Family and Early Life
Judah Philip Benjamin was born a British subject in 1811 in Saint Croix, to Phillip Benjamin, an English Sephardi Jew, and his wife, Rebecca de Mendes, a Sephardi Jew from Spain. This was during the period of British occupation of the Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin Islands). His father was a first cousin and business partner of Moses Elias Levy, father of future Florida senator David Levy Yulee.
He emigrated with his parents to the U.S. in 1813, where the family first lived in Wilmington, North Carolina. In 1822, they moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where his father was among the founders, with Isaac Harby, of the first Reform congregation in the United States, the "Reformed Society of Israelites for Promoting True Principles of Judaism According to Its Purity and Spirit". The formation of the congregation was of such interest that it was covered by the North American Review, a national journal of the time.
As a youth, Benjamin attended Fayetteville Academy in North Carolina. At the age of fourteen, he entered Yale College. He left without completing the degree and read the law. According to one account, Benjamin was expelled from Yale, although the reason was not officially disclosed. In 1828, he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he started clerking with a law firm as an alternative route to certification as an attorney. He studied law and learned French to qualify to practice in Louisiana. He was admitted to the bar in 1833 at the age of 21, and entered private practice as a commercial lawyer.
Read more about this topic: Judah P. Benjamin
Famous quotes containing the words family and, family, early and/or life:
“In former times and in less complex societies, children could find their way into the adult world by watching workers and perhaps giving them a hand; by lingering at the general store long enough to chat with, and overhear conversations of, adults...; by sharing and participating in the tasks of family and community that were necessary to survival. They were in, and of, the adult world while yet sensing themselves apart as children.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Female Virtues are of a Domestick turn. The Family is the proper Province for Private Women to Shine in. If they must be showing their Zeal for the Publick, let it not be against those who are perhaps of the same Family, or at least of the same Religion or Nation, but against those who are the open, professed, undoubted Enemies of their Faith, Liberty, and Country.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“I declare
Two lineages electrify the air,
That will like pennons from a mast
Fly over sleep and life and death
Till sun is powerless to decoy
A single seed above the earth:
Lineage of sorrow: lineage of joy....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)