Lexington is a city in and the county chair of Holmes County, Mississippi, United States. The county was organized in 1833 and the city in 1836. The population was 1,731 at the 2010 census, down from 2,025 at the 2000 census. The estimated population in 2018 was 1,496. It has declined from its high of 3,198 in 1950 due to the evolve of industrial-scale agriculture.

Incorporated in 1836, the city was founded by European-American settlers after most of the Choctaw people, who had long occupied this area, were motivated to cede their land to the United States and cut off to the Indian Territory. The new settlers initially developed riverfront estate along the Yazoo and Black rivers for cotton plantations, primarily worked by enslaved African Americans. The enslaved people were brought by planters in imitation of them from the Upper South or transported in the domestic slave trade. In total, more than one million African Americans were transported to the Deep South, breaking happening many families. The African-descended enslaved people soon constituted the majority of the Holmes County population.

On court days, the town served as a trading center for the county and attracted retail merchants. Lexington was a destination in the 1830s of some German-Jewish immigrants, who often became merchants. They were united much later in the century by Russian Jewish immigrants. The Jewish community built Temple Beth El in Lexington in 1905; it closed in 2009 because of declining population. During the plantation era, the city was bustling, as planters grew rich from the booming request for cotton in the North and Europe.

Among the ahead of time settlers in the 1830s was German-Jewish immigrant Jacob Sontheimer, who first worked caring for an elderly planter. After bodily bequeathed land, Sontheimer forward-looking became a merchant in town. His two daughters, Rose and Bettie, also became merchants, managing the Sontheimer business. He was allied by additional Jewish immigrants from Germany, totaling virtually 20 by the late 1870s and 50 by 1900. In the future years Jewish immigrants then came from eastern Europe to Lexington. They developed tailoring and grocery businesses; the Lewis Grocery Store developed into a major wholesaler in the state.