Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in India

India was never a Western Sephardi settlement. There was no congregation with its own ascamot, no minute books, no burial society, no rabbi. What there was, for roughly a century between the 1670s and the 1780s, was a working outpost: a few dozen Spanish and Portuguese Jewish merchants, sent out from London, Amsterdam and Livorno by their own families, to run one specific trade — coral out to India, diamonds home.

That shapes how this page should be used. If you have an Indian Sephardi ancestor, the Indian records will tell you what he did and when he died; they will very rarely tell you who his parents were. For that you go back to London, Amsterdam or Livorno. What India offers instead is unusually good commercial documentation — the English East India Company recorded everything — and, as Walter Fischel observed as long ago as 1960, that vast archive has still never been systematically searched for Jewish names. It remains the largest unworked seam in this subject.

What does this page cover, and what does it not?

The Iberian Sephardim and the Portuguese New Christians only. India has had several Jewish communities and they are not related to one another.

This page covers the New Christians of the Estado da Índia — Goa, Cochin and the Portuguese ports, from 1498 — and the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Madras (Fort St George) and Surat, from the 1670s, together with their kin in London, Amsterdam and Livorno.

It does not cover, except where they intersect, the Cochin (Malabari) Jews, established on the Malabar coast for a thousand years or more before any European arrived; the Bene Israel of the Konkan coast; the Baghdadi Jews who came to Surat, Bombay and Calcutta from Iraq, Persia and Syria from 1730 onward — the Sassoons, Ezras, Gubbays and Kadoories; or the modern Bnei Menashe and Bene Ephraim. These are significant communities with their own literature. They are a different subject, and a Bene Israel or Baghdadi line does not run back to Iberia. Confusing them is the commonest error in Indian Jewish genealogy.

The one real point of contact is Cochin, where Sephardim from Europe met the existing community, married into part of it, and left the single best genealogical document India has produced.

What was the trade?

Coral out, diamonds home — and everything about the Sephardi presence in India follows from that one commodity pair.

Red coral was fished off North Africa and the Italian coast and worked at Livorno, which was also the point at which Sephardi commercial families held both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic ends of a business. It was in demand in India. Diamonds came from the mines of Golconda, in the Muslim kingdom inland from Madras — until the eighteenth century, effectively the world’s only source.

Both commodities are small, portable, extremely valuable, and immune to spoilage. For a community liable to be expelled at short notice, this was not an accident of trade but a rational choice of it.

A single cycle — coral out, sold, diamonds bought at the mines, shipped home, cut and sold — could take three years, and demanded a trusted agent at each stage who would not abscond with the goods. Kinship supplied that trust.

The classic illustration is the de Castro family of Dublin. Solomon de Castro, born in Hamburg, married Rachel Bravo of Bayonne in London and settled in Dublin between about 1710 and 1725. Of their sons, Daniel shipped coral from Dublin; Samuel received it at Madras; Jacob was in Amsterdam receiving and processing the diamonds that came back; Isaac was at Livorno, where the coral was worked, and which was the parent community of Tunis, where much of it was fished; and Moses went out to India to take over the family business. Five brothers, five nodes of one trade route. Multiply that pattern across the Franco, Paiva, Porto, Fonseca, Rodrigues, Salomons, Mendes and Pereyra families and you have the Sephardi India trade entire.

Two consequences for research. An Indian Sephardi is almost never an isolated figure — find him and you have found a family firm with branches in at least two European cities. And the commercial correspondence of those European branches is often better preserved than anything in India.

Who were the New Christians of Portuguese India?

Merchants and physicians, present from early in the sixteenth century — and tried by a tribunal whose archive no longer exists.

Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498. The Estado Português da Índia was constituted in 1505 with its seat at Cochin, moving to Goa (taken in 1510) in 1530, and at its height ran from Mozambique to Macau.

Garcia de Orta, a New Christian physician, settled at Goa in 1532 and wrote the Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia (Goa, 1563), the first European scientific description of Indian medicinal plants — a major book by any measure. He died in 1568; his body was exhumed and burnt by the Inquisition in 1580 after his sister was convicted of Judaizing. Jerónimo Dias was executed as a Jew at Goa in 1543.

The Inquisition tribunal of Goa was established in 1565 and had jurisdiction over the whole of Portuguese Asia. Its principal targets were Hindu and Muslim converts and lapsed Catholics rather than Judaizers, but New Christians were tried, and the surviving lists of the accused are the core Portuguese-period source.

A warning about those lists. The Goa tribunal’s own archive was largely destroyed after the Inquisition was abolished in the nineteenth century. What survives is residual material at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, together with João Delgado Figueira’s 1623 Reportório, a manuscript index of some 3,800 cases heard at Goa between 1561 and 1623 — for a great many people, the only trace left. This means both that the New Christian population of Portuguese India can never be fully reconstructed, and that absence from the record proves nothing. The same caution applies as on our Macau page, and for the same reason.

Two individuals in the published victim lists deserve a note. Jácome de Olivares, arrested 12 December 1559 and released 10 July 1561, appears in circulating lists under both Goa and Cochin. He is one man: a New Christian merchant of Setúbal who traded at Cochin between about 1540 and 1571 and eventually reached Constantinople, and whose career has been reconstructed by José Alberto Tavim. And Samuel Castiel, an influential Cochin merchant who served the Raja as interpreter to the Portuguese, was murdered by Portuguese residents in 1643 — a reminder that commercial rivalry, not only doctrine, drove anti-Jewish action in Portuguese India.

What is the Notisias, and why is it India’s best genealogical document?

Because it is a small census of a community’s origins, taken at Cochin in 1686 and printed in Amsterdam the following year.

The Portuguese found a long-established Jewish community at Cochin in 1500. After the Dutch took the city in 1663, direct contact between Cochin and the Sephardi communities of northern Europe became possible, and letters passed between Cochin and the Amsterdam parnassim from 1676.

In November 1685 a thirty-four-year-old Amsterdam-born Portuguese Jew left for India to trade in jewels. He reached Cochin on 21 November 1686, stayed five days, and on his return published a short report: Notisias dos Judeos de Cochim (Amsterdam, 1687), with an approbation from Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca. Three Yiddish editions followed within twenty-five years. It was reprinted in Lisbon in 1923 by Moses Bensabat Amzalak.

Its author is given as Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva. Edgar Roy Samuel identified him as the alias of Pedro Pereyra, the jewel merchant who operated at the Dutch factory at Surat — the two names appear in different bodies of evidence and are joined by a single 1685/6 letter from Antonio Gomes Serra to Manuel Levy Duarte that uses both. He was of a wealthy Amsterdam family: son of the army contractor Jacob Pereyra, nephew of the merchant-jewellers Mosseh and Aron Pereyra, brother of Isaac. A letter of about 1787 from Cochin to the Portuguese community of New York names his three companions: Isaac Ergas, Abraham Burta and Isaac Mocatta.

The Notisias prints a list of the heads of the Paradesi households at Cochin, each with the place his family came from and, in several cases, the approximate date of arrival:

Haham R. Haim Belilia — great-grandfather from Safed (c.1566)
David Levy Medulhar — grandfather from Germany (c.1596)
Haim Belilia, teacher and scribe — great-grandfather from Aleppo (1566)
David Raby (Rahabi) — from Aleppo (1646)
Haham Hia Pinto — from Damascus (d. Cochin 1689)
Elia and David Castiel — from Castile (c.1566)
Jeuda and David Asquenazim — sons of Haham Mosseh Asquenaz, grandfather from Germany (d. Cochin 1646)
Semtob Castiel — some branches said to have come in 1511
Mosseh Aleva — grandfather from Aleppo (1606)
Joseph and Zacharias Zackay — of the first Cranganore families
Semuel Barrioti — father and grandfather from Constantina (1578)
David Belilia — grandfather from Jerusalem (1596)
Elia a Reuyaly (Reby) — great-grandfather from Jerusalem, “the first foreigner in Cochin” (c.1566)
Ishac and Abraham Aleva — grandfather from Aleppo (1596)
Sason Michael — from Shiraz
Joseph Susany — a proselyte, from Susa
Aaron of Cranganore — of the first families
Isaque Toby — from Berberia
Mosseh and Meyr — descended from Cranganore royalty on the mother’s side
Joseph Asury — from Babel

Note how few are Iberian. Only the Castiels are given a Spanish origin. The Paradesi community was drawn overwhelmingly from Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Safed, Persia, Iraq, North Africa and Germany, with an older Cranganore stratum beneath. A “Cochin Sephardi” descent is far more likely to run to Aleppo than to Toledo.

The uncomfortable part should be stated rather than skipped. Pereyra de Paiva marked some names with a “B”, for branco — white — and explained the term in a footnote. His list is one of the earliest documents to apply European colour categories inside the Cochin community, sharpening a division between the Paradesi Jews and the far more numerous Malabari Jews, whom his informants described as descendants of freed slaves and refused to count in a minyan. Jonathan Schorsch reads the list as the moment a local dispute about lineage was reframed in the racial vocabulary of the Portuguese and Dutch empires. He also notes that Pereyra de Paiva himself observed that the Paradesim were not white either, ascribing their colour to the Indian climate. The document is genealogically valuable and it is a colonial artefact; use it, and say what it is.

What happened at Surat?

A partnership rather than a community.

Surat, in Gujarat, was the great Mughal port and the site of English and Dutch factories. Its Sephardi connection ran through Pedro Pereyra (Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva); Antonio do Porto, brother of the Domingo do Porto of Madras; and Fernão Mendes Henriques, whose Hebrew name, on Edgar Samuel’s identification, was Isaac Ergas. They traded rough and prepared jewels for the Amsterdam firm of Athias and Levy, whose officer was Manuel Levy Duarte. Letters of January 1692 show the partnership had broken up, with Levy Duarte continuing with Pereyra and dropping the other two. Pereyra was still at Surat in 1700, when he received the English ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir William Norris, with ceremony.

Surat’s later Jewish history belongs to the Baghdadis: Joseph Semah arrived from Iraq in 1730 and a synagogue and cemetery followed. The synagogue was razed; the cemetery survives in poor condition on the Katargam–Amroli road.

Who were the Jews of Madras?

The main story on this page — a working colony of Spanish and Portuguese merchants next door to the world’s only diamond mines.

Fort St George was founded in 1639 on a strip of coast near the Portuguese settlement of São Tomé, and became the English headquarters on the Coromandel coast. It sat next to Golconda. That is why the Jews came.

Before anyone went: the London end, 1670–1682

The first traces are financial. In 1670 a Rodrigues of Berry Street and a Da Costa are recorded paying money into the East India Company’s account with the banker Alderman Edward Backwell. In 1674 two London Jewish merchants, Gomez Rodrigues (identified as Abraham Israel de Sequeira) and Diego Rodrigues, sought passage to India for three men to recover effects stopped at Goa; the Company refused, but allowed them to ship silk and coral beads. Alvaro da Costa shipped 250 oz of foreign gold; Gomez Rodrigues and a De Porta shipped 62 oz on Sir William Langhorne’s account.

Two documents from these years show how central they already were. In 1676 the Company’s sale of goods from newly returned ships was adjourned because the Jewish buyers were keeping Tabernacles. And in December 1675 the Directors reprimanded their Madras agents for shipping diamonds unregistered — the agents’ explanation was that they had deliberately concealed the quantities so that the London Jewish buyers should not learn them and depress the market.

Salvadore Rodrigues, 1681–1694: the interloper who became an agent

The Company held a monopoly, and independent traders — “interlopers” — were treated as a threat. In March 1681 Fort St George was warned to watch for two of them, one being Salvadore Rodrigues, a Jew, thought to have travelled overland.

He surfaced at Masulipatam on 17 August 1683, arriving aboard the interloping ship Constantinople with another Jew named Deporta. They approached the local governor with presents and were politely refused. They tried Covelong; Rodrigues then tried the Portuguese settlement of São Tomé, where two local merchants complained of him in 1684. In 1686 he and a Frenchman, Daniel Chardin — brother of the traveller Sir John Chardin — obtained permission to go up to the Golconda mines.

From there he became something else entirely: the Company’s confidential correspondent at Golconda, reporting on Mughal intentions and handling money for its agent. Governor Elihu Yale asked him to write in French or Portuguese rather than his “broken English”. He was still there in 1694. He never settled in Madras.

James (Jacques) de Paiva, d. 1687: the first Jew of Madras

James de Paiva was no interloper but a wealthy diamond merchant, and can fairly be called the founder of the Madras Jewish colony. His Jewish name was Moses Zagache; his father was Diego Nieto de Paiva; he came from Portugal in 1675 with his brother Abraham de Paiba, and went out to Fort St George with his second wife Jeronima and his servants, trading diamonds in partnership with Abraham do Porto. He went to India buying rough stones for the Antonio Rodrigues Marques syndicate. Richard Barnett dates the emigration to 1675; de Paiva’s will of 1685 speaks of him as about to leave for the Indies, so either the earlier date is wrong or he had returned to London in between.

By 1685 he was trusted enough that the Company adopted his proposal to raise a volunteer cavalry troop at Madras — “all the rich men in Fort St George, to the number of 100 English, Jews, Portuguese and Gentues”, each keeping a horse and arms at his own expense, as de Paiva undertook to do himself. He pressed the Company to secure a lasting firman from the Mughals. His intervention seems also to have secured the admission of the three Jews at Covelong.

He fell ill at the Golconda mines, was carried home aboard the Loyall, and died at Fort St George on 7 September 1687. His will, printed by Cecil Roth in Anglo-Jewish Letters, mentions “my Couzin Moses who goes with us to the Indyes” — taken by Edgar Samuel to be Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva.

His widow Hieronima de Paiva stayed on, and from about 1688 kept house for Governor Elihu Yale, “to the great scandal of people”. She bore Yale a son, Charles Yale, who died at the Cape of Good Hope; she travelled from India to be buried beside him in 1712. Her story continues on our South Africa page. Yale’s fortune, made at Madras, later endowed the college that bears his name.

Bartholomew Rodrigues and Company, 1683–1692

In July 1683 three “interloping Jews at Covelon” asked leave to settle at Madras: Bartholomew Rodrigues, Domingo do Porto (alias Abraham do Porto) and Alvarez da Fonseca. Governor William Gyfford refused. London overruled him — “the Jews may happen to improve the trade of that place but shall never prejudice you” — and they were admitted in 1684.

What they then built was the largest trading house in Madras. Rodrigues and Company did two kinds of business: banking, lending the Company sums from 500 to 3,000 pagodas at 10 to 12 per cent when it needed cash to expand; and trade in diamonds, pearls and amber drawn from Bengal, Pegu and China. In 1689 the firm chartered the Company’s ship Princess of Denmark, 670 tons, for a voyage to Amoy in China, at 15,000 pagodas after hard bargaining down from 25,000 — and the full text of the contract, signed by all three partners, survives in the Diary and Consultation Book. It is a remarkable document of seventeenth-century Anglo-Jewish commerce.

Three Jews sat as aldermen of the Madras Corporation in 1688. Do Porto died in March 1690 and was replaced on the bench by da Fonseca. Bartolomeo Rodrigues died in 1692; his large tomb was a landmark in Peddanaickenpet until it was destroyed.

Abraham Navarro, 1682–1692

Abraham Navarro was a London Jew engaged by the East India Company as an interpreter in 1682. He served on the western side of India while the Madras merchants were chartering ships to China, was involved in the Company’s dealings with the Mughal court, and is credited with the diplomacy that secured a truce with Aurangzeb and preserved the English settlement at Bombay in 1689 — with consequences, had it gone the other way, that are hard to overstate. He also took part in early negotiations with China and had quarrels in Siam with Constantine Phaulcon, the Greek minister of King Narai. He died in Asia in 1692.

Walter Fischel devoted a two-part study to him, in PAAJR 25 (1956) and 26 (1957). That is the place to start.

Two cautions. Which languages he interpreted is not established — Portuguese is near certain, and Persian, the language of the Mughal chancery, is likely; the claim sometimes made that he interpreted an Indian vernacular is unevidenced. And he should not be confused with the Abraham Navarro of Amsterdam recorded in 1627, which was the alias of Rodrigo Fernandes, husband of Violante Nunes and brother-in-law of Jozef Nahemias. Different man, different city.

What did the East India Company think of them?

It welcomed them, in language worth quoting on any page about tolerance — and was attacked in Parliament for doing so.

In January 1685 London told Madras to protect all inhabitants “in the same uninterrupted liberty of their several religions … in which they were born and bred as you do those of our Church and Nation”, and urged that “this generous liberty and frank encouragement of all your inhabitants indifferently would make your place great and famous in short time … a Mart for Nations”. In 1687 it forbade different rates of customs for “Turk, Jews or Gentue”. It wrote to Bombay wishing “you had three good rich Jewes houses settled with you at Bombay, as we have now to the Company’s great advantage at Fort St George”.

This was not universally popular at home. Among the Thirteen Articles of complaint laid against the Company in the House of Commons was the charge “that they have permitted the Jews to establish themselves in India, and made them a part of their Government there, which has in a manner given them the entire Possession of the Diamond Trade to the great discouragement and loss of the English Subjects”.

How did the community end?

The Golconda mines were worked out, and Brazilian diamonds found in the 1720s undercut them.

Isaac Sardo Abendana, who died on 10 May 1709 aged 47 — so born about 1662, reportedly in the Netherlands — arrived about 1702, was a friend of Governor Thomas Pitt, the “Diamond Pitt”, and an expert in diamonds. What followed his death is instructive about how fragile these lives were. Pitt, appointed trustee, was returning to England and declined; the widow was illiterate; the will was reported to be written “in certain characters and other numerous abbreviations”, almost certainly Hebrew or Portuguese, which the executors could not read. Probate appears to have failed, she fell among creditors, and in 1713 the Madras Council complained that a “very turbulent” Danish missionary — probably J. G. Bövingh — had contrived her escape to the Danish colony of Tranquebar “and marrying her though a Jew to a Christian by the way”. She married a German Lutheran in 1712.

Abraham Salomons, who died on 5 June 1745, was Ashkenazi, and the monument raised by his brothers David and Solomon Salomons records nineteen years’ residence. His firm appears in the correspondence of the Nawab of Arcot. That an Ashkenazi merchant sat so comfortably inside a Sephardi commercial world is unusual for the period and probably says something about distance from home.

Solomon Franco, who died on 11 May 1763, “a native of Leghorn, and eminent Hebrew merchant of Madras”, is the Livorno connection made flesh — the coral end of the trade in person.

Moses de Castro, the last Jewish merchant, left Madras in 1786.

What survives of the cemetery?

Four transcribed inscriptions, of which one is lost and one belongs to another community. That is the entire surviving epigraphic record of Sephardi Madras.

The Jewish burying ground lay at Peddanaickenpet, at what became the northern end of Mint Street, and appears on Thomas Pitt’s 1710 survey of Madras. Julian James Cotton, who transcribed it in 1905, records that it was also called “the Hebrew burying ground at Hoghill”. De Paiva is thought to have helped acquire it. There was a synagogue nearby, and the merchants lived in Coral Merchant Street, Muthialpet — the street name being the plainest surviving statement of what they did.

In 1983 the surviving stones were moved to a “Jewish corner” of the Lloyds Road cemetery to make way for a school. Most are now missing. What we have is Cotton’s 1905 transcription of four monuments:

Jaques de Paiva, in Portuguese: “A. S. do Beinventurado Baraon JAQUES DE PAIVA faleseo em 10 de Tisri 5548, ano a crisaõ do mundo, correspondeo a 17 Setembro 1687.” Both dates on the stone are wrong. The records give his death as 7 September, not the 17th, and the year should read 5448, not 5548. This stone has since disappeared.
Isaac Abendana Sardo, in English, with a coat of arms: died 10 May 1709 in his 47th year.
Abraham Salomons, 5 June 1745 — Ashkenazi.
Solomon Franco, 11 May 1763, several lines of Hebrew preceding.

Everything else must come from paper.

What about Bombay, Danish and French India?

Bombay came to the English Crown in Catherine of Braganza’s dowry, by treaty in 1661 and marriage in 1662, and was made over to the East India Company in 1668. Despite the Company’s wish for “three good rich Jewes houses” there, no Sephardi community formed; Bombay’s Jewish history is Bene Israel and, from the eighteenth century, Baghdadi.

Danish India. Fort Dansborg at Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) was founded in 1620–21, about 280 km south of Madras. Its interest here is that it lay outside English jurisdiction — which is why Abendana’s widow was taken there in 1713. Danish colonial and mission records are in Copenhagen.

French India — Chandernagore (1673), Pondicherry (1674), Yanam, Mahé and Karikal. We have no documented Sephardi Jewish presence in French India. It is often assumed that New Christians were present living as Catholics, which is plausible but, as far as we know, unevidenced. It should be recorded as a gap rather than a finding.

What records can you actually reach?

The East India Company records — the great unworked seam

The Company documented itself obsessively, and the Jewish merchants appear throughout: in consultations, despatches, court minutes, freight contracts, court cases and probate. Fischel’s 1960 article is worth reading partly for its footnotes, which amount to the best finding aid in print. The series to work are:

Diary and Consultations, Fort St George, vols 1–90, 1672–1760
Despatches from England 1670–1758 and Despatches to England 1694–1751
Letters from Fort St George 1679–1765 and Letters to Fort St George 1681–1765
Fort St David Consultations 1696–1750
Minutes of Proceedings of the Mayor’s Court, Madras, 1689–1719
Masulipatam Consultation Book 1662–1683

These are held at the Tamil Nadu State Archives in Chennai (formerly the Madras Record Office), with the parallel and overlapping India Office Records at the British Library — Court Minutes of the East India Company, Home Miscellaneous, general ledgers and cash journals, and the Fort St George factory records.

Much is in print and searchable, which is where to start: Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, A Calendar of the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1635–1697, 8 vols (Oxford, 1907–29); William Foster, The English Factories in India; and above all H. D. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800, 4 vols (London, 1913), which quotes the records at length and is the single most useful printed source for named individuals.

Also relevant: the Connemara Public Library, Chennai, one of India’s four legal deposit libraries, and the Telangana State Archives and Research Institute, Hyderabad, for Golconda material.

Portuguese records

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — Tribunal do Santo Ofício, including the surviving Goa material; much is catalogued and digitised through Digitarq. Reference codes take the form PT/TT/TSO-…
João Delgado Figueira’s Reportório (1623), the manuscript index of Goa Inquisition cases 1561–1623 — for many people the only surviving record.
Directorate of Archives and Archaeology, Goa — records of the period of Portuguese rule. Be aware of reported problems with conservation and access, and of the language barrier.
Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa — including the Mhamai House papers, a substantial mercantile archive.

Amsterdam — the best untapped source

The Amsterdam City Archives hold the archive of the Portuguese Jewish community (PA 334), and within the wider holdings the business papers of Manuel Levy Duarte and the firm of Athias and Levy, including outgoing letter-books. These contain letters written to the Sephardi merchants in India, and they are how Edgar Samuel established the Pedro Pereyra identification in the first place. There is almost certainly more in them. Microfilm copies are at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem (HM2 2078–2079 and related).

London and Livorno — where the families actually are

Bevis Marks Records, especially volume 4, Richard Barnett’s edition of the circumcision register of Isaac and Abraham de Paiba, 1715–1775, with a supplement of circumcisions 1679–99, marriages 1679–89 and some female births.
Wills at The National Archives (Prerogative Court of Canterbury). De Paiva’s 1685 will is printed in Cecil Roth, Anglo-Jewish Letters, 1158–1917 (London, 1938), pp. 78–80.
Livorno community records, for the Franco and coral-trade families.

Cemeteries and monuments

Julian James Cotton, List of Inscriptions on Tombs or Monuments in Madras Possessing Historical or Archaeological Interest (Madras, 1905) — the transcriptions above, and the reason we have them at all.
British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA).
International Jewish Cemetery Project — Chennai page.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Fischel’s central claim still stands, sixty-five years on. The East India Company records have been exhaustively mined by economic, military and administrative historians and have never been systematically combed for Jewish names. This is the largest single opportunity in the subject and it does not require travel: Love, Sainsbury and Foster are in print and much is digitised.
Fischel’s Madras article is part one of two. It ends “To be continued” at 1692. The continuation, covering the eighteenth century, needs to be obtained and read.
The Amsterdam Levy Duarte correspondence has been used by Edgar Samuel for one identification and is otherwise largely unexploited for the India trade.
Nobody has reconciled the Madras merchants with their London and Amsterdam congregational records. We know several of their Hebrew names — de Paiva was Moses Zagache, Domingo do Porto was Abraham do Porto, Fernão Mendes Henriques was Isaac Ergas — and those names should be findable at Bevis Marks and in Amsterdam.
The aliases are the hard part and the interesting part. Gomez Rodrigues was Abraham Israel de Sequeira. Every one of these men had a commercial name and a synagogue name, and the two bodies of record use different ones. Any index of Sephardi India must be built as a name-pair index or it will fail.
French India is unexamined, and Danish records in Copenhagen relating to Tranquebar have not been looked at from this angle.
The Cochin Notisias list has never, to our knowledge, been matched against the Aleppo, Damascus and Jerusalem material that its origin column points to.

Organisations and repositories

British Library, India Office Records, London — the Company’s own archive.

Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai — the Madras Record Office series Fischel worked from.

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Digitarq), Lisbon — Goa Inquisition material.

Directorate of Archives and Archaeology, Goa, and the Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa.

Amsterdam City Archives — Portuguese Jewish community archive (PA 334) and the Levy Duarte papers.

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem — microfilms of the Amsterdam material.

Bevis Marks / Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, London.

British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA).

Connemara Public Library, Chennai; Telangana State Archives, Hyderabad.

Help us find records

India is a subject where a small amount of work would go a long way. We are looking for:

Photographs or transcriptions of any surviving stone in the “Jewish corner” of the Lloyds Road cemetery, Chennai — we do not know what is left
References to Jewish merchants in the Fort St George consultations, despatches and Mayor’s Court minutes, however incidental
Any trace of the Madras men in the London or Amsterdam congregational records under their Hebrew names — Moses Zagache, Abraham do Porto, Isaac Ergas, Abraham Israel de Sequeira
Wills and probate of merchants who died in India
Letters to or from India in Sephardi family papers, especially concerning coral consignments
The second part of Fischel’s Madras article, and anything on the eighteenth-century decline
Any documented Jewish presence in French India or at Tranquebar

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

Indian Sephardi research is a matter of following one family firm across three or four countries. The Indian records tell you what a man traded and when he died; the London, Amsterdam and Livorno records tell you who he was. It calls for work in English East India Company sources, Portuguese Inquisition records, and Dutch and Portuguese-language mercantile correspondence, and a careful hand with aliases, since almost every one of these merchants used one name in business and another in synagogue. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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