Today Lancaster may seem like an unlikely landmark for Jewish history in North America. But before our country's independence, Lancaster was an important outpost of what was then the frontier. The oldest inland city in the United States, Lancaster drew those with a taste for adventure and an eye for making money in the lucrative Indian trade. Among those who came in the late 17th and early 18th centuries were a number of Jews. Few stayed long enough to settle or to put down any roots, but it is the presence of one man, Isaac Miranda, who arrived in what is now Lancaster County around 1715, which gives Lancaster the claim to be the fourth oldest area of Jewish settlement in the United States.
Miranda, who was born Jewish in Tuscany (now Italy), ran both a farm and a trading post along Conoy Creek where it joins the Susquehanna River between Bainbridge and Maytown. A savvy trader among the tribes in the wilds of Lancaster County, Miranda became quite wealthy and at the time of his death in 1732 owned considerable property not only in Lancaster County but also in New Jersey and in Philadelphia. As the only Jew in Lancaster during those early decades of the 18th century, his must have been a lonely existence with little or no opportunity to practice his faith. It is no surprise then that Miranda married a non-Jewish woman and apparently converted to Christianity.
William Penn's tolerance for minorities meant that the Pennsylvania colony was a comfortable environment for Jews. Distinguishable from other colonists only by the practice of their faith, Jews were left alone to earn their living and to live as they wished. Nonetheless, Jews in the colony were not permitted to hold political office or to vote. We know of Isaac Miranda's probable conversion since he was appointed to several political offices (none of which he held for very long) by the colony's governor. While Miranda is, according to the historical record, the first Jew to live in Lancaster County, he appears to have been a Jew only by birth, not by the practice of his faith. A few years after Miranda's death, a practicing Jew, Joseph Simon, settled in Lancaster and became the founder and leader of a small but authentic colonial Jewish community in Lancaster.
English-born Joseph Simon arrived here in 1740. He ran a store in a building on Penn Square that was torn down to build the Watt and Shand store. He, along with his nephew, Levy Andrew Levy, and Joseph Solomon, a shopkeeper who was an uncle of Simon's wife, formed the core of Lancaster's Jewish community during this time. They were the first Jews to settle in Lancaster who openly practiced their faith and raised families here.
While the numbers of Jews in Lancaster rose and fell during the colonial period, Simon was unquestionably Lancaster's colonial Jewish patriarch. Highly regarded by his peers, wealthy but presumably illiterate, Simon and his friend and neighbor, Isaac Nuñes Henriques, bought land for a Jewish cemetery in 1747. Simon also provided a room for worship in his own home (now the site of Mellon Bank on the southwest corner of Penn Square), purchased two Torahs for use by Lancaster's colonial Jews (in his will Simon left the Torahs to Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia), and hired and housed the ritual slaughterers. Historical records indicate that this informal congregation held services and observed Jewish ritual and life-cycle events. David Brener, in his history of Lancaster's Jews, speculates that apart from the small and fluid numbers, it was Lancaster's proximity to the larger and more established Jewish community of Philadelphia and the many family ties between the two communities that removed pressure from Lancaster to have its own formal congregation during the colonial period.
As most of Lancaster's colonial Jews were engaged in trade and commerce, their fortunes and their numbers fluctuated as a result of various historical events. As a frontier outpost, Lancaster was well situated to be a jumping off place for trade with tribes and settlers to the west. But the growth of communities even farther to the west, chronic Indian attacks, the French and Indian War, and finally the Revolutionary War all affected this trade. Joseph Simon was involved in a variety of business partnerships in Lancaster and as far west as Fort Pitt and as a result of these events, he saw his own fortunes rise and fall. But perhaps Simon's biggest blow came when his nephew and business partner, Levy Andrew Levy, and his family left Lancaster in 1785 for Baltimore. By the 1790 census, there were only three Jewish families in Lancaster. As in decades earlier, Jews passed through Lancaster but did not settle. Instead, they preferred bigger cities on the coast or the more opportune areas growing farther to the West. Simon left no male heir in Lancaster to carry on a Jewish tradition here and with Simon's death in 1804, an era ended for Jews in Lancaster.
Simon lived to be 92, fathered ten children, and was well respected and successful in a variety of business endeavors. As his sons and daughters married, they moved to Baltimore or to Philadelphia. Rebecca Gratz, his granddaughter, a renowned Philadelphia beauty, founded the first Jewish religious school in America while Richea Gratz, another of Simon's granddaughters, was the first Jewish woman in the United States to attend college.
By 1800, Simon was the only Jew left in Lancaster. With his death, the Jewish community in Lancaster would lay dormant until the 1840s when a new community of Jews would be drawn to Lancaster. These Jews knew nothing of Lancaster's colonial Jewish community except that it had left behind a cemetery. Unknowingly, they built on the legacy of Joseph Simon when in 1856, they established Lancaster's first formal Jewish congregation, Shaarai Shomayim.

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