Abraham Furtado

Abraham Furtado (1756-1817) was born to a French Jewish family of Portuguese Marrano descent. He was born in London after his family emigrated there after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Soon after, they moved to a small town in southwestern France, Saint-Esprit (today, a district of Bayonne). After a short time, the family moved to Bordeaux, where Furtado was raised and educated. Throughout school he studied history, philosophy, and politics which spearheaded his involvement with politics as a young adult. Furtado was an active Jewish Girondist, a member of the Bordeaux Jewish Delegation, and a member of the Bordeaux Popular Commission. He was elected president of the Assembly of Notables and later served as secretary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Sanhedrin; a Jewish high court convened in Paris. During the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), he went into hiding and kept detailed accounts of daily life in his journal. He hid in houses of friends in and around Bordeaux as the Terror swept through the city. In his journal, he recalls using a knife to cut an eyehole in his wall and watched the revolution unfold in the streets. He noted that amid the Terror, the general population wanted for more Jews to be killed.