Sub-Saharan Africa holds two Sephardi histories that have nothing to do with one another. They are separated by three hundred years, several thousand miles and two entirely different bodies of record.
Anyone researching here needs to know which of the two they are in before opening a single archive.
The first history: Portuguese New Christians, 1500–1700
Portugal reached the West African coast in the fifteenth century, and New Christian merchants went with it. They traded along the rivers of Upper Guinea, in the Cape Verde islands, and on São Tomé, and they were far enough from Lisbon to live with a good deal of freedom.
These men are recorded as lançados — literally those who threw themselves out — meaning Portuguese who settled among African communities, married locally and traded on their own account. A significant proportion were New Christians, and some were denounced to the Inquisition for judaising.
The communities covered by this history are Cape Verde, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola.
São Tomé is the darkest chapter. In 1493 several hundred Jewish children, taken from families expelled from Spain into Portugal, were deported there. Most died. The survivors were raised as Christians, and their descendants are part of the island’s population.
The records for this period are almost entirely Portuguese and Catholic: Inquisition files at the Torre do Tombo, colonial administration at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, and parish registers where they survive. There are no Jewish community records, because there were no open Jewish communities.
The second history: Sephardim from Rhodes, 1880–1970
Four centuries later and entirely unconnected, a second Sephardi population arrived in southern and central Africa.
These were Ladino-speaking Jews from Rhodes, then under Ottoman and later Italian rule, who emigrated in numbers from the 1890s. They went to the Belgian Congo, to Southern Rhodesia, and to South Africa, and they built communities in Elisabethville, Bulawayo, Salisbury and Cape Town.
The Rhodesli, as they are known, kept their own congregations and their own rite, distinct from the much larger Lithuanian Ashkenazi population that dominated South African Jewry.
The communities covered by this history are the Congo, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
The records here are modern and comparatively good: congregational registers, civil registration, shipping lists, naturalisation papers and cemeteries. The difficulty is that most of these communities have since dispersed, to Israel, Britain, the United States and Australia, and their records went with them or were left behind in countries where access is now hard.
Which history are you in?
The test is straightforward.
If your family was in West Africa or the islands before about 1750, and appears under a Portuguese Catholic name, you are in the first history. Research runs through Lisbon.
If your family was in the Congo, Zimbabwe or South Africa after about 1880, and the name is Ladino — Alhadeff, Capelluto, Menashe, Hasson, Notrica, Soriano — you are in the second. Research runs through Rhodes, and behind Rhodes, through the Ottoman records.
There is no continuity between the two, and no family we know of belongs to both.
A caution about claims
Sub-Saharan Africa attracts a good deal of speculative writing about lost Jewish communities and Jewish origins for various African populations. Some of it concerns the Lemba of Zimbabwe and South Africa, some the Igbo of Nigeria, and some rests on nothing at all.
These pages cover documented Sephardi and New Christian presence only, and say what the evidence supports. Where a claim is unproven we say so.
The nine communities
Angola · Cape Verde · Congo · The Gambia · Guinea-Bissau · São Tomé and Príncipe · Senegal · South Africa · Zimbabwe
Help us find records
Both halves of this region are thinly documented and we would welcome material of any kind. If you hold family papers, photographs, congregational registers or transcriptions, please email [email protected].
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