There was no Sephardi community in Russia.
Russia barred Jews from the empire for most of its history, and the few people of Portuguese Jewish descent who appear in the Russian record reached it not as a community but as individuals — a court physician, a police chief, a court jester — who arrived at the court of Peter the Great and his successors, almost all of them already baptised or living as Christians.
This page is therefore not a community history but a note on a handful of named individuals, for the researcher who finds a Portuguese-Jewish line running into eighteenth-century Russia and wants to know what is real. Each of the three men below is genuine and documented, but the details in circulation are not all accurate, and we have tried to say which is which.
Why were they there at all?
Because Peter the Great needed skills Russia did not have.
Peter (reigned 1682–1725) built St Petersburg from 1703 and staffed his new court and administration with foreigners — Dutch, German, and others — recruited for their abilities. Some of these were of Portuguese New Christian descent, families that had passed through the Netherlands or Hamburg.
They came as individuals with useful skills, not as Jews and not as a community, and those who rose did so as baptised Christians.
A separate and even thinner thread runs through Courland, the semi-autonomous duchy on the Baltic (now western Latvia), which hosted a small number of Sephardi and Portuguese-Jewish traders and where the ducal court employed some. This is real but slight, and no organised community formed there either.
Anton Devier
António Manuel de Vieira — in Russian, Anton Manuilovich Devier, also spelled Divier and De Vier — was the son of a Portuguese Jewish father from Holland and a Christian mother.
He entered Peter’s service young, was baptised, and rose to become the first Chief of Police of St Petersburg, its General-Politzmeister.
His life turned on court politics. He married the sister of Peter’s favourite Menshikov, against Menshikov’s wishes, and after Peter’s death Menshikov had him exiled to Siberia in 1727. He was recalled and restored under Empress Elizabeth, made a count, and died in 1745.
Yan d’Acosta
Yan d’Acosta — probably João d’Acosta, and also recorded as Jan Lacosta — was a court jester to Peter the Great, having previously worked as a business broker in Hamburg. He was of Portuguese Jewish origin.
The best-known story about him is that Peter, amused by his wit and his command of languages, jokingly styled him “King of the Samoyeds” and granted him a barren island in the Gulf of Finland. The account is well attested and the outline in circulation is accurate.
One caution for researchers: he is not the same person as Uriel da Costa, the seventeenth-century philosopher of Amsterdam, whose surname is spelled the same way. The two are easily confused and are entirely distinct.
António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches
Ribeiro Sanches is the most substantial of the three, and one of the most distinguished physicians of the eighteenth century.
He was born in 1699 at Penamacor in Portugal, into a New Christian family. He studied at Salamanca and then at Leiden under the great Boerhaave, went to Russia in 1731, and served as a court physician in St Petersburg, treating the Empress Anna. He was elected a foreign honorary member of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which continued his pension even after he left. He left Russia in 1747, settled in Paris, and died there on 14 October 1783.
A correction worth making. He attended the young Catherine — the future Catherine II, then a grand duchess — during an illness around 1744, but not Catherine as empress. He had left Russia by 1747, fifteen years before she came to the throne.
Did he return openly to Judaism in London?
Unlike Devier and d’Acosta, Ribeiro Sanches openly identified as a Jew once he had left Portugal, and this is where our own records may touch him.
The London circumcision register kept by the mohel de Paiba records, among adult circumcisions of men newly arrived from the Iberian world, a “Dr Abm Ribeiro Sanches, 25 years old.” An adult circumcision on reaching a free community would fit his history, and the name and profession match.
We treat this as probable rather than proven — the register gives the Hebrew name Abraham where he is otherwise known as António, and the entry cannot be pinned to an exact year. But if it is him, it dates his open return to Judaism to his London years, before Russia.
What has and hasn’t been researched
Very little, because there is very little.
These are three individuals, not a population, and the genealogical trail for each runs back out of Russia — to the Netherlands and Hamburg for Devier and d’Acosta, to Portugal and then London for Ribeiro Sanches. A researcher whose line reaches one of these men will find the substance of the record in the Western Sephardi and New Christian archives, not in Russia.
The Courland thread has never been properly worked and might repay attention from anyone with a Baltic Portuguese-Jewish connection, but it is a small subject.
Further reading
The Wikipedia articles on Anton de Vieira and on António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches are reasonable starting points, with the caveats above.
For the wider context of Portuguese Jews at the northern courts, see our pages on the Sephardic Jews of Germany (for Hamburg) and of the Netherlands.
For the Courland thread, the standard entry point is the discussion of Portuguese Jews in the duchy in the older historical literature; there is no modern study.
Organisations and repositories
There is no Russian Sephardi archive. For the three individuals here, the relevant records are held elsewhere:
Amsterdam City Archives and the London Sephardi archive at Bevis Marks — for the Netherlands and London origins of Devier, d’Acosta and Ribeiro Sanches
Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — the Portuguese Inquisition catalogue, for New Christian family background
Russian State Archives — for the court careers themselves, if the Russian phase is what is being traced
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- Any documentation of the Portuguese Jewish families in Courland, and the traders the ducal court employed
- Confirmation, or otherwise, that the “Dr Abm Ribeiro Sanches” of the de Paiba London circumcision register is António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches
- The Netherlands or Hamburg origins of the Devier and d’Acosta families before they reached Russia
- Any other individuals of Portuguese Jewish descent at the Russian court in the eighteenth century
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
Russian research here is really research somewhere else — in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Lisbon, where the families these men came from are documented. If you have a line that reaches the court of Peter the Great and want to trace it back to its Portuguese origins, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
If you have found this page useful, please consider making a small donation to support this site.
See also: Sephardic Genealogy in Germany: Hamburg · Sephardic Jews of the Netherlands · Sephardic Jews of England · Sephardic Jews of Portugal