Abstract
Pan-Iberian and Jewish Scholarship on Portuguese New Christian slave traders offer two widely divergent views of their Jewish identity. Recent research and methodological advances in the study of Portuguese slave trading and the Inquisitions make it possible to address the relevant questions with more nuance. A “thick” theory of the Inquisitions helps, alongside case-by-case investigation of relevant individuals and families through the increasingly known variety of archival sources. The slave trader Manuel Baptista Peres is presented as a case study by means of several recent investigations. Beyond the question of Jewish identity, other reasons are given for attempting to draw a fuller, more informed general portrait of this group of merchants, their attitudes, behavior and politics.
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Notes
- 1.
Some of the material here appeared in my Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2008). I thank my colleague Sina Rauschenbach for her very helpful comments on early drafts of this chapter. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
- 2.
Seymour Drescher, “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 439–70.
- 3.
Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispano-América y el comercio de esclavos: los asientos portugueses (Seville: E.E.H.A. and C.S.I.C., 1977); idem, “Los asientos portugueses y el contrabando de negros,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 30 (1973): 557–609; José Gonçalves Salvador, Os Cristãos-Novos e o comércio no Atlântico meridional (Com enfoque nas capitanias do sul 1530–1680) (São Paulo: Livraria Pioneira Editora, 1978); idem, Os Magnatas do tráfico negreiro (São Paulo, 1981); Maria da Graça A. Mateus Ventura, Negreiros Portugueses na rota das Índias de Castela (1541–1556) (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 1999). Many other related works exist, of course, including: João Medina and Isabel Castro Henriques, A rota dos escravos: Angola e a rede do comércio negreiro (Lisbon: Cegia, 1996); Nikolaus Böttcher, Aufstieg und Fall eines atlantischen Handelsimperiums: Portugiesische Kaufleute und Sklavenhändler in Cartagena de Indias von 1580 bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1995); Germán Peralta Rivera, Los mecanismos del comercio negrero (Lima: Kuntur Ed., 1990). Böttcher is a German scholar working in Latin American Studies.
- 4.
L. García de Proodian, Los Judios en America: sus actividades en los Virreinatos de Nueva Castilla y Nueva Granada s. XVII (Madrid: Instituto Arias Montano and Seminario de Estudios Americanistas de la Universidad de Madrid, 1966).
- 5.
Other significant contributions include António de Almeida Mendes, “Esclavages et traites ibériques entre Méditerranée et Antlantique (XVe–XVIIe siècles): Une histoire globale” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2007); Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, O trato dos viventes: formação do Brasil no Atlantico Sul (São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2000); Maria Manuel Ferraz Torrão, “Tráfico de escravos entre a costa da Guiné e a América espanhola: articulação dos impérios ultramarinos Ibéricos num espaço atlântico” (PhD diss., Centro de Estudos de História e Cartografia Antiga [Lisbon], 1999).
- 6.
In his autobiographical account of magic in present-day West Africa, written before he entered academia, he writes that “Like my ancestors, some of these lançados [on the sixteenth-century West African coast] had been Sephardic Jews.” Toby Green, Meeting the Invisible Man: Secrets and Magic in West Africa (London: Phoenix, 2001), 20.
- 7.
Tobias Green, “Masters of Difference: Creolization and the Jewish Presence in Cabo Verde , 1497–1672” (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2006).
- 8.
Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 9.
Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 217.
- 10.
Tobias Green, “Equal Partners? Proselytising by Africans and Jews in the 17th Century Atlantic Diaspora ,” Melilah 1 (2008): 4.
- 11.
Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 19.
- 12.
Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 70.
- 13.
Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 200.
- 14.
Green, “Masters of Difference,” 82, 85.
- 15.
Green, “Masters of Difference,” 86.
- 16.
Ana Hutz, “Homens de nação e de negócio: redes comerciais no mundo Ibérico (1580–1640)” (PhD diss., University of São Paulo, 2014); idem, “Os cristãos novos portugueses no tráfico de escravos para a América Espanhola (1580–1640)” (MA Thesis, Unicamp, 2008).
- 17.
Utilizing mostly Portuguese-language scholarship. She does not cite Green, for instance.
- 18.
Hutz, “Homens de nação e de negócio,” 212.
- 19.
Thomas F. Glick, “On Converso and Marrano Ethnicity,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648, ed. Benjamin R. Gampel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 74; José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 41; see also idem, “Four Classes of Conversos: A Typological Study,” Revue des Etudes Juives 149 (1990): 113–24. Also worthwhile are two recent studies: David Graizbord, “Religion and Ethnicity Among ‘Men of the Nation:’ Toward a Realistic Interpretation,” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 32–65; Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, “Plural Identities: the Portuguese New Christians,” Jewish History 25, no. 2 (May 2011): 129–51.
- 20.
For instance, Manuel Duarte, who brought slaves from Cape Verde to Cartagena in the early seventeenth century, was denounced in 1611 and then prosecuted by the colonial authorities in Cartagena as a foreigner, since he was Portuguese. Nowhere in the documentation is his status as an Old or New Christian mentioned. See Maria da Graça A. Mateus Ventura, Portugueses no Peru ao tempo da união ibérica: Mobilidade, cumplicidades e vivências, 2 vols. in 3 pts. (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2005), 1:140.
- 21.
The history and meanings of these terms is too complex to discuss here. I use the terms marrano and crypto-Jew as synonyms that signal loyalty to Judaism/Jewishness in whatever sense. They are thus opposed to the term New Christian or converso , which leaves the question of religious/ethnic loyalty unresolved.
- 22.
Ellis Rivkin, “How Jewish Were the New Christians?” Hispania Judaica 1 (1980): 104–15; António José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory: The Portuguese Inquisition and Its New Christians, 1536–1765, trans., revised and augmented by H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon (Leiden: Brill, 2001), which is a translation and expansion of the 1985 edition of Saraiva’s Inquisição e cristãos-novos (1969); Herman Prins Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Re-examined,” Sefarad 67, no. 1 (Jan.–June 2007): 111–54.
- 23.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 5.
- 24.
See, for example, Eva Alexandra Uchmany, “The Participation of New Christians and Crypto-Jews in the Conquest, Colonization, and Trade of Spanish America, 1521–1660,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 186: “the immense majority of the [converted] Portuguese Jews never abandoned their ancestral religion, but rather only changed their external identity.”
- 25.
Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Re-examined,” 123.
- 26.
See Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank,” in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, eds. Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi, in association with Charles Amiel (Dekalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 100–29. The database is not without problems, some of them quite major. The fact that Contreras and Henningsen choose to begin at 1540, understandably, as records before then were not yet standardized, means that the earliest phase of the Inquisition’s operations, widely acknowledged to be aimed overwhelmingly at alleged crypto-Jews, does not get included in the statistical calculations, severely skewing them toward an undercounting of trials against New Christians.
- 27.
Within this already large body of literature I would include the massive three-volume collection of essays overseen by Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, eds., Historia de la inquisición: España y América, 3 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos and Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000). The first volume is devoted to El conocimiento científico y el proceso histórico de la institución (1478–1834), the second to Las estructuras del santo oficio, and the third to Temas y problemas.
- 28.
Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), “Appendix A: Critical Survey of the Literature,” 363–71.
- 29.
Charles Amiel, “Archives of the Portuguese Inquisition: A Brief Survey,” in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, eds. Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi, in association with Charles Amiel (Dekalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 83.
- 30.
On this phenomenon, see Bárbara Santiago Medina, “La publicación de edictos como fuente de conflictos: el tribunal de la Inquisición de Barcelona,” Pedralbes 28 (2008): 707–22; Ignacio Villa Calleja, “La oportunidad previa al procedimiento: los edictos de fe (siglos XV–XIX),” in Historia de la inquisición: España y América, eds. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, 3 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos and Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000), 2:301–33.
- 31.
Contreras and Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases,” 125.
- 32.
Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 189.
- 33.
Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 71.
- 34.
Solange Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 1571–1700 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 208 (Table 4).
- 35.
Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 198–99.
- 36.
Fermina Álvarez, Alonso, La Inquisición en Cartagena de Indias durante el siglo XVII (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1999), 138–41. For other major heresies the rates were similarly high, while for alleged crimes of superstition and witchcraft the rate was slightly over 10%. See ibid., 161, 212.
- 37.
P. Pérez Cantó, “La dinámica de las estructuras en el tribunal de Lima,” in Historia de la inquisición: España y América, eds. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, 3 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos and Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000), 1:1181–82.
- 38.
B. Escandell Bonet, “La peculiar estructura administrativa y funcional de la inquisición española en Indias,” in Historia de la inquisición: España y América, eds. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, 3 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos and Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000), 2:662. I have not yet come across similar quantitative studies of the Portuguese Inquisition in Africa.
- 39.
Howard Adelman, “Inquisitors and Historians and their Methods” (unpublished paper, June 1990), 30.
- 40.
For instance, David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 14–16.
- 41.
Much other material similarly has been made available. The reproduction is beautifully done and the collections feature online search capacity. We have entered a whole new era of research possibilities. See http://digitarq.dgarq.gov.pt.
- 42.
Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin, From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- 43.
<IndexTerm ID="ITerm409">Ventura, Portugueses no Peru.
- 44.
Though on occasion even Ventura lapses into assuming that inquisitional knowledge-making is determinative. So, for instance, she talks about Gaspar dos Reis and Diogo da Veira, “Portuguese judaizers tried in Lima” (judaizantes portugueses processados em Lima) (1:151), when a more accurate description would have been something like “Portuguese tried as judaizers in Lima.”
- 45.
Ibid., 1:373.
- 46.
Ibid., 1:381. Bowser had written that Bautista Pérez “was noted for the care he took with his cargoes.” Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 50.
- 47.
Bowser, African Slave in Peru, 50.
- 48.
Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:361.
- 49.
Jonathan I. Israel, “Sephardi Contribution to Economic Life and Colonization in Europe and the New World (16th–18th Centuries),” in Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim Beinart, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Hebrew University, 1992), 2:383.
- 50.
Ventura , Portugueses no Peru, 1:298–300.
- 51.
Ibid., 1:377.
- 52.
Ibid., 1:383.
- 53.
Ronnie Perelis, personal communication, October 2015.
- 54.
Ventura , Portugueses no Peru, 1:383.
- 55.
Ibid., 1:373.
- 56.
Nathan Wachtel, La foi du souvenir: Labyrinthes marranes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), ch. 3, 77–101.
- 57.
Ibid., 398n26.
- 58.
Ibid., 398n29.
- 59.
Ibid., 398n30.
- 60.
Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 57.
- 61.
Wachtel, Foi du souvenir, 399n37. My translation.
- 62.
Ibid., 400n47.
- 63.
Ibid., 401n57.
- 64.
Ibid., 401n59.
- 65.
Ibid., 401n60.
- 66.
On the Torres family, Fernando de Córdoba and his sons Diego de Torres and Alonso de Torres, who imported slaves to Málaga and then to the Spanish Caribbean in the 2nd and 3rd decades of the sixteenth century, see Manuel F. Fernandez Chaves and Rafael M. Pérez García, “La élite mercantil judeoconversa andaluza y la articulación de la trata negrera hacia las Indias de Castilla, ca. 1518–1560,” Hispania-Revista Espanola de Historia 76, no. 253 (2016): 391–95, 400–402. An essay by Jessica Roitman treats briefly the careers of the brothers Afonso, Rodrigo and Diogo Fidalgo, while devoting more attention to members of the Gramaxo family, particularly Jorge Fernandes Gramaxo of early seventeenth-century Cartagena; Jessica Vance Roitman , “Sephardic Journeys: Travel, Place and Conceptions of Identity,” Jewish History and Culture 11, nos. 1&2 (Summer/Autumn 2009): 209–28. Elsewhere Roitman looks at the business of Duarte Dias Henriques, who held the asiento for Angola from 1607 to 1615; Jessica Vance Roitman , “New Christians, Jews, and Amsterdam at the Crossroads of Expansion Systems,” in Migration, Trade, and Slavery in an Expanding World: Essays in Honor of Pieter Emmer, ed. Wim Klooster (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 126–30. Other studies include Rosendo Sampaio Garcia, “O portugues Duarte Lopes e o comercio espanhol de escravos negros,” Revista de Historia (Sao Paulo) 8 (1957): 375–85.
- 67.
Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic, 1:221, ch. 6–7. On Curaçao, some scholars suggest, Papiamentu, the local creole tongue, developed as a medium of communication between Portuguese Sephardim and African slaves, as Jessica Roitman recalls in her chapter in this volume.
- 68.
Testimony of an unnamed witness; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 364r; Schorsch , Swimming the Christian Atlantic, 1:150. It is unclear whether the term capitanes de negros refers to masters of slaves or actual ship captains.
- 69.
James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain, 1626–1640 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983).
- 70.
Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 165.
- 71.
See, for example, Bruce Mouser, and Nancy Fox Mouser, The Case of the Reverend Peter Hartwig, Slave Trader or Misunderstood Idealist? Clash of Church Missionary Society/Imperial Objectives in Sierra Leone, 1804–1815 (Madison: African Studies Publications, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003); Bruce Mouser, “Women Slavers of Guinea-Conakry,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, eds. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 320–39. One exceptional piece looks at slave trading on late-sixteenth-century Cabo Verde through the eyes of a Florentine merchant , Francesco Carletti, who himself participated. See Maria Manuel Ferraz Torrão and André Teixeira, “Negócios de escravos de um florentino em Cabo Verde: descrições e reflexões sobre a sociedade e o tráfico em finais do século XVI,” Nova Cidadania, 7, no. 27 (Jan.–Mar. 2006): 54–56, http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/eaar/coloquio/comunicacoes/mmtorrao_ateixeira.pdf.
- 72.
Carletti, mentioned in the previous note, wrote in his report about his world travels that “this trade seems to me inhuman and an indignity to the faith and to Christian piety. These [Africans] differ from us in skin and fortune but have a soul like ours created by the divine creator.” Torrão and Teixeira , “Negócios de escravos de um florentino em Cabo Verde,” 10. But this likely genuine sentiment seems not to have prevented him from engaging in this inhuman and blasphemous business.
- 73.
For examples, see Studnicki-Gizbert , Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 61–65, 84–88; Maria José Ferro Tavares, “Juristas e mercadores à conquista das honras: quatro processos de nobilitação quinhentistas,” Revista de História Económica e Social, 2nd ser., 4 (2002): 7–53; Bernardo José López Belinchón, Honra, libertad y hacienda: Hombres de negocios y judíos sefardíes (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, 2001).
- 74.
Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 134.
- 75.
Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic. In ch. 3, I discuss ambivalent sentiments expressed by the physician and slave trader Blas de Paz Pinto, of Cartagena de las Indias, regarding slaves under his care.
- 76.
Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions; Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic. On New Christian textual critical subjectivities, see Gabriel Mordoch, “New Christian Discourse and Early Modern Portuguese Oceanic Expansion: The Cases of Garcia da Orta, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão and Pedro de León Portocarrero” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2017).
- 77.
In my Swimming the Christian Atlantic, I trace a few such cases in other locations around the Atlantic world, though I assume more must have existed. See José Alberto Tavim’s contribution to this volume; Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta, “Catholics, Jews, and Muslims in Early Seventeenth-Century Guiné,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 170–194, 293; Green, “Equal Partners?”
- 78.
Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, 104–105.
- 79.
Informative parallel Dutch and English cases are explored by Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
- 80.
Claude B. Stuczynski, “Portuguese Conversos and the Manueline Imperial Idea: A Preliminary Study,” Anais de História de Além-mar 14 (2013): 45–61; see also Tavim, in this volume.
- 81.
Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 19.
- 82.
As argued by Mark and Horta in this volume.
- 83.
From a list of ships departing from Arguim, Guiné, for Lisbon between 1512 and 1520, in António de Almeida Mendes, “Portugal e o tráfico de escravos na primeira metade do século XVI,” Africana Studia (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto) 7 (2004): 29–30; see also the list of ships docking at Buenos Aires between 1601 and 1614, in Vila Vilar, “Asientos Portugueses,” 600–609 (Appendix).
- 84.
His Hebrew name was Ya’akov Yisrael. His brother-in-law Aron Querido partnered with him in sponsoring several slaving ships and was also known as someone who converted at least some of his slaves or grumetes to Judaism. See Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 93; Green, “Equal Partners?,” esp. 1–2; Drescher, “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 466, n. 21; Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35; Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa: Empires, Merchants and the Atlantic System, 1580–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 313.
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Schorsch, J. (2018). New Christian Slave Traders: A Literature Review and Research Agenda. In: Rauschenbach, S., Schorsch, J. (eds) The Sephardic Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_2
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