The Lindo family was a Sephardic Jewish merchant and banking family, which rose to prominence in medieval Spain.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Manuel Lindo was a cosmographer and Chair of the Astronomy department at the University of Coimbra in the 16th century. He published a nautical guide in manuscript form in 1539.[7] [8] He was a dear friend of Amatus Lusitanus, who described him as the eminent astronomer.[9] He worked with Pedro Nunes, Abraham Zacuto, José Vizinho, João Faras to build instruments that made Europe's worldwide expansion possible.[10] [11]
Francisco Lindo was arrested for Judaism and Heresy in Évora, on 12 August 1644.
Francisco's son Joao Rodrigues Lindo married Contance Nunes of Guarda and lived in Campo Maior. Their son, Isaac (Lourenco), was born in Badajoz in 1638. He became a merchant in Tenerife, where he and his wife arrested by the Inquisition in 1656. After being held without trial for two years, Isaac and his wife were penanced and released. The family lived in France before settling in London in around 1670.[12] [13]
His brother, Antonio Rodriguez Lindo, a Lisbon merchant, was arrested on 9 October 1660 for Judaism and was condemned to public Abjuration at the Auto-da-fé of Lisbon on 17 September 1662.
One of the oldest and most esteemed of London Sephardic families, it traces its descent to Isaac Lindo.[14]
Isaac visited London in the early 1650s and was married there around 1653. Antonio Fernandez Carvajal and Abraham Chilon, who commissioned one of the first brokers medals in 1655, were his maternal uncles.[15]
He settled in London around 1670 where he became an elder of Bevis Marks Synagogue, one of the first Jewish brokers of the Royal Exchange, London in 1681 and a signatory of the *Ascamot of 1694.[16] [17] His children included:
For nine successive generations members of the family were sworn brokers of the City of London, until the registration of sworn brokers was abolished in 1886:[18] [19] [20]
Six of their brokers medals are on display at the Museum of London.[22] The Lindos were closely related to many other "cousinhood" families of note in Britain, including the Mocatta, Goldsmid and the Montefiores.
Members of the family have been active in the affairs of the Sephardi community.
Moses Lindo (1760-1837) served as President of Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1817 to 1829. Moses' brother, David Abarbanel Lindo, married Sarah Lumbroso de Mattos and had no less than eighteen children, many of whom married into well known Sephardic families.[23]
David's son Nathaneel Lindo (1810-1889) was a City solicitor who operated the firm Lindo & Co., which had long acted as solicitors for the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue and the Italian consulate in London, a tradition which his sons: Gabriel (1838-1908) and Arthur Lindo (1839-1905) continued.
David Lindo Alexander, a grandson of David Abarbanel Lindo, was President of Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1903 to 1917.
In 1937, Frank Charles Lindo (1872-1938), a great grandson of David Abarbanel Lindo, donated funds to build the Lindo Wing at St Mary's Hospital, London.
Among the Jewish residents who made their mark on Kingston’s development, the Lindo family were outstanding.
When Alexandre Lindo arrived in Kingston in 1765, he rented a house on Port Royal Street, and by 1769 he had relocated to a rented house on Peter’s Lane. Alexandre had many children, seven with his first wife, Hannah, and after her death, sixteen with his second wife, Esther Salome. From early, Alexandre set up business on Princess Street, where over time, he acquired several properties. In 1788, he bought a row of houses on Port Royal Street leading to the harbour and established Lindo’s Wharf there. Per Stanley Mirvis' The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition, Lindo "was perhaps the most notorious Jamaican Jewish slave trader, absentee planter, and moneylender at the end of the eighteenth century..."[24]
He owned multiple transatlantic vessels and traded in all types of merchandise. For example, one of his vessels, the Esther Lindo, described by Lloyd's Register as a constant trader on the London-Jamaica run, cleared Jamaica for London on May 28, 1790 laden with sugar, cotton, pimento, Nicaragua wood, coffee, ginger, rum, wine, silver, sweetmeats, tamarinds, balsam, copper, castor oil, and tortoise shell.[25] He owned numerous properties including Greenwich Park (the first steam powered plantation in Jamaica) and Pleasant Hill, a large coffee plantation. Lindo was a successful businessman who bought and traded goods captured by the British Royal Navy.
He supplied André Rigaud during the War of Knives and was close to a French jew who was executed while trying to spark a slave revolt in Jamaica in 1799. He made large loans to the French Government during the Peace of Amiens, negotiated by Charles Leclerc, to finance the Saint-Domingue expedition. When Britain declared war on France, on May 18, 1803, ending the Peace of Amiens, Lindo attempted to draw a draft in Paris, but the debt was dishonoured and Lindo was threatened with arrest.[26] [27] [28]
His eldest son, Abraham Alexander Lindo, was put in charge of the family business in Jamaica and Alexandre moved to London, where he was involved in trading, banking and insurance. He leased part of Roehampton estate called Putney Spot from Benjamin Goldsmid while constructing a mansion in Finsbury Square.
He was elected Parnas of Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1805.[29] [30] That year his sons subdivided Kingston Pen into small lots which then formed a mixed-race working-class township known as Lindo's Town. Lindo’s Town included areas now known as Trenchtown, Denham Town and Tivoli Gardens.
He died at Finsbury Square on March 12, 1812.[31] [32] [33]
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