These two territories complete the French Caribbean on this site, alongside Martinique and French Guiana, and they are here together because they demonstrate the same thing from opposite ends.
All four fell under the Code Noir of 1685, whose first article ordered every Jew expelled from the French islands within three months. The interesting fact — and the one that decides where the records are — is that it was not enforced evenly.
In Guadeloupe, as in Martinique, it was enforced, and the Sephardi presence ended.
In Saint-Domingue — now Haiti — it was not, because the colony was becoming the richest in the world and could not afford to lose competent merchants. Jews went on living and trading there for another century, discreetly and sometimes under individual royal exemption, until the revolution of 1791 scattered them across the Caribbean and into the United States.
That scattering is why this page matters to researchers who have never heard of Saint-Domingue. Its refugees are a documented source population for the Jewish communities of New Orleans, Charleston, Cuba and Jamaica.
Guadeloupe: the shorter story
Guadeloupe became French in 1635, and after the fall of Dutch Brazil in 1654 it received Sephardi planters from the same dispersal that produced Martinique, Cayenne, the Pomeroon and Suriname. They brought sugar and cacao expertise, and they prospered on the same terms as their neighbours in Martinique.
The Code Noir ended it in 1685, and here the expulsion was carried out. What followed was the same as in Martinique: a handful of families who stayed on discreetly or converted, and no communal continuity whatever.
Guadeloupe’s modern Jewish community is entirely unconnected. It formed after 1962, when North African Jews — mostly Algerian and Moroccan, by way of metropolitan France — settled in the French Antilles. There is a small congregation at Le Gosier today.
For research purposes Guadeloupe and Martinique are one subject and should be worked together. The planters moved between the two islands, the records are in the same archives, and the expulsion was a single administrative act.
Why was Saint-Domingue different?
Because it was too profitable to disrupt.
France took possession of the western third of Hispaniola formally at the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, having occupied it from Tortuga and the coast since the 1620s. Within eighty years Saint-Domingue was producing something like a third of the world’s sugar and half its coffee, and was by some measures the single most profitable colony on earth.
A colony like that needs merchants, credit and Atlantic connections, and the Sephardim had all three.
Where they came from
Chiefly Curaçao, whose trading houses worked the whole Caribbean; Bordeaux and Bayonne, the Portuguese Nation of south-western France, which had the metropolitan end of the colonial trade; and Jamaica and Amsterdam.
The great Bordeaux house of Gradis — Abraham Gradis and his successors — supplied the French colonies on a very large scale, and the Bordeaux–Saint-Domingue axis is the one to look at first.
How they lived there
Not as a community. There was no synagogue, no congregation and no cemetery of record.
There were perhaps thirty to fifty Jewish families at any time, at Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien), Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, Jacmel and Les Cayes, trading and in some cases planting. Some held individual lettres patentes — royal letters exempting them by name from the Code Noir. Others simply were not troubled.
This is a genuinely unusual arrangement and it should be understood before searching: a legally excluded population, tolerated for a century because it was useful, and therefore recorded in commercial and notarial documents rather than communal ones. The notaries are where these families are.
1791–1804, and where they went
The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 and ended with independence in 1804. It destroyed the colony and dispersed its free population.
They went to Cuba — principally Santiago — to Jamaica, to Louisiana, to Charleston and Philadelphia, and to France. In 1809 Spain expelled the French refugees from Cuba, and something like ten thousand of them moved on to New Orleans, roughly doubling the city’s population in a year.
The Jewish families went with them, and this is the practical point of the page:
- If you have a New Orleans Sephardi family appearing around 1809, Saint-Domingue by way of Cuba is a strong hypothesis.
- If you have a Charleston or Philadelphia family appearing in the 1790s, the same applies — and our Charleston page is the continuation.
- Cuba and Jamaica likewise.
Haiti after 1804 had no Jewish community. The 1805 constitution barred white landownership, and there was nothing to return to.
What happened in Haiti afterwards?
A small Jewish presence revived in the later nineteenth century — European merchants, and Sephardi and other Jewish traders arriving from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in the wave that Haitians called les Syriens. It never became an organised community.
During the Second World War Haiti issued passports and visas to Jewish refugees, and a small number reached the country. It is a real and little-known rescue, of the same kind as the Philippine and Dominican episodes covered elsewhere on this site, and on a much smaller scale. Haiti voted for the United Nations partition plan in 1947.
There are perhaps a couple of dozen Jews in Haiti today, without a synagogue. The 2010 earthquake did further damage to the country’s archives.
Where are the records?
The essential archive
Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence.
ANOM holds the colonial records of Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe and Martinique, and — this is the important part — the état civil of the French colonies is digitised and available online. Parish registers of baptism, marriage and burial survive in quantity for Saint-Domingue up to 1791, and they are searchable.
For a Jewish family this needs a moment’s thought. A legally excluded population appears in Catholic parish registers only when it does something Catholic — a baptism at the end of life, a marriage, a burial in consecrated ground. Some Saint-Domingue Jewish families are recorded exactly that way, and the entries are frequently the only trace of them.
The notarial records are the better source. ANOM holds the notariat of Saint-Domingue: contracts, powers of attorney, partnerships, debts, inventories, wills. Merchants generate notarial acts constantly, and this is where a family that appears in no communal register will be found in quantity.
The metropolitan end
Archives départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux — the records of the Portuguese Nation of Bordeaux, and the Gradis family papers. For anyone tracing the Saint-Domingue trade this is the other half.
Archives départementales des Pyrénées-Atlantiques, for Bayonne and Saint-Esprit.
Archives nationales, Paris — the Colonies series, and any lettres patentes granting individual exemption from the Code Noir.
The Caribbean ends
Curaçao — Mikvé Israel-Emanuel registers and the Emmanuel volumes, for the families who came from there and for those who went back.
Jamaica, Cuba and Barbados records.
Archives départementales de la Guadeloupe, Basse-Terre, and the Guadeloupe état civil at ANOM.
The destination records — often the most productive
For the post-1791 dispersal:
- Louisiana — the New Orleans notarial archives, which are extraordinary, and the records of the 1809 refugee influx
- Charleston and Philadelphia
- Cuba — the Santiago records and the 1809 expulsion documentation
- French refugee relief and indemnity records, including the 1825 indemnity claims made by former Saint-Domingue proprietors against the Haitian settlement — a substantial named source
Haiti itself
Archives Nationales d’Haïti, Port-au-Prince. Holdings for the colonial period are limited, and the 2010 earthquake caused further loss. Expect to work in France.
What has and hasn’t been researched
Zvi Loker did the foundational work on Jews in Saint-Domingue and remarkably little has been added since. His articles are the starting point and very nearly the finishing point.
The Saint-Domingue notarial records have never been searched systematically for Jewish families, though they are the obvious place to look and ANOM has digitised much of the colonial material.
Nobody has traced the 1791–1809 Jewish dispersal. The refugee routes are well documented in general terms — Cuba, Jamaica, Louisiana, Charleston — and the Jewish families within them have not been identified. This is the most valuable work available here, and it would serve our Charleston, Cuba and Jamaica pages as much as this one.
The lettres patentes exempting individuals from the Code Noir have not been collected. They would amount to a list of the tolerated Jewish families of the French colonies.
The 1825 indemnity claims are a named, dated, quantified source and have not been looked at from this angle.
Guadeloupe’s pre-1685 planters are as undocumented as Martinique’s, and for the same reason.
Further reading
Zvi Loker, on the Jews of Saint-Domingue and the Caribbean — Jews in the Caribbean: Evidence on the History of the Jews in the Caribbean Zone in Colonial Times, and his articles in the periodical literature. The essential source.
Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean — the standard reference for the smaller settlements, covering both territories.
Gérard Nahon, on the Portuguese Nation of Bordeaux and Bayonne and its colonial trade.
Silvia Marzagalli and the literature on the Bordeaux colonial merchant houses, for the Gradis connection.
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — for the events that ended the colony.
Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans, for the refugee migration.
Organisations and repositories
Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence — the digitised état civil and the notarial records of Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe and Martinique
Archives nationales, Paris; Archives départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux; Archives départementales des Pyrénées-Atlantiques
Archives départementales de la Guadeloupe, Basse-Terre; Archives Nationales d’Haïti
Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, Curaçao
Historic New Orleans Collection and the New Orleans Notarial Archives
Help us find records
Both territories are thinly documented and almost everything is in France. We are looking for:
- Notarial acts from Saint-Domingue naming Jewish merchants — the single most productive untouched source
- Lettres patentes exempting named individuals from the Code Noir
- Evidence of Jewish refugees from Saint-Domingue arriving in Cuba, Jamaica, Louisiana, Charleston or France after 1791
- Anything on the Guadeloupe planters before 1685
- Gradis family papers relating to Saint-Domingue
- Documentation of the wartime Haitian visas issued to Jewish refugees
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
Neither territory is researched on the ground. Everything of value is at Aix-en-Provence, in Bordeaux, or in the places the families went afterwards.
For Guadeloupe the story ends in 1685 and the work is finding who was there before it. For Haiti the story ends in 1791 and the work is finding where they went after it — which, more often than people expect, is New Orleans. Both require French, and Saint-Domingue requires a tolerance for notarial handwriting. 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 Martinique · Sephardic Jews of French Guiana · Sephardic Jews of Cuba · Charleston, South Carolina · Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in France