St Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands, holds one of the most important Sephardi communities of the nineteenth-century Caribbean, and for the genealogist a crucial junction.
This is where the dispersed Jews of St Eustatius came after Admiral Rodney destroyed their island in 1781, where families from Curaçao and the other islands converged, and from which Jews scattered onward to Panama, the United States and beyond.
Its synagogue, rebuilt in 1833 with a sand-covered floor, is the second-oldest in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere, after Curaçao’s. If you are tracing a Caribbean Sephardi family, the St Thomas community sits at the centre of the web.
The island is also the birthplace of a remarkable number of well-known people out of a tiny community: the painter Camille Pissarro; the family of Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate cabinet minister; David Levy Yulee, the first Jewish United States Senator; and the physician Jacob Mendes da Costa.
What St Thomas means here
An island in the Virgin Islands group, Danish from the seventeenth century until the United States bought the islands in 1917. The Jewish community centred on the port town of Charlotte Amalie and its Synagogue Hill.
That Danish colonial status matters for records: the community’s official documentation is bound up with Danish colonial administration, and much of it is in Copenhagen.
St Thomas was a free port, and its prosperity, and its Jewish community’s, rose and fell with its role as a transshipment and coaling hub in the age of sail and early steam.
The community’s life is unusually well dated because it was chronicled early and often, by the nineteenth-century observers Nissen and Knox, by the twentieth-century antiquarian Isidor Paiewonsky, and by the modern scholar Judah Cohen.
Where they came from
From the wider Sephardi Caribbean, in successive waves.
Jews were on St Thomas from the island’s official settlement in 1665, as ship-owners, chandlers, brokers, slave-traders and small shopkeepers. There was even a Jewish governor, Gabriel Milan, appointed by the Danish king in 1684. But there was no formal congregation in this early period; the scattered Jews worshipped privately.
The community proper was created by catastrophe elsewhere. After Admiral Rodney sacked St Eustatius in 1781 and drove out its Jewish merchants, the greater part of them came to St Thomas, bringing their families and what they could salvage. They organised a congregation in 1796.
Numbering only nine families in 1801, they grew to twenty-two by 1803 with further arrivals from England, St Eustatius and Curaçao, and to sixty-four families by 1824.
So the St Thomas community is, in large part, the St Eustatius community continued, with Curaçao, and behind both Amsterdam and the wider Portuguese Jewish diaspora. The cemetery inscriptions confirm it: they record birthplaces in St Thomas, Curaçao, Barbados, Jamaica, Amsterdam, London and New York, with the Ashkenazi minority from Hamburg and Germany.
How they made a living
Trade, shipping and the business of a free port.
St Thomas produced little. Its Jews were merchants, brokers, ship-chandlers and shopkeepers in the entrepôt commerce that flowed through Charlotte Amalie, and, in the colonial period, participants in the Danish West Indies slave trade.
In the nineteenth century the island became a great coaling station. As steamships replaced sail, St Thomas Jews ran the coaling wharves that serviced fifteen or sixteen steamers a month, and held agencies for the major shipping lines. The community’s prosperity was tied entirely to the island’s role as a shipping hub.
Why did the community decline?
Because steam made the island unnecessary.
The major steamship lines withdrew their coaling headquarters — the Royal Mail to Barbados in 1885, the French Line to Martinique. The opening of the Panama Canal drew Jews away to Panama, where many St Thomas descendants settled. The catastrophic hurricane of 1867 and repeated fires battered what remained.
From perhaps 400 people in 1837 the community fell to 141 in 1890 and about 50 by the 1940s, sustained through the lean years by the long-serving readers and rabbis David Cardoze, for fifty years to 1914, and Moses De Castro Sasso.
It revived after the Second World War, and today is a small but active congregation, now Reform, its old Sephardi families largely succeeded by American and European newcomers.
If you are tracing a St Thomas Sephardi family, look outward to Panama above all, and to the United States, and back to St Eustatius, Curaçao, and thence to Amsterdam.
The synagogue and cemeteries
The congregation Beracha VeShalom VeGemiluth Hasidim — Blessing and Peace and Acts of Piety — was founded in 1796.
Its first synagogue of 1804 burned. A replacement of 1812 was outgrown. A larger building of 1823 was destroyed in the city fire of 1831, and the present synagogue was built in 1833.
With its sand-covered floor in the Amsterdam and Caribbean tradition, hurricane-proof walls and austere Sephardi interior, it is one of the most celebrated synagogue buildings in the New World. It has held services every week since 1833, interrupted only once, by Hurricane Marilyn in September 1995.
The Hebrew Congregation maintains two historic cemeteries in Charlotte Amalie, the Altona or Frenchtown ground and the Savan ground. An older cemetery was outgrown and a new one opened in 1812.
The inscriptions are the primary genealogical source, and they are exceptionally well recorded. Julius Margolinsky’s 299 Epitaphs from the Jewish Cemetery in St. Thomas, 1837–1916, compiled in Copenhagen from the community archives there, transcribes the stones and indexes them, documenting the St Thomas branches of about eighty Sephardi families and a dozen Ashkenazi ones.
Many stones carry Masonic emblems. Freemasonry was strong in the community, and was the subject of Chumaceiro’s 1896 study.
Records
St Thomas is unusually well documented for a small community, through Danish colonial records, the congregation’s own material, the cemetery, and a strong body of chronicle and scholarship.
Start here
Julius Margolinsky, 299 Epitaphs from the Jewish Cemetery in St. Thomas, 1837–1916, is the key genealogical source. It names some eighty Sephardi families: Abendana, Athias, D’Azevedo, Benjamin, Cardoze, De Castro, Da Costa, Delvalle, Fidanque, Fonseca, Henriques, Lindo, Maduro, Moron, Pereira, Petit, Pissarro, Piza, Sasso, Toledano, Valencia and more.
Isidor Paiewonsky’s Jewish Historical Development in the Virgin Islands, 1665–1959 is a rich chronicle of dated events and individuals. The nineteenth-century histories by Nissen and by J. P. Knox are contemporary sources.
Danish colonial and congregational records
Because St Thomas was Danish until 1917, much of the official record is in Denmark. The Danish National Archives, Rigsarkivet, in Copenhagen hold the West Indies colonial administration, and the Copenhagen Jewish community archives hold St Thomas material — these are what Margolinsky worked from.
The Hebrew Congregation of St Thomas holds its own birth, marriage and death registers, which are detailed from the early nineteenth century: 76 children were recorded born into the congregation in 1831 alone. Records also survive in the St Thomas public library and in private collections.
Modern scholarship
Judah M. Cohen’s Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands (Brandeis University Press, 2004) is the authoritative modern history and the essential starting point for serious research.
What has and hasn’t been researched
St Thomas is well served by chronicle and scholarship; the connective genealogy is where the work remains.
- The community is well documented. Cohen’s history, Paiewonsky’s chronicle and Margolinsky’s cemetery index give an unusually strong foundation.
- The St Eustatius continuation, family by family. St Thomas is the place the Statia community became, and matching the 1781 refugees to their St Thomas descendants is the single most valuable piece of work available here.
- The onward dispersal to Panama and the United States is documented in outline but rarely traced family by family.
- The community’s involvement in the Danish West Indies slave trade, and the enslaved and free people of colour connected to Jewish households, deserve fuller research.
Further reading
Judah M. Cohen, Through the Sands of Time (Brandeis, 2004).
Julius Margolinsky, 299 Epitaphs from the Jewish Cemetery in St. Thomas, 1837–1916 (Copenhagen).
Isidor Paiewonsky, Jewish Historical Development in the Virgin Islands, 1665–1959 (St Thomas, 1959).
J. P. Knox, A Historical Account of St. Thomas, W.I. (New York, 1852).
Judah Chayyim Mendes Chumaceiro, The Evidences of Free-Masonry from Ancient Hebrew Records (1896).
Mordehay Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean (Gefen, 2002).
Organisations and repositories
Hebrew Congregation of St Thomas, Charlotte Amalie.
Rigsarkivet, the Danish National Archives, Copenhagen, for the Danish West Indies colonial records.
The Jewish community archives, Copenhagen, the source of Margolinsky’s index.
The Altona and Savan Jewish cemeteries, Charlotte Amalie.
St Thomas Public Library and the Enid Baa collection; the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati.
For the diaspora links, the St Eustatius and Curaçao records, and the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish archives.
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- Full transcriptions and images of the Altona and Savan cemetery stones, beyond Margolinsky’s 299 epitaphs
- Congregational birth, marriage and death registers, in transcription or image
- Records matching the St Eustatius Jews who came to St Thomas after 1781
- Records of St Thomas families who moved on to Panama, New York and Florida
- Danish colonial records in Copenhagen naming individual Jewish residents and merchants
- Masonic lodge records naming Jewish members
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].
Research services
St Thomas research means a well-recorded island community — the synagogue registers, the Margolinsky cemetery index and the Danish colonial records in Copenhagen, in English, Danish, Hebrew and Portuguese — sitting at the junction of the Caribbean Sephardi world, with lines running back to St Eustatius, Curaçao and Amsterdam and onward to Panama and the United States. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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