In 1492, the same year Columbus reached the Caribbean, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all Jews from Spain who refused conversion to Christianity.

Those who converted — the conversos — could remain in Spain, but under constant suspicion. Those who refused were given three months to leave Spanish territory. Many went to Portugal.

Others went to the Netherlands. Thousands were shipped to Portuguese territories in the Atlantic: the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde.

This was not voluntary immigration. This was forced deportation under threat of death. The Sephardic Jews who arrived in Cape Verde were not seeking economic opportunity; they were fleeing religious persecution with whatever possessions they could carry.¹

In 1496, four years later, Portugal followed Spain’s example. King Manuel I expelled all Jews who refused baptism. Two thousand Jewish children were forcibly taken from their parents and deported to São Tomé, another Atlantic island under Portuguese control.¹

The Atlantic islands became dumping grounds for displaced Jewish populations.

Sephardic Jews established the first sugar plantations in Cape Verde and São Tomé.

They had experience. Before the expulsion, Sephardic Jews had been involved in sugar production in southern Spain and the Canary Islands. They brought their technical knowledge, their commercial networks, and their capital to the Atlantic islands where they had been exiled.¹

But sugar plantations required labor. The Sephardic Jews deported to Cape Verde found themselves on islands that were already receiving shipments of enslaved indigenous Americans from Columbus and the Portuguese. The Atlantic islands became a mixing ground: expelled Jews with agricultural expertise, enslaved American Indians with no choice in their location, and Portuguese colonizers with papal authority to enslave all non-Christians.

The sugar plantations of Cape Verde were not operated by Europeans using African labor. They were operated by displaced Sephardic Jews using indigenous American labor, under the legal framework established by the papal bull of 1452.

“Moor” was a religious category, not a racial one.

In medieval Iberia, “Moor” meant Muslim. It derived from Maure, the Latin name for the inhabitants of Mauritania, but by the fifteenth century it referred to any Muslim under Christian rule, regardless of ethnic origin or skin color.¹

The Moriscos — “little Moors” — were Muslims who had converted to Christianity but remained under suspicion. Like the conversos (Jewish converts), they faced constant surveillance and periodic expulsion.

When Charles V banned “Moors, Jews, and their children” from passing into the Indies in 1539, he was using religious categories, not racial ones.¹

Some Moors were dark-skinned. Others were indistinguishable from the Spanish Christian population. What made them “Moorish” was not their appearance but their religious background — actual or ancestral Muslim faith.

The confusion of religious and racial categories would come later, when European colonial systems needed to justify slavery using skin color rather than religious difference.