This volume, produced for the Caribbean Series published by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Leiden, one of the most distinguished scholarly bodies in the Netherlands, contributes to a larger body of work on Dutch colonialism in both the East and West Indies. Viewed within that framework, the book does an admirable job of outlining the Jewish experience in Dutch Suriname from the colonial period to the late twentieth century, with particular regard to its social etiology.
That context, however, is a small one in the schema of both Caribbean and Jewish history, and the book has difficulty in speaking to broader outlines of those historiographies. It might have sketched out Suriname’s roots as an English colony, but largely neglects Suriname’s founding and its transfer to Dutch rule under the 1667 Treaty of Breda. Sparing use of some comparative data from other colonies with Jewish populations, from...
