Joseph I. Andrews

The eldest son and third child among Joseph and Sallie Salomon Andrews’ twelve children, Joseph I. Andrews was born in New York in 1801.

As a youth, it seems Joseph was something of a scapegrace. Perhaps the earliest record in which he appears—and certainly the most colorful—comes from an 1825 letter of complaint to Zalegman Phillips, parnas of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. In this letter, Abraham Israel, shammash of Mikveh Israel, complains that “the young Ladies of Mr. Andrews” had caused some trouble at the synagogue on Passover, refusing to take their proper seats in the women’s gallery. When the hapless shammash approached their brother Joseph to enlist his support, Israel was shocked by young Andrews’ response. “He boldly told me,” Israel reported, “’I order you, never to go up Again to my sisters or I will Drag you down’…he said he dare the Parnass or any one to ordre his Sisters out of the front seats he will spent a hundred dollars to See it, with Ohther [sic] Abusive Expression.”

After living for some time in Charleston, Andrews settled in Memphis around 1840. The city had been incorporated only fourteen years prior and was home to just a handful of Jews. Andrews quickly established himself as a civic organizer, business leader and founder of Jewish communal institutions. He became a prominent banker, broker and merchant, dealing primarily in cotton. He built Memphis’s first three-story brick house, served for the 1847-1848 term as a city alderman and, when his brother Samuel passed away in 1846, donated the land for a Jewish cemetery, the first Jewish cemetery in the state of Tennessee as well as the first formal Jewish institution in Memphis. In this, Andrews followed a familiar pattern: the first roots put down, the first sign of Jewish communal life in a new city, almost always took the form of a cemetery. A little more than two years after his brother’s death, in 1849, Andrews married Miriam Nones, granddaughter of Revolutionary War veteran Benjamin Nones of Philadelphia. Together they had nine children.

Joseph I. Andrews

early 19th century