The Nunes (Londres) Family

To understand the Nunes lineage, one must first enter the world from which it emerged. In 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain signed the decree expelling the Jews; a considerable portion of these exiles found refuge in neighboring Portugal. This asylum was short-lived: in 1497, King Manuel I ordered the forced mass conversion of the Jews of the kingdom, creating overnight an entire population of "new Christians" converted against their will and often remaining secretly faithful to the faith of their fathers. It is from this matrix that Portuguese crypto-Judaism emerged, more tenacious and more enduring than its Spanish counterpart.

The instrument of surveillance was the Inquisition. Established in Spain in 1478 and then in Portugal in 1536, it did not target Jews as such — subject to their own status — but the baptized suspected of "Judaizing," that is, secretly returning to Mosaic practices. As Francisco Bethencourt demonstrated, the Inquisition was less a fit of punctual fanaticism than a long-standing bureaucratic institution, equipped with courts, archives, standardized procedures, operating on three continents from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century [Francisco Bethencourt, The Inquisition: A Global History]. Henry Kamen for his part emphasized how inquisitorial reality was more nuanced than its black legend, but also how heavily its shadow weighed on Iberian society [Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision].

The question of the degree of Jewish loyalty among conversos has fueled vigorous historiographical debates. Benzion Netanyahu defended the thesis that, already in fifteenth-century Spain, many converts had become sincerely Christian and that the Inquisition persecuted for largely ethnic motives a population already assimilated [Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain]. In Portugal, however, the massive and brutal conversion of 1497 produced a different result: large sections of the cristã-nova population retained, sometimes over five or six generations, a Judaizing memory transmitted within the home. Regional studies, such as that by Stephen Haliczer on the kingdom of Valencia, showed how the inquisitorial tribunal inserted itself into local social fabric and shaped the concealment strategies of suspect families [Stephen Haliczer, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia]; Kamen for his part measured the lasting impact of the institution on Iberian society as a whole [Henry Kamen, Spanish Society, 1400–1600].

It is in this Portugal, where bearing a surname like Nunes or Ribeiro could suffice to awaken suspicion, that the family learned the terrible art of double life. The first virtue that this lineage inherits from its world of origin is thus fidelity to the Law maintained in peril: to preserve, against prohibition and under the threat of the stake, the core of Jewish observance. This clandestine fidelity joins one of the deep springs of Israel's Memory — the conviction that the Law is transmitted even when it can no longer be proclaimed in the light of day.

The founding figure of the lineage, Samuel Nunes Ribeiro, was born around 1668-1670 in Portugal, within a family of New Christians. According to tradition as reported by historians of American Judaism, he practiced medicine in Lisbon with considerable reputation, counting among his clients members of the aristocracy and, it is said, dignitaries of the Church — that same Church whose tribunal was vigilant in rooting out Judaizers. The name he bore in Portugal, beneath a Christian mask, was according to sources that of Diogo (or Diego) Nunes Ribeiro; the Hebrew name Samuel belongs to his recovered life.

The paradox of his situation is illuminating. A sought-after physician, he lived in comfort and public recognition, while secretly practicing Judaism within his household. This condition was that of many Marrano families of Portuguese high society: professional competence offered relative protection, but never immunity. Tradition has it that the Inquisition eventually installed agents even within the physician's own house, on the pretext of protecting or observing him, slowly tightening the noose around the family. Here we measure the nuance that historical honesty demands: the precise details of these events belong as much to transmitted narrative as to the archive, and should be presented as such.

What is certain, and what the broader framework established by scholarship confirms, is that medicine was, for the conversos of the peninsula, both a refuge and a trap. Jewish medical knowledge, inherited from the great Sephardic practitioners of the Middle Ages, remained a prized skill; but practicing it under the gaze of an inquisitorial society exposed one to denunciation, professional jealousy, and ultimately to the dungeons of the Holy Office [Francisco Bethencourt, The Inquisition: A Global History]. The fate of Samuel Nunes Ribeiro embodies this tension between service rendered and danger incurred.

In this chapter emerges a cardinal virtue: care for others, refoua as vocation. By devoting his knowledge to healing — even those very individuals who belonged to the apparatus of persecution — Samuel Nunes Ribeiro bore, without proclaiming it, a Jewish ethic of care in which human life takes precedence over belonging. This dimension, still discreet in Portugal, would become radiant on the shores of Georgia.

The turning point of the narrative is situated in the early years of the eighteenth century. Family tradition and historians of Sephardic Judaism in England report that the Nunes family, sensing the Inquisitorial noose tightening, organized its escape. The transmitted narrative — whose romantic quality must be acknowledged while respecting its coherence — holds that Samuel Nunes Ribeiro and his family took advantage of the presence in the port of Lisbon of an English merchant ship whose captain, invited to dinner, agreed to take the family on board. It is recounted that, under the pretext of a sea excursion, they made their way to the vessel and fled, abandoning property and fortune for freedom.

The date generally retained for their arrival in London is 1703. This choice of destination is not arbitrary. England, since the informal "readmission" of Jews under Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century, had become one of the rare havens in Western Europe where one could live openly as a Jew. The Portuguese Sephardic community of London, gathered around the Bevis Marks synagogue inaugurated in 1701, welcomed precisely these marranos escaped from the peninsula, eager to recover in the open the faith they had held in the shadows. It was within this framework that the Nunes family could, according to tradition, return fully to Judaism, have its sons circumcised, and resume its Hebrew names.

The passage from Lisbon to London illustrates a collective experience: that of the great Sephardic diaspora which, from Spain and Portugal, scattered toward the New World and cities of tolerance, carrying with it its language, its liturgy, and its memory, as Guilherme d'Oliveira Martins retraced in his study of the Sephardic diaspora [Guilherme d'Oliveira Martins, A Diáspora Sefardita]. The work of Minna Rozen on the social and family organization of Mediterranean Jews in early modern times illuminates the way in which these networks of kinship and communal solidarity made such rescues and reconstructions possible [Minna Rozen, Mediterranean Jewry in Early Modern Times].

What the lineage expresses here touches upon involvement in collective life and diaspora solidarity. Flight was possible only through Sephardic networks, and the London refuge took on meaning only through the welcome of an organized community. In returning, in London, to the full light of observance, the Nunes accomplished what generations of marranos had hoped for without achieving it: the return, teshuvah in its most literal sense, to the house of Israel.

London was but one stop. In 1732, King George II granted a charter for the founding of the colony of Georgia, the last of the thirteen British colonies in North America, under the direction of General James Oglethorpe. The London committee charged with organizing it counted among its active members Sephardic Jews from the Portuguese congregation, who chartered a ship, the William and Sarah, to send a contingent of coreligionists to the New World. It was aboard this vessel that Samuel Nunes Ribeiro, accompanied by his family, left England.

The William and Sarah reached Savannah in July 1733, just a few months after the official founding of the colony. It carried some forty Jews, mostly Sephardim of Portuguese origin, which made it one of the very first organized Jewish groups to settle in British North America and the foundation of the future Mickve Israel congregation of Savannah, one of the oldest in the United States. The arrival of this contingent was not without causing embarrassment to the London administrators of the colony, since the charter did not explicitly provide for the settlement of Jews; but the situation on the ground would soon reverse their reluctance.

The event that sealed the place of the Nunes in American history occurred immediately after disembarkation. The young colony was ravaged by an epidemic — likely yellow fever or malaria — which had already claimed many colonists and deprived Savannah of its only physician, who had died. Upon his arrival, Samuel Nunes Ribeiro placed his art at the service of the sick and, through his care, helped stem the mortality. This fact, widely reported by historians of American Judaism, is at the origin of the recognition he enjoyed: the first Jewish physician to practice in what would become the United States was also the man who saved Savannah in its early days.

It is here that the virtue of care, sketched in Portugal, reaches its fullest expression. In the face of the epidemic, the fugitive marrano became the savior of the entire community — Jewish and Christian alike. In this, the Nunes lineage embodies one of the highest values of the Jewish tradition: pikkoua'h nefesh, the saving of human life, which overrides almost all other commandments. The physician who, in Lisbon, healed behind a mask, became in Savannah the recognized benefactor of a colony which, in return, tolerated his faith. The welcome of the stranger and the service of one's neighbor thus answered to each other in a single gesture.

The establishment of the Nunes family in Georgia opened the way to an American posterity. Around Samuel Nunes Ribeiro gravitated his own: according to genealogical sources of colonial Judaism, his family included several children and allies who participated in the life of the nascent community of Savannah. The descent and alliances of the Nunes became intertwined with those of other Sephardic families who were pioneers of colonial America — the Minis, the De Lyon, the Sheftall — which formed the foundation of Judaism in the American South.

The settlement was, however, neither linear nor without trials. Political tensions between Catholic Spain in Florida and British Georgia weighed upon the Jewish colonists, former refugees from the Iberian Inquisition, with the fear of a return of persecution in case of Spanish conquest. Part of the Sephardic families of Savannah indeed left the colony at the end of the 1730s to go to Charleston or New York, more established communities. The detail of the movements of each branch of the Nunes family falls within delicate genealogical reconstitution, where transmitted tradition must be handled with caution and confronted, when it exists, with archival documentation.

What must be retained is that the Nunes lineage participated in a founding moment: the birth of an American Judaism, destined to become one of the most important in the world. The thread that connects the crypto-Jew of Lisbon to the patriarch of Savannah is that of the same quest — the freedom to live openly according to the Law. The Mickve Israel community, whose first faithful descended from the William and Sarah, perpetuates to this day the Portuguese rite that these families had preserved in memory, under duress, on the other side of the Atlantic.

In taking root in the New World, the Nunes family expressed involvement in collective life and transmission: the founding of a congregation, the maintenance of a rite, the inscription of a lineage in duration. In doing so, it attached the destiny of a handful of fugitives to the great adventure of the dispersion of Israel, which saw each exile transformed elsewhere into a new beginning.

From Lisbon to London, from London to Savannah, the Nunes lineage traces in a single generation the entire arc of the Marrano experience: concealment, flight, return, and refoundation. It gathers in its founder, Samuel Nunes Ribeiro, several of the great virtues that Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries — fidelity to the Law maintained under threat of the stake, the solidarity of diaspora networks, involvement in communal reconstruction.

But if we must name, above all others, what this lineage expressed best, it is the care given to others, the ethics of saving life. A physician in Portugal under the watchful eye of the Inquisition, a physician in London, a physician finally in Savannah where his art halted a deadly epidemic upon his arrival, Samuel Nunes Ribeiro made healing the guiding thread of an entire existence devoted to preserving life. In this, he embodied the cardinal principle of pikkoua'h nefesh, and made his knowledge a selfless service rendered to men who were not his own. The fugitive whom one had sought to silence became, on new soil, he by whom others were saved.

Thus the memory of the Nunes joins the collective memory of Israel: that of a people who, driven from one shore, made fertile another, and who knew how to make of the persecution endured the source of a charity offered. The Great Book of this lineage is, in essence, that of a light which the Inquisition will not have extinguished — and which, carried to the other side of the ocean, shone for all.