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.¹

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.

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.²

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.²

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.

Jewish identity was sometimes associated with dark skin.

Ron Hakohen, a researcher at Tel Aviv University, notes “the notion that Jews were considered to be black or swarthy” in European contexts.¹ This was not because Jews were necessarily darker than other Europeans, but because Jewish identity was often marked as foreign, exotic, and non-Christian in ways that overlapped with how Europeans characterized other non-Christian populations.

Medieval European art frequently depicted Jews with dark skin, hooked noses, and other features meant to mark them as visually distinct from Christians. These were artistic conventions, not necessarily accurate physical descriptions, but they created visual associations between Jewish identity and non-European appearance.

When Sephardic Jews were deported to Cape Verde and mixed with enslaved indigenous Americans, the visual distinctions may have been less pronounced than the religious ones. Jewish conversos, Moorish converts, and indigenous American captives were all non-Christians or suspected non-Christians under the same legal framework.

Cape Verde became a meeting place for three displaced populations.

Indigenous Americans, kidnapped from Labrador and the Caribbean and shipped to the islands as slaves. Sephardic Jews, expelled from Iberia and deported to the islands as exiles. Moors and Moriscos, fleeing or enslaved during the Inquisition and sent to the islands as enemies of the Christian faith.¹

All three groups were there for the same reason: they had been classified as non-Christians or questionable Christians under the papal authority established in 1452. All three were subject to the same legal framework that authorized their reduction to “perpetual slavery” or forced exile.

The mixing was not random. It was systematic. The Portuguese were using Cape Verde as a collection point for displaced populations that did not fit the emerging Christian European identity. Indigenous American, Sephardic Jewish, and Moorish identities were being dissolved and reconstituted as “Cape Verdean” under Portuguese colonial authority.

The sorting happened before racial categories solidified.

In 1500, European identity was primarily religious. Christian versus non-Christian, Catholic versus heretic, believer versus infidel. Skin color was noted but not systematically catalogued. Geographic origin mattered less than religious confession. A dark-skinned Christian could be European; a light-skinned Muslim could not be.¹

The people mixing on Cape Verde in the early sixteenth century were sorted by faith, not by appearance. Indigenous Americans who had been baptized might be classified differently from those who resisted conversion. Sephardic Jews who had accepted Christianity publicly but practiced Judaism privately were conversos under surveillance. Moors who had converted to Christianity were Moriscos under suspicion.

The racial categories that would later define these populations — “African,” “Native American,” “white” — had not yet become the primary organizing principles of colonial identity. Religious sorting preceded racial sorting. Cape Verde was where religious categories were being dissolved and racial ones began to be constructed.