The Jewish Sugar and the Inquisition in Brazil
The Jews and the Inquisition in Brazil
The Portuguese Inquisition, officially known as the General Council of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Portugal (Inquisition seal featured), was formally established in Portugal in 1536 at the request of its king, John III. Manuel I had asked for the installation of the Inquisition in 1515 to fulfill the commitment of marriage with Maria of Aragon, but it was only after his death that Pope Paul III acquiesced. In the period after the Medieval Inquisition, it was one of three different manifestations of the wider Christian Inquisition along with the Spanish Inquisition and Roman Inquisition. The major target of the Portuguese Inquisition were those who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, the Conversos, also known as New Christians, Conversos or Marranos, who were suspected of secretly practicing Judaism. Many of these were originally Spanish Jews who had left Spain for Portugal, when Spain forced Jews to convert to Christianity or leave. The number of victims is estimated as around 40,000.
As a colony of Portugal, Brazil was affected by the 300 years of repression of the Portuguese Inquisition, which began in 1536. There have been Jews in what is now Brazil since the first Portuguese arrived in the country in 1500, notably Mestre João and Gaspar da Gama who arrived in the first ships.
Although only baptised Christians were subject to the Inquisition, Jews started settling in Brazil when the Inquisition reached Portugal, in the 16th century. They arrived in Brazil during the period of Dutch rule, setting up in Recife the first synagogue in the Americas, the Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue, as early as 1636. Most of those Jews were Sephardic Jews who had fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal to the religious freedom of the Netherlands.
In his The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith attributed much of the development of Brazil’s sugar industry and cultivation to the arrival of Portuguese Jews who were forced out of Portugal during the Inquisition
An auto-da-fé, meaning ‘act of faith’ was the ritual of public penance carried out between the 15th and 19th centuries on condemned heretics. The apostates were imposed by the Spanish, Portuguese, or Mexican Inquisition as punishment and enforced by civil authorities. Its most extreme form was death by burning. The first recorded auto-da-fé was held in Paris in 1242. Auto-da-fés took place in France, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Peru, the Ukraine in the Portuguese colony of Goa, India and in Mexico where the last in the world was held in 1850. Nearly five hundred auto-da-fés were “celebrated” by the Roman Catholic Church over the course of three centuries, and thousands of Jews met their deaths this way usually after months of suffering in the Inquisition’s prisons and torture chambers. This brutal and public ritual consisted of a Catholic Mass, a procession of heretics and apostates, many of them marranos, or “secret Jews”, and their torture and execution by burning at the stake. Last-minute penitents were garroted to spare the pain of death by burning. Historians note that the best-known action of the Inquisition against Crypto-Jews in Brazil were the Visitations of 1591–93 in Bahia; 1593–95 in Pernambuco; 1618 in Bahia; around 1627 in the Southeast; and in 1763 and 1769 in Grão-Pará, in the north of the country. In the 18th century, the Inquisition was also active in Paraíba, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais. Approximately 400 “judaizers” were prosecuted, most of them being condemned to imprisonment, and 18 New Christians were condemned to death in Lisbon.
A consortium of Jews, headed by Fernao de Noronha, had obtained in 1502 a three year lease from the Portuguese Crown for the exploration and settlement of the newly-discovered Brazil. The lease, constituting in reality a monopoly, was extended for an additional ten years in 1505. This consortium sent six ships each year to Brazil with materials, goods and colonists. Under its auspices, new lands were discovered and settled, and fortifications erected and maintained. The consortium pioneered in the dye brazilwood industry and also brought sugarcane to Brazil from Madeira and Sao Thome, where their ships landed en route. They made successful attempts at planting sugar in Brazil, and by 1516 the construction of a sugar mills started.
Hereditary Captaincies and the Introduction of Sugarcane Culture in Brazil
The Hereditary Captaincies of Brazil (Capitanias Hereditarias do Brasil), established in 1534, were captaincies of the Portuguese Empire, administrative divisions and hereditary fiefs of Portugal in the colony of Brazil, on the Atlantic coast of northeastern South America. Each was granted to a single donee, a Portuguese nobleman who was given the title Captain General. The responsibilities of the donatários (donees) were to administer, colonise and develop the territory in exchange for the hereditary title and ample powers to manage and profit from these estates. I was clearly, just a clever way for the Crown to transfer the burden of Brazil’s colonisation to private landlords. Except for two, Pernambuco and São Vicente (later called São Paulo), they were administrative and economic failures. They were effectively subsumed by the Governorates General and the States of Brazil and Maranhão starting in 1549, and the last of the privately granted captaincies reverted to the Crown in 1754. Their final boundaries in the latter half of the eighteenth century became the basis for the provinces of Brazil.
Sugarcane refer to several species and hybrids of tall perennial grasses in the genus Saccharum, tribe Andropogoneae, that are used for sugar production. The plants are two to six metres (six to twenty feet) tall with stout, jointed, fibrous stalks that are rich in sucrose, which accumulates in the stalk internodes. It is native to the warm temperate to tropical regions of Southeast Asia and New Guinea and was brought to Europe by one of the expeditions of the Crusades.
Starting in the sixteenth century, sugarcane grown on plantations called engenhos along the northeast coast (Brazil’s Nordeste) became the base of Brazilian economy and society. By that time, sugarcane and gold had almost the same value, and the Portuguese were the very few people who had the resources needed to explore overseas, searching for new lands to conquer (and make money). At first, settlers tried to enslave the natives as labour to work the fields. Portugal had pioneered the plantation system in the Atlantic islands of Madeira and São Tomé, with forced labour, high capital inputs of machinery, slaves, and work animals.
The industry was dominated by the Jews, who were good connoisseur of the sugar culture and introduced many innovations, regarding machinery and processes. The extensive cultivation of sugar was for an export market, necessitating land that could be acquired with relatively little conflict from existing occupants. By 1570, Brazil’s sugar output rivaled that of the Atlantic islands. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch seized productive areas of northeast Brazil, from 1630–1654, and took over the plantations.
The Tamoyo Confederation (Confederação dos Tamoios) was a military alliance of aboriginal chieftains of the sea coast ranging from what is today Santos to Rio de Janeiro, which occurred from 1554 to 1567. The main reason for this rather unusual alliance between separate tribes was to react against slavery and wholesale murder and destruction wrought by the early Portuguese discoverers and colonisers of Brazil onto the native people. Cunhambebe was elected chief of the Confederation by his counterparts, and together with chiefs Pindobuçú, Koakira, Araraí and Aimberê, declared war on the Portuguese.
