Jamaica Jewish Genealogy: Records and Cemeteries – Sephardic Genealogy Sephardic Genealogy

Jamaica held the largest Jewish community in the English-speaking Atlantic outside London itself, and for the eighteenth century it is far more important than its small size suggests.

Its Jews were Portuguese, part of the Western Sephardi — or better, the Portuguese-Atlantic — diaspora that ran Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Livorno, Bordeaux and Bayonne, and reached across to Brazil, Suriname, Barbados, Curaçao and the North American mainland.

A Jamaican line is almost never only Jamaican. It connects back to Amsterdam and Bayonne and outward to New York, Newport, Charleston, Panama and London.

Why are there no early Jamaican synagogue records?

Because they were destroyed twice.

The Kingston fire of December 1882 burned both Portuguese synagogues and the records inside them. The earthquake of January 1907 destroyed the records kept since.

So there is no continuous run of communal registers before 1809, as there is for Curaçao, Suriname or Amsterdam.

The eighteenth-century community has instead been reconstructed from what survived elsewhere: wills, tombstones, and the abundant records of the English colonial state, which treated Jews as ordinary subjects and so recorded them everywhere. Stanley Mirvis’s study of some 450 Jewish wills is the model of what can be rebuilt this way.

Three populations

Three groups settled here, and they kept separate congregations and cemeteries for two centuries.

The Spanish and Portuguese Sephardim were the founding and dominant community from the 1660s, Portuguese-speaking, looking to Amsterdam as its metropole. They are the subject of most of this page.

The English and German Ashkenazim arrived through the eighteenth century, with their own congregation from 1787 to 1796. They are distinct in name-stock and records, and should not be resolved against the Sephardim.

Nineteenth-century arrivals included Ottoman and Levantine Sephardim — the Lebanese families such as Matalon and Hadad now prominent — and further Ashkenazim.

What Jamaica means here

An English colony from the 1655 conquest of Spanish Jamaica, and a place whose geography and disasters shaped its records.

Jews first concentrated in Port Royal, the trading port at the mouth of Kingston harbour, burying their dead across the water at Hunt’s Bay. The 1692 earthquake and tsunami destroyed Port Royal and shifted Jewish life to Spanish Town, the inland capital, and to the new commercial city of Kingston across the harbour. Kingston became the capital in 1872.

The island was divided into parishes — up to 22 until an 1867 reorganisation cut them to 14 — and most records are indexed by parish and often by estate or property name, several of which repeat across parishes. A boundary map is a near-essential tool.

Jews settled not only in the two cities but in the seaport towns around the coast — Montego Bay, Falmouth, Savanna-la-Mar, Lucea, Black River, Lacovia, St Ann’s Bay — which is why small Jewish cemeteries ring the island.

Where they came from

From the Portuguese-Atlantic diaspora, not directly from Spain.

The founding families came out of Amsterdam, and behind Amsterdam from the converso communities of Portugal by way of Bayonne and Bordeaux, Livorno, Hamburg and London, and by way of the New World. When the Dutch lost Brazil in 1654, Jews scattered into the Caribbean, and the English capture of Jamaica in 1655 opened a Protestant colony where they could live openly as Jews.

The connection to Bayonne mattered for a specific reason. Because of the re-Judaisation route through south-west France, Bayonne supplied much of Jamaica’s Jewish leadership, which is why, during the Seven Years War, Jamaica’s Jews were suspected of French sympathies.

How they made a living

Trade above all. Port Royal and then Kingston were entrepôts for a largely clandestine commerce, re-exporting English finished goods to Spanish America in defiance of the navigation laws, and dealing in gold, silver and money-changing. English merchants used antisemitic petitions — coin-clipping, tax-evasion — to try to curb Jewish competition from the 1670s onward.

But it is a mistake to think of Jamaica’s Jews as only merchants. As Mirvis stresses, merchants and planters were not separate classes. Trading profits were invested in estates, and Jews were slave-owners like everyone else in a slave society, on plantations as well as in town households.

A few families held large estates, the Lindos among them. Many more were distillers, physicians and surgeons, shopkeepers, teachers and communal functionaries.

And the deepest truth of the records, Mirvis argues, is poverty. The bigger communities of Amsterdam and London dispatched their indigent poor to the Caribbean, so the majority were poor, itinerant, and largely absent from the will-making, property-owning record.

Slave-ownership shaped Jewish family life here in ways the wills expose. Jewish men, often unmarried for want of Jewish women, frequently had children with enslaved or free women of colour and left them inheritances, sometimes conditional on conversion or a Jewish education. These Jews of colour are a real and documented part of the community, and part of why an estimated hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans today carry Jewish ancestry.

Where they went

Outward, continuously. Jamaica was a hub, not a terminus.

Poor members were sent on to Barbados, Suriname and elsewhere. Prosperous families retired to London and appear in the Bevis Marks and Hambro records. And from the late eighteenth century — hurricanes, the American and Haitian revolutions, the decline of the sugar and trade economy, and rising hostility before emancipation — Jews left for North America and other islands.

The nineteenth and twentieth-century emigration ran especially to New Orleans, where the Delgado family settled, and to New York, Newport, Charleston, Panama, Colombia — Cartagena was a major smuggling partner — and later to Miami, Toronto and Vancouver.

Full civil and political rights came in 1831, earlier than in Britain, and were used as a precedent by Jews in London and Canada the next year.

If you lose a Jamaican Sephardi family, look next at Amsterdam, London, Bayonne, Curaçao, Barbados, Suriname, New York, Newport, Charleston, New Orleans and Panama.

Communities and synagogues

Port Royal was the first community, from the 1660s, with a synagogue and a Jew Street, burying at Hunt’s Bay across the harbour. It was destroyed by the 1692 earthquake, and any records went into the sea with the town.

Spanish Town became the capital and the seat of records after 1692. The Sephardi congregation Neveh Shalom was consecrated in 1704 on Monk Street; an Ashkenazi congregation, Mikveh Yisrael, built its own synagogue and cemetery in the 1790s. Both closed by about 1907 as the community followed the government to Kingston.

Kingston became the centre of Jewish life and, from 1872, the capital. The Spanish and Portuguese Kahal Kadosh Sha’ar ha-Shamayim and the English and German congregation kept separate synagogues and cemeteries. Both burned in the 1882 fire. The amalgamated congregation’s synagogue of 1885 fell in the 1907 earthquake. The present Sha’are Shalom, consecrated in 1912, is the last synagogue on the island and one of the few in the world with a sand-covered floor.

The town congregations. Congregations and burial grounds existed in the seaport towns. Montego Bay formed a congregation in 1844 and consecrated a synagogue in 1845, declining by the early twentieth century. Its register mixes Sephardi and Ashkenazi names.

The Sephardi and Ashkenazi congregations amalgamated after the 1882 fire and formally united in 1921 as the United Congregation of Israelites, which maintains Sha’are Shalom and the historic cemeteries. Its liturgy blends the Spanish and Portuguese tradition with British Liberal and American Reform elements.

Cemeteries: the primary genealogical source

With the communal registers gone, the tombstones are the backbone of pre-1809 genealogy, and Jamaica’s are exceptional: trilingual and quatrolingual in Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish and English, dated by both Jewish and civil calendars, and richly carved. The skull-and-crossbones stone at Hunt’s Bay is the one that inspired the Jewish pirates legend.

Barnett and Wright’s The Jews of Jamaica: Tombstone Inscriptions 1663–1880 records 1,456 stones and is the standard printed source, now digitised at the Digital Library of the Caribbean. Jacob Andrade’s 1941 record precedes it.

Since 2007 the fieldwork of Rachel Frankel and the Jamaican Jewish Cemeteries Preservation Fund has re-surveyed the island’s cemeteries stone by stone — measuring, photographing and geo-locating graves, excavating buried and missing markers, and correcting Barnett and Wright — and is publishing them in a searchable online database. Of the 21 or 26 burial grounds once recorded, 14 survive.

Hunt’s Bay in St Andrew, from the 1660s, is the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Jamaica and one of the oldest in the Americas. It holds over 350 stones, the oldest legible from 1672, with family names Aguilar, Baruh Alvares, da Costa Alveranga, de Lucena, de Leon, Gabay, Nunes and Lopes Torres. A 2022 brush fire, started without permission or expertise, damaged the site, which is a reminder of why the documentation work is urgent.

The Orange Street cemetery in Kingston, approaching 200 years old, is the one still in use. Smaller grounds survive at Falmouth, Savanna-la-Mar, Lacovia — which Edward Long in 1774 called mostly inhabited by Jews — Lucea, St Ann’s Bay, Black River, and Rose Corner near Alligator Pond.

Records

Because the community’s own registers were destroyed, Jamaican Jewish genealogy is done through wills, tombstones, and the ordinary records of the colonial state, in which Jews appear constantly because they were treated as ordinary subjects.

Wills: the substitute for communal records

The single richest source for the eighteenth century.

Stanley Mirvis collected roughly 450 Jewish probate wills — a feasible task only because the community was small — and reconstructed communal, family and diaspora life from them: burial and mourning requests, memorial prayers, dowries, the status of women and widows, migration incentives to conversos still in Iberia or Spanish America, and the place of Jews of colour.

Note that these are notarial probate copies, once removed from the testator, in formulaic single-sentence legal Portuguese and English. The originals are at the Island Record Office near Spanish Town, with some typescripts at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, a further remove. A handful were probated in London and are at the National Archives, Kew.

Surviving synagogue registers, post-1809

What survives begins around 1799 to 1809. The Sephardi congregation births, marriages and deaths run 1809 to 1907. The Ashkenazi births and marriages run 1788 to 1920, with much of the death register lost. The amalgamated and United Congregation registers continue into the twentieth century, and a haphazard Montego Bay register runs from 1845 to about 1920.

Originals are at the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town, with facsimile copies at the Kingston synagogue, and index-level transcriptions on the Jamaican Family Search website.

Church of England and civil registration

Because Jews lived openly in a tolerant society, they appear throughout Church of England parish registers from the 1660s to 1878, often marked “of the Hebrew nation”, especially for mixed marriages and for the many children born outside Jewish marriage.

Civil registration became mandatory for births and deaths in 1878 and marriages in 1880, and these certificates carry far more detail than the sparse synagogue lists. Both are microfilmed and indexed on FamilySearch.

Colonial and printed records

The Jamaica Archives holds naturalisation patents, land grants and plats from 1661, inventories from 1661 to 1881, poll-tax and taxation rolls, manumissions from 1747 to 1838, and Dissenters’ registers.

Printed and biographical sources abound. The Jamaica Almanacs of the 1790s to 1878 and the Handbook of Jamaica from 1881 list synagogue and society officers and property-holders by parish. The 1878 Jamaica Directory serves as a near-census. The Who’s Who of Jamaica and Personalities of the Caribbean carry Jewish biographies.

The Gleaner, founded in 1834 by the Sephardi brothers Jacob and Joshua de Cordova, is a deep well of obituaries, notices and advertisements, with runs also at the British Library.

Slavery records

The UCL Legacies of British Slavery project and the Slave Registers of 1817 to 1834 name both owners and, in the registers, the enslaved, and link owners to emancipation compensation. These are essential for tracing both Jewish slave-owning families and the enslaved and free people of colour connected to them.

Sephardic World lectures on Jamaica

The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica — Stanley Mirvis
The Jewish Community of Jamaica — Ainsley Cohen Henriques
Untangling Jamaican Jewish Genealogy — Steve Delgado Porter
The Jewish Cemeteries of Jamaica — Rachel Frankel

What has and hasn’t been researched

Unusually well for a community that lost its own archives, thanks to a strong recent body of work: Mirvis on the wills, Ben-Ur on Jews of colour, the Frankel cemetery survey, and the archival mapping by Delgado Porter, Marina Delfos and colleagues.

The pre-1809 community beyond the wills. Wills over-represent the propertied; the poor, itinerant majority remain thinly documented, recoverable mainly from tax rolls, colonial records and tombstones.
Digitisation. The Jamaica Archives, National Library and Gleaner holdings are under-resourced and largely undigitised.
The Spanish period, 1494 to 1655. Whether conversos were present under Spanish rule is essentially undocumented on the island. The records, if any, would be in Seville and possibly Santiago de Cuba, where the Spanish fled in the 1650s.
Jews of colour, and the wider diaspora out. Both are large and only partly worked.

Organisations and repositories

Jamaica Archives and Records Department, Spanish Town, for synagogue registers, Church of England and Dissenters registers, inventories, patents, tax rolls and manumissions.

Registrar General’s Department and Island Record Office, Twickenham Park, for civil registration, wills and land deeds.

United Congregation of Israelites, Duke Street, Kingston, holding facsimile registers, burial records and the Jamaican Jewish Heritage Centre.

Jamaican Jewish Cemeteries Preservation Fund, holding the searchable cemetery database.

Jamaican Family Search, for transcribed registers, almanacs and directories, and FamilySearch for Church of England and civil records.

National Library of Jamaica and the Institute of Jamaica, Kingston; the Gleaner Company library and archives.

The National Archives, Kew, for denization, slave registers and some Jamaican wills; London Metropolitan Archives; British Library for newspapers.

American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, for Will typescripts and Caribbean material.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Any pre-1809 communal record that escaped the 1882 and 1907 disasters — stray registers, ketubot, or minute-book fragments, in Jamaica or in the London and Amsterdam congregations
Transcriptions or photographs of the tombstones beyond Barnett and Wright, especially of the smaller and lost town cemeteries and of stones excavated since
Jamaican Jewish wills probated in Amsterdam or London, and any originals behind the Island Record Office probate copies
Montego Bay, Falmouth and other town congregation and masonic lodge records naming Jewish members
Records connecting Jamaican families onward to New Orleans, New York, Newport, Charleston, Panama and Colombia, and back to Bayonne, Amsterdam and London
Anything on the Spanish period, 1494 to 1655, from Seville or Santiago de Cuba bearing on a converso presence
Material on Jews of colour and the enslaved and free people connected to Jewish families — manumissions, bequests, parish baptisms

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].

Research services

Jamaican research is a paradox. The community’s own records burned, but the surrounding English colonial state recorded its Jews thoroughly, so the work runs through wills, tombstones, parish and civil registers, tax rolls, almanacs and newspapers, in English, Portuguese, Spanish and Hebrew. Almost every line has to be followed outward to Amsterdam, Bayonne, London or the other Caribbean and American communities. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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