While everyone has been locked indoors, the Sephardic online community has been thriving. This is largely thanks to weekly Sephardic World talks hosted by Ton Thielen and David Mendoza, which have reached an international audience. Sephardic World was put together […]
Genealogy and the Settlement of Jews in Brazil
According to its census, Brazil, with 123 million Roman Catholics, is the largest Catholic nation in the world. If one considers its DNA legacy, however, we find that many white Brazilians descend from Portuguese Jews and New Christians who arrived […]
The Lost Jews of St. Maarten
The first time I visited the half-Dutch, half-French island of St. Martin/St. Maarten in 1991, I heard that it once had a Jewish community. St. Maarten is a 36-square-mile island in the eastern Caribbean, located between St. Thomas and St. […]
Launching the Converso Genealogy Project: Tracking the Diaspora of the New Christians
I was born into a Roman Catholic family in Havana, Cuba, but from a young age, I felt Jewish and inexplicably was drawn to all things Jewish. After converting to Orthodox Judaism at age 34, I found clues along my […]
Announcing “A Nação Hebrea: A Relational Prosopographic Database of the Portuguese Jewish Nation 1500-1800
In today’s world, interest in Sephardic Jewry is greater than ever before, particularly with the recent laws in Portugal and Spain enacting the right for descendants of Iberian Jews to reclaim nationality that had been revoked by the Expulsion. The […]
Costa Fascination: One of England’s Oldest Jewish Families
Genealogy, the research and study of family history, is such a fascinating subject, so fascinating that it has been linked with addiction—not alcohol, gambling or drugs, but the sheer pleasure of finding new facts that lead on to more searching […]