There were three Sephardi colonies in the Guianas in the middle of the seventeenth century, founded within a few years of one another by the same people from the same place.
Two of them are reasonably well known: Cayenne, which our French Guiana page covers, and Suriname, which became one of the great Jewish communities of the Americas.
The third was in what is now Guyana, on the Pomeroon river in the Dutch colony of Essequibo, and it is the one nobody writes about. It lasted about eight years, it was destroyed by an English raid, and its survivors went to Suriname and Barbados.
Together the three are one story with one set of families. This page is the missing third of it.
What was Nova Zeelandia?
Dutch Guiana in this period was a Zeeland enterprise.
The colony of Essequibo was run by the Zeeland chamber of the Dutch West India Company, and in 1657 the Zeeland cities of Middelburg, Vlissingen and Veere obtained a grant to plant a new colony on the Pomeroon river, west of the Essequibo. They called it Nova Zeelandia, and its settlement Nieuw Middelburg.
They needed planters who understood the tropics, and in 1657–58 they turned, as the Company had at Cayenne, to the Amsterdam Portuguese Jews. The negotiation in Amsterdam was conducted by Paulo Jacomo Pinto, and the privileges granted were of the same order as those in the Cayenne patent of 1659 — freedom of religion, land, and communal self-government.
The settlers came from the same pool as Cayenne’s: Amsterdam, Livorno, and above all the refugees from Dutch Brazil, which had fallen in 1654. These were experienced sugar planters looking for somewhere that would have them, and between 1657 and 1660 they had a choice of three Guianese ventures.
That is the point to hold on to. A family that appears in Suriname in the 1670s may have come from Recife by way of the Pomeroon, or by way of Cayenne, or directly — and the three routes are not distinguished in most accounts.
How did it end?
The Second Anglo-Dutch War ended it.
In 1665 an English force under Major John Scott attacked the Dutch settlements on the Guiana coast and destroyed Nova Zeelandia. The colony was not rebuilt.
Its Jewish settlers were dispersed — to Suriname, which was then English and where Governor Willoughby had granted the Jews privileges, and to Barbados, which had a substantial and growing Sephardi community.
So within two years, 1664 and 1665, both the Cayenne and the Pomeroon settlements ended, and both fed Suriname. When the Dutch took Suriname from the English at Breda in 1667, the community that stayed behind was made up substantially of people who had already been driven out of Brazil, and then out of one or other of the two failed Guianese colonies.
Oppenheim’s study, which remains the foundation of the whole subject, also traces connections to a fourth venture, on Tobago — the Zeeland and Courland settlement of Nieuw Walcheren. The same Amsterdam network was behind all of them.
What about Dutch Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice?
The Dutch held Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice until the British occupation of 1796 and the formal cession of 1814, when the three became British Guiana.
There were Jews in the Dutch colonies during that long period, but never again a settlement of the kind attempted on the Pomeroon — a scatter of planters and merchants rather than a community, and closely connected to Suriname and Barbados rather than independent of them.
A note on slavery
These were plantation colonies, and the Sephardi settlers of the Guianas were planters. Like their neighbours, and like the Jewish planters of Suriname, Barbados and Jamaica, they owned enslaved people, and the sugar economy they came to build rested on that.
The scholarship now addresses this directly — Aviva Ben-Ur’s Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society is explicitly about it for Suriname — and this site sees no reason to be evasive about it. It is part of what these records are, and anyone working in plantation-colony documents will meet it in the first inventory or will they open.
British Guiana
Under British rule the Jewish presence remained small: merchants at Georgetown and New Amsterdam, some from Britain, some from Curaçao, Suriname and Barbados. There was never a substantial congregation and, so far as we are aware, no permanent synagogue.
Individual Sephardi families are traceable, but as families rather than as a community, and most eventually left for Britain, the West Indies or North America. There is effectively no Jewish community in Guyana today.
The plan that never happened, 1939
The best-known association between Jews and Guyana is a scheme that came to nothing, and it is worth stating plainly because people search for it.
After the Évian Conference of 1938 failed to find homes for Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, British Guiana was seriously proposed as a place of large-scale resettlement. A commission investigated in 1939 with American and British backing, and there was real diplomatic momentum behind it. The land was judged unsuitable, the costs prohibitive, and the war intervened.
No settlement took place. There is no refugee generation in Guyana to research, and any family tradition to that effect should be checked carefully — the more likely destinations for that generation were the Dominican Republic, which did take refugees at Sosúa, or Suriname, where a parallel plan was also discussed.
Where are the records?
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.
Oppenheim’s “Western Guiana” is this colony. His article prints and translates the documents, it is freely available, and it is very nearly the whole literature. Read it first.
The Dutch records
Nationaal Archief, The Hague — the archives of the Dutch West India Company, and particularly the Zeeland chamber, which ran Essequibo and granted the Pomeroon patent. Also the Oud Archief Essequibo en Demerara, which survives in quantity for the later Dutch period.
Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg — the Zeeland provincial archive, and the natural home of anything generated by the three Zeeland cities that founded Nova Zeelandia.
Amsterdam City Archives — the Portuguese Jewish community archive (PA 334) and the despachos, which should record members leaving Amsterdam for the Guianas.
The British records
The National Archives (UK) — the CO 111 series for British Guiana, and the records of the Dutch colonies taken over in 1814.
National Archives of Guyana, Georgetown.
Where the people went
For most families the trail continues elsewhere, and better:
- Suriname — the Paramaribo and Jodensavanne registers, and Ben-Ur and Frankel’s Remnant Stones tombstone survey
- Barbados — the Bridgetown and Speightstown records and the Nidhe Israel cemetery
- Amsterdam, for those who went home
What has and hasn’t been researched
Nothing has been written on this colony since Oppenheim in 1907. That is not an exaggeration; it is the position.
The three Guianese settlements have never been reconstructed as one migration, though the numbers are small — a few hundred people across all three — and every end is documented.
The Amsterdam despachos have not been searched for Pomeroon or Cayenne departures.
Nobody has traced the 1665 dispersal — who went to Suriname, who to Barbados, and who returned to Amsterdam.
The Zeeuws Archief has not been worked from this angle at all, as far as we know, though Nova Zeelandia was a Zeeland project from beginning to end.
Further reading
Samuel Oppenheim, PAJHS 16 (1907) and 17 — the foundation, and essentially the literature.
Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean — covers the Guianas alongside the islands.
Aviva Ben-Ur, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, and Ben-Ur and Rachel Frankel, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname.
Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, and Jonathan Israel on the Dutch Atlantic — for the 1654 dispersal that produced all three colonies.
Organisations and repositories
Nationaal Archief, The Hague — West India Company and Essequibo records
Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg
Amsterdam City Archives — Portuguese Jewish community archive and despachos
The National Archives (UK); National Archives of Guyana, Georgetown
Jodensavanne Foundation and the Suriname Jewish community, for the continuation
Help us find records
This is the least documented Sephardi settlement in the Americas and almost anything would help. We are looking for:
- Any list of the Pomeroon settlers, or of those dispersed in 1665
- Amsterdam despacho entries for departures to the Guianas between 1657 and 1665
- Material from the Zeeuws Archief relating to Nova Zeelandia
- Records of Sephardi families in British Guiana in the nineteenth century
- Anything connecting a Suriname or Barbados family back to the Pomeroon
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
Guyana is researched in The Hague, Middelburg and Amsterdam, not in Georgetown. The colony that matters here lasted eight years and its people are recorded before they arrived and after they left.
If you have a Suriname or Barbados family and want to know whether they came through the Pomeroon, that is a question with an answer, and Oppenheim is where it starts. 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 French Guiana · Sephardic Jews of Suriname · Jews of Barbados · Sephardic Jews of Brazil