The English meaning of Delmonte is From the hill.
The name Delmonte is of Spanish origin.
There are many indicators that the name Delmonte may be of Jewish origin, emanating from the Jewish communities of Spain and Portugal.
When the Romans conquered the Jewish nation in 70 CE, much of the Jewish population was sent into exile throughout the Roman Empire. Many were sent to the Iberian Peninsula. The approximately 750,000 Jews living in Spain in the year 1492 were banished from the country by royal decree of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Jews of Portugal, were banished several years later. Reprieve from the banishment decrees was promised to those Jews who converted to Catholicism. Though some converted by choice, most of these New-Christian converts were called CONVERSOS or MARRANOS (a derogatory term for converts meaning pigs in Spanish), ANUSIM (meaning "coerced ones" in Hebrew) and CRYPTO-JEWS, as they secretly continued to practice the tenets of the Jewish faith.
Our research has found that the family name Delmonte is cited with respect to Jews & Crypto-Jews in at least 6 bibliographical, documentary, or electronic references:
When the Conversos fled Portugal to settle in Amsterdam they returned openly to Judaism. Because they often still had relatives in Portugal, they tried to protect them by using aliases in their transactions. However, it wasn’t only the Portuguese who wound up in Amsterdam. Even a century after 1492, conversos were finding their way from Spain to Amsterdam. Listing a person as a Portuguese merchant generally meant he was Jewish. Their family contacts worldwide, along with their language skills, were great commercial assets in their farflung business ventures. And in their contacts with family back home, they had to be discreet as to not bring suspicion on relatives left behind This work is a wonderful research tool for Sephardic research in Amsterdam.
When the Conversos fled Portugal to settle in Amsterdam they returned openly to Judaism. Because they often still had relatives in Portugal, they tried to protect them by using aliases in their transactions. However, it wasn’t only the Portuguese who wound up in Amsterdam. Even a century after 1492, conversos were finding their way from Spain to Amsterdam. Listing a person as a Portuguese merchant generally meant he was Jewish. Their family contacts worldwide, along with their language skills, were great commercial assets in their farflung business ventures. And in their contacts with family back home, they had to be discreet as to not bring suspicion on relatives left behind This work is a wonderful research tool for Sephardic research in Amsterdam.
From the civil records of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The Amsterdam Municipal Archives possess a complete set of registers of intended marriages from 1578 to 1811, the year when the present Civil Registry was started. Between 1598 and 1811, 15238 Jewish couples were entered in these books. Both the number of records and the volume of data that may be extracted from them are unprecedented.
From the records of Bevis Marks, The Spanish and Portuguese Congregation of London
Bevis Marks is the Sephardic synagogue in London. It is over 300 years old and is the oldest still in use in Britain.The Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation of London has published several volumes of its records: they can be found in libraries such as the Cambridge University Library or the London Metropolitan Archive
Precious Stones of the Jews in Curaçao; Curaçaon Jewry 1656-1957, by Isaac Samuel Emmanuel (1957)
Names taken from 225 tombstones of 2536 persons, 1668 - 1859, men, women and some Rabbis. Includes cemetery history and plan, biographies including family histories, chronological list of names, alphabetical list of family names + number of members + eldest tombstone year, large bibliography, general alphabetical index, 15 genealogies.
Dicionario Sefaradi De Sobrenomes (Dictionary of Sephardic Surnames), G. Faiguenboim, P. Valadares, A.R. Campagnano, Rio de Janeiro, 2004
A bilingual (Portugese/English)reference book of Sephardic surnames. Includes New Christians, Conversos, Crypto-Jews (Marranos), Italians, Berbers and their history in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Contains over 16,000 surnames presented under 12000 entries, with hundreds of rare photographs, family shields and illustrations.It also contains a 72-page summary of Sephardic history, before and after the expulsion from Spain and Portugal, as well as a 40-page linguistic essay about Sephardic names, including an interesting list of the 250 most frequent Sephardic surnames. The period covered by the dictionary is of 600 years, from the 14th to the 20th century, and the area covered includes Spain and Portugal, France, Italy, Holland, England, Germany, Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, the former Ottoman Empire, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, North America, Central America and the Caribbean, South America and more.
Around the 12th century, surnames started to become common in Iberia. In Spain, where Arab-Jewish influence was significant, these new names retained their old original structure, so that many of the Jewish surnames were of Hebrew derivation. Others were directly related to geographical locations and were acquired due to the forced wanderings caused by exile and persecution. Other family names were a result of conversion, when the family accepted the name of their Christian sponsor. In many cases, the Portuguese Jews bear surnames of pure Iberian/Christian origin. Many names have been changed in the course of migration from country to country. In yet other cases "aliases", or totally new names, were adopted due to fear of persecution by the Inquisition.
For information on available options for DNA testing please see below. This information is provided as a courtesy and as a general information service only. We do not take responsibility, provide support nor are we connected in any way to these companies
Order a testWe endeavor to assist those with possible Jewish roots and to provide them with an array of tools to facilitate their personal journey of discovery and learning about their heritage
Join our facebook community!