As the population of the city grew and the congregation became more diverse, tensions rose between the Sephardic and Ashkenazic members of KKBE. In 1775, the congregation was torn by a dispute that pitted former hazan Abraham DaCosta and several of his relatives, members of early Sephardic families, against Emanuel Abrahams and Myer Moses, who were among the many newcomers from German-speaking states. (By this time Ashkenazim outnumbered Sephardim in the congregation.) The split resulted in the two groups worshipping in different places.

After the British navy’s defeat at the Battle of Sullivan’s Island in June 1776, military activities mostly spared Charles Town until the British siege began in late March 1780. After their victory in May 1780, the British occupied the city until December 1782. Many Jewish families scattered. Patriots, in particular, made their way to Philadelphia, which remained in control of American forces. For reasons not entirely clear, by 1783, KKBE’s Sephardic members had founded Beth Elohim Unveh Sholom or House of the Lord and Mansion of Peace, holding services in a rented building on Fulton Street and burying their dead in a separate cemetery on Hanover Street. Within a year, however, the two factions merged back into KKBE.

Most Jewish men joined the congregation, and some of them became involved in the brotherhood of Masons, a fraternity rooted in the artisan guilds of medieval Europe that in the New World provided social and business networks regardless of faith or nationality. One of the first Jewish members of a Charleston lodge was Isaac DaCosta, who joined Solomon’s Lodge No. 1 in 1753 and became its treasurer in 1759. In 1783, he was one of the organizers of the Sublime Grand Lodge of Perfection, which became the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in 1801. Four of the eleven founders of Scottish Rite were Jewish; only two of the eleven were American-born.

Charleston Jews also founded specifically Jewish charitable institutions, such as the Hebrew Benevolent Society, in 1784, to take care of the sick and bury the dead, and, in 1801, the Hebrew Orphan Society, whose mission was to provide for “the Relief of Orphans and Children of Indigent Parents.”

In 1790, there were more than fifty Jewish households in Charleston. More than half included slaves, on the average about three per household. Some households were headed by women, and a number of married women practiced as femes sole, women who were legally permitted to conduct business and enter contracts, free of their husbands. Nearly half the city’s Jewish residents lived on King Street, which was becoming the principal business street. There were at least four Jewish auctioneers, one factor, one cigar maker, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a baker, one artist, a “Jewish butcher,” three merchants, one schoolmaster, one scrivener (clerk), and twenty-four shopkeepers in Charleston.

PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO THE PASSAGE OF TIME, THE LOSS OF MANY BUILDINGS, AND THE ERRATIC SHIFTING OF STREET NUMBERS OVER THE YEARS, IT IS DIFFICULT TO PINPOINT THE EXACT LOCATION OF MOST OF THESE 1788 SITES. LOCATIONS INDICATED ARE APPROXIMATE.