Skip to content
Menu
Search the archive

Blog

Costa Rica's two Sephardic arrivals, four centuries apart

· Deric

The first arrival: colonial New Christians, Cartago, 1500s–1600s

Iberian New Christians came with the conquest and settled principally around Cartago, the colonial capital. They arrived as Catholics — legally, publicly, and in most cases by then sincerely — and their descendants lost any awareness of Jewish origin entirely within a few generations.

This is the population our country-by-country post is about: the Central Valley founder families, the repeating surnames, the endogamy. No synagogue, no community, no records of Jewish practice — because the whole point was that there be none. What survives is genealogy and, in principle, DNA.

Careful: "Portuguese merchant" in a Spanish colonial document is a hint, not a verdict. It often meant New Christian — that is exactly why the phrase is useful and exactly why it is not proof. A named individual in a dated record is proof. Portugués is a reason to go and look.

The second arrival: the Caribbean Sephardim, 1800s

Entirely different people, entirely different story.

In the nineteenth century Sephardic families came to Costa Rica from Curaçao, Jamaica, Panama and elsewhere in the Caribbean — the descendants of the Amsterdam-linked Portuguese Jewish communities of the Dutch and English colonies. They settled in Alajuela and San José and became merchants.

Recorded family names include Sasso, Robles, Maduro, Halman, Méndez-Chumaceiro, Salas de Lima, Lindo and Piza.

These families never hid. They carried their names from Curaçao, where Mikvé Israel — the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas — had been functioning since the 1600s. And like the colonial families before them, they married each other, keeping tight family ties within a small group.

Then a third, which is not Sephardic at all

From the early 1900s, and heavily in the 1930s, Ashkenazi Jews from Poland arrived — known locally as polacos. Max Teitelbaum, from Siedlce, arrived in 1928, started as a door-to-door seller, and brought over so many relatives and friends that most of Costa Rica's Ashkenazi community descends from that chain. Today the community is roughly 2,500 people — about 2,000 Ashkenazi and 850 Sephardic.

Why this post matters for the DNA question

Three arrivals, three completely different genetic signatures, and readers mix them up constantly.

  1. If your Jewish ancestry comes from the colonial layer, it is 400–500 years deep, diluted through dozens of generations, detectable only because endogamy preserved it — and it will not look Ashkenazi.
  2. If it comes from the 19th-century Curaçao layer, it is recent, traceable by name, and should appear in genealogy before it appears in a DNA test.
  3. If it comes from the 1930s Polish layer, your test will say Ashkenazi and say it loudly, because that is the population consumer panels actually measure well.

A Costa Rican with a few percent "Ashkenazi" on a consumer test has almost certainly not measured layer 1. Below ~2% it is noise; above that it more often points to layer 2 or 3, or to the Ashkenazi panel's known bleed. Sorting out which layer you are in is a genealogical question first — and in Costa Rica, unusually, the genealogy exists to answer it.

Sources