First the derision and the sorrows, then the years of exile. Kicked out of anti-Semitic Spain in the 1490s, Jews were among the first to arrive in the New World. They were Iberian immigrants or Sephardim (after Sefarad, Hebrew for Spain) in search of refuge.
THE STORY OF THE JEWS: Finding the Words, 1000BCE-1492CE, by Simon Schama. Bodley Head, 2013, 496 pp., £25 (hardcover)
Officially, Jews were not allowed to settle anywhere in New World territories with Catholic orthodoxies. Judaism, if it was practiced at all in pre-British Jamaica, was practiced in secret. After the island was wrested from Spain in 1655, however, Sephardi Jews began to arrive from Brazil, Holland, England, Guyana and Surinam. By the mid-18th century, Jamaica had become a thriving outpost of Diaspora Jewry in the Caribbean, with infusions also of Ashkenazi Jews from northern Europe.
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