Sephardic Jews of St Kitts and Nevis

Nevis had one of the earliest Jewish communities in the English Caribbean — small, Portuguese Jewish, and established by the 1670s.

It is remembered for two things above all: its part in the sugar economy that made Nevis the Queen of the Caribbees, and the schoolroom where a young Alexander Hamilton learned his Hebrew.

The community lasted roughly a century, from the 1670s to the later 1700s, and then dispersed. What survives is a walled cemetery in Charlestown with nineteen legible stones, a scatter of English colonial records, and the careful modern archaeology of Michelle Terrell.

A word of caution frames this page. Much of what circulates about Jewish Nevis — that the community was 75 to 100 strong and a quarter of the population, that it possessed the oldest synagogue in the Caribbean, that Hamilton had a Jewish father — comes from newspaper and magazine features and does not stand up. Where the popular story and the scholarship diverge, this page follows the scholarship.

What St Kitts and Nevis means here

Two small neighbouring islands in the Leeward Islands, English and later British colonies from the 1620s, and today a single independent federation.

The Jewish community that is actually documented was on Nevis, the smaller island, centred on its capital Charlestown. Claims about a separate community on St Kitts itself are thin and mostly derive from the same popular articles. The hard evidence — cemetery, muster rolls, the synagogue site — is on Nevis.

Nevis was, briefly, enormously rich: its sugar industry made it a prize of the British Caribbean. That wealth drew and sustained the Jewish traders, and its collapse in the eighteenth century, together with war, hurricanes and earthquakes, emptied the community out. The island’s prosperity and its Jews rose and fell together.

Where they came from

Most likely from Barbados, and behind Barbados from the Portuguese Jewish diaspora.

The old assumption that Nevis’s Jews came straight from the fall of Dutch Brazil does not fit the dates. If the community formed in the 1670s, it was too late to be direct Brazilian refugees. Terrell’s reconstruction is that Sephardim came to Nevis as traders from Barbados, the largest early English Caribbean Jewish community, sometime after the 1654 dispersal from Brazil.

A Nevis line is therefore best pursued through Barbados, and from there into the wider Portuguese Jewish network of Amsterdam, London and Livorno.

The families are known partly from a muster roll of 1677 to 1678, which lists individuals — among them members of the Levy Rezio, Israel and Mendez families — explicitly as Jewes, and partly from the cemetery.

By about 1700 at least twenty-seven Jewish individuals in roughly seventeen households were recorded. That sounds tiny, but Terrell’s point matters: seventeen households was on a par with the Jewish communities of the largest British West Indian colonies at the time. Port Royal in Jamaica had about twenty, Speightstown in Barbados fourteen. Nevis was a real community, not a handful of strays.

How they made a living

Trade and sugar. The Nevis Jews were merchants and traders, and they are credited — in a claim repeated everywhere, though hard to document precisely — with bringing the technique of crystallising sugar that helped make the island so productive.

As elsewhere in the plantation Caribbean, this was a slave society, and the merchant economy the Jewish traders took part in rested on slavery.

Was Alexander Hamilton Jewish?

No, and the claim that his father was Jewish is unsupported. But the better-documented story is real and more interesting.

Hamilton’s mother, Rachel Faucett, had earlier been married to a Danish Jew, Johann Michael Lavien. Alexander, born of her later relationship with James Hamilton and so refused a place in the Anglican church school as illegitimate, was instead enrolled in a small private school on Nevis kept by a Jewish schoolmistress, where he learned to recite the Decalogue in Hebrew.

His own family later recorded the memory of him placed standing by her side upon a table, reciting Hebrew as a small child.

The existence of a Jewish school on Nevis is in fact known partly through Hamilton’s biographies. That is the defensible version: not Jewish ancestry, but a Jewish education.

Where they went

Away, as the sugar economy failed.

Through the eighteenth century Nevis’s merchant economy collapsed under political and economic pressure, war and natural disaster, and the white and Jewish populations dwindled together.

By the second half of the century only about three Jewish households remained. The last known burial in the cemetery is 1768, and an 1809 letter refers to land where the Jews Synagogue was formerly, so by then the synagogue itself was gone.

The families relocated, chiefly to the British colonies of North America and to other islands. Hamilton’s own mother had earlier moved from Nevis to St Croix, a reminder of how mobile these island populations were.

If you are tracing a Nevis Sephardi family, look first to Barbados, then to the wider network — Amsterdam, London, and the North American communities of New York, Newport and Charleston — and to the neighbouring islands.

The Charlestown Jewish cemetery

With no communal registers surviving, the cemetery on Government Road is the heart of the record.

It was consecrated by 1679 — the act of setting aside a burial ground is itself the evidence that a permanent community had formed — and used until 1768. Nineteen legible markers survive, inscribed in Hebrew, English and Portuguese in the usual Western Sephardi manner.

Michelle Terrell’s archaeological study recorded and analysed them, and found that one family, the Pinheiros, kept ties to the island across some 150 years.

The legible stones Terrell recorded include:

Ester Marache, 1679 (5439), the oldest surviving stone
Bathsheba Abudiente and her newborn son, 1684 (5444)
Daniel Mendez, 1684 (5444)
Raquel Levy Rezio, 1684 (5444); Ribca Levy Rezio, 1687 (5448)
Benvenida Cohen Rodrigues, 1684 (5445)
Abraham Abudiente (Gideon), 1689 (5450)
Abraham Cohen Lobatto, 1690 (5450); Rachell Cohen Lobatto, 1701 (5462)
Daniel Cohen, 1703/4; Jacob Senior, 1709 (5469); Hananiah Arrobas, 1729/30 (5490)
Jacob Vas Mendes, 168?; and, undated, Abraham Cohen Rodrigues, Abraham Hezekiah Israel Gomes, and an Arrobas stone

The cemetery was restored in the twentieth century and is a protected site. The transcriptions matter because, as everywhere, the stones weather and are lost.

On the synagogue: a building in Charlestown long known as the Jews’ school, or associated with the community, has been investigated, and a structure identified as a mikveh survives. Claims that this is the oldest synagogue in the Caribbean run ahead of the evidence — the synagogue itself was gone by 1809 — and are better treated as an open archaeological question than as established fact.

Records

Nevis has no surviving Jewish communal archive, so the community is documented through the cemetery, English colonial records, and modern scholarship.

Michelle M. Terrell, The Jewish Community of Early Colonial Nevis: A Historical Archaeological Study (University Press of Florida, 2005), is the authoritative modern source. It reconstructs the community from the cemetery, the muster rolls and the colonial record. Malcolm Stern, “Some Notes on the Jews of Nevis” (1958), is the earlier study, following Stern’s accidental rediscovery of the community in 1957.

The muster rolls, censuses, deed and property records, and court and shipping papers of the English Leeward Islands are where individual Jewish residents appear. Many are held at the National Archives, Kew, and in the National Archives of St Kitts and Nevis. Because Jews lived openly under English rule, they appear in the ordinary colonial record rather than in any separate register.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Nevis is, for its size, well studied — Terrell’s book is a model — but the connective genealogy is thin and the popular literature is unreliable.

The cemetery and core community are well documented. Terrell’s survey of the nineteen stones and the muster-roll families is solid ground.
The Barbados origin needs tracing family by family. If the community came from Barbados, matching the Nevis families to the Bridgetown and Speightstown records is the most productive work available, and is largely undone.
The dispersal is barely traced. Where the families went after the community failed is almost entirely open.
The popular claims need correcting. The inflated population figures, the oldest-synagogue claim, and the Jewish-father story about Hamilton have all been repeated uncritically.

Organisations and repositories

Nevis Historical and Conservation Society, Charlestown, local custodian of the cemetery and community sites.

National Archives of St Kitts and Nevis, and the National Library.

The National Archives, Kew, for Colonial Office records, muster rolls and censuses.

American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, for Stern’s notes and Caribbean material.

The Charlestown Jewish cemetery and the mikveh site, both protected.

For the likely origin of a Nevis line, the Barbados Jewish records and the Nidhe Israel synagogue and museum, Bridgetown.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Full transcriptions and photographs of all nineteen Charlestown cemetery stones, and of any recovered or buried markers beyond them
The 1677–78 Nevis muster roll and later censuses naming Jewish residents
Barbados records matching the Nevis families — Levy Rezio, Mendez, Abudiente, Cohen Lobatto, Pinheiro, Arrobas, Cohen Rodrigues
Records showing where Nevis Jewish families went after the community declined
Any surviving documentation of the Charlestown synagogue and Jewish school, and the archaeological findings on the mikveh site
Deeds, wills and shipping papers naming individual Nevis Jewish merchants

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

Research services

Nevis research means a small, century-long community documented mainly through its cemetery, the English colonial records, and Terrell’s archaeology, with the origin most likely in Barbados and the wider Portuguese Jewish network behind it. It is careful cross-archive work, and it means sorting the reliable evidence from a good deal of unreliable popular retelling. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

If you have found this page useful, please consider making a small donation to support this site.