Jews

Sources

New Netherland. The first recorded Jews in North America came to the Dutch West India Company’s settlement of New Netherland in 1654. They did not all come together but instead represented the two major immigrant streams of Jews that came to early America—the Ashkenazim, or European Jews, and the Sephardim, or Spanish Jews. In the summer of 1654 Solomon Pietersen and Jacob Barsimson, both traders, arrived in New Amsterdam. Barsimson had sailed from Amsterdam. That same year twenty-three Sephardic Jews fled Brazil after the Portuguese defeated the Dutch there. While not exactly welcomed in New Amsterdam, they were not permitted as non-Catholics to remain in Brazil. The next year, 1655, Jewish merchants from Amsterdam arrived in New Amsterdam. In 1656 they petitioned local authorities for permission “to purchase a burying place,” which was granted. By 1663 the Jewish community in New Amsterdam was unraveling, mainly because New Netherland was a backwater with decreasing appeal to Jewish merchants. All told, before the English conquest of 1664 there might have been as many as fifty Jews in New Netherland although not all at the same time.

New York. By the time the English took over New Netherland in 1664 there was no Jewish community left there, but Jews trickled into New York so that by 1682 there were enough to purchase land for a cemetery. Between 1690 and 1710 Jews of Anglo-German extraction migrated to New York so that by 1692 they worshiped as the congregation Shearith Israel at a house on Beaver Street. In 1730 they built the first synagogue in North America. At the time of the American Revolution some four hundred Jews lived in New York City. Single families also settled in various New York towns, but the city remained the heart of the Jewish community.

Rhode Island. The Jews in Newport, Rhode Island, began as an offshoot of the New York group. In the 1740s some of New York’s Jewish merchants, such as the Harts, Isaackses, and Polocks, began paying Rhode Island taxes as transients. By 1743 Moses Lopez had moved there, and five years later he was joined by his brother-in-law, Jacob R. Rivera. By 1756 the Jews had organized a synagogue. They built a school in 1763, yet the community comprised only fifteen families. The synagogue provided seating for sixty adult men. By 1761 the town even boasted a Jewish social club, yet there were never many Jews in Newport. By 1774 the community had about two hundred people.

South Carolina. The first of the British colonies to openly provide for a religious toleration that included Jews was South Carolina. Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of the proprietors, and his secretary, the great philosopher John Locke, composed the Fundamental Constitutions of 1669 with an eye toward drawing people, including Jewish merchants, from Barbados. Four Jewish shopkeepers were naturalized in 1697–1698. Jews continued to trickle in during the early eighteenth century, but there were no organized schemes for a Jewish settlement until 1737. While this fell through, Sephardic Jews from London and the West Indies arrived in Charleston in the late 1730s. They were joined in 1740 by Jews fleeing Savannah, Georgia, and rumors of Spanish invasion. In 1749 the Jewish community organized a Sephardic-rite synagogue, Beth Elohim. (It would not have a building until 1794.) On the eve of the Revolution some two hundred Jews lived in Charleston.

Georgia. The first Jews in Georgia represented the only organized migration of their people to British North America, and they arrived as part of a settlement scheme organized by the Bevis Marks Sephardic congregation in London. On 11 July 1733, 41 Jews of Sephardic, Germanic, and Italian stock landed in the new colony, only the third or fourth boatload of people to do so. These individuals brought with them the ritual objects necessary to form a congregation and organized a synagogue, Mickva Israel, in a rented room. While neither James Oglethorpe nor the Georgia trustees wanted Jews, the charter did not actually exclude them, and they proved to have skills valuable to the new colony. Samuel Nunez was a doctor who helped the colony through an epidemic its first summer. Abraham De Lyon was a vintner. More Jews arrived later in the year, and the community grew until the War of Jenkins’ Ear broke out in 1739, pitting England against Spain. Spaniards had been the chief cause of the Jewish New World diaspora, and Oglethorpe’s unsuccessful assault on Saint Augustine raised the specter of a Spanish threat to Savannah. The Jews departed, leaving only the family of Benjamin Sheftall in Savannah in 1741. Jews began trickling back into Georgia in the 1760s, after the end of the French and Indian War and the resurrection of trade. On the eve of the Revolution the Jewish population lay somewhere between 27 and 240.

Sources

Kenneth Coleman, Colonial Georgia: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1989);

Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992);

James William Hagy, This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993);

Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew: 1492–1776 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970);

David De Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers 1682–1831 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952).