In the current decade, we have lived to see the half-millenium anniversary of the onset of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jewish people from Spain. Originally, the displaced Jews tried to seek refuge in Portugal, but they were forced out in 1495. From there they fanned out all over the Mediterranean world. Over the course of the next 200 years, they became skilled in international trade because of the restrictions that prevented them from working in most gainful occupations. Using their network of relations scattered in various countries, plus their skill in money lending and financial matters, they soon established an overseas network that became an indispensable class of middle men in conducting trade between various nations.
By the early 1600s, many Jews had emigrated to Holland from all over Europe because of the Dutch government's liberal policy of religious tolerance. There they were allowed to worship in peace; Amsterdam was a financial capital of Europe where those with money were always welcome. At that time, the Dutch Empire was rapidly expanding and the Dutch had just conquered a new, previously Portuguese colony in northern Brazil. It was only natural that the Jews were sent as front-line settlers to this far off New World. Once in Brazil, the colony of Jewish plantation-owners became skilled in the agricultural techniques needed to grow crops in the tropical climate.
During the time the Jews were creating their large plantations in Brazil, they provide their most lasting benefit to the Caribbean economy. Sugar cane had been imported to Brazil from Madeira, an island possession of Portugal, as early as 1532 by a Marrano planter, and it became the basic foundation of the entire Caribbean economy until the 18th century. Sugar cane could be easily grown in the hot climates of South America (and later in the Caribbean), then converted to sugar to be shipped back to Europe. The Jews who had settled early on in Brazil were the landowners and sugar barons. Those arriving later became involved in trade. Brazilians Jews formed an overseas trading network with their relatives who still lived in Amsterdam. They formed partnerships to bring supplies to Brazil, and some even became successful slave traders. By the 17th century, the Jews of Brazil had become a class of rich plantation owners, businessmen, importers, and even writers and teachers.
The long history of the Jews' migration which has become known by the cliche "The Wandering Jew", is not only true in a historical sense, but is also true in an individual sense. This can be illustrated by the life stories of any number of our Jewish ancestors.
I have found that one of the best ways to "personalize" events that occurred in the distant past is to try to view them through the eyes of a particular person or family. In this case, I have chosen as my model the Cardoza family, whose members were typical of the Sephardic Jews who made their way to the New World and tried their hand at a variety of occupations there. I became intimately familiar with this particular clan because genealogical research has revealed that my wife's first name, Rachelle, can be traced back to her great-great-grandmother, Rachel Cardoza-Baeza (born 1801). In Sephardic practice, children were traditionally named after their grandparents, both living and dead, as a sign of honor. At birth, my wife was actually named after her grandmother (Richel Grace Gomperts, born 1868), but this grandma Richel had turn been named for her grandmother, the aforementioned Rachel Cardoza-Baeza.
The 17th century Cardozas were just one among many Sephardic families who had made their way to the Western hemisphere. The list of the members in the Jewish community in Dutch Brazil has been transcribed in the minute books of the two congregations there, Zur Israel and Magen Abraham, for the years between 1648 and 1654. By the way, spellings in olden times were quite variable depending on both the whim of the name-holder and the prevailing language in the territory in which he found himself. Thus Cardoza can be spelled innumerable ways, including Cardoso, Cardozo, etc. So exactly how various Cardozas and Cardosos might be related to each other, as well as to various other ancestral cousins in my wife's family tree who bore such hyphenated names as Marques-Cardoza and Uzziel Cardoza, is a question of some scholarly debate. Nonetheless, it is very likely that these are all members of what was essentially one very large and multi-branched family.
There are a total of four Cardozas or Cardosos listed in the minute books from the Brazil congregations : David, Simeao, Eliau Aboab, and Salamao. Surviving old records also show that on April 7, 1645, the West India Company granted a certain Michael Cardoso, "Portuguese of the Jewish nation", permission to practice lawn in Brazil. He was the representative for the Santa Campanhia de Dotar Orfas e Donzelas, a Jewish benevolent organization. The Christian governing members of the Supreme Council of New Holland (Dutch Brazil) recoiled at the thought of a Jew functioning in this capacity, and so the council refused to recognize his right to practice. At Cardoso's behest, the Jews of Amsterdam interceded with the West India Company on his behalf. As a result, the Company wrote the Supreme Council, on August 11, 1645, criticizing their intolerant behavior and insisting that Cardoso be accorded the right to practice his profession. It is significant that the intercession of Ams rdam Jewry carried sufficient weight to induce the local government of Brazil to retract its refusal. Michael Cardoso thus became the first Jewish lawyer in the New World, and he practiced until his death in 1655. The historical researchers Frieda and (the late) Egon Wolff, who made extensive investigations concerning the history of the earliest Jewish settlers in Brazil, have worked with a cryptographic expert. Their studies, using an analysis of the handwriting on ancient documents, has proven that Michael Cardoso's son, Simon, was the Simeao Cardoso who had signed the Recife rules in 1648.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese wanted their valuable Brazilian territory back. A new war between Portugal and Holland over Brazil began in 1645, and lated until 1654. When the Dutch finally surrended, the Jews were again forced to withdraw, under the threat of the Inquisition. The period of religious freedom and tolerance for Jews in Brazil had lasted for just 24 short years, from 1630 until 1654, and then it was gone.
Some of the Jews who were forced to leave returned to Amsterdam, but many of the Jews who left Brazil settled on the relatively nearby islands of the Caribbean; one boatload even made it as far as New Amsterdam (New York). These large numbers of Jews arriving from Brazil marked the beginning of definite Jewish communities in the West Indies. Jewish settlements rose up in Dutch colonies in the Caribbean like Surinam and Curacao, and British colonies like Jamaica and Barbados, which were the nearest locations where they felt safe from the Spanish and Protuguese Inquisition.
Surinam, located on the northeast coast of South America, in the region between Brazil and Venezuela, was a unique destination for some of the Jews fleeing Brazil. First, it was only a British colony for a short while; very soon becoming Dutch property, and going by the name of Dutch Guiana. In addition, Surinam is not strictly geographically located in "the Caribbean", since it lies on the northeastern coast of the South American continent. It has, however, always been considered part of the Dutch West Indies, because it is inaccessible by land from the rest of South America, and its economic and social focus has always been northward to the Caribbean Ocean. Again, because of Holland's liberal religious policies, fairly large numbers of "the Hebrew Nation" eventually made their way to Surinam.
From 1700-1750 Surinam's plantation economy was in its ascendancy. There was temendous local prosperity based on the world's need for Surinam's sugar cane. Thousands of slaves were imported from Africa to work on the plantations. The triangle trade of rum form New England, slaves from Africa, and sugar from the West Indies was in full swing. The Jews owned a majority of the plantations during this period. In fact, the agricultural economy of Surinam, with its riches not only of sugar cane, but also of coffee and cacao (chocolate), turned out to be the leading community of the Americas by 1730. It's wealth far surpassed that of such better known places as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.
But the plantations were dependent on the labor of the slaves imported from Africa. In the late 17th century, the slaves began rebelling and escaped into the jungle, where they set up communities of their own, emerging periodically to attack the plantations. This resulted in a shortage of labor at the same time that there was a banking crisis in Holland. These factors, capped by the discovery that sugar could be obtained easily from beets (grown inexpensively right at home in Europe), caused a severe economic decline which affected not only Surinam but all of the Caribbean colonies; the region has never fully recovered. As a result, much of the white population of these colonies, including the Jews, fled to calmer, safer, and better economic havens. the period of greatest out-migration from Surinam, for example, began in the 1790s and extended through the early part of the 19th century.
An accurate measure of the economic problems, of the Carribean Jews at the end of the 18th century, can be assessed through a study of their community taxes, called the Finta. This was an annuel assessment of each members' wealth. Boys were considered members from the age of 13 onward, and were taxed as well, although nominally.
Poverty excused no one from the Finta; every household had at least one paying member, even if it was only for a minimal sum (in Surinam, one guilder, equivalent to about half of an American dollar!). During the years from 1770 to 1790, Dutch Guiana's Sephardic community had a stable number of about 300 members. In 1770, the total amount of the Finta was 19,000 guilders, or about 61 guilders per person, on average. By 1790 the total amount had declined to under 6,000 guilders, with an average of about 16 guilders per person. So the total had plunged to less than a third of its 1770 assessment, and each member paid on the average about one-quarter of the amount paid just twenty years earlier.
The Sephardi population included a variety of occupational types, including planters, merchants, shopkeepers, old-timers, and new-comers. It was the richest landowners who became the most spectacularly impoverished, as they fell prey to the land speculation and loans that were offered during this period. By 1790, the era of the Jewish Sephardic planters which had flourished for over a century, had come to an end and most of the plantations fell into Christian hands.
By the early 1800s, the plantation economy of Surinam was in decline; the once proud Sephardic planting families were deeply enmeshed in financial problems. My wife's great-great-grandmother, Rachel Garcia Cardoza-Baeza (born 1801), was the daughter of an old land-owning family that considered themselves gentry, but Daddy, David Moses Cardoza-Baeza, born 1767, was in big trouble at the bank. As he looked around town (in this case, Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana' capital city) for a suitable match for his daughter Rachel, his eye fell on young David Jacob de Vries. Davis was definitely the scion of a family with Ashkenazic origins, but he did have the big advantage of being the heir of Paramaribo's wealthiest woodwares merchant. Blood may be thicker than water, but it seemed that money was thicker than blood; so although there was a bit of a scandal about it in town, the marriage was arranged. Rachel got herself a rich husband and her de Vries in-laws acquired a daughter-in-law with status With his daughter taken care of, David Moses sailed off to Barbados where he made one last-ditch attempt to make a go of it in the plantation gbusiness.
The above vignette, which I reconstructed from genealogical data I unearthed, deserves some commentary. First, a word is in order here concerning the use of compound names by the Sephardis. The classical teaching is that a hyphenated last name indicated a dynastic marriage that had occurred in the distant past between two powerful, wealthy and influential families. Traditionally the female's ancestral name was listed first, and the male's second. However, my research has revealed that, to the contrary, new names were being "mixed and matched" as late as mid-18th century. For example, I found evidence that a young man named Aron da Costa married Ester de Britto in 1730; the one surviving son from that union passed on, the subsequent generations of his descendants, the name da Costa-Britto. The father, Aron da Costa, meanwhile, had gone on to marry a second time in 1738 to Rachel Henriquez de Grenada; several children of this second marriage survived to maturity and produce many generations of progeny who bore the name Henriquez da Costa. The order of the names, therefore, seems to have been rather arbitrary, and the whole purpose behind the children's keeping their newly formed hyphenated names was probably to identify themselves unquestionably when it came time to claim their inheritances from various relatives.
In my research I found that, as far as the Cardoza family of Surinam is concerned, in the 1730s there were three gentlement each with a variation on the name of David Cardoza. The first was David Cardoza-Baeza (my wife's great-great-great-grandfather), the second was David Uzziel-Cardoza, and the last was David Marquez-Cardoza. I wondered whether these three were distantly related to the Cardoza family of the ancient past, or whether they were more closely related with variations in their double last names representing more recent marriages in the Cardoza family's history. Although I am still not entirely certain, I consider it likely that these three probably were all first cousins to each other, and named for their common grandfather, David Cardoza; their additional surnames were probably used in order to distinguish them from each other.
Another point worth clarifying is the relationship between the Sephardis and the Ashkenazis. In the 1660s, the original Jewish settlers in Surinam were Sephardim, that is, derived from Spanish and Portuguese origins. By the year 1700, the original 18 families had grown into a Sephardic communitiy that consisted of 90 households. Also, by this time some Ashkenazim (Jews of Dutch or German origin) had arrived in Surinam, but they numbered only about a half-dozen families. The Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews did not get along well with each other; Sephardis, who were mostly wealthy and well-educated business people, viewed themselves as the elite of the Jewish people, while Ashkenazis were, in general, much poorer. So the Sephardis, considering themselves as the remnants of nobility, tended to vieuw their Ashkenazic brethren with disdain, definitely being of a lower class. By 1704, the influx of German-speaking Jews now made the Askenazis half as numerous as the Sephardis and, as the ea y part of the 18th century progressed, still more Ashkenazic Jews continued to arrive. Up to this point, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews belonged to one community and attended the Sephardic synagogue located at the Joden Savanne, the semi-autonomous "Jewish Village" located about fifty miles upstram on the Surinam River, surrounded by the Jews' plantations. There was also a satellite "prayer-house", established in the capital city of Paramaribo, which was not dignified with the title of "synagogue". With their population having grown to such a substantial size, the Ashkenazis naturally wanted a synagogue of their own. Consequently, they bought the old satellite "prayer-house" in Paramaribo from the Sephardis where, in 1735, they established the Ashkenazic congregation, "Neve Shalom". From that date on, the two factions of the Jewish community maintained their own separate identities.
For much of the 18th century, the Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish communities in Surinam sniped and viewed with each other to varying degrees, in typical sectarian ways, and there were virtually no intermarriages between these two groups. However, it must be remembered that, as part of the agreement signed in 1735 between the two branches of Jews, when the Ashkenazis acquired the originally-Sepharic "prayer-house", it was specified that the Neve Shalom congregation would always follow the Sephardic ritual and order of prayers (minhag). Therefore, throughout Surinam's Jewish history of three centuries, there was never a congregation that followed the traditional European Ashkenazic mode of worship. In fact, the only real difference between the two factions, other than a psychological and historical one, was that the Ashkenazic Jews spoke Dutch and German at temple, while the Sephardis maintained their traditional Spanish and Portuguese. Of course, all of the most important p yers in both congregations were recited in Hebrew. It can be seen then that by allowing his daughter to marry an Ashkenazic, albeit a rich one, David Moses Cardoza-Baeza was braeking with a tradition that depended far more on ?the way people felt about things", rather than any real and tangible differences, at least as far as the way Judaism was practiced in Surinam.
As a consequence of this particular state of affairs, which existed uniquely in Dutch Guiana, it is a historical fact that many of the early Surinam "Sephardis" who settled in the united States were really Ashkenazic in origin. This is due to the fact that they felt much more at home with the rituals used in North American Sephardic services than the real Ashkenazic ones!
A final footnote to the David Moses Cardoza-Baeza story involves his fate after migrating to Barbados. When the orignal early British colony on Surinam was passed to the Dutch in 1667, many Jews had moved to Barbados in order to retain their coveted British citizenship. At that time, England was the only country in the world to offer citizenship to its Jewish subjects (and then only as an inducement to settlement in its far-flung colonies). But the Jews' success there caused the other settlers to try to limit their scope of business, and the British government did finally put limits on the Jews' ability to trade : they were not allowed to purchase slaves, and were required to live in a special ghetto. By 1802, the colonial governement in Barbados had removed all these discriminatory regulations. So with the slave revolts and other pressing financial problems in Surinam, David Moses Cardoza-Baeza was just one of many who tried to make a new start by moving to a new locale. His daugh r Rachel, discussed above, was one of nine children, of whom only three survived childhood. Rachel's youngest sibling, David Moses, Jr., was the only male left who could carry on the family name. He married Rahel de David Lobo in Barbados in 1831, the same year that a hurricane destroyed all of the towns on the island, and effectively ended the Jewish community there. This Rahel Lobo died after a short time, and David was married a second time, to Anna de Joshua Levi. The Barbados family tree ends with their youngest son, Edmund Isaac, "the last Jew of Barbados", can be found in E.M. Shilstone's book, Monumental Inscriptions in the Burial Ground of the Jewish Synagogue at Bridgetown, Barbados (New York, 1956).
So, as we have seen, by the second half of the eighteenth century, the golden age of the Caribbean Jewish plantation-owners had passed, and this decline continued. For example, in 1800 there were more than 800 plantations in Surinam, but by 1830 their number had been reduced to 550, and by 1850 only 263 remained. As the plantation economy continued to slide throughout the 1800s, many Jewish people in the West Indies moved from the plantations, in the country-side, to the cities, and became shopkeepers. The Sephardis scrambled to survive by reigniting their old connections in the world of international trading, and became, more than ever, a class of "travelling salesmen". These voyagers were motivated primarily by business interests. Surviving records show, for example, that half of the ships' departures from Surinam in the period from 1730 to 1800 were bound for Amsterdam; the other half were equally divided between ports in the Caribbean and others along the easter seaboard of what was to become the United States and Canada. Among the most popular North American ports wich traded with the West Indies region were Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York; Boston and Newburyport, Massachusetts; Newport, Rhode Island; and Halifax, Nova Scottia.
What sorts of goods were traded? Virtually everything! Before 1800, the major export of the Caribbean colonies had, of course, been sugar. In fact, the molasses and sugar trade became the major factor in the independence movement in the colonial United States. In 1763 the British decided to enforce the Molasses Act, which imposed a tax duty on all molasses, rum, and sugar imported into the American colonies from the West Indies. This set the stage for smuggling and a showdown between England and her American colonies.
Another type of business also became very profitable on the high seas. By 1750, what became known as the "triangle trade" was well established : first leg began in New England where more than one hundred distilleries were producing rum. Laden with barrels of this liquor, ships sailed to Africa where the rum was traded in exchange for slaves. From there, ships set out for the West Indies, where the Africans were traded in return for molasses. The boats then returned to New England with cargos of molasses made from sugar cane, which was then processed into rum, and the cycle was repeated.
Sailing ships originating in Boston, Norfolk, and Philadelphia also carried pork, beef, vegetables, and rum to the West Indies; plus tobacco, sugar, rice and lumber to England. But the richest part of the cargo to the West Indies was the prolific codfish, netted off the banks of Newfoundland. Cod could be easily caught, salted, dried, and packed; then sold cheaply and profitably. Plantations throughout the West Indies and the Southern U.S. fed cod regularly to their slaves, and sometimes the masters ate it as well. Still another export from North America to the Caribbean region was horses. This was potentially quite a profitable enterprise because one horse could do the work of ten slaves; however, it was also a very risky business because many of the animals died during the long sea voyage.
Because of the growing importance of trade, the shipping lanes became the highways of the early 18th century. Shipping merchants became the equal to lawyers, land-owners and clergy in social standing, and became their superiors on the economic level. Ship captains were also part of the new aristocracy. Between 1730 and 1763, with almost continious war among the European powers, often acted out admidst their colonies in the New World, privattering was also a profitable colonial enterprise. The governments of France, England and Spain all sanctioned ships' captains to capture "enemy" vessels. The captains would then divide the cargo and share the loot with the crown. Privateering contributed to the growth of the thriving young shipbuilding industry, but made travelling over the ocean waves extremely dangerous indeed! Still all of these various maritime activities served to provide a niche into which the Sephardic traders tried their utmost to engineer themselves in order t earn their livelihoods.
It is possible for us to ever be able to visualize what life must have been like for the literally wandering Jews of that day and age? The answer, fortunately, is yes, for some accounts of 18th century shipboard travel have come down to us. Our imagination expands as we try to realize what the daily life of those Sephardic traders, of so long ago, must have been like. It was a time when the shipboard voyage to the West Indies from Amsterdam of New York took between four and six weeks on an old sailing ship; for example, the first steam service between Paramaribo and Holland did not begin until 1829, and this was before anti-seasick pills had been invented! Surviving logs of ships' voyages which are now filed in the archives of the Hague, Netherlands, indicate that on October 24, 1765, Samuel Cardoza da Costa arrived in Surinam on the schooner Lieve Sak (a schooner was a two-masted vessel rigged fore and aft; the ship's name in Dutch means "Sweet Saxon"). The ship's captain s listed as David Johns, and the vessel had set off from Boston, with an intermediate stop in Barbados. I believe Samuel Cardoza da Costa to be a son of my wife's great x6 grandfather, Gabriel Cardoza-Baeza, and his first wife, Ribca, daughter of Baruch da Costa. The scene, as the ship pulled into the Surinam River, was described by the Belgian adventurer PJ Benoit, whose book, A voyage to Surinam (Reis Door Surinam) was published in Europe in 1839. The vignette he painted would have held us as an accurate description for the entire preceding century, and would have been equally applicable to a traveler arriving in virtually any port in the Caribbean region : "After a month or more at sea, the exotic trees, flowers, flamingos, and butterflies (of Surinam seemed) a delightful sight. As the vessel sail(ed) up the Surinam (river) towards Paramaribo there (was) a succession of plantations. Everywhere orchards (and) cultivated lands present(ed) an aspect of flourishing activity. Hundreds of milles' (ships) sail(ed) down the river every day, laden with sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton, indigo; products destined for many countries. As (the) vessel would approach the capital city of Paramaribo, it would become "surrounded by boats of all sizes, filled with the curious. (The) Colonists (would) clamour for news; fruit and flowers (would be) brought on board...". (Benoit, 89).
Once ashore, signs of bustling activity could be seen everywhere along the main shopping thoroughfare (which, in Surinam's case, was Saramacca Street) : "Every one saunter(ed) along here and the shops offer(ed) all that one's heart could desire. The most remarkable (were) the "vettewariers", (general stores) usually run by Jews ... Everything (was) to be found in their shops in elaborate profusion. The tailors'shops (and shoemakers') were generally run by (freed) slaves. Their product (were) expensive and inferior, and wealthy Europeans (whites) prefer(ed) to order their clothes from Europe. (Consequently, there were) great number(s) of fashion (bazaars) stocked with garments that look(ed) a bit frumpy from the long (sea) voyage, but (in) which the vain glorious Surinam ladies (were) proud to (sold) duty-free wares. Cafes and billiard halls (were) plentiful and a great deal of drinking and gambling (occurred) ... The markets suppli(ed) an abundance of fres fruit and vegetables. Europeans, as well as prosperous Creoles, generally (went) in for elaborate and often costly meals, for which the necessary delicacies (were) imported from Europe and America" (Benoit, 91).
As we have seen, because the Dutch and English were prominent in overseas trade, they filled their colonies in the Caribbean with merchants and traders. Since the Jews had been banned from many other gainful occupations in Europe, they comprised a large part of the merchant community these countries, and subsequently in their West Indian colonies. Later on, as economic conditions in the Caribbean area became more difficult, the newly formed United States came to be regarded as a golden land of opportunity, and attracted many of thes meso-American Sephardic merchants as settlers.
From as early as the late 18th century, the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies of North America had begun to prosper and were already starting to call themselves "Americans". Their settlements were rapidly developing and flourishing economically. No longer thinking of themselves as Europeans in a foreign land, they felt a sense of freedom and unity that was infectious. It was the desire for political and individual freedom, as well as the aura of economic potential, that led the Sephardic Jews, and indeed people from all over the world, to migrate to America.
This was paticularly true in the period just after the American Revolution, up until 1840. After that, the United States' Jewish population received a great infusion of Ashkenazic settlers streaming out of Eastern Europe. As mentioned earlier, of historical interest is the unusual fact that many of the early Caribbean "Sephardis" who settled in the United States, especially those from Surinam, were really of Ashkenazic family origins. As part of the agreement that had been signed between the two branches of Jews in Surinam in 1735, it was specified that the Ashkenazic synagogue members there would always follow the Sephardic ritual and order of prayers (minhag). For this reason, when individuals of Ashkenazic heritage subsequently began to migrate from Dutch Guiana to the United States in the period around 1800, they felt more comfortable joining Sephardic synagogues in their new country, rather than joining Ashkenazic ones. For example, Jacques Ruden was clearly originall of Germanic heritage, and yet he became the president of the main Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in New York called Shearit Israel. Similarly, Gomperts Solomon Gomperts, whose family ultimately had originated in the Rhenish cities along the Dutch/German border, also joined the Sephardic Shearit Israel congregation when he relocated from Surinam to New York 1801.
So although the Jewish settlements in the West Indies were small in terms of total population, their influence and contributions are still visible today in divers Hebraic communities spread across the United States and the rest of the world. For example, the oldest synagogue in the United States is the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island; but few people know that the Touro family first established itself in the New World in Surinam. Likewise, Abraham Bueno de Mesquita was the first Jew to be buried in New York City (in the Chatham Square cemetery in 1683); he came to New York from Jamaica, and had relatives on the Caribbean island of Nevis.
Vangal Simons, who came to Virginia from Dutch Guiana in the very last years of the 18th century, is the single Jewish progenitor (having taken a Christian wife, none other being available) of many of the Protestant FFV (First Families of Virginia), who trace their origins back to Mecklenburg Country. Likewise, other Caribbean Jews, such as Asser Samuel Levy, who came to Philadelphia in 1785, are the scions of families which are today spread across the United States and Canada, and whose current-day members include adherents to Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Abraham Morpurgo and the famous scholar Rabbi Jacques Judah Lyons, two of the 19th century rabbis of New York City's Shearit Israel, were born in Dutch Guiana. In fact, to this very day, a special prayer is said in New York's Sephardic synagogue "For our sister congregation in Surinam", just after Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur night.
Once established in North America, many Sephardi families, over the generations, went on to produce progeny who achieved quite a measure of status and achievement. In the Cardoza family (and obviously form a branch distant from my wife's family), the most prominent name that comes to mind is Judge Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (1870-1938). He was born in New York City and was a graduate of Columbia University. In 1914, he became a member of the New York Court of Appeals, and served a chief justice of the court after 1927. President Herbert Hoover appointed him to the United States Supreme Court in 1932 to succeed Oliver Wendell Holmes, where he served as an associate justice until his death. He became a leading member of the court's liberal wing, and wrote the court's opinion upholding the federal Social Security Act in 1937.
Despite Judge Cardozo's many eminent achievements, the Cardozo family (as well as other Sephardic dynasties) had its share of "dirty linen", all enticingly revealed in Stephen Birmingham'book, The Grandees (Harpers and Row, 1971). This volume details the rise (and foibles) of Sephardic families among New York City's social elite in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In conclusion, the history of the early Sephardic Jewish settlers in the New World is one that is generally not well known. Their place gets lost in more colorful tales of Spanish conquistadors, cut-throat pirates, and continual battles between the European powers over territory; nevertheless, their importance cannot be underestimated. A Jew introduced sugar cane to Brazil in the 1500s; this corp was the mainstay of the economy of the Western hemisphere for several hundred years. Jews started trade routes between the islands of the West Indies and their mother countries. In fact, Caribbean Jewish merchants were often so successful that frequently other businessmen tried to persuade their governments to tax or restrict Jewish trade. But despite these attempts to put them out of business, Jewish communities in the Americas flourished.
At a time when the United States did not exist, but was itself no more than a set of colonies, Jewish settlers looked to the religious and economic freedom they found in the New World to make new lives for themselves. We know that Jews fled Brazil and set up Jewish communities in the West Indies; in turn, the Caribbean congregations helped support the Jewish enclaves that were just starting on the North American mainland. In fact, there was so much travel and trade between North America and the West Indian islands that the Jews of the Caribbean are regarded, by many scholars, as the "missing link" in the Jewish settlement of the early United States.
Today there are scarcely any identifiable Jewish people left in the West Indies. Their ranks have been decimated by out-migration and inter-marriage. There had always been a shortage of eligible women in the island colonies because most of the original settlers were single young men. In later years, with the economy declining and people emigrating elsewhere, the number of women available for a Jewish man to marry became even more limited. Therefore, especially in the period after the 1860s, more and more white Jewish males married outside of their religion and race, often to litght-skinned black women. Although some of the descendants of these unions remained Jewish, the great majority have converted to various Christian denominations, and their affiliation to Jewish beliefs and traditions has become diluted, in many cases, to the point of non-existence. It is not uncommon today in Surinam, for example, to see a woman of obvious African descent wearing a Star of David. If you shou ask her why she wes the symbol, she might tell you it's a "good luck charm" given to her by her grandfather. Thus the legacy of one of the world's mos exotically-located areas of Jewish communities has been supplanted by the cosmopolitanism of the modern world.
Because of their involvement in trade, many of the Sephardic settlers in the New World had lives which can only be described as peripatetic. These "lives on the move" were quite typical of the unsung heroes of an earlier Jewish generation who did their best to ferret out a livelihood while these sttlers were not famous men and women, and they usually left no philosophical manuscripts from which we can easily gauge their characters. Yet, by the very actions involved in all their wanderings, they have left significant traces of their existence, enabling us to reconstruct what life was like for them and their fellow Jews of this period. It gives us pause to realize the determination and perseverance with which the early Sephardi colonists in the New World faced life. My few examples information which I have been able to unearth about various members of the Cardoza family epitomize the now silent Jewish members of generations past whose efforts ultimately have made it possible r us to exist in the world today.
In remembering them by resurrecting their stories, we pay homage to
the overwhelming endurance of the human spirit.