French King Louis XIV ordered Jews expelled from French colonies in North America on this date in 1683. The order was mostly ignored where it would be most relevant, in Martinique, the Caribbean land with the largest Jewish population. France had conquered Martinique in 1635; Jews had arrived there with the Dutch in the previous century, and it was a Sephardic Jew, Benjamin d’Acosta, who introduced the cultivation of the sugar-cane into the island’s slave system.
Louis XIV’s order was reiterated in the “Code Noir” in 1685, which defined laws for slave-ownership in the French empire, restricted the activities of free Africans, banned all religions but Catholicism, and ordered all Jews out of the colonies. Again, the decree was largely ignored.
In Canada, which the king officially declared to be French territory in 1663, Jews had not been permitted to settle, and their presence there was not documented until the French and Indian War of the 1760s, when four Jews were members of the British regiment that attacked Montreal. In 1738, however, Esther Brandeau, a French Jewish girl, disguised herself as a boy, “Jaques la Frague,” and entered Quebec as a sailor. She was soon arrested and was eventually sent back to France, after refusing to convert.
“After years of legal wrangling between the governments of Canada and France, Esther was deported, and she vanished from the historical record. Her story shows the lengths 18th-century Jewish women had to go to in order to fulfill thei