This is a page about a colony that lasted five years and failed. But this is where Suriname began.
The great Sephardi community of Suriname, with its plantations and its autonomous settlement at Jodensavanne, did not arise there spontaneously. It was founded by people who had already tried twice: once in Dutch Brazil, and then at Cayenne, under a Dutch patent of 1659 that granted them some of the most generous privileges any Jewish community obtained anywhere in the seventeenth century.
When the French took Cayenne in 1664, they moved on, and took the patent’s terms with them as a precedent.
If you research a Suriname family and want to know where they were before, the answer for a good many of them is Cayenne — and before that, Recife.
Where did the settlers come from?
The chain begins with a defeat.
Dutch Brazil — Pernambuco, with its community at Recife and its synagogue Kahal Zur Israel, the first in the Americas — fell to the Portuguese in 1654. Its Jews, who had lived openly under Dutch rule for a generation, had to leave, and they scattered in every direction:
- back to Amsterdam
- to Curaçao
- to New Amsterdam — the twenty-three refugees who founded what became Shearith Israel in New York
- and to the Guianas
They were experienced tropical planters who understood sugar, and they were looking for somewhere that would have them.
What was the Nassy patent of 1659?
David Nassy — born Joseph Nunes da Fonseca, of the Amsterdam Portuguese community — was the organiser of these ventures. He had obtained a patent from the Dutch West India Company for a Jewish settlement on Curaçao in 1652. In 1659 he obtained another, for Cayenne, which the Dutch had taken from the French two years earlier.
The terms are what make it remarkable. The 1659 patent granted the settlers freedom of religion, the right to build a synagogue, land, the right to be governed under their own arrangements, and exemptions from various duties.
It is among the most liberal charters granted to Jews anywhere in the seventeenth century, and it was granted by a trading company that wanted planters who knew what they were doing.
Settlers came from Amsterdam, from Livorno, and from the Brazilian refugees. At its height the settlement held perhaps 150 to 200 Jews — small by any measure, and a substantial proportion of the colony.
The settlement itself was at Remire, near Cayenne, on the coast.
What happened in 1664?
The French retook Cayenne under Le Febvre de La Barre. The Jews were offered the choice of remaining under French rule or leaving.
Most left, and where they went is the point of this page. They moved to Suriname, then held by the English, where Governor Willoughby granted them privileges on terms recognisably descended from the Cayenne patent. When the Dutch took Suriname from the English in 1667 — trading New Amsterdam for it at Breda — the Jewish community stayed, and became the community our Suriname page describes.
So the sequence is:
Recife (to 1654) → Cayenne and Remire (1659–1664) → Suriname (from 1664)
Three attempts, two failures, and one of the most remarkable Jewish communities in the Americas at the end of it.
The Code Noir, 1685
Whatever Jewish presence remained under French rule ended formally with the Code Noir, promulgated in 1685 for the French colonies.
Its first article ordered all officers to expel every Jew resident in the French islands, described as declared enemies of the Christian name, and gave them three months to go.
The same article expelled the Sephardim of Martinique — where Benjamin da Costa d’Andrade and his fellow planters had built a substantial sugar interest — and applied equally to Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue.
It is the single fact that connects all the French Caribbean pages on this site, and it is why the French islands have Sephardi beginnings and no Sephardi continuity.
What about Dreyfus and Devil’s Island?
French Guiana’s later Jewish associations are not community history, but people search for them and the page should be straight about them.
From 1852 the colony became France’s penal settlement — Cayenne, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and the Îles du Salut. Alfred Dreyfus was held in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island from 1895 to 1899.
That is the best-known Jewish connection to French Guiana by a very long way, and it has nothing whatever to do with the seventeenth-century community.
There is a small Jewish community in Cayenne today, largely of Moroccan origin by way of metropolitan France, with Brazilians and Israelis. It is a modern community and there is no continuity with the settlers of 1659.
Where are the records?
The Cayenne settlement lasted five years and generated correspondingly little of its own. Almost everything is at one end or the other.
The Dutch end
Nationaal Archief, The Hague — the archives of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), which granted the patent, corresponded with the colony and recorded its people. This is the primary archive for the settlement.
Amsterdam City Archives — the Portuguese Jewish community archive (PA 334). The despachos are the key series: the community’s records of members leaving Amsterdam. Anyone who sailed for Cayenne under the Nassy patent should have been recorded there before departure.
The 1659 patent itself survives and has been published.
The French end
Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence — the colonial archives for Guyane, and the natural home of anything generated after 1664, including the enforcement of the Code Noir.
Archives départementales de la Guyane, Cayenne.
Archives nationales, Paris — the Colonies series.
French Guiana remains a French département, so its modern civil registration is French in form and held in the ordinary way.
The Suriname end — where the people went
For most families this is where the trail actually continues, and it is far better documented:
- the Sephardi community registers of Paramaribo and Jodensavanne
- Aviva Ben-Ur and Rachel Frankel, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname — the tombstone survey and surname index
- the Suriname material in the Nationaal Archief
Our Suriname page is the next step.
The foundational study
Samuel Oppenheim, “An Early Jewish Colony in Western Guiana, 1658–1666, and its Relation to the Jews in Surinam, Cayenne and Tobago”, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 16 (1907), with a supplement in volume 17.
This is the study on which everything since is built. It is freely available, it prints and translates documents, and it should be the first thing anyone reads on this subject.
The other Guiana
Oppenheim’s title refers to Western Guiana, and that is a different colony again.
At almost the same moment — from 1657 — there was a second Dutch Jewish settlement in Essequibo and the Pomeroon, called Nova Zeelandia, organised from Amsterdam with Paulo Jacomo Pinto among those involved. It was destroyed by an English raid in 1666.
That territory is now Guyana. The three settlements — Pomeroon, Cayenne and Suriname — are one story with one set of families, and they should be read together.
What has and hasn’t been researched
Nobody has reconstructed the Recife–Cayenne–Suriname chain family by family, though all three ends are documented and the numbers are small. Perhaps two hundred people. This is a bounded, achievable piece of work and it would establish the founding families of Suriname on evidence rather than tradition.
The Amsterdam despachos have not been searched for Cayenne departures, and they should have caught them.
The 1659 patent’s terms have never been compared systematically with Willoughby’s Suriname grant, though the descent of one from the other is the reason Suriname’s Jews enjoyed the autonomy they did.
The enforcement of the Code Noir in Guyane is undocumented as against Martinique, where it is well attested.
Guyana — Essequibo and the Pomeroon — has no dedicated treatment anywhere outside Oppenheim.
Further reading
Samuel Oppenheim, “An Early Jewish Colony in Western Guiana, 1658–1666”, PAJHS 16 (1907) and the supplement in 17 — the foundation.
Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas — the standard reference for the smaller settlements.
Zvi Loker, Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times.
Aviva Ben-Ur, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 (Pennsylvania, 2020), and Ben-Ur and Rachel Frankel, Remnant Stones.
Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century.
On Dutch Brazil and the dispersal: Jonathan Israel, and Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil.
Organisations and repositories
Nationaal Archief, The Hague — Dutch West India Company records
Amsterdam City Archives — Portuguese Jewish community archive (PA 334) and the despachos
Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence; Archives départementales de la Guyane, Cayenne; Archives nationales, Paris
Jodensavanne Foundation and the Suriname Jewish community, for the continuation
Help us find records
This is a small subject where a little evidence would go a long way. We are looking for:
- Amsterdam despacho entries recording departures for Cayenne between 1659 and 1664
- Any list of the Remire settlers, or of those who left in 1664
- Documentation of the enforcement of the Code Noir in Guyane
- Anything at all on the Pomeroon settlement beyond Oppenheim
- Family papers or traditions connecting a Suriname family to Cayenne or Recife
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
French Guiana is not a place you research in French Guiana. The records of the Jewish settlement are in The Hague and Amsterdam, the records of its ending are at Aix-en-Provence, and the records of the people themselves are in Suriname, where they went.
If you have a Suriname family and want to know where they were before 1664, that is a question we can help with. 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 Suriname · Sephardic Jews of Brazil · Sephardic Jews of Martinique · Sephardic Jews of Curaçao