r/Jewish_History

In the territory of the Kingdom of Peru, the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Lima condemned a total of 23 Christians to death, accused of “Judaizing.” The accusations were based on denunciations often made by servants, friends, partners, neighbors, or business rivals, as well as confessions obtained under torture or observed evidence.

What accusations did they face?

The main one was that they secretly practiced Jewish religious customs. These included observing the Sabbath as a day of rest, avoiding work, or lighting candles at sunset; fasting on Jewish holidays such as Yom Kippur or the Fast of Esther; abstaining from eating pork, seafood, or meat; performing circumcisions on male children; reciting prayers in Hebrew; and using ritual objects of Judaism. Teaching Judaism to family members, friends, or servants, or engaging in endogamous marriage to preserve the purity of Jewish blood.

Blaspheming against Christ, the saints, religious images, or the Catholic Church. Secretly mocking Christians. Conspiring against the Peruvian government. They were also accused of usury and swindling in business. Making pacts with the devil and performing animal sacrifices. Maintaining contact with Jews in Europe and participating in "suspicious" trade networks.

List of Jews condemned by the Holy Office of Peru:

1.- Nuñez, Jorge - 1595
2.- Rodríguez, Francisco - 1595
3.-De Contreras, Pedro - 1595
4.- De Lucena, Baltasar - 1600
5.- Nuñez de Cea, Duarte - 1600
6.- Enríquez, Duarte - 1605
7.- López de Vargas, Diego - 1605
8.- Díaz Tavares, Gregorio - 1605
9.- Acuña de Noroña, Juan - 1625
10.- Tavares, Manuel - 1625
11.- De Vega, Antonio - 1639
12.- De Espinosa, Antonio - 1639
13.- López de Fonseca, Diego - 1639
14.- Maldonado da Silva, Francisco - 1639
15.- Rodríguez da Silva, Juan - 1639
16.- De Azevedo, Juan - 1639
17.- De Lima, Luis - 1639
18.- Bautista Pérez, Manuel - 1639
19.- Váez Pereira, Rodrigo - 1639
20.- Duarte, Sebastián - 1639
21.- Cuaresma, Tomé - 1639
22.- Henríquez, Manuel - 1664
23.- De Castro, María Francisca Ana - 1736

"Those who accused him of being Jewish were other Portuguese, who left reconciled on this very occasion, although they claimed they had not seen him practice any ceremony of the Old Law. Taken to the torture chamber, he persisted in his denial, but when they were about to turn him around for the first time, he declared that he had lived as a Jew and that he wanted to die at once. Condemned unanimously to be hanged, he remained obstinate throughout the night before the auto-da-fé, 'and almost the entire time his sentences were being read, and although afterward he took a cross in his hands and, it is said, confessed, there was little satisfaction in his death.'" (Toribio Medina, 1887)

Reference(s):

.- Historia del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima (1569-1820), José Toribio Medina (1887).

On the facade of the ancient Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue, the first synagogue in the Americas, built in 1637, there was a relief of the Prophet Moses holding a staff. After the end of the Dutch presence, the relief was removed and taken to the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Olinda, Brazil. Currently, the image, over 300 years old, is located at the Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Institute of Pernambuco, Brazil.

During the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco, several Portuguese Jews settled in Recife, especially on Rua do Bom Jesus in 1636. Therefore, the street became known as Rua dos Judeus ("Street of the Jews"), the main point of the city's slave market.

New Christians, descendants of Portuguese Jews who were forced to choose convert to Catholicism during the reign of King Manuel I, were interested in the Terra de Santa Cruz at a time when Portugal did not have the people or resources to populate it. The establishment of the Holy Office in Portugal in 1536 was, without a doubt, a stimulus for the new Christians, always suspected of Judaizing, to become more anxious and gradually abandon Portugal for Brazil.

Portuguese Jews had strong trade relations with the Netherlands and with the Protestant Dutch, who were at war with Spain, which ascended the Portuguese throne in 1580.

As both Dutch Calvinists and Portuguese Jews considered the authority of Spain and the Catholic Church enemies, the New Christians supported the Dutch colony in Brazil (1630-1654), as this allowed them to return to Judaism.

They helped the colonization of this new Dutch colony on the other side of the Atlantic. Sugar, dyes and the slave trade were his main interests. They were mainly established in retail trade, exporting sugar and tobacco, with a small part that owned sugar mills and was involved in tax collection and loans.

They were also engaged in the slave trade. Slaves brought by East Africa Coast Company ships were auctioned and sold on credit to plantation owners. Portuguese Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam and Recife had a monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade until the mid-18th century. The da Costa, Ximenes, Ferreira, Dias Henriques, Vaz de Évora, Rodrigues de Elvas and Fernandes de Elvas families were some of the most prominent families that managed the contracts.

According to the chronicler Duarte de Albuquerque Coelho, the Jew Antonio Dias Paparrobalos acted as a central guide for the Dutch troops who landed. The military expedition organized in 1629, composed of mercenaries of various nationalities, included a unit composed mainly of Portuguese Jews, then called the "Company of Jews", which was part of the fleet of Admiral Hendrick Lonck that conquered Pernambuco in 1630.

The list was drawn up by Portuguese captain Estevan de Ares de Fonseca, a New Christian from Coimbra who converted to Judaism in Amsterdam. Fonseca, captured by the Spanish in the wars against the Protestants in the Netherlands, confessed to the inquisitors the active participation of Portuguese Jews in the army of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces and in the invasion of Brazil.

One of the Jewish soldiers who stood out the most in Dutch Brazil was Captain Moisés Navarro, who arrived in Pernambuco as a navy soldier and in 1635 became the owner of a sugar mill, a merchant of sugar and tobacco, and one of the richest men in Dutch Brazil. It was Moisés Navarro who, after the defeat at the Battle of Guararapes in 1649, acted as Sigismund von Schkopp's interpreter to the Portuguese and convinced commander Francisco Barreto de Menezes that the Dutch could bury their dead in Guararapes. After the end of Dutch Brazil in 1654, Navarro and his brothers Aaron and Jacob moved to the island of Barbados.

The majority of Recife's European residents after the Dutch occupation were Sephardic Jews, originally from Portugal, but who first emigrated to Amsterdam. The first rabbi of the Americas, appointed in 1642, was the Portuguese Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, chief rabbi of the Jews of Recife.

Gaspar Dias Ferreira, born in Lisbon and a New Christian, before the Dutch occupation, a merchant in Pernambuco, thanks to his relations with the Dutch, had acquired two of the best sugar mills that had been confiscated during his captain's service. Among the Portuguese, he became the most hated man in Dutch Brazil for his collaboration with the invaders from the beginning; He was the main Dutch spy in Pernambuco. He became a friend and advisor to Prince Maurice of Nassau.

Portuguese Jews largely financed the construction of Mauriciópolis, the new capital of New Holland (Official name of Dutch Brazil), a project led by Nassau, which became the most modern metropolis in the Americas. The city's bridge, at the time the largest built in Brazil, was financed in 1640 by the Sephardic Jew Baltazar de Affonseca.

Around 1654, after years of fighting against the West India Company, the Portuguese reconquered most of New Holland. They besieged Recife, or Mauriciópolis, the capital of the Dutch colony, in 1654. After the guard surrendered, General Francisco Barreto de Menezes demanded that the city's Jews liquidate their businesses in Brazil and leave the area, and the Portuguese settlement and Rua dos Judeus ("Street of the Jews") were renamed: Rua da Cruz ("Street of the Cross"), as was the Porta da Terra ("Gate of the Earth") was renamed Porta do Bom Jesus ("Door of the Good Jesus").

In 1654, the year of the Dutch surrender in Pernambuco, Sephardic Judaism left with the Jews who left Recife for Amsterdam, or were transferred to the Caribbean, the new paradise of the sugar industry in the Atlantic, nicknamed the Jodensavanne ("Jewish Savannah.")

There are reports that many were unable to leave Brazil and sought refuge in the interior, but it is not advisable to exaggerate the importance of this movement. Zur Israel itself had a relief fund, derived from the famous tax, intended to finance the return of poor Jews to Netherlands. Most of the new Jews left Recife in 1654. Those who remained soon converted back to Catholicism, before the Dutch surrender. This was the case of Captain Miquel Francês, born in Portugal in 1611, who traveled to New Holland with his family in 1639, where he met Brother Manoel Calado, who convinced him to renounce his Jewish faith and convert to Catholicism. Miquel Francês was the main spy of João Fernandes Vieira, one of the leaders of the Pernambuco revolt and the Battle of Guararapes.

They wanted to forget that they had been Jews for some time. Above all, they wanted "others" to forget him. Abandoned synagogue, abjuration of Judaism.

A group of 23 Portuguese Jews, consisting of men, women and children, headed to North America. There is data from September 1654 about their presence in New Amsterdam.

In Brazil, it is widely believed that the Jews who were expelled from Recife were the founders of what would later become New York. This is incorrect. New York did not receive that name until 1664, when the English expelled the Dutch from the island of Manhattan.

The colony's English name was a tribute to the Duke of York, the future king James II of England and VII of Scotland, the last Catholic monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland who was deposed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Apart from the English, the Jews expelled from Brazil did not found New York, nor New Amsterdam, the former name of the city on the island of Manhattan. This city, as its name indicates, was built as a fort in 1625 by the West India Company, five years before the conquest of Recife by the Dutch themselves. It was a fur trading post with the Indian population, nothing more than that.

A group of Jews, embarked on the frigate Valk, left Recife at the beginning of 1654 for the Caribbean. They were captured by the Spanish and taken to Jamaica, where there was talk of a possible expulsion to the Inquisition, probably that of Cartagena de Indias.

The truth is that 23 Jews from this group managed to reach New Amsterdam, where they were only received after the intervention of Menasseh Ben Israel before the Dutch authorities in Amsterdam. The Dutch in Manhattan no doubt feared that the Jews would repeat there what they had done in Brazil, namely, take over the trade. But that didn't happen: the Portuguese language was not really used in New Amsterdam.

The supposed founding of New York by the Jews of Recife is nothing more than a legend. In reality, the Jews of Recife did found the first Jewish community in North America, which later, especially in the 18th century, was integrated into the Antillean Sephardic networks. But, strictly speaking, the first Jew to set foot in New Amsterdam was Jacob Barsimson, or Jacob Bar Simson, an Ashkenazi who lived in Brazil until 1647. He fled Recife in 1654 on his own, obviously separated from the Sephardic Jews, and arrived in New Amsterdam in July. Shortly after, he returned to Netherlands.

Around 300 Portuguese Jews from Pernambuco migrated to Suriname. The new community then found it necessary to build a new religious temple after the loss of the Recife Synagogue. In 1665, the second oldest synagogue in the Americas, the Neveh Shalom Synagogue, was inaugurated in Paramaribo, Suriname. According to historian Ineke Rheinbeger, parts of the old Recife Synagogue were used in its construction. They developed a sugarcane plantation economy that used enslaved Africans as labor; according to some accounts, newly settled families received 4 or 5 enslaved people as part of their settlement grant, not unlike the economic reality in Brazil.

This saga is, not infrequently, a myth, among others constructed about the Dutch period in Brazil. Like the myth that Brazil would have been a better country if it had been colonized by them, an idea deconstructed by Sérgio Buarque, starting with Raízes do Brasil (1936):

Original:

“Só muito dificilmente (a empresa colonial neerlandesa) transpunha os muros das cidades e não podia implantar-se na vida rural de nosso nordeste, sem desnaturá-la ou perverter-se. Assim, a Nova Holanda exibia dois mundos distintos, duas zonas artificiosamente agregados. O esforço dos conquistadores batavos limitou-se a erigir uma grandeza de fachada, que só aos incautos podia mascarar a verdadeira, a dura realidade econômica em que se debatiam.”

Translation:

“Only very rarely did (the Dutch colonial enterprise) cross the city walls and it could not implant itself in the rural life of our Northeast without distorting or perverting it. Thus, New Holland exhibited two distinct worlds, two artificially aggregated zones. The effort of the Batavian conquerors was limited to erecting a façade of grandeur, which could only mask the true, harsh economic reality in which they struggled from the unwary.”

The Nassau government was ultimately idealized as a model of colonization that, however, Nassau, would have produced a more prosperous and civilized country. However, Evaldo Cabral de Mello demonstrated that the feeling of "nostalgia for Nassau" was not a phenomenon of the 20th century. It went back a long time. Since the 18th century, it was common to attribute several works in Recife to the Flemish, which in fact had been built by Portuguese governors. The expression "it is the work of the Dutch" became common to indicate useful and well-executed works. Even today, there are people who claim that Recife's Ponte Vecchio, with its lampposts and embroidered iron railings, was the work of Nassau, although it was built in 1921. Traps of memory. Nostalgia for an imaginary colonization.

Source(s):

.- Jerusalém colonial. By Ronaldo Vainfas

.- Judeus no Brasil: Estudos e Notas. By Thana Mara de Souza

.- Jews and new Christians in Dutch Brazil 1630- 1654. Kagan, Richard L.; Morgan, Philip.

One of the oldest and most distinguished Sephardic Jewish families of the Iberian Peninsula, in the 17th century, the first member of the Abravanel family arrived in Brazil. He was a distinguished figure, named David Abravanel Dormido, and under the name Manuel Martinez Dormido, he had been royal treasurer in the Spain of King Philip IV, where he lived as a New Christian, or Marrano/Judaizer (It is a term that refers to someone who was baptized in the Catholic Church and who, in public terms, presented himself to society as a practicing Catholic, but who was secretly Jewish, and even privately maintained some practices of Judaism).

Discovered as such, he was imprisoned for five years by the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. In 1632 he fled to Bordeaux in France and from there to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where he settled and integrated into the local Jewish community.

His sons Daniel (known as Luiz) and Salomão (known as Antonio) Abravanel Dormido were merchants in Dutch Recife in 1640, during Nassau's government in Pernambuco until 1654.

They were close friends of Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel (formerly Manoel Dias Soeiro, 1604-1657), whose wife, Raquel Abravanel, was the great-granddaughter of Dom Isaac Abravanel, a powerful figure in the Portuguese court in the 15th century. Their stay in Brazil was very brief.

Salomão Dormido was involved in disreputable activities (extortion) in Recife, which led to his arrest by Dutch authorities in 1652.

As members of the Jewish community, they helped colonize this new Dutch colony across the Atlantic Ocean. They established themselves mainly in the retail trade, exporting sugar and tobacco, with a small number owning sugar mills and engaging in tax collection and money lending. Some, however, were involved in the slave trade, with slaves brought by ships of the East Africa Coast Company being auctioned off and sold on credit to the plantation owners.

Abravanel helped finance military efforts to contain Portuguese revolts against the Dutch presence, with the creation of the famous Excubiae Iudaeorum ("Jewish Guard") in Recife, but it was all in vain.

The reconquest of Pernambuco by the Portuguese in 1654 ruined them. At that time, the question of the readmission of Jews to England arose, and Dormido was put in charge of the negotiations by Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel.

He went to London; and on November 3, 1654, he presented a petition to Cromwell, which the latter recommended to the Council. Cromwell also interceded with the King of Portugal for the restitution of Dormido's fortune after the loss of his assets (slaves and slave ships) in Brazil. In 1663 Dormido settled in London, where he became head of the first synagogue. His son Solomon was authorized to become a broker in the city of London in 1657, without taking the usual Christological oath.

In England, David Abravanel was called "the Brazilian" because of his long stay in Pernambuco, and he had a great influence in convincing England to accept Jewish immigration, as they had been expelled from the island in the 13th century. His son, Solomon Abravanel, who lived in Recife for twenty years, was the first broker on the Royal Stock Exchange in London. As a result, Jews from the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal came to Great Britain. They became increasingly integrated into British society.

It was believed in England that the existence of the Jewish community in Amsterdam was a major factor in the Netherlands becoming the richest country in the world (on a per capita basis); they hoped that allowing a similar Jewish settlement in London would bring equal prosperity to England.

It was in the 20th century that the 'Abravanéis' returned to Brazil, coming from cities that belonged to the crumbling Ottoman Empire. One of them was the young Alberto Abravanel, a direct descendant of Dom Isaac Abravanel, who would become the father of "Silvio Santos".

Source(s):

.- A odisséia dos judeus de Recife. By Egon Wolff, Frieda Wolff (1979)

.- Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800. Richard L. Kagan, Philip D. Morgan

.- As comunidades esquecidas: estudo sobre os cristãos-novos e judeus da Vila de Igarassu, Capitania de Itamaracá e Cidade Maurícia. By José Alexandre Ribemboim

https://ellguy.substack.com/p/how-to-turn-a-peace-prize-into-a?r=17hq7h

A banner written in Yiddish next to a banner in Russian with a slogan urging the Red Terror and a portrait of the deceased Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky, a Russian revolutionary of Jewish origin and Bolshevik leader during the Russian Revolution of October 1917.

These documentary images are rare, first published in Russia already under Bolshevik control in 1918. This filmed demonstration likely took place after the assassination of Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission. Moisei Uritsky was murdered on August 30, 1918, in Petrograd by Leonid Kannegisser in front of the Cheka headquarters. This assassination, along with the attempted assassination of Vladimir Lenin by the Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan, triggered the Bolshevik Red Terror.

The central banner is written in Yiddish, which translates to: "BUND," "Long Live the Internationale!", "Long Live Socialism!"

These images could indicate that members of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, a secular Jewish socialist party, openly supported Soviet power and publicly advocated for the Red Terror (referring to the campaign of political repression and massacres carried out by the Bolsheviks through the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, and the Red Army in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic between 1918 and 1922 during the Russian Civil War) in response to what they called the White Terror (referring to the persecution or violent actions committed by monarchist or conservative forces as part of a counter-revolution).

Jehuda Alkalai is one of the most remarkable figures in Jewish history. Fifty years before Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Alkalai was already advocating for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

It is said that Theodor Herzl's paternal grandfather, Simon Loeb Herzl, attended Alkalai's synagogue in Semlin and that the two visited each other frequently. Simon Loeb Herzl "held in his hands" one of the first copies of Alkalai's 1857 work, which prescribed "the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the renewed glory of Jerusalem." Contemporary scholars conclude that Herzl's implementation of modern Zionism was undoubtedly influenced by this relationship.

Source(s):

.- Theodor Herzl: A New Reading, Georges Yitshak Weisz, Gefen 2013, pp. 47-51