Monsanto (Holy Mountain) and its Portuguese origins, at least in name

When I recently googled ‘Monsanto’ I got about 6,910,000 results in 0.27 seconds and the first ones refered to a A Sustainable Agriculture Company, to the respective entry of the English version of the Wikipedia (“Monsanto Company is a publicly traded American multinational chemical, and agricultural biotechnology corporation headquartered in Creve Coeur, Missouri”), News on Monsanto (the first of which mentions The Toxic Impacts of GMO Maize: Scientific Journal Bows to Monsanto, Retracts anti-Monsanto Study), Monsanto, the TPP and global food dominance (TPP meaning the Trans-Pacific Partnership), Cutting-edge Monsanto cotton research lab comes to Toowoomba, Organic Consumers Association: Millions Against Monsanto, March Against Monsanto, and the The World According to Monsanto. Unsurprisingly Monsanto is also on the Forbes World’s Most Innovative Companies List, and it goes on.

But none of these first entries refers to Monsanto Park, the largest green patch in the city of Lisbon, Portugal, I use for my modest jogging and cycling exercise every other weekend. So, after my daughter co-organized here in Lisbon the March against Monsanto some years ago, I started to get worried about what I could possibly be getting wrong or what was wrong with the park in question.

That’s when it occurred to me to use the Portuguese version of the Wikipedia instead, and there it was: 4 different entries for Monsanto. One for the “sustainable agriculture company” here introduced simply as a multinational agriculture and biotec firm, another for the Lisbon forest park (you should visit one of these days), named apparently after a hilly formation of the same name, and even more interesting the one for an administrative parish in the center of Portugal, and for a village of the same name close to the Spanish border. Why did these look more interesting? Because they allow us to at least construe a hypothesis connecting Portugal to the Monsanto corporation, or at least to its name origin.

Even when you start using the English version of the Wikipedia you will be alerted to the different Monsantos around. In its disambiguation page it lists 14 articles associated with the same title. The one of interest to us is the one which refers to the village of Monsanto, Idanha-a-Nova municipality, close to the Spanish border. It’s the one where I suspect the forefathers of the wife of Monsanto’s founder John Francis Queeny took their family name from. 

Many Jews then living in Portugal, after being expelled from Spain or longer, were force converted to the Christian/Catholic religion under threat of expulsion, or worse. While converting into what became known as Cristão Novos (New Christians) they took and adopted many localities, trees, and other Portuguese names.

“Monsanto was founded in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, by John Francis Queeny, a 30‑year veteran of the pharmaceutical industry. He funded the start-up with his own money and capital from a soft drink distributor and gave the company his wife’s maiden name. His father-in-law was Emmanuel Mendes de Monsanto, a wealthy financier of a sugar company active in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and based in St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies.”

Figure 108 – Monsanto, the village

Among the 15 possible entries I was confronted with while trying to google ‘Monsanto’ two caught my attention: ‘Monsanto Portugal’ and ‘Emmanuel Mendes de Monsanto’.

Monsanto was part of a long list of Portuguese places close to the Spanish border on the East, where quite extensive Jewish communities have been identified, including my own hometown of Viseu.[1] No one with the family name Monsanto is identified by Tavares, but as many Jews have been forced by the inquisition to convert to Catholicism adopting many different names of objects, localities, plants and animals, one should not be surprised if some of them adopted the name of Monsanto village as their new family name as ‘cristãos novos’, or ‘new Christians’.

From the English version Wikipedia we learn that the company “Monsanto was founded in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, by John Francis Queeny, a 30‑year veteran of the pharmaceutical industry. He funded the start-up with his own money and capital from a soft drink distributor and gave the company his wife’s maiden name. His father-in-law was Emmanuel Mendes de Monsanto, a wealthy financier of a sugar company active in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and based in St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies.”

From a Metapedia wiki we can add some details: “Monsanto was founded in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901 under John Francis Queeny, a businessman born in Chicago of Scottish ancestry, who originally worked for the Jewish-owned Meyer Brothers Drug Company, one of the largest wholesale pharmaceutical companies at the time. Queeny married a Sephardic Jewess named Olga Mendez Monsanto, the daughter of Don Emmanuel Mendes de Monsanto. 

The Jewish Monsanto family were involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and sugar plantation industry, with interests in the West Indies, Puerto Rico and Louisiana. The Monsantos were just one of many Jewish families involved in the enslavement of Black Africans.”

“This surname is among the most common on St Thomas and no less than 30 are listed in the phone book. They are descended from a Jewish family from Spain and Portugal which was enobled but left due to persecution from the Spanish Inquisition. The majority of the descendants of the family are now Christian but branches which retain their original religion still exist.
The international chemical company Monsanto was financed by Catholic Don Emmanuel Mendes de Monsanto of St Thomas who made a fortune financing the sugar industry in Puerto Rico notably Vieques, he was made a baron by Spain. The founder was John Patrick Queeney his son-in-law a chemist who made sacharin in competition with a German company who had previously monopolised it.”[2]

Apparently “the Monsanto family was a longtime Sephardic Spanish family that fled the Inquisition to Holland. Isaac Rodriguez Monsanto eventually migrated to America, later bringing over his brothers and sisters. The family became prosperous merchants, shippers, fur buyers, and bankers in New Orleans, despite the Code Noire. 

Furthermore, they practiced their Judaism openly, but some in succeeding generations abandoned their ancestral faith. In 1986 Olga Mendez Monsanto married John Francis Queeny, hard-driving chemical entrepreneur. He and his son Edgar Monsanto Queeny created the Monsanto Chemical Company, naming it after Olga Mendez Monsanto.”

Mendes/z appears spelled in an inconsistent way, the Portuguese Mendes and the Spanish Mendez way according to source. The predominant use of the Mendes version points to a long lived presence in Portugal, even if a family member was made baron by Spain while living in Puerto Rico.

Here is our hypothetical story in a nutshell:

Monsanto, the company, got its name from the family name of the founder’s wife. She descended from a Jewish family, which lived between Spain and Portugal, and got forced out first from Spain to Portugal, then from Portugal to the Netherlands, as many others did, like the family of famous economist and MP David Ricardo, on to the West Indies and on to the USA. It was while the family lived in Iberia and in the process of forced conversion to Catholicism that the family adopted the name of the Portuguese village, Monsanto, as their family name. 

As it happened often at the time, so-called New Christians officially dropped their Jewish family names and adopted names of localities, objects[3], trees, and other plants. Perhaps some family members dwelled in Monsanto for some time, but I was unable to trace them down.

[1] Tavares, Maria José Ferro “Os judeus da Beira Interior: a comuna de Trancoso e a entrada da inquisição” Sefarad, vol. 68:2, julio-diciembre 2008, págs. 369-411

[2] From a post by Richard Bond in Ancestry.com.

[3] Like Machado  meaning axe.