Malta matters to this site for one reason above all, and it connects directly to the congregational records of Amsterdam and London.
Our Israel page describes how the Portuguese community of Amsterdam established two obligations in 1616 and kept them for three centuries: Terra Santa, the support of the Holy Land, and Cativos, the redemption of captives. London followed, with two boxes in the synagogue, one labelled for each.
Malta is where a great deal of the Cativos money went.
For nearly three centuries the Knights of St John ran a crusading war from Malta against Ottoman and North African shipping, and they took captives — including Jewish merchants and passengers, who were held in the slave prison at Valletta and ransomed. The Sephardi communities of Livorno, Venice, Amsterdam, London and Constantinople organised systematically to buy them out.
There is also an older Maltese Jewish community, expelled in 1492 by the same decree that emptied Spain, and a small modern one. But it is the captives that make Malta part of this project.
Were the Jews of Malta expelled in 1492?
Yes. Malta was part of the Kingdom of Sicily and thus of the Crown of Aragon, and the expulsion decree applied to it.
Jews lived on Malta from antiquity — there are Roman-period catacombs at Rabat, beside Mdina, with menorah carvings — and continuously through the Arab, Norman and Aragonese periods. By the fifteenth century there were communities on both Malta and Gozo, of some hundreds of people.
The Jews of Malta and Gozo were expelled along with those of Sicily, Sardinia and the Spanish kingdoms. Some converted and stayed; the community as such ended.
Godfrey Wettinger’s The Jews of Malta in the Late Middle Ages is the study, and it is unusually good — Malta’s records for this period are better than most places can offer.
Who were the Jewish captives of the Knights?
Charles V granted Malta to the Order of St John in 1530, and for the next 268 years the island was the base of a religious military order permanently at war with Islam.
The Order’s galleys raided Ottoman and Barbary shipping and coasts, and they took prisoners for sale and ransom. Jewish travellers and merchants on Muslim-flagged vessels were taken with everyone else, and so were Jews seized in coastal raids on North Africa and the Levant.
They were held in the slave prison at Valletta. Those with communities behind them could hope to be ransomed; those without could not, and remained slaves.
A small resident Jewish presence grew out of this. Agents were permitted to live in Valletta to negotiate ransoms and to attend to the captives’ needs — and some captives, unransomed, lived out long lives on the island. There was a Jewish burial ground.
This was not a community in the ordinary sense. It was the administrative and human residue of a ransom system.
How did the redemption of captives work?
The ransoming of Jewish captives was an organised, funded, institutional activity across the Sephardi world, and Malta was one of its principal objects.
- Venice maintained a confraternity for the redemption of captives.
- Livorno, closest to Malta and deeply engaged in the North African trade, was the operational centre — Livornese merchants had the contacts, the shipping and the correspondents to move money and people.
- Amsterdam and London contributed through the Cativos funds described above.
- Constantinople and the Ottoman communities raised money at the other end, since many of the captives were their own members.
This is the connection worth understanding. A Sephardi householder in London or Amsterdam putting money in the Cativos box in 1700 was, quite often, paying to release a Jew from the Knights of St John.
The same congregational records that document Terra Santa document this — and, unlike the Terra Santa lists, the Cativos records name individuals on the receiving end, because a ransom was negotiated for a named person at a named price.
That makes the Cativos accounts a genuinely under-used genealogical source, and one that sits in archives this project already works in.
Why is Malta different from every other small territory?
Because it has its own Inquisition archive, still on the island.
Almost every small territory on this site has the same structural problem: no local tribunal, so the records are somewhere else. Macau’s went to Goa and Lisbon. Manila’s to Mexico. Hormuz’s to Goa. Cape Verde’s and Guinea’s to Lisbon. Cuba’s and Panama’s to Cartagena and then Madrid.
Malta is the exception. The Roman Inquisition established a tribunal on the island in 1574, and its archive — the Archivum Inquisitionis Melitensis — survives substantially and is held at the Cathedral Archives in Mdina.
It is one of the best-preserved Inquisition archives anywhere, and it dealt regularly with Jews, with converts, with renegades and with the whole ambiguous population that a slaving, ransoming frontier produces. For a Mediterranean subject of this kind, having the tribunal’s own records in place is a considerable advantage, and it is under-used.
What happened after 1798?
Napoleon took Malta in 1798, abolished slavery and freed the captives. It is a clean ending: the system that gives this page its subject stopped in a single year.
The British took the island in 1800, and under British rule a small Jewish community formed — traders arriving from Gibraltar, from Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco, and later from Corfu and Italy. It had a synagogue in Valletta and never numbered more than a few hundred.
Today the Jewish Community of Malta numbers perhaps a hundred people, with a synagogue at Ta’ Xbiex and a cemetery at Marsa. The older Jewish burial ground from the Knights’ period is at Kalkara.
What records survive?
On Malta
Archives of the Order of St John, held at the National Library of Malta, Valletta — including the Order’s own administrative records and, critically, its registers of slaves. Jewish captives should be recorded there by name.
Cathedral Archives, Mdina — the Archivum Inquisitionis Melitensis, the Malta Inquisition archive, substantially intact from 1574.
Notarial Archives of Malta, Valletta — continuous from 1465, and a very rich collection. As in New Orleans and Saint-Domingue, notarial records are where a legally marginal commercial population appears: ransom contracts, powers of attorney, debts and sureties.
National Archives of Malta, Rabat.
The Marsa and Kalkara Jewish cemeteries.
The ransoming communities
This is where the money came from and where the negotiations are recorded.
Livorno — the Jewish community archive and the Archivio di Stato di Livorno. The operational centre of the Malta ransoms.
Venice — the archive of the Jewish community and the Archivio di Stato.
Amsterdam City Archives — the Portuguese Jewish community archive (PA 334), and specifically the Cativos accounts.
Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, London — the Mahamad minute books and the general community accounts. As our Israel page notes, London united the Terra Santa and Cativos offices in one gabbai, so the two appear together in the same records.
At the origin
Many captives were Ottoman or North African Jews, and our Turkey, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco pages set out those records.
What has and hasn’t been researched
The Cativos accounts have never been worked genealogically. They name ransomed individuals, they cover centuries, and they sit in the Amsterdam and London archives that this project already uses. This is the single most promising piece of work on this page, and it would serve the Israel, Turkey, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco pages as well.
The Order’s slave registers have not been searched for Jewish names, as far as we know — a defined, bounded source naming individuals held on the island.
Cecil Roth’s 1928 article remains the standard treatment of the captives, which is a long time for a subject with this much surviving documentation.
The Malta Inquisition archive is under-used for Jewish subjects generally.
The nineteenth-century British-period community has no modern study.
Further reading
Godfrey Wettinger, The Jews of Malta in the Late Middle Ages (Malta, 1985) — the standard work on the medieval community and the 1492 expulsion.
Cecil Roth, ‘The Jews of Malta’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 12 (1928–31) — the classic account of the captives and their ransoming, and still the starting point.
Frans Ciappara, on the Inquisition in Malta and on Maltese society under the Order.
Salvatore Bono, on slavery and captivity in the early modern Mediterranean; and the wider literature on ransom and redemption, including Wolfgang Kaiser’s work.
For the ransoming side, the studies of the Livornese and Venetian Jewish communities, and our Livorno and Italy pages.
Organisations and repositories
National Library of Malta, Valletta — Archives of the Order of St John
Cathedral Archives, Mdina — the Malta Inquisition archive
Notarial Archives of Malta, Valletta
National Archives of Malta, Rabat
Jewish Community of Malta
Amsterdam City Archives; Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, London; the Jewish community archives of Livorno and Venice
Help us find records
Malta is a subject where the sources survive and nobody has used them. We are looking for:
- Cativos accounts from Amsterdam, London, Livorno or Venice naming ransomed captives
- Entries from the Order of St John’s slave registers identifying Jewish captives
- Malta Inquisition cases involving Jews, converts or renegades
- Ransom contracts in the Maltese notarial archives
- Anything on the British-period community, 1800 onwards
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
Malta is an unusual research problem: the people were not residents but prisoners, and they are documented by the institutions that held them and the communities that bought them out. The work is in Valletta and Mdina at one end and in Livorno, Venice, Amsterdam and London at the other.
If you have a Sephardi ancestor who disappears at sea in the Mediterranean and reappears afterwards, captivity and ransom is a possibility worth testing. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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See also: Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Israel · Sephardic Jews of Livorno · Sephardic Jews of Gibraltar · Turkey and the Ottoman Empire