On Friday, Jonas Phillips drafted and delivered a letter addressed to His Excellency the President and Honorable Members of the Convention Assembled. Born in Germany in 1736, Phillips immigrated to the British colony of South Carolina when he was twenty years old, working as an indentured servant to pay his passage. After completing his indenture and becoming a freeman three years later, he moved to New York, became a merchant, and married Rebecca Mendez Machado. Eventually Jonas and Rebecca had twenty-one children.

An early supporter of the Patriot cause, Phillips moved his family out of British-controlled New York to Philadelphia, where he maintained his business and joined the Continental Army in 1778. His enthusiasm for independence had been expressed in a letter written to a friend in the Netherlands just weeks after Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776. His letter discussed the war against the British and included a list of goods he wanted to import for sale, as well as a copy of the Declaration of Independence. The British intercepted his letter. Unable to recognize the language in which it was written, the British assumed it was in code, when in fact it was written in Yiddish by a founder of Mikveh Israel, also known as the Synagogue of the American Revolution.

During the War, many Jews fled from New York, Richmond, Savannah, and other cities to Philadelphia, seeking refuge from the British. As the community grew, it purchased a lot on Cherry Alley and hired a carpenter and bricklayer to build a two-story building complete with a school, a mikvah, and an oven for baking Matza for Passover. Nearby were the Old Reformed Church of the United Church of Christ and Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Joachim Gans is believed to be the first Bohemian and first recorded Jew in America, recruited in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh in his failed effort to establish the first permanent British colony in the New World. Nearly sixty-five years later, twenty-three Jews sailed into New Amsterdam (later New York), after Portugal expelled Jews and Protestants from Brazil.

While Jews settled throughout the colonies, a surprising number settled in the South, particularly South Carolina, where its original constitution, drafted by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 1st Earl of Shaftsbury, and his secretary, the celebrated philosopher John Locke, provided for religious toleration – except for Catholics. The document expressly included in its protections religious freedom for “Jews, heathens, and dissenters.” In 1733, the London Sephardic Jewish community sent forty-two of its members with the first English settlers of Georgia. Overall, religious toleration prevailed throughout the colonies, although in many places Jews and other non-Christians were prohibited from voting and holding public office.

With the cry for freedom and independence from Great Britain came new freedom for religious minorities. Like other groups, Jews were divided between allegiance to the King and support for the Patriots. In 1774, as relations between the colonies and the British deteriorated, Francis Salvador became the first Jew to be elected to public office in the colonies. His family had acquired 200,000 acres of land in the new Georgia District of Ninety-Six (known as “Jews Land”). Like his friends Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Rutledge and other plantation owners, slaves worked Salvador’s plantation. Elected to the second Provincial Congress, Salvador was a champion of independence, and the first Jew to be killed in the War. Attempting to raise the alarm of an impending British-led Indian attack on frontier families in Ninety-Six District, he was shot and fell into bushes. He was found later, but died from his wounds, including having been scalped by Cherokee Indians.

The highest-ranking Jewish officer in the Continental Army was Mordecai Sheftall, achieving the rank of colonel. After Savannah was taken by the British, Sheftall and his son were captured and placed on board the Nancy, a British prison ship, and refused all inducements to abandon the Patriot cause. As a prisoner, he refused to eat pork because of his religious convictions. To taunt him, his captors ordered his cutlery to be smeared in pork grease, knowing he would not use it. While on the prison ship, another prison drowned while attempting to escape and Sheftall offered to use what little he had of his personal money to pay for the man’s burial. Although released in June 1779, he was captured a second time and exiled to the island of Antigua. Through a prisoner exchange, he was released again in April 1780 and eventually settled in Philadelphia where he helped build Mikveh Israel, the Synagogue of the American Revolution.

Jonas Phillips’s letter to the Convention draws attention to the Pennsylvania Constitution which requires any person holding public office to swear an oath affirming belief in one God and the divine inspiration of both the Old and New Testaments. As a Jew, affirming divine inspiration of the New Testament violates his conscience and freedom of religion. He reminded the delegates that “the Jews have been true and faithful Whigs…They have been foremost in aiding and assisting the States with their lives and fortunes; they have supported the cause, have bravely fought and bled for liberty which they cannot enjoy.”

Phillips closed his letter with a prayer “unto the Lord. May the people of these States rise up as a great and young lion; may they prevail against their enemies; may the degrees of honor of his Excellency the President of the Convention, George Washington, be extolled and raised up…May God extend peace unto the United States and their seed after them so long as the sun and moon endureth, and may the almighty God of our father Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob endue this noble assembly with wisdom, judgment, and unanimity in their councils, and may they have the satisfaction to see that their present toil and labor for the welfare of the United States may be approved of, through all the world and particularly by the United States of America.”