Curaçao קוראסאו

In 1634 the West India Company took the island from Spain; the first Jew on it was the interpreter Samuel Cohen. In 1651 João d'Yllan received a charter to bring Jewish colonists — ten or twelve came instead of the promised fifty, and the agricultural colony failed. After 1654 refugees from Recife arrived, and in 1659 a party of some seventy came from Amsterdam under Isaac da Costa; with them came the first Torah scroll, a gift of the Amsterdam community and still in the synagogue today, and land was granted for the Beth Haim Blenheim cemetery.

From the 1660s agriculture was abandoned: the community moved into Willemstad and took to shipping, insurance, finance and the inter-imperial Caribbean trade. The first synagogue was a converted house, in 1674; it was rebuilt on the same site in 1681 and 1703, and in 1732 the present Snoa of Kahal Mikvé Israel was consecrated.

By the middle of the eighteenth century some fifteen hundred Jews lived on the island — more than in all the North American congregations together. Its governance, liturgy, ascamot and hakhamim came from Amsterdam, where they were trained at Ets Haim. From Curaçao in turn came the communities of New York, Newport and the coast of what are now Venezuela and Colombia.

The other side is worth holding too: Caribbean prosperity, on Curaçao and still more in Suriname, rested on plantation slavery and on the provisioning and contraband trades. About 1700 some nine thousand enslaved people worked on Jewish-owned estates in Suriname.