Sephardic Jews of Guinea-Bissau

Cape Verde, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau are one subject: one trading population, one base in the islands — and three different answers to whether a New Christian could live openly as a Jew. The difference was jurisdiction. Read the three pages together.

What makes Guinea-Bissau distinct is that it is where the two legal regimes met. On the Petite Côte of Senegal, New Christians could live openly as Jews because they were in African kingdoms and the Inquisition had no reach. On Cape Verde they could not, because the islands were Portuguese. The Rivers of Guinea contained both situations at once — and the same man might spend his year in both.

What were the Rivers of Guinea?

The estuaries of the Cacheu, the Geba and the Buba, with the Bijagós archipelago offshore — the most productive stretch of the Upper Guinea trade, and the reason Cape Verde existed as a colony at all.

The Portuguese called this coast the Rios de Guiné. Cacheu, founded in 1588, was the principal post: a fortified praça with a captain, a garrison and a church. Farim and Geba were the upriver posts. Bissau was founded in 1687 and became the capital much later.

Why does 1879 matter more than any other date here?

Because Portuguese Guinea was governed from Cape Verde until that year — so anything earlier is filed under Cape Verde.

This is the single most useful practical fact on the page, and it catches people out constantly. Before 1879, Guinea business is Cape Verde business: it is in the Cabo Verde series at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino in Lisbon, and in the national archive at Praia. Researchers looking under Guiné for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are looking in the wrong place.

Where could the Inquisition reach, and where could it not?

At Cacheu, yes. A few hours upriver, no.

At Cacheu the Portuguese had real jurisdiction. There was a captain, a church, and an ecclesiastical apparatus that reported to Lisbon. New Christians were numerous among the traders based there — the trade was substantially in their hands — but they lived as Christians, because at Cacheu they had to.

Upriver, and inland, the position reversed. The lançados who settled in African villages along the Geba and the Cacheu, married local women and traded on their own account were outside Portuguese authority in any practical sense, exactly as their counterparts were at Porto de Ale and Joal in Senegal. Denunciations reached Lisbon; very little followed.

So Guinea-Bissau produced denunciations rather than a community. There is no equivalent here of the openly Jewish settlements of the Petite Côte — or if there was, it has not been found. What there is instead is a substantial New Christian trading population, recorded as Christians, some of whom were accused of being something else.

For a researcher that means the evidence is inquisitorial and commercial, not communal. There are no registers, no cemetery and no congregation. There are denunciations, testimonies, trade licences and accounts.

Who were the lançados and the Kristons?

The traders who settled beyond Portuguese authority, and the Luso-African population descended from them.

The lançados — Portuguese traders, many of them New Christians, who settled among African societies outside Portuguese jurisdiction — were as important on these rivers as anywhere on the coast, and probably more so.

Their descendants by African women formed the Kriston population: Portuguese-speaking, nominally Catholic, African in most respects, and dominant in the river trade for two centuries. Alongside them the nharas — the women traders of the Guinea rivers, the equivalent of the Senegalese signares — ran commercial households of real power, and Philip Havik’s work has made them the best-studied part of this society.

One legacy is still audible. Guinea-Bissau Creole — Kriol — descends from the trade language of this world and is spoken today by the great majority of the population. It is one of the oldest Portuguese-based creoles in existence, and it was formed in part by men who had been New Christians in Portugal.

How much of the Kriston population descends from New Christians is not knowable from documents, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What can be said is that New Christians were heavily represented among the lançados, and that the lançados are the Kristons’ paternal ancestry.

A note on slavery

The Rivers of Guinea were a slaving coast, and Cacheu was one of the principal embarkation points of the Atlantic trade.

The lançados and the New Christian merchants of these rivers were slave traders. Here the subject is not incidental to the records — it is what the records are about, and anyone who opens them will find it on the first page. Our Genealogical Standards page discusses how to handle this kind of material.

Was there a Jewish presence in the colonial period?

No identified community — but one open and answerable question.

Portuguese Guinea became a separate colony in 1879, with Bissau as capital from 1941, and remained Portuguese until independence in 1974 after a long liberation war.

Cape Verdeans staffed the Guinea administration and trade in large numbers, and Cape Verde had the nineteenth-century Moroccan Jewish families described on our Cape Verde page. Whether any of those families’ descendants served or traded in Guinea is not something we have seen documented — but it is a reasonable question and the records to answer it exist.

There is no Jewish community in Guinea-Bissau today.

What records can you actually reach?

Portugal

Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon — the Guiné series, and the principal colonial archive for this territory. For anything before 1879, also search under Cabo Verde, because that is where Guinea was administered from.
Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — the Inquisition records, through Digitarq. This is where the denunciations concerning the Guinea rivers are, and they are the main evidence of a New Christian presence.

Cape Verde

Arquivo Nacional de Cabo Verde, Praia — the pre-1879 administration of Guinea, and therefore an essential archive for this page.

Guinea-Bissau

Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisa (INEP), Bissau, which holds the national historical archive. It is under-resourced and the colonial-period holdings are limited; expect to work in Lisbon.

The Netherlands

Dutch traders — including Sephardim of the Amsterdam community — were active on the Guinea coast in competition with the Portuguese. The Amsterdam notarial archives and the West India Company records at the Nationaal Archief, The Hague, document that trade and name the men in it.

What has and hasn’t been researched

No openly Jewish community has been identified in the Guinea rivers, unlike Senegal. Whether that reflects the historical reality or simply the state of research is an open question, and it is worth someone testing properly.
The Cacheu denunciations have not been worked genealogically. They are in the Torre do Tombo, they name individuals, and they have been used by historians for what they say about society rather than for who they say it about.
The pre-1879 Cape Verde filing is not widely understood, and researchers are looking in the wrong place as a result.
The Kriston descent question is unanswerable from documents and is a DNA question if it is anything.
The Cape Verdean Jewish families in colonial Guinea — an open and answerable question, as above.

Organisations and repositories

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

Arquivo Nacional de Cabo Verde, Praia — essential for anything before 1879.

Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisa (INEP), Bissau.

Amsterdam City Archives and Nationaal Archief, The Hague.

Help us find records

This is the least documented of the three West African pages. We are looking for:

Inquisition denunciations naming individuals at Cacheu, Farim, Geba or the Bijagós
Evidence of any organised Jewish presence on the Guinea rivers, which would change this page substantially
Trade licences, accounts or correspondence naming New Christian merchants of the Rivers of Guinea
Anything connecting the Cape Verde Moroccan Jewish families to colonial Guinea
Amsterdam notarial acts naming traders on this coast

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

Guinea-Bissau is researched in Lisbon, and — for anything before 1879 — under Cape Verde. There is no community to trace here and no registers to find; what there is is a New Christian merchant population documented in Inquisition denunciations and commercial records, and the work is identifying individuals within it. It is difficult, it is in Portuguese, and it is often inconclusive. We would rather tell you that at the outset. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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