Sephardic Jews of the United States: Two Histories That Share a Name

The Sephardi history of the United States is two separate stories.

The first is the colonial Western-Sephardi world: the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who founded the first Jewish congregations in North America from 1654, in five port cities — New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah and Charleston — all following the Amsterdam–London rite.

The second is the modern immigration: the Sephardim who came from the collapsing Ottoman Empire and North Africa from the 1890s onward — Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) speakers from Turkey and the Balkans, Judeo-Greek speakers, and Judeo-Arabic speakers from Syria — and who make up almost the entire living Sephardi population today.

The two are largely unconnected. This page keeps them apart and links to the pages that treat each community in detail.

Why is “Sephardi” so confusing in the American context?

Because in the colonial congregations it describes a rite, not always a descent.

As Marc Angel and others have shown, the five colonial congregations were culturally Spanish and Portuguese but demographically often not. Ashkenazim outnumbered Sephardim in New York as early as 1730, and intermarriage was so common that within a few generations many “Portuguese” families were of largely Ashkenazi descent.

The communities stayed Sephardi because the Sephardi rite and culture prevailed, not because the members were all of Iberian blood.

So a family worshipping at Shearith Israel or Mikveh Israel in 1800 may trace back to Amsterdam and Iberia — or to Germany and Poland.

This is the opposite of the modern immigrant communities, which are Sephardi by direct descent. It is also the same trap set out in more detail on our Canada page, where Montreal’s Shearith Israel presents exactly the same problem.

The colonial communities (1654–1820s)

The story begins in September 1654, when twenty-three Jewish refugees from the fall of Dutch Brazil landed at New Amsterdam and founded what became Congregation Shearith Israel — the first Jewish community in North America.

Over the next eighty years four more Spanish and Portuguese congregations formed, in Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah and Charleston. Between 1654 and 1825 these were, in effect, the entire organised Jewish presence in the country, and all followed the Western Sephardi tradition of Amsterdam and London’s Bevis Marks.

These communities were small, mercantile, and tightly linked to each other and to the wider Atlantic diaspora — Amsterdam, London, Curaçao, Jamaica, Barbados, Suriname and St Thomas.

The same families recur across them: Lopez, Rivera, Seixas, Gomez, Nunes, Levy, Touro, Hendricks, de Lucena. They lent one another money, ministers (Gershom Mendes Seixas served both New York and Philadelphia), Torah scrolls and marriage partners.

To research one colonial congregation is almost always to research the others, and the Caribbean and European communities behind them.

The five historic congregations

New York — Congregation Shearith Israel (1654). The oldest Jewish congregation in the United States; the mother community.
Newport, Rhode Island — Congregation Jeshuat Israel / Touro Synagogue. Its 1763 synagogue is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States; the Aaron Lopez merchant network.
Philadelphia — Congregation Mikveh Israel (1740). The Revolutionary-era community of Haym Salomon and the Gratz family; still Spanish and Portuguese in rite.
Savannah, Georgia — Congregation Mickve Israel (1733). The third-oldest congregation in the country, founded by Sephardim who arrived five months after Georgia itself.
Charleston, South Carolina — Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (1749). Once the largest Jewish community in North America, and the birthplace of American Reform Judaism.

A related early Southern community also documented in this project is Georgetown, South Carolina, near Charleston.

New Orleans is a sixth city page on this site, and a different case: Louisiana was French and then Spanish, Jews were legally excluded until 1803, and its Sephardi congregation dates only from 1846. See Sephardic Jews of New Orleans.

The modern communities (1890s onward)

The Western Sephardi communities dwindled through the nineteenth century, engulfed by the far larger Ashkenazi immigration.

When Sephardi immigration revived, from about 1890 and heavily between 1908 and 1924, it came from an entirely different world: the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, not Iberia-via-Amsterdam. These newcomers were Sephardi by direct descent but spoke no Portuguese and had no link to the colonial congregations.

Roughly 25,000–30,000 arrived before the 1924 immigration quotas nearly closed the door.

Three cultural-linguistic groups

The division still shapes their institutions and their genealogy.

Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) speakers from Turkey and the Balkans — Istanbul, Salonika, Rhodes, Monastir, the Dardanelles, Marmara — the largest group, concentrated first on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, then Brooklyn, and in Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta and elsewhere.

Judeo-Greek (Romaniote) speakers, chiefly from Ioannina (Janina), a smaller group with their own congregations in New York.

Judeo-Arabic speakers from Syria — Aleppo and Damascus — with Egyptian and Lebanese Jews, who built the distinctive and cohesive Syrian community of Brooklyn and the New Jersey shore.

Later waves followed: Moroccan and other North African Sephardim after 1948 and especially the 1960s, and Iranian Jews after 1979 (often counted with Sephardim in the broad sense).

Together these communities, not the colonial congregations, are the living Sephardi population of the United States.

Seattle

Seattle deserves special mention: it holds one of the largest and most cohesive Judeo-Spanish communities in the country, and the most vibrant Sephardi religious life of any American city outside New York.

Its Sephardim came from two Ottoman sources and kept separate congregations accordingly — one for Jews from the island of Rhodes (Congregation Ezra Bessaroth) and one for those from the Marmara Sea region and the Turkish mainland (Sephardic Bikur Holim).

Ladino survived unusually well there, and the community produced a disproportionate number of Sephardi rabbis and scholars. The University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Program is now a major centre for Ladino and Sephardi documentation.

The Syrian community

The Judeo-Arabic-speaking Syrian community, centred in the Gravesend and Flatbush sections of Brooklyn and along the New Jersey shore (Deal, Bradley Beach), is the most cohesive and institutionally complete Sephardi community in the United States — with its own extensive day-school and yeshiva network, a very low rate of intermarriage, and a strong communal structure.

It is largely endogamous and maintains its own rabbinical leadership and religious court.

National organisations

Efforts to unite the scattered American Sephardim have a long and only partly successful history — the Federation of Oriental Jews (1912), the Sephardic Jewish Community of New York (1924), the Union of Sephardic Congregations (1928, founded by Shearith Israel, Mikveh Israel and Montreal, which produced the standard English Sephardi prayer books), and the Central Sephardic Jewish Community of America (1941).

Bodies active in the modern era include the American Sephardi Federation (part of the Center for Jewish History in New York), the Sephardic Brotherhood of America, the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, and Yeshiva University’s Sephardic community programmes. These are the natural first points of contact for descendants and researchers.

Which records apply to your family?

The two histories use different records, and knowing which you need saves a great deal of wasted effort.

For the colonial communities

Congregational records — minute-books, membership, circumcision and marriage registers — survive well and are mostly held at the American Jewish Historical Society and the American Jewish Archives, with much accessible through the Center for Jewish History in New York; the individual congregations retain material too.

The cemeteries are primary genealogical sources, several of them transcribed and published: the four Shearith Israel cemeteries in New York, the Colonial Jewish Burial Ground in Newport, the Mikveh Israel cemetery in Philadelphia, and the Coming Street cemetery in Charleston (Elzas for Charleston, de Sola Pool for New York).

The 1790 federal census — the first — captures the colonial community. Jacob Rader Marcus’s documentary histories and Malcolm Stern’s First American Jewish Families are the essential printed genealogies.

For the modern communities

Standard modern American records apply: federal censuses (1900–1950), state vital records, naturalisation and immigration files (Ellis Island and the ports).

And — distinctively — the Judeo-Spanish immigrant press, above all the newspapers La America (1910–1923) and La Vara (1922–1948), which recorded the community’s life in Ladino.

Community and synagogue records, the HIAS immigration files, and the University of Washington Sephardic Studies digital collections carry the twentieth-century story. Origins abroad are traced back to Istanbul, Salonika, Rhodes, Aleppo, Damascus and the other source communities.

Organisations and repositories

American Jewish Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History, New York — the colonial congregational archives (including Shearith Israel) and the American Sephardi Federation

American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati — congregational records and the Stern genealogical papers

University of Washington Sephardic Studies Program, Seattle — Ladino and modern Sephardi collections

Sephardic Brotherhood of America; Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture; American Sephardi Federation

National Library of Israel — the Ladino press (La America, La Vara and others)

FamilySearch and the National Archives (US) — federal censuses, immigration and naturalisation records

For origins: the Amsterdam and London Portuguese-Jewish archives (colonial lines) and the archives of Istanbul, Salonika, Rhodes, Aleppo and Damascus (modern lines)

Research services

American Sephardi research splits in two.

A colonial line runs through congregational and cemetery records and the printed genealogies of Stern and Marcus, and almost always back to Amsterdam, London or the Caribbean — and may well prove partly Ashkenazi behind the Sephardi facade.

A modern line runs through censuses, immigration files and the Ladino press, and back to Turkey, the Balkans, Greece or Syria.

Knowing which story a family belongs to is the first and most important step. 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.