The two largest Iberian organizations promoting Jewish culture and history – the Hispanic Jewish Foundation based in Madrid and the Portuguese Jewish community based in Oporto – announced today a partnership whose first goal is to release a free documentary film called “The 2,000 Kidnapped Spanish Jewish Children”. The Premiere will be in May 2025.

The film will be available to all for free online and will be dedicated to the families of the hostages of October 7, 2023, reminding that the feeling of anguish, loss and grief inherent in the kidnapping of loved ones has always been a part of the history of the Jewish people. The new documentary reveals a shocking episode in 1493 that involved the Spanish Jewish community that had taken refuge in Portugal after their expulsion from Spain the previous year.

Eager to make a profit from the hospitality he had offered to tens of thousands of Spanish Jews (Abraham Zacuto wrote in his “Book of Genealogies” that they numbered about 120,000), the Portuguese king Dom João II demanded they pay a tribute of high value, under penalty of being made a slave and property of the kingdom if they failed to do so.

Many Spanish Jews were unable to pay the amount requested, or exceeded the period in which they could legally be in the kingdom, so they were targets of severe punitive measures, the most serious of which was the kidnapping of their children up to 8 years old, who were sent in large ships to the island of São Tomé, 7,500 km from Portugal.

This episode of extreme cruelty is almost unknown today, despite having been described in detail by Portuguese chroniclers of the time and Jewish leaders such as Isaac Abravanel, Samuel Usque and Shlomo Ibn Verga. In the Jewish world, the island was called “I Ha Timshaim” (the "Island of Lizards"), because it was inhabited by huge crocodiles that swallowed people alive. The volcanic island was an uninhabited and inhospitable place, immersed in poisonous vapors, full of wild animals and with a climate that caused high fever and death.

The Portuguese king fell seriously ill after sending the children to São Tomé and it is said that before dying, he said in delirium: “Get those children out of there!”

In the meantime, despite the harshness of the sea voyage and the dangers of the new home, there were many survivors among those children. São Tomé soon became a region abundant in sugar, wine, meat and cheese.

David Hatchwell Altaras, President of the Hispanic Jewish Foundation founded a decade ago and which is building an imposing Jewish museum in Madrid, says that “this film produced by the Oporto Jewish Community in partnership with our Foundation, shows how important is the history of the Iberian Jews to understand the current events, whether in the dramas faced by the Jewish people or in the deep roots of the developed world, because the expulsions of the 15th century brought prosperity to Holland, England, Turkey, the Balkans and the Maghreb, from where Jews headed to the United States, Latin America, Germany, Poland, Russia and even China.”

In turn, Michael Rothwell, director of the Jewish and Holocaust museums of Oporto, an Ashkenazi who has lived in the city for more than four decades, says that "it is a duty of Jewish leaders to record and share the most relevant facts of our history, and nothing could be more natural than the joint effort of the Hispanic Jewish Foundation and the Jewish Community of Oporto, because of the kinship relationship between the Spanish and Portuguese Sephardic communities, the same ancient origin, the same family names, the intermarriages, the same destinies after the expulsions, the immense contingent of Spanish Jews who fled to Portugal at the end of the 14th and 15th centuries, the remarkable stories of Isaac Abravanel, Isaac Aboab, Abraham Zacuto, Yosef Karo, Menasse ben Israel, Abraham Saba and many others.”

The Jewish Community of Oporto, whose museums have already received around 20% of the country's teenage population, offered to the Jewish Museum of Madrid a replica of the hold and deck of a ship that was built for filming and similar to the one that transported 2,000 Spanish children in torment.

The Jewish community of the Iberian Peninsula, which covers the territories of Spain and Portugal, is more than two millennia old and has seen the birth of personalities such as Maimonides and Yosef Karo, authors of the Mishneh Torah and the Shulchan-Aruch respectively. Iberian Jews coexisted with Romans, Germanic peoples, Muslims and were associated with the foundation and development of the Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, which each held an empire of 13 million km2. The expulsions of the Jews at the end of the 15th century marked the beginning of the decline of both kingdoms and the birth of other powerful nations.