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PROLOGUE

A puzzling entry in a pirate’s journal jumped out at me. Invading Jamaica in 1643, William Jackson found the island’s capital deserted except for “divers Portuguese of the Hebrew nation who came unto us seeking asylum, and promised to show us where the Spaniards hid their gold. ” I had always learned that early New World adventure was the province of Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors, and that they were all devout Catholics carrying the cross. So what were Portuguese Jews doing on a Spanish island, seeking asylum with an English pirate?

It was 1967. I had moved to Jamaica from New York, and came upon Jackson’s journal in the reading room of Jamaica’s national library while perusing contemporary accounts of the island’s buccaneer beginnings. I was more than intrigued. I wanted an answer.

What I next learned was startling: Before England conquered Jamaica in 1655, the island belonged to the family of Christopher Columbus, who provided a haven for Jews otherwise outlawed in the New World. The leader of the Jewish community, the late Sir Neville Ashenheim, went even further, telling me that Columbus was a Jew, and that Jamaica’s Jews traced their ancestry to the first settlers.

I was so beguiled by these findings that I would spend the next four decades following their lead and unfolding an unknown chapter in Jewish history.

Forbidden to settle the New World, they came disguised as Christians. They and the other settlers were similar in spirit, but while the others came to conquer, convert the heathen, search for gold, or collect a bevy of Indian women, the Jews came to escape persecution and settle a land beyond the tentacles of the Inquisition.

The story begins with Columbus and the Age of Discovery, when secret Jews sailed with the explorers, marched with the conquistadors, and were among the first settlers in every New World colony. This early history is largely unknown because few then or since realized that these pioneers were Jewish. Forbidden entry in the New World because of their religion, Iberian Jews posed as New Christians from Portugal, the one settler group that was not required to prove their Catholic ancestry. Most Portuguese operating in the Spanish Empire were New Christians, commonly called conversos, and many maintained their allegiance to their ancestral faith.