The mostly non-pirate Jews of the Caribbean

Marina Berkovich, JHSSWF President

The original Jewish community of St. Maarten, an island shared by Holland and France, started with Jews who sought refuge from the Iberian expulsion of 1492. Beginning with Christopher Columbus’s first cross-Atlantic voyage, some Jews sailed far into the unknown, away from European persecution.

After the Portuguese defeated the Dutch in Brazil in 1654, Brazilian Jews scattered to Amsterdam, Holland, Surinam, Africa, British Barbados, Martinique, Nevis and Curacao, which they turned into major Jewish spiritual leaders for America’s first synagogues. Other than crystalizing sugar, many found fortune in pirate-loving Port Royal. Not the one in Naples, Florida! The real one in Jamaica! Twenty-three others managed to make it to New Amsterdam.

Since the early 1700s, the Dutch encouraged Jews to settle on St. Eustatius, a Caribbean Island not far from St. Maarten. Jewish presence always meant a lively merchant community with the multitude of advantages it created.

At the start of the American Revolution, two famous cousins, King Louis XVI of France and King Charles III of Spain, formed the trading company to stockpile munitions on St. Eustatius before shipping them to the American colonies where they would become the primary source of weapons for General Washington … hmm …

By 1783, St. Martin had a large enough Jewish population to build a synagogue. In 1879, a property referenced as “two lots formally the Jewish Synagogue” was sold. In 1895, the property changed hands again as “the land called the Jewish Synagogue” on today’s Guavaberry Street, which incidentally has the oldest ruins in Phillipsburg, the capital of the Dutch side of the Island. By 1910, when the next sale took place, no reference to the Jewish Synagogue was made. It disappeared.

Faced with the abolition of slavery — on the French side in 1848 and the Dutch side by 1863 — the Napoleonic wars and the diminishing plantation system, the Jews left St. Maarten. The Dominican Republic entered into a commercial treaty with Holland and some families moved there. Most of the St. Eustatius community went to St. Thomas, which now has their menorah. Some moved to Panama and the United States. By 1863, St. Martin had no Jewish residents.

In 2012, a plaque denoting the 19th-century Jewish burial ground of St. Maarten was erected after a forensic DNA testing identified the remains of a 48-year-old Jewish male to be of the Sephardic Jewish ancestral group with ties to St. Eustatius and Barbados.

Though officially forbidden from settling in Puerto Rico, secret Jews, Marranos, conversos, Cryptos, began settling there in the 15th century. In 1898, a few American Jews openly migrated there. Large groups of Jews escaped the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. Then, Cuban Jews escaped Castro in 1959, most settling in San Juan. Puerto Rico has the largest, wealthiest Jewish community in the Caribbean with several synagogues — information for you in case you seek refuge … or if your cruise ship stops there.

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