Isaac Da Costa

Isaac Da Costa (1721-1783) migrated from London around 1750 and began a family in Charleston with his wife Sarah Pimenta Da Costa (c.1735-1793). In 1752, he placed an advertisement in The South Carolina Gazette noting his large supply of textiles, clothes, and shoes, as well as other dry goods such as tea, candlesticks, pewter dishes, and gunpowder. Seven years later, he announced the sale of an enslaved man who was “brought up chiefly in a [schooner],” and by the beginning of the 1760s, Isaac engaged in business with Thomas Farr Junior (d. 1778).¹ Operating together as Da Costa & Farr, Isaac and Thomas sold imported dry goods such as clothing, wine, rum, and sugar, before they parted ways in 1762, and potentially again in 1766. By 1778, Isaac began another business endeavor—Isaac Da Costa & Son—with his namesake, Isaac Junior (c.1751-1809). By the following year, the younger Da Costa joined Joseph De Palacios & Company.

While engaged in the mercantile industry, the elder Isaac Da Costa also contributed to the early success of Beth Elohim Synagogue and served as its first Hazan, or reader. In 1764, he sold the synagogue a plot of land to serve as a communal burying ground—now known as the Coming Street Cemetery. Due to a conflict between congregants of Sephardic and Ashkenazi descent, two burial grounds were used by the time of Isaac’s death in 1783. Ironically, Isaac was buried between Hanover and Amherst streets in the DaCosta Cemetery, a burial ground for “Portuguese Jews,” rather than the Coming Street Cemetery he founded.

¹ “To be sold,” The South Carolina Gazette, September 8, 1759, 4.