Dr Miguel Lourenço, a researcher at CHAM – Humanities Center (NOVA University of Lisbon), with his expertise in the history of Macao and the Philippines in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially on representations of the Inquisition in these territories, will be delivering a talk on ‘Glimpses from the Lives of the New Christians of 16th Century Goa’, at Fundação Oriente, Rua Filipe Neri Xavier, Fontainhas, Panjim on July 17 at 6 pm. He is the coordinator of the project ‘Monsoons,’ an initiative of the Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies to study the presence of the New Christians in the Estado da Índia. Dr Miguel is the author of ‘A Articulação da Periferia. Macau e a Inquisição de Goa (c. 1582-c. 1650)’ (Lisboa and Macao, 2016).
The New Christians in India have been the subject of much debate and scholarly production since long. From Brazil to the Ottoman Empire, from Mexico to the Philippines, from Italy to Cochin, the New Christian diaspora is a prolific field of research. In Goa, however, it has been largely left out of these dynamics, due to the scarcity of information available to uncover their lives, expectations and travails. In this presentation, Dr Miguel shall offer a bird’s-eye view of the New Christians of Goa during the 16th century, depicting the relations between their different groups and families, while at the same time, highlighting some individual cases of that period.
During the first half of the 16th Century, Goa acquired an important dimension as a trading post. Among the many merchant groups that contributed to Goa's growth and vigor during this period were the so-called New Christians, Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism or their descendants. Very soon, Goa began to attract these elements, who abandoned an increasingly less tolerant Portugal, where the Inquisition had been founded in 1536, for a city that was a nodal point for commercial relations that crossed the entire Indian Ocean and where there existed no branch of the Inquisition.
Merchants, goldsmiths and shoemakers travelled to Goa with their families, marrying off their sons and daughters, who went on to raise two and three generations of New Christians born in the city of Goa. ‘Glimpses from the lives of the New Christians of 16th century Goa’ aims to recover some of the experiences of these families, from the time they settled in the city and formed a community, until the time when the establishment of the Inquisition in Goa in 1560 led to two decades of inquisitorial proceedings for ‘Judaism’ offences.
The community lost some of its main leadership figures: some left Goa for Portugal, others for the Islamic sultanates of the Indian subcontinent, others were imprisoned with their families by the Inquisition and their lives were lost.
This overview of the experiences of these individuals in the city of Goa throughout the 16th century aims to show how the New Christians organized their lives in order to adapt to their place of arrival and how the Inquisition affected this community.