4
The Portuguese New Christians and the Sephardic diaspora
Religious persecution has been one of the principal factors driving Portuguese to emigrate, as it was for their English counterparts in the seventeenth century. If there was no single iconic departure like that of the Pilgrim Fathers, there was a constant flow of Jewish and New Christian emigrants who left Portugal from the end of the fifteenth century, either to escape active religious persecution or to find places to settle where they could practise their religion without fear of molestation.
The origin of the dispersal of the Sephardic Jews has been frequently described, and the constant movement and settlement of those involved produced a bewildering complexity that marks it as one of the first examples of a truly global diaspora. During the Middle Ages there had been large Jewish populations in all the Iberian kingdoms and, in spite of sometimes violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism, this population had survived and prospered, particularly in the worlds of finance and commerce but also in medicine and urban artisan trades. Alongside the Jewish community, and placed, so to speak, between it and the Christian population, were the conversos—Jewish families that, for one reason or another, had converted to Christianity. Following the anti-Semitic riots of 1391 the emigration of Jews from the peninsula had begun on a small scale, but much larger numbers of Jews had converted and in the following century this converso community became a group with a distinct identity within Castilian and Portuguese society. In time, being a converso became an inherited status and no longer simply implied a recent religious conversion. As practising Catholics the conversos became eligible to hold municipal and even ecclesiastical office, could own land and were able to contract marriages with noble families. It was the wealth, success and rising social status of converso families, as well as the suspicions that they remained crypto-Jews, that fuelled increasing hostility from ‘old Christians’ in the middle years of the century.1
During the fifteenth century Castile experienced very disturbed social conditions culminating in the civil war which followed the death of Enrique IV in 1474. The victor in this civil war, the Infanta Isabella, who had married Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469, was under strong pressure to adopt policies to unite her kingdom and to forge closer links with her husband’s realm. This prompted her to respond to demands from within the church to establish an Inquisition to inquire into the religious orthodoxy of the converted Jews. The Inquisition was established in 1480 and at first concerned itself not with practising Jews and Muslims but only with the converso population. In 1492, however, the decision was taken to expel all orthodox Jews from the two kingdoms. It is probable that around 70,000 people were affected by this order and in the next few years there was a mass departure. Some Jews followed earlier emigrants to the more tolerant climate of Italy, while others went to North Africa or the Ottoman territories, settling in already established Jewish communities in Adrianople, Salonika and Istanbul itself. About 30,000 crossed the frontier into Portugal. The arrival of such large numbers of religious refugees presented a challenge to Portugal’s traditional policy of toleration. The king, Dom João II, granted 600 families the right to settle permanently but decided that the rest of the refugees would have to leave the kingdom. However, the future of the Portuguese Jewish and converso population was still undecided when the king died in October 1495, to be succeeded by his cousin, Dom Manuel. As the famous Jewish mathematician Abraham Zacuto put it, ‘We [in Portugal] had the enemies on one side and the sea on the other.’2
Dom Manuel wanted to secure a marriage with the daughter of Isabella of Castile and agreed to expedite the expulsion of Castilian Jews from Portugal. After due consideration his orders took a form which was to have a profound influence on the history of the Sephardic Jews. All Jews resident in Portugal were ordered either to leave the country or to convert to Christianity. To those who converted Dom Manuel promised that there would be no inquiry into their faith for the next twenty years—that is, that there would be no Portuguese Inquisition. In the years 1496 and 1497, therefore, there was a renewed exodus of orthodox Jews from the Iberian peninsula while large numbers apparently accepted Manuel’s amnesty and formally converted to Christianity. Those who neither left nor converted were subject to forced conversion and their children were taken away from them. It was then that, allegedly, 2,000 Jewish children were dispatched to help form a Portuguese community in São Tomé. The Iberian Jewish community now split to follow two paths: one part had left the Iberian peninsula and had begun to settle in other lands, while a second group, approximately equal numerically to the first, remained in Portugal where they became known as New Christians.3
The Jews who departed at first settled throughout the Mediterranean lands, some finding a safe haven in the fortified towns that the Portuguese controlled in Morocco, while others went to the rudimentary settlements in West Africa and even to the Estado da Índia. It was felt that there was no need to expel such valuable citizens from these extra-territorial fragments of the Portuguese monarchy. Although there was a violent outbreak of anti-Semitism in Lisbon in 1506, the New Christians who remained prospered during the reign of Dom Manuel (1495–1521). Members of New Christian families not only maintained their prominence in commerce but received royal appointments, some even becoming members of the royal council. Others were appointed to the Military Orders of knights or to positions in the church, while still others married into the old aristocracy of Portugal. Dom Manuel’s solution to the crisis of the 1490s had led to a great expansion of New Christian influence throughout the kingdom.
Portuguese in Spanish America
Many Jewish families which had left the Iberian peninsula retained links with the New Christians, and through them the Jewish business community was able to trade and invest in the commercial networks that opened up in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. New Christian and Jewish money was soon helping to finance the growth of both Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic trade, and for the first half of the sixteenth century there was no Inquisition outside the Iberian peninsula to restrict their activity. After the union of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns in 1580, all trade restrictions between Portugal and Castile were lifted and the Portuguese had free access to Spanish markets. The result was renewed impetus to the diaspora as Portuguese New Christians moved in numbers not only to the Spanish-controlled Netherlands, where they had already been long established and where the royal factory at Antwerp formed a focus for their activities, but also to Spain itself where the port of Seville, through which all trade with America was channelled, was conveniently close to the Portuguese frontier. From Seville many travelled to the Spanish territories in America.4
Portuguese were not allowed by law to settle in the Spanish Indies, but circumventing this embargo was only too easy. Large numbers of Portuguese sailors shipped aboard Spanish vessels, while the existence of a sizeable Portuguese community in Seville meant that the passage of an illegal emigrant at San Lucar was easy to arrange. Moreover the growth of the slave trade between Portuguese ports in Africa and the Spanish Indies allowed increasing numbers of Portuguese to take ship from the Atlantic islands to the New World. It was also easy for Portuguese who settled in Brazil after 1530 to move on to the burgeoning Spanish settlements on the Río de la Plata.
By the 1630s Portuguese were estimated to form around 6 per cent of the population of Mexico City and Cartagena de las Indias. Another estimate suggests that at the time of the break-up of the union of the Crowns in 1640 there may have been around 10–12,000 Portuguese in Mexico alone and 6,000 Portuguese New Christians in Spanish America as a whole.5
In contrast to the pattern of emigration in later centuries, the Portuguese who settled in Spanish America did not share a common background within Portugal itself, for the records of the Inquisition show that those Portuguese whom it examined came from 91 different places. However, these Portuguese trading communities enjoyed a distinctive communal life, which helped them to retain a strong Portuguese identity. This in turn provided additional strength to the commercial networks and the system of trust and credit on which so much commercial activity depended. In the larger cities like Mexico City or Potosí the Portuguese congregated in their own areas, and many maintained large houses where separate families lived together. Security may have been a paramount consideration but there were social pressures as well. As Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert expressed it, ‘Compadrazgo (godparentage) obligations forged at the birth of new members of the community created bonds of fictive kinship; hospices were built to lodge sojourners; chapels and confraternities devoted to the Portuguese Saint Anthony provided a symbol of collective affiliation as well as a space where Portuguese migrants could gather and organize various forms of mutual aid.’6 The larger Portuguese communities might also establish a branch of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia.
If Jewish rites were practised within the Portuguese community, it was in secret. Sometimes these were mingled in an eclectic way with Christianity, as for example in the veneration of images dedicated to Saint Moses.7 The social and business worlds of the Portuguese New Christians in Spanish America were closely intertwined. Families tried to marry their sons and daughters to existing or prospective business partners, and the clandestine practice of Jewish rites became, through fear of the Inquisition, a bond which reinforced the trust on which the conduct of business depended.
After Portugal broke away from Spain in 1640, Portuguese were no longer welcome in Seville or in Spanish America and the once thriving Portuguese community began to receive the unwanted attentions of the Inquisition. Many left for other Atlantic destinations while those who survived assumed Spanish nationality and a Spanish identity, which effectively dissolved the ties of Portuguese separateness. Within a generation the Portuguese had become absorbed into the local Spanish creole population.
New Christians and Jews in West Africa
Many New Christians took the opportunities presented by Portugal’s overseas expansion to establish themselves in the Atlantic islands or as lançados on the coast of western Africa. There many reverted to Judaism or were able to practise mixed marrano religious rites. African rulers were not concerned with the religion of the ‘strangers’ who settled in their kingdoms, and for this reason many New Christians who ‘had been born in Portugal … came here to declare themselves [Jews] because the kings of the land protected them and they could not be punished’. They settled so that they ‘could practise in freedom their own religion and law’.8 In the first half of the seventeenth century there was a thriving Jewish population at various points along the rivers of upper Guinea, but it appears that these gradually became merged with the wider Luso–African community and separate Jewish communities had largely disappeared by the end of the century. One reason given for this disappearance was the custom whereby Portuguese who settled in western Africa married local women. As a Jew has to be born to a Jewish mother, it was inevitable that with these marriages no permanent Jewish presence would be able to take root. New Christian influence, however, remained strong in the Cape Verde Islands and in São Tomé, where the conflict between the local moradores and the episcopal authorities gave rise on the part of the latter to hysterical accusations of Judaising—one bishop actually claiming that he had seen midnight processions in which a Golden Calf was carried through the streets. Toby Green has argued that the New Christian community in Cape Verde was instrumental in the process of creolisation and in the creation of the trans-Atlantic networks that led to the expansion of the slave trade. His argument is that the New Christians were used to living with a dual identity—that of Jew and Christian—and possessed the cultural flexibility which enabled them to trade profitably in the upper Guinea region. Less convincing is his argument that the New Christians brought with them their experience of violence in the Iberian peninsula and that, having escaped persecution in the Iberian peninsula, their becoming pioneers of the slave trade involved ‘some form of psychological transference for a group whose estimation of humanity cannot have been very high following recent events in Portugal’.9 More likely the Portuguese New Christians became involved in the slave trade simply because they derived great profits from it.
The Portuguese Inquisition
During the first part of the sixteenth century the New Christians and Jews who left Portugal often joined the Iberian communities outside the peninsula that were dominated by Old Christians. However, life became more complicated when the Inquisition was established in Portugal in 1536 (with oversight of the Atlantic settlements) and in Goa in 1560. Meanwhile branches of the Spanish Inquisition were set up in Mexico and Lima, also in the 1560s. New Christians living in Portugal and its overseas settlements and in Spanish America were now subject to investigation and this precipitated further emigration. For the next two hundred years the Inquisition and the Crown played cat and mouse with the New Christian population of Portugal. The Inquisition initiated trials and investigations, which forced the New Christians to seek amnesties from the Crown in return for large payments. Periods of active persecution were thus followed by periods of tacit toleration, which in turn prompted further persecution and further amnesties.
During the period from 1580 to 1640, when the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms were united, the Portuguese New Christians were by and large protected by the Spanish Crown and had unprecedented opportunities to expand their commercial activity in Spain and Spanish America. The Spanish Crown offered its protection in return for the financial backing of the New Christians, and investigations by the Inquisition were discouraged. The protection offered was particularly effective between 1621 and 1643, during the ascendancy of the Count Duke of Olivares. During that time large Portuguese populations were established in Spanish America, while in Europe the New Christian bankers largely superseded the Genoese as the main financiers of the Spanish monarchy and as contractors for the asiento—the supply of slaves to the Spanish possessions.
However, after the Portuguese declared their independence in 1640 and enthroned Dom João IV as king, the Inquisition became more active in its persecution of New Christians. The king tried to prevent this persecution, as his Spanish predecessors had done, and for the same reason: the financial resources of the New Christian mercantile community were needed to support the Crown’s attempt to stimulate the Portuguese economy by creating overseas trading companies and domestic industries. The Inquisition, on the other hand, was encouraged in its persecution by elements among the nobility and common people who systematically tried to undermine any economic enterprise that was supported by New Christian capital, even when it had the backing of the Crown. The result was that the years from 1640 to 1730 saw some periods of very active persecution and, in consequence, increased flows of emigration.10
During the seventeenth century, while the fortunes of the New Christians in the Iberian peninsula fluctuated, outside Spain and Portugal they experienced great commercial success and were among the leaders in the development of European capitalism. It has been suggested that one reason for the success and prosperity of the Portuguese mercantile class (Old and New Christians alike) in the Atlantic world was the very fact that outside Portugal the influence of the nobility was very much less and in many areas non-existent.11 Whatever the reason, the seventeenth century provided striking proof of the contention that the major contribution of the Portuguese to European civilisation was made by exiles and estrangeirados, not by Portuguese resident in Portugal itself.
The ‘Portuguese nation’ in the Dutch colonies
Persecution by the Portuguese Inquisition was never prolonged or effective enough to persuade all the New Christian families to emigrate, but it was sufficiently threatening to convince many of them to invest their wealth outside Portugal. This trend became more marked after the split between Portugal and Spain in 1640. As access to an undivided Atlantic economy was now impeded by war, many New Christians moved to France or the Netherlands where a large Portuguese Sephardic population was already established. The Dutch occupation of northern Brazil (effective between 1630 and 1654) and the increasing Dutch presence in Africa presented the Portuguese New Christians with fresh investment opportunities. New Christian money was invested in sugar and slaves as well as in the Dutch Charter Companies and in Dutch trading voyages to West Africa. During the Dutch occupation of Recife, the New Christian population in northern Brazil rose to between 850 and 1,000 and may have constituted as much as half the white population of the colony.12 When the Dutch were eventually expelled from Brazil in 1654 many New Christians departed once again and moved to the Dutch and English colonies in North America.
Curaçao was another area of settlement. Declared a free port by the Dutch in 1675, the island developed as a commercial centre rather than a plantation colony. Many Sephardic Jews from Amsterdam settled on the island, and by 1726 they owned 200 vessels and dominated the regional trade. Numbers rose from 600 in 1702 to 1,500 in the mid eighteenth century when they constituted a quarter of the island’s white population.13 At the same time there were 400 Jews in Jamaica and around 1,000 in Suriname. The dominance of the Sephardic Jews in the Dutch West Indies was one reason for the rise of Papiamentu, a Portuguese-based creole language that was used by Sephardic traders and their African associates and which survives as a living language in the twenty-first century.
Sephardim in Europe
Following the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal in 1536, substantial numbers of New Christians began to leave Portugal and to establish exile communities in many of the major ports of Europe. The people who made up these communities were often referred to simply as ‘Portuguese’ or the ‘Portuguese nation’, and modern scholarship has described them typically as ‘Port Jews’ (as opposed to the ‘Court Jews’ who operated directly under the protection of European monarchs). The leaders of these exile communities came from wealthy merchant families and maintained ties with other Sephardic communities in Europe and with kin back in Portugal. Not all traced their origin to Portugal, for some were descendants of Spanish Jews who had not crossed into Portugal following the expulsion in 1492 but instead had directly sought refuge in Italy or the eastern Mediterranean. These formed a separate group of orthodox Jews who had never undergone conversion and who did not integrate easily with the converso or New Christian exiles who arrived at a later date.14 These orthodox Sephardim apart, the New Christian diaspora was aided by the fact that most of the exiles were at least nominally Catholic. This made it easier for them to be accepted in Catholic societies like the Italian states or in France where Henri II issued lettres patentes to ‘Portuguese’ merchants who wanted to settle in the south-west of France. However, there were dangers once these New Christians tried to revert to Judaism: many of them, once they were safe from the Inquisition, decided to throw off an assumed Christianity and return to the Jewish faith. This made them vulnerable to local laws against apostasy. Not surprisingly it was the wealthiest Sephardic families that found it easiest to find toleration, safe conducts and permissions to reside.
The experience of the Portuguese who settled in the Medici port-city of Livorno illustrates what happened to the first generation of the Sephardic diaspora. New Christians from Portugal had settled, with encouragement from the Grand Dukes, from as early as the 1540s. When the Sephardic community was granted special privileges in 1591, among them immunity from Inquisition inquiries, many openly reverted to Judaism. By 1634 the community was solidly Jewish and there were no longer any New Christians as such—‘crypto-Judaism ceased to be a pressing social phenomenon’.15 Livorno now became a major centre of the Sephardic diaspora. The community there grew steadily throughout the seventeenth century and by 1738 numbered 3,687. Throughout the rest of the eighteenth century Jews constituted around 10 per cent of the city’s population.
In northern Europe the main city where Portuguese New Christians settled was Amsterdam, which since the late sixteenth century had become the centre of opposition to the Spanish monarchy and its monopolistic commercial pretensions. Portuguese New Christians were welcomed because, as Yosef Kaplan puts it, ‘these Jews were an attractive economic factor during the Age of Mercantilism thanks to their experience in international trade, their ability to mobilise resources from a population dispersed around the world, and, no less, their connections with the Iberian Peninsula’.16
Although direct migration from the Iberian peninsula accounted for much of the growth of the Amsterdam Sephardic community, some of the migration to Amsterdam seems to have come from communities established in south-western France, suggesting that there was a staged migration, particularly important for those of limited means for whom south-western France was the initial refuge nearest to the Iberian peninsula. Others moved on from Antwerp and Venice as the economic fortunes of these cities declined. Indeed the Venetian ‘ponentine’ community contributed materially to the establishment of the community in Amsterdam, providing it with one of its first rabbis, Joseph Pardo, and the model for the Dotar, its dowry society.17
The Portuguese and Spanish New Christians who began to settle in Amsterdam in the 1590s arrived as nominal Catholics and, although the crypto-Judaism of many of their number was well known, the municipal authorities turned a deaf ear to the protests of the Calvinist clergy. In 1616 they issued a set of regulations which were to govern relations with the Jewish community for the next two hundred years. These regulations contained three prohibitions. The ‘Portuguese’ were not to convert Christians, were not to speak against the Christian religion, and were not to have sexual relations with Christian women.18 At about the same time the Portuguese exile community founded the institution that became known as the Dotar, to provide dowries for poor girls. The existence and practice of the Dotar became central to the way that the Portuguese community defined itself. According to Miriam Bodian it gave ‘institutional expression to “the Nation”’ and showed clearly how the Amsterdam Sephardic community aspired to a leadership role in the whole Sephardic diaspora.19 The criterion for receiving a dowry was to be an established Portuguese New Christian or someone of Jewish lineage, and it was to be open to Sephardic Jews wherever they lived. Dowries might even be given to bona fide New Christians who had not yet returned to Judaism.
As more and more of the New Christians ‘came out’ as practising Jews, a number of separate communities were organised which came together in 1622 to create the Imposta, a governing body whose statutes were based on those of the Venetian Jewish community. This move to consolidate the organisation of the ‘Portuguese nation’ was prompted by the arrival of increasing numbers of Ashkenazim.20
The numbers of Portuguese in Amsterdam stagnated while the war between the United Provinces and Spain continued but grew rapidly after 1648, numbering around 3,000 by 1680. As the largest and richest Sephardic community in northern Europe the ‘Portuguese nation’ in Amsterdam held an influential and even dominant position in the diaspora. As Miriam Bodian explained, ‘Dutch society actually encouraged… the cultivation of a distinct Portuguese–Jewish identity [and] provided the conditions that allowed the community to develop its own “expansionist” role as a nerve centre for the entire Atlantic “Portuguese” diaspora’.21 Other Sephardic communities in northern Europe often sought rabbis and teachers from the Amsterdam intellectual elite. In the Jewish communities in southern France, for example, the ‘persons appointed as representatives of the [Amsterdam] Dotar… were undoubtedly informal authority figures in their settlements’.22
The members of the ‘Portuguese nation’ in Amsterdam ‘retained an intensely proud sense of their Iberian identity, reflected in their language use and in their patterns of cultural consumption’.23 Throughout the seventeenth century they conducted their correspondence in Portuguese and retained a strong interest in Iberian theatre and literary culture. To safeguard their Iberian heritage they became increasingly exclusive. When the first Ashkenazi refugees began to arrive from Germany in the 1630s, ‘they were not permitted to become members of the Spanish–Portuguese “Nation”’.24 Indeed the Ashkenazim were considered to be of a different class and were often referred to as ‘criados da Nação’—servants of the Portuguese nation. The Portuguese community adopted regulations to exclude not only Ashkenazim but even members of their own community who married Ashkenazim. For their part Ashkenazi immigrants sought to benefit from the privileges already accorded the Sephardim and settled in their shadow—often as servants in the Sephardic households, as happened also in Denmark, Hamburg and London.
The rivalry between the two branches of Judaism took on an impressive architectural form. In 1670 the Ashkenazi community began work on the Great Schul on the Houtgracht in Amsterdam. Not to be outdone the Sephardic community built their own grand synagogue, the Esnoga, across the street. Opened in 1675 this magnificent building, as prominent as any of the city’s churches, remains today as testimony to the wealth and taste of the people who built it—marking in an impressive manner what can now be seen as the high-water mark of the prosperity of Amsterdam’s Sephardic Jews.25
As the ‘Portuguese nation’ grew in numbers and wealth during the seventeenth century, it also adopted regulations to exclude Jews with black ancestry and descendants of converts who could not claim descent from Abraham and membership of the tribe of Judah. As Yosef Kaplan wrote, ‘the apologists among them did not hesitate to make generous use of the Iberian terminology of the days of the Statutes of Purity of Blood … yesterday’s segregated and downtrodden, who had been deprived of their honour by the Old Christians in Spain and Portugal, now hailed their own ancestry as a symbol of their Jewish identity’. And again, in
the purity of the Nação, the separatist strategy of the Western Sephardic diaspora shows itself in its fullest, most extreme form. Any reader of these regulations, who observes the manner in which it inquired into the pure “Portuguese or Spanish extraction” of candidates for membership in the congregations, cannot but recall the intense attention given by Iberian institutions and organisations at the time of the expansion of the Statutes of limpieza de sangre to verifying the pure origins … of anyone who wished to join them.26
It is interesting to contrast this with the ‘flexibility’ with regard to race and intermarriage which Toby Green found in the New Christians of western Africa.
The sense of exclusiveness among members of the nação led to problems in accommodating the poor. The common solution was to arrange for the poor members of their community to be sent to London or to the Americas, thereby assisting and promoting the Sephardic diaspora.27
The Sephardic community in Amsterdam retained, in one form or another, its sense of being Portuguese throughout the eighteenth century, but the consciousness of an exclusive Iberian identity inevitably waned. One factor was the gradual drying up of the flow of New Christian exiles from Portugal. After a final burst of activity by the Inquisition early in the eighteenth century, the persecution of New Christians in Portugal largely ceased and was stopped altogether after Pombal’s restructuring of the Inquisition in the 1760s and his granting of full civil rights to New Christians. No longer fed demographically by new exiles and spiritually by the consciousness of persecution, the forces which had been bringing change to the Sephardic community began to make inroads on its exclusiveness. In particular the declining wealth of the community, resulting from the more general decline in the Dutch economy, led to growing social divisions between rich and poor and a tendency for the wealthier members of the community to integrate with Dutch society. The use of the Portuguese language also declined until by the nineteenth century it was retained largely for liturgical and ceremonial purposes. The Napoleonic reforms, which brought about the total emancipation of the Jews but also the abolition of their autonomous institutions, further undermined the survival of a distinctive Portuguese ‘nação’. However, it was still possible in the nineteenth century for a Sephardic synagogue congregation to refuse burial rites to someone who had married an Ashkenazim.28
The story of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jews is especially interesting because it is so well documented and, as a consequence, so well studied. In many ways it shows the same trajectory of rise, consolidation and decline that was later followed by so many other Portuguese diasporic communities.
The Sephardic diaspora in Britain and Germany
Amsterdam was frequently a base from which Portuguese Jews moved on to other centres. Among the most important secondary destinations for the diaspora were Hamburg, Bordeaux (where the Sephardic population reached 1,500 by 1750) and London.
The rise of the Sephardic community in Hamburg reflected the changing pattern of commerce in the Atlantic world. Portuguese New Christians began to arrive in Hamburg around 1590 and, as they were ostensibly Catholics, were granted special privileges to settle in the city. By 1663 they numbered around 600. Through contacts in Brazil, the Hamburg ‘Portuguese’ began the refining of sugar which soon became the most important industry in the city, while links with the communities in Curaçao provided opportunities for manufactured goods from Hamburg to enter the closed markets of Spanish America.29
Jews had been granted formal permission to settle in England during the Protectorate, but the Sephardic Jewish community did not come directly from the Iberian peninsula and was first and foremost an offshoot of that of Amsterdam. It grew rapidly only after 1700, as the focus of finance and international trade shifted from the United Provinces to London. The movement of so many Sephardic families to London was a movement planned ‘in deliberate consultation with Amsterdam and other Portuguese merchants seeking to maximise their advantages or to maintain their positions in international trade’.30 This was not, therefore, an example of migration under pressure, though later in the 1720s and 1730s some refugees did arrive directly from the Iberian peninsula. Around 1720 the Sephardic population of London has been estimated to have been around 1,000, with a further 1,500 arriving during the next fifteen years.31 The lack of formal controls on the movement of foreigners encouraged this immigration, and figures for the second half of the eighteenth century show that most Sephardic immigrants had their origins in the Mediterranean or the Low Countries rather than in the Iberian peninsula. Like its counterpart in Amsterdam, the Sephardic community in London at first assumed responsibility for all poor Jews who arrived. However, the growing numbers of both Ashkenazim and the Sephardic poor led to strict limitations being put on the amount of charity offered and to the adoption of policies either to send poor immigrants back where they came from or to forward them to the New World. When the royal charter was granted for the settlement of Georgia in 1732, the leaders of the Sephardic community took the opportunity to send many of the poorer members of their community to the new colony.32
In London the wealthy Sephardic families operating in the City of London found a society that was largely tolerant of religious heterodoxy, especially among the rich, although the City remained very reluctant to allow Jews to obtain official positions within its institutions. Many immigrants never formally became members of any synagogue and rapidly assimilated to the lifestyle of those around them, buying country properties, socialising with other wealthy merchant families and aping the manners of the landed aristocracy. As a result the Sephardic community in London never developed an identity as pronounced as that of the Portuguese nação of Amsterdam.
Characteristics of the Portuguese Sephardic diaspora
The Sephardic diaspora began as a forced migration exactly contemporaneous with the forced migrations of Africans resulting from the slave trade. However, in contrast to the experience of African slaves, it is clear that ‘on the whole Jews not only adapted to the conditions of exile but often flourished within it materially and spiritually’.33
The Sephardic diaspora resulted in the establishment of a large number of Jewish communities throughout northern Europe and the Atlantic basin, which formed a network with ties to the Iberian peninsula. Some of these communities remained small, unstable and insecure but others put down roots, developing their own cultural life and themselves generating further emigration. As a result of settling and putting down roots in different countries, the Jews and New Christians of the Portuguese ‘nation’, in spite of their strong sense of identity, their elaborate commercial and family networks and their notable cultural conservatism, inevitably took on something of the nationality and cultural traits of the countries where they settled. However, this did not necessarily happen quickly and there is a notable contrast in this respect between the Sephardic communities of Amsterdam and London.
The culturally conservative Amsterdam community retained Portuguese family names and the use of the Portuguese language throughout the seventeenth century, adhering to an inherited Iberian culture through successive generations. In this way the community retained its sense of its own uniqueness. In the words of Miriam Bodian, ‘in the fragmented, tolerant, particularistic world of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Portuguese Jews felt no pressure to prove that they “belonged” to the majority society’.34 As Daniel Swetschinski observes, ‘ironically, there exists an unmistakeable parallel between this continued use of Portuguese in the diaspora and the erstwhile, imagined or real, preservation of Jewish customs in Portugal and Spain’.35
Although most Sephardic Jews had family histories of persecution in the Iberian peninsula, escape to Amsterdam, Hamburg or London did not mean that the exiles cut off all relations with their country of origin. Many maintained contacts in Portugal and some at the highest possible levels. Miriam Bodian gives the example of the brothers Jacob and Moses Curiel, members of whose family had been imprisoned and executed by the Inquisition, but who continued to serve the Portuguese Crown. Jacob became ‘its agent in Hamburg from 1641 to 1644 and in return for his services, Dom João IV of Portugal made him a knight of his royal household, a rank later granted to his eldest son Moses … agent of the crown of Portugal in the Netherlands from 1645 to 1697’.36 Duarte Nunes da Costa, another exiled New Christian, was involved in negotiations for the release of the king’s brother, held in Milan after the 1640 Portuguese revolt against Spain.37
The Sephardic diaspora was dominated by wealthy families. Although many of the community were poor, the high proportion of wealthy people among the migrants sets this phase of Portuguese emigration apart from most later phases which were characterised by the emigration of the poor. One striking statistic illustrates the level of education and social status of the ‘Portuguese nation’. Among male Jewish migrants arriving in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century only 1 per cent were illiterate at a time when general male illiteracy in Dutch society ranged from 30 to 43 per cent.38 In some respects the departure from Portugal of educated New Christians has to be seen in the context of a wider tendency for educated Portuguese—the so-called estrangeirados—to make their careers abroad. From the Portuguese community of the Sephardic diaspora were to come some of Europe’s leading cultural and political figures—among them Rodrigo Lopes (physician to Queen Elizabeth and, possibly, the model for Shylock), Baruch Spinoza (who, however, fell out with the Sephardic community of Amsterdam), David Ricardo, Camille Pissarro and Benjamin Disraeli (whose grandmother was of the ‘Portuguese nation’).
Merchants of the Sephardic Jewish community formed voluntary groupings in which the networks of commerce, often bound together by marriages, were all-important and in which religious and communal ties and discipline were correspondingly weak. During the period of active persecution in the Iberian peninsula the communities of religious exiles might include not only confessed Jews but New Christians who had not abandoned their Christianity—though there was a marked tendency for them to do so once they had left Portugal behind. There were also marranos whose religious practice drew on both Christianity and Judaism. In these circumstances the religious foundations of the Sephardic communities were bound to be weakened. New Christians who had not yet returned to Judaism were accepted as part of the ‘nação’. New Christian martyrs were celebrated even if they had not formally reconverted; and New Christians, still practising their Christian religion, were able to apply to the Dotar for dowries for their daughters. In Amsterdam the ‘Portuguese’ came to see themselves as ‘a colony of foreign merchants’ as well as an ‘association of religious exiles’.39 As Miriam Bodian points out, ‘there is, overall, a peculiar, polarized quality to the set of attitudes the “Portuguese” held about Iberian society. The great majority of them were able, it seems, to divorce the experience of converso persecution from the world of Iberian values and culture, demonizing the former and holding fast to the latter.’40 This made the purity of Sephardic descent and membership of the nação more important than religious orthodoxy. This explains also how New Christians could be accepted but Ashkenazi Jews rejected.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the use of the Portuguese language was one way in which members of the nação distinguished themselves, and this was true not only of Amsterdam. In the sixteenth-century Ferrara household of the rich Sephardic Lady Beatrix de Luna, ‘the language spoken by both the young valets and the orphan girls who waited on the “lady” was Portuguese’.41
The ‘Portuguese nation’, constituted by the Sephardic diaspora, was essentially a society of rich merchant families who retained close ties with each other and established networks of family and commercial interest, literally throughout the world. It is the international, the globalised, nature of the Sephardic community which is particularly striking.
When we look again at the early modern Sephardic port Jews, we cannot help but be struck by the constancy of movement in their lives. As exiles and refugees, many moved restlessly from one home to another: variously back and forth in Christian lands, Muslim lands; in the Mediterranean ranging from Iberia, to Italy, to North Africa, to the Levant; to the west European Atlantic seaboard; to colonial possessions in the New World or the Far East. With families far-flung across countries and continents, the Sephardic world was one of both people and goods on the move.42
The De Luna family is an early example of this movement. From Portugal they moved to Flanders, ‘then escaped undercover to Venice and later to Ferrara, and finally emigrated “out of Christianity” to Constantinople to return publicly to their Jewish faith’.43 Throughout all this movement their sense of identity remained vital for the success of their financial and commercial dealings. A member of the Amsterdam ‘Portuguese nation’ sailing for Curaçao or Jamaica or moving to settle in Copenhagen or Livorno would find that his ‘Portuguese’ identity enabled him to establish the necessary business contacts and obtain the assistance of other ‘Portuguese’ in the region where he settled. This mobility and sense of being a community at home in all parts of the globe enabled the Sephardic Jews and New Christians to assume a wider cultural and even political role as ‘interpreters’. In the ports where they settled, such as Amsterdam, Odessa or Salonika, they acted as intermediaries or brokers between Dutch and Iberians or Ottomans and Europeans.44 Such a role was not always seen in a positive light, for Portuguese New Christians also maintained close relations with the Barbary corsairs and acted as their agents in the purchase of goods in Europe.45
Eventually this movement of the Portuguese Sephardic community outside the Iberian world would mark a parting of the ways. At first the Jews or New Christians who left Portugal had settled in the same areas as their Old Christian associates. In Spanish America or West Africa, New and Old Christians had lived and traded side by side. After the middle of the sixteenth century, and still more after Portugal’s separation from Spain in 1640 and the expulsion of the Dutch from Brazil in 1654, their paths would separate and, although the Sephardic community retained a sense of its ‘Portuguese’ identity, direct contacts with Portugal or with other communities of the Portuguese diaspora became ever weaker. When in the nineteenth century a new wave of migration brought poor Portuguese to the coasts of the United States, they would have nothing in common, and probably no contact, with the community of Sephardic Jews long established there.