Name/Title
Colonel Mendes I. CohenEntry/Object ID
1986.0002.0912Description
This portrait by Rembrandt Peale of Mendes Israel Cohen (1796–1879) shows the son of Prussian Jews who immigrated to the mid-Atlantic just prior to the Revolution. After joining the army at age 16, Cohen served in the War of 1812, worked as a banker, and studied botany. In 1829, he became one of the first Americans to travel to the Holy Land, writing extensively about the Jewish communities he encountered during a six-year journey that also included a tour of Europe.
Although closely associated with Baltimore, where the Cohen family’s bank and lottery helped fund that city’s Washington Monument (1815) in Mount Vernon Place, Mendes’s uncle Jacob established himself in Philadelphia, where he was active in the Masons and served as president of Mikveh Israel, the city’s first Jewish congregation and synagogue. Mikveh Israel was established as a Sephardic congregation but soon welcomed Ashkenazi Jews, like the Cohens, into its Orthodox community.
How might Mendes Israel Cohen’s life reflect the ways that Jewish identity in early America was shaped between local belonging and global movement?Made/Created
Artist
Attributed to Rembrandt PealeNotes
Date made: c. 1840?Dimensions
Dimension Description
FrameDimension Description
SizeHeight
25 inWidth
30 in