The Jews of Savannah and Charleston
Dr. Laura Leibman in conversation with Dr. Shari Rabin
On the eve of the American Revolution, Savannah’s Jewish community was one of the largest in the country — a center of merchants and landowners, most of Portuguese descent. Once the British occupied the city, many chose or were forced to leave.
Mordechai Sheftall, head of the Revolutionary committee, for example, was captured, served pork (which he refused to eat) and imprisoned; and Abigail Minis, a landowner and prominent community member, was forced to leave her home after the British discovered her support for the rebels.
Charleston, home to a small Jewish population since the 1690s, grew significantly in 1741 when families fled Savannah after the colony’s trustees outlawed slavery and amid fears of conflict with Spain due to the persistence of the Inquisition.
During the Revolutionary War, Charleston Jews formed a “Jew Company” to fight the British. The local hero was Francis Salvador, a young member of the provincial congress killed and scalped at the age of 29 by Native Americans allied with the British.
Join Dr. Laura Leibman (Princeton University) and Dr. Shari Rabin (Oberlin College), prominent scholars of American Jewish history, to explore how the Jews of Savannah and Charleston navigated the Revolution and how their choices shaped both Jewish life and the broader Southern colonies.
America at 250: Jewish Communities at the Birth of the Nation
Stories of the Revolutionary War tend to focus on Betsy Ross sewing the Stars and Stripes, Paul Revere’s midnight ride to warn the Minutemen and George Washington and his ragtag army barely surviving the winter at Valley Forge.
But Haym Salomon is sometimes absent, although after being sentenced to execution for attempting to blow up a British warehouse on Washington’s orders, escaped and helped finance the decisive Battle of Yorktown, as is Francis Salvador, the first Jew killed in the Revolutionary War. Missing too is Mordecai Sheftall, the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the Continental Army.
While Jews made up less than 0.04 percent of the American population in 1776, they left an indelible mark on the nation’s founding.
As we celebrate the Semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, The Temple Emanu‑El Streicker Cultural Center is proud to highlight and honor the often-overlooked contributions of our Jewish forebears in a program led by Dr. Jonathan Sarna (Brandeis University), Dr. Laura Arnold Leibman (Princeton University), Joseph Weisberg (PhD candidate, Brandeis University), Dr. Shari Rabin (Oberlin College) and Dr. Toni Pitock (Drexel University), some of the foremost experts in early American Jewish history.