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Meet the 2 Jews of Guyana, a South American nation with a tradition of religious tolerance
(JTA) — When Janet Jagan, an immigrant from the United States, made history by becoming Guyana’s prime minister in 1997, she was thought to be the country’s only Jew.
In fact, another Jew had recently purchased an island off the coast of Guyana, and 25 years later, there are at least two Jews living in the tiny South American nation. One is a Guyanese-British-Israeli guesthouse operator who has been working in Guyana since the 1970s. The other is a former Madison Avenue marketing executive from Chicago who until recently ran the country’s largest tour operator.
Both offer a window into three dynamics that define Guyana: a government that embraces all faiths, an economy based on extractive industries and an expansive rainforest the country hopes will be a draw for its growing ecotourism industry.
Guyana, an English-speaking country of roughly 800,000, came to international prominence in 1978 as the site of the Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones were killed, either by suicide or murder.
These days, though, the country is drawing attention for the recent discovery of oil off its coast. ExxonMobil announced the discovery in 2015 and promptly began developing Guyana’s oil resources. With over 11 billion barrels of reserves and producing over 350,000 barrels per day, Guyana is on track to produce more than 1 million daily barrels by 2030, potentially transforming one of South America’s poorest countries.
It was an earlier extractive industry that first brought Raphael Ades to Guyana. Born in Tel Aviv in 1951 to an Italian-Jewish mother and a Syrian-Jewish father, Ades had a peripatetic childhood. The family moved first to Milan when Ades, who goes by Rafi, was 11, after his father Meyer entered the diamond trade, then two years later to southwestern Germany. They landed in Pforzheim, known at the time as Goldstadt because of the prominence of jewelry and precious stone trading locally.
But the family was not yet settled: In 1967, Meyer took the family to London, where Ades finished high school and took his university entrance exams, excelling in all of the languages he had picked up — English, French, Italian, German and Hebrew. As a psychology student at the University of London, Ades began helping his father, who maintained an office in London’s diamond district, at work. His father contracted out the polishing, and one of the polishers was Indo-Guyanese.
“That day, my dad took out the atlas and started to read up on Guyana,” Ades recalled. “‘This is somewhere I want to go,’ he told me.”
During a trip to visit an Israeli friend in Venezuela, Meyer went on a prospecting trip to Guyana, and registered the Guyana Diamond Export company. When he suffered a heart attack, Ades and his mother flew to Georgetown to be with him. Barely 21, Ades stepped in to take a larger role in the business. He flew with other diamond buyers into the rural mining areas, and learned the operations were producing thousands of carats of diamonds.
“I stayed in Guyana through the second half of 1972 and fell in love with the place,” Ades recalled. “I went to the [main] Stabroek market in Georgetown, seeing all of the iguanas and macaws. When my dad recuperated, I started going back to Guyana myself.”
His mining business thrived. In 1997, he bought Sloth Island, a 160-acre outpost about a two-hour journey from Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, requiring an hour-long car ride through the small villages that dot the Atlantic coast, and then an hour’s boat ride down the widening Essequibo River, passing pristine forests lined with mangroves and Indigenous villages.
When Ades bought the property, it was mostly underwater. He brought in workers from neighboring villages to pump out the water, build up the sand and retaining walls and add structures. Sloths were already there, but he brought ocelots and monkeys from neighboring islands, as well as other birds. (The ocelots, he said, used to eat the electrical wires and open the fridge.)
Now anchoring Sloth Island is a blue and white guesthouse, a series of covered huts for dining and hammock relaxation and a wooden walkway for nature walks through partially cleared forest. Indigenous guides identify the numerous species of plants and birds. The pandemic has receded as a threat to business, and the island hosts tourists every weekend — though climate change is presenting new issues.
“There are many times that the river floods part of the island and I lose sand and soil,” Ades said. “We have to keep on pumping out water and repairing damage to the buildings when that happens.”
The year after he bought the island, his widowed mother, then living in Belgium, broke her hip. When she was well enough to travel she moved to Guyana to be with her son, dividing her time between Georgetown and Sloth Island. When she died in 2009, Ades was at a loss given the lack of a Jewish cemetery, synagogue, and minyan required to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. He was interested in burying her across from Sloth Island, on a hill in the mining town of Bartica just across the river. But a Jewish friend from France facilitated a connection with the Surinamese Jewish community, who prepared the body for burial in the cemetery adjacent to Paramaribo’s main synagogue.
“That’s the last time I was in a synagogue, in 2010, after my mother passed,” Ades recalled.
A view of Raphael Ades’ resort on Sloth Island. (Seth Wikas)
The absence of Jews in Guyana is a notable lacuna in a country that otherwise boasts a broad range of religions. History records a colony of Dutch Jews who settled in northwestern Guyana in the 17th century to produce sugarcane, but the English destroyed that colony in 1666, dispersing the Jewish residents. Jews from Arab lands moved to Guyana in the late 19th and 20th centuries to escape persecution but then migrated elsewhere; Jews fleeing Europe came in 1939 but did not settle long enough to establish a sustained community.
Janet Jagan was an anomaly: Born Janet Rosenberg in Chicago, she married a Guyanese man in the United States and moved with him to Guyana in 1947. Her father Cheddi Jagan was trained as a dentist but entered politics as Guyana gained independence from Great Britain, serving as the first premier of the semi-independent colonial government in the early 1960s and then as the country’s fourth president in the 1990s. When he died in 1997, Janet Jagan was sworn in as his replacement and then won a term of her own later that year. She died in 2009.
According to the 2012 census, Guyana is about two-thirds Christian, a quarter Hindu, and less than 10% Muslim, with smaller populations of Rastafarians and Baha’is. Guyana’s cities and towns are dotted with churches, mandirs and mosques, and the country has enshrined freedom of religion in its constitution. Christian, Hindu and Muslim holy days are national holidays.
“We embrace all faiths and are always looking to build bridges across communities,” Mansoor Baksh, a leader within the country’s Islamic Ahmadiyya movement, told JTA. Omkaar Sharma, a member of the country’s Hindu Pandit Council, said something similar: “We have a long tradition of co-existence and celebrating each other’s holidays. It’s what makes Guyana special.”
On the occasion of the Hindu festival of Diwali last month, President Mohamed Irfaan Ali, South America’s only Muslim head of government, emphasized the country’s inclusivity when he told the nation: “Under the One Guyana banner, our people are coming together, rejecting the forces of division and hatred, and uniting in the pursuit of peace, progress and prosperity.”
The sentiments have had practical implications for the country’s two Jews. In 2017, when a Guyana Tourism Authority group was slated to travel to Suriname for a conference on travel catering to Muslim tourists, the Mauritanian organizer of the event protested the presence of Jewish participants. There were supposed to be two: Ades, and Andrea de Caires, then head of the country’s largest private tour operator, Wilderness Explorers.
“I got a call from the Guyanese Tourism Minister at 1 a.m., who asked me if I was Jewish, and he explained the situation. And I thought, this [antisemitism] is still going on in the world?” de Caires remembered.
The Guyanese tourism minister refused to abide by the ban, de Caires proudly said, and told the Surinamese hosts and conference organizers: “If Jews aren’t allowed, then none of us are going.” The Surinamese, long known for their religious tolerance, also refused to accept the prohibition, and said that all participants were welcome (in Suriname’s capital Paramaribo, a mosque stands next to a synagogue and they share a parking lot). Both de Caires and Ades attended the event.
“When I arrived at the conference, the Surinamese minister of tourism welcomed me, and the director general of Guyana’s tourism ministry gave me the microphone to open the conference. We [Rafi and I] went in with our heads held high,” de Caires said.
De Caires has lived in Guyana since 2010 but her path to Guyana took a different route from Ades’. Born Andrea Levine in Chicago as the granddaughter of a rabbi, she traveled extensively as a child with her physician father, who taught her the importance of creating a Jewish home.
“Judaism was always a part of my life — we celebrated the holidays, lit candles on Friday night, but my father would often say, ‘Going to temple doesn’t make you Jewish,’” Caires said.
De Caires moved to New Jersey and trained as a jeweler, working with clients that included Tiffany’s. She transitioned to working at Bloomingdale’s in sales and then management, and then she moved on to the cosmetic company Borghese, where she became vice president of sales and marketing.
“I got caught up in Madison Avenue, a single mom of three kids, and then I met Salvador,” she recalled. “And I knew there was no point in pursuing a relationship if I wouldn’t move to Guyana.”
Salvador is Salvador de Caires, her Guyanese husband whom she met through her sister. Visiting Guyana for the first time in 2008, she fondly recalled her first visit to the Karanambu Lodge in the country’s south, a former cattle ranch that is now a conservation hub sitting at the center of Guyana’s forests, rivers, and savannahs. The most accessible route is via airplane from Georgetown and then four-by-four vehicle. While based at the lodge, de Caires continued to take conference calls for her New York-based career, while learning more about Guyana and the business of running a tourist destination off the beaten path. She and Salvador moved permanently to Guyana in 2010 to take over the day-to-day management of the lodge.
“When we moved to Guyana, it never occurred to me there would never be a Jewish community here. There’s a Jewish community everywhere,” de Caires remembered thinking. “That was pretty startling.”
Andrea de Caires is shown with Guyanese President Irfaan Ali. (Courtesy of de Caires)
So when they moved from Karanambu in 2016 to work at (and eventually lead) Wilderness Explorers in Georgetown, de Caires was committed to opening her home to Guyanese friends and neighbors with Hanukkah parties and Passover seders.
“The first year we had a Hanukkah party, our invitation went out for latkes and black cake (a traditional Guyanese dish), and we had government ministers, ambassadors and local friends over,” she recalled. “I told the story of the holiday and we lit the candles.”
It wasn’t the first time de Caires had been single handedly responsible for the fostering Jewish traditions in Guyana. She recalled an incident in 2012 when a Colombian-Jewish tourist came to Karanambu Lodge during Passover and asked her to make matzah brei. Under a thatched roof, she was able to make the holiday delicacy for her visitor.
For Ades, too, it is hosting that makes him most appreciate his chosen home in Guyana.
“I will always remember Feb. 1, 1963, the day we left Israel. We had always planned to return,” he said. “But I’m still here. Between then and now I have lived in so many places, and Guyana has been my home for a very long time. One of the best parts of my week is meeting new people who come to Sloth Island — people of different backgrounds from around the world. It is wonderful to welcome them all.”
De Caires plans to share her Jewish traditions once again next month, hosting another Hanukkah party for her Guyanese friends and neighbors. And with the worst of the pandemic in the rearview mirror, both Ades and de Caires are looking forward to booming tourist seasons. De Caires and her husband are also ready to begin a new professional chapter: They recently accepted new positions with a Guyanese conglomerate to develop its tourism operations at a riverine resort.
Does de Caires feel like she has lost something by establishing roots in a place without an established Jewish community?
“If I left here, that would mean there’s one less person to support others [including Jews],” de Caires replied. “I think it’s interesting Rafi and I are both in tourism — you need to have a lot of tenacity, but it’s important that we welcome others to this beautiful country.”
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For the Jews of Venice, an uneasy history of scapegoating and grudging tolerance
The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism
By Alexander Lee
Basic Books, 432 pages, $34
When one thinks of Venice and the Jews, the first figure that probably comes to mind is Shylock, literary history’s famous Jewish villain, a moneylender who demands a “pound of flesh” from the titular character in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
In Alexander Lee’s new book, The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, Shylock is mentioned just twice, both times in the introduction, but his ghost hovers over the pages of the book. Much of Lee’s historical account of Jewish life in Venice is devoted to Jewish moneylenders, and the key role they played in keeping Venice’s economy afloat.
The First Ghetto centers on the uneasy and guarded relationship that the Venetian government and its Christian people — first as the Venetian Republic and later as part of the Italian nation — always had with its Jewish population. According to Lee’s account, Venice didn’t want the Jews, but it needed them, largely for their ability to provide credit.
As he tracks the rise and fall of the Venetian Ghetto across more than six centuries, from Venice’s first Jewish visitor in 1315 through the fateful deportation of its Jewish citizens in the Holocaust, Lee’s focus is so narrowly limited to the fluctuations of finance that he very nearly makes the word “Jew” synonymous with “moneylender” or “pawnbroker.”
That’s a pity, because readers can be left with the impression that the primary role Jews played in the life of the city nicknamed “La Serenissima” — the most serene place — was financial.
“More than once, the Ghetto’s Jews helped keep the Venetian economy from collapse,” writes Lee, an Italian Renaissance scholar at the University of Warwick who has previously published four books, including Machiavelli: His Life and Times. “They founded no fewer than eight glittering synagogues, each a masterpiece of its kind, founded innumerable charities, and administered their own affairs with democratic probity.”
There is, of course, validity to the argument that the Venetian brand of capitalism that emerged in the late Middle Ages and sustained the city through the 20th century was reliant on Jewish labor. Since the mid-12th century, the Catholic Church had prohibited usury, loans offered with interest. But this rule only applied to Christians lending to Christians. They could, however, take out interest-bearing loans from Jewish moneylenders, who were permitted to lend and borrow without, apparently, incurring sin.
The precarious arrangement proved, over time, to be mutually beneficial for the Venetians and the Jews. As long as they were supporting the city’s financial needs, Jews were tolerated — even as they were isolated, overtaxed and frequently attacked. When the Venetians had less of a need for Jewish resources, cruelty against them spiked. They were blamed for most of the city’s woes, including the Black Death, the loss of wars, and various forms of spiritual corruption.
Even if Jews’ contributions were valued by some, the majority of Venice’s Christians “still harbored a horror of moneylending in Venice itself — and almost all regarded Jews with unconcealed hostility,” Lee writes. To balance this necessity against their antipathy, Jews were permitted to live in Venice, as long as they remained apart. Thus the Venice Ghetto was born.
Beginning in 1516, they were segregated to an island of their own on the dilapidated site of a former municipal cannon foundry, Ghetto Nuovo, surrounded by high walls and an iron gate. They were constrained in cramped conditions, and allowed to associate with Christian residents only for business purposes, in daytime. They were marked as outsiders wherever they traveled within the city by a yellow circular patch on their clothing, and an oddly shaped yellow hat.
“The Ghetto was simply the easiest way of allowing Jewish loans to keep flowing,” writes Lee, “while keeping the spiritual ‘risks’ [of associating with Jews] to a minimum.”
Although Jews had been segregated and harassed in other settings for centuries, Venice’s Ghetto was a precursor of the many Jewish ghettos that would later be created throughout Europe. The word ghetto, borrowed from Venice, later “shed its purely Jewish connotations,” Lee writes, and became “shorthand for vulnerability, poverty and powerlessness,” in the living conditions of any minority group.
The first 150 pages of The First Ghetto track the vicissitudes of the explotive financial partnership between Venice and its largely captive population of a couple thousand Jewish residents. The periods of time when Jewish life could be conducted with some sense of security and ease were offset by periods of blame, harassment, and threats of expulsion. But, as Lee argues, the story of Venice’s Jews is one of resilience and survival.
Shakespeare penned The Merchant of Venice between 1596 and 1598, in a period that Lee describes as the Ghetto’s “Golden Age, 1589-1630.” Yet precisely why the character of Shylock emerged in England in this period or how the play related to the true conditions of moneylending and commerce are unfortunately never discussed.
Culture and humanity are strikingly absent from Lee’s account of the history of the Venice Ghetto. Lee notes that the inhabitants of the Ghetto were “poets and scientists, musicians and philosophers; they put on plays and held festivals; and they transformed Venice into the greatest center for Hebrew printing in the world.”
But, apart from a detailed account of the genesis of the book trade, Lee offers little description of these poets and scientists or philosophers, nor does he provide much insight into the daily life experienced in the Venice Ghetto. I yearned for a more vivid sense of how the Ghetto’s people passed their time, what they ate, how they socialized or practiced religious observance — and how they responded to the discrimination they faced.
The book’s subtitle, Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, suggests that Lee might dive into the genesis of antisemitic tropes or ideas — why did Christian Venetians believe that Jews ate babies, for example? — but this kind of analysis isn’t provided. Instead, Lee seems to regard antisemitism as a given, a force of nature that merely fluctuates depending on the conditions of the time.
“By 1630,” writes Lee, “Venice was the best place in the world to be a Jew.” And, “Anyone could see that the Ghetto was indispensable to Venice.” The bright moment didn’t last long, however, as that same year, the city was hit by a plague that took about a third of its population. Because they were still relatively isolated, the Jewish community lost only about 15% of its residents, but the larger city’s “glory days were now numbered,” Lee writes. “There would be no recovery — only a gradual slide into irrelevance.”
In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte marched into Venice and forced its leaders to abdicate, effectively ending the Venetian Republic, and declared all its residents equal. The walls of Venice’s Ghetto were finally torn down; its gates were carried to the town square, smashed to bits, and burned. A member of the national guard, Raffaele Vivante, jumped up and gave a speech. “Here you have toppled the terrible doors which held our Nation as if locked up in a prison,” he cried, and then, as Lee writes, “The dancing went on till dawn.”
In the 1930s and 40s, under Mussolini’s fascist reign, the Venetians’ long-simmering hatred of its Jews rose to a boil. As the Jewish community was still small and somewhat contained, in spite of early 20th-century integration, it was easy to identify and decimate. The emptying of the Ghetto, handled here in about ten pages, resulted in the removal of around 2,100 people in 1943 and 1944, of whom hundreds were murdered.
In the 21st century, while the waves of antisemitism have once again crested, the notion that to be Jewish is to be linked to moneylending, banking, and usury has, sadly, gained new currency. Although this is not the only issue Lee touches upon, I wondered while reading the book if it was truly useful to hammer home this connection once again.
As I read Lee’s history, waiting for a better sense of the dimensions of humanity in the Ghetto, a line from the Merchant of Venice kept popping into my mind: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” I would have liked to have seen a slightly more sanguine touch on these pages.
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British Museum postpones a Jewish Culture Month lecture, citing ‘disruption’ concerns
(JTA) — The British Museum has canceled a lecture titled ‘‘Ancient Israel and Judah” that was scheduled to take place today on its premises.
In a statement on Wednesday, the museum said the decision was made because it was informed in recent days that “a significant proportion of registered attendees were individuals intending to deliberately disrupt the event.”
The event was supposed to be jointly led by members of the museum’s senior curatorial team alongside organizers from Jewish Culture Month, with the lecture presented by Dr. Paul Collins, the museum’s Keeper of the Department of the Middle East.
Jewish Culture Month is the first event of its kind in the United Kingdom, organized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The festivities opened on May 15 and run through June 16, and include more than 100 events celebrating Jewish heritage, creativity and culture across the U.K.
Major British institutions including the British Library, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum and the BBC are participating.
The British Museum said it was only postponing and not canceling the event, stating the decision was a joint one “made following conversations with organisers and security partners.” The museum added that the decision was made “to protect the event — not diminish it.”
British Museum Assistant Press Officer Lucy McDonald told JTA that the museum could not comment on “operational or security arrangements” and referred to the statement saying that the event would be rescheduled “to a later date when it can take place in an environment that properly safeguards both the audience experience and the integrity of the programme itself.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews responded with a statement saying, “It is highly regrettable that individuals have sought to deliberately disrupt a Jewish Culture Month event celebrating Jewish cultural heritage at the British Museum.” A spokesperson for the Board told JTA they could not comment further.
At the launch earlier this month, Board of Deputies Acting President Adrian Cohen said the events were designed for Jewish and non-Jewish community members alike because “British Jewish culture is not something that exists in isolation.”
Board of Deputies Director of Culture, Education and Communities Liat Rosenthal added, “Jewish culture has never been something sealed behind glass. It is a living culture. An argumentative culture. A hospitable culture. A culture of memory and reinvention. Of stories carried across borders and generations, then remade anew.”
The museum’s postponement of the event is a blow to London’s Jewish community, which has weathered rising antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Shimon Cohen, the campaign director for Shechita UK, an organization that advocates for the Jewish ritual of kosher animal slaughter, told JTA in a statement, “Why has our country descended into mob rule? Why are we signaling that intimidation, vitriolic abuse, and violence against Jews works?”
“The British Museum can ‘celebrate the contribution of our communities’ except the Jewish community,” said Cohen. “Instead, their message is clear: let them cower, be cancelled, and be exposed, through the cowardice of our passivity, to ever more hatred, and why? Simply because Jews don’t count!”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Miami, rekindling the Black-Jewish alliance that Clarence Jones insisted never died
The day before the March on Washington in 1963, a man who embodied much of what that civil rights action was all about left this world. The march went on, and changed history, in dedication to the life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois. During it, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins told the crowd, of Du Bois, that “his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause.”
A similar scenario is unfolding in Miami today with the start of a major convening of groups committed to the Black-Jewish alliance. It comes in the shadow of the death of Clarence B. Jones, a lawyer and speechwriter for Martin Luther King, Jr., who embodied that alliance and its cause for much of his life. He died last Friday at 95.
Chairman emeritus of the Black-Jewish alliance group Spill the Honey, and long cemented in history as the legal mind behind King’s protest strategies who also contributed passages to the “I Have a Dream” speech, Jones would vociferously argue that despite endless fissures, the alliance never ended.
That is a position I too have long maintained, particularly because a major part of the alliance is acknowledging the existence and power of Black Jews. As I and so many others tirelessly repeat, the two groups are not mutually exclusive. It’s a misnomer to say “Blacks” and “Jews” when each group overlaps with the other.
And if the alliance did die sometime during the last 30 or 40 years, did my existence and that of every other Black Jew not get the memo?
Our reality hasn’t stopped others from restarting the alliance with all the patentability of reinventing the wheel. I’ve lost count over the years of how many times a new Blacks-and-Jews group — again, usually ignoring Black Jews — would form as if it alone had the answer to whatever discord was then going on, from disputes over affirmative action after the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision to the latest over Israel’s horrific actions in Gaza and Lebanon.
That led me and Bruce Haynes, author of The Soul of Judaism and an African American professor who recently discovered his Jewish ancestry, to wonder last February if it was time to form an umbrella organization for all the organizations so dedicated.
While we discussed it, others were mobilizing.
An influential — and funded — group was already working on exactly that, calling for the National Convening of the Black-Jewish Alliance in Miami this week. Organizers include the Redstone Family Foundation and the EXODUS Leadership Forum, founded by CNN commentator Van Jones.
At 95, Clarence Jones would not have made the trip. But Spill The Honey, the organization he recently chaired and for which Haynes and I both serve as board members, is also among coalition partners.
Nearly 100 Black, Jewish, and Black Jewish leaders (this time, we’re being heard) will gather in what will be a show of unity merely in all of us being together, even if we don’t agree on everything. No coalition does, and those that do succeed (think of the not-always-comfortable bedfellows of the civil rights and labor groups that pulled off the March On Washington) do so despite their differences. What’s important is that we’ll be in the room together.
Will it work? Who knows. The alliance has always been rocky, even if it has also always survived.
And don’t count Clarence Jones out yet. His spirit will definitely be with us, which he foreshadowed in a conversation we had in the Forward three years ago.
“When I die, I’m coming back Jewish,” he said.
“But still Black?” I asked.
“Absolutely!”
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