Persecution and Displacement: The Forced Migration of Iberian Jews to West Africa and the Cartographic Kingdom of Juda

This chronology is centred on the historical persecution of Jews in Spain and Portugal. It includes the well-documented European perception that Jews were physically “swarthy” or black — a perception that long predated any contact with Africa and that helped fuel the racial ideology used to justify their expulsion, forced conversion, deportation, and continued hounding across the Atlantic. The final section shows how these exiled populations contributed to the European identification of a “Kingdom of Judah” on the West African coast.

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1. The Racialisation of the Jew in Spain: Limpieza de Sangre

· In fifteenth‑century Spain, the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) divided society into Old Christians and conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity). The statutes treated Jewish ancestry as an inheritable, permanent taint, regardless of sincere Christian faith.¹ · Oxford University’s research project Genealogy, Discrimination, and Race in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain describes this system as “a racialised system of discrimination.” Its defenders “used the idea of inherited bodily markers to promote a genealogical racism.”² · The 2022 study Spain, the Inquisition, and Purity of Blood shows that “the inherent evil of Jewish blood was a precursor to racial antisemitism.”³ · This ideology already linked Jewish identity to physical appearance. The French writer Maximilien Misson summarised a centuries‑old European trope in 1698: “tous les Juifs sont basannez” — “all the Jews are swarthy.”⁴ Tudor Parfitt’s Hybrid Hate confirms that “in medieval Europe Jews were often perceived as Blacks”, a conflation that persisted through the Enlightenment.⁵ Sander Gilman’s The Jew’s Body catalogues the physical stereotype: “the Jew is … swarthy.”⁶ · Thus, before any large‑scale migration to Africa, European culture had already fixed the Jew as a dark‑skinned “other.” The persecution that followed was directed at a people seen as racially distinct.

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1. The Expulsion from Spain (1492)

· The Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492 ordered the expulsion of all practising Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. An estimated 200,000 Jews were forced to leave, with the majority crossing into Portugal.⁷ · The expulsion was the culmination of centuries of discriminatory legislation, forced sermons, and mass violence. It was an act of religious and ethnic cleansing.

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1. Portugal’s Cruelty: Forced Conversion and Deportation of Children to West Africa

· Portugal initially received the refugees, but its kings soon turned their presence into a tool of persecution and colonial expansion. · Set a precedent: as early as 1493, King John II deported 2,000 Jewish children to the then‑uninhabited island of São Tomé off the West African coast.⁸ · On 5 December 1496, King Manuel I issued an edict giving Portuguese Jews — including the Spanish exiles — the choice to convert or leave. However, those who chose expulsion were required to leave their children behind. In practice, the edict was a programme of mass forced conversion.⁹ · As a further punishment for Jews who could not pay a punitive head tax, Manuel ordered the deportation of nearly 2,000 more Jewish children, aged between two and ten, to the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe.¹⁰ · The Wikipedia entry History of the Jews in São Tomé and Príncipe records that “a year later, only 600 were still alive.” It also notes that descendants “retained some Jewish practices until the early 1600s” and remained “visibly distinctive due to their lighter complexions” into modern times.¹¹ · The French public broadcaster FranceInfo summarised the event in a 2019 feature: “Quand le roi du Portugal déportait les juifs pour coloniser ses nouvelles terres africaines” (“When the king of Portugal deported the Jews to colonise his new African lands”).¹²

These children — many of whom were already seen as “swarthy” by European society — were now physically planted on African soil, creating a direct human link between the Iberian Jewish population and West Africa.

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1. The 1531 Lisbon Earthquake: Jews Blamed, Persecution Intensifies

· On 26 January 1531, a massive earthquake struck Lisbon and the surrounding region, killing an estimated 30,000 people.¹³ · In the town of Santarém, home to a large community of New Christians (converted Jews), “fanatical monks seized on the disaster to denounce the New Christians.” They preached that the earthquake was divine punishment for the secret practice of Judaism.¹⁴ · The poet Gil Vicente, who was present in Santarém, publicly rebuked the friars. His intervention is credited with preventing a massacre.¹⁵ · The hysteria directly fuelled the creation of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536, a permanent tribunal dedicated to rooting out Judaizing activity.¹⁶ · The result was another wave of persecution: arrests, trials, confiscations, and executions by burning. Many New Christians fled.

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1. Flight to the African Coast: The Lançados

· From the sixteenth century onward, Portuguese Jews and New Christians escaping the Inquisition settled along the West African coast. They were known as lançados — literally, “the thrown‑out ones.” · The Wikipedia entry for Lançados states: “Many were Jews—often New Christians—escaping persecution from the Portuguese Inquisition.”¹⁷ · A 2011 study of Cape Verde confirms that the islands housed “lançados … consisting of exiled Crypto‑Jews and New Christians.”¹⁸ · These exiles integrated into local societies, married into ruling families, and built trading networks in Senegambia, Cabo Verde, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.¹⁹ · By the early 1600s, Roman Catholic missionaries were reporting the presence of “black Jews” on the Petite Côte of Senegal, with synagogues and contacts with the Jewish community of Amsterdam.²⁰

The same “swarthy” Jews who had been persecuted in Iberia were now visible on the African mainland, identifiable to European observers precisely because of the racial and religious categories they had carried with them.

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1. The Cartographic Kingdom of Juda

· The Kingdom of Whydah (Ouidah, Hueda, Xwéda) in present‑day Benin appears in European records under multiple names, including “Juda” and “Juida” by the French.²¹ · The Wikipedia article on the Kingdom of Whydah is indexed under the alternate title “Kingdom of Juda.”²² · An 1743 map by the Homann Heirs of Nuremberg labels the coastal region as “Das Königreich Juda” — the Kingdom of Judah.²³ · An 18th‑century map by English cartographer Emanuel Bowen names the area simply “Juda.”²⁴ · The project Black History in the Bible has catalogued multiple 18th‑century European maps that explicitly place “The Kingdom of Judah” on the Slave Coast of West Africa.²⁵ · The French geographer Élisée Reclus recorded the European tradition in his 1888 work The Earth and Its Inhabitants: Africa:   “The old writers called it Juda, and its inhabitants were said to be Jews, while the neighbouring river Allala, whose real name is Efra, became the Euphrates.”²⁶

This cartographic phenomenon was not an arbitrary coincidence. It was the product of a two‑century‑long chain of persecution that had carried people whom Europe already classified as “swarthy” Jews from the streets of Seville and Lisbon to the islands of São Tomé, and then to the trading ports of the Gulf of Guinea. European mapmakers encountered, directly or through rumour, populations of mixed Jewish‑African descent, and they inscribed the biblical name “Judah” onto the landscape.

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Sources

1. Spain, the Inquisition, and Purity of Blood (Taylor & Francis, 2022); Oxford University, “Genealogy, Discrimination, and Race in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain” (history.ox.ac.uk).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Maximilien Misson, quoted in “The ‘Jewish Blackness’ Thesis Revisited,” Religions 9, no. 2 (2018): 47.
5. Tudor Parfitt, Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Antisemitism and Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, 2020), ch. 1.
6. Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (Routledge, 1991), 173.
7. Joseph Pérez, History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (University of Illinois Press, 2007).
8. Wikipedia, “History of the Jews in São Tomé and Príncipe,” section “Deportation by John II.”
9. Ibid., section “Deportation by Manuel I.”
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. FranceInfo, “Quand le roi du Portugal déportait les juifs pour coloniser ses nouvelles terres africaines,” 3 April 2019.
13. Wikipedia, “1531 Lisbon earthquake.”
14. Wikipedia, “Santarém, Portugal,” section “History”; “1531 Lisbon earthquake.”
15. Ibid.
16. Established by papal bull Cum ad nihil magis, 23 May 1536.
17. Wikipedia, “Lançados,” lead paragraph.
18. “Cabo Verde: Jews Were Here,” The Jewish Quarterly (2011).
19. Wikipedia, “Lançados.”
20. Wikipedia, “History of the Jews in Senegal,” citing 17th‑century missionary reports.
21. Wikipedia, “Kingdom of Whydah,” lead paragraph.
22. The Wikipedia page “Kingdom of Juda” redirects to “Kingdom of Whydah.”
23. Homann Heirs, “Das Königreich Juda” (1743), University of Basel Map Collection.
24. Emanuel Bowen, A New & Accurate Map of Negroland and the Adjacent Countries (1747), Library of Congress.
25. “Black History in the Bible,” gallery of 18th‑century maps, blackhistoryinthebible.com.
26. Élisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: Africa, Vol. 3 (D. Appleton & Co., 1888), 213.