Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In 1485, the Portuguese Crown and Catholic Church began to kidnap Jewish children, forcibly convert the young conscripts, and ship them to São Tomé Island off the African equator to work the government sugar plantations. The collision of slavery, sugar agriculture, and discovery of The Americas transformed this island colony into the nidus of the wholesale black slave trade that infected Africa and Western commerce for the next 350 years. This is a unique and little-known chapter of the Diaspora which also reveals the Medieval Churchs complicity in the business of slavery.
São Tomé tells the story of young Marcel Saulo and his sister Leah abducted with other children from their synagogue in Lisbon and shipped 4,000 miles to the West-African island.