Sephardic Jews of New York: Shearith Israel

New York is where Jewish North America begins.

In September 1654 twenty-three Jewish refugees from the fall of Dutch Brazil landed at New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony that became New York. They founded what grew into Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States.

For over 170 years, from 1654 to 1825, it was the only Jewish congregation in New York. It set the pattern that the other early American communities followed: the Amsterdam and London rite, the communal structure, the customs. Every strand of American Sephardi history runs back through here.

A caution central to New York in particular. Shearith Israel was Spanish and Portuguese in rite, but Ashkenazim outnumbered Sephardim in the congregation as early as 1730. Intermarriage was so common that within a few generations many Portuguese families were largely of Ashkenazi descent. In the year the first synagogue was completed, a Sephardi, Moses Gomez, presided over the community for the first half of the year and an Ashkenazi, Jacob Franks, for the second. The community remained Sephardi because the rite and culture prevailed, not because all its members were Iberian.

What New York means here

New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company until 1664, then the English and later British colony and city of New York, with the Sephardi community centred on Lower Manhattan.

The 1654 arrival was contested. The director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, tried to expel the refugees, but the Amsterdam Jewish shareholders of the West India Company had him overruled. Contrary to a common account, no Jews were actually expelled, and the New York records show Jews living openly and continuously from 1654 onward.

Under the Dutch and early English there were restrictions on public Jewish worship, which is why the congregation’s first dedicated synagogue came only in 1730.

Where they came from

The founding twenty-three came from Recife in Dutch Brazil, refugees of the Portuguese reconquest of 1654, and were of Spanish and Portuguese descent.

They were reinforced through the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the wider diaspora: Amsterdam, London, the Caribbean at Curaçao, Jamaica and Barbados, and the other mainland ports. Increasingly they were joined by Ashkenazim from Central Europe.

The recurring Sephardi family names are the classic ones of the American colonial community: Gomez, Levy, Seixas, Hendricks, Nunes, Hays, de Lucena, Peixotto, Nathan, Phillips and Hart.

How they made a living

Trade and finance. New York’s Jews were merchants, shippers, importers and brokers, tied into the transatlantic and Caribbean commerce of the Sephardi diaspora.

The Gomez family ran a major trading house, and Moses Gomez’s mill house up the Hudson is recognised as the oldest surviving Jewish dwelling in the United States. Members were among the founders of the New York Stock Exchange, and the Hendricks family later built the American copper industry.

As elsewhere in the colonial economy, some were connected to the slave trade and slave-holding, which the records document.

The Revolution and Gershom Mendes Seixas

The Revolution scattered the community.

Gershom Mendes Seixas, minister of Shearith Israel from 1768 to 1816 and the best-known early American Jewish clergyman, closed the synagogue and left New York rather than remain under British occupation in 1776. He took the congregation’s Torah scrolls first to Connecticut and then to Philadelphia, where he led Mikveh Israel. This is why New York and Philadelphia genealogy are so intertwined for this generation.

Seixas returned in 1784. He was later a trustee of Columbia College and took part in Washington’s inauguration.

The wartime dispersal, and the later engulfing of the old Sephardi community by mass Ashkenazi immigration, gradually reduced the Sephardi proportion. Shearith Israel itself has continued the Spanish and Portuguese rite unbroken to the present.

Congregation Shearith Israel

Shearith Israel, Remnant of Israel, was founded in 1654 and is the oldest Jewish congregation in North America.

Its first synagogue was built on Mill Street in 1730. The congregation has occupied several buildings since, and has stood at Central Park West and 70th Street since 1897. It preserves the Western Sephardi tradition and colonial-era ritual objects, and its history is documented in David and Tamar de Sola Pool’s An Old Faith in the New World.

The four cemeteries

Shearith Israel’s burial grounds are a primary genealogical source and among the most striking historic sites in Manhattan.

Chatham Square, the first cemetery, in use from the seventeenth century to 1833 and now in Chinatown, holding colonial and Revolutionary-era members
West 11th Street, the second, 1805 to 1829, in Greenwich Village
West 21st Street, the third, 1829 to 1851
Beth Olam at Cypress Hills, Queens, the fourth, from 1851 and still in use

The inscriptions are recorded and are essential for tracing the colonial and nineteenth-century families.

Records

New York has some of the best-preserved colonial Jewish records in the country.

Congregation Shearith Israel’s own archives — minute books, membership, circumcision and marriage registers, running back into the colonial period — are a rich genealogical source. They are accessible through the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History, with a further selection at YIVO. The four cemeteries are documented and transcribed.

For the wider genealogy, Malcolm Stern’s First American Jewish Families, Hyman Grinstein’s The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, and Marcus’s documentary histories are the essential printed sources. The 1790 federal census and New York colonial records carry the community too.

New York State civil records of birth, death and marriage are available from the Department of Health for the modern period.

The modern Sephardi community

New York is also the centre of the modern Sephardi immigration, which is a separate story treated on the United States page.

From the 1890s, Judeo-Spanish speakers from Turkey and the Balkans, Judeo-Greek speakers from Ioannina, and Judeo-Arabic speakers from Syria settled on the Lower East Side, in Harlem and then Brooklyn. The great majority of American Levantine Sephardim settled in New York, and Shearith Israel played a central role in helping the immigrants, even as they built their own congregations and institutions.

The Syrian community of Brooklyn and the New Jersey shore is the most cohesive modern Sephardi community in the country. These modern communities are not descended from the colonial one.

Sephardic World lectures on New York

The First Jewish Citizen of New York — Daniela Weil
Who Owns the Cemetery? Shearith Israel, New York — Zachary Edinger
Storied Stones: Shearith Israel’s cemeteries and the history of New York City — Zachary Edinger
Art of the Jewish Family — Laura Arnold Leibman
Jews and the American Revolution — Laura Arnold Leibman

What has and hasn’t been researched

The colonial community is exceptionally well documented; the connective work and the modern community less so.

The colonial congregation is thoroughly studied. Shearith Israel’s records, the de Sola Pool histories, Grinstein and Stern cover it in depth.
The Caribbean and Amsterdam links, family by family, are only partly traced, though the records to do it are good.
The modern immigrant genealogy — Ladino, Greek and Syrian — is under-documented in English-language genealogical work, despite rich community and press sources.

Organisations and repositories

Congregation Shearith Israel, Central Park West and 70th Street.

American Jewish Historical Society and Center for Jewish History, New York, holding the Shearith Israel records, together with the American Sephardi Federation. YIVO holds a further selection.

The four Shearith Israel cemeteries: Chatham Square, West 11th Street, West 21st Street, and Beth Olam at Cypress Hills.

Moses Gomez Mill House, Marlboro, New York. [LINK NEEDED]

New York State Department of Health for civil vital records, and the National Archives and FamilySearch for censuses and immigration.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Transcriptions of the four Shearith Israel cemeteries, especially Chatham Square
Records linking Shearith Israel families to Amsterdam, London and the Caribbean
Congregational registers — membership, circumcision, marriage — in transcription or image
Material connecting New York and Newport families, and New York and Philadelphia in the Revolutionary period
Records of the modern Ladino, Greek and Syrian communities, and their origins abroad

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].

Research services

New York research means the best-documented colonial congregation in the country, with Shearith Israel’s records and its four cemeteries, and lines running back to Amsterdam, London and the Caribbean. The community was Sephardi in rite but mixed in descent. The modern Ladino, Greek and Syrian communities are a separate research world of censuses, immigration files and community records. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

If you have found this page useful, please consider making a small donation to support this site.