Curaçao holds the oldest continuously used synagogue in the Americas, the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in the Americas, and for most of the eighteenth century the largest and richest Jewish community anywhere in the New World.
It was also a parent community. Sephardim who left Curaçao founded, financed or refounded congregations in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, St Thomas, Coro, Barranquilla, Panama and across the northern coast of South America. If you are researching a Sephardi family anywhere in the Caribbean or the Spanish Main, Curaçao is very often where the line runs back to.
The community was a daughter of Amsterdam, and it never forgot it. Its regulations were reviewed and approved by the parnasim of the Portuguese community of Amsterdam; its rabbis were trained there; its ritual, its language of record and its self-government were Amsterdam’s, transplanted to a small, dry island forty miles off the coast of Venezuela.
One caution frames everything below. Curaçao’s own archives are incomplete and scattered. A great deal of what survives does so because Isaac S. Emmanuel transcribed and published it in the 1950s, and because the colonial records went to the Netherlands.
What Curaçao means here
Curaçao is one of the ABC islands — Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao — off the Venezuelan coast, Dutch since 1634 and governed for most of its history through the Dutch West India Company and then directly from the Netherlands.
That colonial status matters for finding records. Colonial reporting and registers went automatically to Dutch archives, so a large part of the eighteenth-century material is in The Hague and Amsterdam rather than in Willemstad.
The Jewish community centred on Willemstad, first at the settlement of De Hoop about two miles north of the town, then within the walled city and its Otrobanda and Scharloo quarters as the community turned from farming to trade. Papiamentu, the island’s creole, took a strong Portuguese and Hebrew element from this community. The earliest Jews spoke Portuguese, later Spanish, and kept both in ritual and record long after.
The political history runs: Dutch from 1634; British occupation 1800 to 1816; Dutch again from 1816; internal autonomy from 1954; a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands from 2010. The 1825 royal decree granting equal rights also abolished the community’s internal self-government and brought it more tightly under Amsterdam, which alters what records were generated and by whom.
Where they came from
From Amsterdam, and before Amsterdam from Portugal and Spain, and for one founding stream by way of Dutch Brazil.
The first Jew on the island was Samuel Cohen, an interpreter with the Dutch fleet that took Curaçao from Spain in 1634. Organised settlement began in 1651, when João d’Ylan led about a dozen families to establish the De Hoop plantation, and grew with a group of Portuguese Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Brazil in 1654.
A larger group of around seventy families arrived in 1659 under Isaac da Costa, bringing a Torah scroll donated by Amsterdam. That is the moment the congregation Mikvé Israel is usually dated from, and the year the Beth Haim cemetery was consecrated.
Between 1697 and 1792, Amsterdam paid to send poor Jews out of the city, and about 140 families came to Curaçao with that support — the same despacho system that populated other Western Sephardi settlements. This is worth knowing genealogically: a poorer Curaçao family may appear in the Amsterdam poor-relief and despacho records rather than among the merchant elite.
How they made a living
Trade, shipping and finance. The soil was poor and farming failed, so within a generation the settlers moved into the walled town and into commerce, importing cloth, tools and weapons from Europe and exchanging them for hides, tobacco, cacao and foodstuffs along the Spanish Main.
They built the island’s first trade routes to Venezuela and dominated insurance and brokerage. In 1734, 39 of 44 insurers on the island were Jewish, and in the 1790s 17 of 25 trade brokers.
They were shipbuilders and shipowners on a large scale, more than two hundred ocean-going vessels at the height, and the ships were built on the island.
Not all were rich. Tax records of 1702 and 1707 place the Jewish population in the lower half of incomes, with an extensive network of orphan funds, dowry funds, schools and charities existing precisely because a substantial part of the community needed them.
Curaçao Jews were also slave-owners and were active in the slave trade to the Spanish Main, generally on a small household scale rather than the plantation scale of Suriname or Jamaica. The records document it.
Why do Curaçao lines so often stop?
Because of an unusual demographic pattern, and it is worth knowing before you assume a family died out.
From about 1719 to 1816, economic pressure, French oppression, British occupation and the revolutions in Venezuela and Santo Domingo pushed Curaçao Jews to leave. Men left disproportionately: Orthodox women could not travel without a male chaperone.
By the mid-nineteenth century women far outnumbered men, and only about half the Jewish women in Curaçao married. Migrating men often married gentile women abroad and left the faith.
So a Curaçao line frequently ends in an unmarried woman on the island and a lost man overseas. The line has not ended; it has moved and changed religion.
Those who left went to St Thomas, Coro and the Venezuelan coast, and across the new republics of Colombia and Venezuela as the Inquisition fell. The growth of Latin American Sephardi communities in the nineteenth century is largely Curaçaoan. Others went to Newport, New York and Philadelphia, whose early congregations Curaçao supported financially, and to Jamaica, Panama, Costa Rica and Santo Domingo.
If you lose a Curaçao family, look next at Amsterdam, St Thomas, Coro, Caracas, Barranquilla, Jamaica, Panama, New York, Newport and Santo Domingo.
Synagogues
Mikvé Israel is the mother congregation, founded in effect between 1654 and 1659 and Orthodox Sephardi in ritual for three centuries. Its present synagogue, the snoa, the sixth Jewish house of worship on the island, was built in 1732 on the site of the 1703 synagogue, a smaller version of the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam. It is the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas, known for its sand-covered floor. Its regulations forbade a second congregation on the island.
Neve Shalom was built in 1746 as a satellite for Jews living across the harbour in Otrobanda, for whom crossing on the Sabbath was a problem. It was controlled by the main synagogue, a source of long and bitter disputes that had to be settled by royal decree from Holland, and it lasted only until 1818.
Temple Emanuel was founded in 1864, when about a third of the community broke away to form a Reform congregation. A Sephardi Reform community is unusual. It followed the ritual of Temple Emanu-El in New York, and its temple of 1866 to 1867 resembles a New England church and is now a government office. Emanuel consecrated its own cemetery at Berg Altena.
In 1964 Mikvé Israel and Emanuel reunited as Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, adopting a Reconstructionist and then broadly Reform ritual, while its articles require that Sephardi customs be preserved: Sephardi cantillation, the prayer for the sovereign in Portuguese, honours called in Portuguese, memorial prayers in Spanish, and the singing of Bendigamos.
Sha’arei Tsedek is a separate Ashkenazi community formed from immigrants, mostly from Bessarabia and Romania, who began arriving after 1926. Its members are a distinct population from the Sephardim and should not be resolved against them.
The cemeteries
Beth Haim at Blenheim, consecrated in 1659, is probably the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Americas, with perhaps 5,000 burials and richly carved Portuguese-style stones.
Its tragedy is that it sits beside the Isla oil refinery. Decades of acid emissions have all but destroyed the inscriptions and carvings. This makes the early photographs and transcriptions — above all Emmanuel’s, and the facsimiles made between the 1930s and 1950s — the primary surviving record of many stones rather than merely a supplement to them.
The later cemeteries at Berg Altena, the Reform ground of 1864 and the adjoining Orthodox ground bought in the 1880s, once divided by a wall taken down in 1958, hold close to 2,000 burials and are in far better condition.
Together the cemetery registers and inscriptions are the single richest genealogical source for the community.
Records
The situation is unusual and must be understood before searching. The records are split between what Emmanuel published, what stayed in Curaçao, and what went to the Netherlands.
Some crucial material has been lost, discarded or dispersed. Documents were kept in board members’ homes rather than a communal office, and some surfaced only by chance — in one case at a 1988 auction, recovered by litigation.
The Emmanuel corpus: start here
Isaac S. Emmanuel, Precious Stones of the Jews of Curaçao: Curaçaoan Jewry 1656–1957 (New York, 1957), gives the transcribed and translated tombstone inscriptions of Beth Haim with genealogical notes. Given the destruction of the stones, this is the primary record rather than a secondary one.
Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, two volumes (Cincinnati, 1970), is the standard history. It carries a marriage dictionary, lists of communal officers, and the St Eustatius material as appendices. The marriage dictionary and cemetery material are the backbone of any Curaçao reconstruction.
Communal records in Curaçao
These are held in the Mongui Maduro Library, a climate-controlled repository, and inventoried by professional archivists. Access requires prior approval of the congregation’s directiva, generally granted.
The holdings include the Regulations and Escamot of 1759, approved by Amsterdam; ketubot registers, for example 1781 to 1811; membership registers such as that of 1855, giving Hebrew and civil birth dates and later death dates; minute books and correspondence, in Portuguese to the 1850s and then Spanish; and the charity archives.
Two manuscript memorial books are exceptional. The Memoria para os Kahal Kados, compiled 1739, records communal events from 1674. The Memorial Senior, compiled 1763, lists spiritual leaders and members of the Mahamad from 1674 to 1810. Emmanuel called these the most precious documents in the archive.
Records in the Netherlands
Because Curaçao was a colony, much of the pre-1780 record is in The Hague and Amsterdam rather than Willemstad.
The Dutch West India Company archives and the States-General series, both digitised and freely browsable through the Nationaal Archief in The Hague, cover roughly 150 years of colonial affairs.
The Amsterdam city archives hold the older colonial records. The archive of the Portuguese Jewish congregation of Amsterdam holds its correspondence with Curaçao, daughter to mother community. The Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie and Leiden University hold further material, the latter especially from the Reform congregation.
Copies in the United States and Israel
The American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati holds Curaçao documents photographed by Jacob Rader Marcus on his 1953 Caribbean expedition and later by Nathan Kaganoff. The American Jewish Historical Society, the Center for Jewish History and the National Library of Israel hold further copies.
These matter because in several cases the copy has outlived, or is more accessible than, the original.
Sephardic World lectures on Curaçao
- A Journey through Curaçao’s Jewish History — Ron Gomes Casseres
What has and hasn’t been researched
Curaçao is better served than most Caribbean communities, thanks almost entirely to Emmanuel. The cemetery inscriptions and the marriage dictionary give a strong spine for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Over a thousand certificates of Sephardi ancestry have been issued from the Curaçao archives for Portuguese and Spanish citizenship applications since 2016, which is evidence that the material supports rigorous descent work.
The gaps are specific.
Digitisation of the Willemstad communal registers — the ketubot, membership and minute books — is a stated priority but not yet done, so remote research still depends heavily on Emmanuel’s printed transcriptions rather than the originals.
Backwards to Amsterdam. Linking Curaçao families to their Amsterdam origins through the banns, ketubot, despacho and poor-relief records is only partly done, though it is the most tractable single improvement, because the two communities share names, ritual and record conventions.
Outwards to the daughter communities. The Curaçaoan foundations of St Thomas, Coro, Barranquilla, Panama and the Venezuelan and Colombian coast are documented in outline but rarely traced family by family.
The unmarried women. The nineteenth-century surplus is well described demographically but under-researched at the level of individual lines that simply stop.
Reconstructing the destroyed stones, by matching Emmanuel’s transcriptions and the surviving photographs against the cemetery registers to recover what the acid has erased.
Further reading
Isaac S. Emmanuel, Precious Stones of the Jews of Curaçao: Curaçaoan Jewry 1656–1957 (Bloch, 1957).
Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2 vols (American Jewish Archives, 1970).
Mordehay Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean (Gefen, 2002).
Josette Capriles Goldish, Once Jews: Stories of Caribbean Sephardim, and “The Girls They Left Behind: Curaçao’s Jewish Women in the Nineteenth Century”.
Jonathan I. Israel, “The Jews of Curaçao”, in Diasporas Within a Diaspora (Brill, 2002).
Wim Klooster, “Contraband Trade by Curaçao’s Jews with Countries of Idolatry, 1660–1800”, Studia Rosenthaliana 31 (1997).
Charles Gomes Casseres, “A Brief History of the Sephardim of Curaçao”.
Blanca de Lima, “Una red comercial sefardita en el eje Curaçao-Coro durante el siglo XVIII”, Ler História 74 (2019).
Organisations and repositories
Congregation Mikvé Israel-Emanuel and the Jewish Cultural Historical Museum, Willemstad. [LINK NEEDED]
Mongui Maduro Library, Curaçao, repository of the Jewish community archives. [LINK NEEDED]
Sha’arei Tsedek congregation, Willemstad.
Nationaal Archief, The Hague, for the West India Company and States-General archives, digitised and free to browse.
Stadsarchief Amsterdam, for the older colonial records.
Ets Haim / Livraria Montezinos, Amsterdam.
Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, The Hague; Leiden University Library.
American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati; American Jewish Historical Society and Center for Jewish History, New York; National Library of Israel.
Beth Haim cemetery documentation project. [LINK NEEDED: bethaimcuracao.com]
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- The Willemstad ketubot, membership and minute-book registers in transcribed or digitised form
- Early photographs, facsimiles or rubbings of the Beth Haim stones before the refinery damage, beyond those Emmanuel published
- Any list linking Curaçao families to the daughter communities at St Thomas, Coro, Barranquilla, Caracas and Panama
- Amsterdam banns, despacho and poor-relief entries naming families who then appear in Curaçao
- The Berg Altena cemetery registers, Orthodox and Reform, in full
- Records of the orphan, dowry and charitable foundations
- Correspondence between the Curaçao Mahamad and the Amsterdam parnasim
- Any pre-1781 communal register
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].
Research services
Curaçao research means good records in Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew and Dutch, split between the community archive in Willemstad, the Dutch colonial and Amsterdam Sephardi archives, and copies in the United States and Israel. Emmanuel’s published transcriptions are the indispensable key to a cemetery whose stones are largely gone. Reading it, and following a family back to Amsterdam or out to Coro, St Thomas or Colombia, is skilled work. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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