Sephardic Atlantic
The historical commercial network of Sephardic Jewish merchant communities across the Atlantic basin from the 16th–19th centuries, anchored by Amsterdam, London, Curaçao, and the colonial port cities of the Americas. The first organized Jewish commercial network of the modern era.
The Sephardic Atlantic is the historical commercial network of Sephardic Jewish merchant communities that operated across the Atlantic basin from the 16th through 19th centuries — anchored by Amsterdam, London (after 1656), the Caribbean entrepôts (Curaçao, Suriname, Jamaica, Barbados), and the colonial port cities of Recife, Newport, New York, and Charleston.
The network was originally constituted by Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia in 1492 and 1497, many of whom passed through Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Livorno before establishing trading houses across the Atlantic world. The communities specialized in sugar, tobacco, diamonds, coral, and slave-economy adjacent commodities, and operated through kin-based credit networks that pre-dated modern correspondent banking.
The Sephardic Atlantic is structurally important as the first organized Jewish commercial network of the modern era. The institutions it produced — the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam (Esnoga, 1675), Bevis Marks in London (1701), Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, Shearith Israel in New York — remain operational, and many of its merchant families seeded later European and American Jewish capital structures.