ing to Miss Elvira Nathan Solis,* which bears a Spanish legend that may be rendered:

'Draw me not without reason

Sheathe me not without honor."

* Daughter of David Hays Solis and Elvira Nathan, his wife; David Hays Solis being the son of Jacob da Silva Solis and Charity Hays, his wife.

THE COLONIZATION OF AMERICA BY THE

JEWS.

BY DR. M. KAYSERLING, Buda-Pest, Austria.

The sources on the earliest settlement of the Jews in America are rather scant. Like the discovery of the New World and its colonization, the earliest settlement of the Jews in the newly discovered countries is, as might be expected, closely connected with Spain. Where the history of the Jews in Spain ends, that of the Jews in America begins; the Inquisition is the last chapter of the confessors of Judaism on the Pyrenean peninsula, and its first chapter on the continent of the western hemisphere.

The number of the Marranos, the children and grandchildren of those Jews who were burnt and condemned by the Spanish Inquisition, that settled in New Española and on the American continent shortly after the discovery, was so large that Queen Johanna considered it necessary, in 1511, to take measures against them. But this also clearly shows that the Marranos or Nuevos Christianos concealed their faith, or were able to conceal it, as little in the New World as in the mother-country.

The Marranos, New Christians, or Secret Jews were by no means so alien to Judaism as is generally assumed. A nation does not change its religion, its hereditary faith, like a garment. With astonishing tenacity, nay, with admirable obstinacy, the Marranos for centuries firmly clung to the faith of their fathers; it was not a rare occurrence that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the martyred Jews sanctified the Sabbath in a most conscientious manner by refraining from work as far as possible, and by wearing better clothing; they also celebrated the Jewish festivals, observed the

Quippur, as the Day of Atonement is called in the acts of the Inquisition, by fasting, married according to Jewish custom, etc. If one considers how many Marranos suffered for Judaism, even as late as in the 18th century, how many as martyrs of their faith went to the stake or ended their lives in the prisons of the Holy Office, how the inhabitants of the New World not only in Goa, Lima, and other places, but, transported in groups to Spain and Portugal, suffered everything for their attachment to Judaism in Seville, Toledo, Evora, Lisbon, he will be glad to identify himself with the Jews. Their religious heroism will be apparent in all its magnitude when the immense documentary material which is heaped up in the state archives of Alcalá de Henares, Seville, Simancas, Evora, Lisbon and other cities shall have been sifted and worked up.

As in New Española, so also in Portuguese India and Brazil, secret Jews settled in considerable numbers before the middle of the 16th century; they were scattered along the whole coast and carried on an extensive trade in precious stones with Venice, Turkey and other countries where copatriots and co-religionists were living. They, too, threw off the mask of disguise and professed Judaism as soon as they believed themselves in security. No wonder therefore that, like in the mother-country, Lisbon, Evora and Coimbra, so also at Goa, the metropolis of Portuguese dominion in India, the Inquisition was established with jurisdiction over all the Portuguese possessions in Asia and Africa as far as the Cape of Good Hope.

In order to prevent the emigration of the Marranos to India or Brazil, the Cardinal-Infant D. Enrique, as Regent of Portugal, issued an edict on the 30th of June, 1567. This was repeatedly renewed, and recalled only when the Jews, and Marranos, who were already residing there, offered to pay to the state the immense sum of 1,700,000 cruzados. Only then was residence and free commerce granted them by the law of the 21st of May, 1557. It was forbidden under

4

penalty to call them any longer Jews, Marranos or New Christians.*

At the outbreak of hostilities with Holland, which granted full religious liberty to the Jews, the Marranos made common cause with the Hollanders, equipped ships for them, and sent considerable sums of money to Spanish-Portuguese Jews in Hamburg and Aleppo, who forwarded them to Holland and Zealand.†

Also in the old empire of the Inkas, in Peru and in Lima, secret Jews, mostly Portuguese refugees, settled early. They soon became so numerous there that Philip II., who was cruel even against his own son, took the most rigorous measures against them and introduced the Holy Office. The first who fell as a victim of the Inquisition was a physician named Juan Alvarez; he himself, his wife and children, lived according to the law of Moses (à la Ley de Moyses). In 1582 Moses Lopez, who was also called Luis Coronado, of Yelves in Portugal, went to the stake; he confessed to have observed the Jewish law in his house with many other persons of his The merchant Duarte Nuñez, who emigrated from Lisbon, experienced the same fate; he confessed to have lived as a Jew and desired to depart from life as such. A few years later he was followed by the physician Alvaro Nuñez of Braganza, who lived in La Plata, by Diego Rodriguez de Silvera, who settled in Guamanga, and many others.‡

race.

A new phase of the colonization of America by the Jews began with the conquest of Brazil by the Hollanders. In 1642 Spanish-Portuguese Jews set out, under the leadership of two rabbis, Isaac Aboab and Moses Raphael de Aguilar, from Amsterdam to Brazil, and took up their homes at Bahia and other cities. From there they settled in Paramaribo, Curaçoa, Cayenne, etc. When, in 1654, the

* Documentos remittidos da India, III., 459, 510 f.; Porto Seguro Historia geral do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), p. 412.

+ Documentos, etc., I., 106.

J. T. Medina, Historia del Tribunal del S. Oficio de la Inquisicion de Lima (1569-1820).

Hollanders lost Brazil and the Jews were deprived of the liberty which they had enjoyed, many returned to Amsterdam, the remainder taking up their domiciles in Surinam. The Jews who, according to the list published by Dr. Cyrus Adler in the "Publications of the American Historical Society," lived in 1650 in Barbadoes, came, with a few exceptions, directly or indirectly from Amsterdam; several of those mentioned, as Isaac Pereira, Isaac Meza, Jacob Nuñez, were living several years before in Surinam. Also Benjamin Bueno de Mesquita, buried in New York on the 25th of October or 4th of Cheshvan, 1683, whose tombstone is described by Mr. N. Taylor Phillips,† was a member of a well-known Spanish-Portuguese Jewish family of Amsterdam.

As late as the eighteenth century, those persecuted by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition sought refuge in America; the advocate, Manuel Seixas, of Alcacere, whose son Vicente was condemned on the 10th of May, 1682, at Lisbon, as an adherent of Judaism, was certainly a relative of the Seixas whom we find a hundred years later as Hazan (Reader) in New York and Philadelphia.

* Publications I., 105 ff. Paul Denerde and David Ralph Demereado were hardly Jews. For Rodrigus (p. 106) read Rodriques; for Decompas, de Campos; for Abof, Aboaf; for Hamias, Namias; for Cordoza, Cardozo; for Fonceco, Fonseca, and for Dechavis, de Chaves.

+Publications No. I., p. 91.