Rachel Mordecai Lazarus

A teacher and early champion of women’s rights, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus was born in Virginia; she grew up in the small town of Warrenton, North Carolina, where she and her family were the only Jews. While she had little formal education, Rachel’s father Jacob Mordecai was a prominent scholar and she herself loved learning, and taught at the nonsectarian boarding school her father directed. In 1821, she married Aaron Lazarus, a widower from Wilmington. Though she was drawn to Christianity—going so far as to be baptized shortly before her death—she was distressed by antisemitism and began a correspondence with a favorite author, Maria Edgeworth, to protest the antisemitic depiction of a character in one of the latter’s novels. Their correspondence was published in a full edition in 1977.