There are many indicators that the name de Pinto 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 de Pinto is cited with respect to Jews & Crypto-Jews in at least 9 bibliographical, documentary, or electronic references:
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.
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.
Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World: 1391-1648,edited by Gampel.
This book explores antecedents,causes, mechanics and aftermath of the 1492 expulsion from Spain and lists Sephardic movers and shakers during the period.
The Jews of Jamaica, by Richard D. Barnett and Philip Wright.Oron Yoffe, Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, 1997.
The product of many years of painstaking research by two late scholars, Richard D. Barnett and Philip Wright, this volume presents the texts or summaries of 1456 tombstone inscriptions of Jews who lived in Jamaica between 1663, when the British ousted the Spanish, and 1880, when systematic registration of deaths was introduced. Jewish families who had fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal settled in Jamaica in increasing numbers during that time. Ashkenazic Jews also settled there in the eighteenth century. The Jews played a significant part in developing the island's natural resources and its international trade. Featuring detailed indexes by name, date and language, The Jews of Jamaica is a valuable tool for the study of immigration to the Americas, the surnames, given names and genealogy of Sephardi Jews. The texts of the inscriptions, many of them in three languages (Hebrew, English and Portuguese or Spanish), are of cultural interest and sometimes refer to dramatic events in the lives of the Jewish residents of Jamaica during a turbulent period.
Judios Conversos (Jewish Converts) by Mario Javier Saban. Distal, Buenos Aires, 1990. The ancestors of the Argentinian Jewish families. List of names of those Jews expelled from Santa Fe.
This best-selling work traces the immigration of Conversos from Portugal to Argentina and Brazil. It contains many Sephardic names and family trees within its 3 volumes. Many of the individuals listed appeared before the Inquisition and were secret Jews. Some later converted and intermarried. Many of the names listed here represent the famous names of Jewish/Sephardic Argentina. Over 100 pages of genealogies, well detailed, are provided.
ETSI (a Paris-based, bilingual French-English periodical) is devoted exclusively to Sephardic genealogy and is published by the Sephardi Genealogical and Historical Society (SGHS). It was founded by Dr. Philip Abensur, and his professional genealogist wife, Laurence Abensur-Hazan. ETSI's worldwide base of authors publish articles identifying a broad spectrum of archival material of importance to the Sephardic genealogist. A useful feature of ETSI is the listing, on the back cover, of all Sephardic family names, and places of origin, cited in the articles contained in each issue
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
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.
Noble Families Among The Sephardic Jews, by Isaac Da Costa, Bertram Brewster, and Cecil Roth.
This book provides genealogy information about many of the more famous Sephardic families of Iberia, England and Amsterdam. It documents the assimilation, name changes and conversion of many Sephardic families in Spain, England and The Netherlands. There is a large section dealing with the genealogy of the members of Capadose and Silva families in Spain and Portugal. This reference includes genealogical tables and a translation of Da Costa’s 1850 work "Israel and the Gentiles", with chapters by Bertram Brewster on the Capadose conversion to Christianity and by Cecil Roth on their Jewish history.
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.
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