In the 1660s, Jews of Iberian ancestry, many of them fleeing Inquisitorial persecution, established an agrarian settlement in the midst of the Surinamese rainforest. The heart of this community—Jodensavanne, or Jews’ Savannah—became an autonomous village with its own Jewish institutions, including a majestic synagogue consecrated in 1685. Situated along the Suriname River, some thirty kilometers from the capital city of Paramaribo, Jodensavanne was by the mid-eighteenth century surrounded by dozens of Jewish plantations sprawling north- and southward and dominating the stretch of the river. These Sephardi-owned plots, mostly devoted to the cultivation and processing of sugar, collectively formed the largest Jewish agricultural community in the world at the time and the only Jewish settlement in the Americas granted virtual self-rule.

Sephardi settlement paved the way for the influx of hundreds of Ashkenazi Jews, who began to migrate in the late seventeenth century from western and central Europe. Generally banned from Jodensavanne, these newcomers chose to settle in Paramaribo, where they established their own cemeteries and historic synagogue, deeply influenced by their European Jewish predecessors. Meanwhile, slave rebellions, Maroon attacks, the general collapse of Suriname’s economy, soil depletion, absentee land ownership, and a ravaging fire all contributed to the demise of the old rainforest settlement beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century.

This volume examines three Sephardi cemeteries, whose monuments date from 1666 to 1904; one Ashkenazi cemetery, whose monuments date from the 1680s to the late nineteenth century; and the remains of the seventeenth-century synagogue in Jodensavanne to present transcriptions and English translations of nearly 1,700 epitaphs, carved in Portuguese, Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, Aramaic, and French. It is the result of eight years of on-site fieldwork in Suriname and research in archives in the United States and the Netherlands. Remnant Stones includes a fold-out scaled plan of each of the cemeteries showing stone orientation, locations, and adjacencies.