Sephardic Jews of Portugal – Sephardic Genealogy

Portugal is where most Western Sephardi lines end, and where, increasingly, they can be made to begin again.

There has been no continuous Jewish community here since 1497. In December 1496 Manuel I decreed that all Jews must convert or leave by October 1497. In the event he prevented them from leaving and had them forcibly baptised instead.

Everyone descended from Portuguese Jewry after that date descends from New Christians, cristãos-novos. The records that concern us are Catholic records, Inquisition records, and the records of the communities people escaped to.

That is the central fact about Portuguese research and it shapes everything else. You are not looking for Jews in Jewish records. You are looking for people who were baptised, married and buried by priests, who carried Portuguese Catholic names, and who in some generation left, resumed Judaism abroad, and took a new name. The work is bridging that gap.

It can be done. Twenty years ago tracing a Sephardi line back into Iberia was thought impossible. It is now routine enough that a method can be described.

Timeline

1492: expulsion from Spain. Perhaps 100,000 Spanish Jews enter Portugal on payment of a per-head tax, most with only eight months’ leave to stay.

1493: several hundred Jewish children deported to São Tomé.

1496–97: Manuel I decrees expulsion, then converts it into forced baptism. Portuguese Jewry becomes New Christian in a single act.

1506: Lisbon massacre; around 2,000 conversos killed.

1531–36: the Portuguese Inquisition is authorised and established.

1540: first auto-da-fé in Lisbon.

1580–1640: the Iberian Union. Portugal under the Spanish crown; pressure on New Christians increases and emigration accelerates.

1605: the General Pardon. Philip III, needing money for the wars against the Dutch and English, obtains a papal pardon negotiated by New Christian financiers. All prisoners are freed and declared not guilty. It lasted about a year.

1606: the Inquisition resumes, more systematically, and begins the index described below.

1649: the Companhia Geral do Comércio do Brasil, with New Christian capital central to the Brazil trade.

1773: Pombal abolishes the legal distinction between Old and New Christians.

1821: the Inquisition is abolished.

1912: the Jewish community is formally recognised.

How do you trace a family back to Portugal?

The method is to work backwards from the free community and forwards from the Portuguese records until the two meet. Several kinds of evidence create the bridge.

Vindos de Portugal. London’s Sephardi records describe new arrivals from Portugal by this phrase, and the congregation recorded them carefully because it was supporting them. Our records of London arrivals between 1700 and 1750 include entries such as Moseh Dias Fernandes, circumcised in London on 1 March 1725, recorded as born at Freixo de Numão in 1687, son of Abraham Dias Fernandes, and arrested by the Lisbon Inquisition in 1703.

That single entry gives a Portuguese birthplace, a birth year, a father and an Inquisition case. It is the whole method in one line.

Adult circumcision. A man circumcised as an adult in a Western Sephardi community has almost always arrived recently from Iberia. Bordeaux circumcision records usually state the country. Amsterdam’s registers show men circumcised at 21, 25, 38 and older through the eighteenth century, which is direct evidence of continuing arrivals long after the period usually assumed.

Amsterdam marriage banns. These state where the bride and groom were born. Of the entries we hold with a stated origin, 137 give Lisbon, 38 Porto, 21 Oporto, plus Vila Real, Bragança, Trancoso, Viseu, Fronteira and 53 simply Portugal. About 27 per cent of stated origins are Iberian.

Attestations of origin. The Amsterdam Portuguese community kept a file of statements that applicants for membership were of Spanish or Portuguese Jewish origin, often naming where the person was known from and who could vouch for them.

Signatures. A person had a Catholic given name in Portugal and a Hebrew one abroad, but the surname was often the same or related, and handwriting does not change. Comparing a signature in an Inquisition processo with one on an Amsterdam marriage bann, a London ketubah or a notarial deed can identify the same man in both worlds. This technique is now well established and is one of the most reliable bridges available.

Inquisition testimony itself. Prisoners were asked about relatives, and sometimes named people living openly as Jews abroad.

The Inquisition records

These are the largest and most useful body of Portuguese material for Sephardi genealogy, and they are extensively digitised.

Scale

The Tribunal do Santo Ofício archive holds around 79,000 processos, individual case files, of which roughly half concern judaising.

Our own catalogue of processos against New Christians and judaisers holds 27,046 cases, distributed almost evenly across the three metropolitan tribunals: Évora 9,357, Coimbra 8,913, Lisbon 8,776. A fourth tribunal at Goa also operated; its archive has burned and does not survive.

The cases run from the 1530s to the 1770s, with the heaviest concentration between 1625 and 1675 — some 10,500 cases in fifty years — and a second wave between 1700 and 1750.

What a processo contains

A complete file holds the denunciation, the arrest warrant, interrogations, witness statements, confessions, an inventory of the prisoner’s property, and the sentence. They range from a few pages to over a thousand.

For genealogists the genealogia section is the heart of it. The prisoner is asked to name parents, grandparents, paternal relatives, maternal relatives, spouse and children, in that order. The format was standardised, which makes the documents far easier to read than they first appear.

The catalogue data alone is rich. Of our 27,046 cases, 96 per cent record a birthplace across 2,844 distinct places, and 94 per cent name at least one parent. Each entry carries a direct link to the digitised file.

See also our pages on Types of Files in the Portuguese Inquisition Archives and the Glossary of Jobs.

Are the Inquisition genealogies reliable?

No, and this is important.

Prisoners were trying to save their lives and protect relatives. People claim not to know their grandparents’ names with implausible frequency. Family members are described as childless. Relatives who had already appeared before a tribunal, or who were living openly as Jews abroad, are often simply omitted, unless the prisoner believed the Inquisition already knew.

A worked example makes the point. Miguel de Mendonça Valadolid, arrested in 1729 aged 43, told the Lisbon tribunal that his parents were born and lived at Valladolid. In fact his father was born at Jaén and his mother at Seville, and both had been tried by the Spanish Inquisition. He also said he did not know whom his paternal uncle had married or where he was born, and later in the same file admitted he had lived with that uncle in Amsterdam, and named the wife and children.

Cross-reference between processos is therefore essential. Statements were also corrected at later audiences within the same file, so read the whole document rather than only the genealogia.

The Livro dos Compromissos

This deserves separate mention because it is little used and extremely powerful.

After the General Pardon of 1605 the Inquisition rebuilt its intelligence apparatus. From 1606 it kept a master index of every Portuguese Old and New Christian, anywhere in the world, accused of religious crimes. It covers Portugal, Spain, Brazil, India, Spanish America, Amsterdam, Hamburg, France, Italy, Salonica, Constantinople and London.

It runs to over 2,200 pages with five or six persons to a page — roughly 11,000 to 12,000 names and perhaps 100,000 references. Each entry gives the person’s place of residence when denounced, their status, often their spouse and parentage and biographical detail, and a reference to the processo in which they are named.

The index is alphabetical by given name rather than surname, which is how Portuguese indexes of the period work. A fixed number of pages was allotted to each given name; when those filled, names spilled elsewhere, so a common name like João appears throughout all 2,270 pages.

It is at its most complete for the first half of the seventeenth century, thins through the later seventeenth and early eighteenth, and stops in 1766. There is a separate register for women.

No index to it exists. Creating one, even of names, places and page references, would be a major contribution to Sephardi genealogy.

Other Inquisition series

Processos de bens: confiscation files, with inventories of possessions.

Processos de fuga: files on prisoners who escaped, directly relevant to families who reached the free communities.

Autos-da-fé: ceremony records, lists of those punished, and sermons.

Habilitações: background investigations for people seeking positions requiring proof of clean blood. Useless as statements of fact where Jewish ancestry is concerned, since the whole point was to deny it, but they name families and generations.

Most of this material has barely been examined since it was created.

Catholic parish records

For anyone whose family remained in Portugal into the seventeenth or eighteenth century, these are the backbone.

Parishes were required to register baptisms, marriages and burials from the Council of Trent in 1563 and the Council of Lisbon in 1605, with some keeping records earlier and some complying badly.

Portugal is unusually fortunate here. In 1911, following the republican revolution, the state confiscated the parish registers. Priests wrote their last entries on 31 March 1911 and civil registration began the next day. Because the books went into state custody rather than remaining in churches, they survived the twentieth century intact, are held in a small number of central locations, and have all been microfilmed and digitised.

The distribution is confusing and catches people out. Books from roughly 1860 onward went to the district archives. Older books mostly went to the national archive in Lisbon. So for many parishes — Faro is the standard example — everything before about 1860 is in Lisbon rather than in the local district archive. Guimarães is a special case, its books held by the municipal archive.

The records improve over time. Early entries are terse and give little beyond the child, the father and the godparents. From the early eighteenth century they note whether a child was legitimate. From around 1742 many parishes begin naming all four grandparents with their birthplaces, which makes it possible to distinguish between two couples of the same name in the same village.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed some parish archives but by no means all. Some destroyed baptisms were reconstituted later when a person needed proof of baptism in order to marry, so a record dated 1790 may attest a baptism of 1750.

Civil registration proper begins in 1836 and is too late for almost all Sephardi research.

Notarial and other records

The notarial registers, cartórios notariais, are probably the most valuable underused source after the Inquisition. They hold wills, property transactions, business agreements and inventories taken on death, and many begin in the 1500s. New Christians were disproportionately merchants, so they are disproportionately present.

Digitisation is under way but far from complete. Search by notarial plus the town, and if nothing appears, try the district or the nearest large town.

The Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino holds the colonial records, and this is where families in Brazil, India, Angola and Cape Verde appear. Very little is digitised. It is worth noting how many senior colonial appointments went to men of New Christian descent: positions were often effectively hereditary, and confiscation of property did not remove a family’s education or its network.

Róis de confessados, parish lists of those who had confessed, are the nearest thing to an early census, grouped by household. They survive patchily but are valuable where they do.

Portugal has no usable census records: statistical returns are destroyed after the figures are extracted. Election registers from 1836 and military conscription registers from 1855 partly compensate.

The Misericórdia archives, the charitable brotherhoods, held responsibility for the poor and the sick. The University of Coimbra archive, the military archives, and the Torre do Tombo’s holdings on the trading companies are all worth searching for specific families.

Where the surnames lead

The commonest names in the judaising processos are the commonest Portuguese names: Rodrigues (2,312), Lopes (1,805), Fernandes (1,407), Mendes (1,169), Gomes (1,018), Nunes (1,010), Dias (899), Henriques (641), Álvares (576), Vaz (390), Pereira (350), da Costa (341), Cardoso (293), da Fonseca (199), de Castro (109).

This is why a surname alone will not identify a family. A search for Rodrigues returns thousands of cases and most have no connection to yours. See our page on Sephardic surnames.

The productive approach is to search for clusters. Take the surnames of the earliest generation of your family in the free community — Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Bordeaux — and look for those names appearing together, in the same place, at about the time the family first appears abroad. Correlation is not proof, but a familiar cluster in the right place at the right date is where to start.

The geography helps too. The processos concentrate heavily in particular towns: Beja (1,289), Lisbon (1,196), Bragança (1,037), Lamego (955), Elvas (903), Évora (596), Montemor-o-Novo (500), Arraiolos (480), Coimbra (448), Porto (446), Serpa (437), Vila Viçosa (390), Trancoso (294), Covilhã (208). The north-east around Bragança and Trás-os-Montes, and the Alentejo around Beja and Elvas, are New Christian heartlands.

Foreign birthplaces appear too: Rio de Janeiro (285), Brazil generally (259), Pernambuco (35), Bahia (14), Goa (7), Angola (2), and a handful for London, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Venice, Amsterdam and Hamburg.

Reading the documents

The manuscripts are in Portuguese of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, heavily abbreviated, and often written by scribes whose spelling is inconsistent.

Handwriting-recognition software has changed what is practical. Transkribus can be trained on particular scribes and improves markedly with training. A model for Portuguese handwriting of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, developed by Carla Vieira and colleagues, is specifically trained on Inquisition documents, and there is also a general Portuguese model.

Large language models handle the language better than the letterforms, so a useful workflow is to run an image through Transkribus and then pass the output to an AI model to correct the Portuguese and translate. Neither is reliable on its own, and the output always needs checking. But the combination has moved these documents from specialist territory into something a determined amateur can work with.

Sephardic World lectures on Portugal

Beginners’ Guide to Searching in the Archives of the Portuguese Inquisition — Ton Tielen and David Mendoza
Tracing your Jewish Ancestors back to Portugal — Ton Tielen
Researching Sephardic Ancestors in Portugal with Tombo.pt — João Ventura
Vindos de Portugal — Carla Vieira
Trade and Persecution: three merchants between Lisbon and London — Carla Vieira
Ruling the Sephardic Atlantic — Carla Vieira
Miguel de Mendonça Valladolid: prisoner of the Inquisition — David Mendoza
The De Sola Mendes Family and the Portuguese Inquisition — Florbela Veiga Frade
DNA Evidence of Jews in Portugal — Inês Pires Nogueiro
Speaking for the Silenced — Richard Zimler
I. S. Révah: the scholar who revolutionised Sephardic studies — Carsten Wilke

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Inquisition catalogue is indexed and searchable and increasingly well used. Almost nothing else is.

The Livro dos Compromissos has no index. The notarial registers are barely digitised and hardly touched. The Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino is largely unexplored by Sephardi genealogists. The parish records are digitised but not indexed, which means they are searchable only if you already know the parish.

Two developments will change this. As parish records are indexed by machine, it will become possible to identify people born or married in Portugal who are not buried there, and to match those absences against people of the same surnames appearing abroad. And Y-DNA testing of men still living in Portugal, descended from relatives who never left, offers the prospect of matching patrilineal Sephardi lines to the branches that stayed behind.

Organisations and repositories

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, holding the Inquisition archive and the pre-1860 parish registers. Searchable through digitarq.arquivos.pt and its advanced search page.

tombo.pt, an index across all seven Portuguese archive websites, organised by district, municipality and parish, in English and Portuguese. The most useful starting point for parish research.

inquisicao.info, a searchable database built from the Torre do Tombo Inquisition catalogue. [LINK NEEDED]

Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, for colonial records.

Seventeen district archives, three regional archives for the Azores and Madeira, and the municipal archive of Guimarães.

Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

Arquivo da Universidade de Coimbra.

Arquivo da Misericórdia de Lisboa.

Arquivo Histórico Militar.

Associação Portuguesa de Genealogia, which publishes Revista Raízes & Memórias.

Genealogia FB, holding volunteer-created indexes.

The Sephardic Diaspora discussion group.

For the Spanish side of the story, see our page on Spain.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

An index to the Livro dos Compromissos, giving names, places and page references
Any transcription of the companion register for women
Notarial registers naming New Christian merchants, particularly at Lisbon, Porto, Beja, Elvas and Bragança
Róis de confessados for any New Christian town
Material from the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino naming New Christian families in Brazil, India or West Africa
Any surviving records of the Goa tribunal, thought lost
Correspondence between people in Portugal and relatives in the free communities
Y-DNA results from men with documented Portuguese ancestry, particularly from the New Christian regions

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].

Research services

Portuguese research means Catholic parish registers, Inquisition manuscripts in early modern Portuguese, and the problem of matching a person recorded under one name in Lisbon to the same person recorded under another in Amsterdam or London. It is the hardest and most rewarding work in Sephardi genealogy, and it is now genuinely possible in a way it was not a generation ago. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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