Eidot CHeMDaT"A History
As recorded in W.E.B. DuBois' A Chronicle of Race Relations, in 1668—nearly twenty years after Solomon Franco, the first Jew known to have lived in Boston, was paid to leave the colony—another Boston resident, also named Sollomon, was apprehended in nearby Wenham, Massachusetts, for traveling on a Sunday. Because seventeenth-century Puritan law strictly regulated travel and labor on the Christian Sabbath, he was prosecuted for "profaning the Lord's Day."
Sollomon's exact sentence is not fully detailed in the surviving court archives, and little else is known about his background or origins save for the fact that Essex County Quarterly Court records describe him as a "malata Jue" (mulatto Jew), making him the first documented individual of African and Jewish descent in the Americas—the first Eidot CHeMDaT"A Jew.
Beginning with Sollomon, Jews with African ancestry have lived in the Americas since the colonial era. Before the 1820s, the largest Afro-Jewish communities were in the Caribbean, with Suriname as the most sizable among them.
Unlike the majority of their co-religionists in North America, European slave-owning Jews in Suriname converted both people they enslaved, as well as the children of White Jewish slave-owners and enslaved women of color. Incorporation of enslaved people into the Surinamese Jewish community was so prevalent that in 1767–68, Dutch Jew Salomon Levy Maduro published Sefer Brit Itschak, which contained the names of seven mohels (ritual circumcisers) in Suriname, along with prayers for converting and circumcising enslaved people. Although initially most Afro-Surinamese people entered Judaism through conversion, by the end of the eighteenth century, many members of the Afro-Surinamese Jewish community had been Jews from birth for several generations.
However, Eidot CHeMDaT"A Jewry in Suriname were never regarded as equals to the white Jews of Suriname, and were heavily discriminated against.
White-led congregations in Suriname–such as the Ashkenazi Neveh Shalom (“Oasis of Peace”) and the Sefaradi Tzedek ve-Shalom (“Justice and Peace”)–enforced strict, racially oppressive bylaws that relegated Afro-Jews to second-class status. Jews of African descent were not allowed to say qaddish or yahrtzeit/nachalah prayers for the dead in white synagogues, nor were white Jews allowed to say the prayers on their behalf. Afro-Jews were forced to sit in segregated areas, denied synagogue honors, and were even buried in the swampy section of the Jewish cemetery.
Tired of systemic exclusion, enslaved and free Afro-Surinamese Jews formed their own brotherhood (siva) in 1759 and called it Darhe Jesarim (“Path of the Upright”). Recognized as the first formal Eidot CHeMDaT"A communal organization and synagogue in the Americas, Darhe Jesarim both educated and provided a place where Afro-Surinamese Jews could worship without the inequities and distinctions endemic to the white-run congregations.
By 1790, Darhe Jesarim had begun to organize prayer services, even though officially the communal bylaws of the Portuguese Jewish community forbade Portuguese Jewish minyans to be held outside of Beracha ve-Shalom (in Jodensavanne) and Tzedek ve-Shalom (in Paramaribo). The establishment of an independent Eidot CHeMDaT"A congregation provoked severe pushback and legal action from the white Jewish establishment, and in 1793 the tensions between the Ashkenazi and Sefaradi communities were momentarily set aside, with the regents of the white-led synagogues taking legal action against Darhe Jesarim. In response, thirty-one Afro-Jews signed a twenty-page petition authored by two of their leaders. In addition to requesting that they be allowed to pray independently of the white-led Jewish congregations, the petition outlined the humiliations they had suffered and argued that the exclusion of Afro-Jews from full religious rights was contrary to Surinamese civil law.
Predictably, it was ruled that Afro-Surinamese Jews were "to behave themselves in all respects with the subordination and the due respect" toward the white-led communities of Suriname. The Darhe Jesarim synagogue building was ultimately destroyed shortly after 1804, and in 1817 the community was forced to disband and its members were absorbed back into the city's two white-run synagogues as second-class members, unable to fully participate in the rituals of white-led synagogues until 1841.
Eventually, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some members of Suriname's Eidot CHeMDaT"A community travelled north, and settled in North American cities. In 1857, a German-Jewish journalist interviewed several African-American Jewish women who worshipped at Congregation Shearith Israel in New York who had immigrated from Suriname.