The group of Jewish ex-conversos known as Western Sephardim, also referred to ambiguously as “Spanish and Portuguese Jews,” “Spanish Jews,” “Portuguese Jews,” and “Jews of the Portuguese Nation,” originally resided in Spain and Portugal as ostensible New Christians, or as Anusim, or “forced [converts].” An Old World branch and a New World branch are further divisions among Western Sephardim.
According to Henry Kamen and Joseph Perez, of the 350,000 people of Jewish heritage who lived in Spain at the time the Alhambra Decree was issued, up to 300,000 of them made the decision to stay in Spain, making up the majority of the population. In addition, a sizeable number of people returned to Spain in the years after the expulsion, with the Crown assuring they may reclaim their property at the same price as it had been sold as long as they converted to Catholicism.
Nevertheless, discrimination against this sizable converso population persisted, and the Inquisition particularly persecuted individuals who covertly practiced the Jewish faith. The final wave of persecution ended in the middle of the 18th century. External emigration from the Iberian Peninsula occurred at the same times as these periods of increasing Inquisitional persecution.
A small number of marranos (conversos who secretly practiced Judaism) later emigrated to more religiously tolerant Old World nations outside the Iberian cultural sphere, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, and England. This was due to the discrimination and persecution they had experienced. After the first decrees mandating conversion, deportation, or death, conversos in these countries sometimes converted back to Judaism and re-joined the Jewish community up to the third or even fourth generations later. These Jews who have converted again are the Old World Western Sephardim.
On the other hand, New World Western Sephardim are the offspring of the millions of Old Christian Portuguese and Spaniards who immigrated to the Americas. They were conversos, or New Christians of Jewish descent. More specifically, New World Western Sephardim are Western Sephardim whose converso ancestors immigrated to various non-Iberian colonies in the Americas under which authorities they could revert to Judaism.
The descendants of conversos who immigrated to the American colonies of Iberia but were unable to convert to Judaism are contrasted with another group called New World Western Sephardim. The Sephardic Bnei Anusim are a similar but separate group.
Converso immigration was once forbidden in most of Ibero-America due to the presence of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition in those countries. As a result, very few Iberian American colonies’ converso immigrants ever converted to Judaism. Of the conversos in the New World who did convert to Judaism, the majority were those who had first sought temporary asylum in the Netherlands and/or were establishing in the Dutch colonies in the New World, such as Curaçao and the region formerly known as New Holland (also called Dutch Brazil).
Dutch For less than 25 years, the Dutch dominated the northern part of the colony of Brazil. The Portuguese then took control of the southern part of the country. Jews who had just recently converted in Dutch Brazil were forced to evacuate once more and settle in other Dutch colonies in the Americas, including Curaçao and New Amsterdam, which is now New York.
Western Sephardim, many of whom landed in the then-Dutch-ruled New Amsterdam, created all of the earliest congregations in the non-Iberian colonial lands of the Americas, with their synagogues being in the tradition of “Spanish and Portuguese Jews.”
The oldest Jewish congregation in the country, namely in the United States, is Congregation Shearith Israel in modern-day New York City, founded in 1654. Its current structure was constructed in 1897. Congregation Jeshuat Israel in Newport, Rhode Island, is believed to have been founded shortly after Western Sephardim arrived there in 1658 but before the community purchased a cemetery in 1677 that is today known as Touro Cemetery.
The surnames of many Western Sephardim (whether Old World or New World) tend to be Portuguese versions of typical Spanish surnames, but some are still Spanish, as a result of their ancestors’ intermittent period of living in Portugal (after the first exodus from Spain).
Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and Benjamin N. Cardozo, a former associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, are two prominent individuals with roots in Western Sephardim. Both are descended from Western Sephardim who emigrated from Portugal to the Netherlands, and in Nicolás Maduro’s case, from the Netherlands to Curaçao and ultimately Venezuela.
