AHC Jewish Canary Islands

Without a specific royal decree being issued from the Iberian Peninsula with banishment and forced deportation this scenario has limited possibilities and even less prior to 1300.
 
You have to convert the locals to Judaism or at least deal with them somehow. Presumably (best case scenario), they deal with a major Guanche leader on Tenerife or Gran Canaria, defeat or convert him, and the rest of the islands fall into line. It would take quite the expedition of Iberian Jews to force this, however. If they simply wanted a good place to settle without discrimination, Madeira is always open.
 
Without a specific royal decree being issued from the Iberian Peninsula with banishment and forced deportation this scenario has limited possibilities and even less prior to 1300.

Happened to Sao Tome, I believe. The Spanish sent converted jews there as part of an exile.

Didn't really make a difference to the long term demographics. Sao Tome these days is all Christian. It just wasn't an environment in which Judaic thought could thrive, because of the isolation and the fact crypto Christianity was enforced.

I don't think that's your way. A conversion of the guanche seems a better bet.
 
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Here's my stab at it anyway.

The Umayyad Caliphate launches a small fleet west to capture the canary islands for whatever reason, prestige, an island base, to spread the word of islam, etc. This is an era of conquest, it's entirely possible some ambitious governor of Morocco might want to give it a shot.

There were jews who served in the caliphate and the navy tended to be have more opportunities for advancement than elsewhere (the maritime port of Sidon was governed by a Jew in the 10th century).

So lets say there's an expedition sent to the islands. With a small numbers of arabs, berbers, black africans and some jews (which would not be an unreasonable ethnic makeup for the time period). Then the berber revolt breaks out (maybe delayed from OTL). Word trickles to the canary islands, there's a withdrawal of troops and also ethnic strife between the berbers and the arabs.

Before long the caliphate is cut off from the atlantic by the berber states. No more ships are coming, the army attempts to withdraw entirely but their ships are either wrecked or destroyed in the ethnic fighting. They're now left on the canaries to fend for itself the way the OTL Syrian army retreated to Iberia and stayed there.

Some particularly ambitious jewish sailor rises to the top in this chaos. He makes an alliance between the remaining soldiers and local guanches, marries a guanche women and establishes himself in control of a large area of land.

As a result of his influence, Judaism or a form of Judaism becomes picked up by the other guanches and spreads among the islands. Evangelicalism is encouraged by the situation, in order to have jewish girls for him to marry. Resulting in a canary islands that is already majority jewish by the time any Iberians decide to turn up, if they ever do.
 
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Sephardi Jewish traders from a surviving Emirate of Córdoba begin to use the island as a jumping-off point to rapidly ship in ivory and other rare goods from the Bight of Benin, rather than making the trans-Saharan crossing. They set up a waystation on the island. Eventually some crew members settle there and start selling supplies to trade ships. Traffic increases as the Songhai stir up the trans-Saharan route and eventually you get a little Sephardi microstate in the Canarias. The Andalusis come in to help quell the more restive natives, though Judaism spreads among many.
 
Sephardi Jewish traders from a surviving Emirate of Córdoba begin to use the island as a jumping-off point to rapidly ship in ivory and other rare goods from the Bight of Benin, rather than making the trans-Saharan crossing. They set up a waystation on the island. Eventually some crew members settle there and start selling supplies to trade ships. Traffic increases as the Songhai stir up the trans-Saharan route and eventually you get a little Sephardi microstate in the Canarias. The Andalusis come in to help quell the more restive natives, though Judaism spreads among many.

Thing with that is it's hard to trade there. The portuguese found it really difficult because there simply wasn't existing trade routes that went south to the bight. All the states were in the north and all the traders were doing the trans sahara route.

The first African slave trade was Portugal bringing slaves to the bight of benin to create the manpower needed to move goods. You need to be trading for a long time before it becomes worth it to do it by ship rather than over the desert.

If it's a private venue, it's a very expensive one to kickstart. They'd need some other way of making funds from the canaries to fund it. Wine, maybe?
 
Thing with that is it's hard to trade there. The portuguese found it really difficult because there simply wasn't existing trade routes that went south to the bight. All the states were in the north and all the traders were doing the trans sahara route.

The first African slave trade was Portugal bringing slaves to the bight of benin to create the manpower needed to move goods. You need to be trading for a long time before it becomes worth it to do it by ship rather than over the desert.

If it's a private venue, it's a very expensive one to kickstart. They'd need some other way of making funds from the canaries to fund it. Wine, maybe?
Doing anything there is hard. The model I'm lining up there establishes the trade route by disrupting land routes across the Sahara. It's easier to take a ship when going by camel gets your whole caravan hung out to dry by a bunch of angry Songhai.

Wine could work, though.
 
Doing anything there is hard. The model I'm lining up there establishes the trade route by disrupting land routes across the Sahara. It's easier to take a ship when going by camel gets your whole caravan hung out to dry by a bunch of angry Songhai.

Wine could work, though.

How about you go the other way then. Ghana remains intact and expands to the coast but the upper sahel and morocco become lawless, so trading with Arguin/the gambia is therefore a better deal. That way you're dealing with the traders still and you don't need to create a new route, you're just skipping the middleman.
 
How about you go the other way then. Ghana remains intact and expands to the coast but the upper sahel and morocco become lawless, so trading with Arguin/the gambia is therefore a better deal. That way you're dealing with the traders still and you don't need to create a new route, you're just skipping the middleman.
I like that.
 
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