The purpose of this research is to examine the experience of Jews in the modern period, with emphasis on the New World in general and the United States in particular, with reference to Howard M. Sachar's The Course of Modern Jewish History. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context for the Jewish presence in the New World and then discuss the mass migration of Europeans, including Jews, to America, chiefly in the nineteenth century; the establishment of Jewish social, commercial, and intellectual community life in the context of religious pluralism and developing American nationalism; the impact of Jews on Western culture; and the impact of the Holocaust on the American and global Jewish community.
The establishment of Jewish communities in the New World was in part a product of the necessary response of Jews to the experience of oppression in Europe. The Americas, and particularly, the U.S., represented a physical escape from absolutist political traditions that included Jew-hatred as a component. Indeed, Jews interested in escaping the Spanish Inquisition saw a way out of the oppression of a clandestine life as a Jew, manifest life as a Christian, given the 1492 expulsion of infidels, both Jews and Moors, by Ferdinand and Isabella. But even as exiles, observant New World Jews (marranos) were at risk, being permitted to practice their religion only to the degree local authorities, from South America to the Caribbean islands, would permit it, until the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man (Sachar 176).
The American colonies proved more hospitable on the whole, owing to the emergent victory of secular political life, although Jews did not have full citizenship status. As they had in Europe, many of the American Jews engaged in trade and commerce, acting as merchants and as middlemen in foreign trade and in white-Indian trade. On the whole they adopted colonialist attitudes right along with other Americans. Separat...