Early Emigration from Central Europe to North America (1654-1820)
Several Jews with Ashkenazic names were among the first group of Jews who sailed to North America and landed (1654) on Manhattan Island, New Amsterdam (renamed New
York when England captured it in 1664).
During the second half of the seventeenth century, many German states expelled their Jewish populations in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War (1618—1648). Many of those Jews emigrated to Holland and later to England, and the push westward was increased by a general economic decline in the German states during the eighteenth century. Yet only a handful of German and Polish Jews continued and crossed the Atlantic to North America before 1820: by the time of the American Revolution (1776) the number of Jews in the thirteen colonies was estimated at between 1,500 and 2,000 (mostly of Ashkenazic origin), usually residing in cities along the eastern seaboard and involved in commerce and artisanship (Faber 1992, 107; Sarna 1986, 359). Most American Jews at the time were already completely acculturated and often indifferent to Jewish religious practices.Not every Central European Jew emigrated to North America due to poverty: some belonged to families of merchants in Europe seeking to widen their trading sphere by sending a family member to the New World. Ashkenazic Jewish immigrants had been considered somewhat uneducated and uncouth by Sephardim (Jews who originated in the Medieval Iberian peninsula), who made up a minority among the colonies’ Jewry. Still, most Jewish congregations in eighteenth-century North America adhered to the Sephardic rite of worship.