History of the Jews in the United States
The history of the Jews in the United States goes back to the 1600s and 1700s. There have been Jewish communities in the United States since colonial times, with individuals living in various cities before the American Revolution. Early Jewish communities were primarily composed of Sephardi immigrants from Brazil, Amsterdam, or England, many of them fleeing the Inquisition.
Private and civically unrecognized local, regional, and sometimes international networks were noted in these groups in order to facilitate marriage and business ties. This small and private colonial community largely existed as undeclared and non-practicing Jews, a great number deciding to intermarry with non-Jews. Later on, the vastly more numerous Ashkenazi Jews that came to populate New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere in what became the United States of America altered these demographics.
Until the 1830s, the Jewish community of Charleston, South Carolina, was the largest in North America. In the late 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, many Jewish immigrants arrived from Europe. For example, many German Jews arrived in the middle of the 19th century, established clothing stores in towns across the country, formed Reform synagogues, and were active in banking in New York. Immigration of Eastern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, in 1880–1914, brought a new wave of Jewish immigration to New York City, including many who became active in socialism and labor movements, as well as Orthodox and Conservative Jews.
Refugees arrived from diaspora communities in Europe during and after the Holocaust and, after 1970, from the Soviet Union. Politically, American Jews have been especially active as part of the liberal New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party since the 1930s, although recently there is a conservative Republican element among the Orthodox. They have displayed high education levels and high rates of upward social mobility compared to several other ethnic and religious groups inside America. The Jewish communities in small towns have declined, with the population becoming increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas. Antisemitism in the U.S. has endured into the 21st century, although numerous cultural changes have taken place such as the election of many Jews into governmental positions at the local, state, and national levels.
In the 1940s, Jews comprised 3.7% of the national population., at about 7.1 million, the population is 2% of the national total—and shrinking as a result of low birth rates and Jewish assimilation. The largest Jewish population centers are the metropolitan areas of New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Jewish immigration
The Jewish population of the U.S. is the product of waves of immigration primarily from diaspora communities in Europe; emigration was initially inspired by the pull of American social and entrepreneurial opportunities, and later was a refuge from the peril of ongoing antisemitism in Europe. Few ever returned to Europe, although many have made aliyah to Israel. Statistics demonstrate that there was a myth that no Jews returned to their previous diasporic lands, but while the rate was around 6%, it was much lower than for other ethnic groups.From a population of 1,000–2,000 Jewish residents in 1790, mostly Sephardic Jews who had immigrated to Great Britain and the Dutch Republic, the American Jewish community grew to about 15,000 by 1840, and to about 250,000 by 1880. Most of the mid-19th century Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants to the U.S. came from diaspora communities in German-speaking states, in addition to the larger concurrent Christian German migration. They initially spoke German, and settled across the nation, assimilating with their new countrymen; the Jews among them commonly engaged in trade, manufacturing, and operated dry goods stores in many cities.
Between 1880 and the start of World War I in 1914, about 2,000,000 Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews immigrated from diaspora communities in Eastern Europe, where repeated pogroms made life untenable. They came from Jewish diaspora communities of Russia, the Pale of Settlement, and the Russian-controlled portions of Poland. The latter group clustered in New York City, created the garment industry there, which supplied the dry goods stores across the country, and were heavily engaged in the trade unions. They immigrated alongside non-Jewish eastern and southern European immigrants, which was unlike the historically predominant American demographic from northern and western Europe; records indicate between 1880 and 1920 that these new immigrants rose from less than five percent of all European immigrants to nearly 50%. This change caused renewed nativist sentiment, the birth of the Immigration Restriction League, and congressional studies by the Dillingham Commission from 1907 to 1911. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 established immigration restrictions specifically on these groups, and the Immigration Act of 1924 further tightened and codified these limits. With the ensuing Great Depression, and despite worsening conditions for Jews in Europe with the rise of Nazi Germany, these quotas remained in place with minor alterations until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Jews quickly created support networks consisting of many small synagogues and Ashkenazi Jewish Landsmannschaften for Jews from the same town or village.
Leaders of the time urged assimilation and integration into the wider American culture, and Jews quickly became part of American life. During World War II, 500,000 American Jews, about half of all Jewish males between 18 and 50, enlisted for service, and after the war, Jewish families joined the new trend of suburbanization, as they became wealthier and more mobile. The Jewish community expanded to other major cities, particularly around Los Angeles and Miami. Their young people attended secular high schools and colleges and met non-Jews, so that intermarriage rates soared to nearly 50%. Synagogue membership, however, grew considerably, from 20% of the Jewish population in 1930 to 60% in 1960.
The earlier waves of immigration and immigration restriction were followed by the Holocaust that destroyed most of the European Jewish community by 1945; these also made the United States the home for the largest Jewish diaspora population in the world. In 1900 there were 1.5 million American Jews; in 2005 there were 5.3 million. See Historical Jewish population comparisons.
The most recent Jewish communities to immigrate to the United States en masse are Iranian Jews, who primarily immigrated to the United States in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, and Soviet Jews who came after the fall of the Soviet Union.
On a theological level, American Jews are divided into a number of Jewish denominations, of which the most numerous are Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Orthodox Judaism. However, roughly 25% of American Jews are unaffiliated with any denomination. Conservative Judaism arose in America and Reform Judaism was founded in Germany and popularized by American Jews.
Colonial era
, a Spanish conquistador and converso first set foot in what is now Texas in 1570. The first Jewish-born person to set foot on American soil was Joachim Gans in 1584. Elias Legarde was a Sephardic Jew who arrived at James City, Virginia, on the Abigail in 1621. According to Leon Huhner, Legarde was from Languedoc, France, and was hired to go to the Colony to teach people how to grow grapes for wine. Elias Legarde was living in Buckroe in Elizabeth City in February 1624. Legarde was employed by Anthonie Bonall, who was a French silk maker and vigneron, one of the men from Languedoc sent to the colony by John Bonall, keeper of the silkworms of King James I. In 1628, Legarde leased on the west side of Harris Creek in Elizabeth City. Josef Mosse and Rebecca Isaake are documented in Elizabeth City in 1624. John Levy patented of land on the main branch of Powell's Creek, Virginia, around 1648, Albino Lupo who traded with his brother, Amaso de Tores, in London. Two brothers named Silvedo and Manuel Rodriguez are documented to be in Lancaster County, Virginia, around 1650. None of the Jews in Virginia were forced to leave under any conditions.Solomon Franco, a Jewish merchant, arrived in Boston in 1649; subsequently, he was given a stipend from the Puritans there, on the condition that he leave on the next passage back to Holland. In September 1654, shortly before the Jewish New Year, twenty-three Jews from the Sephardic community in the Netherlands, coming from Recife, Brazil, then a Dutch colony, arrived in New Amsterdam. Governor Peter Stuyvesant tried to enhance his Dutch Reformed Church by discriminating against other religions, but religious pluralism was already a tradition in the Netherlands and his superiors at the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam overruled him. In 1664 the English conquered New Amsterdam and renamed it New York.
Religious tolerance was also established elsewhere in the colonies. The charter of the colony of South Carolina granted liberty of conscience to all settlers, expressly mentioning "Jews, heathens, and dissenters." As a result, Charleston, South Carolina has a particularly long history of Sephardic settlement, which, in 1816, numbered over 600—then the largest Jewish population of any city in the United States. Sephardic Dutch Jews were also among the early settlers of Newport, Savannah, Philadelphia and Baltimore. In New York City, Congregation Shearith Israel is the oldest continuous congregation started in 1687 having their first synagogue erected in 1728, and its current building still houses some of the original pieces of that first.
Revolutionary era
By the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1776, around 2,000 Jews lived in the British North American colonies, most of them Sephardic Jews who immigrated from the Dutch Republic, Great Britain, and the Iberian Peninsula. Many American Jews supported the Patriot cause, with some enlisting in the Continental Army; South Carolinian planter Francis Salvador became the first American Jew to be killed in action during the war, while businessman Haym Solomon joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty and became one of the key financiers to the Continental Army. The highest ranking Jewish officer in the Patriot forces was Colonel Mordecai Sheftall; whether or not Brigadier general Moses Hazen was Jewish is still the subject of debate among historians. Other American Jews, including David Franks, suffered from their association with Continental Army officer Benedict Arnold during his defection to the British in 1780.U.S. President George Washington remembered the Jewish contribution when he wrote to the Sephardic congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, in a letter dated August 17, 1790:
May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in the land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants. While everyone shall sit safely under his own vine and fig-tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.
A small Jewish community had developed in Newport over the 18th century; this included Aaron Lopez, a Jewish merchant who played a significant role in the town's involvement in the slave trade.
In 1790, the approximate 2,500-strong American Jewish community faced a number of legal restrictions in various states that prevented non-Christians from holding public office and voting, though the state governments of Delaware, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia soon eliminated these barriers, as did the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1791 more generally. Sephardic Jews became active in community affairs in the 1790s, after achieving "political equality in the five states in which they were most numerous." Other barriers did not officially fall for decades in the states of Rhode Island, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. Despite these restrictions, which were often enforced unevenly, there were really too few Jews in 17th- and 18th-century America for anti-Jewish incidents to become a significant social or political phenomenon at the time. The evolution of Jews from toleration to full civil and political equality that followed the American Revolution helped ensure that antisemitism would never become as common as in Europe.