Brazil

The Portuguese Inquisition was founded under King João III in 1536 and abolished in 1821, but no permanent tribunal of the Holy Office sat in Brazil. Inquisition business in the captaincies of Portuguese America was directly administered by the Lisbon Inquisition. The Inquisition was always most active in the states of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco, where there was the highest concentration of voluntary lay auxiliaries, the "familiars" (often Portuguese immigrant merchants not of New Christian descent). As a result of distance and its less effective system of repression, Brazil became a haven for New Christians, the descendants of converted Jews, who were particularly suspected of apostasy to Judaism. Denounced individuals were shipped to Lisbon if there seemed sufficient grounds for a trial. If found guilty, they could be punished by confiscation of their property, imprisonment, whippings, and even execution in Portugal. The number of individuals put to death after sentencing by the Inquisition for Judaizing in Brazil did not exceed 500. Arrests and confiscations at the behest of the Inquisition damaged the economic life of Portugal and its colonies by disrupting the system of personal credit drawn on rich New Christian merchants. Reforms carried out from 1768 to 1773 under the Marquês de Pombal forbade the use of the term "New Christian" and ended Inquisitorial activity against them in Brazil for accusations of Jewish ritual practices.

Lisbon ordered a series of Inquisitorial visitations to Brazil in response to reports of moral and doctrinal laxity there. Father Heitor Furtado de Mendonça collected confessions and denunciations in Bahia from 1591 to 1593, then in Pernambuco from 1593 to 1595. Father Marcos Teixeira investigated in Bahia from 1618 through 1620. Father Giraldo de Abranches was active in Grão-Para from 1763 to 1769. The number of Inquisitorial investigations fluctuated from year to year in response to instructions sent from Lisbon and the zeal of the agents in Brazil. Much documentation of these visitations has been published during the twentieth century and has provided historians with information about colonial social conditions and religious beliefs. Outside of the visitation periods, denunciations were forwarded to Lisbon, which then instructed clerical commissaries resident in Brazil to investigate, and to arrest, if necessary, the accused, who were to stand trial in Portugal. Catholics were reminded annually by the Edict of the Faith of their duty to denounce a list of offenses, including the practice of Jewish rituals, bigamy, witchcraft, sodomy, clerical solicitation of penitents, and blasphemy. Those accused of these offenses in Brazil were usually white males. The proportion of white women, Native Americans, African-born slaves, and free blacks investigated was lower than their proportions of the total population. Article 9 of the 1810 Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of Alliance and Friendship signed in Rio specified that no tribunal would be set up in Portuguese America. In 1821 the Inquisition was abolished throughout Portuguese territories by the liberal Cortes that sat in Lisbon.

See alsoCatholic Church: The Colonial Period .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960).

Anita Novinsky, Cristãos Novos na Bahia (1972).

Sonia A. Siqueira, A Inquisição portuguesa e a sociedade colonial (1978).

Laura De Mello E Souza, O diabo e a terra de Santa Cruz (1986).

Ronaldo Vainfas, Trópico dos pecados: Moral, sexualidade e Inquisição no Brasil (1989).

Elias Lipiner, lzaque de Castro: O mancebo que veio preso do Brasil (1992).

Luiz Mott, Rosa Egipcíaca: Una santa africana no Brasil (1993).

Additional Bibliography

Cohen, Thomas M. The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Grinberg, Keila. Os judeus no Brasil: Inquisição, imigração e identidade. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2005.

Novinsky, Anita. Inquisicão: Prisioneiros do Brasil, séculos XVI-XIX. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Expressão e Cultura, 2002.

Pieroni, Geraldo. Banidos: A Inquisição e a lista dos cristãosnovos condenados a viver no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 2003.

Silva, Lina Gorenstein Ferreira da. A Inquisição contra as mulheres: Rio de Janeiro, séculos XVII e XVIII. São Paulo: Associação Editorial Humanitas: FAPESP: LEI, 2005.

Vainfas, Ronaldo. Confissões da Bahia: Santo Ofício da Inquisição de Lisboa. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997.

Wadsworth, James E. Agents of Orthodoxy: Honor, Status, and the Inquisition in Colonial Pernambuco, Brazil. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

                                          David Higgs