History of the Jews in Texas

Jao de la Porta was with Jean Laffite at Galveston, Texas in 1816, and Maurice Henry was in Velasco in the late 1820s.

Dr. Albert Levy became a surgeon to revolutionary Texan forces in 1835, participated in the capture of Bexar, and joined the Texas Navy the next year.

[3] Today the vast majority of Jewish Texans are descendants of Ashkenazi Jews, those from central and eastern Europe whose families arrived in Texas after the Civil War or later.

These services would eventually lead to the founding of Texas' first and oldest Reform Jewish congregation, Temple B'nai Israel, in 1868.

[3][5] Between 1907 and 1914, a resettlement program, known as the Galveston Movement, was in operation to divert Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe away from the crowded-immigrant cities in the Northeast.

Ten thousand Jewish immigrants passed through the port city of Galveston during this era, approximately one-third the number who migrated to the area of the Ottoman Empire that would become the state of Israel during the same period.

[7] Judge Roy Bean then turned the tent saloon into a part-time courtroom, pronounced his own innocence, and began calling himself the "Law West of the Pecos".

Billie Mayfield edited a weekly Klan newspaper in Houston that regularly used antisemitic stereotypes to attack Jews as parasites only interested in extracting wealth from the community.

[8] In one article, Mayfield even wrote that “there are lots of good Jews in Houston and all over Texas; you find them with tombstones over their heads.”[9] In many ways, the KKK threat helped unify the Houston Jewish community, which fought against the racist, antisemitic organization with newspaper articles, business boycotts, and legal action.

He pioneered the innovations of cash-and-carry and self-service grocery stores in Houston, building a local chain that reached 70 locations by the time of his death in 1967.