Biography
Haym Solomon was born in Leszno, Poland to a Sephardi Jewish family from Portugal. In his youth, he studied Hebrew. During his travels in western Europe, he acquired a knowledge of finance as well as fluency in several other languages. He returned to Poland in 1770 but left for England two years later in the wake of the Polish partition. In 1775, he immigrated to New York City, where he established himself as a financial broker for merchants engaged in overseas trade.
When he first came to the colonies, he became friends with Alexander MacDougall. In July 1777, Solomon married Rachael Franks, the daughter of Moses Franks, of a prominent colonial period Jewish family that included loyalist and revolutionary sympathizers. Moses Franks was also of one of the largest slave dealers in the city at the time. Their first child, a boy named Ezekiel, was born in New York in the summer of 1778; later, in Philadelphia, they had two daughters, Sarah and Deborah. Rachel Solomon gave birth to her fourth child three months after her husband's death and named the baby Haym M. Salomon.
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