A founder of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia during the war, Phillips and his wife had a total of twenty-one children.

[2] An additional grandson was Mordechai Manuel Noah, American consul to Tunis and recognized as the most influential Jew in the early 19th-century United States.

[3] Jonas Phillips was born in 1736 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Germany, in either Buseck or Frankfort am Main (Frankfurt).

At the age of 20, the ambitious Phillips emigrated to the British colonies in North America, sailing from London in November 1756.

He was employed by Moses Lindo, an indigo planter and Sephardic Jew who was part of the growing Jewish community in the city.

By the beginning of the 19th century, Charleston was home to the largest and wealthiest Jewish community in North America, a status it would hold until about 1830.

Phillips left Albany to secure an introduction to Rebecca Mendez Machado, daughter of a Sephardic Jewish family in New York City.

In that year he joined the revolutionary Continental Army, serving in the Philadelphia Militia under Colonel Bradford.

While the congregation left that first synagogue and the property was redeveloped, its cemetery at the site has been preserved and is designated as a National Historic Landmark.

[2] In 1834, he bought Monticello eight years after President Thomas Jefferson's death, and used his own money to preserve the house and estate for the American people.