A Society for the Visitation of the Sick and for Mutual Assistance was organized in October, 1813, with Jacob Cohen as its first president. In 1819 several ladies organized the still existing Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, of which Miss Rebecca Gratz (1781–1869), who was reputed to be the prototype of Rebecca in Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe,” was the first secretary. Several other benevolent and educational societies date their origin from the first half of the Nineteenth Century, and have helped to give the Jewish community of Philadelphia that substantiality and compactness of organization which is missing in other large cities of the United States.
At the same time progress was being made in other directions, too. The aptitude of the Jew for the legal profession could not be displayed and utilized as early as his well known medical skill, which he exercised even in the dark ages. But as soon as the opportunity of emancipation was offered, good jurists appeared and soon occupied a prominent place at the bar and also on the bench. The earliest Jewish practitioner in Pennsylvania, of whom there is a record, was Moses Levy (d. May 9, 1826), whose admission to the bar dates as far back as 1778, and who a year later was admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of that State. He held various offices and finally became Presiding Judge of the District Court of the City and County of Philadelphia (1822), after having served twenty years as Recorder. At least three other Jews were admitted to the practice of law in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century; Samson Levy (d. 1831) in 1787, Daniel Levy of Northumberland county (d. 1844) in 1791, and Zalegman Phillips (1779–1839) in 1799. About a dozen more were admitted during the first half of the nineteenth century, among them being the latter’s son, Henry Mayer Phillips, who was admitted in 1832, and was, twenty-four years later, elected to represent the fourth district of Pennsylvania in the 35th Congress. (See Henry S. Morais, The Jews of Philadelphia, index.)
The number of Jews in the remainder of the thirteen original colonies was at that time very small and they were mostly scattered. While there are, for instance, records of Jews who lived or traded in Delaware as early as 1655, there was no Jewish community in that State until about two centuries later. But there was at least one Jewish family in Wilmington, Del., immediately after the Revolution, several members of which participated in that struggle. David Bush joined the Washington Lodge of Freemasons of Wilmington on December 16, 1784.[19] He was its Senior Warden in 1789, its Treasurer in 1791 and again Senior Warden in 1795. He was the father of Major Lewis Bush, who has been mentioned in a former chapter ([page 90]), and of three other sons, two of whom also held offices in the same lodge in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Joseph Capelle (Carpelles?) was Master of the lodge in 1792.
The colony of New Jersey, whose Indians, according to a description by William Penn, closely resembled Jews, had very few real Israelites in Colonial times, despite its proximity to New York on one side and to Pennsylvania on the other. In the test established in West Jersey for office-holders in 1693, the candidate had to declare on oath or affirmation that he “professes faith in God the father, and Jesus Christ his eternal son....” In the East Jersey Bill of Rights was inserted the provision “that no person or persons that profess faith in God, by Jesus Christ his only son, shall at any time be any way molested.... Provided this shall not be extended to any of the Romish religion.” But, as it is justly observed by Mr. Friedenberg (see “Publications,” XVII, p. 36), these provisions were not at all aimed against the Jews, of whom there were hardly any in the colony at that time, but against heathens, atheists, infidels and Catholics, especially against the latter. No Jews were naturalized in New Jersey before the Revolution. David Hays is known to have resided on a plantation in Griggs Town, Somerset County, in 1744, when he offered it for sale; and Myers Levy, a Dutch Jew, is reported to have absconded from Spottsville, in East New Jersey, in 1760, leaving many debts behind. Another Jew, Nathan Levy, a shop keeper of Philipsburg, Sussex County, West Jersey, is mentioned many years later. There was only, as far as it is known, one Jew in the New Jersey troops of the Continental Army: Asher Levy or Lewis, a grandson of the well-known Asser Levy of New Amsterdam. He was commissioned ensign in the first regiment, September 12, 1778. “The New Jersey Journal” was established by David Franks at Camden in 1778 and existed about four years.
The first families with Jewish names which are mentioned in the records of New Hampshire, were the Moses and the Abrams family “descendants of Jewish Christians.” The Abrams family, according to tradition, is descended from two brothers who came from Palestine to New England at an unknown date, their names being William Abrams, who was a ship’s carpenter and fell into the sea and was drowned, and John, the other brother, who settled at Amesbury, Mass. (“Publications,” XI, p. 79). In the list of grants to settlers on the road, between Wolfsborough and Leavits Town (Ossipee), issued in 1770, on condition that each settler had to give a bond for £30 that a house would be erected by him within a year, grant No. 11 was made to Joseph Levy. In 1777 mention is made of William Levi, of Somersworth, as a private in the 2d New Hampshire Continental Regiment. Abraham Isaac settled in Portsmouth about the close of the Revolution and was active in Masonic affairs. A local historian writes of him that “he and his wife were natives of Prussia and Jews of the strictest sect. They were the first descendants of the venerable Patriarchs that ever pitched their tents in Portsmouth, and during their lives were the only Jews among us. He acquired a good property and built a house on State street. Their shop was always closed on Saturday.” Mr. Isaac died February 15, 1803, and on the stone which marks his grave in the North Burying Ground is an epitaph written by the poet J. M. Sewall, author of the popular revolutionary song “Vain Britons Boast No Longer.”
It has already been mentioned in a former chapter ([page 86]) that there were hardly any Jews in North Carolina at the time when its representatives voted at the Constitutional Convention against the abolition of religious tests. The provision of its State Constitution of 1776, which read “That no person who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion ... shall be capable of holding any office or place of trust or profit in the Civil Department within the State” was doubtless aimed primarily at Roman Catholics, though it necessarily included Jews, Quakers, Mohamedans, etc. Jews did not become directly interested in the struggle for religious liberty in that State until the first decade in the Nineteenth Century, and the description of it will be found in the following chapter.
The annals of Freemasonry, which usually disclose the earliest Jewish settlers in various localities in the eighteenth century, do not contain any Jewish names in the lodges of that fraternity until its very close. Jacob Mordecai (b. in Philadelphia, 1762; d. in Richmond, 1838), the son of Moses Mordecai (b. in Bonn, Germany, 1707; d. in Philadelphia, 1781), was Master of Johnston Caswell Lodge No. 10, of Warrenton, N. C., in 1797, 1798 and 1799. He was the founder and proprietor of a female seminary in that city which enjoyed a good reputation. One of his sons, Major Alfred Mordecai (1804–87), was probably the first Jewish graduate of the United States Military Academy of West Point.[20] Zachariah Hart (also spelled Harte) was a member of David Glasgow Lodge, in Glasgow County, in 1798 and 1799. Abraham Isaacs was Senior Warden of St. Tammany Lodge No. 30, of Wilmington, in 1798. Aaron Lazarus (1777–1841), who is mentioned as one of the first Hebrews to reach Wilmington and later became one of the first directors of the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad Company, was a member of the same lodge in 1803. There were about half a dozen other Jewish Masons in the lodges of Wilmington, Newbern and of Beaufort County about that time.