The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1781

(AMERICAN JUDAICA).

G.G.J.and J. Robinson

London

1793

I.S. and S.A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, pp. 1048-1049

Petition of the Jews of St. Eustatius to British Admiral Rodney. Until the year 1781, the Jewish community of St. Eustatius, a tiny island in the Dutch Antilles, in the Caribbean Sea, lived relatively peaceful lives. Mostly Sephardim, they maintained close ties to the Amsterdam community as well as to their co-religionists in the New World, especially those residing on the larger island of Curacao, and on occasion with Shearith Israel, the Spanish-Portuguese Congregation of New York. Under Dutch rule, they were granted full votong rights and maintained a well-organized Jewish community, including ritual bath, synagogue and cemetery. In the year 1781, English Admiral George Brydges Rodney occupied St. Eustasius and submitted the Jewish population - by then numbering some one hundred families - to much harassment. The specific cause for Rodney’s vendetta was the fact that the Jews had been supplying the American colonists in their struggle against England. Rodney ordered all male Jews to appear at the city weigh-house. There, they were searched, their valuables (some 8,000 pounds we are told) confiscated, and thirty of their number forcibly banished from the island. The remaining Jews were held in custody while their property was forcibly sold off. On pp. 161-162 of this Annual Register, is a petition by the Jews at St. Eustatius to Admiral Rodney and General Vaughan, Commanding Officers in Chief of His Britannic Majesty’s Army and Navy in the West Indies, pleading for the decree to banish them from the island be rescinded. Later the same year, the French removed the British from St. Eustatius and three years later, the island was restored to Dutch rule. See I.S. and S.A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (1970), pp. 523-527 1048-1049; J. Hartog, The Jews and St. Eustatius (1976), pp. 11-12.