The small Jewish community in the Bahamas has origins dating back to the 17th century. Luis de Torres, who was the official interpreter of Christopher Columbus is believed to have been one of the first European Jews to set foot in the New World, when the Santa Maria landed in San Salvador in 1492.

Luis De Torres was supposedly fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Chaldean, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Latin. He was also a Converso, a crypto-Jew who had been forced to convert to Catholicism out of fear of the Inquisition.

The Bahamas were first settled by the British in 1620, but at that time, relatively few Jews came to the islands. Still, a Jew, Moses Franks, served as attorney general and chief justice of the islands in the 18th century. After World War I, a few Jewish families from Poland, Russia, and the United Kingdom settled in Nassau, the capital.

Later Jews came to Freeport on Grand Bahamas Island. In Nassau there is a Conservative synagogue named for Luis de Torres and in Freeport there is a Reform congregation with a synagogue that was built in 1972.

Today there are about 300 Jewish people living in the Bahamas. In addition to a synagogue, on New Providence Island in Nassau there is a special section of a cemetery that is walled-off for Jewish graves at the corner of Shirley St. and Lover’s Lane.