SOLIS

SOLIS, family name of 17th-century Portuguese Marranos. A young Lisbonite SIMÃO PIRES SOLIS was accused in 1630 of stealing the sacramental elements from the church of Santa Engrácia and he was condemned to the stake. His hands were chopped off and he was dragged through an incensed mob and burned. For weeks thereafter bands of Old Christians rioted against the new christians . Solis's brother, the Franciscan HENRIQUE SOLIS, left Portugal, where he was burned in effigy on March 11, 1640. He made his way to Amsterdam and took the name Eleazar, remaining a leading member of Dutch Jewry until 1656. Other bearers of the Solis name are descendants of the Portuguese court financier DUARTE DA SILVA (1596–1688), whose son ISAAC (DIOGO) DA SILVA SOLIS of Hamburg and grandson ISAAC (FERNANDO) DA SILVA SOLIS of the Low Countries adopted their new names upon re-embracing Judaism. Fernando's father FRANCISCO, reconciled at an auto-da-fé in 1652, became treasurer general to Queen Catherine. He was credited with planning the Spanish victory over the Duke of Crequi in 1673, and in 1682 he was named Marquis de Montfort. The Marrano economist DUARTE GOMES DE SOLIS was a financial authority for the Portuguese crown during   the early 1600s. His often reprinted and translated Discourse on the Commerce of the Two Indies (Lisbon, 1622) projected a scheme for the development of the territorial lands. The volume Mémoires Inédits (ed. by Léon Bourdon, 1955) contains GOMES DE SOLIS's economic reports to the crown for 1621. The proceedings of Madrid's inquisitorial court for 1634 record that an otherwise unknown DIEGO DA SOLIS of Lisbon appeared in the defense of Bartolomé Febos. The Solis name was carried to the New World as well. One JOSEPH DE SOLIS resided at Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1645–50. During the same time BENJAMIN DE SOLIS was a member of the first synagogue in Dutch Brazil. The U.S. family of solis-cohen traces its ancestry back to SOLOMON DA SILVA SOLIS, who fled to Amsterdam from Spain in about 1665 and married Isabel da Fonseca, daughter of the marquis of Turin, count of Villa Real and Monterey. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Roth, Marranos, index; A. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), 50 (on Duarte Gomes de); 110 (on Joseph de); 138 (on Benjamin de); R.J.H. Gottheil, in: JQR, 15 (1902/03), 231 (on Diego Rs S.).