Tuesday, July 1, 2008, 08:06 AM [
General]
The history of the Jews in the United States has been influenced by waves of immigration primarily from Europe, inspired by the social and economic opportunities of the United States of America and fueled by periods of anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews in Europe. The history of Jewish immigration
therefore parallels that anti-Semitic repression in Europe. Antisemitism in the United States has always been less prevalent than in Europe.
Jews have been present in what is today the United States of America as early as the Colonial period of the 17th century, if not earlier, though they were small in numbers. The earliest Jewish communities were almost exclusively Sephardic Jewish immigrants of Spanish and Portuguese ancestry.[1][2] Until about 1830 the Jewish community of Charleston, South Carolina was the most numerous in North America. Large-scale Jewish immigration commenced in the 19th century, when many Ashkenazi Jews from Germany arrived in the United States, primarily becoming merchants and
shop-owners. By 1880, there were approximately 250,000 Jews in the
United States, many of them being the educated, and largely secular, German Jews, although a minority population of the older Sephardic Jewish families remained influential.
Jewish immigration to the United States increased dramatically in the early 1880s as a result of persecution in parts of Eastern Europe, with a distinct wave of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews arriving from the poor rural Jewish populations of the Russian Empire, the Pale of Settlement (modern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova), and the Russian-controlled portions of the former Duchy of Warsaw[3]
Over two million Jews arrived between the late nineteenth century and 1924, when immigration restrictions increased due to the National Origins Quota of 1924 and Immigration Act of 1924. Most of these immigrants were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe who settled in New York City and its immediate environs (New Jersey, etc.), establishing what became
one of the world's major concentrations of Jewish population.
These newly-arrived Jews built support networks consisting of many small synagogues and Ashkenazi Jewish Landsmannschaften (German for "Territorial Associations") for Jews from the same town or village. Jewish American writers of the time urged assimilation and integration into the wider American culture,
and Jews quickly became part of American life. 500,000 American Jews
(or half of all Jewish males between 18 and 50) fought in World War II, and after the war Jewish families joined the new trend of suburbanization. There, Jews became increasingly assimilated as rising intermarriage rates combined with a trend towards secularization. At the same time,
new centers of Jewish communities formed, as Jewish school enrollment
more than doubled between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s,
while synagogue affiliation jumped from 20% in 1930 to 60% in 1960.
The twentieth century’s wave of immigration, followed by the Holocaust that destroyed most of the European Jewish community, made the United
States the home of the largest Jewish population in the world during
the 20th century. At the beginning of the century, there were
approximately a million Jews in the United States, at the end of the
century, close to six million. Jewish growth slowed after the 1920s,
when immigration fell due to new restrictions, and intermarriage and
assimilation resulted in many of Jewish descent identifying more with
their American than Jewish heritage. Currently, the intermarriage rate
in the United States for Jews exceeds fifty percent.
By the year 1900 the 1.5 million Jews residing in the United States comprised the third-largest Jewish population in the world, behind those of Russia and Austria-Hungary. In the 1930s and arter World War II, large numbers of Jews came as refugees from Europe, and after 1980 Soviet Jews were able to emigrate from the Soviet Union.
The proportion of the Jewish population in the United States has measured 2-3% since 1900.
In the 21st century American Jews were widely diffused in major metropolitan areas in New York, South Florida, Philadelphia, California, New England, Ohio, and Illinois.
On a theological level, American Jews are divided into a number of Jewish denominations, of which the most numerous are Orthodox Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism. Conservative Judaism arose in America and Reform Judaism was popularized by American Jews.
