New Orleans is the only American city on this site where a Sephardi family might have arrived before the Jews were legally permitted to be there — and been expelled for it.
Louisiana had its own edition of the Code Noir, promulgated in 1724, whose first article expelled Jews from the colony, exactly as the 1685 Caribbean version did at Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue. Spanish rule after 1763 continued the exclusion. Only with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 did the position change.
So the city has three distinct Sephardi arrivals: a colonial presence that was illegal and was punished for it; the refugees from Saint-Domingue who reached the city in 1809 by way of Cuba; and the community that formed after American sovereignty, which built the Sephardi congregation of Nefutzoth Yehudah in 1846.
And it has one archive that makes all of it traceable — the New Orleans Notarial Archives, which are unmatched anywhere in North America for this kind of work.
Were Jews legally allowed in colonial Louisiana?
No.
France codified the law of its Louisiana colony in 1724, and the first article ordered the expulsion of Jews. It is the same instrument, in a Gulf Coast edition, that appears on our Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti and French Guiana pages, and the five should be read together: the same law, applied across the whole French empire, with the same consequence.
Spain took Louisiana in 1763 and took possession in 1769, and Spanish law excluded Jews from its colonies as thoroughly as French law did.
A Jewish presence in colonial New Orleans was therefore always illegal — which is precisely why the individuals who can be identified stand out so clearly in the record. They appear in it because the authorities noticed them.
The Monsantos
The colonial Sephardi story of Louisiana is one family.
Isaac Monsanto arrived in New Orleans around 1757, in the last years of French rule, from a Sephardi family with Curaçao and Amsterdam connections. With his brothers — Manuel, Benjamin and Jacob — and his sisters, he built one of the more substantial trading houses in the colony, dealing in the Gulf and Mississippi commerce.
Under Spanish rule it ended. In 1769 Governor Alejandro O’Reilly, arriving to impose Spanish authority after the local rebellion, expelled Isaac Monsanto from Louisiana under the exclusion of Jews. The family scattered along the Gulf and the river — to Pensacola, Manchac and Natchez — and some of them worked their way back.
The Monsantos are worth knowing about beyond Louisiana. It is a Sephardi surname of the Curaçao and Caribbean world, and it appears on our St Thomas page as well. A Sephardi Monsanto family of the Virgin Islands later gave its name, by marriage, to the chemical company — a piece of trivia that is nonetheless a real indication of how far this small family network reached.
1809: the refugees from Saint-Domingue
The single largest arrival in the city’s early history was not planned.
Refugees from the Haitian Revolution had been sheltering in eastern Cuba since the 1790s. In 1809, after Napoleon invaded Spain, the Spanish authorities expelled the French from Cuba, and something like ten thousand of them landed at New Orleans in a matter of months — roughly doubling the city’s population.
Jewish families were among them, as our Haiti and Cuba pages set out, and this is one of the more important untraced questions on this site. The migration itself is well studied; the Jewish families within it are not.
If you have a New Orleans Sephardi family that appears around 1809, the sequence to test is Saint-Domingue → Santiago de Cuba → New Orleans.
Judah Touro
The most consequential Jew in the city’s history was a Sephardi from Newport, and his life connects three other pages on this site.
Judah Touro (1775–1854) was the son of Isaac Touro, hazan of the Newport congregation — the synagogue that now bears the family name. He came to New Orleans in 1801, made a very large fortune in shipping and property, was wounded at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, and gave most of it away.
His bequests went to Jewish congregations across the United States and beyond. Among them was the money that, with Sir Moses Montefiore, built Mishkenot Sha’ananim in 1860 — the first Jewish neighbourhood outside the walls of Jerusalem, described on our Israel page.
Newport to New Orleans to Jerusalem, in one life. Touro Infirmary and Touro Synagogue in New Orleans, and Touro Synagogue in Newport, all carry the name.
Nefutzoth Yehudah, 1846
The first Jewish congregation in Louisiana — and the first anywhere in the United States outside the original thirteen states — was Shangarai Chasset (“Gates of Mercy”), founded in 1828 by a mixed group of largely Alsatian and German Jews.
The Sephardi congregation came next. Nefutzoth Yehudah — “the Dispersed of Judah” — was founded in 1846 by the Portuguese and Sephardi families of the city, and Judah Touro built and endowed its synagogue in 1850. It maintained its own burial ground.
The two congregations merged in 1881 to form Touro Synagogue, which survives.
For research purposes the separation matters, exactly as it does in Buenos Aires, Havana, Tunis and Vienna: between 1846 and 1881 the Sephardim of New Orleans had their own congregation, their own records and their own cemetery, and which one a family belonged to is a fact worth establishing early.
Thereafter the city’s Jewish population became overwhelmingly German and then Eastern European, and the Sephardi element became a small minority — reinforced in the twentieth century by arrivals from the Ottoman world, Syria and, after 1948, Egypt.
What records survive?
The Notarial Archives — the reason to research here
The New Orleans Notarial Archives are continuous from 1733 and are among the great record collections in the United States.
Louisiana inherited the French and Spanish civil-law notarial system, in which every property transfer, marriage contract, succession, inventory, partnership agreement, mortgage and manumission was drawn up by a notary and preserved. The result is a documentary record of commercial and family life that the common-law states simply do not have.
For a merchant family this is unmatched in North America, and for a colonial Jewish presence that was legally excluded and therefore appears in no congregational record, it is very nearly the only place they can be found. The Monsantos are documented here.
Civil and municipal
Louisiana Division and City Archives, New Orleans Public Library — vital records indexes, city directories, municipal records.
Louisiana State Archives, Baton Rouge — Orleans Parish births, marriages and deaths.
Catholic parish registers, principally St Louis Cathedral, for the colonial period and for intermarried families. As on our Panama and Colombia and Cape Verde pages, a legally excluded or assimilating Jewish family may appear only in Catholic records.
Spanish colonial
Archivo General de Indias, Seville — the Papeles de Cuba, which hold the administration of Spanish Louisiana. This is where O’Reilly’s expulsion of Isaac Monsanto is documented, and where the Spanish government’s dealings with the colony’s Jews will be found.
Jewish institutional
Touro Synagogue — the records of both Shangarai Chasset and Nefutzoth Yehudah.
Touro Infirmary archives.
The Jewish cemeteries — the Dispersed of Judah burial ground is the Sephardi one, alongside Gates of Mercy and Hebrew Rest.
Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, New Orleans, opened 2020.
Institute of Southern Jewish Life — its Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities is free, reliable and covers the Louisiana towns as well as the city.
Manuscript collections
The Historic New Orleans Collection — manuscripts, and substantial Saint-Domingue refugee material.
Tulane University, Louisiana Research Collection.
American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, which holds a great deal of Southern Jewish material including Touro papers.
A practical warning
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 damaged records, dispersed the community and disrupted institutions across the city. Some collections were affected; some were moved; some finding aids have not caught up.
Check current locations before travelling, and do not assume a pre-2005 reference is still accurate.
What has and hasn’t been researched
The Jewish families among the 1809 Saint-Domingue refugees have never been identified. This is the most valuable piece of work available here and it would serve our Haiti, Cuba and Charleston pages as well.
The Notarial Archives have not been searched systematically for Jewish names, despite being the obvious place to find a legally excluded merchant community.
The Monsanto family has not been reconstructed across its full range — Louisiana, Pensacola, Natchez, Curaçao, St Thomas and Amsterdam.
Nefutzoth Yehudah’s membership between 1846 and 1881 has not been published, and it would identify the Sephardi families of the city precisely.
Bertram Korn’s The Early Jews of New Orleans is from 1969 and remains the standard work. Nothing of comparable scope has replaced it.
Further reading
Bertram Wallace Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans (American Jewish Historical Society, 1969) — the standard work, and still the foundation.
Elliott Ashkenazi, The Business of Jews in Louisiana, 1840–1875.
Catherine C. Kahn and Irwin Lachoff, The Jewish Community of New Orleans.
Emily Ford and Barry Stiefel, The Jews of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta.
Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Florida, 2007) — for the 1809 arrival.
Institute of Southern Jewish Life, Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities — free, and the quickest orientation to the smaller Louisiana towns.
Organisations and repositories
New Orleans Notarial Archives — the essential collection
Louisiana Division and City Archives, New Orleans Public Library; Louisiana State Archives, Baton Rouge
The Historic New Orleans Collection; Tulane University, Louisiana Research Collection
Archivo General de Indias, Seville — Papeles de Cuba
Touro Synagogue and Touro Infirmary, New Orleans; Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience
American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati; Institute of Southern Jewish Life
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- Identification of Jewish families among the Saint-Domingue refugees who arrived in 1809
- Notarial acts naming Jewish merchants in colonial and early American New Orleans
- Nefutzoth Yehudah congregational and burial records, 1846–1881
- Documentation of the Monsanto family in Louisiana, Pensacola, Natchez and the Caribbean
- Anything on the twentieth-century Sephardi arrivals from Turkey, Syria and Egypt
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.
Research services
New Orleans is an unusually good place to research a Sephardi merchant family, because the notarial system recorded what congregations did not.
The two questions to settle first are whether the family was Sephardi or Ashkenazi — which between 1846 and 1881 determines the congregation, the records and the cemetery — and whether they arrived before or after 1803, which determines whether they were there legally. If the family appears around 1809, the trail probably runs back through Cuba to Saint-Domingue. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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See also: Sephardic Jews of Newport, Rhode Island · Charleston, South Carolina · Sephardic Jews of Cuba · Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Israel