One warm July day in 1776, Jonas Phillips, a Jewish, Hessian-born Philadelphia merchant, picked up a brand-new copy of the Declaration of Independence, printed by his neighbor, John Dunlap. On 28 July he folded the document and enclosed it with a letter to another Jewish merchant, Gumpel Samson, in the Dutch Republic. The letter, sent via the Dutch possession of St. Eustatius in the Leeward Islands, was intercepted by the British, who may have been puzzled by the fact that it was written in Yiddish. Phillips’s letter and the copy of the Declaration are today displayed in the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, as the first copy of the Declaration known to have been sent out of the country.Footnote ¹

What possessed this Jewish-German immigrant to British North America to send his business partner the Declaration and letter? Practically speaking, his business intersected with the emotional labor of making connections with the European Jewish community. Phillips therefore praised Samson, his “beloved master, my kinsman,” and attempted to ensure that Phillips’s mother received a bill of exchange for £10, using Samson as a go-between—this was the third attempt to convey a bill to her. Phillips also viewed the conflict between Britain and the North American colonies through a mercantile lens and as an opportunity to take advantage of the unavailability of British-made goods by substituting those made abroad: “As no English goods can come over at all, and much money can be earned with Holland goods if one will venture, should you have a friend who will this winter acquaint himself with the goods mentioned below, I can assure you that four hundred per cent is to be earned thereby.” The enumerated items included many different sorts of textiles for use in clothing and maritime sailmaking, combs, needles, pins, “drugs & medicines,” and sewing thread.Footnote ² Perhaps unsurprisingly, Phillips reconciled the needs of his business with political realities. After British North Americans successfully resisted the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea were meant to help offset the indebtedness incurred on behalf of the colonies during the French and Indian War.Footnote ³ Phillips opposed the importation of British goods during this 1767 conflict over the duties.

In his 1776 letter, Phillips showed confidence that the North American British colonies would successfully challenge the most powerful country in the world, writing: “The war will make all England bankrupt. The Americans have an army of 100,000 fellows and the English only 25,000 and some ships. The Americans have already made themselves like the States of Holland. The enclosed is a declaration of the whole country. How it will end, the blessed God knows. The war does me no damage, thank God!”Footnote ⁴ For Phillips, an American Revolution that began as a business opportunity would become a field for self-making to a degree not possible in Britain itself.

A decade after his letter, Phillips used his participation in the revolution to demonstrate that Jews had been: “true and faithfull whigs; and during the late contest with England they have been foremost in aiding and assisting the states with their lifes and fortunes, they have supported the cause, have bravely fought and bleed for Liberty which they can not Enjoy.”Footnote ⁵ He called on that history to ask George Washington to proscribe religious tests for public office in the federal constitution draft. His enshrinement as the writer of the 1776 “Judeo-German letter” helps to peel back some of his self-making and the possibilities that the Declaration of Independence amplified. Transforming himself from a Hessian Jew to Jonas Phillips as he crossed the Atlantic to North America was the first step in his self-making. Since 1740, Jews resident in the British North American colonies for seven years could be naturalized through methods that respected their unwillingness to swear Christian oaths.Footnote ⁶ In contrast, in Britain the draft 1753 “Jew Bill” proposing to confer the right of citizenship to Jews living in Britain had been repealed after an acrimonious debate in the press before a single person could be naturalized.Footnote ⁷

Born Jonah ben Feibush in Buseck, Hesse, in 1736, Phillips migrated to London in his late teens. There, he met Moses Lindo, the wealthy scion of a Sephardic London brokerage family, who moved to South Carolina in 1756 to begin a transatlantic trade in indigo. Lindo hired Phillips to accompany him to Charlestown; there he lived with Lindo’s family.Footnote ⁸ By 1759, Phillips had moved to New York, where he garnered respectability by becoming a freeman of the state and being inducted into the local Freemasons’ lodge as a master mason.Footnote ⁹ In 1762, he initiated his work as an importer and retailer with Gumpel Samson, and he married Rebecca Machado, a descendant of wealthy Portuguese crypto-Jews. This extremely fecund marriage into a notable Sephardic family helped him to downplay his humble Ashkenazi origins and facilitated upward mobility for his children.Footnote ¹⁰

Phillips’s surviving business records—many of them just loose scraps of paper—show that he belonged to a business circle that accepted and traded interest-bearing promissory notes from a wide variety of people, including illiterate individuals and women. When someone refused to pay he sued them in the Mayor’s Court.Footnote ¹¹ Unfortunately, this litigiousness went both ways, and in 1765 the Supreme Court of New York declared Phillips an insolvent debtor and took possession of his assets.Footnote ¹² The Jewish community of New York City, few in number but united through their membership in the Shearith Israel synagogue, supported his family by hiring him as a kosher butcher or shochet for the next four years. His family was, he professed, “poor but honest,” and by 1770 he was again engaged in trade, signing his name to a petition to refuse the importation of British goods.Footnote ¹³

Phillips carefully stewarded his own reputation. In 1773, still rebuilding his personal credit, he presented himself as a “faithful subject of King George the Third” when he sued John Carpenter for slander in New York.Footnote ¹⁴ In the same year, Phillips collected a stellar character reference from Moses Lindo, who was by now the official indigo inspector for South Carolina. Lindo described Phillips as “trustworthy even of Gold untold.”Footnote ¹⁵ In New York and Philadelphia, Phillips worked as both a retailer and vendue operator, that is, an agent who sold others’ goods at auction. Existing business records from contemporaneous merchants illustrate his networks: he is recorded in Abram Heydrick’s receipt book as having traded him Indian silk taffeta fabric for 7 pounds 12 shillings, and in John Coffman’s receipt book for unenumerated articles.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1776, Phillips began to advertise regularly in Philadelphia newspapers: “Russia and raven duck, fine and coarse writing paper, silk and oil-clock ombrillos, black and coloured ribands, indigo, florence oil, sweet wines, pepper, coffee, cocoa, rations, and sundry dry goods.”Footnote ¹⁷

In October 1776, Phillips announced that he needed to settle all his accounts because he was about to enter into a partnership.Footnote ¹⁸ The New York Jewish community had divided into two factions: a Tory faction that was willing to stay in New York after the British captured that city, and a rebel faction that spent the war in Philadelphia. Phillips decamped for Philadelphia. This statement, later attributed to Phillips, explained his reasoning: “better that it [the congregation] should die in the cause of liberty than that it should live and submit to the impositions of an arrogant government.”Footnote ¹⁹ Two years later, on 31 October 1778, Phillips enlisted in the Philadelphia militia. Such a course was unusual in the small American Jewish community; estimates based on surviving records suggest that only about 100 Jews served.Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, he did see action: on 3 September 1779, he was listed on a muster roll as being one of the on-duty matrosses assigned to the artillery regiment of Captain Edward Gale. As a matross, he would have been one rank below a gunner with the task of readying a gun for its next firing.Footnote ²¹

Phillips remained in the Philadelphia militia until 1781, a laudable commitment for a man who was then 45 years old.Footnote ²² Moreover, he refused payment for his military services, noting that he was willing to assist a worthy cause for free. He apparently did not need the money, having thousands of pounds in taxable property to his credit and owning at least two enslaved people.Footnote ²³ By 1782 he was wealthy and self-assured enough to take a very haughty tone with a customer who threatened to sue him for nonpayment for some silk: “It is your own fault that you have not been paid before, I am willing to return you the silk, you are the first unreasonable gentleman that has offered to sue me. I thank God my character will not suffer by it.”Footnote ²⁴

Phillips’s character was inseparable from his status within a larger Jewish community. When his wartime service ended, he and a few fellow Jews were still without a dedicated synagogue, worshipping in a room on the second floor of a private home. Phillips paid £16,000 for a piece of property in foreclosure that he hoped would become a new synagogue, but the parcel was too small. Despite this setback, Phillips was a major financial contributor to the synagogue that was eventually built and presented it with a brand-new Torah scroll.Footnote ²⁵ As president of the new synagogue, Phillips invited members of the federal and state governments to observe its consecration:

The invitation suggests that, rather than seeing themselves as a marginalized group, Phillips and the other Philadelphia Jews saw their customs as compatible with American ideals.

After the war concluded, advertisements for Phillips’s store proliferated, suggesting that he had reinvested his wartime earnings. In 1783, he placed an advertisement offering a 10 pound reward for the return of his chaise, horse, and horse tack, which had been stolen from his chaise house. The possession of all of these items illustrates the continued growth of his personal fortune.Footnote ²⁷ He petitioned the Philadelphia state legislature to change its rules regarding the granting of vendue licenses, to ensure that auctioneers were required to give a secured bond.Footnote ²⁸ He also attempted to make his mark on the national economy by proposing to the superintendent of finance, Robert Morris, “the Scheme of a Lottery,” which according to Morris, “I could not approve as either reasonable, feasible or just therefore returned it to the Author.”Footnote ²⁹ A second petition that he sent to the Pennsylvania Assembly was read and reported on favorably in 1796, illustrating the continued exercise of his political voice.Footnote ³⁰ A final important testimony to his increasing status is his growing household. Although Jonas and Rebecca lost four infants in their first year, his wife ultimately bore twenty-one children.Footnote ³¹

Jews in Britain could not be elected to public office until the Jews Relief Act, which required an oath sworn “on the true faith of a Christian,” passed in 1858.Footnote ³² In the newly created United States, however, Jews had an easier road to political inclusion. New York’s 1777 state constitution was the first to admit Jews to full civil rights.Footnote ³³ Eight years later, Virginia’s Statute of Religious Freedom (1785) not only operationalized full political rights for Jews, but also emphasized that freedom of conscience, as a natural right, was not one capable of being regulated by the state.Footnote ³⁴ And after 1787, the floodgates opened for individual states to alter their constitutions to remove religious tests for officeholding, but state constitutions, even broad-minded ones like Virginia’s or Pennsylvania’s, unthinkingly introduced Christianity either as a requirement for voting, or as a behavioral constraint.Footnote ³⁵

When the Constitutional Convention met in his adopted city to write a new federal constitution, Phillips sent that body a letter to express his frustration with Pennsylvania’s state constitution. He began his letter by addressing the assembly as those with “wisdom, understanding, and knowledge.”Footnote ³⁶ He explained that in Pennsylvania, putative officeholders had to swear that they acknowledged both the Old and New Testaments as “given by divine inspiration,” which Phillips noted was “absolutely against the Religious principle of a Jew, and is against his Conscience to take any such oath.”Footnote ³⁷ If the framers would but remove the one phrase about the New Testament, the Jews would “think themself happy to live under a government where all Religious societys are on an Equal footing.” Phillips ended the petition with a prayer: “May the people of these states Rise up as a great & young lion, May they prevail against their Enemies,” and he added that Washington’s exploits should be celebrated around the world. The Convention had no control over Pennsylvania’s state constitution, but his letter did convey, from someone who had carried arms during the conflict, a demand for equal treatment.

Phillips was integrated into the fabric of Philadelphia socially as well as politically. In the same year that Phillips reached out to the Constitutional Convention, he hosted his daughter Rachel’s wedding to Michael Levy. Phillips invited the eminent physician Benjamin Rush to attend, as Rush had recently provided medical care for Jonas’s wife, Rebecca. Rush attended the wedding largely for anthropological reasons, writing to his wife, “you know I love to be in the way of adding to my stock of ideas on all subjects.” Rush described the family’s parlor, packed with benches to seat 30 or 40 men, and “an old rabbi” who chanted in Hebrew. Rush was impressed by the great beauty and diffidence of the bride and surprised when the ceremony itself involved a canopy over the bride and groom and the breaking of a glass. Invited to stay and dine, Rush claimed other pressing business, but accepted wine and cake. He reported to his wife that his mind was racing with ideas:

For Rush, the interest in and enjoyment of the ceremony were accompanied not with disgust, but seemingly with regret about the current status of the Jews and hope for their future.

In 1789, Phillips moved his household and his store from the Northern Liberties of Philadelphia to Ogden’s Ferry. In his new, larger space, he offered not only his traditional retail assortment but also a real estate brokerage. Ever the innovator, he set up a private taxi system to take would-be buyers from the Market Street area of Philadelphia over the bridge by appointment. His advertisements appeared in the Philadelphia newspapers at least eighty-six times, showing that he clearly had the money for overheads.Footnote ³⁹

The year 1790 marks a turning point in the story of Phillips’s self-making. He had successfully transformed himself from an unremarkable Hessian immigrant into a revolutionary war soldier and wealthy retailer who continually leveraged his social and economic position to expand the possibilities for the Jewish community. Although the 1787 Constitutional Convention had had no control over the Pennsylvania state constitution, in 1790 a new Pennsylvania constitution omitted the offending language. It was replaced with the assertion in Article IX, Section 4 that “that no person, who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments, shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this commonwealth.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In the same year, George Washington famously addressed Congregation Yeshuat Israel in Newport, Rhode Island, whose congregants had greeted him with their well-wishes:

Washington’s return letter, which may have been written for him by Thomas Jefferson, and that sounds a lot like Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom for Virginia, reads in part:

Phillips died in 1803 at the age of 67 and was buried in the First Shearith Israel cemetery in Lower Manhattan. He had apparently broken with the Philadelphia congregation, while his wife, who long outlived him, was buried in Philadelphia.Footnote ⁴³ Several of his children survived to adulthood, moving from the mercantile interests of the first generation in North America to become attorneys, actors, military officers, and diplomats. Phillips’s descendants include the first Jewish American naval commodore, Uriah Phillips Levy, who was such a devotee of Thomas Jefferson that he presented Congress with the statue of Jefferson that now sits in the rotunda and purchased Jefferson’s Monticello estate to prevent it from falling into ruins.Footnote ⁴⁴

Phillips’s life illustrates a potential for self-making for a Jewish immigrant in revolutionary America in a way that was less possible than it would have been in Britain. In the decade leading up to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, some commentators and officials have used Phillips for political reasons as the embodiment of a “Judeo-Christian” heritage that he himself would not have recognized.Footnote ⁴⁵ Visitors to the Museum of the American Revolution learn, as I did, about the Jewish merchant, the “Judeo-German” letter, and the Declaration of Independence, but this is only a snapshot within a more complicated life. Almost nothing else in Yiddish survives in Phillips’s papers, as he integrated himself into an Anglophone civic and political sphere and a Jewish religious sphere: the letter is a tantalizing look at a moment of personal self-making in the larger context of the self-making of a new polity.