Peacocks and Monkeys from Tarshish
The Story of Sri Lanka’s Jews
The ancient port of Tarshish must have been a rich and exotic place. According to the Bible’s Book of Kings, a fleet of ships would arrive from Tarshish every three years, bearing gold, silver, ivory, monkeys and peacocks (or maybe parrots) for King Solomon.
There is disagreement among Bible scholars about where Tarshish may have been. One opinion notes that King Solomon’s boats docked at Etzion Gever on the Red Sea, close to modern day Eilat. This suggests that Tarshish may have been to the south or east, maybe Africa, Arabia or even India.
The other opinion places Tarshish somewhere in the Mediterranean region. In another biblical book, that of Jonah, the fugitive prophet boarded a ship destined for Tarshish, from the Mediterranean port of Jaffa. There was no Suez canal in those days so if Tarshish had been in Arabia or India, the journey from Jaffa would have involved skirting the entire African coast, a very long and hazardous route. A long journey may have suited Jonah, who was trying to get as far away as he could, but it is unlikely that merchants shipping goods to Tarshish would have sent them from a Mediterranean port when they could have saved weeks of sailing by despatching them from the Red Sea.
Other passages in the Bible, and a couple of other ancient documents support the theory that Tarshish was a Mediterranean port. Some suggest it was Carthage on the north coast of Africa or, given the similarity of names, Tarsus in Turkey or Tartessos in Spain.
Jews in Sri Lanka disagree. They are certain that the city of Galle, on the island’s southern coast was the site of biblical Tarshish. They point out that the treasures Solomon imported from Tarshish were far more likely to be found in Sri Lanka than anywhere on the Mediterranean coast.
Sri Lanka may qualify as the world’s most benign location for Jewish settlement. The island, once known as Ceylon, has never had a large Jewish population but Sri Lanka’s Jews do not seem to have experienced anything like the persecution or discrimination so frequent elsewhere in the world. Indeed, Jewish life on the island was so easy that, according to legend, Adam and Eve chose to live there after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and Noah’s Ark finally came to rest there, on the mountains of Serendib (the old Persian name for Sri Lanka, from which we get the word serendipity).
The earliest record of Jewish settlement on Sri Lanka comes from the travelogue of a Persian geographer, Abu Sa'id al-Hasan. Writing at the beginning of the 10th century he says he found a large number of Jews on the island, but says nothing more about them. 200 years later another Arab traveller added a little more detail, reporting that four of the 16 members of the King of Serendib’s governing council were Jews.
If you look on the internet, as I did, you will find references to the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela who is said to have come across a community of 3,000 Jews when he visited Sri Lanka in the 1170s. But he may not have been referring to Sri Lanka. His geography sounds right but he called the island he visited Ibrig or Candig, and even the author of the 1907 translation of Benjamin’s travel diary questions whether he was writing about Ceylon. Nevertheless, even without Benjamin it is apparent that Jews have lived on Sri Lanka for a very long time.
When Portugal colonised Ceylon in 1505 they brought Jewish soldiers with them. These soldiers had been forcibly converted to Catholicism in Portugal but still lived under severe discrimination and jumped at the opportunity to get away from their homeland. The soldiers were, of course, all men; few, if any, Jewish women from Portugal travelled with them. It didn’t take for the soldiers to settle down with local women. Their descendants are now members of the small Sri Lankan ethnic group known as Portuguese Burghers. Their Jewish ancestry only survives in some of their surnames.
The Dutch came to Sri Lanka next, entering into a treaty with the local King, agreeing to evict the Portuguese in return for a trade monopoly with the island. More Jews arrived and although intermarriage again depleted their numbers, this time several families retained their Jewish identity. The records of the Dutch East India Company contain the names of various Goldsteins and Singers who arrived together in 1787. So did Frans Phillip Frentz who was appointed as magistrate in the Kalpitya peninsula in the north west of the country.
The most frequently mentioned Dutch Jew to take up residence in Sri Lanka had in fact converted to Catholicism before his arrival. His name was Leopold van Dort, he took up the position of Professor of Hebrew at the Christian Theological Seminary in Colombo, where he translated the Qur’an into Hebrew. He made his translation from a Dutch version of the Qur’an, which had been based on a French rendering of the original Arabic (so it probably wasn’t too accurate). He lost his job, and vanished from the island records, when the Dutch governor general removed Hebrew from the Seminary’s curriculum. It has been suggested that van Dort went back to Amsterdam.
When Napoleon occupied the Netherlands, the British moved to keep him out of Dutch Ceylon. They seized the island and remained in occupation until 1948. It was under British rule, in 1841, that three wealthy brothers from the de Worms family came to Ceylon. They purchased several estates in the hill country and planted them with coffee. When recurring outbreaks of coffee blight destroyed their crops they imported tea seedlings from China and turned their estates over to tea. They established the flourishing tea industry that is now Sri Lanka’s largest agricultural export. The de Worms brothers returned to England in 1865 but their estate remains in business today, still known as the Rothschild Tea Plantation, named after their maternal grandfather.
It was under British rule that the Jewish presence in Sri Lanka grew from a small number of individuals scattered across the country to something resembling a community. A synagogue was built in Colombo for soldiers in the British army and several British Jews took up positions in the colonial administration. The person whose name is cited most frequently is Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard. He worked for the civil service, became an assistant government agent and wrote a novel, The Village in the Jungle, based on his time in the country. Two other British Jews, Sir Sidney Abrahams and Sir Alan Rose served as the island’s Chief Justices with Alan Rose acting as Governor-General for a while.
Jews started to leave Sri Lanka in 1948, the year in which the island was granted independence, the State of Israel was founded and war broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Sri Lanka has a large Muslim population and its new independent government came down firmly on the Arab side, leaving many Jews feeling endangered.
But they came back. Sri Lanka is now one of the most popular destination for Israeli tourists. The synagogue in Colombo was demolished in 1966, and a hotel built on the site, but the Chabad outreach organisation have moved in to cater for religious, and not so religious, Jews. There are now apparently four Chabad centres across the island, probably commanding a larger institutional Jewish presence than at any time in the past.
Three weeks ago, on October 24th 2024, in the surfing resort of Arugam Bay, Jews were reminded that there is no guarantee of safety, even in Sri Lanka. The Israeli government, the US Embassy and the German Foreign ministry all issued warnings of a terrorist threat. The local police said that one of the targets was the Chabad centre. Fortunately the attack was thwarted, three people were arrested and the police have now set up a hotline dedicated to assisting Israeli tourists. In contrast, the neighbouring Maldives islands have announced that they are banning Israelis from entering their country.
I wrote this article after I received a message from Ruan Ranasinghe, telling me about the Jewish history of his land. His grandmother, Anne Ranasinghe, was one Sri Lanka’s most important poets, a winner of countless awards, whose work is discussed in the Oxford Companion to Contemporary Poetry.
Born as Anneliese Katz in Germany in 1925, she escaped to England as a teenager on the Kindertransport, the remarkable rescue programme for German Jewish children. She met her future husband, Dr. Don Abraham Ranasinghe while she was studying in London to become a midwife. They married and moved to Sri Lanka; he became a professor at Colombo University Medical School and she took a degree in journalism after raising four children. She became a citizen of Sri Lanka in 1956 and published her first collection of poems, And the Sun That Sucks The Earth to Dry in 1971. She also wrote short stories and essays. She died in 2016, having never seen her parents again. They were murdered by the Nazis. Her tribute to her mother, Holocaust 1944 is available online.
