Sephardic Jews of Brazil: New Christians, Dutch Recife and the Dispersal of 1654

Brazil holds a singular place in the Western Sephardi story, because it is the one location in the Americas where the diaspora arrived twice.

It came first as New Christians — cristãos-novos, the descendants of Jews forcibly converted in Portugal in 1497 — who crossed to the colony from its earliest years and lived outwardly as Catholics under the shadow of the Inquisition.

It came a second time openly, with the Dutch conquest of the northeast in 1630, when Sephardim from Amsterdam established at Recife the first professing Jewish community and the first synagogue in the Americas. When the Portuguese retook Recife in 1654 that community scattered, and the families who left carried the institutions, the Torah scrolls and the trading networks of the Sephardi Atlantic outward to Amsterdam, the Caribbean and New Amsterdam.

Why is Brazil difficult to research?

Because the record is split three ways, and almost nothing was kept in Brazil itself.

For most of the other communities on this site the problem is that too little survives. For Brazil the difficulty is that the evidence is divided between:

the Portuguese Inquisition, whose trial files in Lisbon are the fullest source for the New Christians;
the Dutch West India Company, whose archives in The Hague document the Recife community and its sugar trade;
the congregation of Amsterdam, to which most of the survivors returned.

Two streams should not be confused. The New Christians were never a constituted Jewish community; they were a suspected minority within colonial Catholic society, and they are documented by those who accused them. The Dutch-period Jews of Recife were a formal congregation with its own regulations, and they are documented as such.

The families overlap — some Recife Jews were New Christians who had lived in Brazil before openly returning to Judaism in Amsterdam — but the records, and the questions a researcher asks of them, are different.

Where did they come from?

From Portugal, and by two quite different routes a century apart.

The first route: direct and early

It is reasonable to assume, as Rodolfo Garcia wrote, that the New Christian appeared on the Brazilian coast from the very first Portuguese voyages — “people at home on the sea and in commerce, who would not let slip an opportunity for adventure and profit.”

A letter of the Florentine Piero Rondinelli, dated Seville, 3 October 1502, records that the land of Brazil — then called the land of the Parrots — had been leased to a syndicate of New Christians on condition that each year they send ships to explore three hundred leagues further along the coast and build a fort. Fernão de Noronha appears as one of the principal lessees.

From the 1530s, as the Inquisition took permanent hold in Portugal, New Christians crossed to the colony under pressure of persecution, “to seek shelter in Brazil, far from the ferocious gaze of their persecutors.”

The second route: through Amsterdam, a century later

The Sephardim who founded the Recife community in the 1630s were, in the main, not people crossing directly from Iberia but Portuguese Jews who had already settled in the Netherlands, reverted openly to Judaism there, and sailed west with the Dutch West India Company.

Around six hundred left Amsterdam for Dutch Brazil in 1642, among them the hakham Isaac Aboab da Fonseca and Moses Raphael de Aguilar.

Some of these families had roots in Brazil already, and the two streams met: the Amsterdam marriage banns record spouses born in Pernambuco, and the congregation’s own membership lists show men leaving for Brazil and returning within the year.

The practical rule for research is the same as for London and Curaçao: when a Brazilian Sephardi line runs out, look to Amsterdam. The Recife community was founded from there, returned there, and is documented there far more fully than in any surviving Brazilian source.

How did they make a living?

Sugar, and everything that sugar required — credit, broking, shipping and tax-farming.

The New Christians of colonial Brazil were prominent as merchants, tax-farmers, sugar-mill owners and physicians. The predilection of Jews for the healing arts is written into surnames still borne today — Mendes dos Remédios, Castro Boticário.

Jorge Fernandes served as physician to the second governor-general; mestre Afonso Mendes came with Mem de Sá. Bento Dias de Santiago held the contract for the royal tithes across Bahia, Pernambuco and Itamaracá and owned the Camaragibe sugar mill. João Nunes, whose fortune “exceeded two hundred thousand cruzados”, helped finance the conquest of Paraíba. Gaspar Dias Ferreira, who reached Pernambuco in 1618, became the wealthiest of all, later the confidant of Johan Maurits, imprisoned by the Dutch, and author of the Epistola in carcere.

The Recife Sephardim and the slave trade

Under Dutch rule the Sephardim of Recife operated above all as brokers in an economy in which sugar and slavery were inseparable.

They were not, in the main, involved in the ocean passage itself; their role was to buy enslaved Africans from the West India Company, sell them on to plantation owners — often against future payment in sugar — and consign that sugar to merchants in Holland. The Company’s surviving sale lists in the Dutch national archives name many such buyers.

This is uncomfortable history, but it is the documented economic basis of the community, and the records it generated are among the fullest that survive.

The commercial world these families moved in was a Portuguese one that spanned the Atlantic. Recent work on the sugar trade between Brazil, Porto and Amsterdam shows how New Christian merchants managed transoceanic risk through reputation, through kinship, and through the courts — granting powers of attorney that ran from Amsterdam to Porto to Brazil, and pursuing debtors across jurisdictions. A merchant’s standing was itself an asset, defended in public at the Bourse and before the notary.

What happened in 1654, and why does it matter?

The Recife community existed formally for only five years, from its constitution in 1649 to the Portuguese reconquest in 1654. Its dispersal seeded much of the Sephardi presence in the Americas.

Most of its members returned to Amsterdam — a subsidy list of September 1655 records 8,000 guilders raised to relieve the poor arriving from Brazil, among the last donors Baruch Spinoza’s father.

One ship, the Valk, was blown to Spanish Jamaica and its passengers stripped of everything; three of them, Daniel Cardoso, Moses Mercado and Isaac Israel, made their way home and are named in a declaration taken at Havana.

Another vessel carried twenty-three Jews to New Amsterdam, founding — over the resistance of Peter Stuyvesant — the first Sephardi community in North America.

What left Brazil was not only people but institutions. Aboab da Fonseca carried a cargo of Torah scrolls back to Amsterdam, and from there a wave of scrolls travelled outward across the Sephardi Atlantic: to London in 1655–56, to Barbados in 1657, to Cayenne in 1658, to Curaçao in 1659, and to Suriname. Curaçao in particular became one of the largest Sephardi communities in the western hemisphere and a mother-congregation for many others.

If you are researching an early Sephardi family in Barbados, Jamaica, Suriname, Curaçao or New York, Recife is very often where the line passes through, and Amsterdam is where it began.

A great many New Christians, however, did not leave. They remained in Brazil and were gradually absorbed into the wider population — a process the Inquisition continued to interrupt into the eighteenth century, and which Pombal’s law of 1773 formally closed.

Kahal Zur Israel, Recife

Kahal Zur Israel — “Rock of Israel” — was established in Recife in 1636 and is the first synagogue in the Americas. During the Dutch period the community may have numbered around 1,450 people.

Its formal regulations, the Escamot of 1649, survive and carry a list of 166 signatories; the best transcription is Ton Tielen’s.

One feature of the Escamot is telling: unlike the regulations of Amsterdam, London, Curaçao, Suriname and Jamaica, they do not restrict membership to those of Iberian origin. The reason is that the Recife congregation included Ashkenazi members, among them Abraham Cohen, who signed only in Hebrew.

The community had a house synagogue as early as 1636, in the house of Sarah Coronel, and a hakham, Jacob Lagarto, on the island of Itamaracá the same year; but it was not formally constituted until 1649. The site on the Rua do Bom Jesus in Recife has been excavated and reconstructed as a museum.

What about under Portuguese rule?

Before and after the Dutch interlude there was no synagogue, because open Jewish worship was impossible. What existed instead were clandestine gatherings of New Christians.

Inquisition testimony describes an esnoga at the Camaragibe sugar mill, where the New Christians of the district gathered during the new moons of August to keep Yom Kippur and other rites; a man named Thomaz Lopes, called Maniquête, is said to have gone through the streets of Olinda with one foot bare and a cloth tied above his ankle as the signal for these meetings. The New Christians of Bahia were said to have their esnoga at Matuim.

These are not communities in the institutional sense. They are the traces of clandestine practice, recorded by those who denounced it.

Rio de Janeiro and the south

In the final decades of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth, the centre of Inquisitorial activity shifted south to Rio de Janeiro, where numerous sugar-mill owners were arrested. This is a story of persecution rather than of congregation: there was no synagogue, and the families concerned were sent to Lisbon for trial.

Between 1707 and 1711 there were years in which more than 160 people were seized, sometimes whole families.

The modern communities

After Brazil’s first constitution granted freedom of religion in 1824, Jews returned.

Moroccan Jews arrived through the nineteenth century, principally during the Amazon rubber boom, settling the Amazon basin; the synagogues of Belém date from this period, and the Hakitía dialect survived there into the twentieth century. (This is the community whose collapse after 1912 sent families south to Argentina.)

Today Brazil has the tenth-largest Jewish community in the world — about 107,000 by the 2010 census, or more than 120,000 by CONIB’s estimate — concentrated in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with sizeable communities in Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, Pernambuco, Bahia, Pará and Amazonas. In the North Region most Jews are Sephardic; in the South most are Ashkenazi.

The modern community has no direct institutional continuity with the colonial New Christian past.

The first Jewish cemetery in the Americas

The first Jewish cemetery in the Americas was established at Recife during the Dutch period. It does not survive as a legible burial ground, and what is known of it comes from documentary reconstruction rather than surviving stones — chiefly the work of José Alexandre Ribemboim and José Luiz Mota Menezes.

The following individuals are those the reconstruction identifies as probably having received Jewish burial there. It is a short and uncertain list, but it is the earliest Jewish burial record in the hemisphere.

Felipe Dias do Vale (before 1634) · Manuel Mendes de Castro (1638) · Benedictus Jacob (1641) · Moses Abendana (1642) · Benjamin Pereira (1644) · Moses Mendes (1645) · Isaac Russon or Rusten (1645–46) · Antonio Montesinos (1646–47) · David Henriques (1648) · David Barassar (1648) · Baltasar da Fonseca (before 1649) · Jacob Delian (1649) · David Senior Coronel (1651) · Salamão Musaphia (1651) · Simon Bar Mayer (1653–54) · Antonio da Costa Cortizes

The absence of an accessible early cemetery is one reason the Recife community is documented through its regulations, its charity records and the Amsterdam archives rather than through burials — the reverse of the situation in France or Curaçao, where the cemetery is often the fullest surviving source.

What records survive?

There is no single Brazilian Sephardi archive. The records are split between three bodies, in three countries, reflecting the three phases of the story.

The Portuguese Inquisition

For the New Christians, the Inquisition trial files at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Lisbon are the fullest source.

Brazil was visited twice by the Holy Office — the first Visitation to Bahia in 1591–93 and to Pernambuco in 1593–95 under Heitor Furtado de Mendoça, and the second to Bahia in 1618–20 under Marcos Teixeira — but a permanent tribunal was never established in the colony.

The surviving records of these visits, the confissões and denunciações, were published by Paulo Prado in the 1920s and are the raw social history of the colonial cities. Later prosecutions, especially the Rio de Janeiro arrests of 1707–1714, are documented in the trial files themselves.

A trial file typically gives a full family genealogy, which is what makes the Inquisition — for all its horror — the richest genealogical source for this population.

The Dutch West India Company

For the Recife community, the archives of the West India Company and the States General, held at the Nationaal Archief in The Hague, are the essential source.

They include the Company’s slave-sale and sugar-shipment lists — the negros records, of which around a hundred survive — many of which name the Jewish brokers involved. Much of this material has been digitised. The Surinam and Brazil papers were the subject of large digitisation projects, and the older Brazil inventory of 2005 lists what survives.

The Amsterdam congregation

Because most of the Recife community returned to Amsterdam, the Portuguese Jewish archives of Amsterdam are indispensable for tracing its members.

The signatories of the successive Escamot — those of Amsterdam of 1639 and 1642, and of Recife of 1649 — can be compared to identify the same men in both places; Ton Tielen’s project of comparing the actual signatures is beginning to do this.

The Amsterdam Finta, Promessas and Imposta membership lists, kept year by year, allow a man’s movement to Brazil and back to be dated. Isaac Emanuel drew a list of 43 marriages of Brazil-born or Brazil-connected Jews from the Amsterdam marriage banns.

Brazilian records

Brazilian civil and ecclesiastical records — parish registers, notarial books, wills, land grants — survive in the Brazilian National Archives and in local cartórios, but they record New Christians as Catholics and are largely unexplored for Sephardi research.

Series of interest include the church records (registros eclesiásticos), the notarial series (série notarial, with its wills, powers of attorney and marriage contracts), and the inventories and wills. For families that remained and were absorbed, these are the records that will carry a line forward after the Inquisition file ends.

The Genealogia Paulistana of Luís Gonzaga da Silva Leme is the standard genealogical work for São Paulo.

Which families are recorded in colonial Brazil?

These are family names recorded among the New Christians and Jews of colonial Brazil, drawn from the Inquisition visitations and trial records, the Recife Escamot of 1649, the reconstructed Pernambuco cemetery, and the Amsterdam banns of Brazil-connected marriages. They are listed alphabetically, not by frequency.

Two cautions, the same as elsewhere on this site. Compound surnames fragment: a family recorded as Fernandes may appear as Diogo Fernandes, Fernandes Brandão or Fernandes Diamante, and the components are given here as they were written rather than merged. And frequency reflects how well a family was documented — which, for this population, means how thoroughly it was investigated by the Inquisition — as much as how numerous it was.

Abendana · Aboab · Aguilar · Alvares · Antunes · Barassar · Brandão · Bravo · Cardoso · Castro · Coelho · Cohen · Coronel · Correa · Costa · Coutinho · Da Costa · De Barros · Delian · Dias · Dique de Sousa · Espinosa · Fernandes · Ferreira · Fonseca · Frazão · Garcia · Gomes · Henriques · Leão · Leitão · Lopes · Lucena · Mendes · Mercado · Mesquita · Monsanto · Montesinos · Moraes · Musaphia · Nunes · Paredes · Pereira · Peres · Pimentel · Raposa · Ribeiro · Rodrigues · Sanches · Senior · Serrão · Silva · Teixeira · Tinoco · Ulhoa · Vaz · Ximenes

Names outside this list are not rare — the Brazilian Inquisition records alone contain many hundreds of distinct family names, and a name absent here may still be well documented in a trial file.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Recife community is comparatively well studied. Its regulations, its rabbis, its economy and its dispersal have all been worked over by historians, and José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello’s Gente da Nação is the standard account of the New Christians and Jews of Pernambuco between 1542 and 1654. The signatory list of the 1649 Escamot is transcribed. The dispersal of 1654 has been traced community by community.

The New Christian population, by contrast, is documented but scattered. The Inquisition visitation records are published, but there is no consolidated index of the individuals named across the 1591–95 and 1618 visits and the later Rio prosecutions. The Brazilian civil and notarial records have barely been touched for Sephardi research.

And the great genealogical question — which modern Brazilian families descend from the colonial New Christians — remains largely open, dependent on trial-file evidence that is rich but dispersed. Ongoing genetic-genealogy work may add to this, but claims of Jewish descent in Brazil are notoriously difficult to confirm, and groups that appear Jewish today are often not.

Sephardic World lectures on Brazil

Organisations and repositories

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — the Portuguese Inquisition trial files; the essential source for the New Christians

Nationaal Archief, The Hague — the archives of the Dutch West India Company and the States General, documenting the Recife community and the sugar and slave trades; much of it digitised

Ets Haim / Livraria Montezinos and the Portuguese Jewish archives, Amsterdam — the Escamot signatories, and the Finta, Promessas and Imposta membership lists, essential for tracing Recife families who returned

Arquivo Histórico Judaico Brasileiro (AHJB) and the Arquivo Histórico Judaico de Pernambuco

Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue and Museum, Rua do Bom Jesus, Recife — on the excavated site of the 1636 synagogue

ASBRAP (Associação Brasileira de Pesquisadores de História e Genealogia)

Help us find records

We are looking for:

A consolidated index of the individuals named in the Inquisition visitations of 1591–95 and 1618 and the Rio de Janeiro prosecutions of 1707–1714
Any transcription of the Recife Escamot of 1649 beyond the signatory list
Transcriptions or indexes of the West India Company slave-sale (negros) and sugar-shipment lists that name Jewish brokers
The Amsterdam marriage banns of Brazil-born and Brazil-connected spouses beyond Emanuel’s list of 43
Any survey or documentation of the Dutch-period Jewish cemetery at Recife
Notarial and parish records of New Christian families in Bahia, Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro
Family papers from any Brazilian family of documented New Christian descent

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

Brazilian Sephardi research means Portuguese Inquisition files for the New Christians, Dutch West India Company archives for the Recife community, and the Amsterdam congregational records for the many who returned — three bodies of material in three countries and three languages, with almost nothing kept in Brazil itself. Families appear simultaneously in Recife, Amsterdam, the Portuguese Inquisition and the wider Caribbean. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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