Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão

Origins and early life

Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão was born in Portugal around 1555, a New Christian — one of the descendants of the Jews forcibly converted in 1497 — and, like so many of his kind, he sought in Brazil a horizon wider than the Inquisition's; the sources establish his status and his repeated troubles with the Holy Office, though they name no individual Jewish ancestor, and this fiche says so.

Work and career

He crossed the ocean in the late sixteenth century, became a sugar planter and tax farmer in Pernambuco and then in Paraíba, and was denounced more than once before the visiting inquisitors. Out of that colonial life came the work that carries his name: the Diálogos das Grandezas do Brasil, the Dialogues of the Greatness of Brazil, completed in 1618 and attributed to him by scholarship — one of the two major descriptions of colonial Brazil written in the seventeenth century, an inventory of its lands, sugar economy, plants, peoples and possibilities that historians still mine.

He speculated, wrongly but revealingly, that the Indians of Brazil descended from the tribes of Israel. He died in Brazil after 1618, the date of his book.