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.

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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

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From the burial register of Bethahaim Velho Cemetery, Published by the Jewish Historical Society of England and transcribed by R. D. Barnett.

The register gives us dates for the burials in the "Bethahaim Velho" or Old Cemetery. The dates are listed as per the Jewish calendar.

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Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy, by Dan Rottenberg

In this work Dan Rottenberg shows how to do a successful search for probing the memories of living relatives, by examining marriage licenses, gravestones, ship passenger lists, naturalization records, birth and death certificates, and other public documents, and by looking for clues in family traditions and customs. Supplementing the "how to" instructions is a guide to some 8,000 Jewish family names, giving the origins of the names, sources of information about each family, and the names of related families whose histories have been recorded. Other features included a country-by-country guide to tracing Jewish ancestors abroad, a list of Jewish family history books, and a guide to researching genealogy.

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The Inquisitors and the Jews in the New World, by Seymour B. Liebman. Reports the names of people who appeared before the inquisition in the New Spain

Except for a brief introduction, the entire book is a listing of Inquisition Records in the New World. This is a source for converso names in the New World.

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Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, by Miriam Bodian

This work explores why the Portuguese Jews of northern Europe never established a solid sense of belonging to the wider Sephardi diaspora. It explores how, historically, the Conversos lost the consciousness of being “Sephardi” in the generations after the expulsion from Spain and the mass baptism of Portugal’s Jews in 1497. To be sure, once the Portuguese ex-Conversos organized in Jewish communities, their leaders made efforts to reconnect with the wider Sephardi world, and these efforts had serious symbolic and strategic value. But the Portuguese Jews’ rootedness in the Converso experience meant that their core sense of collective self remained distinct. Contributing factors to their enduring sense of distinctness were these aspects of Converso experience: the absorption of Catholic notions of piety; the “de-rabbinization” of crypto-Jewish belief; and the difficulty for many Conversos of maintaining any stable set of traditional beliefs. The outward image their leaders sought to cultivate may have been one of Sephardi traditionalism, but, at an emotional level, members of these communities continued to regard themselves as members of the “nação”—a term that evoked the Converso past.

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Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews, by David Gitlitz

Despite the increased attention given to Hispano-Jewish topics, and the "conversos" or Crypto-Jews in particular, this is the first thorough compilation of their customs and practices. The author has culled from Inquisition documents and other sources to paint a portrait of the richness and diversity of Crypto-Jewish practices in Spain, Portugal, and the New World. The history of Spanish Jews, or Sephardim, stretches back to biblical times. The Jews of Spain and Portugal made formative contributions to all Hispanic cultures, the impact of which is first being measured and recognized today. The Sephardim experienced a Golden Age in Iberia between 900-1100, during which they acted as the intermediaries between the rival political and cultural worlds of Islam and Christianity. This Golden Age ended with the Reconquest of Spain by Catholic overlords, though for another 300 years the Jews continued to contribute to Iberian life. In 1391 and again in 1492, intense and violent social pressures were put upon the Jews to join the larger Christian community. Many Jews converted, often unwillingly. In 1492 the remaining Jews were exiled from Spain. The converted Jews (Conversos) became an underclass in Spanish society. Many of them clung tenaciously to Jewish practices in the face of torture and death at the hands of the Inquisition. Having lost contact with other Jews, these people developed a religion which was an admixture of Catholic and Jewish rituals. David Gitlitz examines these practices in detail and attempts to answer the question of whether the Conversos were in fact Jewish. Gitlitz's research is exhaustive. He has combed through thousands of Inquistion records, showing that a sense of "Jewishness" if not Jewish practice remained a core value of many Spaniards' lives well into the 1700s. Gitlitz is convincing in showing that the Inquisition unwittingly aided crypto-Jews in perpetuating themselves by publishing Edicts of Faith. Essentially checklists for informers, they described the behavior of "Judaizers" (sometimes the practices listed were absurd or simply erroneous). These, ironically, were used by Judaizers as guides to religious behavior. It is revealing that as the Inquisition faded, crypto-Judaism waned, though never totally vanished. Gitlitz's knowledge and research on the subject is encyclopedic. The book is written in a "textbook" style which makes it somewhat technical and dry, though it is enlivened by excerpts from Inquisition records, which Gitlitz has apparently chosen for their interest, irony, unintended comedy, or spiritedness. It is difficult to imagine that human beings would face the tortures of the rack for not eating pork. That these same tortured people could summon the will to laugh at their executioners is something wondrous. The book includes the names of the Sephardim (and sometimes their residences too).

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Sangre Judia (Jewish Blood) by Pere Bonnin. Flor de Viento, Barcelona, 2006. A list of 3,500 names used by Jews, or assigned to Jews by the Holy Office (la Santo Oficio) of Spain. The list is a result of a census of Jewish communities of Spain by the Catholic Church and as found in Inquisition records.

Pere Bonnin, a philosopher, journalist and writer from Sa Pobla (Mallorca), a descendant of converted Jews, settles with this work a debt "owed to his ancestors", in his own words. The book, written in a personal and accessible style and based on numerous sources, includes a review of basic Jewish concepts, Jewish history in Spain, and Christian Anti-Semitism. There is also a section that focuses on the reconciliation between the Church and Monarchy and the Jews, which took place in the 20th Century. In this study, Bonnin deals in depth with the issue of surnames of Jewish origin. In the prologue, the author explains the rules he followed in the phonetic transcription of surnames of Hebrew origin that are mentioned in the book. The researcher cites the Jewish origin, sometimes recognized and other times controversial, of historically prominent figures (like Cristobal Colon, Hernan Cortes, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and many others) and links between surnames of Jewish origin with some concepts in Judaism.. The book also includes an appendix with more than three thousands surnames "suspected" of being Jewish, because they appear in censuses of the Jewish communities and on the Inquisitorial lists of suspected practitioners of Judaism, as well as in other sources. In the chapter "Una historia de desencuentro", the author elaborates on surnames of Jewish origin of the royalty, nobility, artistocracy, clergy, and also of writers, educators and university teachers during the Inquisition. Special attention is given to the "Chuetas" of Mallorca, the birthplace of the author.

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Raizes Judaicas No Brasil,(Jewish Roots in Brazil) by Flavio Mendes de Carvalho.

This book contains names of New Christians or Brazilians living in Brazil condemned by the Inquisition in the 17th and 18th centuries, as taken from the archives of Torre do Tombo in Lisbon. Many times details including date of birth, occupation, name of parents, age, and location of domicile are also included. The list also includes the names of the relatives of the victims. There are several cases in which many members of the same family were tortured and sentenced so some family lines may end here.

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Histoire des Juifs de Rhodes, Chio, Cos,(History of the Jews of Rhodes: Chio,Cos) by Professor Abraham Galante, published in Istanbul.

Abraham Galante (1873-1961) was first a teacher and an inspector in the Jewish Turkish Schools of Rhodes and Izmir. He conducted an active campaign for the adoption of the Turkish language by the Jews. In 1914, after the revolution of the Young Turks, Galante was appointed professor of Semitic languages and later of history of the Ancient Orient. His principal field of scientific activity was the study of the Jewish history in Turkey

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