Autograph Letter Signed, in English to Rev. Isaac Leeser, Philadelphia

TOURO, JUDAH

New Orleans

10 March 1849

See L. Huhner, The Life of Judah Touro (1946), p. 95 (contents of the letter)

EXCEPTIONALLY RARE AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED BY JUDAH TOURO American Jewish philanthropist Judah Touro was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1775 and died in New Orleans in 1854. Touro was orphaned of his father, Isaac Touro, Dutch-born chazan (minister-cantor) of Newport's Congregation Yeshuath Yisrael, at the tender age of eight. Thenceforth he lived in the home of his maternal uncle, Moses Hays of Boston. Touro moved to New Orleans from Boston in 1801. Practically overnight Louisiana would first be ceded by the Spanish to the French, and then sold to the United States in what has become known as the “Louisiana Purchase.” Under the new American administration, New Orleans became the major shipping hub that it has remained to this day. Touro became extremely active in the Port of New Orleans and ultimately amassed a fortune estimated at the time of his death in 1854, of some one million dollars. Touro received reknown on account of his generous bequests to Jewish philanthropic causes both in the United States and Eretz Israel. He gave vasts sums to aid the destitute in Jerusalem and asked Sir Moses Montefiore of London to act in his stead to see that the funds were wisely utilized. In the United States many institutions still bear Touro's name, including the colonial synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, as well as a Jewish college in New York. In the present letter, Touro informs Isaac Leeser that the check enclosed for the amount of $1,120.17 is to defray the cost of “sundry articles, ordered by Mr. G. Kursheedt, for the Synagogue here.” It is fair to say that more than any other single individual, Isaac Leeser (1806-1868) was the driving force behind the advocacy of Orthodoxy in mid-eighteenth century America. Gershom Kursheedt (1817-1863), named after his maternal grandfather, Gershom Mendes Seixas, chazan of Spanish-Portuguese congregations in New York and Philadelphia, was a disciple of Isaac Leeser. Through Kursheedt, Leeser was able to exert an Orthodox influence upon the direction New Orleans Jewry was taking. See B.W. Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans (1969), pp. 74-90 (Touro), 247-252 (Kursheedt); EJ, Vol. XV, cols. 1288-9; L. Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (1995), pp. 13,182, 265, n. 51. Autograph Letters by Judah Touro very rarely appear at auction