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History of the Jews in America
Ezekiel’s Statue of Religious Liberty
in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia.
HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN AMERICA
FROM THE PERIOD OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD TO THE PRESENT TIME
BY
PETER WIERNIK
NEW YORK
The Jewish Press Publishing Company
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1912
By THE JEWISH PRESS PUBLISHING CO.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PREFACE.
There were less than ten thousand Jews in the New World three centuries after its discovery, and about two-thirds of them lived in the West Indies and in Surinam or Dutch Guiana in South America. While the communities in those far-away places are now larger in membership than they were at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, their comparative importance is much diminished. The two or three thousand Jews who lived in North America or in the United States one hundred years ago have, on the other hand, increased to nearly as many millions, the bulk of them having come in the last three or four decades. On this account neither our conditions nor our problems can be thoroughly understood without the consideration