Sephardic Jews of Charleston, South Carolina

Charleston was, for a time, the most important Jewish community in North America. By 1800 it held the largest Jewish population of any city in the United States, larger than New York’s. Its Congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, founded in 1749, was one of the five colonial Spanish and Portuguese communities.

Charleston has a double claim on American Jewish history. It was a great colonial and early-national Sephardi centre, and it was the birthplace of Reform Judaism in America, where in 1824 a group of members broke away to form the first Reform congregation in the country.

For the genealogist it is one of the richest and best-documented of the early communities, above all through the work of Barnett Elzas.

As with the other colonial congregations, Beth Elohim was Spanish and Portuguese in rite but mixed in descent. Its founders were largely Sephardim of London and Caribbean origin, but Ashkenazim were part of the community from early on. Trace Charleston families without assuming Iberian ancestry throughout.

What Charleston means here

The great port of colonial and antebellum South Carolina, called Charles Town before the Revolution.

South Carolina’s founding constitution, drafted with John Locke’s involvement, granted liberty of conscience explicitly to Jews, heathens and dissenters. That made Charleston unusually welcoming. Jews were present from the 1690s and voting by the early eighteenth century.

Charleston was a plantation-economy city built on slavery, and this frames the community’s history. Charleston’s Jews lived in and profited from a slave society, and some were slave-owners and traders, which the records document. A related early community also covered by this project is Georgetown, South Carolina, up the coast.

Where they came from

From the Western Sephardi diaspora, chiefly by way of London and the Caribbean.

Individual Jews were in South Carolina from the 1690s. Organised community life dates from the 1740s, and Beth Elohim was founded in 1749. The founding families came largely from the London Spanish and Portuguese community at Bevis Marks, and from the Caribbean islands. As at Savannah, some came from Georgia after that community’s early instability.

The families intermarried across the colonial network. Charleston, Savannah, Newport and New York share surnames and bloodlines.

How they made a living

Trade, broking, shopkeeping and the professions, in one of the wealthiest cities of early America.

Charleston’s Jews were merchants and shopkeepers, some prosperous, and were prominent in the civic, political and cultural life of the city. In the nineteenth century Jews sat in the state legislature and were leaders in commerce and the professions. This prosperity, like the city’s, rested on a plantation and slave economy, and the community’s involvement in it is part of the record.

The birth of American Reform

Charleston’s most consequential contribution to American Jewish history came in 1824.

A group of Beth Elohim members, seeking a shorter, partly English and more decorous service, petitioned for reform. Rebuffed, they formed the Reformed Society of Israelites, the first organised Reform Judaism in the United States, predating the German-American Reform movement.

The society itself was short-lived. But Beth Elohim adopted Reform in the 1840s, installing an organ amid considerable controversy, and the congregation became and remains Reform. This is why it no longer functions as a Spanish and Portuguese synagogue.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho’s painting of the interior of the 1794 Beth Elohim synagogue, of about 1838, records the building before it burned in that year.

Where they went

Charleston’s Jewish community declined relatively as New York and other cities grew. It was disrupted by the Civil War and the broader decline of the antebellum South, and families dispersed across the South and the country.

As with all the colonial communities, the network reached back to London and the Caribbean and across to the other mainland ports, Savannah especially, and New York.

Synagogue and cemeteries

Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, the Holy Congregation House of God, built its first synagogue in 1794. After it burned in 1838 the present Greek Revival building was raised in 1840. It is one of the oldest surviving synagogue buildings in the United States and the second-oldest in continuous use.

The Coming Street cemetery, opened in 1762, is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the South and a primary genealogical source. Its inscriptions were transcribed and published by Barnett Elzas in The Old Jewish Cemeteries at Charleston, S.C. (1903) and later by Solomon Breibart. The Library of Congress holds a view of the new Jewish cemetery of K.K. Beth Elohim. There are later cemeteries as well.

Records

Charleston is among the best-documented early American Jewish communities. That is thanks largely to Barnett A. Elzas, who at the turn of the twentieth century transcribed the cemeteries and wrote the standard history, The Jews of South Carolina.

The congregational records of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim are held by the Special Collections of the College of Charleston Library, the major repository for Charleston and South Carolina Jewish history. The Coming Street cemetery inscriptions are published, by Elzas in 1903 and by Breibart.

South Carolina probate and civil records, the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina, and the standard histories carry the community, as does the 1883 Year Book of the City of Charleston.

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

Sephardic World lectures

Jews and the American Revolution — Laura Arnold Leibman

What has and hasn’t been researched

Charleston is very well documented, with the usual connective gaps.

The congregation and cemeteries are thoroughly recorded. Elzas’s transcriptions and histories are a strong foundation.
The London and Caribbean origins, family by family, are only partly traced, though the Bevis Marks and island records make it possible.
The Savannah to Charleston connection, meaning the families who moved between the two Southern communities, is under-worked.
The community’s involvement in slavery, and the enslaved and free people of colour connected to Jewish households, deserve fuller research.

Organisations and repositories

Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, Hasell Street, Charleston.

Special Collections, College of Charleston Library, holding the Beth Elohim congregational records and the major South Carolina Jewish collections.

Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina.

The Coming Street cemetery of 1762 and the later Charleston Jewish cemeteries.

South Carolina Department of Archives and History, for probate and civil records, and FamilySearch for the same. [LINK NEEDED]

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Transcriptions of the Coming Street and later Charleston Jewish cemeteries beyond Elzas and Breibart
Records linking Charleston families to London, the Caribbean and Savannah
Beth Elohim congregational registers — membership, marriage, burial — in transcription or image
Material on the Reformed Society of Israelites of 1824 and its members
Records of the enslaved and free people of colour connected to Charleston Jewish households

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

Research services

Charleston research means a rich, well-transcribed early community — the Beth Elohim records, the Coming Street cemetery and Elzas’s scholarship — with lines running back to London and the Caribbean and across to Savannah. The community was Sephardi in rite but mixed in descent, and embedded in a slave society. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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