JAMAICA

‘Sephardic Jews from Portugal had a presence in Jamaica for centuries’

The national motto of Jamaica is ‘Out of many, one people’, hinting at a remarkable diversity of cultures. Columbus found indigenous people called the Arawak when he arrived in 1494. By 1509, Spain held the island with modest settlements and, when the Arawaks died from conquest and white man’s diseases, imported African slaves. Sephardic Jews from Portugal established a presence and maintained it for hundreds of years. When the British Parliamentarian forces claimed the island in 1655, little resistance was offered. By 1659 an Island Secretary’s Office was established – the beginning of more than 300 years of British bureaucracy and record-keeping.

Parliamentarian military expeditions had another consequence. At the end of the campaign to crush the Catholic/Royalist movement in Ireland in the early 1650s, more than 50,000 Irish