History of the Jews in the Canary Islands

The contemporary Jewish community is small and is mostly composed of Sephardi Jews who migrated to the islands in their mid-twentieth century and their descendants.

An example of this is the case of Diego de Herrera, governor of the island of Gran Canaria in the 16th century who, along with other converts with high political positions, managed to get Emperor Carlos I to abolish the Inquisition court.

The existence of cryptic groups on the three royal islands (Gran Canaria, La Palma and Tenerife) is known to meet first thing in the morning or at night in the house of those considered chiefs, who were sometimes rabbis who had adapted to the insular reality.

[5] After a series of calamities that affected the Canary Islands between 1523 and 1532, the local delegation of the Inquisition promulgated some edicts that included the religious and social customs of the Jewish and Muslim converts.

Added to all this, skippers, owners and ship captains were prohibited from giving passage to converts of any kind or to new Christians, under pain of confiscation of their property, their boats and their excommunication.

There were also cases of keeping the Yom Kippur, Passover, praying raising and lowering the head, and refraining from eating meat pig.

Most Sephardi Jews in the Canary Islands came from Morocco and other North African countries, moving there for economic reasons during the 1960s at the end of the era of French and Italian colonial rule.