History and Culture

Benjamin Franklin Peixotto

February 28, 2023

by Tanya Elder

Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, was born in Ohio as one of eight children of Rachel Seixas Peixotto and Dr. Daniel Moses Levy Peixotto. Benjamin started his life as a journalist for the Ohio Plain Dealer, but sided early during the Civil War with the Copperheads, who wanted peace between the Union and Confederacy. He left the newspaper with its editor George Davis, going on to found the Hebrew Benevolent Society, the first B’nai B’rith lodge in Cleveland, and the Jewish Orphan Asylum. Peixotto would later become a lawyer in New York, and was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant as American consul to Romania where Peixotto called for the Jews of Romania to be evacuated to the United States due to pograms and antisemitism. The AJHS holds the records of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, the first Jewish civil rights group in the U.S. with numerous documents from him regarding “Rumania.” After he left government service, his founded the Menorah: A Monthly Magazine for the Home in 1886. He passed away in 1890 at the age of 55 years old. The AJHS holds his death mask, an image of which can be viewed at the United States National Portrait Gallery.

Tanya Elder

Tanya Elder studied Experimental Theatre, History and Archival Management at New York University and Library Science at Wayne State University. She was a children’s librarian at the Philadelphia Free Library and the Queens Public Library; she worked as an Archives Assistant at the NYU University Archives; and as a project archivist at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives (New York City Council, 1898-1998), and the Stephen Wise Synagogue. She was archivist at the Riverside Church in New York City, and researcher for ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? As an NHPRC archivist at the Center for Jewish History, she re-processed the Raphael Lemkin papers, a lawyer who developed the theory of genocide, and wrote on the known American archives of Lemkin entitled, “’What you see before your eyes’: documenting Raphael Lemkin’s life by exploring his archival Papers, 1900–1959,” for the Journal of Genocide Research. She also published the essays “Hip v. Nice v. Nasty. v. Traditional v. Aaarrgghhh” and “What Do I Have to Be,” for two compilations of In Our Own Voices: The Changing Face of Librarianship. She is currently the Senior Archivist of the American Jewish Historical Society.