American Jewish Archives Journal, Vol 44, No. 01 (1992)

Introduction:
Sephardim in the Americas
The year 1992 and the observance of the Columbus quincentenary
marks a special moment in the history of the American Jewish experience.
For a brief time, the historical spotlight will be able to shine on a
group of American Jews whose ancestors left Spain at about the same
time that Columbus undertook his journey of discovery. And while
mainstream America will celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of
Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World, this same group
of American Jews, the Sephardim, will shed tears for the nearly
200,000 Spanish Jews who were expelled in 1492 from a country in
which they had lived for many centuries.
Indeed, research in American Jewish history has shown that the
first significant Jewish immigrants to this country and to this hemisphere
were Jews from the West Indies and Europe who traced their
ancestry to the Jewish communities in Spain and Portugal.
The Sephardim, as they identified themselves according to their
prayer ritual, dominated the religious, social and economic life of
American Jewry during the colonial and early federal periods. By the
1830s~ however, they were overwhelmed in numbers by a substantial
immigration of Jews from German-speaking Central Europe. These
German Jews soon developed much of the institutional framework
that would serve as the foundation for a future American Jewish
community.
The earlier Sephardic community soon became part of American
Jewish myth. They were viewed as the "Grandees" of American Jewish
society, an aristocratic, acculturated group that has now all but
vanished as a factor in the American Jewry of the twentieth century.
In the years between 1881 and 1924, over two million Jews from
Eastern Europe reached these shores and became the dominant force
in American Jewish life. But, in those same years, a second, much less
known group of Jewish immigrants left the shores of Europe and
Asia to come to the United States. They numbered somewhere
between thirty and fifty thousand and despite numerous languages
and origins also identified themselves as Sephardim. They came to