Early American Jews in and about Manhattan

The Jews of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York City were small in number (no more than a few hundred or two percent of Manhattan’s total population). Nevertheless, they occupy a special place in narratives of American Jewish history as the founders of what became the world’s largest Jewish metropolis. In this way, their historical significance is defined in relation to later events and a vastly different city. Meanwhile, accounts of early New York that do not similarly look forward struggle to incorporate Jews, either ignoring them entirely or identifying them as just another compartmentalized example of the city’s ethnic and religious diversity. Moreover, specialist scholarship on early New York Jewry remains primarily concerned with national themes, including Americanization and the pursuit of civil and political rights. These literatures collectively uproot early New York Jews from their time and place, presenting them incompletely as antecedents of later New York Jewry, tightly-bound isolates, or representative American immigrants.

This paper confronts the early history of Jewish New York on its own terms, and in so doing supplements Protestant accounts of that urban environment. It argues that New York should be understood as both a historical creation (of Jews and others), and a historical actor in the sense that it molded the opportunities and experiences of its inhabitants. Within that rubric, this paper pursues three lines of inquiry. First, it examines the daily lives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Manhattan Jews, paying specific attention to New York’s wards, streets, and landmarks. Second, it analyzes how Jewish identity was shaped by and in the city. Finally, it traces the movement of Jews beyond New York to claim that Jews profoundly impacted the city’s place within the Atlantic World.