Jodensavanne

Based on Wikipedia: Jodensavanne

In the dense jungle of Suriname, about thirty miles south of the capital, lie the ruins of a synagogue made from imported European bricks. The building has no roof. Trees grow through what was once the sanctuary. But if you look closely at the crumbling walls, you can still make out the architectural ambition of the people who built it in 1685—people who had been expelled from Portugal, then Brazil, then French Guiana, and who finally stopped running in this remote corner of South America.

This was Jodensavanne. The Jewish Savanna.

It was one of the most unusual communities in the colonial Americas: a self-governing Jewish settlement with its own courts, its own religious freedom guaranteed by colonial charter, and—like virtually all profitable settlements in the seventeenth-century Caribbean—an economy built entirely on the labor of enslaved Africans.

The People Who Had Nowhere to Return

To understand Jodensavanne, you need to understand something about the people who founded it. They were Sephardic Jews—descendants of the Jewish communities expelled from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497. For generations, they had been wanderers, settling in Amsterdam, then migrating to Dutch and English colonies in the New World, always one political shift away from having to move again.

The first group arrived in the 1630s and 1640s, when Suriname was still under English control. They came from the Netherlands, Portugal, and Italy, settling initially in the old colonial capital of Torarica. On April 8, 1651, three men—Benjamin de Caseras, Henry de Caseras, and Jacob Fraso—sent a formal petition to the English Council of State requesting permission to "live and trade in the territories of Suriname and Barbados." This document marks the earliest solid date for an organized Jewish presence in the region.

A year later, a much larger group of about twelve hundred settlers arrived under the leadership of Francis, Lord Willoughby, establishing the community that would become known as Jodensavanne. Then came a third wave in 1664—Jews fleeing Brazil after the Portuguese reconquered Dutch territories there, led by a man named David Cohen Nassy.

The British, eager to keep this last group from moving yet again, granted them extraordinary privileges: the right to operate their own court system and complete freedom of religion. These were rights that Jews in most of Europe could only dream of.

Here is the crucial difference between these settlers and other colonial planters. A Dutch merchant who got rich growing sugarcane in Suriname could always pack up his fortune and retire to Amsterdam. An English planter could return to London. But the Jews of Jodensavanne had no such option. There was no homeland waiting for them. Spain and Portugal had expelled their grandparents. Much of the rest of Europe restricted where Jews could live and what professions they could practice.

So they built to stay.

They laid out their settlement on raised ground with one main road and four side streets. They built a school that taught Spanish and Portuguese alongside religious subjects. And between 1665 and 1671, they constructed a synagogue—only the third in all of South America.

Sugar, Slavery, and Self-Governance

Jodensavanne was, first and foremost, a sugar colony. And in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, sugar meant slavery.

The economics were brutal and straightforward. Sugarcane is extraordinarily labor-intensive to cultivate and harvest. It must be processed quickly after cutting or the juice ferments. The work is backbreaking, dangerous, and relentless during harvest season. No European colonist was going to do this labor themselves, and there weren't enough European workers available even if they were willing.

So like every other sugar colony in the Americas, Jodensavanne ran on enslaved African labor. According to some accounts, newly arrived Jewish families received four or five enslaved people as part of their settlement grant. At its peak around 1700, the community had roughly 570 free citizens and an estimated 9,000 enslaved people—a ratio of nearly sixteen to one.

When the Dutch took control of Suriname from the English, they preserved and even expanded the rights of the Jewish community. The 1691 charter granted them one hundred acres specifically for building a new synagogue and burial ground. They gained the right to transport goods on Sundays—when Jewish law would allow work but Christian colonial law typically prohibited commerce—and, significantly, the authority to banish people from their own community.

This last right mattered enormously. It meant the Jewish community of Jodensavanne was essentially self-governing. They had their own courts for internal disputes, their own religious authorities, their own mechanisms of social control. In an era when Jews across most of Europe lived at the pleasure of Christian rulers who could revoke their rights at any moment, this autonomy was remarkable.

But autonomy for the Jewish settlers didn't mean freedom for anyone else.

Resistance and Raids

Jodensavanne existed in a state of near-constant conflict. The threats came from three directions: the Indigenous Kalina people (whom Europeans called the Caribs), enslaved people within the plantations, and foreign military forces.

The Kalina had lived in this region long before any European arrived. They watched these foreigners carve sugarcane plantations out of land that had been theirs. In late 1678, they attacked. The assault was serious enough that European settlements throughout the area felt threatened.

But the more persistent danger came from within. Enslaved people resisted in ways both small and catastrophic. In 1690, there was a major revolt on a plantation owned by a man named Immanuel Machado. He was killed. The people he had enslaved escaped into the jungle, joining what were called Maroon communities—settlements of escaped slaves who had created their own free societies in the interior.

These Maroon communities became a permanent feature of Surinamese life. They raided plantations. They helped others escape. They represented living proof that the system of enslavement was not inevitable, that it could be resisted, that freedom was possible. For the colonists, they were a constant threat.

The third threat came from European rivals. In 1712, a French naval expedition raided Jodensavanne. The French knew the community was wealthy—sugar plantations generated enormous profits—and they came for plunder. The raid was devastating enough that the colonists afterward invested heavily in defensive fortifications.

Even before these attacks, the community was shrinking. The Essai Historique, a historical account from the period, records that about two hundred Jews left Suriname in 1670. In 1677, the year before the Kalina assault, ten Jewish families departed with their slaves. The violence, the tropical diseases, the constant vigilance required—it was wearing people down.

The Synagogue That Outlasted the Community

Despite the dangers, the community invested in permanence. In 1685, they built a second synagogue, this one made of bricks imported from Europe. Before this building, there had been no synagogue of major architectural significance anywhere in the Americas.

Think about what this meant. These were people who had been expelled from one country after another. They had no permanent home in Europe. And yet here, in the jungle of South America, they built a synagogue impressive enough to make a statement: we are here, we are staying, and we are building something that will last.

The original wooden synagogue had included a separate women's section (as Orthodox tradition required), an archive for community records, and silver decorative elements on the wooden structure. The new brick building was even more ambitious.

In October 1785, the synagogue celebrated its centennial. The celebration drew more than fifteen hundred people, most of whom had to sail in from Paramaribo. By that point, only about twenty Jewish families still lived in Jodensavanne itself. The community had largely relocated to the colonial capital. But they came back for this anniversary—a testament to what the place still meant to them.

The Slow Collapse

Jodensavanne's decline was not a single catastrophe but a gradual squeeze from multiple directions.

First, there were financial pressures. In 1712, the Cassard expedition (the same French raiders who attacked the settlement) extracted a heavy tribute from the entire colony. In 1773, a major sugar importer in Amsterdam collapsed, sending shockwaves through the plantation economy. Planters who had borrowed money to buy land and slaves found themselves unable to repay their loans.

Then came technological disruption from an unexpected direction. In 1784, Europeans began cultivating sugar beets—a crop that could grow in temperate climates and produce the same sugar that had made Caribbean plantations so valuable. Suddenly, Surinamese sugar had competition it couldn't match. Why ship sugar across the Atlantic when you could grow beets in Germany?

The oldest plantations suffered most. After more than a century of continuous cultivation, the soil was exhausted. Yields dropped. Costs stayed the same. The math no longer worked.

Meanwhile, Paramaribo was growing. The colonial capital was closer to the coast, better positioned for trade. As the center of economic activity shifted, there was less reason to stay in the interior. The Maroon Wars continued, making the upriver plantations increasingly dangerous. Every factor pointed toward leaving.

By 1790, Jodensavanne's free population had dropped to about twenty-two people—not counting the enslaved. By the early nineteenth century, fewer than ten remained.

The end came in 1832. During a slave revolt, the settlement was destroyed by fire. There would be no rebuilding this time.

A Strange Second Life

More than a century later, the name Jodensavanne was revived for a very different purpose.

In 1942, during World War II, the Dutch colonial government built an internment camp near the ruins of the old Jewish settlement. They called it the Jodensavanne internment camp. The name must have seemed grimly appropriate to someone: a place associated with Jews, now repurposed to hold prisoners.

But the prisoners weren't Jews. They were 146 political detainees from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia)—people the colonial government considered dangerous German sympathizers or members of the Dutch Nazi Party (the NSB) or the German Nazi Party (the NSDAP). Some Indonesian nationalists were also sent there, including Ernest Douwes Dekker, a prominent independence activist.

The camp lasted until 1946. It was, by all accounts, a harsh place. The Dutch called it "the green hell."

What Remains

Today, you can still visit the ruins. The brick walls of the Berache ve Shalom synagogue still stand, though open to the sky. Three cemeteries remain, their headstones inscribed primarily in Hebrew and Portuguese. The earliest graves in the Cassipora Cemetery date to the early seventeenth century; the most recent, to 1840.

Scattered throughout the cemetery are several ohelim—small roofed structures built over the graves of particularly important community members. In Jewish tradition, an ohel (the singular form) marks the burial place of a revered religious figure. The presence of multiple ohelim here tells us something about how this community saw itself: as a place that produced people worth commemorating permanently.

Since 2014, the Archaeological Institute of the Americas and the University of Suriname have been working to document and preserve what remains. In September 2023, UNESCO designated the site a World Heritage Site under the name "Jodensavanne Archaeological Site: Jodensavanne Settlement and Cassipora Creek Cemetery."

The site lies near the indigenous village of Redi Doti, accessible via the Carolinabrug bridge. The journey from Paramaribo takes about an hour and a half by car—roughly the same time it once took by boat, sailing upriver to a community that no longer exists.

The Uncomfortable Questions

Historian Natalie Zemon Davis has spent years researching eighteenth-century Jodensavanne, focusing particularly on David Cohen Nassy (a descendant of the community's founder, born in 1747) and the relationships between Black and white people within the Jewish community. In 2016, she published an article called "Regaining Jerusalem" about how Passover was celebrated there.

The choice of subject is telling. Passover commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. It is the central Jewish story of freedom. And it was celebrated annually in a community where Jews themselves held thousands of people in bondage.

This is the paradox that makes Jodensavanne so difficult to think about clearly. These were genuine refugees—people who had been persecuted for generations, who had no homeland, who were constantly aware that their rights could be revoked at any moment by Christian authorities. They built something remarkable in the jungle: a self-governing community with religious freedom and legal autonomy.

And they built it on slavery.

The same merchants who imported bricks from Europe to build their synagogue imported human beings from Africa to work their fields. The same community that celebrated its liberation from bondage every Passover held nine thousand people in bondage at its peak. The same people who knew what it meant to be expelled from one country after another expelled enslaved people to deadly labor in sugarcane fields.

There is no way to make these facts comfortable. They simply are what they were. The ruins in the jungle testify to both the community's aspirations and its crimes.

The Map and the Names

In the eighteenth century, a Prussian engineer named Alexander de Lavaux drew a detailed map of the Suriname River region, titled "Algemeene Kaart van de Colonie of Provintie van Surinam." It showed about seventy plantations along the river in 1750, most of them bearing Jewish names.

One planter, Solomon Meza, owned a thousand-acre property. Others had smaller holdings. Together, the Jewish plantations formed a significant portion of Suriname's sugar economy—some sources suggest they were among the oldest and largest operations in the colony.

The map survives. The plantations are gone. The jungle has reclaimed most of what was cleared. But the names persist in the historical record, marking a time when Sephardic Jews fleeing European persecution became, in the Americas, not the persecuted but the slaveholders—participants in the same brutal system of human exploitation that characterized every sugar colony in the New World.

The synagogue ruins stand among the trees. The headstones in the cemetery slowly sink into the earth. And the complicated history of Jodensavanne resists any simple telling.