In the 1660s, Jews of Iberian ancestry, many of them fleeing
Inquisitorial persecution, established an agrarian settlement in the
midst of the Surinamese tropics. The heart of this
community-Jodensavanne, or Jews' Savannah-became an autonomous village
with its own Jewish institutions, including a majestic synagogue
consecrated in 1685. Situated along the Suriname River, some fifty
kilometers south of the capital city of Paramaribo, Jodensavanne was by
the mid-eighteenth century surrounded by dozens of Jewish plantations
sprawling north- and southward and dominating the stretch of the river.
These Sephardi-owned plots, mostly devoted to the cultivation and
processing of sugar, carried out primarily by enslaved Africans,
collectively formed the largest Jewish agricultural community in the
world at the time and the only Jewish settlement in the Americas granted
virtual self-rule. Sephardi settlement paved the way for the influx of
hundreds of Ashkenazi Jews, who began to emigrate in the late
seventeenth century from western and central Europe. Generally banned
from Jodensavanne, these newcomers settled in Paramaribo, where they
established their own cemeteries and historic synagogue. Meanwhile,
slave rebellions, Maroon attacks, the general collapse of Suriname's
economy, soil depletion, absentee land ownership, and a ravaging fire
all contributed to the demise of the old Savannah settlement beginning
in the second half of the eighteenth century..
