Ancestry.com - Jewish Migration to the United States
"Colonial Period (1654-1838)
The first Jews to come to North America arrived in 1654 at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (renamed New York in 1664). Most were refugees from the Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, which was conquered by the Portuguese that year. The Jews, fearing persecution from the Portuguese Inquisition, left with plans to go to Holland, the home of many Sephardic Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition 150 years earlier. However, they ran out of money and were forced to land at the Dutch colony.
Because Jews in the New World were allowed to practice their religion in a relatively nondiscriminatory environment, record books of American synagogues exist back to colonial times. Besides New York, early Jewish settlements were founded in Savannah, Georgia (1733), Philadelphia (1745), Charleston, South Carolina (1749), Newport, Rhode Island (1763), and Richmond, Virginia (1789).
There are records for this period at the American Jewish Historical Society (10 Thornton Dr., Waltham MA 02154) and the American Jewish Archives (3101 Clifton Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45220), as well as at the synagogue archives themselves.
The definitive genealogical work, now in its third revision, is Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern, FASG, First American Jewish Families (Baltimore: Ottenheimer Publishers, 1991). It contains the genealogies (descendants) of every Jewish person known to the author who arrived in the United States before 1838. Some 50,000 persons are identified in it. "
The first Jews to come to North America arrived in 1654 at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (renamed New York in 1664). Most were refugees from the Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, which was conquered by the Portuguese that year. The Jews, fearing persecution from the Portuguese Inquisition, left with plans to go to Holland, the home of many Sephardic Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition 150 years earlier. However, they ran out of money and were forced to land at the Dutch colony.
Because Jews in the New World were allowed to practice their religion in a relatively nondiscriminatory environment, record books of American synagogues exist back to colonial times. Besides New York, early Jewish settlements were founded in Savannah, Georgia (1733), Philadelphia (1745), Charleston, South Carolina (1749), Newport, Rhode Island (1763), and Richmond, Virginia (1789).
There are records for this period at the American Jewish Historical Society (10 Thornton Dr., Waltham MA 02154) and the American Jewish Archives (3101 Clifton Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45220), as well as at the synagogue archives themselves.
The definitive genealogical work, now in its third revision, is Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern, FASG, First American Jewish Families (Baltimore: Ottenheimer Publishers, 1991). It contains the genealogies (descendants) of every Jewish person known to the author who arrived in the United States before 1838. Some 50,000 persons are identified in it. "
posted by Helen Campbell @ 12:56 PM
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