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Gracia Mendes Nasi (20 June 1510 – 3 November 1569), also known as Doña Gracia or La Señora (The Lady), was a Portuguese philanthropist, businesswoman, and one of the wealthiest Jewish women of Renaissance Europe.
Gracia Mendes Nasi was a Marrano stateswoman and patroness. A member of the first generation of Portuguese Marranos (probably of Spanish descent), her original name as a Christian in Portugal, where she was born, was Beatrice de Luna.
Doña Gracia Nasi (c. 1510–1569) was among the most formidable figures of the Sephardi world in the sixteenth century. Her dramatic (indeed melodramatic) life began in Portugal, where she was born into a Jewish family whose members had recently been forcibly baptized.
Nasi, Gracia Mendes (1510–1569) Portuguese businesswoman, patron of the arts, and head of an underground Jewish organization, who orchestrated the boycott of the port of Ancona. Name variations: Beatrice de Luna; Beatrice Mendes; Gracia Mendes; Doña Gracia Nasi or Naci. Gracia's family name was Nasi; with their conversion to Christianity ...
Beatrice Nasi, who would come to be known as Doña Gracia, one of the richest women in the world, was born in 1510 in Portugal, where her forcibly-baptized, Crypto Jewish family fled from the nearby Spanish Inquisition.
Dona Gracia Nasi was a great Jewish hero. For decades she ran an underground railroad for Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and single-handedly supported Jewish communities in Italy, Turkey and Israel. Praised during her lifetime as “the heart of her people”, Dona Gracia Nasi’s story is hardly remembered today.
Gracia Mendes Nasi, 1510-1569. Photo credit - Wikipedia. A Portuguese businesswoman and philanthropist. One of the richest women in the world and the most important Jewish woman in 16th century Europe.
