﻿ The Jews of the USA from 1654 to today




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Ancestory   (now Rootsweb)
This article originally appeared in "Jewish American Research" by Gary Mokotoff in ‘The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy’

See also Historical Jewish population comparisons


The first Jews to come to North America arrived in 1654 at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (renamed New York in 1664). Most were refugees from the Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, which was conquered by the Portuguese that year. The Jews, fearing persecution from the Portuguese Inquisition, left with plans to go to Holland, the home of many Sephardic Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition 150 years earlier. However, they ran out of money and were forced to land at the Dutch colony.

Because Jews in the New World were allowed to practice their religion in a relatively nondiscriminatory environment, record books of American synagogues exist back to colonial times. Besides New York, early Jewish settlements were founded in Savannah, Georgia (1733); Philadelphia (1745); Charleston, South Carolina (1749); Newport, Rhode Island (1763); and Richmond, Virginia (1789).

There are records for this period at the American Jewish Historical Society and the American Jewish Archives, as well as at the synagogue archives themselves.

The definitive genealogical work, now out of print, is First American Jewish Families by Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern, fasg.1 It contains the genealogies (descendants) of every Jewish person known to the author who arrived in the United States before 1838 who remained Jewish for at least one generation. Some fifty thousand persons are identified in it.


Much information about this group can be found using conventional American genealogical resources; little is available through synagogue records. Family historians who have attempted to do German emigration research, Jewish or Christian, know about the paucity of information available for tracing ancestry back to Germany. Ship manifests and citizenship papers provide no clues as to ancestral towns in Germany, so genealogists must dig for information. Family records or death records may hold clues. For example, Jewish immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century are among the most difficult of Jewish ancestors to document; however, Jewish tombstones of German immigrants have been known to indicate the town of birth. Check census records as well; census takers sometimes wrote down the town of birth rather than the country of birth on the census record.

Most German Jews left through the ports of Hamburg and Bremen. Emigration lists from Hamburg for the years 1850 to 1934 have survived and are available on microfilm through the Family History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. Two separate indexes exist, both arranged by year. One, called the direct index, lists ships that sailed directly to the United States. The other, the indirect index, lists ships that stopped at other ports prior to coming across the Atlantic. Virtually no lists from Bremen exist today. They were destroyed in periodic purges. The earliest surviving lists are from 1920. Gyugyugujygjuy gbguyyfyyjfjutybfut


In 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated, and the Russians blamed it on the Jews. Decades of pogroms against the Jewish population followed. This anti-Semitism, along with deplorable economic conditions, drove millions of Jews from Eastern Europe; 2 million went to the United States. Most Jewish Americans are descended from these persons, and there is a wealth of genealogical information about them.


To learn more about this wave of immigrants (Jewish and others), the U.S. government began documenting them more carefully during the 1890s. Passenger arrival records included age, occupation, nationality, town of last residence, final destination, and other data. Starting in 1906, place of birth was added, and in 1907, name and address of the nearest relative in the immigrant's native country were added. The National Archives in Washington, D.C., has on microfilm the ship manifests and indexes to these lists. Most of these have been digitized and placed on the Internet. The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation has records for Ellis Island from 1892'1924 online at http://ellisisland.org with an every-name index, but superior access to these images can be found at http://stevemorse.org. Records of Castle Garden, predecessor to Ellis Island can be found at http://www.castlegarden.org, as well as on Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com also provides indexes and images of other ports, including Baltimore, Boston, Galveston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and other ports of less interest to Jewish research. Copies of these microfilms are available through the Family History Library and regional branches of the National Archives. If access to any of these Internet sites or facilities is difficult, you can request copies by writing to the National Archives, Washington, DC 20408.


Most Jewish immigrants became citizens of the United States. Even those who decided not to complete the process usually went through the first step by filling out a declaration of intention. The declaration of intention form included a number of questions, such as date of birth, date of marriage, arrival date, name of ship, current address, and, in certain years, name at time of arrival in the United States. Consequently, declarations of intention are valuable resources for Jewish American research. Because the submitter was the actual immigrant, it is not unusual to find more accurate information, such as birth dates, in citizenship papers. The location of these papers depends on which court naturalized the individual. If the certificate of naturalization, thought by many to be the 'citizenship papers,' is in the family's possession, it will show the county, state, or federal court in which the citizen was naturalized. Contact the court to learn the current location of the records.

Another way to determine the court of naturalization is through voter registration records. Immigrants had to prove their citizenship, and these records often indicate the court where naturalized. Contact the board of elections where the immigrant lived to determine if the records still exist. Otherwise, the long (six months to one year) route must be taken: contact the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Washington, DC 20530. Some naturalization records have been microfilmed by the Family History Library. For more information on naturalization records, see chapter 9, 'Immigration Records.'


Jewish immigrants formed societies based on their towns of origin; these were called landsmanshaftn societies. Membership in such a group invariably meant that the person came from the town or a neighboring town. One function of these groups was to buy land in a Jewish cemetery. Even if it cannot be determined that an ancestor was a member of a landsmanshaftn society, burial in a plot owned by such a group implies that the ancestor came from that town. (Be aware that the burial societies also sold burial plots to outsiders, so such evidence is not conclusive.) The archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 15 W. 16th St., New York, NY 10011, has a large number of records of these societies. The institute has published its holdings in A Guide to YIVO's Landsmanshaftn Archive.2


Because this period is contemporary, a principal source of information is the individuals themselves or their children. A wealth of twentieth-century documentation on Americans described elsewhere in this book can be used as well.


Holocaust survivors who were friends and neighbors of victims can often provide valuable information. The National Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors contains the names of more than one hundred thousand survivors and their families living in the United States and Canada. The book is available in many Holocaust centers and major libraries. A list of institutions can be found at http://ushmm.org/remembrance/registry. The organization that created the registry will forward letters to survivors. Write to the American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, 122 W. 30th St., New York, NY 10001.


AISH, Rabbi Ken Spiro

















































(2) Ibid., 51-72.


the National Humanities Center, Jonathan D. Sarna and Jonathan Golden, Brandeis University





























In a long tradition of “persecuting the refugee,”
the State Department and FDR claimed
that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security
Smithsonian, Daniel A. Gross  November 18, 2015
































A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson, 1988  pp566-

The expansion and consolidation of USA Jewry in the  nineteenth and twentieth centuries was as important in Jewish history as the creation of Israel itself; in some ways more important. For, if fulfilment of Zionism gave the harassed diaspora an ever-open refuge with sovereign rights to determine and defend its destiny, the growth of US Jewry was an accession of power of an altogether different order, which gave Jews an important, legitimate and permanent place in shaping the policies of the greatest state on earth. This was not
fragile Hofjuden influence but the consequences of democratic persuasion and demographic facts. At the end of the 1970s the Jewish population of the United States was 5,780,960. This was only 2.7% cent of total US population but it was disproportionately concentrated in urban areas, particularly big cities, which notoriously exert more cultural, social, economic and indeed political influence than small towns, villages and rural districts. Towards the end of the twentieth century the Jews were still big-city dwellers. There were 394,000 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, over 300,000 in Paris, 285,000 in Moscow, 280,000 in Greater London, 272,000 in Jerusalem, 210,000 in Kiev, 165,000 in Leningrad, 115,000 in Montreal and 115,000 in Toronto. But the most impressive urban concentration was in the United States Metropolitan New York, with 1,998,000 Jews, was by far the largest Jewish city on earth. The second largest was Los Angeles with 455,000. Then followed Philadelphia (295,000), Chicago (253,000) Miami (225,000), Boston (17000) and Washington DC (160,000) Altogether there were sixty-nine American cities with a Jewish population of over 10,000. There was also a demographic concentration in  key states. In New York State 2,143,485 Jews constituted 12 per cent of the population. They formed 6 per cent in New Jersey 4.6 per cent in Florida, 4.5 per cent in Maryland, 4.4 per cent in Massachusetts, 3.6 per cent in Pennsylvania, 3.1 per cent in California and 2.4 per cent in Illinois. Of all the great American ethnic votes, the Jewish vote was the best organized, the most responsive to guidance by its leaders and the most likely to exert itself effectively.

However, it was possible to exaggerate the direct political impact of Jewish voters however well schooled. Since 1932 the Jews had voted overwhelmingly Democratic, sometimes by as high a proportion as 85-90 per cent. There was no clear evidence that Jewish influence on Democratic presidents or policy was proportionately decisive. In fact during the 1960s and 1970s the continuing fidelity of the Jewish voter to the Democratic Party appeared to be based increasingly on emotional historic grounds rather than on a community of interests. In the 1980s most Jews, somewhat to the surprise of psephologists, still voted Democrat, though the majority fell to around 60 percent. In the 1984 election they were the only religious group (apart from atheists) to give the Democratic candidate majority support, and the only ethnic group (apart from blacks). The Jews voted as they did not for communal economic or foreign policy reasons but from a residual sympathy for the poor and the underdog.80 By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the notion of the 'Jewish lobby’ in American politics had  become to some extent a myth.

What had happened, in the relationship of Jewish citizens to America as a whole, was something quite different and much more important: the transformation of the Jewish minority into a core element of American society. Throughout the twentieth century American Jews continued to take the fullest advantage of the opportunities America opened to them, to attend universities, to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, professional men and women of all kinds, politicians and public servants, as well as to thrive in finance and business, as they always had. They were particularly strong in the private enterprise sector, in press, publishing, broadcasting and entertainment, and in intellectual life generally. There were certain fields, such as the writing of fiction, where they were dominant. But they were numerous and successful everywhere. Slowly, then, during the second half of the century, this aristocracy of success became as ubiquitous and pervasive in its cultural influence as the earlier elite, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Jews ceased to be a lobby in American society. They became part of the natural organism itself, a limb, and a powerful one. They began to operate not from without the American body inwards, but from within it outwards. With their historic traditions of democracy, tolerance and liberalism, they assumed to some extent the same role in America as the Whigs had once played in England: an elite seeking moral justification for its privileges by rendering enlightened service to those less fortunate. In short, they were no longer a minority seeking rights but part of the majority conferring them; their political activity switched imperceptibly from influencing leadership to exercising it.

Hence it became hard to distinguish specifically Jewish element in American culture. They had become an integral and harmonious part of it. It was still harder to identify American policies which were in response to supposed Jewish interests. Such interests tended to become increasingly coterminous with America’s as a whole. This principle operated forcibly in the case of Israel. It was no longer needful to argue America’s leaders into guaranteeing Israel’s right to survive. That was taken for granted. Israel was a lonely outpost of liberal democracy upholding the rule of law and civilized standards of behaviour in an area where such values were generally disregarded. It was natural and inevitable that Israel should receive America’s support and the only argument was about how that support could be most judiciously provided. By the 1980s the realities of the world were such that Israel would have remained America’s most reliable ally in the Middle East and America her most trustworthy friend, even if the American Jewish community had not existed.

Yet that community did exist and it had achieved a unique status in the diaspora not merely by its size but by its character. It was a totally assimilated community which still retained its Jewish consciousness Its members thought of themselves as wholly American but as Jewish too. Such a phenomenon had never existed before in Jewish history, It was made possible by the peculiar circumstances of America’s growth and composition. The Jews, the eternal ‘strangers and sojourners’, at last found permanent rest in a country where all came as strangers Because all were strangers all had comparable right of residence until the point was reached when all, with equal justice, could call it home Then too, America was the first place in which the Jews had settled where they found their religion, and their religious observance, an advantage, because all religions which inculcated civic virtue were1 honoured. Not only that: America also, and above all, honoured the umbrella religion of its own, what might be called the Law of Democracy, a secular Torah which Jews were outstandingly well equipped to observe. For all these reasons it became perhaps misleading to see the American Jewish community as part of  the diaspora at all. Jews in America felt themselves more American than Jews in Israel felt themselves Israeli. It was necessary to coin a new word to define their condition, for American Jews came to form, along with the Jews of Israel and the Jews of the diaspora proper, the third leg of a new Jewish tripod, on which the safety and future of the whole people equally depended. There was the diaspora Jew, there was the ingathered Jew and, in America, there was the possessing Jew.   (This article was written in 1988.    The question becomes ‘Why?’.  One answer is here How American Jews Became Israeli Settlers   Politics, Michael Schulson, May 30, 2017)


World Jewish Congress United States

American Jewish Historical Society

Massachusetts: Portuguese American Archives


Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University

National Museum of American Jewish History

A History of the Jews in America Paperback – November 2, 1993
by Howard M. Sachar

Jewish-American History Foundation

The Jacon Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives

Jewish Book Council

Jewish Population in the United States

Early American Jews

Jews in America: Portal to American Jewish History

Jews in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century America

Jewish Women’s Archive - Encyclopedia   Sharing Stories, Inspiring Change -

Nazi Germany - United States Policy and Its Impact on European Jews   Holocaust Encyclopedia



The first Jews arrived in what is now the USA with Columbus in 1492,

In 1654, 23 Jewish refugees from Recife Brazil arrived in New Amsterdam (later called New York).  The USA was founded as a modern republic rooted in the Bible with a principle of religious tolerance.  In the 17th century pilgrims arriving in ‘New England’ were Puritan refugees escaping from European religious persecution who saw their emigration from England as a virtual re-enactment of the Exodus.

Thanksgiving - first celebrated in 1621, a year after the Mayflower landed, was seen as a day parallel to the Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). It was to be a day of fasting, introspection and prayer. With no oral tradition the Puritans tended toward a literal interpretation of the bible   In some instances this led to a stricter more fundamentalist observance than Judaism.  

The Hebrew Bible played  a central role in founding educational institutions, including Harvard, Yale and Columbia. Bible studies were required and some even adopted a Hebrew word or phrase as part of their official emblem or seal.  Their biblical education colored the American founders' attitude toward politics.

By 1776 there were an estimated 2,000 (mostly Sephardic) Jews living there.

President George Washington remembered the Jewish contribution when the first synagogue (the Sephardic Touro Synagogue) opened in Newport, Rhode Island in 1790  He sent this letter, dated August 17, 1790:


His reference to the "vine and fig-tree." refers to the words of Prophet Micah, prophesying the Messianic utopia.




First, most lived in port cities like New York which were trade biased  with others from different backgrounds and religions so that people of diverse backgrounds and faiths lived side by side.

Second, many early  leaders and institutions were Sephardic, that is coming from the Iberian peninsula, who had strong cultural institutions.

Third, they organised themselves into synagogue-communities which assumed responsibility for the religious and communal needs of all local Jews.

The American Revolution committed itself to the principles of freedom and democracy and religious freedom.

The Civil War saw Jews on both sides

First, tensions led to an upsurge of racial and religious prejudice with Jews as convenient scapegoats.

Second, Jews in the North (not in the South) had to fight to have an an army chaplain.

Third, the most sweeping anti-Jewish official order in American history--General Order No. 11, was published on December 17, 1862 which expelled all Jews from General Grant's military department. This was an irate and highly prejudiced response to wartime smuggling and speculating which applied to both Jews and non-Jews. Thanks to President Lincoln this order was revoked wthin eighteen days.


In the twentieth century, when issues such as immigration restriction and bills aimed at abrogating America's commercial treaty with Russia arose, German and Eastern European Jews were united and planned strategy together. Kinship proved far stronger than petty in-group squabbles.

By 1924, nearly two million Eastern European Jews had immigrated to America.  This was later increased by those escaping the Nazis.


The story is told in the videos

For each there are sources of information for
genealogical research.






Fewer than 15,OOO


German emigration



 Eastern European emigration






Holocaust survivors



Russian Jews
and others

Up to
5O,OOO per year

1900    1,500,000 1.97% of US Population
1942    4,975,000 3.00%    
1970    5,400,000 2.63%
2010    5,275,000 1.71%




The Americas

The Diaspora

The JEWS of the USA
from 1654 to TODAY


Jewish Migration
to the
United States

The Amazing Story
Jewish influence
on the
Founding Fathers
American Democracy.

The American Jewish Experience
Through the
Nineteenth Century: Immigration

The U.S. Government
Turned Away
of Jewish Refugees,
That They Were Nazi Spies

The Growth
of US Jews
and the Diaspora



The JEWS of the USA
from 1654 to TODAY