Who do you think was the first Jew to set foot in Australia?
The obvious answer
is one of the First Fleet Jewish convicts.
Whilst that is probably where we would find the name of the first Jew to
stay for a while, it is not the only possible answer. Nor is it the same
question as ‘who was the first to set foot’.
Who are the other
candidates for this honour?
The Jack Tars of
the Georgian Royal Navy were both pressed ganged and compulsorily enlisted by
order of magistrates as an alternative to prison. Given the pattern
of settlement of Jews in the major naval ports it is possible that Jews were
among the crews of the First Fleet .
We have good evidence that pressed Jewish
sailors like Landsman Moses Benjamin were included in Nelson's fleet in 1803.
It is even possible that poverty, the bounty for enlisting and the hope of prize money might have encouraged an occasional desperate Jew to volunteer.
It’s fun to speculate that a Jew might have rowed the first boat ashore and even leapt out to hold it steady for the officers to land. Whilst the naval tradition is the most senior officer is the last aboard and first out of a small boat, that is only after it has been made secure, so it is within the realms of possibility that the first person to set foot ashore in 1788 was a Jewish sailor who is part of the crew of the boat in the background of this painting.
We
would be able to get some clues by following up on the work done by Geoffrey
Green and looking at the names and ratings of the crews from the excellent
records kept by the Royal Navy.
If there were no identifiable Jews among Captain Arthur Phillip’s men, what about Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse’s 114-man crew, might there have been a Jew among them? How did the 18th century French navy go about manning its ships?
Wait, I hear you say, why start in 1788 with the First Fleet and Captain Arthur Phillip? Look at the enlistment and names of the crew HMS Endeavour and of James Cook’s landing parties in 1770. Cook left Plymouth on 26 August 1768, six years after Plymouth Synagogue was built in 1762 so it is feasible his crew included one or more Jews.
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| Interior of Synagogue, Plymouth Devon UK |
Abel Janszoon Tasman landed in in what we now call Tasmania in 1642.
Amsterdam was a sanctuary for Jews from Spain, Portugal and Eastern Europe from the mid sixteenth century.
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| Ashkenazi Synagogue Amsterdam |
Could there have been a Jew in the employ of the Dutch East
India Company among Tasman’s landing party?
What about the crew of
the Batavia, wrecked in WA in 1629? Was one of the mutineers or their victims the first Jew to land and stay in Australia?
Can we go back
further? Why limit ourselves to a somewhat Ashkenazi
perspective. What route might a Sephardic ancestor have taken to
reach Australia?
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Could a Jew have found their way into the company
of the Macassan visitors who came to Northern Australia in search of trepan as long as 800 years
ago? It would be hard to discover. We know the Portuguese led by Francisco Serrão
arrived in Malacca in 1511 and there is plentiful evidence that Jews were part of the conquest of South America, for instance building a Synagogue in Recife, in Brazil in 1636. There might well have been one or more Jews among the Portuguese who reached Malacca. It is a big stretch but not entirely beyond the the realms of possibility that one travelled with a Macassan party to North Australia.
How did spices reach the West before 1511? That opens an entire new line of enquiry involving the Maritime Spice Routes that reached Western Europe via the Middle East.
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| Maritime Spice Route |
Could a Jewish merchant have sailed among the Islamic traders and reached
Northern Australia, either by accident or design?
