Portuguese Jews and New Christians in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822
Portuguese Jews and New Christians in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822
A New Geography of the Atlantic World
“This masterful use of Inquisition records and other sources reveals the roles of Portuguese Jews in colonial Brazil and, more broadly, in networks that spanned the Atlantic from Brazil to Amsterdam, Africa, the Caribbean, New York, and other places.”—Andrew Sluyter, author of Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications
The diaspora of Portuguese Jews and New Christians, known as Gente da Nação (People of the Nation), is considered the largest European diaspora of the early modern period. Portuguese Jews not only founded the first congregations and synagogues in Brazil (Recife and Olinda), but when they left Brazil they played an imperative role in establishing the first Jewish communities in Suriname, throughout the Caribbean, and in North America.
Drawing on nearly twenty thousand digitized dossiers of the Portuguese Inquisition, this volume offers a comprehensive, critical overview informed by both relatively inaccessible secondary sources and a significant body of primary sources.
Alan P. Marcus is a professor of geography and environmental planning at Towson University. He is the author of Confederate Exodus: Social and Environmental Forces in the Migration of U.S. Southerners to Brazil.
