Revolutionary War battalions in Georgia and South Carolina ordered their casks of food from Mordecai Sheftall, a Jewish merchant in Savannah who was a commissary general for the Continental troops. He kept every receipt, as was his habit, whether he was rationing beef for hospitalized soldiers, hiring a dance teacher for his daughter or tracking down rough fabric to make into clothing for slaves. ''My Ethiopians are almost naked,'' one plantation owner wrote to Sheftall in 1788. About 3,300 of Sheftall's documents, which his family preserved after his death in 1797, have been stored for decades at the American Jewish Historical Society, now part of the Center for Jewish History at 15 West 16th Street in Manhattan. Few military archives from Southern colonies survive, and fewer still from Jewish patriots, said Susan L. Malbin, the society's library director. But scholars could have trouble poring through the Sheftall trove. Much of it is falling apart. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]