“At this day also the Abassins affirm that upon the Nilus [Nile] towards the west there inhabiteth a most populous nation of the Jewish stock under a mightie king. And some of our modern cosmographers set down a province in those quarters which they call the land of the Hebrews, placed as it were under the equinoctial, in certain unknown mountains, between the confines of Abassin and Congo”
SOURCE;
(John Pory, ‘A Geographical Historie of Africa’; 1600)
“King John II, in 1492, expelled all the Jews to the Island of St. Thomas (Sao Tome), which had been discovered in 1471, and to other Portuguese settlements on the continent of Africa; and from these banished Jews, the black Portuguese, as they are called, and the Jews in Loango [Angola / Kongo] who are despised even by the very negroes, are descended”
SOURCE;
(The Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature; Volumes 57-58; 1783)
The Jews in Loango are descended from the black Portuguese Jews who got expelled there…
The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was an edict issued on March 31, 1492, by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of practicing Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by July 31 of that year…
Over half of Spain's Jews had converted as a result of the religious persecution and pogroms which occurred in 1391…
Due to continuing attacks, around 50,000 more had converted by 1415…
A further number of those remaining chose to convert to avoid expulsion…
As a result of the Alhambra decree and persecution in the years leading up to the expulsion of Spain's estimated 300,000 Jewish origin population, a total of over 200,000 had converted to Catholicism to remain in Spain, and between 40,000 and 100,000 remained Jewish and suffered expulsion…
A remarkable fact in the history of Loango is that the country contains—according to a statement which was fully credited by Oldendorp, himself a writer of most correct judgment and of unimpeachable veracity, many Jews settled in the country, who retain their religious rites, and the distinct habits which keep them isolated from other nations…
Though thus separate from the African population, they are black, and resemble the other Negroes in every respect as to physical characters…
SOURCE;
(James Cowles Prichard, Researches Into the Physical History of Mankind: Ethnography of the African races; 1837)
In other words, the black Portuguese Jews who settled in Loango were indistinguishable from the native black Africans…
In the reign of Jean II of Portugal nearly 700 Jews were taken from their kin and deported to the island of São Tomé on the west coast of Africa. This island is close to Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon…
Escaping from São Tomé the Jews emigrated to the coast of Angola between 1484 and 1499…
They must have settled in several Portuguese colonies and over the centuries mixed with the indigenous black population…
Near the Congo in Gabon in 1776 black Jews, called Bavumbu (or even Mavambo, Mayomba, May or Mavumbu), lived on the coast of Luango by the river named the Rio Muni…
SOURCE;
(Cambridge University Press, European Journal of Sociology; Vol 61; 2020)
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