Alvares
ALVARES
ALVARES (Alvarez) , Sephardi family of Marrano descent. The first known to bear the name was samuel dios-ayuda (= Joshua?) of Astorga, baptized as Garcia Alvarez Delcón, probably at the time of the persecutions of 1391. He is sneeringly referred to as "the delight and ornament of Jewry" in an anti-*Converso satire preserved in the Cancionero de Baena.
There were many martyrs of the Inquisition of the name both in the New World and the Old. fernando alvarez (c. 1620–1640) of Bordeaux and later Leghorn, who had returned to Judaism under the name of Abraham de Porto, was one of the few Marranos burned by the Roman Inquisition. duarte henriques was treasurer of the customs in the Canary Islands before escaping in 1653 to England, where, as Daniel Cohen Henriques, he became active in the synagogue. His effigy was burned by the Inquisition in 1658, but seven years later he was denounced again by his own son. isaac (died 1683) alias Isaac Israel Nuñes, court jeweler, headed the London Sephardi Community immediately after the Plague and Fire of London: his tombstone, still legible, is written in English alexandrine couplets and praises him because "his fargain'd knowledge in mysterious gems/ sparkled in the European diadems." Joseph Israel Nunez, alias Antonio Alvarez, a jeweler of French origin, lived in Amsterdam in the second half of the 17th century. Isaque Alvares lived in Bayonne in the 17th century. We find Rodrigo Alvarez in Cologne and Emanuel Alvares in Hamburg in the 16th century. In America, the name figures in the Jewish community from the beginning of the 18th century (solomon, distiller in New York in 1703). The English musician eli parish-alvars (1808–1849) presumably belonged to this family. The Alvares Correa family lived in Brazil.
bibliography:
L. Wolf, Jews in Canary Islands (1926), index; J. Caro Baroja, Los Judíos en la España moderna (1962), index; Rosenbloom, Biogr. Dict. 7; Roth, Marranos, index; jhset and jhsem, index volume. add. bibliography: R. Barnett and W. Schwab (eds.), The Western Sephardim (1989), index.
[Cecil Roth]