Sephardic Jews of Senegal

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.

In the first decades of the seventeenth century there were openly Jewish communities on the coast of Senegal — men who had been born New Christians in Portugal, who had reverted to Judaism, who kept the Sabbath and buried their dead as Jews, and who did all of it within a few hundred miles of Portuguese posts that would have arrested them.

How was open Judaism possible in Senegal?

Because these men were living in African kingdoms, not in Portuguese territory.

The rulers of Siin and Bawol protected them because they were commercially useful, and the Inquisition had no jurisdiction and no reach. This is the mechanism, and it is the whole point of the page: the limit on Iberian religious policy in the Atlantic was not conscience but jurisdiction. Three hundred miles away in Cape Verde, which was Portuguese, the same men could not have done it.

The political timing sharpens it. Portugal and Spain were under one crown from 1580 to 1640, and the Iberian empires’ reach into the Atlantic was at its height. That these communities existed at all, in that period, is a measure of how completely African sovereignty could nullify European law.

This is one of the most remarkable episodes in the whole Sephardi story, it lasted about a generation, and almost nobody knows about it. It has a full scholarly book behind it — Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta’s The Forgotten Diaspora.

Where were the communities?

At Porto de Ale and Joal, on the Petite Côte — the stretch of coast running south from what is now Dakar, in the territories of the Serer and Wolof kingdoms.

They were made up of Portuguese New Christians who had come out to the Guinea coast as traders — many of them by way of Cape Verde, which was the base for the whole Upper Guinea trade — and who, once beyond the reach of Portuguese law, returned to Judaism openly.

Denunciations reached the Lisbon Inquisition, which is precisely how we know about them. Informants described Jews living as Jews on the Senegalese coast, observing the Sabbath and the festivals. The Inquisition could do very little: the men were in another kingdom’s territory, under another kingdom’s protection, and the local rulers had no reason to hand over merchants who brought them trade.

What was the Amsterdam connection?

Direct and regular — which means these men are documented at both ends.

They were not isolated adventurers. They were in continuous contact with the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam. Men moved in both directions: some of the Petite Côte Jews had come from Amsterdam, others returned there. Trade goods, correspondence and religious authority all travelled the same route. The best-documented individual is Jacob Peregrino, an Amsterdam Jew who lived on the coast and whose connections to the mother community are traceable in the records at both ends.

For a researcher this is the crucial fact, because it means these men appear in Amsterdam as well as in Lisbon: in the Portuguese community’s own records, and in the Amsterdam notarial archives, which recorded the contracts, powers of attorney and disputes of the Atlantic trade in enormous detail.

Who were the lançados, and what became of them?

Portuguese traders — a great many of them New Christians — who settled outside Portuguese jurisdiction, married local women, and controlled the coastal trade for two centuries.

The name means, literally, those who had “thrown themselves” among the Africans. The related term tangomão carried the same meaning with more disapproval attached.

Their descendants became the Luso-African trading class of Senegambia — Portuguese-speaking, Catholic in name, African in most respects, and dominant in coastal commerce. Later, at French Gorée and Saint-Louis, the signares — the powerful mixed-race women traders of the eighteenth century — descended in part from the same world.

How much of that population was of New Christian origin is not knowable, and this page will not guess. What can be said is that New Christians were heavily represented among the lançados, that Cape Verde was their base, and that the two openly Jewish communities of the Petite Côte grew out of that milieu rather than arriving separately.

A note on slavery

The Upper Guinea trade was, above all, a trade in enslaved people, and the lançados and the Petite Côte communities were part of it.

There is no version of this history in which these men were bystanders. They were traders on a slaving coast, and hides, wax and ivory were the smaller part of what they dealt in. That is what the documents record, and anyone working in them will meet it immediately.

What came after?

Three later layers, none of them continuous with the first.

French Senegal. France established itself at Saint-Louis in 1659 and Gorée in 1677, and Senegal became the administrative centre of French West Africa. There is no continuity between the seventeenth-century communities and anything after.

Moroccan Jewish traders. In the nineteenth century Jewish merchants from Morocco — connected to the Mogador and trans-Saharan networks described on our Morocco page — appear in Senegal, as they do in Cape Verde. This is a small but real thread and it is much less studied than the Cape Verdean equivalent. Moroccan Jewish surnames turn up in Senegalese administrative records, and Raquel Levy-Toledano has identified Senegal as a target for DNA work on exactly this question.

Vichy. The anti-Jewish legislation of the Vichy government was applied in French West Africa, with Dakar as its centre. Jews in Senegal — French officials, traders and North Africans — were subject to the Statut des Juifs, and that generated records: registrations, dismissals, property measures. This is a defined and accessible body of material.

There is effectively no Jewish community in Senegal today.

What records can you actually reach?

Portugal — where the Petite Côte communities are documented

Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon — the Inquisition records, catalogued through Digitarq. The denunciations, testimonies and investigations concerning Jews on the Guinea coast are here, and they are the primary evidence for the whole subject. Mark and Horta’s book is built on them.
Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon — the administration of Cape Verde and Guinea.

The Netherlands — the other end

Amsterdam City Archives — the Portuguese Jewish community archive (PA 334), and, at least as importantly, the notarial archives, which document the Atlantic trade contract by contract and name the men involved on both sides.
Nationaal Archief, The Hague — West India Company material, once the Dutch displaced the Portuguese on the coast.

France and Senegal

Archives nationales du Sénégal, Dakar — a substantial archive, holding the records of French West Africa (AOF) as a federation, and therefore covering far more than Senegal alone.
Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, and the Archives nationales, Paris — the Colonies series.
Vichy-period records for French West Africa, in the same repositories.

Cape Verde

The islands were the base for everything described here, and our Cape Verde page sets out those records — the Arquivo Nacional in Praia, the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, and the Torre do Tombo.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Mark and Horta did the work and nobody has continued it. The Forgotten Diaspora established that these communities existed and identified individuals. What has not been done is tracing those individuals as families — where they came from in Portugal, who they married, and what became of their descendants in Amsterdam or on the coast.
The Amsterdam notarial archives are the obvious next source and are largely unworked from this angle. They are vast, they are indexed, and they name people.
The Moroccan Jewish presence in nineteenth-century Senegal is almost entirely unstudied, despite the parallel Cape Verdean story being well documented. If Cape Verde had a Castiel, Senegal has had nobody.
The Luso-African descent question is open and probably unanswerable by documents. DNA is the only realistic route, and Levy-Toledano has flagged it as worth testing.
The Vichy records for French West Africa have not been used genealogically.

Organisations and repositories

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

Amsterdam City Archives — Portuguese Jewish community archive and the notarial archives.

Archives nationales du Sénégal, Dakar.

Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence.

Help us find records

This is a small, extraordinary subject with a great deal still to find. We are looking for:

Inquisition denunciations and processos concerning Jews on the Guinea coast beyond those Mark and Horta have published
Amsterdam notarial acts naming traders on the Petite Côte or the Guinea coast
Anything identifying where the Petite Côte Jews came from in Portugal, or where they went afterwards
Evidence of Moroccan Jewish traders in Senegal in the nineteenth century — names, businesses, burials
Vichy-period records from French West Africa naming Jewish residents

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

Senegal is researched in Lisbon and Amsterdam. The Inquisition’s own files are the reason we know these communities existed, and the Amsterdam notarial archives are where the same men appear as merchants rather than as suspects. It is difficult work in Portuguese and Dutch, and the population is very small — but it is one of the few places where a genuinely open Jewish community existed outside Europe in the seventeenth century, and the records survive. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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