Judah Touro

More than any other figure of the period, Judah Touro stands as the prototype of the American Jewish philanthropist.

Born in 1775, Touro was the second son of Isaac Touro, hazzan of Newport, Rhode Island’s synagogue Jeshuat Israel. The Dutch-born, Sephardic Isaac had arrived in Newport in 1758 at the height of the city’s bustling commercial prosperity. He had come, perhaps, at the invitation of parnas Aaron Lopez, and over his years in Newport became intimately acquainted not only with city’s prominent Jewish merchants—the Harts, the Riveras the Lopezes—but also with another of Newport’s clergymen, one of late 18th-century America’s great intellectuals, theologians, lawyers and the future president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles. 1773 had seen Isaac’s marriage to Reyna (Richea) Hays, daughter of merchant Michael Hays and brother of Moses Michael Hays. The following year their first son, Abraham, was born.

With the coming of the Revolutionary War, Isaac, a Tory, opted to remain in Newport, even as many of the city’s residents fled. The war was economically straining on the city and the Touro family was reduced to poverty, reliant on the charity of British soldiers. Eventually the Touros were able to relocate to Jamaica, where Isaac officiated until his death in 1784.

On Isaac’s death, Reyna brought the family back to New England, moving in with her brother Moses Michael Hays in Boston. Soon after, she too passed away, leaving Hays the responsibility of raising her three children along with his seven. Reyna was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Newport which years later would serve as the subject of a Longfellow poem.

Though Hays, a prosperous merchant and financier, would pass on to Touro his mercantile acuity as well as his commitment to civic and Jewish life, the relationship between uncle and nephew would not always be harmonious. Having been raised in the family business, and in 1798 entrusted with a major cargo shipment to the Mediterranean, Touro was at twenty-five discharged by his uncle and compelled to leave home. The cause for this sudden break was Hays’ daughter Catherine. The cousins had fallen in love and wished to marry. Hays disapproved of the relationship, and his decision to expel his nephew from the family business and home would prove a transformative moment in Touro’s life. In 1801 Touro, seeking out opportunity, moved to New Orleans, in the still French territory of Louisiana, and the two cousins never saw each other again. Neither one of them married—tradition has it, out of devotion to each other

Touro established himself as a merchant and shipper in the growing port city at the mouth of the Mississippi. The Louisiana Purchase followed his arrival by two years, and with the American acquisition of the territory, New Orleans experienced a tremendous influx of investment and flurry of speculation. Touro profited significantly from these boom years.

In the War of 1812 Touro fought under Andrew Jackson as a volunteer. In the battle of Januray 1, 1815 Touro was, in the words of a contemporary observer, “struck in the thigh by a twelve pound shot which produced a ghastly and dangerous wound.” He was carried from the battlefield by his friend Rezin D. Shepherd, who then spent the next year nursing Touro back to health. With his recovery, he resumed his business activities, now investing extensively in real estate in and around the rapidly expanding New Orleans of the 1820’s and 30’s.

As Touro entered middle age, he embarked on what would amount to a second career in philanthropy. Initially the objects of his generosity were non-Jewish institutions: a public library in his birthplace of Newport and one in his adopted home of New Orleans—the city’s first. He provided support for various churches in New Orleans and $10,000 to complete the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston.

Then, in his early 70’s, Touro made the acquaintance of two leaders of the American Jewish community—Gershom Kursheedt and Isaac Leeser. They convinced Touro of the importance of financing Jewish institutional life in America, a task that he would take to passionately and with unprecedented generosity. Though New Orleans already had a synagogue—Shanaria-Chasset—Kursheedt persuaded Touro of its inadequacies, impugning it’s rabbi for eating “whatever comes before his maw.” Touro helped found the new congregation Nefuzoth Yehuda, providing the funds for a building, lands for a religious school and a cemetery. He also began regularly attending services there. He next donated the money for the establishment of New Orleans’ Jewish hospital, the Touro Infirmary.

In death, Touro set the bar for American Jewish philanthropy, and his will, in a sense, remains one of the great documents of institutional Jewish history in the United States. He left $100,000 to the leading Jewish congregations and benevolent societies of New Orleans. He willed a further $150,000 to Jewish congregations and charitable institutions in 18 other American cities and $60,00 to help relieve the poverty of the Jewish population in Palestine. Touro also left money to non-Jewish institutions, such as the Massachusetts General Hospital that his brother had helped found. He was buried with his family in Newport, and his bequest to the abandoned synagogue there, where his father had officiated, made possible its reopening and continuity to this day. In the popular consciousness, if not officially, it now bears his name—the famous Touro Synagogue of Newport—and is the oldest standing synagogue in the United States.

Judah Touro

1861