Sephardic Jews of São Tomé and Príncipe

This page concerns a single event, and it is the darkest thing on this site.

In 1493 the Portuguese Crown ordered around two thousand Jewish children to be taken from their parents, forcibly baptised, and shipped to the uninhabited equatorial island of São Tomé, to be raised as Christians and to populate a colony. Most of them died. The survivors grew up on the island, and their descendants are, in part, the people of São Tomé and Príncipe today.

What happened in 1493?

Around two thousand Jewish children were taken from their parents, baptised by force, and shipped to an uninhabited island on the equator.

The context is the expulsion from Spain. In 1492 tens of thousands of Castilian Jews crossed into Portugal, admitted by João II on payment of a poll tax and on condition that they left again within a fixed period. Many could not pay, and many could not leave — there were not enough ships, and the ones there were charged what they liked.

Those who remained beyond the deadline were declared to have forfeited their liberty. Among the measures taken against them, the Crown ordered that their children be taken away.

The children — the sources vary on the age range, but the youngest were very young indeed — were forcibly baptised and put aboard ships for São Tomé, an island in the Gulf of Guinea, discovered around 1470 and until then uninhabited. The captaincy had just been granted to Álvaro de Caminha, who needed settlers.

How do we know? What the sources say

This is not a disputed event. It is recorded by the Portuguese administration itself, and with grief and fury by the Jewish chroniclers of the following generation:

Samuel Usque, Consolação às Tribulações de Israel (Ferrara, 1553) — the best-known account, and the one usually quoted
Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah
Joseph ha-Kohen, Emek ha-Bakha (The Vale of Tears)

Their accounts agree on the essentials: the children were taken, they were sent to an island on the equator, and they died there in very large numbers — of disease, of the climate, and of neglect. The chroniclers write about it as one of the defining cruelties of the expulsion period, and they are not exaggerating for effect.

Some survived. How many is unknown; the figures that circulate are guesses. They grew up on São Tomé as Christians, were absorbed into the small settler population, and had children.

Was São Tomé’s founding population Jewish?

In part, and by abduction rather than migration — but the arithmetic cannot be pushed.

São Tomé was uninhabited before the Portuguese arrived. Its European-descended founding population was assembled deliberately, from three sources: a small number of officials and settlers; degredados — convicts and exiles, among whom New Christians were over-represented; and the deported children.

So it is defensible to say that São Tomé is one of the very few places in the world whose founding settler population was substantially of Jewish origin, and that this happened not through migration but through abduction.

What is not defensible is a precise arithmetic. We do not know how many children survived, how many left, or what proportion of the modern population descends from them. The islands’ population today is overwhelmingly of African descent — the forros, the Angolares and the later plantation populations — with the European element small and mixed. The deported children are part of that ancestry. How large a part is not known.

São Tomé has a further and grimmer significance: it was the first place in the Atlantic where the sugar plantation worked by enslaved Africans was established at scale, and it was the model for Brazil and then the Caribbean. The island where the Jewish children were sent is also the island where the Atlantic plantation system was invented.

Were there New Christians on the islands afterwards?

Yes, through the sixteenth century — as degredados and as merchants.

The islands became an entrepôt for the slave trade of the Gulf of Guinea and the Kongo and Angola coasts, and that trade drew the same Portuguese and New Christian commercial networks described on our Cape Verde, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau pages.

There was no Inquisition tribunal on the islands. Cases and denunciations went to Lisbon, as they did from every Portuguese possession in Africa, and the surviving material is in the Torre do Tombo.

There has been no Jewish community on São Tomé since the sixteenth century.

Can you trace an individual child?

No. There are no names.

No list of the deported children is known to survive, and it is unlikely that one was ever compiled in a form that identified them individually — they were taken as a group, baptised as a group, and shipped as a group. The Portuguese records that survive are administrative: the order, the arrangements, the captaincy.

That means:

You cannot trace an individual child.
You cannot establish descent from one by documents.
A São Toméan family tradition of Jewish ancestry may well be true in a general sense and cannot be verified in a particular one.

We say this clearly because the alternative is to let people spend money looking for something that does not exist. The value of this page is historical, not genealogical.

What could DNA answer?

Whether the children left descendants — and this has never been asked.

If a meaningful number of the deported children survived and had sons, their Y-chromosome lineages would still be present in the São Toméan population — and Sephardi Y lineages are increasingly well characterised, as the Avotaynu DNA Foundation’s work on Moroccan Jewish lineages demonstrates.

Population-genetic studies of São Tomé and Príncipe exist and show, as expected, overwhelmingly West and Central African ancestry with a small European component. As far as we are aware, nobody has asked whether any part of that European component is specifically Sephardi.

It is a bounded, answerable question, it would matter a great deal to São Toméans, and it is exactly the kind of thing this field ought to be doing. We would like to see it done, and we would help.

What records exist?

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — the royal chancery of João II for the deportation order and the regimento of Álvaro de Caminha; the Corpo Cronológico for the 1490s; and the Inquisition material, through Digitarq, for the later New Christian presence.
Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon — the São Tomé colonial series.
Arquivo Histórico Nacional de São Tomé e Príncipe — limited holdings for the early period.
Catholic parish registers of São Tomé, for the later centuries.
The Jewish chronicles — Usque, Ibn Verga, Joseph ha-Kohen — which are published, translated and freely available, and which are the only sources written from the children’s side.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The event is well documented; the people are not. No serious attempt appears to have been made to establish how many children survived, or what became of them, from the Portuguese administrative record.
The Y-DNA question is open and answerable, as above, and is the single most valuable thing that could be done here.
The later New Christian presence on the islands is under-studied, and the Torre do Tombo Inquisition material would be the place to start.
São Tomé’s place in the history of the plantation system is well studied by economic historians and rarely connected to its Jewish history, though the two begin in the same decade on the same island.

Organisations and repositories

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

Arquivo Histórico Nacional de São Tomé e Príncipe.

Avotaynu DNA Foundation — for the lineage question above.

Help us find records

We would be glad to be proved wrong about the absence of names. We are looking for:

Any list, muster or account identifying the children deported in 1493, however partial
Portuguese administrative records of the São Tomé settlement in the 1490s naming individuals
Inquisition denunciations arising on São Tomé or Príncipe
Contact with anyone able to advance the Y-DNA question in the São Toméan population

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

We will not take a commission to trace descent from the children of 1493, because it cannot be done. If your interest is São Tomé’s later New Christian settlers, or the Portuguese records of the colony, that is different work and we can advise on it. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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