Sephardi Jews in the Americas

The Sephardic diaspora in the Americas has its roots in the expulsions carried out by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering all professing Jews to convert to Christianity or leave Spanish territory. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Jews departed, many settling initially in neighboring Portugal, Ottoman lands, Italy, and the Netherlands.^[1] Portugal expelled its Jewish population in 1497, though many remained as nominal converts known as conversos or, pejoratively, Marranos. Many converso families preserved Jewish practice in secret for generations, always at risk of prosecution by the Inquisition.^[2]

When the Dutch West India Company began expanding into the Americas in the early seventeenth century, Sephardic merchants based in Amsterdam played an active role as investors, translators, and traders. The Dutch colonies, governed by a Calvinist tradition that was more tolerant of religious diversity than Iberian Catholicism, offered Sephardic Jews a degree of protection unavailable in Spanish or Portuguese territories.^[3]

The first substantial organized Jewish community in the Western Hemisphere was established in Dutch Brazil, particularly in Recife and Olinda, after the Dutch seizure of those Portuguese-held territories in 1630. Thousands of Sephardic Jews emigrated from Amsterdam to settle there, and Recife briefly became the site of the largest Jewish community in the Americas, with its own congregation and rabbi, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, often described as the first rabbi in the New World.^[4]

When Portugal reconquered the region in 1654, Recife's Jewish population of roughly 600 was given only three months to depart.^[5] Most returned to Amsterdam or dispersed to the Caribbean, where Sephardic communities took hold in Suriname, Curaçao, Jamaica, Barbados, and Martinique. In Suriname, Jewish settlers established one of the oldest permanent Jewish communities in the New World as early as 1638 and founded a colony known informally as Jodensavanne (Jewish Savanna).^[6] In Curaçao, Jewish refugees from Recife arrived in 1659 and established the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere.^[7]

These Caribbean communities became the economic and demographic springboard for Sephardic settlement in North America. Sephardic Jews traded extensively with one another across these island communities and with the English and Dutch colonial ports of the North American seaboard, maintaining networks of commerce and kinship that stretched from Amsterdam to Suriname, Curaçao, Barbados, and beyond.^[8]

The first documented Jewish community in what is now the United States arrived in September 1654, when twenty-three Sephardic Jews, men, women, and children fleeing Recife, reached the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (present-day New York City). Their ship, the Valck, had been blown off course in the Caribbean.^[9] The colony's director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, attempted to have them expelled, writing to the Dutch West India Company that he wished to prevent the "deceitful race" from infecting the colony. His request was overruled by the company's directors in Amsterdam, who were influenced partly by Jewish shareholders and by practical commercial considerations.^[5]

Despite official permission to remain, the new settlers faced restrictions on trade, property ownership, and public worship throughout the Dutch period and into the subsequent English period after 1664.^[10] Out of this community grew Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, founded in 1654 and formally organized in 1655. It was the only Jewish congregation in New York City until 1825, serving both Sephardic and Ashkenazic members under a Sephardic liturgical rite.^[11]

Over the following century, Sephardic communities established themselves in the major port cities of British North America. By the time of the American Revolution, Jewish congregations existed in six centers: New York, Newport (Rhode Island), Philadelphia, Charleston (South Carolina), Savannah (Georgia), and Richmond (Virginia). Until at least 1795, all documented congregations in what became the United States followed the Sephardic liturgical rite, even where Ashkenazic members had become a numerical majority.^[12]

In Newport, Rhode Island, Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and the West Indies began arriving around 1658. Newport's founding charter, rooted in the principles of Roger Williams, offered unusual religious tolerance, and the community flourished in the mid-eighteenth century as a commercial hub. Prominent Sephardic merchants such as Aaron Lopez and Jacob Rodriguez Rivera made Newport one of the most commercially dynamic ports in the colonies, pioneering the spermaceti candle trade and engaging in extensive transatlantic commerce.^[13] In 1763, the community dedicated the Touro Synagogue, designed by architect Peter Harrison, which remains the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States.^[14]

In Charleston, South Carolina, Jewish settlers appeared as early as the 1690s, drawn by the colony's commercial opportunities and its tradition of religious tolerance. By 1749, the community was large enough to form Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, which followed Sephardic Orthodox rites. By 1820, Charleston had the largest Jewish community in the United States.^[15] It was in Charleston, in 1824, that the first organized movement for Reform Judaism in North America began, initiated by members of Portuguese Jewish descent who sought to modernize religious practice.^[16]

In Savannah, Georgia, forty-two Jewish settlers, primarily Sephardic, arrived from London in 1733, just months after the colony's founding. Their presence made Georgia one of the earliest English colonies in North America to have an organized Jewish community, though periods of disruption during the colonial wars led to dispersals and returns.^[17]

Sephardic Jews in the colonial Americas were predominantly merchants, traders, and shipowners. Their extensive family and religious networks, which connected communities from Amsterdam and London to Curaçao, Barbados, Suriname, and the North American ports, gave them distinct advantages in transatlantic commerce. They dealt in commodities including rum, molasses, whale oil, spermaceti candles, dry goods, textiles, and slaves.^[14][18]

Despite their commercial prominence, Sephardic Jews in the British colonies faced restrictions on public office and other civil disabilities throughout much of the colonial period. They nonetheless contributed to cultural institutions such as the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport and supported the founding of what became Brown University.^[19] Several Sephardic merchants served in the American Revolution, and Francis Salvador of South Carolina became in 1774 the first Jew elected to public office in North America and in 1776 the first Jewish American killed in the Revolution.^[20]

The Sephardic communities of colonial America maintained the Spanish and Portuguese liturgical rite, conducting services in Ladino and Hebrew, and observing the customs of the Iberian Jewish tradition. Even as Ashkenazic Jews came to outnumber Sephardim in most North American congregations by the mid-eighteenth century, the Sephardic minhag (custom) remained dominant in communal institutions well into the early nineteenth century. The Sephardic character of colonial American Judaism set the tone for early communal institutions including synagogues, cemeteries, and charitable societies.^[21]

The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue tradition emphasized formality, decorum, and a close relationship between religious and commercial life. Synagogues served as centers for communal welfare, kosher supervision, education, and the resolution of commercial disputes. The sand-covered floors of Sephardic synagogues in Suriname, Curaçao, and elsewhere are a distinctive architectural feature, sometimes interpreted as a reminder of the desert wanderings of the Israelites or of the need for silence during secret worship under Inquisition-era conditions.^[22]

The Revolutionary War significantly disrupted Sephardic communities across North America. Newport's Jewish population, threatened by British occupation, largely departed and never fully reconstituted as a commercial force. Charleston's community was scattered by the fall of the city in 1780, though most returned afterward.^[20]

By the early nineteenth century, the demographic weight of Sephardic Jews within American Jewry had been overtaken by the growing Ashkenazic immigration from central and later eastern Europe. Nevertheless, the Sephardic institutional framework, including Congregation Shearith Israel in New York and Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, continued to shape American Jewish religious culture long after Sephardim ceased to be the majority.^[13]

A later and separate wave of Sephardic immigration arrived between roughly 1880 and 1924, when large numbers of Sephardic Jews from the former Ottoman Empire, particularly from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans, settled in the United States, primarily in New York City. These immigrants, who spoke Judeo-Spanish and preserved distinct Iberian customs, were often not recognized as fellow Jews by the established Ashkenazic community, reflecting the complex internal diversity of the broader Jewish world in America.^[23]