Jewish Settlement in the Americas

Migration to the New World: Canada and the United States

Multitudes of East European immigrants, later joined by tens of thousands of Jews from Ottoman lands, turned the Atlantic New World into a center of Jewish population rivaling the old. In Canada, there were 4,223 Jews in 1880, mostly concentrated in Montreal. Within thirty years, Canada’s Jewish population exploded to 74,564. 

The “Old” American Jewish Community

The U.S. Jewish population was still quite small before masses of immigrants from the Russian Empire and Austrian Galicia began to flow across the Atlantic in the 1880s. In the United States, the “old” community of some 300,000 Jews as of 1880, descendants of early modern Western Sephardic mercantile communities and (mostly) mid-nineteenth-century Central European immigrants, was spread out across the country’s industrial north, the Jim Crow South, and the expanding west. 

Living mostly in small numbers in hundreds of cities and towns, American Jews enjoyed full equal rights; and although this community encountered some social discrimination and religious suspicion, in most places it was ever more solidly integrated into an expanding urban middle class. This was so not least because even after the Civil War (1861–1865) and the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), America remained a country where whiteness remained the entry ticket to full belonging and opportunity, and racial distinctions trumped concerns about ethnic origin or religious difference. In the Midwest and especially the expanding West, Jewish officeholders and mayors were not unheard of.

Uptown Jews Meet Downtown Jews

The opening of the country’s gates to mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe in the 1880s transformed American Jewry. The 300,000 “old” American Jews were almost immediately swamped by a largely East European Jewish wave eventually five to six times its size, accompanied by a smaller wave from the Ottoman Empire. 

The Jews who encountered the Yiddish-speaking immigrants landing in New York were people who had succeeded economically, had successfully integrated into civil society, and were well assimilated into the American cultural world and way of life. Virtually all of them were tradesmen or members of the liberal professions. These “Uptown” businessmen who admired German culture, worshiped at Reform temples or decorously modern Orthodox synagogues, and had found a place in both the Republican and Democratic parties clashed on economic, political, and social grounds with the poor “Downtown” Yiddish speakers who filled the Lower East Side. This confrontation produced the twentieth-century Jewry of the United States, as well as the Jewish communities in Canadian cities, including Toronto and Winnipeg.

The Swelling Jewish Communities of Latin America

The Jews of Argentina

Once negligible Jewish communities in Spanish and Portuguese Latin America swelled with equal rapidity. The tiny Jewish community of Argentina, where the first Jewish wedding of that country was officially recorded in 1860, multiplied after 1889 as thousands of East European Jews arrived annually, along with a smaller but substantial influx of Jews from North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. 

By 1914, there were almost 100,000 Jews in Argentina, most of them Ashkenazim whose mother tongue was Yiddish. Nearly 20,000 of these settled in a uniquely extensive network of agricultural colonies founded by the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA); historian Haim Avni estimates that the total number of Jewish immigrants employed in agricultural jobs in Argentina by 1914 reached at least 35,000—though the same period saw streams of migration from these settlements to the large city of Buenos Aires, where most Jews moved.¹ 

 Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru

In the same period, new communities of some thousands emerged in Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay, and Bolivia. Later, Jewish immigrants established similar communities in Chile and Peru, most of whose members had previously lived in Argentina, and they also spread to neighboring countries.