The establishment of Chabad houses in Weligama and along the Sri Lankan East Coast sparked a mass agitation across the country, paving the way for many social media commentators to depict Jewish tourists on the island as bogeymen. Yet the history of the Jews in Sri Lanka tells us a different narrative — one that many are reluctant to acknowledge.

The demographic structure of Sri Lanka after independence offers little indication 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. Anna Ranasinghe, a German-born Jewish Holocaust survivor, settled in Sri Lanka after the end of World War II 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 back to antiquity. According to biblical tradition, Tarshish was a distant port visited by King Solomon’s merchant ships, which returned laden with treasures such as gold, silver, and exotic creatures. Many have identified Sri Lanka’s ancient port city of Galle with the Tarshish of legend, where Solomon’s vessels exchanged goods such as peacocks and apes, both native to the island. Elephants, an emblematic symbol 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, mention the presence of a "large number of Jews" on the island — such a claim can be justified by other contemporary writings affirming the existence of Persians, Abyssinians and Nestorians, suggesting that Jewish traders may also have stayed there during the Anuradhapura period in Sri Lankan history.

Burghers May Have Jewish Ancestry

A presence of Jews in Sri Lanka emerged 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 and were appointed to overseas positions 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) may have Jewish ancestry, as numerous Jewish employees of the Dutch East India Company settled in the island 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, motivated by his evangelical convictions Although the proposal was never implemented, 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 island’s economic, social, and cultural development. For example, Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish Prime Minister of Britain, recommended Muttu Coomarswamy for a 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 began 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.

Post-Colonial Jewish Connections

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 the island, 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 what he perceived as 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.

Colombo Had a Synagogue

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.

(The author is a lecturer at the Faculty of Law, General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Sri Lanka. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at punsaraprint10@gmail.com )