Two Early Seventeenth-Century Sephardic Communities on Senegal's Petite Cote

Abstract

Portuguese archives contain a wealth of documents that are insufficiently utilized by, and often unknown to, historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century west Africa. Lusophone sources are crucial for the period of earliest contact between Europeans and West Africans. While the publications of Avelino Teixeira da Mota are widely known, the work of contemporary Portuguese scholars such as Maria Emilia Madeira Santos, Maria Manuel Torrão, and Maria João Soares does not have the same visibility except among lusophone scholars. Relatively few Africanists have recognized the potential significance of the Portuguese archives for Senegambia, a region generally considered within the orbit of francophone or anglophone west Africa. The Portuguese archives remain a rich source of hitherto unknown documents, some of which will lead to fundamental transformations in our historical knowledge of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Upper Guinea coast.The two of us have worked extensively on the history of the Luso-Africans in Senegambia and the Guinea of Cape Verde. Mark has investigated the construction and evolution of their identity. Horta, in particular, has for many years focused on their representation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese sources. Both writers have argued elsewhere—following Boulègue and Moraes—that among these Luso-Africans—or “Portuguese” as they were known in contemporary sources—there were New Christians, some of whom were probably practicing Jews. Evidence of the Jewish presence in west Africa remained scanty, however, and we argued that if some “Christian” Portuguese were in fact practicing Jews, they were Jews primarily in the privacy of their own communities.