His name was Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, and I think that he would have thought of himself as Sephardic, Hispanic as well as Judeo Portuguese.
Look, Judge Cardozo was born in New York City, the son of Rebecca Washington (Nathan) and Albert (Abraham) Jacob Nunes Cardozo.
Both Cardozo’s maternal grandparents, Sara Seixas and Isaac Mendes Seixas Nathan, and his paternal grandparents, Ellen Hart and Michael H. Nunes Cardozo, were Spanish & Portuguese Israelites; their families immigrated from the United Kingdom before the American Revolution, and were descended from Jews who left their native country Portugal on the Iberian Peninsula for the Netherlands during the Portuguese inquisition.
Judge Cardozo was a twin, with his sister Emily. He was a cousin of the poet Emma Lazarus. He was named for his uncle, Benjamin Nathan, a vice president of the New York Stock Exchange and the victim of a famous unsolved murder case in 1870.
Albert Cardozo was himself a judge on the Supreme Court of New York (the state’s general trial court) until he was implicated in a judicial corruption scandal, sparked by the Erie Railway takeover wars, in 1868. The scandal led to the creation of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and Albert’s resignation from the bench. After leaving the court, he practiced law until his death in 1885. Last but not least I should mention that Judge Cardozo’s father was a trustee and Segan (Vice-President) of Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue in New York City. His mother Rebecca Cardozo died in 1879 when Benjamin was quite young.
Judge Cardozo remained all his days a convinced bachelor.
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