Portuguese Jews and New Christians in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822

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.

Portuguese Jews and New Christians and their descendants were deeply involved in the colonial enterprise in Brazil. They were among the New World’s first sugarcane-industry experts, skilled laborers, merchants, rabbis, calligraphists, playwrights, poets, writers, pharmacists, medical doctors, real estate brokers, and geographers—a fact that remains largely unknown in most public and academic spheres.

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.