In 1496, King Manuel I of Portugal punished Portuguese Jews who refused to pay a head tax by deporting almost 2,000 Jewish children to São Tomé and Príncipe.
[1] A generation later, when Portugal colonized Brazil, some of the grown children were sent to work in the Brazilian sugar trade.
[2] A new community of Jews was established on the islands in the 19th and 20th centuries with the arrival of a small number of Jewish sugar and cocoa traders.
However, living descendants of the Portuguese-Jewish children remain on the islands where they are visibly distinctive due to their lighter complexions.
[1] Some of the Jews of São Tomé and Príncipe later settled in the Kingdom of Loango, along the coasts of continental Africa in what is now Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, and the Cabinda Province of Angola.