If you ask most people where American Jewish history begins, they’ll say New York. Some might know about Newport. Almost no one says Georgia.

And yet, just five months after the colony of Georgia was founded in 1733, a ship called the William and Sarah sailed into Savannah’s harbor, carrying forty-two Jewish refugees who had fled the Inquisition. They arrived with almost nothing. A Torah scroll. A circumcision kit. The clothes on their backs.

They would go on to build the third-oldest Jewish congregation in America and the oldest in the South. And nearly three centuries later, the story they started is still unfolding, quietly, in plain sight, mostly missed by the people walking right past it.

Recently, I sat in the sanctuary of that congregation, Mickve Israel, as the community opened a new exhibit marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Sitting there, I kept thinking about how strange and wonderful it is that this place exists at all. That it has always existed. That Savannah, a city most people know about for ghost tours and raucous St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, has been home to one of the great untold stories in American Jewish life for almost three hundred years.

The Synagogue That Doesn’t Look Like One

Mickve Israel sits on Monterey Square in the heart of Savannah’s historic district. Walk past it without knowing what it is and you’d assume it was a church. Pointed Gothic arches. Stained glass. A soaring central tower. It’s the only Gothic-style synagogue in North America, and you wouldn’t know it until you got close enough to spot the Hebrew inscriptions and the Star of David on the spire. In 2017, Condé Nast Traveler named it one of the fifteen most beautiful synagogues in the world. Many people still walk by without a second glance.

That resemblance was not an accident.

When the congregation chose the Gothic Revival style for their building in 1878, they were making a quietly courageous decision. As architectural historian Stephen Moffson has written, by adopting the visual language of Christian architecture, the congregation was deliberately softening the line between itself and its gentile neighbors. You can read that as a shield against discrimination or as an outstretched hand. It was almost certainly both.

After the consecration, a........

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