Jewish history in Colonial America

The history of the Jews in Colonial America.

Elias Legarde (or Legardo) was a Sephardic Jew who arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, on the HMS Abigail in 1621.

The second Jew known to have lived in northern North America was Solomon Franco, a Sephardic Jew from Holland who is believed to have settled in the city of Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1649. Franco was a scholar and agent for Immanuel Perada, a Dutch merchant. He delivered supplies to Edward Gibbons, a major general in the Massachusetts militia. After a dispute over who should pay Franco (Gibbons or Perada) the Massachusetts General Court ruled on May 6, 1649, that Franco was to be expelled from the colony, and granted him "six shillings per week out of the Treasury for ten weeks, for sustenance, till he can get his passage to Holland."

Solomon Pietersen was a merchant from Amsterdam who came to town in 1654. In 1656, Pietersen became the first known American Jew to intermarry with a Christian; though there are no records showing Pietersen formally converted, his daughter Anna was baptized in childhood.

On July 8, 1654, Jacob Barsimson left Holland and arrived aboard the Peartree on August 22 in the port of New Amsterdam (in Lower Manhattan, where Wall Street is today). Barsimson was employed by the Dutch East India Company and had fled the Portuguese settlements in the New World, who had captured a formerly Dutch settlement and established the Portuguese Inquisition there.

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