Sephardic Jews of the Dominican Republic: Fusion, and the Cemetery That Records It

The Dominican Republic is not a records-rich Sephardi community like Curaçao or Livorno, and this page reads differently as a result.

There was never an organised congregation, a synagogue, or a set of communal registers for the nineteenth-century Sephardim. What there was instead is one of the most complete cases of voluntary assimilation in Jewish history: a small number of Sephardi merchant families, most of them out of Curaçao, who settled from the 1820s, married into the Dominican Catholic elite, and within three or four generations became Dominicans who remembered their Jewish descent with pride but no longer practised the religion.

The rabbi Henry (Enrique) Ucko, himself a refugee of the 1940s, called this process not assimilation but “fusion” — and the word has stuck.

For the researcher this means the sources are scattered, indirect, and often Catholic: parish baptisms, cemetery stones bearing both a Hebrew name and a cross, Masonic lodge rosters, notarial and commercial papers, and family chronicles kept privately. The community that would have generated Jewish records was in Curaçao and Amsterdam, not Santo Domingo. A Dominican Sephardi line is therefore almost always researched by following it back to Curaçao.

One caution before the detail. Much of what is repeated about the Dominican Sephardim traces to a single 1944 article by Ucko, written without footnotes or references, and accepted uncritically by later historians. Tineke Sjenitzer’s recent recovery and analysis of Ucko’s archive shows both how valuable his eyewitness work was — he read the cemetery stones before they were lost — and how much of it was reconstruction. Where a claim rests on Ucko alone, this page says so.

Which Jewish presence are you looking for?

Three distinct presences settled here, and they should not be run together.

Colonial Conversos (pre-1800). A presumed New Christian presence under Spanish rule, for which there is almost no corroborating evidence. Jews could not live openly under the Real Audiencia and its Inquisition, so any Sephardi presence before about 1799 is inference, not record.

Nineteenth-century Sephardim (1820s–1900). The “fusion” families — Curaçao Sephardim who came to trade after independence removed the Spanish obstacle to open Jewish life. This is the subject of most of this page, and the only genuinely Sephardi chapter.

Ashkenazi refugees (1930s–1940s). The Sosúa settlement, established when the Dominican Republic was the one state at the 1938 Évian conference to offer mass refuge. These were German- and Austrian-speaking Ashkenazi Jews and are not part of the Sephardi story, though they are covered briefly below because they are what most people mean by “Jews in the Dominican Republic”.

What does “the Dominican Republic” mean here?

The eastern, Spanish-speaking two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola — in Taíno, Kiskeya — shared with French- and Kreyol-speaking Haiti to the west. That political history governs which records exist and in what language.

Spain ceded the whole island to France at Basle in 1795; the Real Audiencia left for Cuba in 1799. The eastern part declared independence in 1821 but was then held by Haiti from 1822 to 1844 — which is why the oldest Jewish tombstone in the country, Jacob Pardo’s of 1826, is written in French.

Independence came in 1844; a brief return to Spanish rule followed in 1861–1865; the capital was renamed Ciudad Trujillo under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1936–1961) and is now Santo Domingo again.

Records may sit under any of these regimes and in Spanish, French or, for the refugee period, German.

Where did they come from?

Overwhelmingly from Curaçao, and through Curaçao from Amsterdam and ultimately Iberia. This is the standard Western Sephardi route: expelled from Spain and Portugal to the Netherlands (sometimes via Smyrna, France or Italy), out to Curaçao in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and on to the surrounding mainland and islands in the nineteenth.

The cemetery stones make the Curaçao link explicit — several give Curaçao as the birthplace, for example Joshua de Marchena, “nacio en Curacao 19 de marcho 1808”.

The families that recur are a subset of the Curaçao Sephardi surnames: Pardo, de Marchena, de Crasto (Castro), Namias de Crasto, Curiel, León, León Pereira, Lopez-Penha, Naar, Senior, Cohen (Coen), Henríquez and Levy. Some families came by way of St Thomas, and the Señor León line held British consular status, which is how the cemetery briefly became British ground.

A departure worth pausing on: the Curaçao push. After emancipation ended slavery there in 1863, Curaçao entered a recession, and that — as much as Dominican opportunity — drove Sephardim across to Hispaniola. If you are working a Dominican line, the Curaçao end is where the documented genealogy lives.

How did they make a living?

Import–export trade, wholesale and retail, and the purchase of gold and tobacco from the interior. The nineteenth-century Sephardim were, in Ucko’s phrase, “exclusively merchants”.

Some were substantial: a branch of the Rothschild house opened in Santo Domingo around 1830 as Rothschild & Cohen, out of St Thomas. Several combined trade with public life — David León was unsalaried British Vice-Consul by 1853; Eugenio de Marchena became a financier and politician; the family founded businesses that traded actively back to Curaçao.

The 1846 Santana letter

This is the key document for the merchants’ standing.

When authorities in La Vega petitioned the government to act against “four or five Jews” buying tobacco and gold at prices that undercut local monopolists, President Pedro Santana refused in strong terms, defended the Jewish merchants by name (a “Mr. Naar” among them), noted they had helped fund the war of independence, and had the reply printed and circulated.

It is preserved in the Archivo General de la Nación and is the single best piece of evidence that antisemitism never took durable hold here — hostility, when it appeared, was commercial jealousy quickly slapped down by a liberal government, often with Masonic sympathies in play (Santana and Naar were lodge brothers).

Where did they go?

Two directions: into the Dominican population, and back out to Curaçao and the wider network.

The first generation often did not settle permanently — they built a firm, prospered, and left, sometimes leaving a younger relative to run the branch, sometimes vanishing from the island entirely, because political instability and the absence of any Jewish communal life made them keep their capital and their futures elsewhere.

Those who stayed fused. Marrying Catholic Dominican women, indifferent to organised religion, and far from any Reform congregation that might have held them, they let their children be baptised while keeping a proud consciousness of hebreo descent — partly, Ucko notes candidly, because Jewish ancestry was also proof of white descent, which the Dominican Creole elite valued.

Descendants reached the top of both state and church: President Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal and the scholars Pedro, Max and Camila Henríquez Ureña; and Monsignor Armando Lamarche y Marchena, an ecclesiastical governor, of Jewish grandparents.

If you lose a Dominican Sephardi family, the family did not usually move — it converted and stayed, or it returned to Curaçao. Look for it in Dominican Catholic parish and civil records under the same surname, and in the Curaçao registers one generation back. Related network points are St Thomas, Barranquilla, Maracaibo and Coro.

The Cementerio Cosmopolita — the one real monument

There is no synagogue and no communal archive, but there is a cemetery, and it is the heart of the Sephardi record.

The first municipal cemetery of Santo Domingo, on the Avenida de la Independencia (opened 1824, closed to burials around 1943), contained a walled-off Protestant-and-Jewish annex in its west corner, reached originally by its own gate. The Jewish section was put under British protection through the León family’s consular status, was run from 1880 by a “Sociedad Cosmopolita” of Jewish descendants, and between 1914 and 1918 was absorbed into the general cemetery. Its dividing walls came down, Catholic graves filled in around the Jewish ones, and the fusion of the cemetery became, as Ucko put it, a symbol of the fusion of the people.

Ucko surveyed and transcribed these graves in the 1940s and again in 1957, guided by Haim H. Lopez-Penha, and his transcriptions are now the primary record because many stones are gone.

The oldest is Jacob Pardo, “natif d’Amsterdam”, died 6 December 1826, aged 41 — the oldest identified Jewish grave in the country and one of the oldest stones in the cemetery of any faith.

Others he recorded include the de Marchena family (Clarita 1881, Gabriel 1812–1888, Eugenio 1845–1895, Joshua b. Curaçao 1808–d.1865); the León family plot (A. C. León 1841–1907, David León, Benjamin León 1857–1938 with his Catholic wife Leonor Castro); the Curiel family (Samuel 1836–1907, Jacob, Jacobo d.190?); Namias de Crasto — a row of children’s stones from a diphtheria epidemic of 1887; Lazar Pardo (1854–1931) and Josefa Pereyra de Pardo; Moises Lopez-Penha (1849–1900); and Levy.

A pencil list of the Hebrew dead made by Benjamin León around 1910, which Lopez-Penha preserved, records further names — Abraham Cohen (Coen), Jacob de Lemos — whose stones have vanished entirely.

The stones themselves are the fusion in miniature: a Jewish name under a Masonic triangle; a father buried in his tallit beneath a statue of Jesus raised for his Catholic wife; graves that carry only a name and date (the local sign of a Jewish burial) sitting between crosses. This is the documentary texture of Dominican Sephardi history — not registers, but hybrid monuments.

Sosúa and the 1940s refugees

The best-known Jewish chapter here is not Sephardi, and is included for completeness.

At the 1938 Évian conference the Dominican Republic, under Trujillo, alone offered to take large numbers of Jewish refugees — up to 100,000 on paper, though only some 5,000 visas were issued and perhaps 700–1,000 settlers actually reached the colony at Sosúa on the north coast from 1940.

Trujillo’s motives were mixed and troubling: a bid to repair his reputation after the 1937 massacre of Haitians, and a “whitening” of the population by settling European whites near the Haitian border.

The settlers — mostly German and Austrian Ashkenazim — built a cooperative dairy and meat enterprise (Productos Sosúa) that outlasted the farming. Most descendants later left for the US or Israel; a small community and a museum remain.

This settlement generated its own, much better records — DORSA files, residence-permit applications in the Archivo General de la Nación, and a large secondary literature — but it belongs to Ashkenazi, not Sephardi, genealogy.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Thinly, and the honest summary is that the Sephardi story here is under-documented by nature, not by neglect.

The strengths are Ucko’s cemetery survey (now edited and contextualised by Sjenitzer), the 1846 Santana letter, the Lopez-Penha family chronicle, and the Sosúa literature. The gaps are large:

The Curaçao link, family by family. Every documented line runs back to Curaçao, yet the systematic matching of Dominican descendants to the Curaçao marriage and cemetery registers is barely begun. This is the single most productive piece of work available and the most tractable, because the Curaçao records are good.

Ucko unverified. His fusion thesis and family chronicle need checking against primary sources — parish registers, notarial protocols, the National Archive — which he did not cite. Sjenitzer has begun this; most remains.

The Converso question. Whether any New Christian presence survived from the colonial period into the nineteenth-century community is unproven either way and would need Inquisition and Real Audiencia records in Seville and Santo Domingo.

Catholic and Masonic records. Because the families converted and joined lodges, their later traces are in baptism registers and Masonic rosters — sources rarely searched for Jewish genealogy.

Organisations and repositories

Archivo General de la Nación, Santo Domingo (agn.gob.do) — the Santana letter, municipal council minutes, residence permits and colonial records

Rabbi Henry Zvi Ucko Papers, Wilson Library Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — the cemetery survey, the Lopez-Penha material, and a Penha family history

Cementerio de la Avenida de la Independencia (former Cementerio Cosmopolita), Santo Domingo — and the Find A Grave “Cementerio Judío” listing

FamilySearch — Dominican colonial records, civil registration, church records and census, partly digitised

El Instituto Dominicano de Genealogía (idg.org.do); Genealogía Nuestra; Genealogia Dominicana

For the Curaçao end of any line: Mongui Maduro Library and Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, Willemstad; and the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish and Dutch colonial archives

For Sosúa: the Sosúa Jewish Museum, the Centro Israelita de la República Dominicana (Santo Domingo), and the DORSA records

Help us find records

We are looking for:

The Lopez-Penha family chronicle in full, and any surviving copies of the family documents Haim H. Lopez-Penha held
Any transcription or photograph of the Cementerio Cosmopolita Jewish graves beyond Ucko’s, especially of stones now lost (Abraham Cohen, Jacob de Lemos, the León and Namias stones on Benjamin León’s 1910 list)
Dominican Catholic parish baptism and marriage registers naming the Sephardi families — Pardo, Marchena, Curiel, León, Namias de Crasto, Cohen, Naar, Senior, Levy, Lopez-Penha
Masonic lodge rosters and minutes from Santo Domingo and La Vega (the 1846 lodge minutes are cited by Ucko) that list these names
Curaçao marriage and cemetery entries that match the Dominican settlers, to complete the crossing family by family
Notarial and commercial papers of the nineteenth-century firms, including any Rothschild & Cohen (Santo Domingo / St Thomas) records
Any evidence for or against a colonial-period Converso presence surviving into the nineteenth century

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Dominican Sephardi research is unusual: the subjects became Catholic Dominicans, so the work runs through cemetery stones, parish and civil registers, Masonic records and commercial papers rather than any Jewish archive — and almost every line has to be carried back to Curaçao, and from Curaçao to Amsterdam, to be understood. It calls for Spanish, some French, and familiarity with the Western Sephardi naming and migration patterns. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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