Jews the victims of slavery, too

Ainsley Henriques, Contributor

Your columnist Professor Carolyn Cooper reminds me of the lines often given to recalcitrant schoolboys: 'Persistent perversity provokes patient pedagogue, producing particularly painful punishment.'

She has tried in her columns of July 8 and July 22, 2012 to get me to comment on what she claims is an incomplete history of the Jews of Jamaica. This history is a brief description to be found in the poster room in the Jewish museum at the Jewish Heritage Centre on John's Lane, which is open to the public. We are all aware, however, that no history is ever complete, so from that perspective she is correct.

Professor Cooper's grouse is that no mention is made of the role of the Jews in Jamaica in the horror of enslavement. In this, too, she is correct, but this is because their history with enslavement is much more than just that - too much for a poster board.

Let me remind her that Jews themselves were enslaved. The Jews who came to Jamaica were run out of countries where they had lived for generations. In Spain, had they not run for their lives, they would have been put to death; or if they had converted, they could have been brought before the Auto da Fe. If found guilty at these trials they, as many were, sentenced to death and burnt at the stake or garrotted.

Macabre massacres

Let me remind Professor Cooper that, having fled to Northern Europe, they were subsequently murdered by the millions for being Jews as recently as in her lifetime. Those who remained in the Middle East after the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70, and those who returned to these lands after the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, were turfed out in 1948 after the establishment of the State of Israel for being Jews. That number being estimated at about one million men women and children for just their belief, some even settling here for a time.

For further information on the Jews in Jamaica, Professor Cooper should read our eminent historians at places like the University of the West Indies. She would learn that Jews in Jamaica were second-class citizens and, like the free people of colour, had limited civil rights. Yes, despite this, there were some Jews, as well as some free people of colour, who owned enslaved people during this period.

She will also learn that both these groups got civil rights only in 1831-32, just prior to Emancipation. Further, it is interesting to note that it was the free people of colour and the emancipated people of colour who, when having earned the right to vote, were the main political supporters of those Jews who sought to be elected to the legislature.

Time for reflection

The commemoration of Emancipation is a time for reflection with our penchant for celebrations. Reflection on the suffering and the hardship, the horror and the terror of being enslaved. Celebration should be to express the joy by those of us who are here as the descendants of those who survived. This is true whether we are of African ethnicity or Jewish heritage.

The Jewish festival for the reflection and celebration of Emancipation from being enslaved is the Passover. It lasts a week that begins with the feast that Jesus participated in. This is the Seder, otherwise known to Christians as the Last Supper.

It is time that we all in Jamaica learn to reflect in our own homes, churches, villages and towns on what was enslavement and what Emancipation means to all of us, so that we can truly celebrate.

We must not wring our hands in despair nor hang our heads in shame, but hold them high and rejoice in the chance that we have been given in this life to redeem ourselves in the present and create a future for the generations to come.

Ainsley Henriques is honorary secretary of the United Congregation of Israelites. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.