Manuel I orders the Jews and Muslims out of Portugal: Muge, 5 December 1496

In the first days of December 1496 the Portuguese court was staying at Muge, and King Manuel I, on the throne for just over a year, broke there with his predecessors' policy of tolerating Jews and Muslims. On 4 December, by one account, he ordered a sermon announcing that the Jews would be expelled. The letter patent itself is dated at Muge on 5 December 1496.4 sources4 sources

Its title left no room for doubt: “that the Jews and free Moors leave these kingdoms and neither live nor stay in them”. Every Jew, and every Muslim who was not a slave, had to be gone by the end of October 1497. Anyone found after that would be put to death and lose his goods to whoever denounced him. A Christian caught hiding one would lose his own property.2 sources2 sources

On paper the terms were mild. The Jews could leave with all their property, debts owed to them would be paid, and the king promised to help them on their way. Not everyone at court agreed with it. The Council of State warned that money would flee the country with them.3 sources3 sources

It did not work out that way. Within a year most of Portugal's Jews had been baptised by force, many of them dragged to the font, and the kingdom officially had no Jews left at all, only Old Christians and New Christians.2 sources2 sources

Jews had lived in the Iberian Peninsula long before there was a Portugal. François Soyer, whose 2007 book is the first study of the 1496–7 persecution of both Jews and Muslims in Portugal, notes that their presence “predated both the Islamic conquest and the creation of Portugal by many centuries”.1 source1 source

They lived in self-governing communities with their own officials and judges, synagogues, schools, cemeteries and butchers. In return for heavy taxes the crown took them under its protection. The law also kept them apart: Jews had to live in separate quarters called judiarias, as Muslims did in mourarias, and to wear badges on their clothes. Sex between a Christian and a Jew or Muslim carried the death penalty.1 source1 source

There were riots, but Soyer finds that anti-Jewish violence in Portugal never came close to what happened elsewhere in the peninsula, and Portuguese kings and clergy did not generally run campaigns of forced conversion. By his estimate Portugal had at most 30,000 Jews in the late fifteenth century, in a kingdom of barely a million people.1 source1 source

They left a mark on Portuguese culture. The first dated book printed in Portugal was a Hebrew Pentateuch, finished in Faro in the printing shop of Don Shmuel Gacon on 30 June 1487. Hebrew presses followed in Lisbon and Leiria, and Hebrew books made up about half of the roughly thirty titles printed in Portugal before 1500.1 source1 source

On 31 March 1492 Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, the Catholic Monarchs, signed an edict ordering every Jew in their kingdoms to convert or leave by the end of July. Portugal, next door and close to Castile in culture and trade, took the largest share of the exiles.2 sources2 sources

Its king, João II, let them in at a price. Refugees crossed at set points such as Olivença, Arronches, Bragança and Melgaço, paid a toll and received a safe-conduct. Only 600 families were allowed to settle. The rest had eight months to move on and waited in camps near the border, where epidemics broke out. Those caught entering without paying were enslaved.2 sources2 sources

Leaving was no safer. Ships bound for North Africa sailed from Porto, Lisbon and Setúbal, and on board many refugees were robbed and the women raped; on landing they were attacked again by the garrisons of the Portuguese strongholds of Arzila and Tangier. In 1493 the king had perhaps as many as 2,000 Jewish children taken from their parents and sent to São Tomé, an equatorial island the crown wanted settled.2 sources2 sources

Manuel became king in October 1495. He wanted to marry Isabella, eldest daughter of the Catholic Monarchs. She knew Portugal already: she had married João II's son and heir Afonso, who died in 1491 after a fall from his horse at Santarém. Widowed, she had resolved never to marry again.2 sources2 sources

Her parents' price was the expulsion of Portugal's Jews. The marriage agreement was signed on 30 November 1496, and the decree followed five days later. Ha-Lapid, the newspaper of Porto's Jewish community, put it plainly in 1940: the expulsion “had been demanded by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, in an express clause in the marriage contract”.2 sources2 sources

Since the nineteenth century historians have read the decree as the price of a dynastic dream: the marriage could put Manuel's heirs on every throne in the peninsula. Soyer accepts that Isabella and Ferdinand pressed him, but argues he gave way to buy “a long-lasting settlement with his powerful Castilian neighbours” and freedom to concentrate on expansion overseas and war in North Africa.1 source1 source

The Muslims are a separate case. Soyer, working from unpublished documents in the Portuguese national archives, argues that their expulsion was not forced on Manuel by inflexible Spanish demands, as modern historians had assumed. He wanted to boost his image as a crusading Christian king.2 sources2 sources

The wedding took place at Valencia de Alcántara, a Castilian town on the border, in October 1497. That same year Isabella's brother Juan, heir to Castile and Aragon, died, and the couple became heirs to the Spanish thrones. She died in childbirth at Zaragoza in 1498. Their son Miguel, who might have united the Iberian crowns, died in Granada in 1500, before his second birthday.2 sources2 sources

Manuel soon changed course. According to Soyer, he feared that “the kingdom would remain like an empty fishing net”, since the Jews held most of its wealth, and he issued orders that stopped them sailing without a royal licence. Jews who accepted baptism could stay, and the deadline for it was Easter 1497.2 sources2 sources

Meanwhile the crown took over synagogues, schools and the communities' common property. The Great Synagogue of Lisbon was given to the Order of Christ. Hebrew books were seized; some were sold off cheaply and others burned in Lisbon, and Hebrew printing in Portugal came to an end.2 sources2 sources

Then, around Easter 1497, the crown turned on the children. Jewish children under 14 were taken from their parents to be baptised and brought up in Christian homes, and the order was later stretched to young people of up to 20. Soyer dates the seizures to the week before Easter; Ha-Lapid gave 2 April. The chroniclers Damião de Góis and Jerónimo Osório, Bishop of Silves, recorded parents who killed their children, and themselves, rather than hand them over.4 sources4 sources

Most adults still refused. Departures, first allowed from three ports, were restricted to Lisbon, and those who came to the capital to embark were penned instead in the grounds of the Estaus, a palace at the top of the Rossio. The historian Jorge Martins puts their number at about 20,000. Reportedly kept without food or water, they were dragged to nearby churches and baptised.3 sources3 sources

Accounts differ on when this happened. Observador, like Hessayon's summary of Soyer, places it in the spring, before the converts were given guarantees on 30 May 1497. Gretchen Starr-LeBeau and Grayce Souza place it at the end of October, when the deadline for leaving ran out.4 sources4 sources

Samuel Usque, in an account quoted by Ha-Lapid, described how the king's men separated the young, up to the age of 25, from their elders and tried promises first. When that failed, they used force.1 source1 source

Rabbi Abraham Zacuto called it “a forced conversion on a scale never before witnessed”. In Portugal it became known as the conversão em pé, the conversion standing up. On 30 May 1497 the king promised the converts that for 20 years nobody would inquire into their beliefs.3 sources3 sources

The Muslims were treated differently. Portugal's Muslim minority was small, and Christian rulers feared reprisals against Christians living under Muslim rule, so most Portuguese Muslims were allowed to leave with their children. Some may have gone to Castile; others certainly went to North Africa.2 sources2 sources

The converts and their descendants were called New Christians, cristãos-novos, to set them apart from Old Christians. The decree of 30 May 1497 said they were not to be treated differently from other Christians. Two years later, as wealthy converts moved their money abroad, Manuel forbade them to leave the kingdom without royal permission, on pain of losing their goods.2 sources2 sources

In the spring of 1506 Lisbon was suffering from plague and hunger. On Sunday 19 April, at the Dominican church of São Domingos beside the Rossio, people claimed to have seen a miracle, a light shining on the crucifix. According to Damião de Góis, a New Christian said it was only the reflection of a candle. He was dragged out of the church by the hair, killed, and his body burned in the Rossio.3 sources3 sources

Two Dominican friars, João Mocho and Bernardo, urged the crowd on. For three or four days mobs hunted New Christians through the city, broke into their houses and burned the dead and the living on bonfires.4 sources4 sources

Nobody knows how many died. Soyer gives estimates of anywhere between 1,000 and 4,000 men, women and children. Góis, who was four years old at the time, counted more than 500 dead on the Sunday and more than 1,000 on the Monday alone. Garcia de Resende, who wrote that he saw it, put the dead at more than 4,000 in verse. The nineteenth-century historian Alexandre Herculano and the American historian Yosef Yerushalmi gave about 2,000, which Observador calls the figure most specialists accept.3 sources3 sources

The killings shocked Europe. An anonymous German who was in Lisbon at the time wrote an eyewitness account that was printed in at least three German editions, and two Spanish chroniclers who had said nothing about the forced conversions of 1497 gave the massacre whole chapters.1 source1 source

The king punished the city. Those proven guilty lost all their property, bystanders who had done nothing lost a fifth of theirs, and elections to the Casa dos Vinte e Quatro, the body of the city's guilds, were suspended. Góis wrote that the two friars were burned; the historian António José Saraiva argued that they escaped. For a time the crown also let New Christians emigrate.2 sources2 sources

Manuel asked Rome for an inquisition on the Spanish model as early as 1515. His son João III got one. Pope Paul III's bull Cum ad nihil magis, signed on 23 May 1536, was read out in Évora cathedral on 22 October. From the start its main target was Judaism among the New Christians.1 source1 source

The legal distinction between Old and New Christians was abolished in 1773, and the Inquisition itself in 1821. Its victims included the comic playwright António José da Silva, “o Judeu”, executed in Lisbon in 1739. Many New Christians escaped abroad, and their descendants founded Portuguese Jewish communities from Amsterdam to the Americas.3 sources3 sources

In front of the door of São Domingos stands a monument at the spot where, in 2000, the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, José Policarpo, expressed shame for the Inquisition's persecution. Beside it, since 2008, has stood a memorial to the victims of 1506 by Graça Bachmann, proposed by Lisbon's Jewish community: a truncated stone globe carved with a Star of David, on a base inscribed with a line from the Book of Job.1 source1 source

The state went further. In 2013 parliament amended the nationality law so that the government could naturalise descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews, and the rules took effect on 1 March 2015. Their preamble tells the story in the state's own words, from Manuel's decree to the conversão em pé. Applicants normally presented a certificate from a Jewish community in Portugal confirming their descent, shown through surnames, family language, genealogy or family memory.2 sources2 sources

Demand was enormous. By the end of 2021, 137,087 applications had been filed and 56,685 approved, with only 300 refused. In 2022 another 124,663 arrived, and 18,121 people were approved that year.2 sources2 sources

Then the rules tightened. From September 2022 applicants had to show a lasting link to Portugal, such as regular visits throughout their lives or an inheritance, and an amendment approved at the end of 2023 added three years of legal residence for new applicants. Finally Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026, published on 18 May 2026, repealed the Sephardic clause altogether. Applications already lodged are decided under the old rules; Lisbon's Jewish community stopped accepting new ones from 4 May 2026.4 sources4 sources