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Colonial AmericaAmerican Revolution

Mikveh Israel Cemetery

Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania

Marker Inscription

Founded 1740. Notables buried here include Nathan Levy, whose ship brought the Liberty Bell to America; Haym Salomon, Revolutionary patriot; the Gratz family; and Aaron Levy, founder of Aaronsburg.

Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission

The Story

Founded in 1740, this is one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the United States and the resting place of some of colonial and Revolutionary America's most notable Jewish families. Among those buried here are Nathan Levy, whose ship carried the Liberty Bell across the Atlantic; Haym Salomon, the broker whose financing helped sustain the American Revolution; and the prominent Gratz and Levy families. Their graves testify to a Jewish community woven into Philadelphia life from its earliest colonial days.

Why it matters

It preserves the memory of a founding-era Jewish community whose members helped finance independence and build American commerce, an early chapter in the nation's story of religious pluralism and immigration.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

When this burial ground was set aside in 1740, Philadelphia was the thriving commercial heart of Britain's American colonies—a port city founded on William Penn's promise of religious liberty, where Quakers, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics, and Jews could worship without the persecution that shadowed much of the Old World.

That promise is exactly why a small but determined Jewish community took root here so early. Jewish merchants and their families had been filtering into the Atlantic port towns for decades, and Philadelphia's tolerance made it a natural home. A community needs consecrated ground almost before it needs a synagogue, and so this plot became one of the first things these families secured for themselves.

By the time the Revolution arrived a generation later, this was no longer a frontier outpost of Jewish life but an established presence—woven into the commerce, the civic rhythm, and eventually the war effort of a city about to become the birthplace of a nation.

People & events

The names resting here read like a roster of early American Jewish life. Nathan Levy, a merchant whose trading ship carried across the Atlantic the great bell that would one day become the Liberty Bell, helped establish this very cemetery—his family's need for a burial place gave the community its sacred ground.

Haym Salomon is remembered as a patriot of the Revolution, a broker whose financial dealings helped keep the cause afloat during its most desperate hours. That a recent immigrant would pour himself into the fight for a country still being invented says much about what this new world meant to those who came seeking it.

The Gratz family built one of early America's notable commercial dynasties, their name echoing through the young republic's trade and civic affairs. And Aaron Levy, who founded the Pennsylvania town of Aaronsburg, shows how these families did not merely live in America—they helped settle and shape it, laying out towns and planting communities in its interior.

Its place in the American story

This is among the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the United States, and that fact alone anchors a larger American story: religious pluralism was not a later addition to the national experiment but present at its founding.

The people buried here were not bystanders to the Revolution and the birth of American commerce—they were participants. One financed the fight for independence; another's ship carried a symbol that would come to stand for American liberty itself. They remind us that the story of the founding generation includes voices and faiths too often left out of the familiar telling.

In a single quiet enclosure, you can trace the arc of immigration, civic contribution, and belonging that runs through all of American history—the idea that people fleeing the constraints of elsewhere could arrive, take root, and help build something new.

If you visit

This is a small, walled burial ground tucked into the modern city—easy to pass without noticing, which is part of its power. Step inside and the noise of Philadelphia falls away, leaving weathered stones that have stood since before the United States existed.

Take your time reading the markers. Some names will be familiar from the plaque; others belonged to ordinary merchants and family members whose lives together made up a community. Let the dates sink in—graves here predate the Declaration of Independence signed just blocks away.

It pairs naturally with a walk through historic Philadelphia, where the Revolution is commemorated on a grand civic scale. Here you get the quieter, more intimate counterpart: the private resting place of families who helped make that history, and whose presence testifies that the new nation's story belonged to many peoples from the very start.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · Nathan Levy
  • · Haym Salomon
  • · Aaron Levy
  • · Gratz family

Related events

  • · American Revolution

Themes & tags

ImmigrationAmerican RevolutionLandmark

Nearby & related markers

Haym Salomon (1740-1785)

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Haym Salomon arrived in America around 1772, an immigrant who threw himself into the Revolutionary cause and was twice imprisoned by the British. From Philadelphia he worked as a broker and money-lender, extending enormous credit to help keep the struggling war effort and the young government solvent. Active in the city's Jewish community, he was never repaid and died in debt.

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David Salisbury Franks (c.1740-1793)

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David Salisbury Franks was among the small number of Jewish officers to serve the American cause during the Revolution, rising to major and serving as aide-de-camp to General Benedict Arnold. When Arnold's treason was exposed, suspicion inevitably fell on the men closest to him, and Franks endured investigation before being formally cleared and going on to diplomatic service. He died in Philadelphia's 1793 yellow fever epidemic and, having no coreligionists to bury him, was laid to rest at Christ Church by a Christian neighbor.

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For a year or so after 1815, this Philadelphia house sheltered Joseph Bonaparte — Napoleon's elder brother and the deposed king of Naples and later Spain — as he began his long American exile following the collapse of the Napoleonic empire. In these rooms gathered Bonapartist refugees and French émigrés, a small colony of the defeated regime finding footing in the young republic. Joseph would go on to build a grand estate at Point Breeze in New Jersey and live in America for years before returning to Europe.

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Founded in 1787 by German-speaking Catholics who wanted to worship and pass on their traditions in their own language, Holy Trinity became the first German national parish in the United States. Its church rose in 1788–1789, and within a few years its congregation and cemetery included African Americans and refugees from the upheaval in Saint-Domingue, buried alongside parishioners of European descent. The model of the ethnic 'national parish' it pioneered would shape American Catholicism for generations before the parish finally closed in 2009.

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