The Sephardi communities of the Americas were not founded from Spain or Portugal. They were founded from Amsterdam and London, by families who had already left Iberia a generation or two earlier.
That single fact governs almost all research in this region. When an American or Caribbean line runs out, the answer is usually in a European archive rather than a local one.
This page covers twenty-nine communities, from Canada to Peru.
Where the American communities came from
One event created most of them.
Around 600 Jews left Amsterdam for Dutch Brazil in 1642. When Portugal retook Recife in 1654 they scattered. Some went to Curaçao, some to the Guianas, and twenty-three reached New Amsterdam, where they founded what became Shearith Israel in New York.
From those beginnings the network spread across the Caribbean and up the Atlantic coast. Curaçao became the mother community of the region and seeded Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Aruba. London supplied Jamaica, Barbados and, in 1733, Savannah.
The families intermarried across enormous distances. A Curaçao merchant’s daughter might marry into a Jamaica family, and their son settle in Charleston. Studying one island in isolation will not work.
Slavery and the American Sephardi communities
These were sugar, tobacco and trading colonies, and the Jewish communities within them lived in and profited from slave economies. Some members were slave owners; some were slave traders.
The records document this, and so do these pages. Where enslaved and free people of colour are connected to Jewish households, that is a legitimate and under-researched part of the record, and several pages list it among the material we are looking for.
The five colonial congregations of North America
Five Spanish and Portuguese congregations were founded before American independence, in this order:
- New York, Shearith Israel, 1654 — the oldest in the United States
- Newport, Rhode Island, from 1658, with the Touro Synagogue of 1763
- Savannah, Georgia, Mickve Israel, 1733
- Philadelphia, Mikveh Israel, from 1740
- Charleston, South Carolina, Beth Elohim, 1749
All five were Spanish and Portuguese in rite but mixed in descent. Ashkenazim were members from early on, and intermarriage was common within two generations. Trace these families without assuming Iberian ancestry throughout.
See also the United States page for the modern Sephardi immigration, which is a separate story and not descended from the colonial one.
The Caribbean
Curaçao is the centre. Its Mikvé Israel-Emanuel is the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas, and its Beth Haim cemetery and marriage records are the richest Sephardi source in the hemisphere.
Around it: Jamaica, Barbados, Suriname, St Thomas, St Eustatius, St Kitts and Nevis, Martinique, the Dominican Republic, Bonaire, Aruba, Cuba, and Haiti and Guadeloupe.
Suriname is the exception to almost every rule. Jodensavanne was a self-governing Jewish agricultural settlement with its own militia, unlike anything else in the Sephardi world.
Central and South America
Two separate histories again.
The first is the New Christian presence under Spanish and Portuguese rule, documented almost entirely through Inquisition records: Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and the Cartagena tribunal that served Panama and Colombia. There were no open Jewish communities, and the people named in these files were living as Catholics.
The second is nineteenth and twentieth-century immigration: Curaçao families into Venezuela, and Moroccan, Syrian and Ladino-speaking arrivals into Argentina. Also Canada, whose Spanish and Portuguese congregation in Montreal dates from 1768.
Guyana and French Guiana belong to the seventeenth century and the Dutch settlements at Essequibo, Pomeroon and Cayenne, which fed into Suriname.
Where are the American Sephardi records?
Three places, in this order.
The congregation’s own archive, where one survives. Curaçao, New York, Newport, Philadelphia and Charleston all have good ones.
The colonial power’s archives in Europe. Dutch material is at Amsterdam and The Hague, British material at Kew, Danish material in Copenhagen. This is frequently better preserved than anything on the island.
And Amsterdam, for the generation before. The marriage banns record where each party was born, and Curaçao, Brazil, Suriname and Barbados all appear.
The American pages
Argentina · Barbados · Bonaire · Brazil · Canada · Curaçao · Dominican Republic · Jamaica · Martinique · Mexico · Peru · St Eustatius · St Kitts and Nevis · St Thomas · Suriname · United States · Venezuela
Aruba · Charleston · Cuba · French Guiana · Guyana · Haiti and Guadeloupe · New Orleans · New York · Newport · Panama and Colombia · Peru · Philadelphia · St Eustatius · St Kitts and Nevis · St Thomas · Savannah ·
Help us find records
If you hold family papers, transcriptions or photographs from any Sephardi community in the Americas, please email [email protected].
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