Sephardic Jews of Martinique: Expulsion, the Code Noir and the House of Gradis

Martinique is a story of a community that was expelled.

There was a Sephardi presence on the island from the mid-seventeenth century — Portuguese Jews and refugees from Dutch Brazil, prosperous in trade and central to the founding of the sugar industry — but Louis XIV’s edicts of 1683 and the Code Noir of 1685 ordered the Jews out, and the continuous community never recovered.

What follows for the next century is not a congregation but a régime of bare toleration, carried in practice by a handful of families and above all by one: the Gradis of Bordeaux, whose Atlantic trading house was too valuable to expel.

For the researcher this has a sharp consequence. Unlike Curaçao or Jamaica, Martinique has no continuous Jewish community records, no synagogue archive, no communal registers spanning the generations. The Jews who mattered here were Bordeaux Jews with a Martinique branch, so the genealogy is really Bordeaux genealogy — and the records live in France, chiefly in the Gradis family papers and the Bordeaux archives, not on the island.

Which Jewish presence are you looking for?

Two quite separate presences, which must not be run together.

The colonial Sephardim (c.1650–1789). Portuguese and Dutch-connected merchants, expelled in the 1680s, surviving thereafter only as tolerated individuals and the Gradis house. The subject of this page.

The modern community (1960s onward). Jews from metropolitan France, Algeria and Morocco who built the present community centre and synagogue at Schoelcher — a different population entirely, with no descent from the old settlement.

What does “Martinique” mean here?

A French Caribbean colony from the 1635 conquest, and today a département of France, on the eastern edge of the Caribbean.

That French status is the key to both the history and the records. The Jews’ legal position was decided in Paris and Versailles — by Colbert, by successive royal edicts, and finally by the Revolution — and the surviving documentation is French, held in France.

The commercial capital was Saint-Pierre (destroyed by the 1902 eruption of Mont Pelée, which also destroyed much local record); the Gradis plantation lay at Basse-Pointe in the north; the modern community is at Schoelcher, near Fort-de-France.

Note the political history that governs the record-keeping: French rule from 1635, brief British occupations during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and the whole period framed by the slave economy — the Code Noir that expelled the Jews was the same body of law that governed slavery, and Martinique’s Jewish merchants, the Gradis included, were slave-owners and slave-traders.

Where did they come from?

From the Dutch orbit and from Brazil.

Dutch Jews had settled Martinique and neighbouring islands early in the seventeenth century and were already prosperous when France took the island in 1635; they were reinforced by Sephardi refugees leaving Dutch Brazil after the Portuguese reconquest of 1654.

This is the same Portuguese-Atlantic diaspora that populated Barbados, Suriname, Curaçao and Jamaica — and when Martinique expelled its Jews, many went to Curaçao, tying the two islands together.

The eighteenth-century presence came from a different direction and by a specific mechanism: Bordeaux. When the Code Noir was declared to apply only to foreign Jews, French Sephardim from Bordeaux — pre-eminently the Gradis — could operate under naturalisation papers or toleration, and the island’s Jewish families were in family and business relations with the Bordeaux community, to whom they appealed when their status was threatened.

How did they make a living?

Trans-Atlantic trade and sugar.

The early Sephardim were merchants, and one of them, Benjamin d’Acosta de Andrade, is credited with introducing sugarcane cultivation and processing to the island — a fact pointedly recorded even as he was expelled.

The eighteenth-century story is dominated by the house of David Gradis et fils of Bordeaux, one of the great French Atlantic trading firms: exporting sugar and indigo from Martinique, Saint-Domingue and Cayenne, importing wine, linen, flour and provisions, and from 1776 owning the Basse-Pointe plantation (the Habitation Gradis), acquired from an indebted planter, Mathieu de Prunes du Rivier.

The wealth is inseparable from slavery, and this page states it plainly. The Gradis firm was a participant in the slave trade; the Basse-Pointe estate was a slaveholding sugar plantation; and the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher — for whom the town of the modern Jewish community is named — recorded slave-breeding incentives on the Gradis estate in 1840–41. Slavery was abolished in the French colonies in 1848.

Where did they go?

Outward under compulsion, and then not replaced.

The expulsions of the 1680s scattered the community — many to Curaçao — and no continuous population succeeded it.

The Gradis presence was a branch of a Bordeaux house, and its people moved along the firm’s Atlantic network: Moïse Gradis, who took the Basse-Pointe plantation in the 1790 division of the firm’s assets, went to Philadelphia in 1794 after the Saint-Domingue slave revolt, and returned in 1800–1803 to stop the British occupiers sequestrating his property. The line of the business ran Bordeaux–Martinique–Saint-Domingue–Cayenne, with London and Philadelphia as wartime refuges.

If you are tracing a Martinique Sephardi family, the trail almost always leads to Bordeaux and Bayonne, and from the 1680s expulsion to Curaçao and the other Caribbean communities.

Was there ever a synagogue?

Briefly, and the answer is itself the point.

A synagogue is reported to have been established in 1667, in the window before the persecutions; it did not survive the expulsions, and no lasting congregation replaced it in the colonial period.

Samuel Gradis, a son of David and the family’s representative at Saint-Pierre, died there in 1732 and — there being no Jewish burial ground — was buried in the garden of the Brothers of Mercy. It is a telling detail about the absence of communal institutions.

The present community, dating from the 1960s–70s, maintains a community centre and synagogue at Schoelcher (the Association Cultuelle Israélite de la Martinique), with a Torah study group, youth activities, a chevra kadisha and a kosher market, and more recent Chabad outreach. It is a living community, but a modern and unrelated one.

Where are the records?

Because the community was expelled and the later presence was a Bordeaux branch, the records are French and family-centred rather than communal and local.

The Gradis family papers — start here

The Fonds de la maison Gradis (1551–1980), held in the French national archives, is the central source — the business and family archive of the house of Gradis across four centuries, covering the Martinique trade, the Basse-Pointe plantation, and the family across Bordeaux and the Atlantic.

For a Martinique Sephardi line connected to the Gradis, this is the archive.

Royal edicts and colonial law

The legal history — the edicts of 1664, 1669, 1671, the expulsion of 1683 and the Code Noir of 1685 — is documented in the printed collections of colonial legislation, above all Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Lois et constitutions des colonies françaises d’Amérique sous le Vent (Paris, 1784–90), and discussed in the Revue des Études Juives and in Abbé Grégoire.

These name individuals and set out exactly what the community could and could not do.

Bordeaux

Because the Martinique Jews were Bordeaux Jews, the Bordeaux community records and Théophile Malvezin’s Histoire des Juifs à Bordeaux carry them, and the Archives départementales de la Gironde hold the notarial, commercial and family material.

This is where the continuous genealogy of the Gradis and connected families lives.

On the island

Local Martinique records are thin and much was lost — the 1902 Mont Pelée eruption destroyed Saint-Pierre and its archives.

The Archives départementales de la Martinique hold colonial administrative, notarial and civil records; the Habitation Gradis at Basse-Pointe survives as a documented industrial-heritage site (Mérimée database).

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Gradis are well served; the rest is thin.

The family has attracted real scholarship — Jean de Maupassant on Abraham Gradis, Elvire Maurouard on the Jews of Martinique under Louis XIV, and the Bordeaux slavery-memory projects — and the family archive is rich. The gaps:

The seventeenth-century community. The pre-expulsion Sephardim beyond a few named figures (Benjamin d’Acosta) are barely documented, and identifying them means working the Curaçao and Amsterdam records of those who left.

The families around the Gradis. The tolerated individuals and lesser families of the eighteenth century are known mostly from tax and toleration lists (the 1764 d’Estaing tax) rather than from any continuous record.

Slavery and the enslaved. The Basse-Pointe estate’s enslaved people, and the connections between Jewish slave-owners and the enslaved and free population, are only beginning to be traced through the plantation and compensation records.

The Curaçao link. Matching the Jews expelled in the 1680s to their arrival in Curaçao would recover the human continuity the expulsion broke, and is largely undone.

Organisations and repositories

Archives nationales (France) — Fonds de la maison Gradis (1551–1980), the central family and business archive

Archives départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux — notarial, commercial and community records of the Bordeaux Sephardim

Archives départementales de la Martinique, Fort-de-France — colonial, notarial and civil records

Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence — French colonial administration and Code Noir material

Mémoires & Partages / Mémoire de l’esclavage, Bordeaux — the Gradis and the slave trade

Habitation / Usine Gradis, Basse-Pointe — documented in the Mérimée heritage database (pop.culture.gouv.fr)

Association Cultuelle Israélite de la Martinique, Maison Grambin, Schoelcher — the present community (modern, unrelated to the colonial settlement)

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Names of the seventeenth-century Sephardim of Martinique beyond Benjamin d’Acosta — from the 1660s–1680s, before the expulsions
Records placing Martinique’s expelled Jews in Curaçao, Amsterdam or the other Caribbean communities after 1683–85
The 1764 d’Estaing tax list and any toleration or naturalisation records naming individual Jews on the island
Notarial and commercial records from Saint-Pierre naming Jewish merchants (bearing in mind the 1902 losses)
Basse-Pointe plantation records — the enslaved people held there, and the emancipation compensation
Any burial record or marker for Jews on the island, such as the 1732 burial of Samuel Gradis
Bordeaux material connecting the Gradis and associated families to their Martinique and wider Atlantic branches

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

Martinique research is really French research: the colonial community was expelled and the later one is modern, so a Sephardi line here is traced through Bordeaux — the Gradis family archive, the Bordeaux community and notarial records, and the printed colonial legislation — in French, with the Caribbean end reaching to Curaçao. It is archive work in France more than on the island. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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