Jamaica has one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Americas. Conversos of Spanish and Portuguese origin lived there under Spanish rule, practicing in secret as “Portuguese,” and after the English conquest of 1655 they worshipped openly. The community won full political rights in 1831, earlier than Jews in Britain, and gave Jamaica merchants, journalists, artists and civic leaders. Its Kingston synagogue, Shaare Shalom, still keeps a sand-covered floor. See also Western Sephardim and Portuguese Jews.
Origins
Jamaica was Spanish from 1494 until 1655. Jews of converso families who had fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal settled there, calling themselves “Portuguese” and keeping their Judaism hidden. When England took the island in 1655, they were allowed to stay and to practice openly. Oliver Cromwell granted them English citizenship, which Charles II confirmed in 1660.
The Sephardi connection
After 1655 the community grew with Spanish and Portuguese Jews from Brazil, England, Suriname and other colonies, part of the Atlantic network of the Western Sephardim. In Spanish Town the Sephardi congregation Neveh Shalom was consecrated in 1704; its first hakham, Josiahu Pardo, had come from Amsterdam in 1683. See the synagogue of Spanish Town. In Kingston the Portuguese congregation Shaar Hashamayim was completed in 1744. Ashkenazi Jews arrived later in the 18th century and built their own synagogues in Kingston (1787) and Spanish Town (1796).
Pirates and privateers
Jamaica’s early Jewish history is tied up with the age of privateering. The best-known figure is Moses Cohen Henriques, born around 1595 to a Portuguese converso family. According to Edward Kritzler’s Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean and later accounts, he served under the Dutch admiral Piet Hein, whose fleet captured a Spanish treasure fleet worth 11,509,524 guilders at Matanzas Bay, Cuba, in September 1628, and later lived among the Jews of Dutch Brazil until the Portuguese retook the colony in 1654. The same accounts make him an adviser to Henry Morgan in Jamaica, and say Morgan pardoned him in 1681. Few documents survive for these episodes, and modern figures such as a “billion-dollar” value for the 1628 treasure are estimates, not historical records.
Port Royal, the home port of English and Dutch privateers, also had synagogues and a Jewish merchant community until the earthquake of June 7, 1692 destroyed most of the town.
Rights and civic life
- Restrictions. Jews in colonial Jamaica paid special taxes and could not vote or hold office.
- 1831. When free people of color were about to gain equal rights in the 1820s, the Jewish community petitioned the government in England. On December 19, 1831, Jamaica’s Jews received full political rights, decades before Jews in Britain. By 1849 eight of the 47 members of the Assembly were Jewish.
- The Gleaner. On September 13, 1834, the brothers Jacob and Joshua De Cordova founded The Gleaner in Kingston; it is still published today.
- Population. Jamaica had 2,535 Jews in 1881.
Kingston’s synagogues
The Great Kingston Fire of 1882 destroyed both the Portuguese and Ashkenazi synagogues. The new Shaare Shalom synagogue, built in 1885, was ruined in the earthquake of 1907 and rebuilt in 1911, and in 1921 the Ashkenazi congregation merged with it. Its floor is covered in sand, a custom traced to the conversos of 17th-century Dutch Brazil; see Shaare Shalom. Its prayer book combines the Spanish and Portuguese rite with later British and American liturgy.
At least 21 Jewish cemeteries survive across the island, with inscriptions in Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish and English from 1663 onward. Hunt’s Bay is the oldest; see Jamaica’s cemeteries.
Language and culture
Jamaica’s early Jews wrote and prayed in Portuguese, Spanish and Hebrew; English became the community’s language in the 19th century. The first book published in Jamaica under British rule was a Jewish work, López Laguna’s Spanish verse paraphrase of the Psalms, Espejo fiel de vidas (1720). The artist Isaac Mendes Belisario recorded Afro-Jamaican life in his Sketches of Character (1837–1838).
The community today
A few hundred Jews worship in Jamaica today, most of them in Kingston, and over 2,000 Jamaicans identify religiously as Jewish. Shaare Shalom was the island’s only synagogue until Chabad opened one in Montego Bay in 2014.
Notable people
- Isaac Mendes Belisario 1795–1849 · Kingston Artist of post-emancipation Jamaica; Sketches of Character (1837–1838).
- Jacob De Cordova 1808–1868 · Spanish Town Co-founder of The Gleaner (1834); later a Texas legislator and land agent.
- George Stiebel c. 1821–1896 · Jamaica Son of a German-Jewish father; Jamaica’s first millionaire of African descent; built Devon House (1881).
Sources and further reading
- Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas (Gefen, 2002).
- Richard D. Barnett and Philip Wright, The Jews of Jamaica: Tombstone Inscriptions, 1663–1880 (Ben-Zvi Institute, 1997).
- Edward Kritzler, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (Doubleday, 2008).
- Jewish Virtual Library, “Jamaica Virtual Jewish History Tour”.
- “History of the Jews in Jamaica”, Wikipedia.
Revised October 2026 to correct errors in an earlier version of this page.
