Albert Jacob Cardozo was an American attorney and jurist in New York City. He is best known for his association with the Tammany Hall organization led by Boss Tweed.
Albert Jacob Cardozo (December 21, 1828 – November 8, 1885) was an American attorney and jurist in New York.
Early background
Albert Jacob Cardozo was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the son of Ellen Hart and Michael H. Cardozo, Sephardi Jews of the Portuguese Jewish community. Sephardi Jews immigrated to the colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries from London. The family returned to New York, where Albert Cardozo went to school and read the law; he passed the bar and began practicing law in New York in 1849.
He married Rebecca Washington (née Nathan). Her parents, Sara Seixas and Isaac Mendes Seixas Nathan, were also Sephardic Jews in New York. Among their children was a daughter Nell and fraternal twins, Benjamin (future U.S. Supreme Court justice) and Emily, 11 years younger. After Rebecca died when the twins were young, Nell had a key role in rearing them.
Career
Cardozo became a justice in 1864 of the Supreme Court of New York, that state's trial court. By 1866, Cardozo was working on behalf of Tammany Hall's William M. Tweed ring. Without seeing the applicants, many of whom had questionable citizenship, Cardozo granted naturalization papers for up to 800 persons per day.
