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T HE M AINLAND ' S F RAGILE J EWISH outpost gained a certain demographic depth in ensuing decades. Britain's victory in the Seven Years' (French and Indian) War opened out new horizons for settlement and trade in North America. Accordingly, fresh rivulets of Jewish immigration appeared. Most of the newcomers still were Dorfjuden , German-or Yiddish-speaking men from small towns in Central Europe. Upon arriving in the New World, they preferred initially to dwell among their own, in the cities. Thus New York remained the major focus of settlement. By 1776, between three hundred and three hundred fifty Jews lived there, in a colonial Jewish population of approximately two thousand. Close behind were Newport, Philadelphia, Charles Town, and Savannah. Perhaps 60 percent of American Jews lived in these cities, with smaller numbers in New Haven, Providence, Perth Amboy, and Lancaster. Most were petty traders, and most continued on in North America as retailers and artisans. Among them, however, emerged several impressive business successes. In New York, Samson Simpson and Jacob Franks acted as purchasing agents for the British armed forces on the mainland. During the 1754–63 French and Indian War, Simpson purchased and leased out to the Royal Navy four gunbearing privateers; Hayman Levy, two; Jacob Franks and Judah Hays, one each. By mid-century, Jews accounted for possibly 15 percent of the colonies' import-export firms, dealing largely in cocoa, rum, wine, fur, and textiles. Beyond his role as purchasing agent, as importer, and as real estate investor, the redoubtable Hayman Levy also became the colonies' single largest fur trader. Indians lined the streets outside his New York warehouse to offer him their pelts. One of his employees was the young John Jacob Astor. Ultimately, Levy developed a merchant empire that left him upon his death in 1763 by far the richest Jew in North America. His son David further enlarged the family estate through astute real estate investment. A Levy brother-in-law, Isaac Moses, owned a fleet of merchant vessels that plied the coastal route from Montreal to Savannah. With Samson Simpson, he was the founder of the New York Chamber of Commerce in 1768.
The Jews of Newport represented an even more impressive success story. During the French and Indian War, the dynamic little Rhode Island port initially flourished as a center for British privateering. In peacetime afterward, Newport developed an extensive West Indian trade. As a major focus of the whaling industry, too, the town by 1760 was operating seventeen sperm oil refineries and candle factories. Jews built much of this thriving economy. On the eve of the Revolution, approximately one hundred fifty of them lived in Newport, almost as many as in Philadelphia, and nearly half the number in New York. They figured prominently in the coastal and international trade. One of their number, Aaron Lopez, wrote an unforgettable chapter of colonial business history. The Lopez and Rivera clans were descendants of Portuguese marranos. Settling in Newport early in the eighteenth century, the Riveras prospered as shippers and wholesalers. Moses Lopez, who married into the family, also thrived. In 1752 Moses invited his brother Duarte to emigrate from Lisbon to join him. Accepting the offer, Duarte Lopez and his family departed Portugal as marranos. Upon reaching America, they openly resumed their ancestral faith. Duarte underwent the painful ordeal of circumcision and adopted the name Aaron. His wife, Anna, became Abigail. Their daughter, Catherine, henceforth was Sarah. Aaron (Duarte) Lopez then remarried his wife in a Jewish ceremony. Thereafter, he wasted little time in setting out as a merchant shipper. Five years into the post-1763 boom, Lopez owned in whole or jointly with the Rivera family thirty ocean-going vessels and some one hundred coastal schooners. From Newfoundland to the West Indies, from Lisbon to London, his ships and cargoes figured prominently in the molasses and slave trades. Respected as much for public-spiritedness as for business acumen, Lopez by 1776 had emerged as Newport's most eminent citizen.
In the deep South, meanwhile, Charleston (formerly Charles Town) supported a Jewry very nearly as prosperous as Newport's. A major producer of rice and indigo, a gateway to the West Indian trade, the town by the late eighteenth century encompassed a mixed community of two hundred Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, the second largest Jewish community in North America. Most were small tradesmen, but among them also appeared plantation owners, slave dealers, and importer-exporters. Francis Salvador, born in England, was the grandson of the first Jewish director of the British East India Company. He was also the son-in-law of the absentee owner of one hundred thousand acres of prime South Carolina soil. Dispatched to America in 1766 to care for this estate, Salvador transformed the plantation into a model of enlightened agriculture and achieved recognition as one of South Carolina's pre-eminent citizens. Moses Lindo arrived in Charleston from his native London in 1756, invested in an indigo plantation, energetically promoted the fabulous Carolina indigo trade, and became the Board of Trade “certifier” for all indigo exports.
Elsewhere in the colonies, other Jews shared in the opening of the frontier. Abraham Mordecai conducted an extensive Indian trade along the lower Mississippi (and eventually married an Indian woman). The Gratz brothers, Michael and Bernard, made a good thing of extensive land purchases west of the Alleghenies. In 1775 the three Hart brothers of Kentucky joined a North Carolina judge, Richard Henderson, in forming the Transylvania Company. In a treaty with the Cherokee nation, the partners bartered ten thousand pounds of merchandise for the twenty-million-acre stretch of Kentucky south of the Kentucky River. A Hart employee, the frontiersman Daniel Boone, recruited a Jewish lad as his assistant, one Samuel Sanders, who had been convicted in a London court of “clipping coins” and deported to Virginia Colony for seven years' servitude. Sanders became a son to Boone, who had lost his own son in an Indian attack two years earlier. Eventually Sanders, too, was captured by a Shawnee tribe; he chose to marry and remain among them.
How far, then, had the Jews come, on the threshold of the Revolution? In none of the colonies were they legally entitled to occupy high public office. Yet the prohibition rarely evinced deep-seated animus. Anti-Catholic hostility always was much more intense. Unlike the restrictions imposed on Catholics, not a single law ever was enacted in British North America specifically to disable Jews. To be sure, in England, and in the Netherlands, too, Jews enjoyed considerable religious and even political freedom. Nevertheless, they were much better off in the New World than in the Old. They were free not only to engage in any trade, in any colony, but also to own a home in any neighborhood. In New York and Rhode Island, Jews could attend university (an all-but-unimaginable boon in Europe). Their neighbors at worst were suspicious or unfriendly, but few taunted them, and instances of physical molestation were quite rare. By 1776, the two thousand Jews of colonial America unquestionably were the freest Jews on earth.