8 - Jews and Judaism in the United States

Summary

Jews, like so many other immigrants, crossed the Atlantic seeking economic opportunities and religious freedom. But from the first, the destinies of North America's early Jews illustrate the predicaments lying at the core of the modern Jewish experience: How does one become an American and remain a Jew? How does one maintain a minority faith in a majority culture? And how does a diverse group of people maintain a sense of community amidst competing visions of what it means to live a Jewish life? Moreover, in venturing to the New World, Jews wondered if they would meet disabilities and hatred, as they had elsewhere, or would America prove the exception? American Jews inscribed their history as they responded to these questions, choices, and challenges.

JEWS IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD

In 1654, twenty-three Jewish refugees from Brazil debarked in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The Jews of the United States date their community to these first twenty-three souls, although a few Jewish merchants and even a metallurgist had preceded them to North America, and Jews had already made their way, or soon would, to colonial settlements beyond the Atlantic seaboard, among them Curaçao, Surinam, and Jamaica.

Persecution propelled many to these first outposts, even as new economic possibilities attracted them. Most of the first Jews to cross the Atlantic traced their origins to the Iberian Peninsula, where what had once been a large and thriving Sephardic Jewish community had come to a catastrophic end with the 1492 expulsion of all Jews from Spain and the mass forced conversion of Portuguese Jews in 1497.