Jews

There were Jews in Madeira in the 15th century, and many of them, willingly or not, embraced Christianity after the barbarous decree expelling the children of Israel, issued by Manuel I in December 1496.

This conversion did not, however, shield the old Hebrew families from harshness and persecution. Long before 1547, the year in which the Tribunal of the Holy Office was definitively established in Portugal, the New Christians (cristãos-novos) of this island suffered many wrongs and acts of violence, owing to the spirit of intolerance that then reigned in our country.

‘In the islands of the Azores and Madeira,’ says Alexandre Herculano in the Origem e Estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal, ‘in those small tracts of land, lost as it were in the solitudes of the Atlantic, insults and accusations of Judaism were repeated, and witnesses were easily found to support them, who were afterwards proved to be false.’ ‘This is attested,’ the same author adds in a note, ‘by the judicial instruments presented by the New Christians in Rome in 1544, which are to be found in the Symicta, vol. 31, fol. 137 et seq.’

It should be noted that Dom Diogo Pinheiro, Bishop of Funchal, always upheld in the councils of King Manuel I the true principles of evangelical tolerance in everything concerning the unfortunate Hebrews. ‘Trials for crimes of Judaism,’ says Herculano, ‘which apparently fell under his jurisdiction, or which he was sent to judge, ended as a rule with the release of the accused. Knowing thoroughly the history of the conversion of the Jews, which he had witnessed, he was profoundly convinced that such a conversion had been nothing but brutal violence. For him the fact of an imposed baptism had no validity whatsoever, and the converts had remained as Jewish as they had been before.’

In the ‘Notes and Articles of Complaint’ which Infante Ferdinand sent in 1461 to João Gonçalves da Câmara and to the knights, squires, judges, procurators and good men (homens bons, local notables eligible for municipal office) of the captaincy of Funchal, the following is found: ‘As to your request that neither Jews nor Genoese should trade in that island as buyers and farmers of revenues, because of the ruin that is wrought in the lands where they are active, I say that it pleases me to keep in this the practice that the said lord Infante my father kept.’

The petition addressed to the Infante reveals that as early as 1461 there was a certain ill will in Madeira against the Israelites. This ill will only showed itself very clearly later, when the intolerance and fanaticism of Manuel I opened the way to the persecutions suffered by the members of that proscribed race, even when they accepted baptism to avoid expulsion from the country.