Aruba completes the ABC islands on this site, alongside Curaçao and Bonaire — and it is much the thinnest of the three, for a reason that is worth knowing.
Curaçao has one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the Americas, established in 1651. Aruba, sixty miles away, has nothing of the kind. That is not an accident of who happened to settle where. It was Dutch policy.
The Jewish presence on Aruba is a spillover from Curaçao, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century and remaining small ever since. If you are researching an Aruban Jewish family, you are almost certainly researching a Curaçao family, and the records are on the other island.
Why was there no early Jewish community on Aruba?
Because the Dutch West India Company would not allow settlement.
The Dutch took Aruba from Spain in 1636, during the Eighty Years’ War, and then did something unusual with it: they kept it closed.
Where Curaçao was developed as a trading entrepôt and a slaving depot, and Bonaire as a salt-producing island, Aruba was reserved as a livestock and horse-breeding station. Private settlement was prohibited. The indigenous Caquetío population was left substantially in place, there was no plantation economy, and there was very little for a merchant to do there.
So the Sephardi families who built Curaçao’s community from 1651 had no reason and no permission to go to Aruba. For over a century the island stayed outside the commercial world that produced Jewish settlement everywhere else in the Dutch Caribbean.
The three ABC islands are instructive taken together: one company, three deliberate uses — trade at Curaçao, salt at Bonaire, livestock at Aruba — and three completely different Jewish outcomes.
Who was the first Jewish resident?
The prohibition eased in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the first Jewish resident is conventionally identified as Moses Salomon Levie Maduro, who came from Curaçao with his family in 1754.
The name is significant in itself: Maduro is a Curaçao Sephardi family of the first rank, familiar from the Mikvé Israel registers and from the commercial history of the whole southern Caribbean. Aruba’s Jewish history begins as a branch of a Curaçao family, and largely continued that way.
Settlement remained slow. Through the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a small number of Curaçao Sephardi families crossed to Aruba as traders and, from the 1820s, in connection with the island’s gold — discovered in 1824 and worked commercially until 1916 — and later phosphate.
Numbers were always very small: a handful of families, without a congregation, a rabbi or a synagogue, and dependent on Curaçao for anything requiring a community.
What changed in the twentieth century?
Oil.
The Lago refinery at San Nicolas, built from 1929, turned a quiet island into one of the largest oil-refining centres in the world and drew workers and merchants from everywhere.
Jews came with that expansion — this time including Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe arriving in the 1920s and 1930s, alongside the older Curaçao Sephardi families. The community that resulted was small and mixed, and it organised itself only in the second half of the twentieth century.
Beth Israel — the Israelitische Gemeente Beth Israel — was established with its synagogue in 1962, and remains the island’s congregation. There is a Jewish cemetery at Oranjestad.
The community today numbers a few dozen families, and it is not divided along Sephardi and Ashkenazi lines in the way that Curaçao, Havana or Buenos Aires were. It is too small for that.
Where are the records?
Curaçao first
For almost any Aruban Jewish family the useful records are Curaçao records, and our Curaçao page sets them out:
- Mikvé Israel-Emanuel congregational registers
- the Beth Haim cemetery at Blenheim, one of the oldest Jewish burial grounds in the Americas
- Isaac S. and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles — which covers Aruba and Bonaire as well as Curaçao, and includes the marriage dictionary and extensive genealogical material. This is the first book to obtain for any of the three islands.
On Aruba
Archivo Nacional Aruba, Oranjestad — the island’s national archive.
Civil registration for the Dutch Caribbean colonies from the nineteenth century, held in Aruba and duplicated in the Netherlands.
Catholic and Protestant parish registers, for intermarried families and for the period before Jewish institutions existed.
Beth Israel congregational records, from 1962.
The Oranjestad Jewish cemetery.
In the Netherlands
Nationaal Archief, The Hague — the Dutch West India Company records, the administration of the Netherlands Antilles, and the colonial civil registration duplicates.
Amsterdam City Archives — the Portuguese Jewish community archive, for the families at their origin.
What has and hasn’t been researched
Aruba has no separate literature. Emmanuel and Emmanuel cover it within the Netherlands Antilles; nobody has written about it independently, and there is probably not enough for a book.
The eighteenth and nineteenth-century families have not been traced individually — how many crossed from Curaçao, when, and what became of them.
The gold-era arrivals of the 1820s–1830s are undocumented from this angle.
The three ABC islands have never been reconstructed as one community, which is what they effectively were: one Sephardi population distributed unevenly across three islands, with Curaçao as the centre and the others as branches.
Further reading
Isaac S. Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles — the foundation, and effectively the only substantial source for Aruba.
Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean — covers the ABC islands alongside the rest of the region.
For the island’s general history, the standard Dutch and Papiamento-language works on Aruba, and the Archivo Nacional Aruba’s publications.
Organisations and repositories
Archivo Nacional Aruba, Oranjestad
Beth Israel congregation, Aruba
Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, Curaçao — the essential starting point
Nationaal Archief, The Hague; Amsterdam City Archives
Help us find records
Aruba is small and lightly documented. We are looking for:
- Records of the Curaçao families who crossed to Aruba in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- Transcriptions from the Oranjestad Jewish cemetery
- Anything on the Jewish presence during the gold era, 1824–1916
- Beth Israel records and the history of the community’s organisation before 1962
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
Aruba is researched from Curaçao. The Emmanuel volumes and the Mikvé Israel registers will almost always identify the family, and the Aruban records will then show what it did after crossing. It is a short problem, and we will tell you quickly whether there is anything on the island to find. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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See also: Sephardic Jews of Curaçao · Jews of Bonaire · Sephardic Jews of the Netherlands · Jews of Panama