Curse of Ham

Christopher Columbus began his diary by stating: “In the same month in which their Majesties [Ferdinand and Isabella] issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies.” Contrary to popular assumption, Columbus’ voyage to the New World was not funded by Queen Isabella, but rather by two Jewish Conversos, Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez, and the famous Kabbalist Don Isaac Abarbanel (1437 – 1508). The day of Columbus’ departure was the day after Abarbanel led 300,000 fellow Jews out of Spain carrying a Torah scroll on Tisha B’Av (“the Ninth of Av”), marking the destruction of the First and Second Holy Temples. However, Columbus ordered his crew to be on board the day before, the same day as the deadline for Jews in Spain to convert to Christianity, leave the country or face death. “In the same month in which Their Majesties issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories—in that same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies,” announced Columbus in his account of the expedition which led to his discovery of the New World.[1] “The connection between the Jews and the discovery of America was not, however,” noted Cecil Roth, “merely a question of fortuitous coincidence. The epoch-making expedition of 1492 was as a matter of fact very largely a Jewish, or rather a Marrano, enterprise.”[2]

Tragically, according to David Brion Davis—the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian—Abarbanel also played a key role in providing the justification for enslavement of black Africans, based on the so-called “Curse of Ham”:

[…] the great Jewish philosopher and statesman Isaac ben Abarbanel, having seen many black slaves both in his native Portugal and in Spain, merged Aristotle’s theory of natural slaves with the belief that the biblical Noah had cursed and condemned to slavery both his son Ham and his young grandson Canaan. Abarbanel concluded that the servitude of animalistic black Africans should be perpetual.[3]

According to the Bible, Noah had survived the Flood with his three sons, Shem, Japheth and Ham. After a bout of drunkenness, Noah fell asleep without covering himself. When his son Ham came into his tent, he saw his father naked, and laughed. His two other brothers, Shem and Japheth, were wiser and entered backwards into their father’s tent to cover him. For his sin, Ham was cursed by Noah, but due to his nearness in relation to him, he placed the curse not on Ham, but on Ham’s son, Canaan, and his descendants. Noah then pronounced, according to the Bible, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants he shall be to his brothers”[4]

In the Middle Ages, Ham and Cain were often confused, as both were cursed and were associated with sin, evil, and heresy.[5] One interpretation of this passage had stated that Ham married a descendant of Cain, who was black, so that the descendants of Canaan were both marked with black skin and cursed to be servants of servants. While there is no indication in the Bible of Ham’s wife descending from Cain, this interpretation was used to justify slavery and it was particularly popular in America during the Atlantic slave trade.[6] Modern scholars however believe that the Canaanites are of Semitic origin, and therefore unrelated to black Africans. The term “Hamitic” originally referred to the peoples said to be descended from Ham, one of the Sons of Noah according to the Bible. Of Ham’s four sons, Canaan fathered the Canaanites, while Mizraim fathered the Egyptians, Cush the Cushites, and Phut the Libyans.

Explaining the sources of slavery’s justification, David Goldenberg wrote, “Rabbinic racism became an accepted fact in the canon of literature pertaining to Africans and race prejudice.”[7] Already in the 1940’s, J.A. Rogers noted that the idea of a curse of blackness on Ham “originates in the Talmud, Midrash, and other rabbinical writings.”[8] The proposition that anti-Black racism had a Jewish origin was first stated about thirty years ago, and has been repeated in academia and non-scholarly works with varying degrees of partiality. The idea originated with the 1963 publications of three authors, one a Jew, two of them Black. Thomas Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America claimed that two legends, which the author found in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1904), depict the origin of black skin as a curse of God, thus exhibiting “the most famous example of racism among Jews.”[9] Raphael Patai, an anthropologist, and Robert Graves, a novelist, published Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis, containing examples of rabbinic discussions of Genesis myths.

According to Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, author of The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics, “The golden age of Jewry in Spain owed some of its wealth to an international network of Jewish slave traders. Bohemian Jews purchased Slavonians and sold to Spanish Jews for resale to the Moors.”[10] According to Henri Pirenne, though many merchants were engaged in the slave-trade, they seem to have been principally Jews.[11] Because many of the ethnic Jews in the New World were “New Christians” or “Conversos,” historian Seymour Drescher emphasized the problems of determining whether or not slave-traders were Jewish. He concludes that “New Christian” merchants managed to gain control of a sizeable share of all segments of the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade.[12]

The Jews’ participation in the slave trade, in addition to their reputation as money-lenders, contributed to the justification for their expulsion from numerous European countries beginning in the eleventh century.[13] Despite the prohibition against Jewish participation in slave trading during the Middle Ages, Jews were the chief traders of Christian slaves and played a significant role in the slave trade in Europe and other regions.[14] In his book, A History of the Jews, Solomon Grayzel states that “Jews were among the most important slave dealers” in European society.[15] Lady Magnus writes that during the Middle Ages, “The principal purchasers of slaves were found among the Jews… [T]hey seemed to be always and everywhere at hand to buy, and to have the means equally ready to pay.”[16] By the time of Pope Gregory the Great (590 – 604 AD), Jews had become the chief traders in this type of traffic.[17]

While Moorish slaves were also sold in Gaul, other slaves came from Thuringia, and still others from England. There were many English slaves for sale in the market of Marseilles. All slaves captured on raids by traders, or procured in Britain, were dispatched to the Mediterranean ports. Some writers have pointed out that, as the Western world began the profit increasingly from the slave trade, the image of the Negro deteriorated in direct proportion to his value as a commodity, and scholars began to search for definitive proof the Negro’s inferiority.[18] Justifications drew heavily from Jewish sources. The Babylonian Talmud, which appeared in the sixth century AD, asserted that the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black, and depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates.[19]

Some Arab slave traders used the account of Noah and Ham in the Bible to justify Negro (Zanj) slavery, and later European and American Christian traders and slave owners adopted a similar argument.[20] Talmudic or Midrashic explanations of the myth of Ham were well known to Jewish writers in the Middle Ages, such as Benjamin of Tudela. By the year 1600, the notion was generally accepted. In one of the earliest post-medieval references found, Leo Africanus, the great Arab traveler and one-time protégé of Pope Leo X, wrote about Negro Africans as being descended from Ham. His translator, the Englishman John Pory, followed the text with his own commentary.

Prince Henry the Navigator

The earliest Christian formulation of the Curse of Ham was articulated in the mid-fifteenth-century Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea of Gomes Eannes de Zurara (c. 1410 – c. 1474), to Prince Henry the Navigator (1417 – 1460), Grand Master of the neo-Templar Order of Christ, and great-great-grandson of its founder, Denis I of Portugal. Zurara wrote that a “noble Moor” captured on the Saharan coast had proposed through an Arabic interpreter that, if he were allowed to return home, his ransom would be paid in “black Moors.” Zurara added:

And here you must note that these Blacks being Moors like the others, are nevertheless servants of the former, in accordance with ancient custom, which I believe to have been because of the curse which after the Deluge, Noah laid upon his son Cain [Portuguese original “Caim”], cursing him in this way:—that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world. And from his race these Blacks are descended, as wrote the Archbishop Don Roderic of Toledo, and Josephus in his book on the Antiquities of the Jews, and Walter (Gualtero), with other authors who have spoken of the generations of Noah, from the time of his going out of the Ark.[21]

Archbishop Don Roderic of Toledo has been identified as Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (c. – 1247), the moral leader of the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.[22] Don Roderic was a friend of Alfonso VIII of Castile, the cousin of Blanche of Navarre and a patron of the Order of Santiago.[23] Prince Henry the Navigator was the son of King John I of Portugal and Philippa of Lancaster, whose father was John of Gaunt, son of Edward III of England, founder of the Order of the Garter. Henry’s brother was Edward, King of Portugal, also a Knight of the Garter, who married Eleanor of Aragon, Queen of Portugal. Their son was Afonso V of Portugal, also Knight of the Garter and of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Alfonso V’s sister Eleanor of Portugal married Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, successor to Sigismund, and member of the Order of the Dragon. Frederick III and Eleanor’s son was Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, a Garter Knight and Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, founded in 1430 by Philip the Good to celebrate his marriage to Prince Henry’s sister, Isabela of Portugal. Their son, Philip I of Castile married Joanna of Castile, the daughter of Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella.

Genealogy of the Order of Christ

• ALFONSO II OF ARAGON, the Troubadour (patron of Guyot of Provins, source for Wolfram von Eschenbach) + Sancha (d. of ALFONSO VII OF LEON AND CASTILE, founder of the ORDER OF CALATRAVA, advised by Judah ben Joseph ibn Ezra, relative of Abraham ibn Ezra, student of Abraham Bar Hiyya, influence on temple mysticism of Templars)

  • PETER II OF ARAGON (killed at the BATTLE OF MURET supporting CATHARS, founder of the ORDER OF SAINT GEORGE OF ALFAMA) + Marie of Montpellier

    • JAMES I OF ARAGON (raised by TEMPLARS) + Violant of Hungary

      • Violant of Aragon + ALFONSO X OF CASTILE, el Astrologo

        • Sancho IV of Castile (had affair with Rachel the Beautiful, Jewess of Toledo) + María de Molina

          • Ferdinand IV of Castile + Constance of Portugal (check)

          • Beatrice of Castile + Afonso IV of Portugal (see below)

        • Beatrice of Castile + Afonso III of Portugal

          • DENIS I OF PORTUGAL (founder of the ORDER OF CHRIST) + Elizabeth, Queen of Portugal (see below)

      • Peter III of Aragon + Constance II of Sicily (g-d. of FREDERICK II, Holy Roman Emperor)

        • James II of Aragon (student of Raymond Llull, founder of the ORDER OF MONTESA)

          • Alfonso IV of Aragon + Teresa d'Entença

            • Peter IV of Aragon + Eleanor of Sicily + Blanche of Anjou (daughter of CHARLES II OF NAPLES who discovered remains of Mary Magdalene at Saint-Maximin)

        • Frederick III of Sicily (served by Templar Roger de Flor, “Jolly Roger”)

          • Constance of Sicily, Queen of Cyprus + HENRY II OF LUSIGNAN (transferred property of Templars to Hospitallers. In contact with Ramon Llull)

          • Peter II of Sicily + Elisabeth of Carinthia

            • Eleanor of Sicily + Peter IV of Aragon (see above)

              • John I of Aragon + Violant of Bar (see below)

              • Martin of Aragon (merged ORDER OF SAINT GEORGE OF ALFAMA with the ORDER OF MONTESA)

              • Eleanor, Queen of Castile + John I of Castile (see above)

                • Henry III, King of Castile + Catherine of Lancaster (see below)

                • Ferdinand I of Aragon (founded ORDER OF THE JAR) + Eleanor of Alburquerque

                  • Alfonso V of Aragon (ORDER OF THE DRAGON) + Maria of Castile

                    • Ferdinand I of Naples (ORDER OF THE DRAGON) + Isabella of Clermont

                    • Beatrice of Naples + Vladislaus II of Hungary (no issue)

                  • John II of Aragon + Blanche I of Navarre

                  • John II of Aragon + Juana Enríquez (see below)

                  • Eleanor of Aragon + Edward I of Portugal (see below)

        • Elizabeth, Queen of Portugal + DENIS I OF PORTUGAL (see above)

          • Afonso IV of Portugal (Grand Master of the ORDER OF CHRIST) + Beatrice of Castile (see above)

            • D. Fernando de Castela, (Grand Master of the Order of Santiago)

            • Peter I of Portugal + Teresa Lourenço

              • John I of Portugal + Philippa of Lancaster (d. John of Gaunt, s. of Edward III of England, founder of the Order of the Garter + Philippa of Hainault)

            • Maria of Portugal, Queen of Castile + Alfonso XI of Castile (see below)

          • Constance of Portugal + Ferdinand IV of Castile (see above)

            • Alfonso XI of Castile + Leonor de Angulo

              • Federico Alfonso of Castile, 1st Señor de Haro (Grand Master of Order of Santiago) + PALOMA (d. of Gedalia Shlomo ibn ben Shlomo ibn Yahya haZaken, who was head of the Jewish community in Castile)

                • Alonso Enríquez (associated with the chapel of the Holy Christ of the Church of Santa Clara de Palencia) + Juana de Mendoza

                  • Fadrique Enriquez (c. 1388), + Mariana Fernandez de Cordoba y Ayala

                    • Juana Enríquez + John II of Aragon (see above)

                      • FERDINAND II OF ARAGON + ISABELLA I OF CASTILE (CATHOLIC MONARCHS)

                      • Joanna of Aragon + Ferdinand I of Naples (ORDER OF THE DRAGON)

            • Alfonso XI of Castile + Maria of Portugal (see above)

              • Peter of Castile + María de Padilla (see below)

      • James II of Majorca (student of Raymond Llull) + Esclaramunda of Foix (her grandfather was a cousin of Raymond-Roger Trencavel, identified with Perceval)

      • Isabella of Aragon + Philip III of France

        • Philip IV “le Bel” of France (ordered arrest of Templars) + Joan I of Navarre

          • Isabella of France + EDWARD II OF ENGLAND

            • EDWARD III OF ENGLAND (founder of the ORDER OF THE GARTER) + Philippa of Hainault

              • Edward the Black Prince + Joan of Kent

              • Isabella, Countess of Bedford + Enguerrand VII de Coucy (possible author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)

              • John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster + Blanche of Lancaster

                • Philippa of Lancaster + John I of Portugal (see above)

                  • PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR (Grand Master of the ORDER OF CHRIST)

                  • Edward I of Portugal + Eleanor of Aragon (see above)

                    • Afonso V of Portugal (Knight of the Order of the Garter and ORDER OF THE DRAGON)

                      • John II of Portugal

                    • Ferdinand, Duke of Viseu + Beatrice of Portugal (see below)

                    • Eleanor of Portugal + Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor

                      • Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor (Garter Knight) + Mary, Duchess of Burgundy

                        • Philip I of Castile

                  • John, Constable of Portugal (Grand Master of the ORDER OF SANTIAGO) + Isabella of Barcelos

                    • Isabella of Portugal + John II of Castile (see below)

                      • Isabella I of Castile + Ferdinand II of Aragon (Catholic Monarchs)

                    • Beatrice of Portugal

                  • Isabella of Portugal + PHILIP THE GOOD (founder of the ORDER OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE)

                • Henry IV of England + Mary de Bohun

                  • Henry V of England (ORDER OF THE DRAGON) + Catherine of Valois (see below)

                  • Philippa of England + Eric of Pomerania (ORDER OF THE DRAGON)

              • John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster + Constance of Castile (see above)

                • Catherine of Lancaster + Henry III, King of Castile (s. John I of Castile + Eleanor of Aragon)

                  • John II of Castile + Isabella of Portugal (see above)

                    • ISABELLA I OF CASTILE + FERDINAND II OF ARAGON

                      • Joanna of Castile + Philip I of Castile (see above)

                      • Maria of Aragon + Manuel I of Portugal (see below)

                  • Beatrice of Portugal + Ferdinand, Duke of Viseu

                    • MANUEL I OF PORTUGAL (ORDER OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE and Grand Master of the ODER OF CHRIST) + Maria of Aragon (d. of Ferdinand II and Isabella)

              • Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York + Isabella of Castile

        • Charles, Count of Valois + Catherine

        • Charles, Count of Valois + Margaret, Countess of Anjou

          • Philip VI of France + Joan of Burgundy (see above)

            • John II of France + Bonne of Luxembourg (see the Genealogy of the House of Luxembourg)

              • Charles V of France + Joanna of Bourbon (see above)

                • Charles VI of France + Isabeau of Bavaria

                  • Charles VII of France + Marie of Anjou

                  • Catherine of Valois + Henry V of England (see above)

                    • Henry VI of England + Margaret of Anjou (see below)

                  • Catherine of Valois + Owen Tudor

                    • Henry VII of England + Elizabeth of York (see below)

                • Louis I, Duke of Orléans + Valentina Visconti (see Genealogy of the House of Visconti)

              • Louis I of Anjou (adopted son of Joanna I of Naples, inherited kingdom of Naples and Jerusalem) + Marie of Blois

                • Louis II of Anjou + Yolande of Aragon (see below)

              • JOHN, DUKE OF BERRY (requested that Jean d’Arras write the Roman de Mélusine or the Chronique de Melusine part of Le Noble Hystoire de Lusignan) + Joanna of Armagnac

              • PHILIP THE BOLD + Margaret III, Countess of Flanders

                • John the Fearless + Margaret of Bavaria (see above)

                  • Mary of Burgundy + Adolph I, Duke of Cleves (see Genealogy of the Knight of the Swan)

                  • PHILIP THE GOOD (founder of the ORDER OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE) + Isabella of Portugal (see above)

                    • Charles the Bold + Isabella of Bourbon

                      • Mary, Duchess of Burgundy + MAXIMILIAN I, HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR (see above)

                        • Philip I of Castile + Joanna of Castile (see above)

                          • Eleanor of Austria + MANUEL I OF PORTUGAL

                          • Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (ORDER OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE) + Isabella of Portugal

                            • PHILIP II OF SPAIN + Mary I of England (see below)

                            • PHILIP II OF SPAIN + Anna of Austria (see below)

                            • Maria of Austria + MAXIMILIAN II, HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR (see below)

                            • Joanna of Austria + João Manuel, Prince of Portugal (see below)

                          • Isabella, Queen of Denmark + Christian II of Denmark

                          • Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor + Anna Jagellonica (see Genealogy of the Order of the Dragon)

                            • MAXIMILIAN II, HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR + Maria of Austria

                          • Mary, Queen of Hungary + Louis II of Hungary

                          • Catherine of Austria + John III of Portugal (see above)

                            • João Manuel, Prince of Portugal + Joanna of Austria

                              • Sebastian of Portugal (his disappearance in the battle of Alcácer Quibir became basis of Sebastianism, associated with Fifth Empire)

              • Joan, Queen of Navarre + Charles II of Navarre

              • MARIE OF VALOIS, Duchess of Bar + Robert I, Duke of Bar (see above)

                • Henry of Bar + Marie de Coucy, Countess of Soissons (d. of Enguerrand VII de Coucy, possible author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)

                • Violant of Bar + John I of Aragon (see above)

                  • Yolande of Aragon + Louis II of Anjou

                    • Louis III of Anjou

                    • Marie of Anjou + Charles VII of France

                    • RENE OF ANJOU (Grand Master of PRIORY OF SION, founder of the ORDER OF THE FLEUR DE LYS) + Isabella, Duchess of Lorraine

        • Charles, Count of Valois + Mahaut of Châtillon

After 1417, by King John I of Portugal’s request to the Pope, his son Prince Henry the Navigator became the order’s Grand Master and a pioneer of the Portuguese discoveries. Through his administrative direction, Prince Henry is regarded as the main initiator of what would be known as the Age of Discovery. Henry used Templar wealth for the early development of Portuguese exploration and maritime trade with other continents through the systematic exploration of Western Africa, the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, and the search for new routes.[24] Henry was appointed governor of the Algarve in 1419 and eventually settled in Sagres, located about 268 miles away from Tomar. Henry founded the famed Sagres naval center, and gathered a group of Jewish, Arabic, and other scientists and mathematicians to further the study of navigation, astronomy, and cartography.[25] A student of geography and astronomy, Henry constructed the first notable astronomical observatory in Portugal, a vast mariner’s wind compass known locally as the Rosa dos Ventos. Under Henry’s direction, a new and much lighter ship was developed, the caravel, which could sail further and faster.

Some of the most renowned Portuguese navigators were associated with the Order of Christ and received training at Sagres, namely Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral, Bartolomeu Dias, Gil Eanes, Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. Their first maritime success was the discovery in 1418 of the island of Porto Santo by explorers João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, followed by the island of Madeira in 1419. Soon after, between 1427 and 1432, the Azores were found by the Knight of Christ Gonçalo Velho Cabral. Found uninhabited, the Order of Christ proceeded to populate the island, along with Jews, Moors and some foreigners from France, Flanders and Italy. From Tomar the settlers brought to the Azores the Holy Ghost Festival, inspired by Joachim of Fiore. To honor their connection with Tomar and the Order of Christ, the actual flag of Madeira and Madeira’s coat of arms still display the Knights of Christ cross.

Prince Henry also has the dubious distinction of being a founder of the Atlantic slave trade.[26] Henry sought out opportunities to participate in the trade of traditional West African products, especially slaves and gold, and to establish potentially profitable colonies. When Henry was 21, he and his father and brothers captured the Moorish port of Ceuta in northern Morocco. Ceuta had long been a base for Barbary pirates who raided the Portuguese coast, depopulating villages by capturing their inhabitants to be sold in the African slave trade. Following on this success, Henry was inspired to explore down the coast of Africa, most of which was unknown to Europeans. His purpose was to find the source of the West African gold trade and the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John, and stopping the pirate attacks on the Portuguese coast. Henry claimed he was curious about what lay to the south of Morocco, and wanted to discover the southern limits of the Muslim area so that he might ally with others to defeat the infidels, but in fact his principal motivation without doubt was slave raiding along the coast of Africa.[27]

Within a few years, Portugal became deeply involved in the slave trade. From 1444 to 1446, as many as forty vessels sailed from Lagos, an important port in the fifteenth century, not far from Sagres, on Henry’s behalf and the first private mercantile expeditions began.[28] From his Vila do Infante, or Town of the Prince, on the Sagres Peninsula, Henry sponsored voyages down the coast of Mauretania that were primarily slaving expeditions, bringing back to Lagos, from whence they set out, numerous African slaves for Henry own use and for sale by him. Henry justified this on the grounds that he was converting these captives to Christianity. As Sir Peter Russell remarks in his biography, “In Henryspeak, conversion and enslavement were interchangeable terms.”[29]

In 1444, Henry encouraged the first major European slaving voyage, sending six ships under the captaincy of the revenue officer of Lagos, Lançarote de Freitas. Prince Henry furnished each ship with a banner of the Order of Christ. The whole journey is well described in Zurara’s The Chronicles of Guinea, which provides account of Henry’s capture of the Africans in what is now Mauritania:

We saw the Moors with their women and children coming out of their huts as fast as they could, when they caught sight of their enemy. Our men, crying out St James, St George and Portugal, fell upon them killing and taking all they could. There you might have seen mothers catch up with their children, husbands, their wives, each one trying to flee as best he could. Some plunged into the sea, others thought to hide themselves in the corners of their hovels, others hid their children underneath the shrubs that grew about there, where our men found them.

…Then, as though the more to increase their suffering, came those who were commanded to make the division; and they began to part them one from another in order to form companies, in such manner that each should be of equal value; and for this it was necessary to separate children from their parents, and women from their husbands, and brothers from brothers. There was no law in respect of kinship or affectation; each had perforce to go whither fate drove him… consider how they cling one to another, in such wise that they can hardly be parted! Who, without much travail, could have made such a division? So soon as they had been led to their place the sons, seeing themselves removed from their parents, ran hastily towards them; the mothers clasped their children in their arms, and holding them, cast themselves upon the ground, covering them with their bodies, without heeding the blows which they were given…

Henry sponsored Nuno Tristao’s exploration of the African coast, and Antao Goncalves’s hunting expedition there in 1441. The two men captured several Africans and brought them back to Portugal. One of the captured men, a chief, negotiated his own return to Africa, promising in exchange to provide the Portuguese with more Africans. One of Henry’s voyagers, Dinis Dias, came across the Senegal River and rounded the peninsula of Cap-Vert in 1444. By this stage the explorers had passed the southern boundary of the desert, and from then on Henry had one of his wishes fulfilled: the Portuguese had circumvented the Muslim land-based trade routes across the western Sahara, and slaves and gold began arriving in Portugal. In 1446, Tristão sighted the Gambia River.

In 1445, João Fernandes went with a Portuguese trading ship to the Río de Oro, later in the Spanish Sahara. When a Moorish trader wished to return with the ship to Portugal, Fernandes volunteered to remain as a hostage with his family. He was welcomed by the nomad sheepherders of the region. Taken south across the desert to visit an old patriarch, Fernandes found that the nomads obtained their slaves from African kings who raided other tribes. On his return to Portugal, he furnished Prince Henry with detailed information of the western Sahara and the trade with the Guinea Coast. As a result, the Portuguese ceased the hazardous raiding of the African coast for slaves and from 1448 made profitable slave-trading agreements with Moorish and African chiefs.[30] By 1448, the trade of slaves to Portugal had become sufficiently extensive for Henry to order the building of a fort and warehouse on Arguin Island. By 1452 the influx of gold permitted the minting of Portugal’s first gold cruzado coins. At some time in the 1450s, mariners discovered the Cape Verde Islands. By 1460, the Portuguese had explored the coast of Africa as far as present-day nation Sierra Leone.

By the 1480s, Portuguese ships were already transporting Africans for use as slaves on the sugar plantations in the Cape Verde and Madeira islands in the eastern Atlantic. “The European discovery and colonization of Madeira and the Canary Islands,” explain William Phillips, Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips, “would prove fateful precedents for the new world, because the plantation system and colonial governments instituted on these islands became models for the great sugar plantations in the new world.”[31]

Columbus

Prince Henry the Navigator died in 1460, but his work continued under the direction of his nephew, Afonso V’s son, King John II of Portugal (1455 – 1495), the next Master of the Order of Christ. John II was nicknamed the Perfect Prince because he is considered to have lived his life exactly according to the idea of a perfect prince Machiavelli’s work The Prince. As ruler, John was master of the Order of Christ, and many of the navigators and sea captains who explored for Portugal belonged to it. With John II’s ascension in 1481, the fortunes of the Order of Santiago also rose with him and supplied a greater share of the knights for the new expeditions organized by him in the 1480s.[32] John II is known for re-establishing the power of the Portuguese monarchy, reinvigorating the Portuguese economy, and restoring the policies of Atlantic exploration, reviving the work of his great-uncle, Henry the Navigator, renewing his country’s exploration of Africa and the Orient. During his reign, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope reaching India, in 1498.

Through his marriage to Felipa Perestrello, Columbus had access to the nautical charts and logs that had belonged to her deceased father, Bartolomeu Perestrello, a Knight of the Order of Santiago, who had served as a captain in the Portuguese navy under Prince Henry the Navigator.[33] In 1988, Portuguese historian José Mascarenhas Barreto published a book which claims that Columbus was Portuguese and a spy who was part of an elaborate tactic to keep Spain from the trade routes that were opening up around Africa to the Indies. Most historians agree that Columbus first tried to interest John II of Portugal in his expedition across the Atlantic, but that the king was supposedly uninterested, and so Columbus went to Spain for funding instead. Columbus may have used his relative’s maps to navigate his way to America, where his ships sailed under flags bearing the order’s insignia, the red cross of the Templars. Columbus may also himself have been a member of a secret society. He was associated with a political group that supported the ideas of Dante, one of the alleged Grand Masters of the Rosicrucians, and his voyages were sponsored by Lorenzo de Medici, and Leonardo da Vinci.[34] Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to sail to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.[35]

According to John Leddy Phelan, in his seminal The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, navigators like Columbus and Franciscan missionaries like Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525 – 1604), viewed the events of Age of Exploration as the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Book of Revelation.[36] As shown by Phelan, through his association with the Franciscans, Columbus envisioned himself as a “Joachimite messiah,” and considered his voyage across the ocean as part of an effort to convert all the races of the world to Christianity before the end of the world.[37] Columbus’ mysticism was expressed the Book of Prophecies, written following his third voyage to the New World, between September 1501 and March 1502. Influenced by Pierre d’Ailly (1351 – 1420), a French astrologer and Catholic cardinal, Columbus estimated that the world would in in 1656. But before that time, all the prophecies had to be fulfilled, including the spread of Christianity throughout the world, the rediscovery of the Garden of Eden, and a Last World Emperor must be chosen, which he identified with the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, who would be necessary to lead a Crusade to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims and to greet the return of Christ in Jerusalem. According to Columbus, “Jerusalem and Mount Sion are to be rebuilt by the hand of the Christian; who this is to be God declares by the mouth of His prophet in the fourteenth Psalm. Abbot Joachim said that he was to come from Spain.”[38]

According to Phelan, “Mendieta was responsible for formulating what must be considered the mystical interpretation of the conquest.”[39] Mendieta main work is the Historia eclesiástica indiana, a chronicle of the early evangelization of the New World written in the late sixteenth century, but not published until 1870, as it was deemed to contain “unsound,” millenarian and Joachimite ideas.[40] The Historia, explains Phelan, provides an example of how in the sixteenth century the medieval myth of the Messiah-Emperor was transferred to Spain.[41] Mendieta regarded the king of Spain as the Promised One, the Messiah-World Ruler, who is destined to convert all mankind on the eve of the Final Judgment. According to Mendieta, God had raised Spain above all the kingdoms of the earth, and He had designated the Spaniards as His new chosen people, who under the leadership of their “blessed kings,” would undertake the final conversion of the Jews, the Moslems, and the Gentiles, an event believed to precede the rapidly approaching end of the world.[42]

Simon Wiesenthal in Sails of Hope argues that, in light of the Jews’ expulsion from Spain, Columbus’ voyage was motivated by a desire to find a safe haven. In Columbus’ words, “for when all is done, David, that most prudent king was first a shepherd and afterwards chosen King of Jerusalem, and I am a servant of that same Lord who raised him to such a dignity.”[43] Tina Levitan, author of Jews in American Life, found the first reference to Columbus Jewish heritage in a document dated fifty-eight years after the his death from French ambassador to Spain which refers to “Columbus the Jew.”[44] Levitan further states:

From him we learn that Cristobal Colon (who never called himself Christopher Columbus and never spoke or wrote Italian) was the son of Susanna Fontanarossa [also spelled Fonterosal and Domingo Colon of Pontevedra, Spain, where those bearing such surnames were Jews, some of whom had been brought before the Spanish Inquisition.[45]

Estelle Irizarry, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, argues that Columbus was Catalan, and that Columbus tried to conceal a Jewish heritage. Irizarry notes that Columbus always wrote in Spanish, occasionally included Hebrew in his writing, and referenced the Jewish High Holidays in his journal during the first voyage. Recently, a number of Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus was a Marrano. Columbus didn’t speak Italian, signed his last will and testament on May 19, 1506, whose wishes conformed to Jewish customs. He also decreed to give money to a Jew who lived in the Lisbon Jewish Quarter. Columbus used a triangular signature of dots and letters that resembled inscriptions found on gravestones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain. According to Cecil Roth, the anagram was a cryptic substitute for the Kaddish, a prayer recited in the synagogue by mourners after the death of a close relative.[46]

According to Norman Berdichevsky, “There is extensive literature, much of it quite controversial, on the origin of Columbus, but the theory advanced by Mascarenhas Barreto makes the most sense from the standpoint of the Spanish-Portuguese rivalry.”[47] Through his interpretation of the Kabbalah and other research, Barreto suggested that Columbus was born in Cuba, Portugal, the son of a nobleman and related to other Portuguese navigators. According to this claim, his real name was concealed, Christopher Columbus being a pseudonym, meaning Bearer of Christ and the Holy Spirit. His real name was supposedly Salvador Fernandes Zarco and he was the son of Dom Fernando, Duke of Beja, Alentejo and maternal grandson of João Gonçalves Zarco (c. 1390 – 1471), a Portuguese explorer who established settlements and recognition of the Madeira Islands, who was appointed first captain of Funchal by Henry the Navigator. The Duke of Beja was also Duke Viseu and Governor of the Order of Christ and son of King Edward of Portugal. The Zarcos were Portuguese Jews who came from the city of Tomar. According to this research, Columbus was therefore the first cousin of King John II, half-brother of Queen Dona Leonor, half-brother of King Manuel I, and grandnephew of prince Henry the Navigator. Barreto claims to have unscrambled the mystery of Columbus’ coded signature with the monogram SFZ, which can be deciphered through the use of the Kabbalah not only as “Christopher Colon,” but also as “Salvador Fernandes Zarco.”[48] This was why Columbus purported gave Portuguese names to the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles. The first he called Salvador, after his real first name, the second Cuba' after his Portuguese birthplace.

Columbus came to the attention of Ferdinand and Isabella through Luis de Santangel (d. 1498), a Jew and an accountant to the Royal Court, astronomer and mathematician Rabbi Abraham Zacuto (1452 – c. 1515) and his pupil Joseph Vecinho, a physician to Portuguese King John II. The crater Zagut on the Moon is named after him. He was consulted by the John II on the possibility of a sea route to India, a project which he supported and encouraged.[49] For observing the stars, Zacuto made use an instrument called Jacob’s Staff, a sea-quadrant, the invention, not of Regiomontanus, as had long been considered, but of Levi ben Gerson. Zacuto then applied this instrument in navigation to the determination of latitude without depending upon the sun’s meridional height using the altitude of the polar star at night to ascertain the ship’s position. Zacuto’s Almanac Perpetuum, which included the Tables of Navigation in Hebrew, rendered Columbus incalculable service and on one occasion even saved the lives of his entire company.[50] Much of Columbus’ nautical knowledge and familiarity with the sea-lanes to Madeira, the Azores, and Cape Verde were obtained from converted Jews.[51]

Santangel, a third generation converso, worked as escribano de racion to Ferdinand and Isabella which left him in charge of the Royal finance. Santangel managed to convince the Catholic monarchs to fund Columbus’ expedition and provided a large sum of the money himself. In 1497, Ferdinand issued a royal decree that exempted Santangel, his family, and his future successors, from the Inquisition.[52] Among the members of Columbus’ first expedition were several Jews. Among them were Luis de Torres, who understood Hebrew, Chaldaic, and some Arabic, and who was to serve as interpreter. Another was Alonzo de la Calle, who took his name from the Jewish quarter (calle). Rodrigo Sanchez, of Segovia, who was a relative of the chancellor of the exchequer, Gabriel Sanchez, joined the expedition in compliance with the special request of Queen Isabella. Also included were the surgeon Marco and the ship’s doctor Bernal, who had lived formerly in Tortosa, and had been punished in 1490 by the Inquisition, in Valencia, as an adherent of Judaism. [53] The voyage included Several Portuguese conversos seamen, including the pilot of the Niña, Sancho Roiz da Gama, who was related to the Portuguese Admiral Vasco de Gama.[54]

Luis de Torres was the first European to set foot on American soil, and the first to discover the use of tobacco. After arriving at Cuba, which he believed to be the Asian coast, Columbus sent de Torres and the sailor Rodrigo de Jerez on an expedition inland, with the task of exploring the country, contacting its ruler, and gathering information about the Asian emperor described by Marco Polo as the “Great Khan.” After settling in Cuba and having won the confidence one of the chiefs, de Torres received from him large grants of land and many slaves as gifts. From Ferdinand and Isabella, Torres also received an annual pension of 8,645 maravedis and died in Cuba. Santangel was the first to receive a detailed statement of Columbus’s voyage and discoveries, contained in a letter written in 1493, in the Azores, where he stopped on his way home. From Lisbon, Columbus wrote a similar letter to Gabriel Sanchez, who published it in Barcelona.

When Columbus returned to Europe in 1493 from conquering the Caribbean islands of the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti for Spain, he first stopped in Lisbon to claim his victory in front of John II. John II’s only response to this was that under the Treaty of Alcáçovas signed with Spain in 1479, Columbus’ discoveries lay within Portugal’s sphere of influence. Before Columbus even reached Ferdinand and Isabella, John II had already sent a letter to them threatening to send a fleet to claim it for Portugal. Spain quickly opened negotiations, which took place in a small Spanish town named Tordesillas. A papal representative was present to act as mediator. The result of this meeting would be the famous Treaty of Tordesillas in 1794, which sought to divide all newly discovered lands in the New World between Spain and Portugal.

Amerigo

Although Columbus was the first to discover the continent of America, his mistake was in believing that the land was a part of Asia. That assumption was corrected by his friend Amerigo Vespucci (1454 – 1512), an Italian merchant and explorer from the Republic of Florence, from whose name the terms America and Americas are derived. Vespucci was born in 1454 in Florence, the child of a notary for the money changers’ guild. Amerigo’s two older brothers, Antonio and Girolamo, were sent to the University of Pisa for their education. Antonio followed his father to become a notary, while Girolamo entered the Church and joined the Knights Templar in Rhodes.[55]

Vespucci’s family had good relations with Lorenzo de’ Medici, also known as “the Magnificent,” the powerful de facto ruler of Florence.[56] In 1482, when his father died, Amerigo went to work for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, head of a junior branch of the Medici family. Lorenzo’s grandfather, Lorenzo the Elder (c. 1395 – 1440), was a brother of Cosimo de Medici, the elder, sponsor of the Christian Kabbalist Marsilio. Lorenzo’s brother Giovanni de Medici would later marry Caterina Sforza, grand-daughter of Francesco I Sforza, member of the Order of the Crescent founded by René of Anjou. Caterina’s uncle, Ludovico Sforza, famous paton of Leonardo da Vinci, would become Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, also founded by René of Anjou. Caterina’s grandson, Cosimo I de Medici a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, married Eleonora of Toledo, who was brought up in Naples at the household of Jacob Abarbanel’s son Don Samuel Abarbanel and daughter-in-law Benvenida.[57] Their daughter Lucrezia, Duchess of Modena, was married Alfonso II d’Este, grandson of Alfonso I d’Este and the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, and an ally of Emperor Rudolf II who supported John Dee. Lorenzo and Giovanni’s support for the heretic Savonarola gained them the nickname of Popolano (“commoner”).

Lorenzo and his brother Giovanni had come under the tutelage of their older cousin, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and studied under Ficino and Amerigo’s uncle, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci. The young Lorenzo was a fellow-student, and from the 1483 Amerigo became his employee and friend. In 1501, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco was suspected of a plot with Cesare Borgia to favor the latter in the conquest of the city. In the early 1500s, Amerigo Vespucci would send most of his famous letters on the “New World” to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. It was the Medici who sent him to Seville in 1492 to work in one of the branches there, and that’s where he got into sailing and exploring. Vespucci became involved with Florentine merchant Gianotto Berardi, most notably providing investment and support for Columbus and his voyages of discovery. Berardi had taken over the Medici business in Seville, and had his own business in African slavery and ship chandlery.[58] Vespucci was a good friend of Columbus, helping him to equip one of his ships for a voyage.

Vespucci made at least two voyages of the Age of Discovery, first on behalf of Spain (1499 – 1500) and then for Portugal (1501 – 1502) for Manuel I of Portugal, Grand Master of the Knights of Christ, and knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece.[59] However, Vespucci became convinced that the land Columbus had discovered was not Asia but a new continent. He wrote to his friend Lorenzo:

A few days ago I wrote you at some length about my return from those new regions we searched for and found with the fleet, at the expense and by the command of the most serene King of Portugal, and which can properly be called a “New World,” since our forebears had absolutely no knowledge of it, nor do any of those who are hearing about it today… On 7 August 1501, we dropped our anchor off the shores of that new land, thanking God with solemn prayers and the celebration of the Mass. Once there, we determined that the new land was not an island but a continent…[60]

Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, patron of Botticelli and uncle of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, was teacher of the grandson of René of Anjou, the future René II, Duke of Lorraine, who studied in Florence. René II was son of Yolande of Lorraine, who supposedly succeeded her father as Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, and Ferri, Count of Vaudémont, who belonged to her father’s Order of the Crescent with Francesco I Sforza. René II was also the grandfather of Mary of Guise, wife married King James V of Scotland. An association of humanist scholars was formed in Saint-Dié under the patronage of René II, who called themselves the Gymnasium Vosagense. The academy included Matthias Ringmann (1482 – 1511), and his collaborator Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470 – 1520).[61] Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages became widely known in Europe after two accounts attributed to him were published between 1503 and 1505, when the Soderini Letter (1505) came to the attention of Ringmann and Waldseemüller. In 1507, Ringmann and Waldseemüller published their Introduction to Cosmography with an accompanying world map. Ringmann wrote, “I see no reason why anyone could properly disapprove of a name derived from that of Amerigo, the discoverer, a man of sagacious genius. A suitable form would be Amerige, meaning Land of Amerigo, or America, since Europe and Asia have received women’s names.”[62] A thousand copies of the map were printed with the title Universal Geography According to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Contributions of Amerigo Vespucci and Others. In 1538, Gerardus Mercator used America to name both the North and South continents on his influential map.

Vasco da Gama

The death of John II’s only legitimate son and heir Prince Afonso in 1491 resulted in a succession crisis. Pope Innocent VIII, John II received authorization to appoint Jorge de Lencastre as the Master of the Order of Santiago in 1492 and also administrator of the Order of Aviz. However, the Pope refused to legitimize his birth, and thus succeed him as heir. As a result, at the death of John II in 1495, his cousin and brother-in-law, Manuel, Duke of Beja (1469 – 1521), his only legitimate successor, ascended as King Manuel I of Portugal. Manuel’s mother was the granddaughter of King John I of Portugal, whereas his father was the second surviving son of King Edward of Portugal and the younger brother of King Afonso V of Portugal. The period of Manuel I’s rule was marked by intensive expansion of the Portuguese Empire due to the numerous Portuguese discoveries. Manuel I began the Portuguese colonization of the Americas and Portuguese India, and oversaw the establishment of a vast trade empire across Africa and Asia.

He sponsored of Vasco da Gama who discovered the sea route to India in 1498, resulting in the creation of the Portuguese India Armadas, which guaranteed Portugal’s monopoly on the spice trade. Before eventually joining the Order of Christ, da Gama was also a member of the Order of Santiago. In 1496, Before sending da Gama on his sea voyage to India, Manuel I sought the advice of Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto, who then lived in the city of Beja, on a calculation of the position of the stars. Zacuto reportedly foretold the success of the expedition and that the Portuguese would conquer a large part of India. Zacuto also instructed the sailors in the use of his newly perfected astrolabe, his tables, and maritime charts, with which da Gama’s ships were equipped. Da Gama himself also consulted Zacuto in Lisbon before he set sail.[63]

Manuel I financed numerous famed Portuguese navigators, including Pedro Álvares Cabral, who discovered Brazil, Afonso de Albuquerque, who established Portuguese hegemony in the Indian Ocean, and João Vaz Corte-Real, who discovered Newfoundland in Canada, among numerous others. The income from colonized lands made Manuel the richest monarch in Europe, allowing him to become one of the great patrons of the Portuguese Renaissance, which produced numerous significant artistic and literary achievements.

Manuel of had become the Governor of the Order of Christ in 1484. Due to the fact that the discipline of the order was declining, Pope Alexander VI commuted the vow of celibacy to that of conjugal chastity in 1492. In 1496, the brethren were dispensed from celibacy and in 1505, from poverty. As a result of his missionary expeditions in Asia and Africa, Manuel I was particularly friendly with Pope Leo X, the second son of Lorenzo de Medici, known as the Magnificent, who granted him the title of Grand Master of the Order of Christ in 1516. Manuel I sent Knight of Christ Vasco da Gama to sail around the African cape to India. Brazil was formally claimed in 1500, the Indian coastal kingdom of Goa captured in 1510, and the port of Macao in China, which was ruled as a colony of Portugal from 1557 to 1999, outlasting even the world’s most famous colony, the British-held Hong Kong. By the end of Manuel’s reign, the Order of Christ possessed 454 commanderies in Portugal, Africa and the Indies. Manuel also made extensive additions to the Order’s headquarters in Tomar. By this time, however, the Portuguese had reached India (1497) and opened the route to the Far East. In 1500, under Manuel’s reign, Knight of Christ Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil.

At the outset of his reign, Manuel I released all the Jews who had been made captive during the reign of John II. He proclaimed a twenty-year moratorium on the activities of the Inquisition, thus facilitating the integration of conversos into Portuguese society. However, Manuel I decided to marry Infanta Isabella of Aragon, the daughter Ferdinand and Isabella had expelled the Jews in 1492. The intended marriage was meant to safeguard Spain from the possible hostility of the Portuguese, and it was imposed on Portugal at the price of compelling its rulers to enforce the expulsion order. In the marriage contract, Manuel I agreed to persecute the Jews of Portugal. Many Jews posing as conversos took advantage of the opportunity to leave Portugal and help establish colonies in the new territories, notably in Goa, the Cape Verde islands, and Brazil.[64]

The population of West Africa known as lançados, many of whom were Jews or conversos escaping persecution from the Portuguese Inquisition, grew quickly during the first half of the sixteenth century in response to the persecution of Jews by Portuguese kings Manuel I and João III. The lançados (literally, “the thrown out ones” or “the cast out ones”) were settlers and adventurers of Portuguese origin in Senegambia, Cabo Verde, Guinea, Sierra Leone, although they lived as far southwest as Elmina, in modern-day Ghana. The lançados developed into a new sociocultural group that spoke Portuguese, dressed in European clothes, and lived in rectangular Portuguese-style houses, but which also adopted local African customs such as tattooing and scarification. They established underground trading networks in weapons, spices, and often slaves, which was perceived by the Portuguese Crown as disrupting its ability to collect taxes.[65] Lançados often took African wives from local ruling families, securing protection and beneficial trading relationships. Although never large in number, the mixed-race lançados served as important intermediaries between Europeans and native Africans, wielding significant power in the early development of port economies in Bissau, Cacheu, and surrounding areas.[66]

Voodoo

The religious beliefs of the lançados were likewise a mix of Catholicism, West African Vodun, and ancestor worship.[67] The name Vodun, or Voodoo as it is known when it was imported by slaves to the Western world, was derived from the god Vodun of the West African Yoruba people, who lived in eighteenth and nineteenth century Dahomey, which occupied parts of today's Togo, Benin and Nigeria. Slaves brought the religion with them when they were forcibly shipped to Haiti and other islands in the West Indies. According to Umberto Eco, the practitioners of Vodun in Africa were the heirs of the Hellenistic mysteries. He explains:

In the centuries of the late empire, Africa received the influences of all the religions of the Mediterranean and condensed them into a package. Europe was corrupted by Christianity as a state religion, but Africa preserved the treasures of knowledge, just as it had preserved and spread them in the days of the Egyptians, passing them on to the Greeks, who wreaked such great havoc with them.[68]

It’s a remarkable suggestion, since the Vodun of West Africa does in fact share a number of surprising parallels with the Western occult tradition. Vodun is a religion distinct from the various traditional animistic religions in the interiors of the same countries where it is found. The divine Creator, called variously Mawu or Mahu, embodies a dual cosmogonic principle of which the female Mawu is the moon and the male Lisa is the sun, often portrayed as the twin children of the Creator.[69] Aido-Hwedo, the Cosmic Serpent, existing before Mawu-Lisa, is the servant of Mawu-Lisa and the creative force sustaining the shape given to the universe by the creators.[70] The chief of all Vodun divinities is Legba, the youngest son of Mawu, is viewed as a trickster deity, often horned and phallic.[71]

Vodun features could be characterized as mystery rites. The foundation of the Vodun religion is interaction between human beings and a group of spirits called Orishas. The Orishas make appearances at religious celebrations through possession trance of Orisha believers. This religion also emphasize continual feeding and supplication to the deities or Orishas. When one is possessed by an Orisha, one speaks and behaves as though one were that Orisha. Each Orisha is associated with particular ideas, objects or natural phenomena. For example the Orisha Shango is worshipped as a thunder-god named Xango, whose symbol is the double-axe, just like the numerous thunder-gods of the ancient Middle East such as Baal. Particularly remarkable is the presence of a symbol for the god Dan, which is a serpent biting its own tail, exactly like the Ouroborous of the Gnostics.

According to recent research based on the dynastic tradition of the Oyo Empire of the Yoruba of Nigeria, the ancient kings mentioned are Israelite, Assyrian and Babylonian rulers. The deportation of the Ten Lost Tribes is remembered in the tradition preserved by the palace bards of Oyo as the Igboho exile.[72] Similarly, the Igbo Jews of southeastern Nigeria, who practice Judaism, claim descent from the Lost Tribes of Israel, specifically from the tribes of Ephraim, Naphtali, Menasseh, Levi, Zebulun and Gad. An estimated 30,000 Igbos were practicing some form of Judaism in 2008, and there are currently 26 synagogues of various sizes.[73] Christian visitors to Africa often noted the similarity of circumcision, menstrual taboos, and other customs, to those of the Jews, while the former Igbo ex-slave Gustavus Vassa (c. 1745 – 1797), also known as Olaudah Equiano, was “induce[d] . . . to think that the one people had sprung from the other.”[74]

Igbo Jews are said to have originated from Syrian, Portuguese and Libyan Israelite migrants into West Africa. These may have been Portuguese Marrano traders who began arriving in the fifteenth century. On his popular blog, Greek Anthropologist Dienekes Pontikos has noted that some deep Sub-Saharan African populations show evidence of Eurasian admixture, and to be mostly West rather than East Eurasian.[75] Dienekes further argues that the admixture seems to have the closest connection to the Sardinian and Basque populations of Europe, which are among those with the least Indo-European impact genetically.[76] A primary example is the R1b1c Haplogroup found in the northern tip of Cameroon, which also borders northern Nigeria, at the south of Lake Chad. It is found there at a very high frequency, where it is considered to be caused by a pre-Islamic movement of people from Eurasia.

Like R1b1a2, R1b1c is a branch of R1b, and is the most frequently occurring Y-chromosome haplogroup in Western Europe, with its highest concentrations in Ireland and Scotland, indicating that they share a common ancestor with the Egyptian Pharaohs. Besides the Atlantic and North Sea coast of Europe, hotspots for R1b include the Po valley in north-central Italy (over 70%), the Ossetians of the North Caucasus (over 40%) and nearby Armenia (35%), the Bashkirs of the Urals region of Russia (50%), Turkmenistan (over 35%), the Hazara people of Afghanistan (35%), the Uyghurs of North-West China (20%) and the Newars of Nepal (11%). R1b-V88, a subclade specific to sub-Saharan Africa, is found in 60 to 95% of men in northern Cameroon. The history of R1b and R1a, which is particularly common in a large region extending from South Asia and Southern Siberia to Central Europe and Scandinavia, are intricately connected to each other. Whereas R1b1 is found in such places as the Levant or Cameroon, R1b1b most likely originated in north-eastern Anatolia. Potentially corroborating the claim of descent from the Lost Tribes, or at least descent from Jewish peoples, is the fact that R1b featured a back migration from Asia to Africa estimated to have taken place around 15,000 years ago. A group of R1b1* people moved from the Levant to Egypt, Sudan and spread in different directions inside Africa to Rwanda, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Guinea-Bissau.[77]

The Portuguese first explored the coast of Benin in 1472, and around 1485 visited Benin City, the most important city of the Edo kingdom of Benin, which flourished during the thirteenth to the fourteenth century. It had important trade relations with Portugal during the last centuries before being destroyed in 1897 by a British punitive raid. In 1691, the Portuguese ship captain Lourenco Pinto observed: “Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.” Many treasures and artefacts, including the famous Benin Bronzes were taken by the British invaders who eventually occupied the area. In the early sixteenth century, the Oba sent an ambassador to Lisbon, and the King of Portugal sent Christian missionaries to Benin. Some residents of Benin could still speak a pidgin Portuguese in the late nineteenth century, and many Portuguese loan words can still be found today in the languages of the area.

Tradesmen and artisans from Benin traded with the Portuguese, who were interested in the kingdom’s artwork, gold, ivory, pepper and slaves. They would take captives from rival peoples and sell them into slavery to Europeans and Americans, providing a significant source of wealth for the kingdom.[78] At first, the volume of the slave trade from Benin was small, but it increased rapidly in the second half of the seventeenth century, when the area became known to Europeans as the “Slave Coast.”[79] The prominence of slaves from the area in the transatlantic trade is reflected in the survival of elements of its culture in black communities of the New World, especially in the “voodoo” religion of Haiti, Cuban Santeria, and Brazilian Candomble and Umbanda, a cult that blends African religions with Catholicism, indigenous lore and Jewish Kabbalah.

Conquistadors

The Jews were far more significant in the earliest exploration, settlement and development of the Caribbean and South America than has previously been acknowledged. Pere Bonnin, after studying a list of 3,500 names resulting from a census of Jewish communities of Spain by the Catholic Church and as found in Inquisition records, cited the Jewish origin of historically prominent figures as Columbus and Hernan Cortes, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and many others.[80] The two most famous conquistadors were Cortes, a member of the Order of Santiago, who conquered the Aztec Empire, and Francisco Pizarro who led the conquest of the Incan Empire. They were second cousins born in Extremadura, where many of the Spanish conquerors were born. When Cortes first conquered Mexico for Spain in 1521, he did so with a number of secret Jews amongst his men.[81] Catholic religious orders that participated and supported the exploration, evangelizing and pacifying of the New World were mostly Dominicans, Carmelites, Franciscans and Jesuits.

Archaeologist Hugo Ludeña raised the possibility that the conquistador Francisco Pizarro was actually of Marrano origin, from a peculiar Hebrew symbol found in the ossuary of Pizarro. For almost a century, the mummified remains of Pizarro were on display in a glass casket in the Cathedral of Lima, Peru. However, in the 1970s, an ossuary was found which the scientific community determined to contain the bones of Pizarro. Ludeña determined that engraved on the lid of the ossuary, which featured three crossed ellipses locked in a circle, was a Jewish symbol, following the funeral rites of the family.[82]

Some Franciscans believed that Cortés’ arrival in the New World ushered in the final era of evangelization before the coming of the millennium. According to Phelan, the connection of the Spanish conquests with the end of the world helps shed light on one of the most celebrated myths of the New World: that of the Mesoamericans as the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, and whose discovery was interpreted as convincing evidence that the world was soon to end.[83] Dominican Fray Diego Durán (c. 1537 – 1588) was among the first to argue that the Natives were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Durán’s speculation that the Mesoamericans were of Jewish origin is drawn from the Fourth Book of Esdras, according to which the ten Lost Tribes of Israel departed Babylon and migrated far away to unsettled lands. Responding to Durán, Jesuit Joseph de Acosta, in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), refuted much of the generally accepted reasoning on Mesoamerican origins. However, in 1607, Dominican friar Gregorio García (d. 1627) published a lengthy treatise arguing against points of Acosta’s position and concluded that Mesoamericans were, in fact, of Jewish origin.

Although he was not able to counter Acosta’s refutations, Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525 – 1604) also suggested that the Mesoamericans’ memory of a universal flood, as well as the idea of a promised savior, were both of Jewish origin. The Mesoamericans, he asserted, were the descendant not of the ancient Jews who were exiled by the Assyrians, but rather from some of the Jews who escaped the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 71 AD. According to Mendieta:

Who knows whether we are not so close to the end of the world that the conversion of the Indiana is fulfilling the prophecies for which we pray that the Jews may be converted in our time? Because if the Mesoamericans descend from the Jews, then the prophecy is already fulfilled. I have little confidence that those babblers [bachilleros] of the Old World will be converted unless God miraculously does it.[84]

Franciscan historians such as Mendieta promulgated the idea that the Mesoamericans believed the conquistadors, and in particular Cortés, to be awaited gods.[85] Mendieta put forth the idea that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl was actually the Messiah that the Jews expected when they revolted against Roman rule in 66–70 A.D. Quetzalcoatl, meaning “feathered serpent,” in his form as the morning star, like the dying-gods of the Middle East, was associated with the planet Venus, whose Latin name was Lucifer.[86] A number of early Spanish sources tended to identify Quetzalcoatl with either Hernán Cortés or Thomas the Apostle.

Franciscans such as Motolinia (1482 – 1565), saw elements of Christianity in the pre-Columbian religions and therefore believed that Mesoamerica had been evangelized before, possibly by Thomas the Apostle, who, according to legend, had “gone to preach beyond the Ganges.” Franciscans then equated the original Quetzalcoatl with Thomas and imagined that the Mesoamericans had long-awaited his return to take part once again in God’s kingdom.[87] A generation later, fellow Franciscan Juan de Torquemada (c. 1562 – 1624), author of Monarquía indiana (“Indian Monarchy”), borrowed almost verbatim Mendieta’s account, and reported that Quetzalcoatl was described by the Mesoamericans as “a fair and ruddy complexioned man with a long beard.” Torquemada recorded a pre-conquest tradition concerning the strangers who had entered Mexico with Quetzalcoatl:

They were men of good carriage, well-dressed, in long robes of black linen, open in front, and without capes, cut low at the neck, with short sleeves that did not come to the elbow… These followers of Quetzalcoatl were men of great knowledge and cunning artists in all kinds of fine work.[88]

Like Quetzalcoatl, the Incan god Viracocha, and several other Central and South American deities, were supposedly described in legends as being bearded.[89] Viracocha was said to have created the universe, sun, moon, and stars, time and civilization itself. Much like the Greek Kronos or the Persian Zurvan, according to the Inca cosmogony, Viracocha may be assimilated to Saturn, the maker of time.[90] Viracocha is also known as Kon-Tiki, the source of the name of Thor Heyerdah’s raft. According to a contemporary anonymous text, a marble statue of Viracocha stood in the holiest temple of the Coricancha, which was described “as to the hair, complexion, features, raiment and sandals, just as painters represent the apostle Saint Bartholomew.”[91] Other accounts of Viracocha identified him Saint Thomas.[92] Apparently, the legends of the Incas led them to identify the white and bearded Conquistadors with Viracocha, an event which Viracocha was said to have promised.[93]

Pirates of the Caribbean

Conversos in the 1590s began to emigrate from Spain and Portugal to the Netherlands, then in the midst of its eighty-year rebellion against Spanish rule. Once in Holland, many Conversos reverted to Judaism. A thriving Jewish community consequently established itself in Amsterdam, and eventually became Europe’s largest, expanding from approximately two hundred individuals in 1609 to about two thousand at mid-century.[94] From the Netherlands, France and eventually Italy, Jews and descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity participated in the European colonization of the Americas. As reported by Dutch historian Dr. Wim Klooster, Jewish ships plying the Atlantic carried such names as the Mazel Tov or Bekeerde Jood (converted Jew).[95] in 1508, the bishop of Cuba reported, “practically every ship [arriving in Havana] is filled with Hebrews and New Christians.”[96]

Several Jewish communities in the Caribbean, Central and South America flourished, particularly in those areas under Dutch and English control, which were more tolerant. By the late sixteenth century, organized Jewish communities were founded in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, the Dutch Suriname and Curaçao, Spanish Santo Domingo, and the English colonies of Jamaica and Barbados. In addition, there were unorganized communities of Jews in Spanish and Portuguese territories where the Inquisition was active, including Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Peru. Dr. Anita Novinsky, a professor of history at the University of San Paulo, estimated that in the region around Rio de Janeiro and the state of Bahia, Marranos constituted 20 percent of the European population by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That number rose to 50 percent in the Paraiba region near Recife, the heart of the lucrative sugar trade.[97]

As reported by Marc Lee Raphael, “In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.”[98] Iberian writers asserted that Marranos played an important role in the formation of both the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company.[99] The Dutch West India Company was a chartered company of Dutch merchants as well as foreign investors founded in 1621. It was granted a charter for a trade monopoly in the Dutch West Indies by the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands and given jurisdiction over Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. All slave imports from Africa were in the hands of the company, which under the terms of its charter held the monopoly to the slave trade. But the Company sold the slaves it transported to Brazil at auctions where Jewish purchasers predominated, purchasing slaves and then selling them to plantation owners and others on credit.[100]

The company entered the slave trade after its successful effort in 1630 to seize northeastern Brazil, followed in turn in 1637 by the capture of Elmina, a major slaving station in Africa. The Company’s rule in Brazil lasted for twenty-four years, during which time it supplied the colony with more than 26,000 Africans. After its expulsion from Brazil in 1654, the Company subsequently turned to supplying slaves to its colonies at New Netherland and Curacao. An even larger Jewish community than that in Suriname had already been established on the island of Curacao, a Dutch possession since 1634, and its members, too, utilized slave labor. The first dozen Jews to attempt settlement on Curacao did so in 1651, and at least one of them arrived with a slave. The history of the effective settlement of Jews in Curaçao began in 1654, when the conquest of Brazil by the Portuguese resulted in the expulsion of the Jews and their dispersion to the West Indies and to the mainland of North America, particularly to New Netherlands and to Newport, Rhode Island. Large numbers came to Curaçao in succeeding years, bringing with them substantial wealth.[101] By the early eighteenth century, half the European population of Suriname, then a territory of the Netherlands, was Jewish.[102]

Despite the Dutch loss in Brazil in in 1654, Holland’s Jews remained interested in settling in the northeastern part of South America. In 1657, a group of them obtained a charter from the Zeeland Chamber of the Dutch West India Company permitting them to settle on the Wild Coast, a coastal region in Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, and offered tax abatements as an inducement to settle, with the greatest reductions in rates going to settlers who established plantations with slaves. While efforts failed to establish a colony at Essequibo, the site chosen under the charter issued by the Zeeland Chamber, but a Jewish presence took hold on the nearby island of Cayenne, which the Dutch seized Cayenne in 1656 or 1657.[103]

In 1659, the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company issued a charter to Joseph Nuñez de Fonseca (also known as David Nassy), (b. 1612), formerly a Jewish settler in Brazil who was the accredited representative of the Company, authorizing him to establish a colony there, affording them freedom of religion. Under Nassy’s leadership, a fairly large Jewish colony arose on Cayenne, whose charter made provision for slaves, with lenience for the settlers to engage in a piratical slave trade. In 1664, the French reconquered Cayenne, forcing Nassy, his fellow colonists and their slaves to settle in nearby Suriname, where Jews had been present as early as 1652. With the advent of the Dutch, who acquired Suriname from the British in exchange for New Netherland in 1667, ten Jewish families with 322 slaves reportedly left for Jamaica.[104]

Jamaica at the time was unique in the New World, as it was a private fiefdom awarded in perpetuity to Christopher Columbus and his heirs in 1494 by Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1655, one year after the Jewish refugees from Brazil began arriving in Jamaica, the private island was seized by the British, led by Admiral William Penn, the father of William Penn Jr., who subsequently founded the state of Pennsylvania. The Jamaican community maintained strong commercial ties with Jewish businessmen in Europe including London, Bayonne and Bordeaux, and with the mainland British North American colonial ports, such as New York, Newport, Charleston and Savannah.[105]

At one point, twenty percent of Kingston’s population were Portuguese and Spanish Jews, while Spanish Town was founded by escaped Jews.[106] The first Jews landed on the island of Jamaica in 1530, just 40 years after it was discovered by Columbus. While Columbus family’s rule kept out the Inquisition for a time, when their power was eroded and the Church began threatening the crypto-Jewish populace, they assisted in the British conquest of the island in 1655. In 2008, an old Jewish cemetery was discovered outside Kingston. Some tombstones have not only Hebrew writing, but are also marked with the Templar skull and crossbones.[107]

Edward Kritzler’s best-seller Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, recounts the tales of Jewish pioneers like the Sephardic Portuguese pirate Moses Cohen Henriques, who was the scourge of the Spanish treasure fleet, and his brother Abraham. In 1628, Henriques helped the Dutch West India Company capture a Spanish treasure fleet in the Battle of Matanzas in Cuba during the Eighty Years’ War. The Dutch took an enormous amount of booty, without any bloodshed, and permitted the Spanish crews, with supplies, to march to Havana. The “gold and silver bullion amounted to a staggering 11,509,524 guilders,” writes Gil Stern Zohar in the Jerusalem Post, “worth around US$1 billion in today’s currency. It was the Dutch West Indies [sic] Company’s greatest heist in the Caribbean.”[108]

Another less well-known Jewish pirate was Yaakov Koriel, who commanded three pirate ships in the Caribbean, before retiring to Safed where he studied under the famous Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria. Similarly, a pirate named David Abarbanel, who likely belonged to the same family as the famous Spanish rabbinic dynasty as Don Isaac Abarbanel, used the nom de guerre “Captain Davis” and commanded his own pirate vessel named Jerusalem.[109] According to Edward Bernard Glick, Jean Lafitte of New Orleans, who is featured in a US national park in Louisiana, and who was the inspiration for Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, was a Sephardic Jew, as was his first wife, who was born in the Danish Virgin Islands.[110] LaFitte helped General Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans during the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, as British forces sought access to the Mississippi River. Lafitte ended up in Jamaica where he served as an adviser to the notorious pirate Henry Morgan.

Lyle Saxon’s novel Lafitte the Pirate (1930) was adapted to film by Cecil B. DeMille as The Buccaneer (1938). In 1958, Anthony Quinn directed a remake starring Yul Brynner as Lafitte, and Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson. Jean LaFoote, loosely based on LaFitte, was a fictional pirate character from the Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal’s character set. Disneyland features a ship anchor monument with accompanying plaque in New Orleans Square dedicated to LaFitte, and he also referred to in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland in which the boat dock is labeled LaFitte’s Landing.

Cochin Jews

Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition in both Spain and Portugal settled in southwest India, in Goa, Madras (now Chennai) and primarily on the Malabar coast, where they joined the Cochin Jews and introduced their racial consciousness through the Curse of Ham. According to The History of the works of the learned (1699), the Cochin Jews of the Malabar coast of India claimed to have been joined by Jews banished from Spain, including the renowned Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1089 – 1164), the student of Abraham bar Hiyya.[111] The Jews of Malabar also claimed to have amongst them other Jews who came from Castille, from Constantina in Armenia, and from Egypt and the town of Tzova in Israel.[112]

The first Portuguese Jews to arrive in India were sailors, who were essential in helping the Portuguese navigate the waters of India. The first Portuguese encounter with the subcontinent was on May 20, 1498, when Knight of Christ Vasco da Gama reached Calicut on Malabar Coast. A number Marranos joined the Portuguese colonialists who were expanding into the East, due to the Treaty of Tordesillas, authorized by Pope Alexander VI in 1494, which gave Portugal the right to found colonies in the Eastern Hemisphere, while Spain was given the West.[113] The ability of the Sephardic Jews to speak Arabic made them vital to interact and conduct diplomatic and trade missions in the courts of the Mughal Empire and the surrounding Muslim and Hindu states.

As K.M. Mathew documents, Jews such as Abraham Zacuto, Pedro (1502 – 1578) Nunes and Joao Baptista Lavanha (c. 1550 – 1624) were instrumental in charting the waters along the Indian coast.[114] Pedro Nunes was a cosmographer from a Marrano family, considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of his time. In 1531, John III charged Nunes with the education of his younger brothers Luis and Henry. John III was the son of King Manuel I and Maria of Aragon, the third daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Like his father, John III was a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. John III’s policy of reinforcing Portugal’s bases in India such as Goa secured Portugal’s monopoly over the spice trade of cloves and nutmeg from the Maluku Islands. King John III, was a Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, and demilitarized the Order of Christ, turning it into a more religious order with a rule based on that of Bernard of Clairvaux.

John III’s daughter was the first wife of Philip II of Spain (1527 – 1598) of the House of Habsburg. The son of Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Spanish kingdoms Charles V and Isabella of Portugal, Philip II was Grand Master of the orders of Santiago, Montesa and Calatrava, and a member of the Order of the Garter. In 1581, after a succession crisis, the Portuguese Nobility gathered in the Convent of Christ in Tomar, which belonged to the Order of Christ, and officially recognized him as Philip II of Spain as King. The convent, like some other Templar churches throughout Europe, was modelled after the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which was believed by the crusaders to be a remnant of the Temple of Solomon. Philip II’s second wife was Mary I of England, denounced as “Bloody Mary,” for her persecutions of Protestants to reverse the English Reformation, which had begun during the reign of her father, Henry VIII, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. He then married Elisabeth of Valois, the eldest daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de Medici, who was known for practices the Black Mass. His fourth and last wife was Philip married Anna, the daughter of Emperor Maximilian I, whose Anne of Bohemia and Hungary, was the great-great-grand-daughter of Emperor Sigismund, founder of the Order of the Dragon. Their son became Philip III of Spain (1578 – 1621).

Joao Baptista Lavanha was a Portuguese cartographer and geographer in the service of the Spanish kings Philip II and Philip III. At the time of the Portuguese succession crisis of 1580, Philip II sent troops to subdue Portugal, and closed the Paço da Ribeira School, founded by Pedro Nunes in Lisbon, and transferred it to Madrid to establish the Academy of Mathematics and Architecture. This institution had as students the playwright Felix Lope de Vega and the writer Miguel de Cervantes, who was also a suspect Marrano.[115] Lavanha was appointed in 1586 by the King to the newly created post of Master Engineer of the Kingdom of Portugal, holding teaching duties at the Academy of Mathematics and Architecture in Madrid. In 1609, Lavanha received the habit of the Order of Christ, and the questions about his Jewish origin had been solved by the direct intervention of Philip III in 1607.[116]

When the Portuguese took control over Goa, Jews and crypto-Jews from Portugal joined the Bene Israel community. The famed Sephardic physician Garcia de Orta (1501? – 1568) belonged to this community. In addition, some settled in Madras, now known as Chennai Jews, they worked with the English East India Company. According to the famed Sephardic poet Daniel Levy de Barrios, during his lifetime Madras was one of the six main areas of Sephardic Jewish settlement in the English empire.[117] Jewish presence in the region was the primary reason for the Portuguese to institute the Goa Inquisition in 1560. More than 16,000 people were put on trial between 1560-1774. In the first 30 years of the Inquisition, 321 people were brought to trial on the charge of crypto-Judaism. Many Jews from Portuguese Goa fled to Bombay and to the Cochin Jews in Kerala.[118] The coming of the Dutch rule beginning in 1663 eased the pressure on the Jewish community in India.[119]

The visit of the Yemenite poet Zachary ben Sa’adia ben Jacob al Zahiri, in the first half of the sixteenth century, although he did not refer to them as “black,” distinguished the Sephardim of Malabar the “other congregations,” whom he described them as descendants of Kushites and Canaanite slaves.[120] Reflecting the Hindu system, the Cochin Jews also subdivided themselves into castes. the “white” Sephardi immigrants or Paradesi (“foreign”) Jews, together with a few Jews from Iraq, Europe and Yemen, joined with an indigenous elite, and distinguished themselves from the “black” Jews, better known as Malabari Jews. Each of these groups were slave-holders, and freed slaves from the Paradesi community were called “brown” Jews. Like the Brahmins, Paradesi Jews discriminated against the “black” Malabari Jews, and would not marry them and would not eat meat slaughtered by their ritual slaughterers.[121]

[1] Cecil Roth. History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 271.

[2] Ibid.

[3] David Brion Davis. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) p. 55; Cf. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, pp. 17-22;27;36-49.

[4] Exodus 9:24-25

[5] Benjamin Braude. “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods.” William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997), p. 128.

[6] Ibid., pp. 103–142; William McKee Evans. “From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham.” American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43; John N. Swift and Gigen Mammoser, “‘Out of the Realm of Superstition: Chesnutt’s ‘Dave’s Neckliss’ and the Curse of Ham’.” American Literary Realism, vol. 42 no. 1, (Fall 2009), 3.

[7] David M. Goldenberg. “The Curse of Ham: A Case of Rabbinic Racism.” Struggles in the Promised Land, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 21-51.

[8] Sex and Race (New York, 1940-44) 3:316-317; later in Nature Knows No Color-Line (New York, 1952), pp. 9-10

[9] Goldenberg. “The Curse of Ham: A Case of Rabbinic Racism,” p. 21-51.

[10] Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht. The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics (New York: Times Books, 1983), p. 39:  Also, Jewish Encyclopaedia, vol. 11, p. 402.

[11] Pirenne. Mohammed and Charlemagne. p. 99.

[12] Seymour Drescher. “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Strangers & neighbors: relations between Blacks & Jews in the United States, Maurianne Adams (Ed.), (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 109.

[13] Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, Ltd., 1971), vol. 14, pp. 1660-64; Salo W. Baron, Arcadius Kahan, Nachum Gross (ed.), Economic History of the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), pp. 271-72;

[14] Drescher. “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” p. 107.

[15] Solomon Grayzel. A History of the Jew: From Babylonian Exile to the End of World II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), p. 312.

[16] Lady Magnus. Outlines of Jewish History , revised by M. Friedlander (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1890), p. 107.

[17] Jewish Encyclopaedia (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1905 -1916), vol. 11, p. 402.

[18] Edith R. Sanders. “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective.” The Journal of African History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1969), pp. 524.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Edith R. Sanders. “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective.” The Journal of African History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1969).

[21] As cited in Benjamin Braude. “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” p. 128.

[22] Braude. “The Sons of Noah,” p. 128.

[23] Napier. A to Z of the Knights Templar.

[24] Michael Hagg. The Templars: The History and the Myth (Profile Books, 2010); Charles E. Nowell. The Great Discoveries and the First Colonial Empires (Cornell University Press, 1954).

[25] Louis Arthur Norton. “The Legacy of Prince Henry.” Mercator's World, vol. 6, no. 3 (May 2001), p. 44.

[26] Peter Russell. Prince Henry “the Navigator.” A Life (Yale University Press, 2000).

[27] Charles E. Nowell. The Great Discoveries and the First Colonial Empires (Cornell University Press, 1954).

[28] “Prince Henry the Navigator.” Catholic Encyclopedia.

[29] Russell. Prince Henry “the Navigator.”

[30] “João Fernandes.” Encyclopedia Britannica.

[31] William Phillips, Jr. & Carla Rahn Phillips. The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 56-69.

[32] L.A. Fonseca. “The Portuguese Military orders and the Oceanic Navigations: From piracy to empire (Fifteenth to early Sixteenth Centuries),” in J. M. Upton-Ward, ed., The Military Orders: On Land and by Sea. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

[33] Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Read Books, 2008), pp. 37-39

[34] Michael Howard. Secret Societies: Their Influence and Power from Antiquity to the Present Day (Simon and Schuster, 2007), p. 74

[35] Ibid.

[36] John Leddy Phelan. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (University of California Press, 1970), p. 17.

[37] Ibid, p. 19.

[38] Lionel Cecil Jane's translation of Columbus' letter on the fourth voyage published in his The Voyages of Christopher Columbus (London, Hakluyt Society, 1930), p. 304. Cited in Phelan. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, p. 21.

[39] Phelan. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, p. 6.

[40] Jose Luis Martínez. "Gerónimo de Mendieta.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, 14 (1980), pp. 189–191.

[41] Phelan. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, p. 12.

[42] Ibid, p. 11.

[43] Harry L. Golden & Martin Rywell. Jews in American History (North Carolina: Henry Lewis Martin Company, 1950), p. 7.

[44] Tina Levitan. Jews in American Life (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1969), p. 4; See also Cecil Roth. Personalities and Events in Jewish History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1953), p. 5.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Charles Garcia. “Was Columbus secretly a Jew?” CNN (May 24, 2012).

[47] Norman Berdichevsky. “The Age-Old Iberian Rivalry and the Jews.” Jewish Political Studies Review 16:1-2 (Spring 2004).

[48] Mascarenhas Barreto. The Portuguese Columbus: Secret Agent of King John II, translated by Reginald A. Brown (St. Martin’s, 1992).

[49] Jose Chabas & Bernard R. Goldstein. “Abraham Zacut:Supplemental Note for a Biography.” Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula (Diane Publishing, 2000). pp. 6–11.

[50] Meyer Kayserling. “America, The Discoery of.” The Jewish Encyclopedia.

[51] Norman Berdichevsky. “The Age-Old Iberian Rivalry and the Jews.” Jewish Political Studies Review, 16:1-2 (Spring 2004).

[52] Kayserling. “America, The Discoery of.”

[53] Ibid.

[54] Berdichevsky. “The Age-Old Iberian Rivalry and the Jews.”

[55] Frederick J. Pohl. Amerigo Vespucci: Pilot Major (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944).

[56] Felipe Fernández-Armesto. Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America (New York: Random House, 2007).

[57] Stefanie Beth Siegmund. The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 446 n. 37.

[58] Ibid., pp. 47–57.

[59] Napier. A to Z of the Knights Templar.

[60] Amerigo Vespucci. Mundus Novus, Letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici (1502/1503); Wolfgang Haase, Meyer Reinhold (eds.), The Classical Tradition and the Americas (Walter de Gruyter, 1994), p. 54.

[61] Davide Baldi. “Ringmann, Waldseemüller and the Philological Cosmography of the New World.” In Cattaneo, Angelo (ed.). Shores of Vespucci (Peter Lang, 2018), p. 101.

[62] Felipe Fernández-Armesto. Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America (New York: Random House, 2007).

[63] Joseph Jacobs & Isaac Broydé. “Zacuto, Abraham ben Samuel.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[64] Berdichevsky. “The Age-Old Iberian Rivalry and the Jews.”

[65] Fernando Tabanez Ribeiro. Guiné-Bolama: história e memórias (in Portuguese). (Oeiras, Portugal: Programa Fim do Império, 2018), p. 33.

[66] Ibid.

[67] UNESCO. História geral da África, Vol. 5: África do século XVI ao XVIII (in Portuguese). (São Paulo: UNESCO, 2010), pp. 468–471.

[68] Eco. Foucault’s Pendulum, (Mariner Books, 2007).

[69] Anthony B. Pinn. Varieties of African American Religious Experience: Toward a Comparative Black Theology (Fortress Press. 2017). p. 5.

[70] “Aido-Hwedo, the Cosmic Serpent.” A Dictionary of African Mythology.

[71] Mathurin C. Houngnikpo & Samuel Decalo. Historical Dictionary of Benin (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), p. 238.

[72] Dierk Lange “Yoruba origins and the ‘Lost Tribes of Israel’,” Anthropos 106 (2011), 579-595.

[73] Edith Bruder. The Black Jews of Africa: History, Religion, Identity. (Oxford University Press, 2008). p. 143.

[74] Natalie Zemon Davis. “Regaining Jerusalem: Eschatology and Slavery in Jewish Colonization in Seventeeth-Century Suriname.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 3,1 (January 2016), p. 16.

[75] Dienekes Pontikos. “TreeMix analysis of North Eurasians (and an African surprise).” Dienekes' Anthropology Blog, March 16, 2012. [http://dienekes.blogspot.ca/2012/03/neandertaldenisovan-admixture-using-pca_18.html]

[76] Dienekes Pontikos. “Neandertal/Denisovan admixture using PCA and ADMIXTURE (and another African surprise).” Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, March 18, 2012. [http://dienekes.blogspot.ca/2012/03/treemix-analysis-of-north-eurasians-and.html]

[77] “Haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA),” Eupedia [http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_R1b_Y-DNA.shtml]

[78] “The Kingdom of Benin.” National Geographic. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/kingdom-benin/

[79] “Benin.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/place/Benin/History

[80] Pere Bonnin. Sangre Judia (Flor de Viento, Barcelona, 2006).

[81] Shep Lenchek. “Jews in Mexico, a struggle for survival: Part One.” Mexconnect (February 1, 2000).

[82] “Arqueólogo sugiere que conquistador Francisco Pizarro fue de origen judío.” Historia De Lima Virreinal (January 21, 2008)..

[83] John Leddy Phelan. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (University of California Press, 1970), p. 24.

[84] Historia, III, 201; cited in Phelan. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, p. 26.

[85] Jose Luis Martínez. “Gerónimo de Mendieta (1980).” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl, 14 (1980).

[86] Enrique Florescano. The Myth of Quetzalcoatl. Translated by Lysa Hochroth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 821.

[87] Jose Luis Martínez. “Gerónimo de Mendieta (1980).” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl, 14 (1980).

[88] Constance Irwin. Fair Gods and Stone Faces (W.H. Allen, London, 1964), pp. 37-8.

[89] Donald. A. Mackenzie. Pre-Columbian America: Myths and Legends (Senate, 1996), p. 268-270.

[90] William Sullivan. The Secret of the Incas (Penguin Random House, 1997).

[91] The Facts on File Encyclopaedia of World Mythology and Legend (London and Oxford, 1988), p. 658.

[92] H. Osborne. South American Mythology (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1968), p. 81.

[93] J. Alden Mason. The Ancient Civilizations of Peru (London Penguin Books, 1991), p. 135; Garcilaso de la Vega. The Royal Commentaries of the Incas (New York: Orion Press, 1961), pp. 132-3, 147-8.

[94] Eli Faber. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York University, 1998), p. 12.

[95] Andrew Brooks. “Jewish Voyagers to the New World Emerging From History's Mists.” New York Times (July 29, 1997).

[96] Gil Stern Zohar. “Jewish pirates of the Caribbean.” Jerusalem Post (April 9, 2016).

[97] Ibid.

[98] Marc Lee Raphael. Jews and Judaism in the United Statses: A Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, 1983), p. 14; Also see Eli Faber. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York University, 1998), Chapter 1.

[99] Charles R. Boxer. The Dutch in Brazil, 1724-1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1957), pp. 10-11.

[100] Eli Faber. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York University, 1998), p. 17.

[101] Cyrus Adler & Herbert Friedenwald. “Curacao.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[102] Andrew Brooks. “Jewish Voyagers to the New World Emerging From History's Mists.” New York Times (July 29, 1997).

[103] Faber. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, p. 18.

[104] Ibid., p. 19.

[105] Ibid.

[106] Edward Kritzler. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (Anchor, 2009). pp. 59–60.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Zohar. “Jewish pirates of the Caribbean.”

[109] Ibid.

[110] Edward Bernard Glick. “Lafitte’s Jewish origins,” The Jerusalem Post (July 14, 2006)

[111] “Abraham bar Hiyya (Savasorda),” EJ; on links between Jews and Templars, see S. Baron, Social, IV, 37; X, 67, 331.

[112] The History of the works of the learned, or An impartial account of books lately printed in all parts of Europe : with a particular relation of the state of learning in each country (1699). Volume 1. (London: Printed for H. Rhodes, at the Star near Fleet-Bridge, T. Bennet, at the Half-Moon in St Paul’s Church-Yard, A. Bell, at the Cross Keys in Cornhill, D. Midwinter and T. Leigh, at the Rose and Crown, in St. Paul's Church-Yard, 1699), pp. 149-150.

[113] Walter J. Fischel. “Leading Jews in the Service of Portuguese India.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 47, 1 (January 1, 1956)), pp. 37–57.

[114] K.M. Mathew. History of the Portuguese Navigation in India, 1497-1600 (Mittal Publications, 1988). pp. 34–38.

[115] Benjamin Ivry. “The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote and Miguel de Cervantes.” Forward (April 28, 2016).

[116] Ubieto Artur & Antonio-Paulo. Aportações à Biografia de João Baptista Lavanha (Coimbra, 1991).

[117] Mordecai Arbell (June 27, 2013). “The Portuguese Jewish Community of Madras, India, in the Seventeenth Century,” Los Muestros, No. 41.

[118] T.V. Parasuram. India’s Jewish Heritage (University of Michigan: Sagar Publications, 1982). p. 67.

[119] Claudius Buchanan. Christian Researches in Asia: With Notices of the Translation of the Scriptures into the Oriental Languages. 2nd ed. (Boston: Armstron, Cornhill, 1811); Menachery G (ed). “The Indian Church History Classics,” Vol. I, The Nazranies, Ollur, 1998.

[120] Jonathan Schorsch. Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 205.

[121] Nathan Katz & Ellen S. Goldberg. “The Sephardi Diaspora in Cochin, India.” Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 3/4, The Sephardic Political Experience (Fall 1993), pp. 97-140.

Volume One

Introduction

1. Babylon

2. Ancient Greece

3. The Hellenistic Age

4. The Book of Revelation

5. Gog and Magog

6. Eastern Mystics

7. Septimania

8. Princes' Crusade

9. The Reconquista

10. Ashkenazi Hasidim

11. The Holy Grail

12. Camelot

13. Perceval

14. The Champagne Fairs

15. Baphomet

16. The Order of Santiago

17. War of the Roses

18. The Age of Discovery

19. Renaissance & Reformation

20. Kings of Jerusalem

21. The Mason Word

22. The Order of the Dragon