The Monções Project

The Monções – Cristãos-novos, judeus e processados por judaísmo na Inquisição de Goa (1560-1812) project was conceived as a way of overcoming the documentary constraints that affect research into New Christians in the State of India. The loss of the archives of the Goa Inquisition – irremediable on several levels – makes it impossible today to carry out research that depends on the quantity or diversity of inquisitorial sources, the serialization of documentary typologies or their correlation with each other. It’s not uncommon for a paper or conference on the Goa Inquisition to warn of the limited funds available to historicize the activity of this court. Founded in 1560 and definitively abolished in 1812 (after an initial closure between 1774 and 1778), the Holy Office of Goa was the only court in the Portuguese inquisitorial system whose archives have not been preserved. The fragmentary and sparse nature of the documentation produced by the Goa Inquisition therefore makes it difficult to carry out analyses similar to those that historiography has conducted on societies under the tutelage of other inquisitorial courts such as those in Coimbra, Évora or Lisbon. Locating, gathering and critically treating the dispersed, fragmentary and heterogeneous documentation produced by the Goa Inquisition is therefore one of the concerns of this project, which aims to recover the individual and collective experiences of New Christians and Jews in the State of India.

The inquisitorial sources are essential for determining who was or was not a New-Christian in the Portuguese societies. They are a rich repository of information on family and mercantile networks, commercial strategies, devotional attitudes, individual or group trajectories, where a variety of social behaviors in which tensions, compromises or convergences between New-Christians and Old-Christians can be seen: a balance in which the existence of the Holy Office played a not insignificant role. For this reason, the disappearance of this wealth of documents has, to a large extent, deprived historiography of the possibility of analyzing, with the depth of other inquisitorial contexts, the tense and unequal coexistence of New Christians, Old Christians and the Holy Office. However, the research carried out allows us to illustrate a diversity of social and geographical contexts where New Christians and Jews resided or frequented, from Mozambique to Macau, to Goa, Cochin and Hormuz, revealing interactions, expectations, anxieties, food and religiosities.

The aim of this project is to make available to the academic community and the general public a whole range of resources that allow various forms of access to the experiences of New Christians and Jews in the State of India, as well as those who were not, but were tried for Judaism. From biographies to maps, from analytical charts to scientific articles. Through the Goana Series of the Usque Collection of the Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies, the project aims to provide a set of critical editions of the cases of the Goa Inquisition against New Christians that have reached the present day. From Mozambique to Macau, via Goa