Jonas Phillips

Jonas Phillips (1736—1803) was a veteran of the American Revolutionary War and an American merchant in New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the immigrant ancestor of the Jewish Phillips family in the United States. Emigrating from Germany in 1759, Phillips worked off his passage as an indentured servant in Charleston, South Carolina. He moved to the North in 1759, becoming a merchant in New York City and then moving to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

A founder of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia during the war, Phillips and his wife had a total of twenty-one children. One of their great-grandsons was Franklin J. Moses, Jr., who was elected as governor of South Carolina in 1872 during the Reconstruction era; his father Franklin J. Moses, Sr. was Chief Justice of the state supreme court. Another notable grandson was Uriah Phillips Levy, the first Jewish Commodore in the United States Navy.

Jonas Phillips was born in 1736 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Germany, in either Buseck or Frankfort am Main (Frankfurt). He was the son of Aaron Phillips, who had anglicized his name, and his wife. Phillips grew up speaking Yiddish and later learned English.

At the age of 20, the ambitious Phillips emigrated to the British colonies in North America, sailing from London in November 1756. Working as an indentured servant to pay off his passage, he lived in Charleston, S.C.. He was employed by Moses Lindo, an indigo planter and Sephardic Jew who was part of the growing Jewish community in the city. By the beginning of the 19th century, Charleston was home to the largest and wealthiest Jewish community in North America, a status it would hold until about 1830.

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