Judah P. Benjamin

Origins and early life

Judah Philip Benjamin was born in 1811 in Christiansted, St.

Work and career

Croix, to Sephardic Jewish parents from London, and raised in Charleston. One of New Orleans's leading lawyers, he was elected to the United States Senate in 1852 — the first Jew to sit there without renouncing his faith — and declined Supreme Court nominations from both Fillmore and Pierce. He owned the Bellechasse sugar plantation and the 140 enslaved people who worked it, and when the South seceded he served the Confederacy as Attorney General, Secretary of War and finally Secretary of State — attacked in antisemitic terms in both North and South, "Mr.

Davis's pet Jew". Ruined and hunted after the defeat, he escaped to England, was called to the bar at 55, and rose to the top of a second profession. His Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property (1868) — "Benjamin on Sales" — remains a standard work of English commercial law a century and a half later.