Joseph Simon (1712–January 24, 1804) was the leader of the Jewish community in

Lancaster, Pennsylvania Lancaster, ( ; pdc, Lengeschder) is a city in and the county seat of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It is one of the oldest inland cities in the United States. With a population at the 2020 census of 58,039, it ranks 11th in population amon ...

, during the eighteenth century.

Life

Joseph Simon was born in 1712. He immigrated to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from England by 1740. In 1747, he and Isaac Nunes Henriques purchased one half acre of land for the cemetery in which he is buried. It is the 4th oldest Jewish cemetery in the United States. At this time Lancaster had enough Jewish men living in the community to support a

minyan In Judaism, a ''minyan'' ( he, מניין \ מִנְיָן ''mīnyān'' , lit. (noun) ''count, number''; pl. ''mīnyānīm'' ) is the quorum of ten Jewish adults required for certain religious obligations. In more traditional streams of Jud ...

, and religious services were held at Simon's house. Simon was a successful trader and owned enormous tracts of land in the West; among others, he was a business partner of William Henry—a gunsmith, merchant, and, later, important patriot during the

American Revolution The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 1765 and 1791. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revolut ...

. In 1759, he helped found the Juliana Public Library and in 1764 the Union Fire Company. In 1767, Thomas Barton, rector of St. James' Church in Lancaster, described Simon to

Sir William Johnson Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet of New York ( – 11 July 1774), was a British Army officer and colonial administrator from Ireland. As a young man, Johnson moved to the Province of New York to manage an estate purchased by his uncle, Royal Na ...

as "a worthy, honest Jew and principal merchant of this place... He is esteemed a main fair in his dealings and honest from Principle." Simon married Rosa Buun (1727–May 3, 1796) and the two had ten childrenJoseph Simon's biography at FindAGrave.com https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/75877368/joseph-simon together. One of their granddaughters was

Rebecca Gratz Rebecca Gratz (March 4, 1781 – August 27, 1869) was a member of thGratzfamily, who settled in the United States before the American Revolutionary War, Revolutionary War. She was a Jewish American educator and philanthropy, philanthropist in 19t ...

(1781–1869), reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in America, and

Walter Scott Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels ''Ivanhoe'', ''Rob Roy (n ...

may have modeled Rebecca in ''

Ivanhoe ''Ivanhoe: A Romance'' () by Walter Scott is a historical novel published in three volumes, in 1819, as one of the Waverley novels. Set in England in the Middle Ages, this novel marked a shift away from Scott’s prior practice of setting st ...

'' on her.

Death

Simon died on January 24, 1804, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and was buried at Shaarai Shomayim Cemetery. At the time of his death, he was the last known colonial Jewish resident of Lancaster, with much of the Jewish community having moved to

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

Notes

References

*David A. Brener, ''The Jews of Lancaster, Pennsylvania: A Story with Two Beginnings'' (1979). *Sidney M. Fish, ''Barnard and Michael Gratz: Their Lives and Times'' (1984). *William Pencak, ''Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800'' (2005). *Oscar Reiss, ''The Jews in Colonial America'' (2004). {{DEFAULTSORT:Simon, Joseph 1712 births 1804 deaths American people of English-Jewish descent Businesspeople from Lancaster, Pennsylvania Jewish-American history American Jews 18th-century American businesspeople