Portuguese Forced Conversions

Many Jews who fled Spain in 1492 crossed into Portugal. In December 1496 King Manuel I, who wanted to marry the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, agreed to her parents' condition and ordered the Jews out. Unwilling to lose so useful a population, he blocked their departure instead. Around Passover 1497 Jewish children were seized and baptized. Thousands of adults who had gathered in Lisbon to sail were baptized by force, some dragged to the font. Only a few, among them the astronomer Abraham Zacuto, managed to get away.

Manuel promised the "New Christians" twenty years free from investigation, but a riot in Lisbon in 1506 killed some 2,000 of them. In 1536 the Inquisition came to Portugal. Many families kept Judaism in secret for generations. Their descendants later founded the Portuguese Jewish communities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Bordeaux, and the 23 refugees from Recife who reached New Amsterdam in 1654. A crypto-Jewish community in Belmonte kept its traditions secretly until it was discovered in 1917.