The Western Sephardic Diaspora

Abstract

Abstract The western Sephardic diaspora was created by descendants of Jews who underwent forced baptism in Portugal in 1497, just a few years after the expulsion from Spain had brought a flood of Jewish exiles across the border. These conversos, many of them crypto-Jews, became known as the “nação” (“nation”), a term that conveyed an ambiguous identity that had made them targets of the Portuguese Inquisition. At first, some immigrated to Iberian colonial lands or fled to Jewish communities in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-sixteenth century, some who were active in the expanding Atlantic trade began settling in southwest France as “New Christians.” In the seventeenth century Portuguese ex-conversos were able to build a thriving, openly practicing Jewish community in the Atlantic commercial center of Amsterdam. This became the hub of a diaspora that eventually included the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of North America. Although some of its traditions have been carefully preserved, by the mid-eighteenth century this once dynamic diaspora had lost much of its commercial and cultural vitality.