The Code Noir of 1685 opened by ordering all Jews out of France's colonies, which makes their presence in Saint-Domingue a puzzle. Loker's answer is that the law went unenforced as often as not, that bribes and loopholes worked, and that many arrivals presented themselves at first as New Christians.

Sifting notarial acts, indemnity registers, parish records and family letters, he maps names across the colony: around Jeremie and the district named for a rabbi called Moron, at Les Cayes, in Leogane and Port-au-Prince, in Jacmel. Most had come from the Sephardic towns of southwestern France or from Curacao and the smaller Antilles.

His answer to his own title is narrow. Only at Cap Francais does the evidence support an organized community, with a prayer leader, a burial ground, and a fundraising letter from Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel addressed to its members. Elsewhere he finds scattered families whose religious life, if any, went unrecorded.