José de Anchieta

Origins and early life

José de Anchieta was born on 19 March 1534 at La Laguna on Tenerife, and he appears in this directory by descent: his maternal grandfather Sebastián de Llarena was a Jew from Castile who had converted to Christianity and settled in the newly colonized Canaries, and his daughter Mencía Díaz de Clavijo y Llarena was Anchieta's mother.

Work and career

This fiche says plainly that Anchieta himself was born, raised and died a Catholic, that he was a Jesuit priest and is a canonized saint of the Roman Church, and that his link to Judaism is the documented grandparent named above, a lineage that his pious early biographers passed over in silence and that archival genealogy has since established. He entered the Society of Jesus at Coimbra in 1551 and was sent to Brazil in 1553, at nineteen, for his health.

With Manuel da Nóbrega he founded the college of São Paulo de Piratininga on 25 January 1554, the seed of the city of São Paulo, and took part in the founding of Rio de Janeiro in 1565 after the war against the French of Villegagnon and the Tamoio confederation. Held hostage among the Tamoio at Iperoig in 1563 while negotiating the peace that saved the colony, he composed, having no paper, a long Latin poem to the Virgin which he memorized on the beach and wrote down afterwards.

He wrote the first grammar of the Tupi language, the Arte de gramática da língua mais usada na costa do Brasil, printed in 1595, along with catechisms, dictionaries and the first plays performed in Brazil, in Tupi, Portuguese and Spanish, which makes him the founder of Brazilian literature. He defended the Indians against enslavement by the colonists and served as provincial of the Jesuits in Brazil from 1577 to 1587. He died at Reritiba on 9 June 1597, was beatified in 1980 and canonized in 2014.