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The Jewish holiday of Purim as celebrated in Suriname and Curaçao in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was neither a private occasion nor limited to Jews. Instead, Jews and Christians, along with the enslaved and manumitted peoples who outnumbered them, participated in public holiday revelry with abandon. In Suriname, Purim lasted nearly a week and sometimes longer. Crowds of masked Jews, young and old, poured into the streets of Paramaribo, yelling out obscene declarations against Christianity. Surrounding them were bands of field slaves pulling wagons laden with costumed Jews and their domestic bondsmen. Sometimes these bondsmen circled the masquerading Jews, shouting and singing through the streets. Intoxicated Jewish men dressed up as armed soldiers, sailors, and even Maroons and Indians, and women donned men’s clothing, their female slaves following suit. Christians purchased masks from Jewish vendors and disguised themselves, with the suspected intention of attacking their enemies incognito. In Curaçao, meanwhile, Jews stretched out the observance of Purim to eight or ten days. Each year, masked youths paraded through the streets of Willemstad, dancing and singing to the tune of an accompanying band and visiting Jewish homes. The carousing included a magnificent fireworks display, the firecrackers bursting into the air or zigzagging erratically across the ground. Purim in Curaçao, one observer remarked in 1853, “constituted carnival.” In both colonies, not only the Jewish community’s ruling institution, the Mahamad, but also successive colonial governors stepped in to curb such public displays of boisterous commotion and intemperance.The Jewish community in Suriname from the17th-19th centuries had more autonomy than anywhere else, possibly in the world. They were one third to one half or so of the "white" population (although most were Sephardic) and some established an autonomous territory in the rainforest that later became known as Jodensavanne ("Jews’ Savannah".) They had their own court system for civil affairs and even their own militia in Jodensavanne. This relative power, plus economic power, influenced everyone else - and the Dutch Indies Purim, in some ways a Carnival, reflected that.
If we consider the enthusiastic participation of the enslaved, it is clear that Purim in Suriname from the second quarter of the eighteenth century had become an Afro-Creole festival, akin in many ways to what scholars and many contemporary observers in the Caribbean have understood as a local variety of carnival. Within the synagogue, Purim retained its characteristics as a classical Jewish holiday celebrated by Jews. But once it took to the streets, its ethnic applicability broadened. Its masquerade and crossdressing, the relaxation of social boundaries, and dancing and singing through the streets invited the participation of others... The holiday by the early 1800s had become a joint cultural production with strong West African overtones.
Ben-Ur says that Purim was given outsized importance by the local Jewish community because so many of their members descended from crypto-Jews who had hidden their religion for so long: they identified with Esther, who also hid her religion in the king's palace.
(The image is AI-generated of what Purim might have looked like in Jodensavanne.)
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