On Sephardic Surnames

By Michael Waas

When Spain and Portugal approved their “Right of Return Citizenship” laws in 2015 for descendants of the Jews expelled in 1492 from Spain, who converted to Catholicism in the preceding century beginning with the persecutions in 1391, or who were forcibly baptized in 1496 and 1497 by rule of the Portuguese King Manuel I, interest in Sephardic genealogy grew. Many people, interested in the possibility of an EU passport, started to ask questions about if they were eligible or not by looking into their genealogies. Along came a list that purported to be an authoritative register of all Sephardic surnames, claiming that anyone who had a name on this list would be automatically eligible for Spanish citizenship through this pathway. 

Photo of the old town of Vinhais, Portugal, a place where many Sephardic Jews lived after being forcibly baptized. One of the famous Amsterdam, Livorno, and London families that came from there was the Lousada family and all of their branches. Photo taken by the author in June 2019.

Problem solved, right? “Was my ancestor Sephardic?” could be answered by this expert list, stating conclusively that your family’s surname had belonged to known Sephardic communities.

However, there was one slight issue: that list was fraudulent and a poor copy of indexing work done by the late Harry Stein, who didn’t claim that all of the surnames he indexed were belonging to Sephardic families; just that the books he consulted on Sephardic genealogy and history, had some kind of reference to the surname. Furthermore, not all of the surnames he indexed even belonged to Jews or were in exclusive use by Jews.

In genealogy, history, anthropology, and archaeology, it is always critical to ask questions of the sources you are reading, even if it is a primary source.

Unfortunately, because of lists like that, myths perpetuated by heritage tourism (“Jews forced to convert took the names of fruit trees, Catholic themes, and plants in order to ‘hide’” being one such popular legend routinely sold by tour guides and books in Spain and Portugal), and, quite frankly, inadequate teaching about the history of Sephardic Jewry, a lot of confusion exists today about Sephardic genealogy and history. With this series on Sephardic genealogy and history, I hope to shed some light and encourage people to ask questions about the past in order to better understand the present and future.

A Pear tree, which in Portuguese is “Pereira”. According to the legends, a sure sign of hidden Sephardic Jewish ancestry. In reality? Just a pear tree with hopefully delicious fruit. Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

So, what is a ‘Sephardic surname’? To put it simply, it is any surname used by someone in the Sephardic community. For the purposes of this series, I will be using the term Sephardic, exclusively meaning those with a genealogical tie to expulsees and conversos/New Christians, as well as those who joined later on. This does not necessarily include other Jewish populations who follow Sephardic traditions and approaches to Jewish law and identify as Sephardim/pan-Sephardim as well, who do not have a genealogical connection.

Unlike most other Jewish communities, surnames have a longstanding usage and tradition amongst Sephardic Jews. In the Iberian peninsula, surnames began being used in the 10th century CE, reaching popular usage by the 15th century. Jews in the Peninsula, like Catholics and Muslims, took to this new tradition readily and thus, the tradition of familial surnames predated the end of Iberian Jewry. Famous surnames like Abarbanel, Benveniste, Zacuto, ibn Yahya, and Palache could be found amongst Iberian Jews in the centuries preceding the persecutions, Expulsion, and forced conversion.

So, to return to the original question, “What is a Sephardic Surname?”

There are two main categories of surnames:

Pre-Expulsion Surnames

These surnames could be toponyms (names related to the place), Arabic names, occupations, Hebrew names, and more. Some pre-expulsion surnames include:

Abarbanel, Abensur, Aboab, Almosnino, Alsheikh, Altaras, Amarillo, Barzilay, Benaroya, Benatar, Benbassat, Bendalec, Ben Ghiat, Bensousan, Benveniste, Faraggi, Franco, Haleva, Herrera, Marcos, Nahmias, Palache, Pardo, Pesso, Policar, Saporta, Saltiel, Senior, Sion, Toledano, Valensi, Zacuto

A tax receipt from 1388 of Samuel Amarillo of Tudela from the archives of the Kingdom of Navarre (thanks to Maria Jose Surribas for sharing it). The Amarillo family after the Expulsion and forced conversion, mainly settled in Salonika, where they produced important rabbis and leaders of the community. The author is a descendant of a branch of this family, including the Hahamim Shelomo Amarillo, Moshe Hayim Amarillo, and Shem Tov Amarillo, all of whom were Chief Rabbis (Shelomo and his son Moshe Hayim in Salonika, Shem Tov in Korfu and Larissa, all today in Greece).

New Christian Surnames

These surnames were given to Jews who were forcibly baptized to become New Christians in Portugal, otherwise known as Conversos in Spain. The acquisition of surnames was simple: They were the baptismal surname of the Old Christian godparents of the Jews in 1496 and 1497. This was done in order to assimilate the New Christians and make them indistinguishable from the Old Christians. In practice, this was not really done at all, and through stigma and discrimination New Christians remained a community apart. Some examples of surnames include:

da Costa, da Fonseca, da Veiga, Delgado, Fernandes, Gomes, Henriques, Nunes, Lopes, Marques, Mendes, Pinto, Pereira, Rodrigues, Vaz…

From the Inquisition of Lisboa processo for Judaizing of Gaspar Fernandes o Gallego. In Portuguese it states “Disse que elle se chama Gaspar Frz gallego, mercador, e que christão novo de idade de sesenta e dois annos…” which means “[the Defendant"] stated that his name is Gaspar Fernandes Gallego, merchant and that he is a New Christian, aged 62 years old”. You can see the rest of his processo, here: https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=2312336

What’s important is that New Christian surnames are indistinguishable from non-Jewish, Old Christian surnames because they are the same. Furthermore, you can have innumerable combinations of names, including siblings with different surnames entirely, as long as the family names existed within the recent genealogy of the family. In my own research, I have a set of siblings born in Viseu, Portugal, and Bayonne and Bordeaux, France who moved to Amsterdam, London, Barbados, and possibly Newport, Rhode Island that have the surnames Mendes, Mendes Sereno/Serrano, and Nunes Mantensa. All the same generation!

Some examples of double surnames found among Portuguese Jews include:

Aboab da Fonseca, Franco da Costa, Franco Mendes, Gomes da Costa, Henriques Nunes, Lopes Pereira, Mendes da Costa, Mendes Seixas, Nunes Vaz, Rodrigues Pereira, Pardo Roques, Sarfaty Pina, Vaz Dias, Vaz Lopes, Vaz Nunes, Vaz Villareal

To sum it up, Sephardic surnames have a long and storied history. Many family names are ancient and have deep roots in Sephardic genealogy and history. Yet, the appearance of a surname in your genealogy that was used by a Sephardic family in the past and today is not an indication of an actual Sephardic genealogy and connection. Each case must be studied critically, understanding all of the data points including communities, oral histories, archives, and genetics. In my own family, we discovered that our surname’s origin lies not in a creation of Dutch Ashkenazim for the Napoleonic surname registration in 1811, but is actually a Dutchification of a Portuguese surname, Vaz, uncovering a previously forgotten and unknown history of a family that became Ashkenazi in the mid-18th century in Amsterdam. This story was only uncovered due to a deep study of YDNA and the archives of Amsterdam. 

If you think you have Sephardic heritage, please feel free to reach out to us and we will be happy to provide a consult and develop a plan for researching your ancestral past. For an amazing further resource on Sephardic surnames, please see the excellent Dicionário sefaradi de sobrenomes by Guilherme Faiguenboim, Paulo Valadares, and Anna Rosa Campagnano, which gives an extensive list of documented surnames of Sephardic Jews and the communities they came from across the world, including archival sources. In the next blog in this series, I will discuss more on who the New Christians were, their genealogies, and their impact on Sephardic history.