By Punsara Amarasinghe –

Formation of Chabad houses in Weligama and the East Coast sparked a mass agitation across the country, paving the path for many social media pundits to depict Jewish tourists to the island as bogeymen. Yet the history of the Jews in Sri Lanka tells us a different narrative; a story that many are reluctant to admit. 

The demographic structure of Sri Lanka after independence has not given the slightest clue about a permanent Jewish population. In contrast to Sri Lanka’s neighbouring state, India, where Cochin and Baghdadi Jews survived amidst all the chaos. In post-independent Sri Lanka, Jewish connections to the island’s culture largely remained overlooked, as there was significant scholarship to explore the island’s history with the Jews. Holocaust survivor, a German-born Jew, Anna Ranasinghe, settled in Sri Lanka after the end of the war with her Sri Lankan husband and remarked towards the end of her life, “ I am the only Jew in this country with a Sri Lankan passport “. 

Despite this obscure history, the connection between the Jews and the island nation may be traced to antiquity. According to biblical tradition, Tarshish was a distant port visited by King Solomon’s merchant ships, which returned laden with treasures—gold, silver, and exotic creatures. Many believe Sri Lanka’s ancient port city of Galle to be the Tarshish of legend, where Solomon’s vessels exchanged goods such as peacocks and apes, both native to the island. Elephants, so emblematic of Sri Lanka, are also thought to have been among the prized commodities.

Besides the biblical account the writings of Persian traveler Abu Sa’id al-Hasan who visited Sri Lanka in the 9th century he writes of finding a “large number of Jews” on the island and such a claim can be justified with the other contemporary writings affirming the existence of Persians, Abyssinians and Nestorians, in which Jewish traders were presumed to have stayed during the Anuradhapura kingdom in Sri Lankan history. 

A notable influx of Jews into Sri Lanka began after the Portuguese and later the Dutch established control over the island’s coastal territories. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, many Jews fled to the Netherlands, where a considerable number joined the Dutch East India Company for overseas appointments in the East Indies and other Asian territories.

As the Sri Lankan historian J. B. Muller argues, many Burghers (descendants of European settlers in Sri Lanka) have Jewish ancestry because numerous Jewish employees of the Dutch East India Company settled in Sri Lanka and intermarried with the local population. Their descendants developed a hybrid identity while retaining Dutch surnames, many of which resembled those commonly found among Jewish families in the eighteenth-century Netherlands. For example, the surname Van Dort, which is common among Sri Lankan Burghers, is believed to derive from Leopold Immanuel Jacob Van Dort, who served as Professor of Hebrew at the Christian Theological Seminary in Colombo between 1758 and 1760.

During the early years of British rule, Sir Alexander Johnston, the Chief Justice of British Ceylon, proposed a plan to establish a Jewish settlement in Sri Lanka. Although the proposal was never implemented, Johnston strongly advocated the establishment of a permanent Jewish settlement, motivated by his evangelical convictions. His vision reflected the growing influence of Christian Zionism in nineteenth-century Britain.

In contrast to the Dutch Jews who settled in Sri Lanka primarily through matrimonial alliances, British Jews rarely selected the island as a permanent residence. This is reflected in the 1911 census, which recorded only eight Jews living in Sri Lanka. Despite their small numbers, British Jews made significant contributions to the economic, social, and cultural development of Sri Lanka. For example, Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish Prime Minister of Britain, recommended Muttu Coomarswamy for knighthood, making him the first Asian to receive this distinction. Additionally, several years before the arrival of James Taylor, recognized as the father of Sri Lanka’s tea industry, the Rothschild brothers, Maurice and Eugene, played a pivotal role in establishing the first commercial tea plantation in Sri Lanka. Their enterprise commenced in the mid-nineteenth century when they acquired land in the Pussellawa region, located in the scenic hills of Ceylon.

In the 1930s, the British appointed Sir Sydney Abrahams, a Jewish jurist, as Chief Justice of Ceylon. He delivered the landmark Bracegirdle judgment, which affirmed the rule of law and remains a milestone in Sri Lankan constitutional history.During the same period, Dr Vallu Reich, an Austrian Jewish scholar who fled Nazi persecution, became the first Professor of Modern European Languages at the University College of Ceylon. He subsequently played a pioneering role in promoting the study of French and German among Sri Lankan undergraduates.

The architectural legacy of Ulrik Plesner represents another subtle Jewish connection that helped shape Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history. Before relocating to Israel, Plesner spent nine years in Sri Lanka, where he pioneered a distinctive approach to modern Sri Lankan architecture. In the 1980s, he returned as the chief architect of the Mahaweli Development Project.Plesner rejected rigid Western design paradigms and the sterility of orthodox modernism. Instead, he drew upon vernacular architectural traditions and incorporated principles derived from seventeenth-century Sri Lankan village layouts documented by observers such as Robert Knox.

Today, the Chabad Houses in Colombo and on Sri Lanka’s southern coast have attracted considerable attention amid a rise in anti-Semitic incidents and rhetoric. Against this contemporary backdrop, it is noteworthy that Colombo once had an active synagogue, which served as a regular place of worship for British Jewish servicemen during the Second World War.

In an essay published in Jewish Quarterly, Anne Ranasinghe notes that the synagogue was frequented by Jewish servicemen in the British Army and was demolished not long after her arrival in Sri Lanka in 1952. She recalls that there was no established Jewish community and identifies only a handful of Jews living in the country, most of whom were European women married to local men.This account is corroborated by Sri Lankan writer Yasmin Gooneratne in her memoir Relative Merits, in which she recalls watching, with fascination, dozens of British servicemen attending the synagogue on the Sabbath.