In 1800, the Jewish population was 0.03 percent of the total population of the United States. The population tended to be younger, those being the ones most likely to make the long trip, and included both men and women, with the women carrying on the traditions of employment in a family economy.
In the United States, it was more likely for female family members to work. Often, this meant success or failure for the family. Many Jewish women married non-Jews. Others became the mainstay of the Jewish family. Non-Jews often depicted the Jewish family falsely, with Jewish men seen as successful capitalists while their wives and daughters were pampered women who never worked. The truth was that Jewish women worked hard and kept their families together (25-26).
Income and education varied widely, but the commercial elite became a growing part of the Jewish community in the nineteenth century. Most lived in urban centers. Most of these communities were held together by German culture. Many Jews also worked as itinerant peddlers or merchants in hundreds of villages and towns with a small number of Jewish inhabitants (26).
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the incidence of intermarriage was high, a partial testimony to Jewish acceptability. Estimates of Jewish intermarriage range from more than 20 percent for the country generally to 50 percent for wide-open boom towns such as New Orleans. Leaders of the Jewish community and the synagogue were certain that intermarriage threatened the existence of the American Jewish world, and this worry had a foundation because when Jews married gentiles, few continued to live as Jews. Most in fact seem to have assimilated entirely into the Christian population. Intermarriage did not destroy the Jewish community, though, but merely diluted it. In becoming less religious, th
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