In Jodensavanne the slaves were free on the Sabbath

The crisp morning sun shines through the treetops forming a welcoming arch over a vast trail leading to Jodensavanne. This Portuguese-Jewish settlement on the Suriname River, about 50 kilometers south of Paramaribo, was a thriving village between the 17th and 18th centuries, surrounded by 150 plantations where thousands of enslaved people worked. Now it is deserted, partly overgrown by jungle, with the ruins of a synagogue and the remains of ancient cemeteries nearby.

The peace is suddenly disturbed when a roaring SUV drives up in the distance. Mark Ponte (42) gets out, a historian from Amsterdam who specializes in 17th and 18th century (colonial) history. “It’s soggy here from the rain,” he says, walking cautiously to the information board at the entrance.

Ponte’s research at the Amsterdam City Archives includes research into the centuries-old, notarial archive of the capital, which is now being digitized. He is in Suriname in preparation for an exhibition in Alkmaar, later this year, about the sugar plantation of the same name in the Commewijne district. And he is involved in a planned collaboration between the city archives of Amsterdam and the National Archives of Suriname, about which mayor Femke Halsema will make further agreements this week in Suriname.

Vibrant Network

Just before his return to the Netherlands, Ponte, who grew up partly in Suriname, pays a quick visit to Jodensavanne. A special place where people once lived whose wills and documents, and sometimes even handwritten notes, he has been seeing and studying for years. Ponte: “There was a lively network between the Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam and here on Jodensavanne, but also with Brazil, Cayenne [hoofdstad van Frans-Guyana] and the rest of the Caribbean. The notarial deeds and wills provide a clear picture of the choices made, how relationships worked and what concerned them.”

He reads on the information board the story of David Cohen Nassy, ​​founder of Jodensavanne. He found many documents about him in Amsterdam. Jodensavanne was unique to Sephardi Jews in colonial times. Fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and then hunted from Brazil and Cayenne, they were given land by the colonial regime to settle here, and the freedom to practice their religion. In this way the colonial government hoped to attract more planters and that the colony would ‘prosper’. The freedom and opportunities for one meant the lack of freedom for the other. The plantation economy was based on slavery and the slave trade: thousands of slaves were exploited and mistreated in and around the village of Jodensavanne.

Ponte: “There was no place in South America where the Jews at that time had more freedom and privileges than here. The governor had agreed to allow the enslaved to work on Sundays and to take the Sabbath (Saturday) off. But it was absolutely not an equal society.”

religious freedom

In the archives he found order lists from David Cohen Nassy for slaves, destined for plantations at Jodensavanne. “We know that Nassy got here through Cayenne, with Sephardic Jews on the run. Before that, the group had ended up in the north of Brazil, where the Dutch had temporary power and there was religious freedom.”

Under Maurits van Nassau, governor-general of Dutch Brazil between 1636 and 1644, many Portuguese Jews moved from Amsterdam to Brazil to establish sugar plantations. In Recife, the continent’s first synagogue was built in 1636. When the Portuguese subsequently conquered Brazil, the Jewish planters fled again.

“The family ties between all these countries remained. David Cohen Nassy lived here on Jodensavanne but maintained trade relations with Amsterdam, where many family lived. And he had interests in plantations in Brazil through his wife Rebecca Drago,” says Ponte.

Nassy had a black daughter, Debora, by an African woman. “I found several deeds and documents from Debora Nassy. She sometimes becomes mulata called. She was the daughter of David Cohen Nassy and a black servant, but had free status in Amsterdam. She worked as a maid for the Belmonte family, one of the great slave-trading families. When Debora settled in Suriname with the Nassy family, she had it recorded in a deed I found that she was a free woman. She was afraid that once back in the colony she would be forced to work again as a slave.”

Ponte had previously discovered through his research in the city archives that there was a lively, small, black community in 17th-century Amsterdam to which Debora Nassy also belonged. They lived in Jodenbreestraat, near Rembrandt, who painted and drew his black residents. Ponte presented the exhibition in the Rembrandt House in 2020 HERE Black in Rembrandt’s time together. “In it we showed marriage certificates of, for example, black sailors who sailed on WIC ships and ended up in Amsterdam, and married black women who came to Amsterdam with plantation owners from Brazil. There was no formal slavery in Amsterdam, they were given the status of servant or housekeeper.”

Around an open area on Jodensavanne are just over thirty graves of brown heart wood with heart-shaped symbols at the top. Pointed roofs of red zinc sheet have been placed above some of the grave posts, to protect against sun and rain. It is the Nengre ber’pe, the black people cemetery. Here the children and descendants of Jewish slave owners who were conceived by their enslaved African wives were buried. They were not full members of the Jewish community and were in a separate cemetery. Well-known Surinamese surnames can be read such as Belliot, Druiventak and Wijngaarde.

Mark Ponte bends over and reads: ‘Abraham Garcia Wijngaarde, born on April 10, 1828 in slavery and died a free man in 1915. Son of Annaatje van la Parra who was born in slavery as the daughter of a Jewish plantation owner’. In the last name: Annaatje van la Parra, Ponte says, you can clearly see the balance of power. “It indicates that she belonged to someone, so ‘owned’ in this case by La Parra.”

House of the Living

Leaves rustle under his shoes as Ponte heads for the river to Beth Haim (House of the Living) cemetery, where the Jewish planters and their families were buried. It has rained a lot the last few days, the ground looks muddy but feels dry in places. Here are tombstones with names such as Del Castilho, Robles de Medina and La Parra. Some richly decorated, with even fully legible inscriptions in Portuguese or Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic and Dutch. Sometimes with images of a tree of life, a vine branch, two hands or an engraved image of a circumcision.

Ponte tries to decipher the Portuguese inscriptions. “These gravestones were often ordered and made in Amsterdam. I recently found a note in an 18th-century document where the Jewish community grumbles about the Jewish girls of Jodensavanne. They would speak too much in Sranan Tongo and less and less Portuguese or Dutch, because they grew up surrounded by enslaved people. People complained about it,” Ponte laughs.

Despite the distinctions made, Jodensavanne was above all a very mixed society in which the enslaved formed part of the Jewish community, and the lines were sometimes less black and white than previously thought.

The path becomes more hilly as the Suriname River comes into view. The ruins of the Beracha Ve Shalom (Blessing and Peace) synagogue, built at the end of the 17th century, are now clearly visible. The walls partly collapsed, some pillars still standing. The Jodensavanne foundation hopes that the settlement will be included on the Unesco World Heritage List this year.

Opposite the synagogue, archaeologists Jovan Samson and Sushmeeta Ganesh are bent over the foundations of the ancient home of the Meza, once a prominent resident of Jodensavanne. “We found much more than we thought: shards, parts of dishes, remains of more houses,” Samson tells Ponte enthusiastically. “Did you also find pipes?” asks the historian and steps into the archaeological zone. “A lot,” says Sushmeeta Ganesh, scraping some sand off a shard.

There was no place in South America where Jews had more freedom and privilege. But it was absolutely not equal

According to the two, the excavations provide a broader picture. “Trade was also conducted with the nearby native village of Redi Doti. You had to maintain contact with your environment. Cultural exchange also took place as a result.”

Ponte recently made a discovery showing that the Nassys were on good terms with the natives. “These are two deeds, signed in 1674 by the indigenous leader Uquerika from Redi Doti. He had come to the Netherlands with a grandson of Nassy, ​​was shown around there and was very enthusiastic. Studying such archives gives you a diverse picture of history and the people who were part of it,” says Ponte, who struggles to pull the SUV out of the mud before a real one. sibi busi, a tropical rain shower breaks loose.