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WI: Jewish America

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lerk

Well-known member
Thinking of how millions more Irish live in America than in Ireland, I wonder: Suppose an anti-semitic English King were to take power in the 17th century, forcing English Jews to, like Puritans, flee to America make a colony there. And then we can go further and have them become a dominant colony, eventually making up the majority of English settlers in North America. Is this possible? What would be the results of this?
 
lerk said:
Thinking of how millions more Irish live in America than in Ireland, I wonder: Suppose an anti-semitic English King were to take power in the 17th century, forcing English Jews to, like Puritans, flee to America make a colony there. And then we can go further and have them become a dominant colony, eventually making up the majority of English settlers in North America. Is this possible? What would be the results of this?
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I am certain that this is Alien Space Bats. There just weren't enough Jews in England for them to become a majority in the colonies.
 
IOTL right now there are more Jewish Americans than there are Jewish Israelis.

The issue with a colonial era POD is that colonization is expensive and your Puritan example doesn't hold up- they ended up as a minority even within New England, so even if you get a Jewish toehold in English North America it won't necessarily last.
 
JesterBL said:
IOTL right now there are more Jewish Americans than there are Jewish Israelis.

The issue with a colonial era POD is that colonization is expensive and your Puritan example doesn't hold up- they ended up as a minority even within New England, so even if you get a Jewish toehold in English North America it won't necessarily last.
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Where did you get the data that Puritans ended up a minority even within New England?
 
lerk said:
Thinking of how millions more Irish live in America than in Ireland, I wonder: Suppose an anti-semitic English King were to take power in the 17th century, forcing English Jews to, like Puritans, flee to America make a colony there. And then we can go further and have them become a dominant colony, eventually making up the majority of English settlers in North America. Is this possible? What would be the results of this?
Click to expand...
...How many English Jews were there at any point during the 17th century? England only readmitted the Jews in 1655, after Edward I's expulsion in 1290 - so a seventeenth-century antisemitic king is hardly needed - and a cursory search reveals a population of 400 by 1690, possibly not counting Marrano communities as well. The demographics here are simply impossible and the premise here a little confusing.
 
Ricardolindo said:
Where did you get the data that Puritans ended up a minority even within New England?
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Presumably where he got the idea that Quakers ended up a minority in Pennsylvania and Catholics a minority in Maryland. Oh wait...

lerk said:
Thinking of how millions more Irish live in America than in Ireland
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inb4 "WHY DO AMERIFATS CLAIM TO BE IRISH WHEN THEY'RE AMERICAN NOT IRISH" discourse
 
I mean larger early modern Jewish population in the Americas is a lot easier, just find a way to defer the edict of expulsion long enough and screw with the establishment of the Inquisition in the new world permanently enough that Iberian Jews wind up leaving for the new world en masse and are able to settle and establish open and functional communities. OTL this kind of happened in New Spain until the Inquisition got going and to a lesser extent on the Spanish frontier (and there's some evidence of some Southwestern natives and Hispanos having some Jewish ancestry from people who went to ground there). But that is not what OP seems to be looking for...
 
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Roger II said:
I mean larger early modern Jewish population in the Americas is a lot easier, just find a way to defer the edict of expulsion long enough and screw with the establishment of the Inquisition in the new world permanently enough that Iberian Jews wind up leaving for the new world en masse and are able to settle and establish open and functional communities. OTL this kind of happened in New Spain until the Inquisition got going and to a lesser extent on the Spanish frontier (and there's some evidence of some Southwestern natives and Hispanos having some Jewish ancestry from people who went to ground there). But that is not what OP seems to be looking for...
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Please, correct "Hispanios" into "Hispanos" like I just did in the quote in order to make it searchable.
Anyways, while the Hispanos of New Mexico have Sephardic ancestry, I haven't read about
Southwestern Native Americans having it. Where did you read that?
 
lerk said:
Thinking of how millions more Irish live in America than in Ireland, I wonder: Suppose an anti-semitic English King were to take power in the 17th century, forcing English Jews to, like Puritans, flee to America make a colony there. And then we can go further and have them become a dominant colony, eventually making up the majority of English settlers in North America. Is this possible? What would be the results of this?
Click to expand...
Ironically, the mid-1600s was when a Philo-Semitic Puritan English Commonwealth (and then Protectorate) first welcomed Jews *back* to England for the first time since their medieval expulsion 1290, so their numbers were quite limited.
 
Roger II said:
I mean larger early modern Jewish population in the Americas is a lot easier, just find a way to defer the edict of expulsion long enough and screw with the establishment of the Inquisition in the new world permanently enough that Iberian Jews wind up leaving for the new world en masse and are able to settle and establish open and functional communities. OTL this kind of happened in New Spain until the Inquisition got going and to a lesser extent on the Spanish frontier (and there's some evidence of some Southwestern natives and Hispanos having some Jewish ancestry from people who went to ground there). But that is not what OP seems to be looking for...
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I mean it didn't really happen but in the early years, yeah, Conversos came over, before they intensified inspection that people coming over had been Christian for five generations. And among those Conversos, some actually and some were accused of crypto-Judaism.

So if somehow you could have the Alhambra decrees of expulsion and so on be delayed one or two generations, *and* no effort to keep the Indies a 'pure field for prosyletization , you could have had openly practicing Sephardi communities. I've posed the idea before, but people have had a hard time believing the possibility.
 
Ricardolindo said:
Please, correct "Hispanios" into "Hispanos" like I just did in the quote in order to make it searchable.
Anyways, while the Hispanos of New Mexico have Sephardic ancestry, I haven't read about
Southwestern Native Americans having it. Where did you read that?
Click to expand...

I'm trying to find where I saw it and am having trouble finding the DM; in any case it was very much marginal on the order of "Maybe a few people here and there marrying in and assimilating"
 
I mean, most post 19the century American Jews are from Eastern Europe, like Poland and Russia. There is a reason Jewish Americans are associated with eastern european last names with -sky or -ski suffixes, borscht, and such.

Before the big migration due to increased pogroms, most American Jews were Sephardi though.
 
Stikfigur said:
I mean, most post 19the century American Jews are from Eastern Europe, like Poland and Russia. There is a reason Jewish Americans are associated with eastern european last names with -sky or -ski suffixes, borscht, and such.

Before the big migration due to increased pogroms, most American Jews were Sephardi though.
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I'd push this back to the 1850s when a lot of yekkes came over but yes.
 
Stikfigur said:
I mean, most post 19the century American Jews are from Eastern Europe, like Poland and Russia. There is a reason Jewish Americans are associated with eastern european last names with -sky or -ski suffixes, borscht, and such.

Before the big migration due to increased pogroms, most American Jews were Sephardi though.
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Are you sure about that? Before the arrival of Eastern European Jews, weren't most American Jews German Jews?
 
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