Pedro Alvares Cabral was the first human being in recorded history to have been on four continents. He set foot on each of them — Europe, Africa, America, and Asia — in a single year, 1500, which was the same year that he led the first extensive European exploration of the northeast coast of South America. He “discovered” what we know today as Brazil in April of that year, and wrote home to King Manuel I notifying him of Portugal’s brand new territory, theirs by virtue of the authority vested in him by the King and his interpretation of the divine will. Cabral sailed on from Brazil, but he left behind the seeds of what would become the first robust Jewish community on the American continent. Among Cabral’s crew was a man who went by the name João Faras. Faras was an astronomer, astrologer, physician, translator and — most importantly for our purposes — he was a member of the community of Portuguese Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity by the King of Portugal just a few years after the Spanish expulsion. Cabral’s men had reached what would become Brazil on April 21, but Faras remained on a boat offshore for six days — he had developed an irritation which made it impossible for him to walk. On the twenty-eighth of that month, finally upright and capable of studying the stars to determine location, Faras and two assistants set up a wooden astrolabe on the beach and attempted to establish the altitude of the midday sun. After some days of study, he drafted a letter to King Manuel I, which included a sketch of the stars which make up the southern hemisphere. He explained with apologies to the king that, due to his lame leg, he could not identify the precise height of the stars, but he did identify a new constellation, which we now know as the Southern Cross. The king to whom that letter was addressed was the very same monarch who, on December 5, 1496, demanded that all his Jewish subjects leave the country. The following year this edict was rescinded and Jews were prohibited from fleeing the country and instead forced to convert to Catholicism. These decrees were issued just four years after the Jews of Spain had been forced from their homeland due to King Ferdinand’s and Queen Isabella’s genuinely world-altering antisemitism — in fact, Manuel issued the decrees in order to satisfy the Spanish monarchs, to whose daughter Manuel was attempting to marry off his son. There were few options for relocation for Spanish Jews in 1492 — England and France had already instituted country-wide bans (in the aftermath of expulsions) against Jews in 1290 and 1306 respectively. Many countries that did not ban Jews wholesale prohibited Jews from owning land and required Christian oaths for vassals under the feudal system. The easiest place for them to go was Portugal, and many of the Jews who were tormented by Manuel’s oppression were originally from the Spanish Jewish community that had just been violently dispersed. Scholars judge from João Faras’ weak Portuguese and preference for Spanish that he was likely among these Jewish Spaniards. In the intervening years, Faras had become a “converso,” or hidden Jew — living publicly as a Christian but privately as a Jew — and so he and his descendants must have remained for as long as the Portuguese maintained control of Brazil. Jewish responses to the inquisition differed. Some, like Faras, chose to stay in Spain or Portugal, convert to Catholicism, and brave the anti-Semitism which stalked them even after baptism. Rumors swirled that the “new Christians” practiced Judaism in secret, adulterating Catholic purity with atavistic practices. Many chose to leave the Iberian peninsula altogether, and some part of that group travelled north to the newly independent Dutch provinces, which permitted Jewish immigration and Jewish practice. In this period Jewish fate was overwhelmingly determined by the governing power’s caprice, which often swung between prejudice and avarice: prejudice because anti-Semitism is a weed that flourishes under every sun and avarice because the Jews repeatedly proved themselves lucrative residents, and in the host countries, money-lust rivaled xenophobia in ubiquity and its power. There was not a single state which granted Jews rights because it understood that Jews were owed rights. The best Jews could hope for were privileges granted by opportunistic and self-regarding leaders. Privileges could only be acquired and maintained for as long as the governing authority could be persuaded that the deal was a good one. (Authoritarian dealmakers can be like that.) The Dutch accepted the Jews because the Jews promised wealth and they made good on that promise. The Muslim rulers of Spain had permitted Jews to participate in trade and business, and for the Jews it was a more or less benevolent period, but when the Christians came and the Jews were eventually forced to flee they carried their business acumen on the road with them and, more importantly, they brought connections to the many Jewish businessmen who had been dispersed by the Inquisition and were now scrounging for residence in port cities around the world. The Jews in exile constituted a kind of international business network owing to their relations with each other. By 1600 most of the discriminatory laws that were enforced in other European countries were either not on the books in Amsterdam or ignored there. When, in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch West India Company dispatched ships to conquer territory across the ocean, some of these prospering Jews went with them. They met the community that João Faras’ had helped found when they got to South America. 
The descendants of João Faras and his community lived as crypto- Jews for generations. In the years after they first arrived in the new world, the conversos flourished financially, so much so that Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations that The Portuguese Jews, persecuted by the inquisition, stript of their fortunes,
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