The eldest of 14 children and first-born son of Samuel Judah and Jessie Jonas, Benjamin S. Judah was born into a life of responsibility. His distinguished New York Ashkenazi family stemmed from the paternal grandfather, Baruch Judah, an immigrant from Breslau who had been one of the founders of Congregation Shearith Israel’s Beaver Street synagogue in 1728.
Judah wore his responsibilities well, establishing himself early in a successful career as a merchant. At age 26, in 1786, he was a founder of the New York Tontine. A decade later, he was in London, where he spent several years establishing important connections on the continent for transatlantic trade. Nevertheless, he would suffer a significant reversal of fortune during the War of 1812.
During the Revolution, Judah allied himself with the Patriot cause, removing from occupied New York to Philadelphia, where he joined Congregation Mikve Israel. Upon his return to New York at the end of the war, he played important roles in the governance of Congregation Shearith Israel and in public life. In 1789, he was among the signatories of a petition to the New York state legislature to have Vermont admitted to the union as an independent state.
Judah regarded himself as a proud American throughout his life. When tensions rose between the United States and France in 1798, while he was living in London, he wrote to Alexander Hamilton to volunteer his services for the purpose of acquiring arms to assist his country “to defend her claims against an insidious foe.” “Every American,” he wrote to Hamilton, “must feel the ardour of aiding his country to justify her rights.”
Judah married late in life to eighteen-year-old Eliza Israel, the daughter of a London contact, in 1803. Although his bout with fatherhood began when he was 44, Judah pursued it just as avidly as he had commerce and politics. He ultimately fathered ten children over the next twenty-four years, including playwright Samuel Benjamin Helbert Judah. When he died, at age seventy-one, his youngest child, George, was only three years old.
