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c h a p t e r 1 Gathering The island of St. Thomas is a small, mountainous, twentyeight square mile land mass located just off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. It is the second-largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands in terms of area: about a third the size of St. Croix, thirty-five miles to the south, and around fifty percent larger than St. John, three miles east. Although its first European sighting came at the hands of Christopher Columbus during his second voyage in 1493, the island was generally left alone to continued migrations of native American tribes for more than a century and a half afterward.1 In 1672, the kingdom of Denmark, looking to join Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands in expanding its influence into the New World, successfully colonized St. Thomas. Arriving on the island’s hilly, wild shores, the settlers were official representatives of a business concern known as the Danish West India Company, and had received specific permission to transform St. Thomas into an agricultural colony and shipping post. Eighty-two years later, when the Danish West India Company folded and the island became a proper colony of Denmark, St. Thomas had been joined by St. John (acquired 1718) and St. Croix (1733) to create the territory that became known as the Danish West Indies. St. Croix, with its relatively wide, comparatively flat terrain, went on to become the agricultural center of the islands; St. Thomas, meanwhile, began to specialize in trade. Blessed with an advantageous location between the Greater and Lesser Antilles archipelagos and a naturally protected harbor on its south shore, the island slowly gained prominence as a haven for the mercantile industry. Denmark attempted to accelerate the process in 1756, when it declared St. Thomas a free port. In doing so, the ruling country opened up the island to the commerce of the world, hoping in the process to increase its profits.2 1 As with other parts of the Caribbean theater, Jews were taking roles in the commerce of the area. For the most part these individuals were of Iberian descent (popularly known as Sephardim), whose ancestors had been forced by the Spanish Inquisition to convert to Christianity in the late fifteenth century . By the seventeenth century, many of these “Converso” or “New Christian ” families had moved to other cities such as Amsterdam, Bordeaux, and Hamburg (and, unofficially, London), where they had begun business interests . In their new environment—which was in most cases Protestant and hostile to Spanish interests—many began to practice their religion openly again to increasing tolerance by local governments. It is likely that the Jews received such “favors” in part because the same local governments had stereotyped them to be good businesspeople, and thus ideal agents for establishing trade routes to the expanding colonial scene. Particularly in the Netherlands, which in 1636 allowed one of the first postInquisition Sephardic synagogues to be established in Amsterdam, Jewish merchants began to take advantage of colonization offers in partial exchange for religious tolerance. Exercising their new freedoms and “rights,” hundreds of Jews eventually travelled to the Dutch Caribbean colonies of Recife (Brazil), Surinam, and Curaçao to open plantations and expand their businesses by the mid-seventeenth century. A similar situation took place in England in the second half of the century in terms of helping to develop Jamaica and Barbados; and Denmark as well held the perception that Jewish merchants would be of great assistance to its nascent colonies. In this manner, small Jewish communities were established in the Caribbean as early as the mid-seventeenth century, becoming the first in the Western Hemisphere.3 Although individual Jews were known to have lived on St. Thomas as early as the late seventeenth century, their presence was sporadic and never enough to create a community in any sense of the word. The fourth governor of St. Thomas, Gabriel Milan, was reported to have been a Jewish convert to Christianity. His increasingly erratic and despotic rule between 1684 and 1687, however, caused endless strife on the island and brought him infamy in Copenhagen, quickly resulting in his extradition and execution.4 In the 1690s, a Jew named Jacob Franks was believed to have spent a short time on St.Thomas as a prisoner of privateer Captain Kidd; Franks’s testimony, according to this account, would lead to the pirate’s downfall.5 Emanuel Vass, a resident of the island...

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