Sephardic Jews of Newport, Rhode Island

Newport holds one of the most important chapters in early American Jewish history. Its Touro Synagogue, dedicated in 1763, is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States. Its Jewish cemetery is the one Longfellow made famous. And for a generation before the Revolution its Sephardi merchants, Aaron Lopez above all, made this small Rhode Island port a commercial rival of New York.

Newport’s Jewish story is also part of the history of American religious liberty. The colony was founded on Roger Williams’s principle of freedom of conscience, which expressly included papists, protestants, Jews and Turks.

A caution that applies to all the colonial communities. The Newport congregation was Spanish and Portuguese in rite, and its leading families — Lopez, Rivera, Seixas, Touro — were genuinely of Iberian ex-converso descent. But the community also included Ashkenazim, and its families should be traced without assuming Iberian ancestry in every case.

What Newport means here

A seaport at the mouth of Narragansett Bay, in the colony and later state of Rhode Island.

The modern picture of Newport as a fashionable summer resort should be set aside. For the thirty years before the Revolution it was one of the principal cities of colonial America, in commercial importance the equal of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston. Its rise and its Jewish community’s rise were the same event, and its decline followed their departure.

Rhode Island’s founding principle is why Jews settled here freely when other colonies were less welcoming. Roger Williams guaranteed liberty of conscience, and the colony refused to persecute Quakers or bar non-Christians.

Where they came from

In two distinct waves.

The first Jewish settlers reached Newport in 1658 — fifteen families, by tradition arriving with the first three degrees of Masonry, which is remembered as the introduction of Freemasonry to America. This early group was reinforced by a documented arrival from the West Indies, probably Curaçao, in 1694. It was small and left little mark. A declaration of the Rhode Island Assembly in 1684 affirmed the Jews’ right to settle.

The second and transformative wave came after about 1748. The Lopez, Rivera, Pollock, Hart and Hays families arrived, many by way of New York, and ultimately from Portugal in the case of the Lopez family and Spain in the case of the Rivera family, where they had lived as New Christians. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 brought further arrivals. By the eve of the Revolution the community numbered perhaps two hundred families.

How they made a living

Transatlantic trade and manufacture, on a scale that built the city.

The Newport Jewish merchants did not merely finance trade but created it, introducing new industries and supplying the foreign trade connections through their co-religionists in ports across the Atlantic. Jacob Rodrigues Rivera introduced the manufacture of sperm oil and spermaceti candles to America. By the 1760s Newport had seventeen such factories, twenty-two distilleries, sugar refineries and rope-walks.

Aaron Lopez, the pre-eminent figure, owned a fleet of some thirty ocean-going vessels and many more coasters, in the European, West India and whaling trades, pushing the whale fishery as far as the Falklands.

He and the other merchants, notably Myer Pollock, were also heavily engaged in the West India trade in molasses, made into rum at Newport and shipped to Africa, with vessels returning to the West Indies with enslaved people. As with the other colonial communities, this was a slave-trading economy, and the record documents it.

Naturalisation records

The Navigation Acts barred aliens from colonial trade, so naturalisation mattered greatly.

Newport’s Jews were naturalised under the Act of 1740, several first in New York before moving. But in 1762 the Rhode Island Superior Court refused to naturalise Aaron Lopez and Isaac Elizer, on the ground that the colony was founded for Christians. Lopez obtained naturalisation under the same British Act in Massachusetts instead.

These naturalisation records, in New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, are valuable genealogical sources.

The Revolution and dispersal

The Revolution destroyed the community.

Lopez and the great majority of Newport’s Jews supported the American cause. Lopez supplied gunpowder and a whale-boat to the colony. Nearly all were compelled to flee on the eve of the British occupation of Newport in 1776. The Lopez and Rivera families and some of the Mendes family removed to Leicester, Massachusetts, and traded there until 1782.

Most Newport records were destroyed at the British approach, which is why documentation of Jewish service is thin. Aaron Lopez’s support of the cause wrecked his business, most of his vessels being lost, and his accidental death by drowning in 1782, just as peace might have allowed him to rebuild, was described at the time as one of the greatest misfortunes ever to befall Newport.

The community never recovered. Many who fled did not return, and those who did could not restore the ruined trade.

In 1790 the congregation addressed George Washington. His reply, promising a government that gives to bigotry no sanction and to persecution no assistance, is one of the founding texts of American religious liberty. But soon there was no longer a minyan, and by the time Judah Touro was buried at Newport in 1854 the community was a memory, revived only later in the nineteenth century.

Where they went

Members of Newport’s Jewish families were also resident in Portugal, the West Indies, New York, Boston, Leicester, Providence, Richmond, Wilmington, Savannah, Charleston, North Carolina and New Orleans. These were interconnected diaspora families rather than an isolated town community. The Touro brothers, born in Newport, made their careers in Boston and New Orleans.

Anyone tracing a Newport family should look to New York above all, since the two communities intermarried and traded constantly, and then to Portugal, the Caribbean and the other mainland ports.

Touro Synagogue and the cemetery

The arrival of the Rev. Isaac Touro from Jamaica in about 1758 stimulated the community’s religious life. Building began in 1762 and the synagogue was dedicated on 2 December 1763.

Designed by the colonial architect Peter Harrison, Touro Synagogue is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States and a National Historic Site. It holds a Torah scroll from Amsterdam, and a clock and charity boxes from Bevis Marks in London, tokens of the community’s place in the Amsterdam and London Sephardi world.

The haham Haim Isaac Carigal, who arrived soon after, became a friend of Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, taught him Hebrew, and left correspondence now in the Yale library.

The Colonial Jewish Burial Ground, the Jewish Cemetery at Newport of Longfellow’s poem, traces to a lot bought in 1677 by Mordecai Campanall and Moses Pacheco. Many seventeenth-century stones had decayed and were reburied when the ground was repaired after Judah Touro’s death, so the oldest legible stones are eighteenth-century. Aaron Lopez’s epitaph is here. The inscriptions, recorded by the Rev. A. P. Mendes and others, are a primary genealogical source, and the Touro bequests maintain the cemetery to this day.

Records

Newport’s own colonial records were largely destroyed in the Revolution. The community is reconstructed from surviving synagogue material, the cemetery, colonial and naturalisation records, and a substantial published literature.

The Touro Synagogue and Congregation Jeshuat Israel hold what survives. The Newport Historical Society and the Rhode Island Historical Society hold colonial records, the Long Wharf and Redwood Library papers — several Jews were founders and stockholders — and much local material.

The Aaron Lopez Papers and the Touro family papers are at the American Jewish Historical Society, within the Center for Jewish History. Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes are catalogued at the Rhode Island State Archives.

For the wider genealogy, Stern’s First American Jewish Families and Marcus’s documentary histories carry the Newport families.

Sephardic World lectures

Jews and the American Revolution — Laura Arnold Leibman
Judah Touro and the Touro Synagogue of New Orleans — Adrien Genet

What has and hasn’t been researched

The great merchant families are well studied; the ordinary community and the connective genealogy less so.

Lopez, Rivera and the merchant elite are thoroughly documented. Chyet’s Lopez of Newport and the American Jewish Historical Society studies cover them well.
The 1658 founding wave is thin. The seventeenth-century settlers left few records and no surviving stones, and the Masonic tradition is hard to document.
The New York link, family by family. Newport and Shearith Israel intermarried and traded constantly, and systematically joining the two communities’ records is productive and only partly done.
The Newport merchants’ role in the rum and slaves trade, and the enslaved people connected to them, deserve fuller tracing.

Organisations and repositories

Touro Synagogue and Congregation Jeshuat Israel, Newport.

Newport Historical Society; the Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association and the Rhode Island Jewish Museum.

Rhode Island State Archives, for colonial and naturalisation records.

American Jewish Historical Society and Center for Jewish History, New York.

The Colonial Jewish Burial Ground, Newport, maintained under the Touro bequests.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Transcriptions of the Colonial Jewish Burial Ground inscriptions beyond Mendes’s record
Records connecting Newport families to New York, Portugal, the Caribbean and the other colonial ports
Naturalisation records for Newport Jews in New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts
Any surviving congregational records, and material on the 1658 founding families, Campanall, Pacheco and others
Documentation of the enslaved people connected to Newport Jewish merchant households

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].

Research services

Newport research means a well-known but record-thin colonial community, its own papers largely lost in the Revolution, reconstructed through the synagogue, the cemetery, colonial and naturalisation records and a rich published literature. The lines run above all to New York and back to Portugal and the Caribbean. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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