Índias (Lisbon, 1540). That is a single testimony, recorded thirty years after the events, from a man remembering his own youth. The outline is not seriously doubted; individual dates and details should not be pressed hard.

Covilhã and Paiva were not Jews. It is occasionally asserted that Covilhã was of converso descent. We have seen no evidence for it. The Jewish participants in this mission are Joseph of Lamego and Abraham of Beja, and there is no need to borrow others — the real ones are remarkable enough.

Baghdad is not Iran. Joseph of Lamego’s Baghdad journey is sometimes used to place Portuguese Jews in Persia. In about 1488 Baghdad was held by the Aq Qoyunlu, the White Sheep Turkmen; the Safavids took it in 1508 and the Ottomans in 1534. Baghdad belongs to a page on Iraq. Hormuz is the Iranian ground here.

And one thing to lay to rest. Afonso de Paiva has no connection to the de Paiva diamond merchants of Madras discussed on our India page. Paiva is a common Portuguese place-name surname, the men are two centuries apart, and Afonso de Paiva was not Jewish. The coincidence is attractive and it is only a coincidence.

Portuguese Hormuz, 1515–1622

Albuquerque attacked Hormuz in 1507, extracted tribute and began a fortress, but had to abandon it when his captains mutinied. He returned in 1515 and took the place definitively, building the fortress of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, whose ruins still stand on the island. The kings of Hormuz continued nominally to reign as Portuguese vassals.

For a century Hormuz was one of the great customs houses of the Portuguese empire, and specifically a jewel and pearl market: Bahrain pearls, Indian diamonds, and the caravan route north to Basra, Baghdad and Aleppo, where goods entered the Mediterranean network that ran through Livorno.

That is the same commercial world described on our India page, seen from its other end. Anyone tracing a Sephardi family in the coral-and-diamond trade should know that Hormuz was one of the doors through which the goods moved.

In 1622 Shah Abbas I retook Hormuz with the naval assistance of the English East India Company. The Portuguese were expelled, the trade moved to the mainland at Gombroon — renamed Bandar Abbas — and Hormuz declined into the near-empty island it remains.

Were there New Christians at Hormuz?

This is the part of the page we cannot answer, and it is the part worth pursuing.

New Christian capital and New Christian merchants were pervasive in the Portuguese Asian trade — James Boyajian’s work established that for the carreira da Índia across the Habsburg period. Hormuz was a principal node of that trade, and a jewel market of exactly the kind in which converso merchants specialised. It would be surprising if no New Christians passed through it in a century of Portuguese rule.

But we have not seen the evidence, and we are not going to assert it. No Hormuz Judaizing case has come to our attention. The place to look is the Goa Inquisition material at the Torre do Tombo and Delgado Figueira’s 1623 index of Goa cases, searched for Ormuz. That is a defined, tractable piece of work.

One named candidate, offered with a warning. Pedro Teixeira (c. 1570 – after 1610), a Portuguese traveller who lived at Hormuz and circumnavigated the globe, published Relaciones de Pedro Teixeira del origen, descendencia y succession de los Reyes de Persia y de Harmuz (Antwerp, 1610), which includes a substantial history of Hormuz translated from Persian sources and remains a principal authority on the place.

He is often described as being of Jewish or New Christian origin. We have not been able to verify that, it is contested, and it should not be repeated as fact. If it is true, he is the best-documented person of Iberian Jewish descent ever to have lived in Iran, and settling the question would be a genuine contribution.

The Persia–India connection, which runs the other way

There is a real and documented movement of Jews between Persia and the Sephardi world, but it goes east, not west, and it is Persian rather than Iberian.

When Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva of Amsterdam listed the heads of the Paradesi households at Cochin in 1686 (see our India page), two of the twenty families gave a Persian origin: Sason Michael, from the city of Shiraz, and Joseph Susany, a proselyte, from Susa.

Persian Jews reached Cochin and later joined the Baghdadi merchant communities of Surat, Bombay and Calcutta. A family that looks Persian in an Indian Jewish record is very likely to be Persian, and not a displaced Sephardi one.

Persian Jewry — where to go instead

If your research is in the Iranian Jewish community proper, this is not the site for it, but the essential points of orientation are these.

The community is ancient and was concentrated at Isfahan, Shiraz, Hamadan, Yazd, Kashan, Tehran and Mashhad. Its literary language was Judeo-Persian, written in Hebrew characters. The Alliance Israélite Universelle opened schools from 1898 and its Paris archives hold correspondence on Persian communities.

The great majority of Iran’s Jews left after 1948 and especially after 1979, chiefly for Israel and the United States, with a substantial community in Los Angeles.

One episode deserves mention here because of the parallel, not because of any descent: the Allahdad of Mashhad in 1839, in which the Jewish community was forcibly converted to Islam and thereafter lived for over a century as Jadid al-Islam, outwardly Muslim and secretly Jewish.

It is the closest analogue anywhere to the Iberian anusim, arising quite independently, and anyone interested in crypto-Judaism as a phenomenon should know about it. See our page on Crypto-Judaism, New Christians and Bnei Anusim.

What records survive?

There is no Jewish community archive for Hormuz, because there was no community. What exists is imperial and mercantile.

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — Tribunal do Santo Ofício, including surviving Goa material, catalogued through Digitarq. Search Ormuz alongside surnames. Reference codes take the form PT/TT/TSO-…

João Delgado Figueira’s Reportório (1623) — the manuscript index of Goa Inquisition cases 1561–1623, and for many individuals the only surviving trace.

Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino and the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon — administrative and customs records of the Estado da Índia, including Hormuz revenues.

Historical Archives of Goa (Directorate of Archives and Archaeology) — the Livros das Monções do Reino and related series covering correspondence with the Gulf.

India Office Records, British Library — English East India Company material on Hormuz and Gombroon, including the 1622 campaign and the subsequent Bandar Abbas factory.

Francisco Álvares, Verdadeira Informação das Terras do Preste João das Índias (Lisbon, 1540) — the Covilhã narrative, and the sole source for the 1487–91 mission.

Pedro Teixeira, Relaciones (Antwerp, 1610); English translation, The Travels of Pedro Teixeira, Hakluyt Society, 1902.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Hormuz Inquisition question is genuinely open. Nobody, as far as we know, has searched the Goa material specifically for cases arising at Hormuz. It is a bounded task with a real chance of a negative result — which would itself be worth publishing.

Pedro Teixeira’s origins are unresolved and are the single most interesting biographical question this page raises.

The Hormuz–Basra–Baghdad–Aleppo overland route is the physical link between the Gulf jewel trade and the Sephardi merchant communities of Aleppo and Livorno. It has been studied as economic history and never, to our knowledge, from the Sephardi genealogical side.

The Covilhã mission is well covered by historians of exploration and almost never treated as Jewish history, although two of its four Portuguese participants were Jews and one of them carried the decisive document home.

Organisations and repositories

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

Historical Archives of Goa, Panaji

British Library, India Office Records, London

Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History (CIJOH), Los Angeles — for the modern Iranian Jewish diaspora

Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris — school and community correspondence for Persia from 1898

Diarna and the Historical Society of Jews from Iran — for sites, cemeteries and community memory

Help us find records

This is a short page because the evidence is short. We would be glad to lengthen it. We are looking for:

Any Goa Inquisition case arising at Hormuz, or any reference to New Christians resident there
Documentation of Pedro Teixeira’s family origins, either way
Portuguese customs or residence lists for Hormuz naming merchants
Anything further on Joseph of Lamego or Rabbi Abraham of Beja, in Portuguese or Hebrew sources
Evidence of Sephardi merchants of Aleppo or Baghdad trading into Persia

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

Iran is not a Sephardi research destination, and we would rather tell you that than take the work.

If your family is Persian Jewish, the sources are Judeo-Persian, Hebrew and Persian and the specialists are elsewhere; we are glad to point you toward them. If your interest is the Portuguese Gulf — Hormuz, Muscat, Julfar, Bahrain — that is Portuguese Inquisition and Estado da Índia research, and it is work we do. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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