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This Jewish Community in the Caribbean Smuggled Gunpowder to the Patriots During the Revolution. A British Admiral Condemned the Island as a ‘Nest of Vipers’
A new exhibition at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, in Philadelphia, spotlights the little-known wartime contributions of the Jews of St. Eustatius
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When museum curator Josh Perelman boarded an American Airlines flight from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to Philadelphia in early April, his carry-on luggage was heavy with the weight of memory—of a long-vanished community and an obscure but critical chapter in the history of the American Revolution. The precious object, carefully wrapped in a padded box with its own handle, was a Hanukkah lamp from 1761.
Known today as a menorah, this fixture is displayed every December in many Jewish households around the world, its candles lit to celebrate the eight days and nights of the Festival of Lights.
In the 18th century, Jews observing Hanukkah would have used an oil lamp much like this one. Bearing the Hebrew year 5522, the artifact is a poignant reminder of a Jewish community that once flourished on the Dutch island of St. Eustatius (also known as Sint Eustatius or, more commonly, Statia), in what is now the Caribbean Netherlands.
This community played a little known but crucial role in the Revolution, conveying a steady stream of munitions and supplies from the forges and mills of Northern Europe to George Washington’s army in North America. As the British admiral George Rodney once proclaimed, “Had it not been for that nest of vipers … this infamous island, the American rebellion could not possibly have subsisted.”
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The lamp is a highlight of a new exhibition at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, in Philadelphia. On loan from the government of the United States Virgin Islands, in cooperation with the Hebrew Congregation of St. Thomas, it’s one of the few tangible links to that vanished St. Eustatius community—a fact that wasn’t lost on Perelman as he boarded his flight home.
“Honestly, it was very emotional,” the curator says. “To be personally responsible for this piece of material culture was an honor, but it also felt like I was carrying the stories of the individuals who touched that lamp.”
The exhibition’s title, “The First Salute,” pays homage to historian Barbara Tuchman’s 1988 book of the same name, which examined the global context of the Revolution. It also refers to an event Tuchman identifies as the “first recognition following the rebel Colonies’ Declaration of Independence of the American flag and American nationhood by an official of a foreign state.” On November 17, 1776, the Continental Navy brig Andrea Doria sailed into St. Eustatius’ harbor with news of the Declaration, prompting a cannon salute by the local fort.
The display features rarely seen artifacts, images and documents that tell the story of the Jewish community on St. Eustatius. “The First Salute” also explores the contributions of other Jews who participated in the Revolution.
Did you know? Ambrose Bear and the Declaration
- More recent research suggests that the first acknowledgment of the Declaration by a foreign nation came from Wolastoqiyik Chief Ambrose Bear.
- On July 12, 1776, Bear attended a treaty negotiation with the Massachusetts Council. An interpreter translated the Declaration into French for Bear and the other Indigenous representatives. “We like it well,” Bear replied.
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The fact that Jews were living in the Caribbean—and, indeed, were involved in the U.S.’s founding conflict—is one of the many surprising revelations of the Weitzman exhibition, which opened last month and runs through April 2027. Historians estimate that Jews made up just 0.1 percent of the Thirteen Colonies’ population during the war. As Laura Arnold Leibman, a scholar of Jewish studies at Princeton University who served as a consultant on the exhibition, says, this figure is “much larger in the Caribbean.” In fact, until the early 19th century, the largest Jewish communities in the Americas were in Suriname and Curaçao, then also Dutch colonies.
Most of St. Eustatius’ Jewish residents were descended from Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal. Like the English religious dissenters now known as the Pilgrims, the offspring of these Iberian Jews found refuge in religiously tolerant Dutch cities in the 17th and 18th centuries. For many, however, that was only the initial stop on a longer journey. “As Holland began colonizing the Caribbean, the Jews were the first” to emigrate, says Dan Tadmor, president and CEO of the Weitzman.
During the Revolution, Jewish merchants made up an estimated 25 to 30 percent of St. Eustatius’ European population of roughly 1,000. In total, the Jewish community numbered between roughly 350 and 400 people. “Some are merchants, some are widows [and] some were sent here with children,” Leibman says. “There’s one woman who is a healer. There is a lay leader of the community … a hazzan. Some were poor. Some were wealthy. It’s quite a cross section.”
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In 1739, locals built a two-story synagogue using yellow bricks imported from Holland. “It became a real center of the community,” Leibman says. (“The First Salute” features an immersive video experience set in this historic building, whose foundations still stand today.)
The Statian merchants at the heart of that community were part of an expansive trans-Atlantic trade network that Jews developed out of necessity. “Social and political status, especially in Europe, was often determined by land ownership,” Perelman says. “Professions like finance, commerce and mercantile activities were considered lower forms of enterprise. So Jews, who couldn’t own land, were often segmented into those professions.”
As Tradmor explains, “These are people who still have family ties back in Europe and in other parts of the Americas. That laid the foundation for a very good network of commerce. If you’re trading, and especially if you’re smuggling, as would be the case during the Revolution, it doesn’t hurt to have your cousin on the other end of the transaction.”
Jewish merchants on St. Eustatius traded sugar, corn, meat and spices—as well as enslaved people. “Anybody who was involved in trans-Atlantic commerce in the 17th and 18th centuries generally, in some capacity, became involved in the buying and selling of human beings,” Perelman says, “because that was part of the economy that supported the colonial enterprise. While Statia was not a major thoroughfare for this, there were certainly some involved in the buying and selling of enslaved Africans.”
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At times, St. Eustatius’ small population swelled with visiting sailors and merchants, reaching an estimated 20,000, according to Perelman. The Statian Jews, many of whom could speak multiple languages, could probably communicate—and thus conduct business—with most of these visitors. They also had geography on their side: “Statia sits right where the great Atlantic trade winds deliver you after crossing the ocean,” Perelman explains. “Ships from Europe, Africa and North America all arrive at roughly the same stretch of Caribbean water—and Statia was right there waiting for them.” As a result, he adds, “the Jews were in the right place and the right time to play critical roles in the secret movement of necessary supplies to the Continental Army.”
This illicit trade began well before the official start of the war, in April 1775—and the British knew it. In 1774, representatives of the crown complained to the Dutch government about the “warlike stores” being sent from its Caribbean colony. The Dutch, conscious of the Royal Navy’s might, responded by placing an embargo on the lucrative exchange. This edict, Tuchman wrote in her book, “was routinely disobeyed.”
A 1942 article in the journal of the U.S. Naval Institute claimed that more than 3,000 American vessels stopped at St. Eustatius over a few months in 1778 and 1779, bringing with them 12,000 hogsheads of tobacco and other goods. In exchange, local merchants routinely shipped thousands of pounds of gunpowder to the American Colonies.
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Modern historians are less likely to offer precise figures. The exact routes taken by Statian ships to Philadelphia and other American cities, what was in their holds at any given time, and whose hands their cargo passed through en route to Washington’s army are open to question. “There’s a lot of fog because these were, after all, secret transactions,” says historian Barnet Schecter.
St. Eustatius’ merchants didn’t leave a paper trail of their smuggling activities. But did Washington himself know about the Jewish community’s key role in keeping his army intact? Schecter, author of George Washington’s America: A Biography Through His Maps, suspects that he did. “He was pretty in the weeds on a lot of stuff,” the historian says. “Part of Washington’s success as commander in chief was due to his interest and abilities in military administration and logistics.”
How significant was this trade network to the American war effort? The British offered a resounding answer to this query in the conflict’s final years.
As the war ground on and supplies kept flowing to the rebels, the crown decided to address the problem of St. Eustatius once and for all. In February 1781, Admiral Rodney led an invasion force of 15 ships and 3,000 troops into the Statian harbor. The clash was over in an hour, with barely a shot fired by the 50 to 60 men of the local garrison.
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Once ashore, the British soldiers emptied the contents of warehouses, damaged homes and stole horses. Described by Tuchman as “a man of unforgiving character and vigorous action,” Rodney then set out to eradicate the island’s Jewish community. He ordered his men to round up all Jewish men, search them and relieve them of anything of value.
“Not only were they deprived of their property,” historian Louis Arthur Norton wrote for the Journal of the American Revolution in 2017, “they were sentenced to banishment, given only a day’s notice for their departure, and were told that they were to go without their wives and children.” The British crammed 101 Jewish men into a makeshift jail in one of the counting houses in St. Eustatius’ port city, Oranjestad. According to Norton, the majority were then loaded onto transport vessels “without family or property and scattered into exile.”
While the synagogue itself survived, the Jewish enclave on the island never recovered. Raimie Richardson, St. Eustatius’ state heritage inspector, notes that the last member of the community died in 1816, although isolated individuals of Jewish heritage might have continued to live on the island after that date. The man is buried in the island’s Jewish cemetery, which was desecrated during Rodney’s attack. Hearing rumors that Jews had buried valuables in the graves, the admiral ordered sections of the cemetery dug up.
Rodney captured St. Eustatius for the British, but his victory was short-lived. The Statian loot he sent back to England—some of it designed to bolster his sagging personal finances—ended up in enemy hands when a French squadron captured the convoy carrying his ill-gotten gains.
The admiral’s zealousness in looting the Jewish community might also have distracted him from responding to a French fleet led by Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse, which appeared off Martinique around the same time. With Rodney otherwise occupied, de Grasse was free to continue to the Chesapeake Bay, where he defeated a separate British fleet during the September 1781 Battles of the Capes. The French victory effectively trapped British General Charles Cornwallis and his army, making possible the decisive American victory at Yorktown the following month.
Although the story of the Jewish community of St. Eustatius and its role in the Revolution is little known in the U.S., the island’s residents haven’t forgotten this chapter in their history. “The trees in the old cemetery are still pruned; the grass is cut, even though it’s not used,” Richardson says. “People never say ‘the ruins’ of the old synagogue. They refer to it as if it’s an active presence.” For many Statians today, the Jewish enclave that once thrived on the island “is part of our community, part of our culture,” Richardson explains. “It’s still felt, even though it’s no longer here.”
According to Perelman, some of the exiled Jews—including the individual who brought over the Hanukkah lamp that the curator later transported to Philadelphia—fled to nearby St. Thomas. (Community records attest to the lamp’s provenance, if not the name of its onetime owner.) Others went to Suriname, Curaçao or back to Amsterdam. Still others left for the new nation that their network had helped nurture.
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Nearly ten years later, in 1790, Washington, the first president of that new nation, wrote what biographer Ron Chernow describes as his “most beautifully enduring statement on religious toleration.” Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, reads, in part:
The government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens. … May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants.
Did the Statian community’s contributions and sacrifices to bolster the Revolution influence Washington’s later attitude toward Jews? “It’s a great ‘we’ll never really know’ question,” Tadmor says, “but Washington was certainly aware of Jewish support of the American cause.”
Perelman was keenly aware, too, of the responsibility he felt when reconstructing the story of the Statian Jewish community through surviving artifacts such as the lamp. He says, “Having gotten to know St. Eustatius so well over the course of this project, and understanding there is no longer a Jewish community there, it really felt like I was carrying the community with me.”
“The First Salute” is on view at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, in Philadelphia, through April 2027.