In 1496, King Manuel I of Portugal punished Portuguese Jews who refused to pay a head tax by deporting almost 2,000 Jewish children to São Tomé and Príncipe. The children ranged in age between 2 and 10. The children were raised as Roman Catholics and worked in the sugar trade, where they had to fend off crocodiles. A year after being deported to the islands, only 600 children remained alive. Some of the children tried to retain their Judaism and Jewish heritage. Until the early 1600s, descendants of the deported Jewish children retained some Jewish practices. By the 18th century, the Jewish heritage on the islands had largely dissipated.[1]
A generation later, when Portugal colonized Brazil, some of the grown children were sent to work in the Brazilian sugar trade.[2]
A new community of Jews was established on the islands in the 19th and 20th centuries with the arrival of a small number of Jewish sugar and cocoa traders.[1]
In contemporary São Tomé and Príncipe, there are no practicing Jews. However, living descendants of the Portuguese-Jewish children remain on the islands where they are visibly distinctive due to their lighter complexions. On July 12, 1995, an international conference was held on the islands' twentieth independence day to commemorate the Portuguese-Jewish children who were deported to the islands in the 15th century.[1]
