Pirates in the Caribbean; #CulturesCollide

Did you know there were real "Pirates in the Caribbean"? - Jewish Pirateers! And they seem to be alive today, playing their music in the heart of Jerusalem!

Angry at Spain for their expulsion , Jewish immigrants to Spain offered to attack and capture Spanish boats in exchange for pocketing the booty. Holland was at war with Spain, and commissary notes were handed out with pleasure. Alexander Hamilton was influenced by Jewish merchants on the Caribbean Island where he was born and raised spreading the ideas of human rights as is given by G-d to the developing colonies in the Americas.

Founding Fathers' Jewish Roots

“An isle in the Caribbean”

In the musical Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton sings that he was “Born in an isle in the Caribbean / I knew I was poor.” The isle in question was Nevis, a British possession then known for its sugar, tea and cocoa plantations and its slave trade. Britain used the island as a dumping ground for criminals, sending shiploads of pickpockets, homeless people, thieves and others from the margins of British society to the tropical island. But Nevis also was home to a thriving Jewish population, most of who fled the Inquisition in Portugal to Brazil, then moved to the Caribbean when the Inquisition terrorized Brazil.

The earliest record of Jewish residents is a muster roll from 1678, listing eight people as “Jewes”. By the late 1670s, 17 Jewish families called Nevis home. They built a synagogue and bought and consecrated a Jewish cemetery. By the time Alexander Hamilton was born in the 1750s (the exact date of his birth is disputed), fully one quarter of the white population of the island’s capital, Charlestown, was Jewish

Nevis Jewish cemetery

In later years, Nevis’ one-time Jewish community was forgotten. That changed in 1957, when an American Jewish historian named Malcolm Stern and his wife took a cruise that stopped in Nevis and he located an old Jewish cemetery, now an overgrown field where goats grazed. Tipped off by locals that Jews had once used the field as a burial site, Stern located 16 Hebrew epitaphs before returning to his ship and later writing about Nevis’ lost Jewish community.

“Get your education, don’t forget from whence you came.”

Nevis’ Christian schools refused to educate the young Alexander Hamilton. Thirsty for knowledge, Hamilton’s mother turned to a local Jewish school to teach her brilliant son. The future founding father learned about Judaism and even learned to speak some Hebrew.

Hamilton learned about Judaism and even learned to speak some Hebrew

Bibliography:

Dr. Yvette Alt Miller. "Alexander Hamilton and the Jews." Aish.org. 2 Septeber, 2017. http://www.aish.com/jw/s/Alexander-Hamilton-and-the-Jews.html