Jews of the Caribbean: Conversos, Sugar, and Sand-Floor Synagogues

Where Jewish America Began

Most Americans, if asked where Jewish life in the Americas began, would say New York — perhaps picturing the twenty-three refugees from Recife who arrived in New Amsterdam in September 1654. They would not be wrong. But they would be incomplete.

Jewish life in the Americas began in the Caribbean — on islands scattered across turquoise waters, in communities founded by refugees from the Inquisition who had endured forced conversion, secret worship, and perilous ocean crossings. Before there were Jews in New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston, there were Jews in Curaçao, Jamaica, Barbados, Suriname, and St. Thomas.

Their synagogues had sand on the floor. Their cemeteries still stand, with tombstones carved in Portuguese, Hebrew, and sometimes Spanish. Their story is one of the least known and most remarkable chapters in the long history of the Jewish diaspora.

The Converso Trail

The story begins with disaster. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all professing Jews from Spain. Five years later, Portugal — where many Spanish Jews had fled — forced its entire Jewish population to convert to Christianity. Those who converted were called conversos or New Christians. Many converted sincerely. But many continued to practice Judaism in secret, behind closed doors, at tremendous risk.

These secret Jews — known as crypto-Jews or, pejoratively, marranos — lived double lives for generations. Outwardly Christian, they attended Mass and baptized their children. Privately, they lit Shabbat candles in windowless rooms, fasted on Yom Kippur, and passed fragments of Jewish knowledge from parent to child.

The Inquisition hunted them relentlessly. Suspected crypto-Jews were interrogated, tortured, and sometimes burned at the stake. Escape was a matter of survival — and the New World offered possibilities that Europe did not.

Recife: The Brazilian Prelude

The crucial waypoint was Recife, in northeastern Brazil. When the Dutch West India Company conquered this region from Portugal in 1630, they brought Dutch religious tolerance with them. Conversos who had been living as Christians could finally return openly to Judaism.

For twenty-four years, Recife hosted a thriving Jewish community — the first openly Jewish community in the Americas. They built a synagogue, established a kehillah (organized community), and worshipped freely for the first time in generations.

Then, in 1654, the Portuguese reconquered Recife. The Jews had to leave. Most returned to Amsterdam. But twenty-three refugees boarded the Sainte Catherine and sailed north, eventually arriving in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam — present-day New York. Governor Peter Stuyvesant tried to expel them. The Dutch West India Company overruled him. American Jewish history had begun.

But many more Recife refugees scattered across the Caribbean, joining converso communities already establishing themselves on the islands.

Curaçao: The Mother Community

Curaçao, a small Dutch island off the coast of Venezuela, became the most important Jewish community in the Caribbean — and arguably in the entire Western Hemisphere for much of the colonial period.

Sephardic Jews from Amsterdam began arriving in the 1650s. The community grew rapidly. By the eighteenth century, Jews constituted a significant portion of Curaçao’s white population — perhaps as much as a third. They were merchants, shipowners, and traders who played central roles in the island’s economy.

The Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue — founded in 1651, with its current building dating to 1732 — is the oldest continuously operating synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. Its most striking feature is its floor: pure white sand, spread across the entire sanctuary.

The sand floor is the subject of much speculation. The most widely accepted explanation is that it recalls the Israelites’ wanderings in the desert — a fitting symbol for a community of wanderers who had crossed oceans to find a place to worship freely. Another theory holds that conversos in Iberia spread sand on the floors of their secret prayer rooms to muffle footsteps, and the Caribbean synagogues preserve this memory.

Jamaica: Pirates, Planters, and Parliamentarians

Jamaica’s Jewish community, established under English rule after 1655, followed a different trajectory. Here, Sephardic Jews became deeply integrated into the colonial economy — as sugar planters, merchants, and even, in the early days, participants in the complicated moral landscape of Caribbean piracy and privateering.

The most notable early Jewish Jamaican may be the most surprising: there is historical evidence that several Jewish merchants in Port Royal — the notorious pirate haven — provisioned and financed privateering expeditions. The moral complexity of this history is considerable, but it reflects the reality that Caribbean Jews, like their Christian neighbors, participated in the full range of colonial economic activity.

By the eighteenth century, Jamaica’s Jews had achieved a level of political integration unusual for the period. Jewish men could vote and hold certain offices decades before Jews in England won comparable rights. The community maintained synagogues in Kingston, Spanish Town, and other locations.

Barbados, Suriname, and Beyond

Jewish communities appeared across the Caribbean wherever colonial powers offered sufficient tolerance.

Barbados received Sephardic settlers in the 1620s and 1630s. Jews played significant roles in developing the sugar industry — the economic engine of Caribbean colonialism. The Nidhe Israel synagogue in Bridgetown, founded around 1654, has been restored as a heritage site.

Suriname, a Dutch colony on the South American mainland, hosted one of the most unusual Jewish communities anywhere. The Jodensavanne (Jewish Savannah), established in the 1660s, was a Jewish agricultural settlement deep in the tropical forest. Jews owned plantations, employed enslaved laborers (a deeply troubling aspect of this history), and maintained a level of autonomy — including their own court system — unmatched in the colonial world.

St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, became home to a significant Jewish community in the eighteenth century. The Beracha Veshalom Vegmiluth Hasadim synagogue — with its own sand floor — was a social and cultural landmark. The community produced one of the most unexpected figures in Jewish history: Camille Pissarro, the Impressionist painter, who was born to a Sephardic Jewish family on St. Thomas in 1830.

The Sugar Connection

Jewish involvement in the Caribbean sugar trade is one of the most economically significant — and morally complex — chapters in this history.

Sephardic Jews brought knowledge of sugar cultivation from Brazil to the Caribbean islands. They invested in plantations, operated sugar mills, and participated in the trade networks that shipped raw sugar to Europe and imported manufactured goods and enslaved Africans to the islands.

This means that Caribbean Jews, like other colonial entrepreneurs, were implicated in the institution of slavery. Some owned enslaved people. Some traded in enslaved people. This reality must be acknowledged honestly — it is part of the full story, uncomfortable as it is.

At the same time, the Jewish communities’ economic contributions helped establish their legal and social standing in colonial societies that might otherwise have excluded them. Economic utility — the same dynamic that created the Court Jew phenomenon in Europe — provided a measure of security in the New World.

Decline and Legacy

Most Caribbean Jewish communities declined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Economic changes — the end of slavery, the collapse of the sugar economy, the shift of commercial power to North America — reduced the islands’ prosperity. Younger generations migrated to the United States, Panama, and eventually Israel.

Today, the Caribbean’s Jewish communities are small. Curaçao maintains an active congregation. Jamaica has a tiny but enduring community. Most other islands have only remnants — a restored synagogue here, a cemetery there, a street name or family story that preserves the memory of a once-vibrant presence.

But the legacy is real. Caribbean Jews were the first openly practicing Jews in the Americas. They built the first synagogues, established the first Jewish institutions, and created the commercial and cultural networks that later Jewish communities in North America would inherit and expand.

When you walk into the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue in Curaçao — when you feel the sand shift under your feet and look up at the wooden ark that has held Torah scrolls for nearly four centuries — you are standing at the beginning of Jewish life in the New World. The story started here, on these islands, with converso refugees who had survived the Inquisition, crossed the Atlantic, and finally — finally — prayed aloud.