The Jews of the Caribbean at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Jews and the Legacy of European Colonialism

If the early modern legacy of European colonization, dispossession of indigenous peoples, and African enslavement on a mass scale shaped Jewish life in the United States in ways not always fully acknowledged by Jews themselves, that same legacy had much more varied outcomes in the much smaller Jewish communities of the Caribbean. These communities of a few thousand were descendants of the early modern Western Sephardic merchant diaspora, who had over time acculturated to English and Dutch culture. By the turn of the twentieth century, they were integrating ever more fully into larger communities on the islands; but in a world shaped by racism, integration meant many things. 

Color Lines and Multiracial Jews in Jamaica, Curaçao, and Suriname

In the British colony of Jamaica, the years 1880–1918 saw ever-deepening integration of the small Jewish population into a white planter class growing ever more concerned about maintaining the color line. Conversely, places like Curaçao and Suriname were home to uniquely multiracial Jewish communities. Of course, that multiraciality was testament not to some irrelevance of race or absence of colonial racism, but rather to tangled histories of Caribbean Jewish slaveholding, contested emancipations and claims to belonging by formerly enslaved people and “mixed-race” descendants of Jewish slaveowners, and families shaped by recent realities of extreme power imbalances and patriarchal-racial domination as much as by care and communality.