The immigration of German-speaking Jews to North America began long before both the United States and Germany were born as independent countries.
The circumstances that brought about Jewish migration out of Central Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were socioeconomic and political. The situation was much different after 1933, however, when Nazi Germany engaged in a systematic persecution of Jews.
Between 1933 and 1940, when German Jews were still able to leave the Third Reich (though it became harder and harder), the United States remained their favored destination. British-ruled Palestine came second.While the first Jews with Ashkenazic (denoting Jews who originated in Medieval Germany) names arrived in North America as early as 1654, Jewish migration from German- and Austrian-ruled regions to America remained minuscule until the 1820s. Between the 1820s and 1870s, some 150,000 to 180,000 Jews emigrated from Central Europe to the United States (Diner 1992, 35; Cohen 1984, 12). This migration virtually constituted American Jewry before 1880. The period stretching between the 1880s and 1933 saw German Jewish immigration to the United States coming almost to a halt. In those years (before the United States curtailed immigration in 1924), Germany primarily served as a transit point for the masses of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe en route to the United States. The Austro-Hungarian Empire witnessed the migration of masses of mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews from Austrian-ruled Galicia to the United States.