The Carvallo Family

The surname Caravahlo / Carvalho is, in its structure, a name of natural origin. The Portuguese word carvalho designates the oak tree, and many place names in Portugal — localities, hamlets, rural properties — bear this name because of the presence of oak forests [Geneanet, notice « Carvalho »]. In Iberian onomastics, the tree functioned as a geographical marker: a family was designated by the place where it resided, and the isolated oak or oak forest constituted a natural point of fixation for the name.

This naturalistic logic is common to many other Sephardic and Iberian surnames: Oliveira (the olive tree), Pereira (the pear tree), Pinheiro (the pine tree), Figueira (the fig tree). Joseph Toledano, in his inventory of Jewish family names in North Africa, precisely places Caravahlo in this botanical series by assigning it the sense of "oak" [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles]. The shift from the spelling Carvalho to Caravahlo — through vowel epenthesis and consonant inversion — attests to the successive transcriptions a name undergoes when migrating from one language and alphabet to another: from Portuguese to the dialectal Arabic of the Maghreb, then from Judeo-Arabic to the French transcription of colonial registers. These graphic deformations, far from being anecdotal, often constitute the very signature of a diasporic trajectory [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles].

The branch that concerns us most precisely in this enriched edition retained the expanded Iberian form Nunes Carvalho — a double Hispanic-Portuguese name where Nunes is a common surname of Spanish descent, and Carvalho the Lusitanian oak. This double designation, typical of Sephardic families of the Atlantic diaspora, functioned both as a communal identity marker and as a social passport in the ports and trading posts where these families conducted their commerce. A double name tells a double story: that of an identity which never accepted being reduced to a single belonging.

The oak tree carries within it a symbolism not without resonance with what the lineage would express through the generations. The oak is robust, rooted, slow to grow but difficult to fell. Its acorns nourish before its branches shade. And it knows how to survive in ungrateful terrain where other species perish. Whether this metaphor was conscious or not in the choice or imposition of the name, it faithfully describes what the Nunes Carvalho family did with its heritage: to take root in each new soil without ever losing the memory of the soil of origin.

It should be emphasized that, on the strictly linguistic plane, the name Carvalho has in itself nothing specifically Jewish: it was and remains widely borne by Portuguese Catholic families with no Hebrew ancestry [Geneanet, notice « Carvalho » ; Wikipedia, « Carvalho »]. It is the historical context — that of forced conversions — which, for certain branches, charged this ordinary name with a clandestine memory. But it is the lived trajectory — documented, traced, printed — that transforms this ordinary name into an emblem of an extraordinary lineage.

The historical background of this record is one of the most dramatic episodes in European Jewish history. After the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, many of them found refuge in neighboring Portugal. But this respite was brief. In 1496, King Manuel I, under pressure from the marriage project that bound him to the Crown of Castile-Aragon, promulgated an edict expelling Jews and Muslims from the kingdom [Encyclopedia.com, "Jews, Expulsion of (Spain; Portugal)"].

The year 1497, however, saw the sovereign resort to a strategy distinct from that of Spain: rather than allow a population whose economic utility he recognized to depart, Manuel I organized a massive forced conversion, retaining Jews on Portuguese soil while compelling them to baptism ["The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal", reviews.history.ac.uk]. Some accounts from the period describe collective baptisms forcibly administered to children torn from their parents. From this constraint arose the vast population of cristãos-novos, the "New Christians," baptized against their will, a considerable portion of whom continued, in the secrecy of their homes, to observe Jewish practices [Jewish Virtual Library, "Marranos, Conversos, Anusim, & New Christians"].

It is in this crucible that the record situates the adoption of the name Caravahlo: converted families would have taken this Christian surname on the surface while preserving their inner loyalty [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles]. This practice of crypto-Judaism — clandestine observance of the Sabbath, dietary laws, the Yom Kippur fast — characterized generations of Marranos, particularly in the remote regions of northern Portugal, where communities of Judaizing tradition maintained themselves into the contemporary period ["The Marranos of Northern Portugal", Portugal Resident]. Families transmitted the bare essentials: the lighting of candles on Friday evening, sometimes without even knowing its name or meaning, the reluctance to consume certain meats, the whispered memory of an identity one could not speak aloud.

Halakha — Jewish Law in its practical, daily, embodied dimension — was the true inner refuge of these families. Where imposed baptism had erased external signs, dietary law, the rest of the seventh day, prayers whispered in the language of the fathers kept alive a belonging that no human institution could entirely abolish. The Carvalho lineage carried within it this founding paradox: to be visibly Christian to survive, invisibly Jewish to endure. This heritage of a law practiced in intimacy, even before it could be named, would traverse centuries and continents — and resurface, intact, in the heart of the Rocky Mountains in 1853.

Here tradition transmitted and historical research answer and nuance each other mutually. Family memory, as Toledano records it, affirms that Caravahlo was a name adopted by marranos who remained faithful to Judaism [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles]. This memory deserves respect and attention, for it bears the trace of a lived experience of concealment and transmission.

The archive, however, invites circumspection. Recent scholarship, notably that published in the Revue des Études Juives under the evocative title "myth of marrano names," has shown that the idea that certain surnames — names of trees, cities, fruits — would be reliable markers of hidden Jewish ancestry belongs largely to historiographical legend [« The Myth of the Marrano Names », Revue des Études Juives]. New Christians most often chose perfectly ordinary names, sometimes those of their baptismal godparents, sometimes common place names, so that no surname alone could attest to Jewish origin [« The Myth of the Marrano Names », Revue des Études Juives].

The intersection of the two registers thus leads to a balanced position: it is likely that certain families bearing the name Caravahlo / Carvalho descend from conversos, but the name itself does not prove it. Only documentary sources — registers of the Portuguese Inquisition, notarial acts, communal archives of the diasporas — would allow one to establish, case by case, the Jewishness of a given lineage [Jewish Virtual Library, « Marrano Diaspora »]. For the Nunes Carvalho branch that occupies this edition, the documentary chain is fortunately more abundant: archives from Sephardic congregations of Amsterdam, Barbados, Charleston and Philadelphia, supplemented by the printed works themselves of two family members, make it possible to trace a continuous genealogy from seventeenth-century Portugal to nineteenth-century America. Editorial caution remains appropriate for the most distant origins, but the fact of an affirmed, practiced and transmitted Jewish identity over at least four consecutive generations is itself indisputable.

There is in this position a lesson that the lineage itself bears, without formulating it: the truth of an identity is not proven by the etymology of a name, but by the sum of the acts, works and loyalties attached to it. The name Carvalho may be the most ordinary of Portuguese words. It is the men and women who bore it who made it singular.

Families of New Christians who wished to return openly to Judaism had to flee the peninsula, where the Portuguese Inquisition — established in 1536 — hunted down Judaizers. A vast Marrano diaspora thus formed throughout Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and the New World [Jewish Virtual Library, « Marrano Diaspora »]. The principal centers of reception were Amsterdam, where the famous « Portuguese nation » flourished; Hamburg; Livorno; Venice; as well as cities of the Ottoman Empire, more tolerant toward Jews who had returned to their faith [Jewish Virtual Library, « Marrano Diaspora »]. In these refuges, families of converso descent were able to resume open Jewish life, sometimes submitting to circumcision delayed by one or two generations, and learning or relearning prayer in the original language.

For the branch that concerns us, family tradition itself preserved the trace of this flight and its successive stages. The ancestors of the Nunes Carvalho left Portugal during the seventeenth century, persecuted by the Inquisition, and found refuge in Amsterdam — the first port of the « Portuguese nation » and a great metropolis of religious freedom in modern Europe. From there, they went to England, where tolerance had gradually extended to Jews since the readmission granted under Cromwell in 1656. It was in London that Solomon Nunes Carvalho the ancestor was born, in 1743, already bearing the given name that would traverse the generations like a thread of memory [Princeton University Art Museum, « The Art and Life of Solomon Nunes Carvalho »].

The trajectory of this London father illustrates how the Sephardic diaspora functioned as a network: the Atlantic ports — Amsterdam, London, Bordeaux, Hamburg — were linked to one another by commercial and family ties that doubled the routes of trade with paths of communal solidarity. To make oneself known in one of these places as an honest merchant and observant Jew was to have moral credit transferable in all the others. The father of Emanuel Nunes Carvalho embodied this figure of the Sephardic merchant who carried his reputation as his only baggage across frontiers: from Portugal to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to England [Wikipedia, « Emanuel Nunes Carvalho »].

The London branch prolonged its journey toward the Atlantic west. The sons of the first London Solomon settled in Barbados, an English island of the Antilles where one of the earliest Sephardic Jewish communities of the New World had taken root — a community whose registers attest to its presence from the middle of the seventeenth century and which had acquired civil rights under the British crown before even the Jews of metropolitan England. From there, they continued their migration toward the young American Republic, establishing themselves in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1811 [Princeton University Art Museum, « The Art and Life of Solomon Nunes Carvalho »]. This trajectory — Portugal, Amsterdam, London, Barbados, Charleston — sums up in a few city names the entire epic of the Atlantic Sephardic diaspora.

The name Carvalho appears in several of these Sephardic communities of the Christian West, attesting to the circulation of these families along the commercial and religious routes of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean [Jewish Virtual Library, « Marrano Diaspora »]. It was by these routes, or by the more southern ones of the Maghreb, that bearers of the name reached North Africa, where Toledano lists them in his inventory of Jewish families of the region [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles].

It is within the Maghrebi context that the reference entry inscribes the name Caravahlo. Joseph Toledano, whose work constitutes the reference catalogue of Jewish surnames in North Africa, records it there with its botanical etymology and its connection to Portuguese marranos [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles]. The Maghreb — and notably Morocco, with its Atlantic ports such as Mogador (Essaouira), Safi or Mazagan, long linked to the Portuguese crown — was a natural land of welcome for families of Iberian origin.

The presence of marranos and Sephardim in these Portuguese trading posts on the Moroccan coast is a documented fact of the long history of Luso-Moroccan relations. Mogador, founded in the eighteenth century by the sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah as a port opening onto the Atlantic, deliberately welcomed Iberian Jewish merchants — the tujjar as-sultan, merchants of the sultan — who constituted a cosmopolitan commercial elite, masters of European languages and networks of great commerce. Jewish families took root there, blending Iberian heritage with local Judeo-Arab culture. The tradition transmitted within these families — that which a nomenclatural inventory such as Toledano's preserves — conserves the memory of a Portuguese origin and of Jewish fidelity maintained through the ordeals of forced conversion [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles].

This chapter pertains above all to transmitted Memory: it rests upon family and communal tradition recorded by the genealogist, more so than upon a continuous series of archival items. The very spelling of Caravahlo, distinct from standard Portuguese Carvalho, bears the mark of this oral transmission and its passage through the languages of the Maghreb before its written fixation. Judeo-Arabic, the vernacular language of Moroccan Jews, and Haketia, the Judeo-Spanish of Morocco, constituted the living media through which names were transmitted, deformed and fixed in new forms, like pebbles rounded by the current of generations.

It is remarkable that, in this Maghrebi context as in the Atlantic context, families bearing the name maintained a double belonging: to local Jewish communities, fully integrated into their networks and their liturgical life; and to the Memory of an Iberian origin that conferred particular prestige within the internal hierarchies of the Sephardic world. To be "of those who come from Portugal" was, in the Jewish communities of North Africa as in those of Holland or England, a silent but real distinction. Whether paths led some toward the Moroccan coasts and others toward the Antilles and North America, all depart from the same Portuguese hearth, the same rupture of 1497, and the same will to remain oneself despite exile.

The Atlantic branch of the lineage experiences its first fully documented figure in Emanuel Nunes Carvalho, born in London in 1771, son of a merchant father whose trajectory epitomized the classical Sephardic journey: from Portugal to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to Great Britain [Wikipedia, "Emanuel Nunes Carvalho"]. This commercial and religious genealogy — commerce as a vehicle for Jewish identity across borders — is one of the constants of the modern Sephardic world. The father had crossed the seas as a merchant; the son would cross the seas as a teacher.

In 1799, Emanuel Nunes Carvalho accepted the position of hazzan — liturgical officiant — of the Jewish community of Bridgetown, Barbados [Wikipedia, "Emanuel Nunes Carvalho"]. The island was then one of the nodes of the Atlantic Sephardic network, a stopover between the Old World and the New, between the old European communities and the young American congregations. The registers of the Bridgetown community bear witness to a structured Jewish life, endowed with a synagogue, a cemetery, and close ties with the congregations of London, New York, and Curaçao. Emanuel established himself there with his wife, but the tropical climate suited neither his health nor hers: in 1806, the couple left Barbados for New York.

In New York, Emanuel supported himself by teaching oriental languages — Hebrew, Arabic, perhaps Judeo-Spanish — to Jewish children and Christian clergymen [Wikipedia, "Emanuel Nunes Carvalho"]. This New York interlude says something essential about the singular position occupied by a Sephardic scholar in early nineteenth-century America: mastery of biblical languages was respected far beyond the Jewish community, in a deeply Protestant country devoted to the direct reading of Scripture. Emanuel was not merely teaching a grammatical technique: he was opening doors between worlds. It is already, in this daily act of teaching, the expression of a virtue that Jewish tradition calls chesed — practical kindness, care for the other — expressed here in the form of knowledge placed at the service of all who thirsted for it.

During these New York years, Emanuel collaborated with Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest synagogue in the United States, founded by Sephardim as early as 1654, and held a leading role in its religious school. It was there that he encountered Gershom Mendes Seixas, the great New York hazzan nicknamed the "rabbi of the American Revolution" for having closed his synagogue rather than remain under British occupation, and who embodied the link between Jewish faith and nascent American patriotism [mikvehisraelhistory.com, "Rev. Gershom Mendes Seixas"]. The association with Seixas, a guiding figure of American Judaism, marked Emanuel deeply — as will soon be seen through the words he spoke at his death.

Emanuel and his brother David Nunes Carvalho subsequently went to Charleston, South Carolina, where one of the most important and oldest Jewish communities in North America then lived. In 1811, at the death of hazzan Jacob Raphael Cohen, Emanuel was called to Philadelphia to lead Congregation Mikveh Israel, one of the most venerable Sephardic synagogues in America — founded in 1740 by Jews from London and the Antilles, and whose registers have borne, from their origins, the names of families from the same Iberian constellation as that of the Carvalhos [Wikipedia, "Congregation Mikveh Israel"].

It was in Philadelphia, in 1815, that Emanuel published A Key to the Hebrew Tongue, an introductory manual of the Hebrew language intended for an English-speaking audience. This volume — modest in its format, pioneering in its intention — merits close attention. To publish in 1815, in Philadelphia, a pedagogical instrument for the study of Hebrew is to accomplish an act at once spiritual and civic. Spiritual, because Hebrew is the lashon ha-kodesh, the holy language, the medium of Torah and prayer, the language in which God has been invoked for millennia. Civic, because, in the young American Republic, the Sephardic Jews of Philadelphia sought to establish themselves durably in the intellectual landscape of the country, to prove that their tradition carried a culture of a depth and rigor worthy of being taught to all.

A Key to the Hebrew Tongue is thus simultaneously an act of transmission within the community — preserving the holy language for future generations — and a gesture of openness toward American society: the language of Israel made accessible to all who wish to learn it. The key that the title proposes is not merely grammatical: it is the key to a civilization, offered by a descendant of Portuguese marranos to his American fellow citizens. In this gesture, there is something profoundly consistent with the great tradition of commentary and exegesis in Judaism, which has always known that the doors of the text open only if someone takes the trouble to hold them: Rashi commented on the Torah so that the less learned could follow; Maimonides wrote his Mishneh Torah so that the law might be accessible to those who could not spend years on the Talmud; Emanuel Nunes Carvalho published his manual so that Hebrew would not die in American synagogues for want of transmission.

The Jewish tradition has valued from its origins the teaching of Torah as a sacred duty — talmud Torah, study is a form of worship. Emanuel Nunes Carvalho, by placing his linguistic knowledge at the service of accessible pedagogy, inscribed himself in this chain of transmission that links the great Talmudic masters to village teachers, to authors of school manuals. It is not an act of prestige: it is an act of service.

The following year, in 1816, Emanuel published A Sermon, preached on Sunday, July 7, 1816, on Occasion of the Death of the Rev. Mr. Gershom Mendes Seixas, a homily composed upon the death of one who had been his colleague, his senior and doubtless his model [Wikipedia, « Emanuel Nunes Carvalho » ; Gershom Mendes Seixas, Wikipedia]. This sermon has the distinction of being considered the first Jewish sermon printed in the United States [Wikipedia, « Emanuel Nunes Carvalho » ; thereaderwiki.com, « Congregation Mikveh Israel »]. That the first Jewish discourse printed in America should be a funeral oration delivered by a descendant of Portuguese Marranos in tribute to a hazzan patriot is not without emotion: at a time when the young Republic was seeking its founding figures, American Judaism, for its part, was searching for its words — and it was the pen of a Carvalho that found them.

In 1817, Emanuel Nunes Carvalho died in Philadelphia at the age of forty-five or forty-six, leaving behind him a brief but pioneering body of work. He was buried in the cemetery of Mikveh Israel, among his own, in that city which he had chosen as the place to anchor the language and word of his people. His brother David Nunes Carvalho survived him and contributed in his own way to the history of American Judaism: in 1825, he participated in the founding of the Reformed Society of Israelites in Charleston, the first reformed congregation in the United States [Wikipedia, « Emanuel Nunes Carvalho »]. This reformist audacity — to adapt liturgy and practice to the new conditions of the American world — was rooted in the same faithfulness to the essential as the Hebrew manual of the elder brother: the conviction that Judaism was not a museum but a living thing.

If Emanuel Nunes Carvalho had opened the Hebrew language to Americans, his nephew Solomon — born in Charleston on April 27, 1815, the very year A Key to the Hebrew Tongue was published — would, half a century later, open to his readers the wild spaces of the American West [Wikipedia, "Solomon Nunes Carvalho"]. The coincidence of dates is not fortuitous: it speaks to the continuity of a lineage where each generation takes up the relay of the previous one not through imitation but through amplification.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho was the son of David Nunes Carvalho — the very man who had co-founded the first American Reform congregation — and of Sarah Cohen D'Azevedo, herself descended from a great Sephardic family of England [Wikipedia, "Solomon Nunes Carvalho"]. Young Solomon thus grew up in a house where Jewish consciousness was articulated with American ambition, where inherited identity nourished the momentum toward the new world. He received a careful education, was trained in the arts of drawing and painting — he is credited with training under Philadelphia portraitist Thomas Sully during his stays in Charleston in 1841 and 1842 [Library of Congress, Picture This blog, "Camera and Locomotive"] — and embraced, in the 1840s and 1850s, the still-fledgling medium of daguerreotypy, one of the earliest forms of photography.

An accomplished artist, Solomon settled alternately in Charleston, Baltimore, and New York, building a reputation in the cultivated circles of the South and the East Coast. In 1852, he received the silver medal from the South Carolina Institute for his painting titled The Intercession of Moses for Israel — a title that in itself says something about the imaginary world in which he dwelt: the biblical Moses interceding for his people, an image of mediation between God and Israel [Loeb Jewish Portrait Database, "Solomon Nunes Carvalho"]. This religious subject deliberately chosen for a public competition was in itself an act of identity pride: in pre-Civil War Charleston, displaying an allegiance to the biblical narrative of Israel was a quiet and assumed affirmation.

In 1853, an unexpected invitation changed the course of his life. General John C. Frémont, known as the "Pathfinder," was preparing his fifth and final expedition westward, with the aim of mapping a transcontinental railroad route between the Mississippi River and the Pacific, passing through the territories of Kansas, Colorado, and Utah [Encyclopedia.com, "Carvalho, Solomon Nunes"]. Frémont, whose vocation as an explorer was inseparable from a cartographic and documentary ambition, sought an artist-photographer capable of visually fixing the landscapes traversed. Solomon, although he was fully aware of the dangers — mountain winters in virtually unexplored territories — accepted [J-Grit.com, "Solomon Nunes Carvalho"]. This choice, deliberate and lucid, testifies to a courage that is not that of recklessness: it is the courage of one who knows what he risks and goes anyway, because the experience to be lived and witnessed seems to him more precious than safety.

The expedition numbered twenty-two members, among whom ten Delaware chiefs served as scouts [J-Grit.com, "Solomon Nunes Carvalho"]. It left Westport, Missouri, in the autumn of 1853 and pushed westward. Carvalho, the sole Jew in the group, served as official photographer, armed with his daguerreotype equipment — cumbersome apparatus, fragile, requiring delicate chemical manipulations even under normal conditions, and demanding extraordinary precision and mastery under expedition conditions. Capturing wide panoramas in high mountains in severe cold was, in 1853, an almost unprecedented feat [Library of Congress, Picture This blog, "Camera and Locomotive"].

The expedition quickly turned into a nightmare. Blocked in the snow of the Rockies, in passes not yet represented with precision on maps, the members of the party suffered intense cold and severe famine. Twenty-seven horses and mules were slaughtered and eaten to survive. One member of the expedition died. Solomon Nunes Carvalho held on [J-Grit.com, "Solomon Nunes Carvalho"]. But he did more than hold on: he resisted in both senses of the term — physically first, morally after.

Without revealing his Jewish identity to the other members of the expedition, he refrained from consuming animals not in conformity with kasher laws, quietly maintaining, in the heart of the snow-covered Rockies, an observance that nothing could have required of him so far from any community [J-Grit.com, "Solomon Nunes Carvalho"]. This detail — this nutritive silence, this consented abstinence in cold and hunger — is one of the most gripping facts this lineage has to offer. It illuminates with a particular light what the Jewish tradition means by kedoushah, holiness practiced in the intimacy of daily life, and by halakha, the law as a lived path rather than a theorized one.

No rabbi was there to see him. No communal register could have recorded it. And yet, in the Rocky Mountains in 1853, a descendant of Portuguese Marranos honored the same dietary law that his ancestors had maintained in the cellars of Porto and Lisbon two and a half centuries earlier. The halakha had not merely crossed the seas: it had crossed the Rockies. What the Inquisition had not broken, nor American integration dissolved: the law had become flesh to the point of no longer depending on a context, a community, external control. It was simply there, in the body of this man who was hungry and who chose nonetheless.

Solomon kept a journal in parallel, whose composition was one of the most important acts of his life [J-Grit.com, « Solomon Nunes Carvalho »]. This writing — documenting what others do not see or do not name, recording the interior of an experience that official reports would reduce to cartographic data — also echoes the Marrano tradition: memory preserved in discretion, testimony that awaits its hour to be revealed. In Frémont's baggage were maps and topographic surveys; in Carvalho's notes were human beings, their sufferings, the peoples encountered, the landscapes felt.

After the mountains, the expedition reached the Mormon territories of Utah. Solomon stayed there for several months to recover from the ordeals he had endured, and his observation of the society that Brigham Young had built there abundantly nourished his journal. His descriptions of the Mormons — their beliefs, their social organization, their relations with other communities — constitute one of the first field analyses of this closed society, written by a cultivated and benevolent outside observer. Carvalho's curiosity about the other, his attentive gaze upon men and women whose faith differed radically from his own, manifests a virtue that the Jewish tradition expresses in the concept of kvod ha-beriot — the respect owed to every human creature as such, independently of his or her beliefs. This man who had been welcomed in the mountains by Native Americans, who had navigated among explorers of diverse origins, and who now observed the Mormons without judging them, carried within him the heritage of a family accustomed for centuries to living among strangers and to finding in each one what deserved to be known.

Solomon also encountered, during his wanderings in the American Far West, indigenous communities — and notably Cheyenne Indians on the Santa Fe trail — with whom he established contact, documenting their faces and ways of life through daguerreotypy [Zócalo Public Square, « A Jewish Photographer's Nearly Forgotten Collaboration with Cheyenne Indians »]. These portraits, made under extreme technical conditions, constitute one of the first photographic testimonies of the peoples of the Great Plains. The fact that a Sephardic Jew, himself descended from a persecuted and minority people, was among the first to fix the face of Native Americans on a silver plate is not without resonance: it is perhaps the relationship with the stranger, cultivated for centuries in the diaspora, that made Carvalho particularly attentive to those whom white America regarded without seeing.

In 1860, the journal of the expedition became the book Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West; with Colonel Fremont's Last Expedition. The work was immediately recognized for its documentary value: it offered Eastern Americans a vivid and precise portrait of the landscapes, the Native American populations, the trials of the expedition, and the practices of the Mormon society of Utah [Loeb Jewish Portrait Database, « Solomon Nunes Carvalho »]. Reprinted several times during his lifetime, the book is still considered today as a primary source for the history of the exploration of the American West.

The publication of this work constitutes a literary act of a scope that exceeds the simple travel narrative. Solomon Nunes Carvalho appears in it not as an exceptional figure in rupture with his milieu, but as the accomplished expression of a lineage that had learned, generation after generation, to transform experience into text: to render speech where action had taken place, to offer to others — to the community, to society, to posterity — the testimony of what one had seen. Emanuel had put Hebrew language into text so that others could read it; Solomon put the Far West into text so that others could see it. Same gesture, same impulse: transmission as cardinal value.

After the expedition, the daguerreotypes that Carvalho had taken in the field were entrusted to the New York studio of Mathew Brady, who had them converted into engraved plates to allow their reproduction — the photographic technique of the era did not yet allow direct reproduction of images. A part of these original daguerreotypes was lost or destroyed in the decades that followed, and some were confused with Brady's own work [Wikipedia, « Solomon Nunes Carvalho »]. This loss is a painful irony for a descendant of Marranos: once again, foundational documents had disappeared in the tumults of history. But the book endured — as had endured, in Portuguese households of the fifteenth century, the prayer whispered and the candle lit on Friday evening.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho had married in 1845, in Philadelphia, Sarah Solis, descended from another great American Sephardic family [J-Grit.com, « Solomon Nunes Carvalho »], thus binding the threads of two lineages that had journeyed, separately, from the same Iberian shores. In 1856, he publicly supported the presidential candidacy of John C. Frémont under the banner of the new Republican Party [Loeb Jewish Portrait Database, « Solomon Nunes Carvalho »], engaging in American civic life with the same naturalness as his father in synagogal reform and his uncle in Hebrew pedagogy. Painter, photographer, author, inventor — he filed several patents over the course of his life — Solomon Nunes Carvalho would not let himself be confined to any single category. He died on May 21, 1897 in New York, having traversed nearly the entire nineteenth century of America, from Charleston in the Jeffersonian era to the metropolis of the Gilded Age.

The name Caravahlo condenses, in a few syllables borrowed from the oak, all the complexity of Sephardic destinies. It first speaks of a landscape — that of the oak forests of Portugal — and of a widespread onomastic usage, without particular religious connotation [Geneanet, notice « Carvalho »]. It next speaks, for certain branches, of a history of constraint and fidelity: that of the New Christians born from the forced conversions of 1497, some of whom remained secretly attached to Judaism [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles ; Encyclopedia.com, « Jews, Expulsion of »]. Finally, it speaks of a geography of dispersion, from Atlantic and Mediterranean refuges to the trading posts of North Africa where the name was recorded, to the congregations of Barbados and Charleston where it flourished, to the classrooms of Philadelphia where it taught, to the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies where it endured [Jewish Virtual Library, « Marrano Diaspora » ; J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles ; Corpus Zakhor id:cca797ad-58ad-41e6-baeb-56b5f371348f ; Corpus Zakhor id:8d1187cc-1534-48ea-9fb5-2870ccf933b6].

Historical honesty demands that we not confuse the name with proof: research has established that no surname alone constitutes a certificate of Marrano ancestry [« The Myth of the Marrano Names », Revue des Études Juives]. The lineage Caravahlo thus stands at the fertile intersection of Memory — living, transmitted, legitimate — and Archive — demanding, nuanced, sometimes fragmentary. It is in this dialogue, and not in the certainty of a single narrative, that the truth of a diaspora family resides.

What this lineage above all expressed most fully is transmission — in its most demanding and most diverse forms. Transmission of the holy tongue, by Emanuel's manual, an act of talmud Torah placed in the hands of a new nation. Transmission of observance, by Solomon's silent fast in the snows of the Rockies, halakha borne in the body as an inheritance that no decree can confiscate. Transmission of Memory, by the journal become book, testimony offered to a posterity its author would never know. Transmission of reformed and open faith, by David and his commitment to the first American Reform congregation. Transmission, finally, of the gaze upon the other — upon the Cheyenne, the Mormons, the Delawares — a gaze shaped by centuries of minority life learning to understand those who do not resemble you.

At each generation, in each new country, the lineage did not merely bear Judaism: it shaped it, taught it, rendered it visible — sometimes for all, sometimes for itself alone, in the silence of the mountains or in the ink of the printers. This capacity to maintain the essential without ever reducing it to the external, to preserve the law in the deepest intimacy and to transmit it in the most public works, belongs to the longest Memory of Israel. It spans the centuries from the anousim forced into hiding to the pedagogues and explorers of the New World. Jewish tradition teaches that each generation receives the Torah anew, as if standing itself at the foot of Sinai. The lineage Nunes Carvalho demonstrated this not through declarations, but through deeds: a manual printed in 1815, a journal written in the cold of the Rockies in 1853, a sermon spoken for the dead in 1816. The oak carvalho is indeed the emblem that was needed: a tree whose roots descend deep into earth one cannot see, and whose branches extend further than one would have expected.