For millions of Jews—and for so many other immigrants—New York was never just a city. In the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, it became a dream, a safe haven, and a symbol of hope for those arriving in America seeking a new life. It was a place where one could start over, even without resources, contacts, or speaking English. For much of the 20th century, the city housed the largest Jewish community in the world; today, it remains one of the vital centers of the Diaspora and the metropolis with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
New Amsterdam
Although some Jews had already arrived in North America before 1654, it is from that year that the beginning of the Jewish presence in New York is recognized – a story that, curiously, begins in Brazil, in Recife.
In the mid-17th century, when the Brazilian Northeast was under Dutch rule, Recife was home to a small and prosperous community of Sephardic Jews. It was the only moment in Brazilian colonial history when converts were able to openly resume their Jewish identity.
The Portuguese reconquered the region in 1654, and with them came religious intolerance and the threat of the Inquisition. Faced with the choice between reconverting to Catholicism or leaving, about 150 Jewish families living in Recife left Brazil on Dutch ships.
One of these ships, with 23 Jews on board, was intercepted by Spanish pirates in the Caribbean and subsequently rescued by the crew of a French vessel, the St. Catherine. This occurred in early September 1654, a few days before... Rosh HashanaThe group arrived on Manhattan Island. Lacking the resources to continue their journey, the Jews were forced to disembark in the then-Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, founded between 1625 and 1626 by the Dutch West India Company.
The reception was hostile. Peter Stuyvesant, the colony's director-general and a devout Calvinist, tried to prevent the stay of those "Jews of the Portuguese Nation," claiming that they would threaten the Christian character of the settlement with the practice of their "abominable religion." He then wrote to the Company, requesting authorization to expel them.
In Amsterdam, however, the Sephardic community was influential. Upon learning of Stuyvesant's request, its leaders sent a petition to the Dutch West India Company, reaffirming their loyalty to Dutch interests, highlighting the importance of Jews to international trade, and reminding them that some of the Company's main shareholders were Jewish. In April 1655, Stuyvesant received a response to his inquiry: “These people [the Jews] may travel, trade, live and remain in the colony, provided they do not become a burden on the community.” Even so, he tried to make life difficult for the Jews, but they reacted. Asser Levy, one of those who arrived in 1654, repeatedly challenged Stuyvesant's measures in court, winning most of the time.
Other Sephardic Jewish merchants settled in New York, then New Amsterdam, forming, in 1655, the first Jewish congregation in what would become the United States: Shearith Israel, later known as the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation. Since many of its founders came from the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam, its community organization followed the model of the Portuguese synagogue in that city.
In that city, Jews had the freedom to practice their religion, provided they did so discreetly, in their homes. In 1656, colonial authorities granted the community a small plot of land for burial, considered the oldest recorded Jewish cemetery in the country.
New Amsterdam will now be called New York.
In 1664, the English captured New Amsterdam, which was then renamed New York.
The new British authorities maintained the legal status of the Jews: they preserved the existing tolerance without significantly expanding their civil and religious rights.
At the beginning of the 18th century, New York was still a small port city, and local Jewish life revolved around Shearith Israel, which, until 1825, remained the only Jewish congregation in the city.
From the early decades of the 18th century, the profile of the Jewish community in New York and North America as a whole began to change. Most of the Jews who settled there were Ashkenazi, originating from Central and Eastern Europe. Despite this, Shearith Israel continued to follow the Sephardic tradition, and to this day remains the city's Spanish-Portuguese rite synagogue.
Until 1730, when the first Shearith Israel synagogue was built on Mill Street (now South William Street), the congregation operated in rented premises. This first synagogue was a simple brick building. As the community grew, the space became too small to accommodate all its members, and in 1818, construction began on a second synagogue on the same street. This one had 167 seats for men and 133 for women.
American Revolutionary War
In 1776, they lived in the Thirteen Colonies1 approximately 2.500 Jews, less than 0,1% of the colonial population. Although numerically small, this population was already integrated into the economic and urban life of several cities, not only New York, but also Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, and Savannah.
The growing discontent of the colonists with metropolitan economic exploitation, the taxation imposed by Great Britain, and the absence of political representation – summarized in the motto “No taxation without representation"(No taxation without representation) – as well as the aspiration for self-government and the spread of Enlightenment ideas led the colonies to break with British power. The crisis worsened with episodes such as the Boston Tea Party (boston tea party)2The conflict began in December 1773 and turned into open war in April 1775. Independence was proclaimed the following year, on July 4, 1776.
The Jews of the Thirteen Colonies, like the rest of the colonial population, were divided between supporters of independence, the "patriots," and those loyal to the Crown. Many Jews identified with the revolutionary cause, believing that independence from British rule would guarantee them religious freedom and an end to exclusionary legal restrictions and religious oaths.3.
When New York was occupied by the British in 1776, these tensions became more evident. At the head of Shearith Israel was then... chazan (Liturgical cantor) Gershom Mendes Seixas (1745–1816), born in America and a supporter of the patriotic cause. Refusing to keep the synagogue functioning under British rule, he left New York with some members of the community, going to Connecticut and then to Philadelphia, where he served at the Mikveh Israel synagogue. The Jews who remained in the city continued to attend Shearith Israel under British protection. Seixas's trajectory became emblematic of the Jewish community's engagement in the revolutionary cause.
The Jewish legacy in the War of Independence was disproportionate to the small size of the Jewish population in the Thirteen Colonies. Among the most remembered figures is Haym Salomon, a Jew of Polish origin who distinguished himself as a merchant and financier linked to the revolutionary effort. Salomon was an important financial supporter of the patriotic cause and played a decisive role in financing the war.
The war ended in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which recognized the independence of the United States. With the creation of the new republic, Jews began to believe that they would achieve full civil integration and freedom of worship. This expectation found support in the political and legal foundations of the new country. The ideal of equality stated in the Declaration of Independence – according to which "all men are created equal," and not just "all Protestants" or "all Christians" – did not, in itself, constitute a complete guarantee of religious freedom. This would be more clearly affirmed in later statutes and legal provisions.
In 1786, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, associated with Thomas Jefferson, repudiated coercion in matters of faith by proclaiming that "No man shall be compelled to attend or support any religious cult, place, or ministry." The federal Constitution, in turn, prohibited the adoption of any religious test as a requirement for holding public office; and the First Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791, forbade both the establishment of an official religion and the restriction of the free exercise of religion.
In responding to congratulations sent by Jewish congregations, President George Washington stated that all groups comprising the new nation were equally under the protection of the American Republic. In a letter addressed in August 1790 to the Jewish congregation of Newport, he declared that the United States government “gives no sanction to intolerance, no assistance to persecution”—a phrase that rightly became one of the symbolic landmarks of Jewish integration into the American political experience.
19st century
Throughout the 19th century, New York established itself as one of the main commercial ports of the United States, becoming a magnet for successive waves of migration. Among the groups that arrived there were new Jewish contingents who contributed to expanding and diversifying Jewish life in the city.
The very trajectory of Congregation Shearith Israel reflects the process of urban and demographic expansion. As the community moved to other areas of Manhattan, the congregation accompanied this movement by building new synagogues. In 1834, it inaugurated a synagogue on Crosby Street, used until 1860, when a new building was erected on West 19th Street, west of Fifth Avenue. This synagogue remained in use until 1897 and was even described at the time as the tallest structure visible from 14th Street. In May 1897, the Shearith Israel of Seventieth Street was inaugurated, a building that continues to be its headquarters to this day.
From its earliest days, Shearith Israel sought to meet the diverse needs of the Jewish community, accompanying its members from birth to the end of their lives. The congregation offered religious education and performed various charitable and community-based functions. Throughout its history, Shearith Israel, as well as its members and rabbis, participated in the creation and development of important Jewish and philanthropic institutions in New York.
In the 1820s and 1830s, the first waves of Jews from Germanic lands and Central Europe arrived in the United States – and, in particular, in New York. This movement intensified in the following two decades, profoundly altering the profile of Jewish life in the country. The American Jewish population grew from about 15 people in 1840 to between 150 and 200 on the eve of the Civil War. In New York, the growth was equally significant: the community, estimated at about 16 people in 1850, reached approximately 40 in 1860, equivalent to almost 5% of the city's population.
Most of these newcomers were German-speaking Jews, many of whom began their economic lives as peddlers and later established themselves as shopkeepers, merchants, and small business owners. They concentrated mainly in Manhattan – in the Lower East Side and the so-called Little Germany...contributing to the demographic, institutional, and cultural expansion of the Jewish presence in the city. They were also decisive in the spread of Reform Judaism and, more broadly, in the shaping of modern American Judaism. The strength of this influence can be measured by the fact that, by around 1880, almost all of the approximately 200 synagogues then existing in the United States were Reform. The Conservative Movement, in turn, was institutionally structured from the founding, in New York, of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1886.
In the field of commerce, these immigrants and their descendants played a prominent role in the development of American retail and, in particular, in the consolidation of the large department stores in New York. Bloomingdale's originated from the business founded in 1861 by brothers Lyman Bloomingdale and Joseph Bloomingdale; Macy's, although not founded by Jews, came under the control of the Straus family in 1896; B. Altman & Company, created by Benjamin Altman, son of Bavarian Jewish immigrants, became one of the most important department stores in the city; and Bergdorf Goodman, founded in 1899 by Herman Bergdorf, gained prominence under the leadership of Edwin Goodman from 1901 onwards. Together, these companies helped redefine the culture of urban consumption between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while areas like Ladies' Mile established themselves as the elegant commercial heart of New York. Gilded Age 4.
It was also during this period that some of the institutions that would become pillars of American Judaism emerged: hospitals, mutual aid societies, charitable organizations, religious schools, and community associations. One of the milestones of this process was the current Mount Sinai Hospital. Founded in 1852 as Jews' Hospital and inaugurated in 1855, it was intended to serve Jews who were frequently refused by other hospitals, and offered free medical care to Jews without resources. After the Civil War, the institution formally abandoned its sectarian character and, in 1866, became known as Mount Sinai Hospital.
Civil War (1861–1865)
In 1861, the American Civil War began, fought between the Northern states, united in the Union, and the Southern states, which formed the Confederacy after proclaiming their secession. At the heart of the war were tensions surrounding federal power and states' rights, especially those related to slavery, then the economic and social basis of the agrarian South. While the Confederate states sought to preserve the slave system and expand their political autonomy, the North fought for the preservation of the Union and, as the conflict progressed, began to link its cause to the abolition of slavery.
In New York, the Jewish population was divided. Some merchants, linked to the cotton trade, maintained relations with the Confederacy; others, however, supported the Union, identifying with the abolitionist cause. At the end of the war, in 1865, the victory of the North ensured the preservation of the United States as a single country and paved the way for the abolition of slavery.
The war revealed the growing integration of Jews into public life. In 1861, the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, with a strong New York presence, sent Arnold Fischel, chazan From Shearith Israel to Washington. Until then, United States law only permitted Christian chaplains in the Union Army, excluding rabbis. After meeting with then-President Abraham Lincoln, Fischel defended the right of Jewish soldiers to be assisted by chaplains of their own faith. In 1862, Congress changed the legislation, paving the way for the appointment of Jewish chaplains. This episode reveals that the Jewish community of New York was already participating in public debate and beginning to establish itself as a center of national Jewish organization.
Migration from Eastern Europe
Between the 1860s and 1880s, New York City consolidated itself as the main urban and economic center of the United States. According to the 1880 census, the city had 1.206.299 inhabitants, of whom about 80 were Jewish. Although this number was far from reflecting the extraordinary expansion that the Jewish community would experience from the end of the 19th century onwards, it was already enough to give it a significant presence and growing influence in New York's economic, religious, and cultural life.
The city then boasted numerous synagogues and Jewish congregations, established by immigrants from diverse backgrounds. Those founded by German Jews, such as Temple Emanu-El, reflected the rise of Reform Judaism seeking to integrate into the American context. In contrast, Shearith Israel preserved the Sephardic tradition and the historical prestige of being the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States.
This situation, however, would be profoundly transformed in the following decades, when a vast wave of Jewish migration from the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe, driven by persecution, poverty, and lack of economic prospects, would permanently alter the composition, profile, and scale of the New York Jewish community.
Beginning in 1881, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a series of pogroms swept through the southern and western provinces of the Russian Empire, while the Tsarist regime hardened its policy towards Jews, a process that would culminate in the restrictive May Laws of 1882. Hundreds of thousands of Jews decided to emigrate in search of better living conditions.
Over the following decades, more than 2,5 million Jews from Eastern Europe would leave their homelands. Most headed to the United States, and New York – the main gateway for immigration to the country, first through Castle Garden and, from 1892, through Ellis Island – would become the great gateway for this wave of immigration.
The saga of these immigrants would become a decisive chapter not only in the history of American Judaism, but also in the history of the United States itself, redefining the demographics, urban life, world of work, and Jewish culture of the New York metropolis.
To survive, the newcomers accepted any work that came their way. The garment industry, booming in New York, absorbed thousands of them, especially women. There were sewing workshops set up in basements, warehouses, and overcrowded apartments. In what were called sweatshirts (garment factories operating in precarious conditions), seamstresses worked long and grueling hours, receiving meager wages and working in unhealthy and dangerous environments.
The tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which mostly Jewish and Italian women workers died, provoked widespread outrage. Strikes, work stoppages, and demonstrations multiplied, often led by union leaders trained in the political culture of Eastern Europe, under the influence of socialism and the Jewish socialist movement, the Bund. New York Jews thus came to occupy a central place in the urban labor movement. The struggle for fairer wages, shorter working hours, minimum safety conditions, and labor legislation became an essential part of American social history.
The “Jewish city”
In the 1910s and 1920s, New York City transformed into the great metropolis of modern Judaism. At certain times, it even became the largest Jewish center in the world. The city's Jewish population grew rapidly, reaching approximately 1,6 million people in 1920. New York's Jewish history was no longer confined to Manhattan: it now spread throughout the city, mirroring the trajectory of a community increasingly rooted in the American urban landscape.
As their lives improved, many immigrants left the Lower East Side (in Manhattan) and moved to larger, more affluent areas, especially in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Brooklyn became one of the main destinations for this movement. Neighborhoods like Brownsville, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, and Borough Park began to receive successive waves of Jewish families. In the Bronx, in turn, a significant Jewish middle class formed. For several decades, the borough housed one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in the world, with an intense cultural life, its own institutions, and growing participation in municipal politics.
The “Yiddish Republic”
The Lower East Side transformed into an extraordinary center of Jewish cultural production. Yiddish newspapers, with impressive circulations, circulated daily, giving voice to the dilemmas of immigration, work, religion, and family life. The most famous of these was... Jewish Daily Forward (ForvertsThe Jewish Journal, founded in 1897, became one of the most influential voices of immigrant Judaism. More than just a newspaper with news and editorials, it offered serialized novels, satires, practical advice for newcomers, and intense debates on politics, education, and identity. Even today, the Forward It survives in digital format.
Yiddish theater, in turn, transformed Second Avenue into a kind of "Jewish Broadway." There, a vibrant universe of comedies, melodramas, musicals, operettas, and political plays flourished, staging, with humor and emotion, the conflicts between the Old and New Worlds. The so-called "Yiddish Republic" of New York thus became one of the most fertile laboratories of ideas, identities, and future projects in modern Jewish life.
This cultural flourishing had roots already laid at the end of the 19th century, when New York Jewish life began to produce prominent figures, some celebrated throughout American culture, others especially renowned in the city's Yiddish community. In poetry and intellectual life, Emma Lazarus occupies a unique place: author of the poem of The New Colossus 5In 1883, she became one of the first Jewish-American voices of national prominence and permanently associated the Jewish experience with the idea of the United States as a haven for immigrants.
In the field of journalism, Joseph Pulitzer, of Hungarian-Jewish origin, established himself as one of the most powerful editors in the American press and helped shape the modern newspaper in the United States. His legacy was so significant that the Pulitzer Prize – the most prestigious annual American award in journalism, literature, and music – was named in his honor.
In the Yiddish press, Abraham Cahan emerged as a central figure: an immigrant from the Russian Empire, he participated in the founding of Jewish Daily Forward.
In Yiddish literature, Morris Rosenfeld stood out as one of the most striking voices of the Jewish working-class experience, describing in his poems the harsh living conditions of immigrants in the city's sewing workshops. In theater, Avrom Goldfaden is widely recognized as the originator of modern Yiddish theater, whose work exerted a profound influence on the New York Jewish scene. It was in this environment that great names of the Jewish stage emerged, such as Jacob Adler, celebrated for his dramatic roles, and Boris Thomashefsky, a pioneer of Yiddish theater in the United States and one of its most popular figures. Alongside him shone Bessie Thomashefsky, an actress, singer, and comedian who would become one of the stars of the New York Yiddish scene as early as the 1890s.
In this vibrant environment, writers, journalists, playwrights, and intellectuals began to develop an original reflection on what it meant to be Jewish in American modernity. Some believed in full integration into melting sweat, the cultural melting pot of the United States; others defended the vitality of a secular Jewish culture centered on the Yiddish language; and there were still those who saw in Zionism and the construction of a Jewish national homeland... Eretz Israel A response to the vulnerability of Jewish life in the Diaspora. New York thus became one of the major centers of Jewish modernity, where press, literature, and entertainment intertwined in the development of new Jewish identities in America.
Antisemitism and the end of free immigration
Although New York has established itself over time as the main center of Jewish life in the United States, neither the country nor the city has ever been free from antisemitism. In the 18th and 19th centuries, although the legal situation of Jews was much more favorable than in much of Europe, prejudice still existed and manifested itself primarily in the social sphere. A landmark of this discrimination was the case of 1877, when the New York banker Joseph Seligman was refused entry to the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs. The episode gained national attention and became a symbol of the exclusion of Jews from prestigious circles and spaces of society. Gilded Age.
At the beginning of the 20th century, this hostility rarely took the form of open violence typical of Eastern Europe, but it continued to manifest itself in social, professional, and residential exclusion: Jews encountered barriers in hotels, resortsprivate clubs and other elite settings. In response to this situation, the State of New York passed a civil rights law in 1913 that prohibited discrimination in public lodging and entertainment venues based on religious belief. Even so, discriminatory practices continued to exist in veiled or informal forms.
In the 1920s, with the population growth and social advancement of Jews, antisemitism gained new visibility, fueled by nativism and extremist movements.
Alarmed by the scale of immigration – both Jewish and non-Jewish – and influenced by the racial theories then in vogue, the United States began to severely restrict the entry of foreigners. The era of mass immigration was coming to an end. In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed laws establishing strict quotas based on the historical ethnic composition of the American population. In practice, these measures drastically reduced the entry of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, including Jews. Thus ended the great migratory cycle that led millions of Jews to leave their homeland and make New York the great urban capital of the modern Jewish Diaspora.
1. The Thirteen Colonies were a group of British colonies established along the Atlantic coast of North America between the 17th and 18th centuries. They formed the basis of English rule in the region and would later give rise to the United States after the independence process.
2 A boston tea party It was a protest that occurred in 1773 in Boston, when colonists threw shipments of tea into the sea to protest against the taxes imposed by Great Britain.
3. The oaths required the profession of Christian faith and its swearing in explicitly Christian formulas as a condition for the exercise of certain civil rights and access to public office, thus excluding Jews from full participation in civic life. In Europe, such restrictions were only gradually abolished between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century.
4 A Gilded Age The Gilded Age in the United States was the historical period situated at the end of the 19th century, between the 1870s and the year 1900.
5 In 1903, a bronze plaque with the poem The New ColossusThe poem, written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, was installed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, immortalizing the phrase: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearn to breathe free."
Bibliography
Howe, Irving, The Immigrant Jews of New York: 1881 to the PresentNew edition, Oxford University Press
Oppenheim, Samuel, The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654-1664: Some New Matter on the Subject. Kindle eBook
Poland, Annie, Soyer, Daniel. Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920 (City of Promises Book 4). Kindle eBook
