Book review/ Mary Hanna for the Sunday Observer.
The Knell of Parting Day: A History of the Jews of Port Royal and The Hunt’s Bay
Cemetery by Marilyn Delevante.
Jamaica 2008, published by Marilyn Delevante. 214 pages.
With painstaking care and much heart, Marilyn Delevante has set herself the task
of unearthing the story of the Port Royal Jews. In this astonishing book, she has gathered
information from the gravestones of 163 graves of their burial ground, the Hunt’s Bay
Cemetery, and revealed information that would otherwise have been lost to history and to
descendants of this ancient Jewish community if it had not been for her tenacious
scholarly labour in revealing names, dates, occupations, and inter-linkages of those
buried in this remote graveyard. It is a work of love and honour, brilliantly realized and
invaluable to other scholars and a general readership alike.
This beautiful and precise book is filled with astonishingly clear colour
photographs of the cemetery and its wealth of information carved into the tombstones
that remain extant. Delevante has collected a team that includes translators of Portuguese,
Spanish, and Hebrew to render into English the inscriptions on the stones. “The
identification of Rabbi Pardo’s tombstone, and confirmation of his date of death is the
single most exhilarating discovery made while conducting research on the Hunt’s Bay
Cemetery”, she says.
The title of this fascinating text is taken from Thomas Grey’s “Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard” (“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day”). It is a singularly
appropriate title for a text whose main purpose is to honour and preserve the memory of
the departed community of Port Royal Jewry. This previously unknown community bears
many linkages to present Jamaican Jews and the book is an invaluable resource for
anyone seeking to trace his or her lineage. Delevante has done much of this work in the
text. With painstaking care, she has traced the connections between the people
commemorated on the gravestones and teased out their relationship also to living or
surviving members of the community. It makes for absorbing reading.
Her pointers are astute and welcome, her photographs clear and interesting, and
the text as a whole is a profoundly reverent contribution to Jewish scholarship of the
Caribbean region.
Her wonderful chapters on the town of Port Royal and the great earthquake of
1692 are among my favourites in the text.
This contribution to preservation of the stones in book form is a great
contribution to Caribbean scholarship and is a welcome addition to scholarship on the
Jewish communities of the region.
By presenting the genealogy in the Hunt’s Bay cemetery and following it into the
present community, she has contributed greatly to the narrative of present Jewish families
and to families that bear the ancient Jewish names but who no longer practice the Jewish
faith and also a compelling narrative of the religious life and the rabbis of Port Royal.
This is a thoroughly scholarly work.