Judah Touro stands as the founding parent of American Jewish philanthropy.

Born in 1775, Judah was the second son of Isaac Touro, the hazzan of Newport, Rhode Island’s synagogue, Yeshuat Israel. A Dutch born Sephardic Jew, Isaac arrived in Newport in 1758. In 1773, Isaac married Reyna (Richea) Hays, the daughter of successful merchant Judah Hays and sister 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 devastating to the city of Newport 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 over a congregation until his death in 1784.

Upon Isaac’s death, Reyna brought the family back to New England, moving in with her brother Moses Michael Hays in Boston. Shortly after, she too passed away, leaving Hays and his wife Rachel with the responsibility of raising her three children along with their seven.

A prosperous merchant, Hays would pass his mercantile acuity as well as his commitment to civic and Jewish life to his nephews. Nonetheless, the relationship between Judah and his uncle was not always harmonious. Despite having been raised in the family business and in 1798 entrusted with a major cargo shipment to the Mediterranean, at age twenty-five Judah was discharged by his uncle and compelled to leave home. The cause of this sudden break was attributed to Judah’s affection for 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 moved to New Orleans, in the still French territory of Louisiana. The two cousins never saw each other again. Neither of them married. Tradition has it that it was 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 United States purchased the Louisiana Territory two years after Judah’s arrival and New Orleans experienced a tremendous influx of investment and a flurry of financial speculation. Touro profited significantly from those boom years.

During the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, Touro fought in the battle of New Orleans. In the words of a contemporary observer, Judah was “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 spent the next year nursing Touro back to health. With his recovery, he resumed his business activities, 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 construction of the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston.

In his early seventies, 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 the rabbi for eating “whatever comes before his maw.” In response, 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 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 $60,000 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, which his brother Abraham had helped found. He was buried with his family in the Jewish Cemetery in Newport, and his bequest to the abandoned synagogue over which his father had officiated made possible its reopening and continuity to this day. In the popular consciousness, if not officially, it now bears his family name, Touro Synagogue, the oldest standing synagogue in the United States.