ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century English attitudes towards Jews which, though considerably more accommodating than those of Europe's Catholic powers, were not particularly welcoming. Ownership of slaves was not uncommon among Jewish settlers in the West Indies. Reverend Robert Robertson of Nevis observed that many Jews and in the two former islands, St Kitts and Nevis are Owners of a Number of Slaves'. A few Jews were resident on the island in 1678, when Sir William Stapleton, governor of the Leeward Islands, compiled the colony's first census. As a participant in both local and transatlantic commerce, Esther Pinheiro possessed influence which stretched beyond the spheres of both her family and Nevis's Jewish community. It stands to reason that the greater assimilability of the Quakers and Huguenots was the result of the lesser degree of otherness that either community offered to English planter society in comparison with that presented by the Jews.
