Philadelphia broker Haym Salomon (1740-1785) played a vital role in ensuring that the American colonies' fight to win independence from the British crown continued. During the 1770s, he brokered a number of large financial transactions that kept American soldiers clothed, fed, and armed. It is thought that this Jewish emigrant contributed much of his own assets to the war for independence because he died deeply in debt.

Haym Salomon was born in 1740 to a family of Portuguese Jews. His parents had been driven out of the Iberian peninsula by anti-Semitic laws enacted by the Spanish monarchy, and settled in Lissa (now Leszno), a part of Poland that, at the time, belonged to the kingdom of Prussia. The Jewish villages in the area, however, were sometimes decimated by vicious pogroms: a crime or incident would occur, Jews in the area came under suspicion for it, and then mob violence...