Transnational Ties: The Longue Durée of Jewish Migrations to the United States

American Jewish life has been shaped by the constant arrival of immigrants from distinct religious and cultural milieus. A long, almost uninterrupted, history of continuous immigration that reaches from the seventeenth century to the present betrays a remarkable cultural diversity distinguishing Jews from most other immigrant groups in the United States. Since the first settlers from Recife reached New Amsterdam in 1654, Jewish immigrants in North America have maintained ties to different Jewish communities in other parts of the world. The focus of the scholarship on specific subgroups and time periods has obscured the longue durée of Jewish immigration, the history of diverse ties Jewish migrants maintained with Jews in other places, and links between the migrations and settlement of Jews and non-Jews. Transnational links of migrants and their descendants in the United States are by no means a uniquely Jewish phenomenon. However, most “ethno-national” global diasporas originated in the nineteenth century as a consequence of strong migration from a specific place, for instance, from Ireland or Southern Italy. Jewish migrants have moved from different regions in and beyond Europe to North America since the seventeenth century. Even after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 many American Jews originated in and are maintaining links with other places, in recent years, for instance, the states of the former Soviet Union.¹

The long history of Jewish migration to North America reaches back almost to the beginnings of European settlement in North America after 1492 and provides an intriguing perspective on the transformation of the global Jewish diaspora over the last 500 years. Jewish migration to North America reflects the rise and fall of the major centers of the Jewish diaspora in this period, Spain (Sefarad), the German-speaking parts of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, the State of Israel, and the (former) Soviet Union, not to mention several smaller centers in the Caribbean, South America, and South Africa. Jews from these culturally distinctive centers formed sub-diasporas, which evolved over centuries, as in the of Sephardi Jews, or over much shorter time periods as in the case of the former Soviet Union and Israel.

In older scholarly accounts, American Jewish immigration history was portrayed as a sequence of three seemingly distinct “waves” of Sephardi, German, and Eastern European Jews. World War I and stringent immigration restrictions that were passed by the United States Congress in its aftermath sharply reduced Jewish immigration. The “three wave” model appeared suggestive because during the respective time periods members of the three groups made a significant impact on American and Jewish life. But even though Sephardi Jews and those from Central and Eastern Europe originated in distinct cultural milieus, their migrations overlapped and they hardly constituted uniform groups.² Relatively little has been written about the close connections between the migrations of Jews and non-Jews. Some Jews from Russian Poland who moved to the United States between 1880 and 1914 maintained close relations with Christian Poles from the same places in cities such as Chicago and in small industrial towns such as Johnstown in Pennsylvania.³

The appreciation of the diversity of Jewish migrants also led to a revaluation of the major causes driving Jewish migrations during the nineteenth century. The influential lachrymose view of Jewish history, promoted not least by Zionist historians, emphasized persecution and expulsion in Europe before the founding of the State of Israel as the overarching cause for Jewish migrations.⁴ It is true that flourishing Jewish centers in Spain, the German lands, and Eastern Europe were largely destroyed. Yet the migration of very small groups of Sephardi Jews to the Americas was not an immediate consequence of the 1492 expulsion edict issued by the Spanish crown. And the migration of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe during the long nineteenth century was primarily driven by economic factors.⁵ The immigration paradigm focusing on arrival and adaptation in the “new world” obscured the persistence of ties to the old home and to Jewish migrants from the same place who had settled in other parts of the world...