Barbados - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 87

façade. Its only drawback perhaps lies in its proximity to the sea. Properly to contemplate the noble pro-
portions a helicopter would be needed, or the crow's nest of a windjammer lying a couple of furlongs out
to sea.
The dispersal of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula which began with the edicts of Ferdinand and Isa-
bella and which sprinkled the Low Countries, the Balkans and the Levant with Spanish-speaking Jews,
once more set Jewry of the Latin world in motion. Maranos from Portugal were early settlers in Brazil,
for the territory of the new world that lay to the east of the forty-sixth meridian of longitude (roughly
speaking, east of a line running from north to south through a point to the east of the Amazon delta) was
granted to Portugal in 1494 by a Bull or Pope Alexander VI Borgia at the treaty of Tordesillas. The rest,
the Caribbees and all of North and the huge remainder of South America, fell to Spain. After the fall of
Recife, enterprising Jews left Brazil and settled in likely trading points in the Caribbean, and many of the
islands where the Jews are now extinct still shelter the cemeteries and ruined synagogues of these adven-
turous offshoots of the Sephardim.
A number of Jewish families took up their quarters in Barbados twenty years after the island was first
annexed by the English, and the commerce and trade of the island prospered in their hands. 'Jews Street'
in Bridgetown became the recognized commercial centre of the island, and names such as Lobo, Ben-
jamin, Belasco, Elkin, Meyers, Danials, Samuel, Levi, Reuben, Massiah, Montefiore, Pinheiro and Da
Costa—the last is still the name of a firm of Bridgetown merchants and of a monumental general stores in
Broad Street—occur often in the history of the island. Some of these Marano families long ago adopted
the Anglican faith, as the tablets in the churches prove. The Synagogue of Bridgetown fell into disuse.
It was subject to the magnificent seventeenth-century Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue in the East End of
London, whose fine Carolean panelling and gilding and sculpted festoons are such a surprise in those
depressing streets. It is now the premises of the Barbados Turf Club. As they drive their motors into the
garage, the members can still see the gravestone of an early rabbi who performed the rites of circum-
cision, according to the boast of his epitaph, 'with dexterity and to applause.'
Driving back from the coast of St. James's Parish to Canefield, we would pass the old Moravian
Church of Sharon. It is almost the earliest in the Western Hemisphere. Its massive white walls, deep
arches and red roof, dominate fields of sugar like a small seventeenth-century schloss or a solid Hussite
stronghold in the Czechoslavakian hills. The Catholic faith, owing to the unbroken English ownership of
the island, is practically unknown, and Labat, rustling down the main street of Speightstown (where for
several days he was the guest of a Church of England parson) in his Dominican habit, records the surprise
of the burghers, who had never in their life before 'seen a bird of my feather.' But the island teems with
Protestant sects. The wails of the Holy Rollers sail across the fields near Holetown; and through the win-
dows of their churches glimpses can be caught of their ecstatic evolutions. Revivalism and rum are two
important means of expression in a social system that affords few other outlets for the humbler coloured
Barbadians. In more educated coloured circles a way out is often sought and found in disaffection.
In nothing is the illusion of England so compelling as in the Parish churches of Barbados. They stand
alone in the canefields, their battlemented belfries and vanes and pinnacles appearing over the tops of
sheltering clumps of trees. Moss-covered crosses and headstones, or square hurricane graves embedded
in the soil, scatter the turf inside the low walls with the haphazard charm of an English churchyard, and
the interiors are full of the familiar and evocative aroma of hassocks and hymn-books and pews. Natur-