Philadelphia is one of the five colonial Spanish and Portuguese communities of North America. Its Congregation Mikveh Israel, Hope of Israel, is the oldest synagogue in Philadelphia and one of the oldest continuously active in the United States. It follows the Amsterdam esnoga rite to this day.
It is best known for its Revolutionary-era role. This was the congregation of Haym Salomon, who helped finance the American Revolution, and of the Gratz family. Its 1782 synagogue was dedicated with a blessing on His Excellency George Washington.
For the genealogist, Philadelphia is closely bound to New York and the other colonial communities, and behind them to Amsterdam and London.
As with the other early American congregations, a caution. Mikveh Israel was Spanish and Portuguese in rite but mixed in descent from early on, with many Ashkenazi members and much intermarriage. It is Sephardi by tradition and custom. Trace its families without assuming Iberian ancestry in every case.
Where they came from
From the wider Western Sephardi and colonial American world.
Jews were in Pennsylvania from the colony’s early decades, drawn by William Penn’s guarantee of religious toleration. That was an unusual freedom, and it made Philadelphia attractive. The founding families came from New York, from the Caribbean, and from London and Amsterdam.
The organised community formed around a burial need. The merchant Nathan Levy, whose child died in 1738, obtained a grant of ground from the Penn proprietors. That plot became the Mikveh Israel Cemetery, from which the congregation traces its formal history to 1740.
How they made a living
Trade and finance, like the other colonial Sephardim: importing, shipping, brokerage and provisioning.
Several Mikveh Israel members were significant in the Revolutionary economy. Haym Salomon brokered the loans that helped fund the Continental cause. The Gratz brothers, Barnard and Michael, ran a major trading house. Ephraim Hart, a member, later helped organise what became the New York Stock Exchange.
The Revolution and Gershom Mendes Seixas
Philadelphia’s community swelled during the Revolution because it was a refuge.
When the British occupied New York in 1776, Gershom Mendes Seixas, minister of Shearith Israel, closed his synagogue rather than serve under occupation. He moved first to Connecticut and then to Philadelphia, where he led Mikveh Israel and helped build its first synagogue. Other New York members, such as Manuel Josephson, came too.
This wartime overlap is why New York and Philadelphia genealogy are so intertwined for this generation: the same families and ministers appear in both. Seixas returned to New York in 1784, and his successor at Mikveh Israel, Jacob Raphael Cohen, had also come from Shearith Israel.
The synagogues and cemeteries
The congregation built its first synagogue in 1782 at Third and Cherry Streets. Its building fund drew contributions from Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris. It rebuilt on the same site in 1825 in an Egyptian Revival design by William Strickland, the first of its kind in the country.
Later buildings followed at North Seventh Street in 1860, North Broad Street in 1909, and finally the present building at 44 North Fourth Street in 1976, in Philadelphia’s historic district near Independence Mall.
The Mikveh Israel Cemetery on Spruce Street, between 8th and 9th, was granted in 1740. It is the oldest Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia and a primary genealogical source. Nathan Levy, Haym Salomon, Rebecca Gratz and Revolutionary-era members are buried there. A second cemetery, the Federal Street burial ground, opened in 1849.
The Philadelphia Congregations project has digitised a series of Mikveh Israel records, which can be browsed there.
Later leadership and the modern community
Mikveh Israel became a centre of American Jewish learning.
Isaac Leeser, minister from 1829 to 1850, was the leading traditionalist figure of his generation and a founder of American Jewish publishing. Sabato Morais, minister for forty-six years from 1851 to 1897, was an opponent of slavery and a founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Members founded Gratz College in 1897 and Dropsie College in 1907. Leon Elmaleh, from 1898, founded the Levantine Jews Society of Philadelphia, a bridge to the modern Sephardi immigration. The congregation remains active and Spanish and Portuguese in rite, with about 200 families, and hosts Sephardi cultural and heritage events.
Records
Mikveh Israel’s records are unusually complete for a colonial congregation.
The congregational records, 1765 to 2011, are held in Philadelphia archives, through the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, with the congregation retaining material. The American Jewish Archives and the American Jewish Historical Society hold related papers.
The two cemeteries are transcribed and documented. Both The Jewish Cemetery, Ninth and Spruce Streets and the Dedication of the New Synagogue are online.
For the wider colonial genealogy, Malcolm Stern’s First American Jewish Families and Marcus’s documentary histories carry the Mikveh Israel families, and the 1790 census captures the community.
Sephardic World lectures
- Jews and the American Revolution — Laura Arnold Leibman
What has and hasn’t been researched
Philadelphia is well documented, but with the usual connective gaps.
The congregation and its notable families — Levy, Gratz, Salomon, Seixas, Morais — are thoroughly studied. Less worked is the systematic tracing of ordinary members back to Amsterdam, London and the Caribbean, and the links to the other colonial congregations, family by family.
The nineteenth-century transition is also less fully traced, as the old Sephardi community absorbed Ashkenazi members and later Levantine immigrants.
Further reading
Edwin Wolf and Maxwell Whiteman, The History of the Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the Age of Jackson (Jewish Publication Society, 1957), the standard history.
Sabato Morais, “Mickve Israel Congregation of Philadelphia”, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 1 (1892).
Malcolm H. Stern, First American Jewish Families.
Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew and United States Jewry.
Organisations and repositories
Congregation Mikveh Israel, 44 North Fourth Street, Philadelphia.
Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, holding the Mikveh Israel records, 1765 to 2011. [LINK NEEDED]
American Jewish Historical Society and Center for Jewish History, New York; American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati. [LINK NEEDED]
The Mikveh Israel cemeteries: Spruce Street, 1740, and Federal Street, 1849.
National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia. [LINK NEEDED]
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- Transcriptions of the Mikveh Israel cemetery inscriptions, for both grounds
- Records linking Mikveh Israel families to New York, London, Amsterdam and the Caribbean
- Congregational membership, marriage and circumcision registers in transcription or image
- Material on the Levantine Jews Society of Philadelphia and the transition to the modern Sephardi community
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].
Research services
Philadelphia research means a well-documented colonial congregation, with Mikveh Israel’s records and cemeteries, and lines running to New York and the other colonial communities and back to Amsterdam and London. The community was Sephardi in rite but mixed in descent. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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