Individual Notes

Note for: Bilhah (Beulah) Abigaill Levy, 26 Nov 1696 - 16 May 1756 Index

Individual Note:
      "Bilhah Abigail Levy Franks was born a year after her parents, Rachel and Moses Levy, arrived In New York from London. She received an extensive cultural education, which was unusual for young women in the colonies. Some of her favorite authors were Shakespeare, Smollett, Fielding, Dryden and Pope. Abigail kept up with the events in the colonies. She went to court to observe the trial of Peter Zenger, a newspaper editor, who criticized the governor and was tried for libel. At age 16, she married Jacob Franks in 1712. He was a boarder in her parent’s home, who emigrated from London. They had nine children, six of them survived infancy.
        "There were approximately 50 Jewish families living in New York City. Most of them belonged to Shearith Israel Congregation, the oldest Jewish synagogue in North America. Jacob Franks served as president. He and Abigail attended Sabbath and the Jewish holidays services. Abigail was very strict in observing the Sabbath, the holy days and her kosher home. She was very careful about eating in her relatives homes. She feared that their kitchens were not as kosher as hers.
        "She wrote 34 letters to her son, Naphtali, who was living in London. Her letters were published by the American Jewish Historical Society, who also has her portrait. In her letters to Naphtali, she told him to eat only bread and butter in his uncle’s house as his kitchen wasn’t that kosher. She was always sending him food. In her letters, she discussed other family members, family business, the politics of the city and neighborhood gossip. Abigail’s letters showed a great deal of warmth for her son and she always ended them with a prayer for the Almighty to look after him.
        "Abigail Levy Franks died in 1756. Although members of her family are buried in the cemetery of Shearith Israel, in lower Manhattan, there is no record of her grave. The legacy, that she left, were the letters she wrote which tell of a devout, religious, warm Jewish mother, who loved her children."--(from “Abigail Levy Franks: The Epitome of a Jewish Mother in Colonial America,” by Seymour “Sy” Brody, from “Jewish Heroines of America: from Colonial Times to 1900.”)
        Born in London in 1696, Bilhah Abigaill Levy, the eldest of the five children of Moses Raphael and Richea Asher Levy, came to New York City with her family around 1703. There she dropped the name Bilhah, which recalled Rachel's handmaiden, the mother of two of Jacob's twelve sons. A few years later, Abigaill's mother died, leaving her eleven-year-old daughter, the only female, to care for her younger brothers until Moses wed again. Perhaps the tensions that erupted between the children of this first marriage and their new stepmother propelled Abigaill to marry Jacob Franks at the age of sixteen, which was uncommonly young for colonial Jewish women. Jacob came from London from a large, thriving Jewish merchant family, yet Abigaill's letters display little interest in her husband's business affairs other than that of the naturally concerned wife: "I never knew the benefit of the Sabbath before, but now I am glad when it comes for his sake, that he may have a little relaxation from that continual hurry he is in"
        Emigrated from London to New York in 1703 with her parents. From the age of seven, Bilhah Abigaill, who in New York shed the marked name of Bilhah to become just Abigaill which she always wrote with two l’s, grew to womanhood. Her childhood, for which no reference survives, can only be inferred.

Individual Notes

Note for: Asher Levy, 2 Feb 1699 - 1742 Index

Individual Note:
Emigrated from London to New York in 1703 with his parents.

Individual Notes

Note for: Nathan Levy, 18 Feb 1704 - 21 Dec 1753 Index

Individual Note:
Emigrated from London to New York in 1703 with his parents.

Individual Notes

Note for: Isaac Levy, 19 Jul 1706 - Mar 1777 Index

Individual Note:
Lancaster Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was founded in 1730; one of the six or seven cities in the United States containing pre-Revolutionary Jewish settlements. The earliest record of this interesting Jewish settlement seems to be that of a deed, dated Feb. 3, 1747, from Thomas Cookson to Isaac Nunus Ricus and Joseph Simon(s), conveying a half-acre of land in the township of Lancaster "in trust for the society of Jews settled in and about Lancaster, to have and use the same as a burying-ground." At this time there were about ten Jewish families at Lancaster, including Joseph Simon, Joseph Solomon, and Isaac Cohen, a physician. In 1780 the list of Jews included also Bernard Jacob, Sampson Lazarus, Andrew Levy, Aaron Levy, Meyer Solomon, Levy Marks, and Simon Solomon, all shopkeepers, and Joshua Isaacs, later of New York, father-in-law of Harmon Hendricks.