THE
SEPHARDIC JEWS
A short history
By the end of the first century A. D. there were Jews
all around the Mediterranean Sea and with
the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the
persecution of the Jews began. In the Iberian Peninsula the
Visigoths pushed out Roman rule in the 6th and 7th centuries and were converted
to Christianity at the same time. In the late eighth century the Mohammedans
(Moors, Muslims) invaded Spain from North
Africa and defeated the Visigoth kings driving them almost
entirely out of what is now Spain and Portugal. The Jews
of Spain flowered under Moorish-rule. Because of their shared religious
heritage, Jews served a valuable role as cultural intermediaries between
Moslems and Christians. Many rose to high places under their Mohammedan rulers; many became very rich and powerful;
others became poets and physicians. In fact, medicine in Spain during the Middle Ages was entirely in the hands of Jewish physicians.
As
the Middle Ages were ending, the Crusades were
beginning and things took a turn for the worst for the Spanish Jews. First, the
Christian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile began to
reconquer the peninsula bringing the zeal and intolerance of the Christian
faith of that time. The bubonic plague was sweeping across Europe at the time
and the rulers needed a scapegoat upon whom to blame this disaster. The Jews
were accused, among other things, of poisoning wells to bring on the black
plague. Since most of the physicians were Jewish and helpless against this
unknown onslaught, they and the rest of the Jews took the blame for the
thousands of deaths from this dreaded disease. There is no indication from
historical records that the Jews survived the black plague any better than
their Christian brethren. It was also fashionable at the time -- and for
several centuries thereafter -- to accuse the Jews of kidnapping Christian
children and sacrificing them in some sort of "black mass". In Spain, this
gathering resentment against the Jews -- no doubt exacerbated because the Jews
were rich and controlled commerce and banking -- burst into flame with a
massacre of four thousand Jews in Seville in June of
1391 followed by similar pogroms in Barcelona and other
Spanish cities. Throughout the Iberian peninsula, Jews were
given the choice of death or conversion. Castille in
particular was rocked by anti-Jewish rioting that rampaged across the kingdom.
When order was restored one year later, it was estimated that 100,000 Jews had
been killed, another 100,000 had converted to Christianity, and another 100,000
had survived by going into hiding or fleeing to Muslim lands. (J.S.
Gerber, (1992), The Jews of Spain , New York: Free Press)
While
some conversos
accepted Christianity (some even became zealous anti-semitics),
there was a significant minority of "New Christians" the Marranos,
who continued to practice Judaism secretly. Once these Jews converted they were able to assume positions of wealth and power that
had been denied them by the Christian authorities. While the church at first
did not distinguish between Old and New Christians, this rapid economic
ascension bred resentment amongst the "Old Christian" populace. In
1469, Ferdinand and Isabella were married, and at first they protected and
supported the Jewish population. However, they also took their religious
responsibilities quite seriously and were disturbed by rumors
of Judaizing amongst the converso population. The
royal couple instituted the Spanish Inquisition, which began operating in 1481 with
an auto-da-fé
in Seville in which
dozens of conversos
were burned at the stake. It is estimated that perhaps as many as 30,000 conversos were killed before the century ended.
In
1492 an event occurred which sealed the fate of the Spanish Jews and it wasn't Columbus discovering
America. Ferdinand
and Isabella conquered Granada and
completed the reconquest of Spain. In March
of 1492, the royal couple issued a decree ordering all Jews to depart from Spain by the end
of July. It is unclear what exactly motivated the expulsion. Some have argued
that Ferdinand was motivated by economic reasons: He had borrowed heavily from
Jewish lenders to pay for the reconquest of Granada and the
expulsion allowed him to renege on his debt while at the same time confiscating
Jewish property. Ferdinand even decreed that the special taxes the Jews had
been forced to pay should be prepaid prior to the expulsion for the next
several years, also all debts due to Jews were transferred to the crown. Others
have argued that the royal couple was pressured by their religious advisors to
issue the decree.
The
major problem facing the Sephardim was finding a country to emigrate. England and France had
banished their Jewish populations in previous centuries. Many German towns had
expelled Jews or destroyed their communities in the hysteria surrounding the
Black Plague, and most of Italy refused to
accept the refugees. Most of the Jews from Castile, about
120,000, set off for Portugal. There King
John II allowed them a temporary entrance permit in return for a hefty sum.
Those who could not pay for the permit were sold off into slavery, and in the
end 600 affluent families were permitted to remain in the kingdom. At the end
of the eight months, the king changed his mind about giving the rest passage
and gave them the choice of conversion or being handed over as slaves. In a
further act of cruelty, the king ordered many of the children of parents who
refused to convert sent to the virtually uninhabited island of So Tomé, where they
perished.
In
1495, John's death provided a short lived relief to the conversionist
pressures. His successor, Manuel I ordered all enslaved Jews freed. However,
Manuel wished to ally himself with Spain by marrying
Ferdinand and Isabella's daughter. As a precondition to the marriage, Ferdinand
and Isabella wanted the Jews expelled from Portugal. On December 5, 1496, Manuel
issued a decree of expulsion that gave the Jews until the end of 1497 to leave.
On a practical level, Manuel did not want the Jews to leave because there would
be no middle class left after the expulsion. Manuel's solution was to try and
eliminate Judaism without eliminating the Jews, i.e., forcing all of Portugal's Jews to
convert. During Passover of 1497, he ordered that all children between the ages
of four and fourteen be seized and converted. Furthermore, these children were
to remain separated from their parents until their parents had converted. Jews
who wished to leave Portugal were told
they could only leave from Lisbon. Upon
arriving in Lisbon, these Jews
found that their children too were taken away, and there were no boats waiting
to take them into exile. Instead an army of priests awaited them; the Jews were
dragged off and baptized en masse.
Thus, the decree of expulsion was no longer necessary because all Portugal's Jews were
now Christians. I would not be surprised that this was the time our ancestors
took the name Henriques, which in Portuguese means the son of Henry.
Manuel
agreed not to inquire into their religious practices for the next twenty years
so that they could adjust to their new identities. Manuel's unfounded hope was
that over time the former Jewish population would forget their old religion and
become stalwarts in "our holy faith". The fact was that Portugal's Jewish
population had entered Portugal in the
first place because they wished to avoid conversion in Spain, and they
remained a Jewish community in spite of their baptisms. As in Spain, conversion
allowed Jews to rise to prominence, and this breed resentment among the
populace. In 1506, two Dominican friars led a mob that killed more than 2000
New Christians in Lisbon. In
response to pleas from the survivors, the king allowed the Marranos to
emigrate, and many did to Jewish communities around the Mediterranean until the
ban on emigration was reinstated in 1521. This was when Manuel's son, John III,
succeeded to the throne.
John
III was quite different from his father. He is portrayed in most histories as a
religious fanatic who was on a holy mission to purge his nation from the stain
of backsliding Judaizers. There is some evidence,
however, that the reactionary. John was more interested in eliminating the
middle class or which the vast majority of the Marranos were members. In any
event beginning around the time of his accession to the Portuguese throne, John
began a campaign to establish an Inquisition in Portugal patterned
after the Spanish model. The grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella pursued his
goal zealously trying to obtain the Pope's permission to set up an Inquisition
under his control. The Marranos fought back at the Papal court in Rome and by
means of entreaty, propaganda and bribes managed to hold off the effective
establishment of the Inquisition for almost 20 years. In the end, however,
intolerance and greed triumphed, and the first Portuguese auto-da-fé
was held in Lisbon in 1540.
The struggle to establish the Portuguese inquisition is narrated in Herculano's book "The origins and establishment of the
inquisition in Portugal" a
fascinating but overly long tale of intrigue and deception.
"Over
time, a new religion, neither wholly Jewish nor wholly
Catholic, evolved among the secret Jews of Portugal. It was a belief
that combined secrecy with fear, partial memory with substantial loss. Its
observances included much fasting, abbreviated prayers in which only one Hebrew
word ("Adonai," or God) was retained,
shortened festivals that could be covertly observed at home, and a special set
of rituals reserved primarily for women. The forced converts would remain courageously
loyal to this new faith even in
extremis, as is evident from literally tens of thousands on Inquisition
dossiers.
Although
the Marranos were explicitly proscribed from emigrating after 1521, many of
them escaped Portugal during
John's reign and thereafter. The trickle became a flood after 1540 as all the
crypto-Jews that could bribed their way out of Portugal. During the
16th century - in 1580 to be exact - the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms were
united under one ruler and the Dutch broke away from their Spanish rulers and
set up an independent state which is now the Netherlands. Since many
of the Marranos engaged in commerce with the Low
Countries, they had reason to travel there on business--and
many of them took advantage of the opportunity to escape Portugal and settle
in the tolerant new Dutch republic. I would not be surprised if that was the
route our ancestors took to leave since we know that there were Henriqueses on the rolls of the Jewish synagogue in Amsterdam (founded
1598) in the early 17th century. The earliest reference to a
Henriques that I can find is the record of the marriage between Ines Henriquez and Emanuel
Sanchez in 1613. Note. D. Verdooner & H. Snel in Trouwen in mokum [Jewish marriage in Amsterdam 1598-1811] used
uniform spelling rather than list all variants found in the civic records.
Other Henriques Families of the New World
We can only surmise how our forefathers reached the New World. The most
probable path is from Portugal to Holland to England to Jamaica to New York with many
peregrinations back and forth across the Atlantic. The Jews
returned to England in the
mid-17th century during the time of Cromwell and the London synagogue
at Bevis Marks was established late in that century. Among the signatures to
the Ascamot (or code of laws) for the Bevis Marks synagogue
of 1677 is a P. Henriques, el Moco (junior). The
earliest listing of the members of Bevis Marks dates back to 1682 (5442) and
includes eight Henriquez. Among them: Abraham Mz. Henriquez, Jaacob Israel Henriquez, Jaacob Bueno Henriquez,
and Joseph Henriquez (junior). There are also records
of a prominent Jewish family named Henriques in Curacao Dutch West Indies, in
the 1700's. In the "New York Public Library there is a book - in Danish,
no less - called "Stamlaven Henriques" by a
man named Margolinsky which traces the ancestry of Henriqueses of Scandinavia and Germany back to Portugal. As
the reader might be starting to suspect, the name Henriques is fairly common
amongst Sephardic Jews, and this is one of the difficulties we face in trying
to trace our ancestors. Civic marriage records from Amsterdam between
1598 and 1811 list well over 200 Henriqueses. The
name Henriques appears throughout Sephardic communities in the New World. A baker
named Jacob Cohen Henriques is mentioned among petitioners for a Jewish
cemetery in New Amsterdam in 1655. Issac Nunes Henriques came to Georgia in 1733
with his family, including his wife Abigail Nunes and
son Shem., and they were amongst the first Jewish
settlers in that colony. England allowed Jews to become naturalized citizens by
the act of 13 George II, c. 7 (1740), and over the next ten years there were 17
Henriqueses in Jamaica who applied for naturalization
including Jacob Nunes Henriques, Moses Nunes Henriques, and two Rachel Henriqueses.
Applying in New York for
naturalization on October 28,
1741 was the above mentioned Issac
Nunes Henriques. Issac died
in July, 1767 in Philadelphia.
Another
difficulty in trying to track ancestry among the Sephardic community is that
many of the Jews who settled in Amsterdam from the
late 16th century emigrated from the Iberian Peninsula where they
had hidden their Jewish identities behind Christian names. Once these
crypto-Jews were beyond the reach of the inquisition they adopted Jewish names.
However, in the course of their business dealings they continued to use their
former Christian names, especially if they were engaged in trade with Spain or Portugal. To give a
concrete example: Albert Hyamson in his book The
Sephardim of England (1951)
notes that Duarte Alvares Henriques (otherwise Daniel
Cohen Henriques) married Leila Henriques, in Amsterdam. However,
the record of this marriage, in 1656, lists the groom as Duarte Henriques Alvares and the bride as Beatris da Veiga, the daughter of Phillipa de Lisveda. As you can
see this makes tracing families quite difficult. I should add that, after their
marriage, Duarte and Leila
moved to England. "This
was the first appearance in England of the
well-known Sephardi family of Henriques." The
earliest direct ancestor we have a definitive record of is Jacob Nunes Henriques, mentioned above, who applied for
naturalization in Kingston on February, 26, 1744. Jacob, according to
"Americans of Jewish Descent", died in Kingston, Jamaica in 1758. He
is listed as being born in Spain. Jacob's father
is given as Abram Henriques Quixano and his mother's
name was Sarah. Quixano, by the way, means Cohen in
Portuguese. A Cohen is a member of the priestly class who are descendants of
Aaron, and the Kohanim have special rights and
privileges among the Jews.