from the Ashes of Lisbon

From the Ashes of Lisbon: A Crypto-Jewish Saga of Courage and Survival

In 1497, Portugal did not simply expel its Jews. It forced them to disappear.

Baptized under threat of exile or death, thousands of Portuguese Jews became "New Christians," living outwardly as Catholics while secretly preserving fragments of Jewish faith and memory. Under the shadow of the Inquisition, a single candle lit on the wrong night could mean accusation, imprisonment, or execution.

From the Ashes of Lisbon is a sweeping historical saga that follows one Sephardic family through the fires of forced conversion, across trade routes and northern ports, into the relative tolerance of Amsterdam, and beyond. Through generations marked by concealment, migration, and reinvention, the novel explores what it means to survive when identity itself has been criminalized.

Fathers memorize forbidden prayers because written words are dangerous. Mothers bury ritual objects beneath kitchen stones. Children grow up sensing difference but learning silence. As families move from Lisbon to Amsterdam and into the expanding networks of European commerce, names evolve, cultures blend, and survival demands adaptation. Yet beneath every change, an ember remains.

The novel examines the psychological cost of divided existence. What happens to a soul forced to live publicly in one faith and privately in another? How many generations can memory survive without language? And when safety finally appears, is identity easily restored?

Written by Dovied Zwi van der Velde under the restored ancestral name D. Nunez Vas, the book is rooted in documented Sephardic migration history and family lineage connected through his maternal grandfather, David Duis. The author is also the son of Holocaust survivors, and his parents formed one of the early postwar Ashkenazi-Sephardi marriages in a Europe reshaped by devastation. That convergence of traditions informs the emotional depth of the story.

Blending meticulous historical reconstruction with intimate family narrative, From the Ashes of Lisbon is a powerful testament to Sephardic resilience, diaspora endurance, and the unbreakable thread between ancestors and descendants.

Some legacies are buried.

Some are forgotten.

And some rise again from the ashes.