Jewish Immigrants in the USA - Shaping the Religious Institute (From the Middle of the XVII Century to 1914)

The Jewish ethnic community in the USA was formed by several immigrant groups - each representing theJewish Diaspora from a certain country. Three large immigrant groups are distinguished that formed the basis of the American-Jewish ethniccommunity: the Hispano-Portugal group (from the middle of the XVII century till the first quarter of XIX century), the German group (fromthe 20-s to the 80-s of the XIX century) and the Eastern-European group (from the 1881 to 1924). Each wave of the Jewish immigrationcreated its own religious institutes and ways of living, which later, combined together, became the trademark of the American Jewishcommunity. The first Jewish communities in the North America date back to the XVII century and served as the only form of groupidentification of the Jewish people till the beginning of the XIX century. However, their functions were limited to the religious service andthe registering of births and deaths, and were similar to the functions of the protestant congregations. They taught religion in synagogues andorganized charity. The first half of the XIV century marked the beginning of the Reform, brought to America by the German immigrants.The main tendency was to liberalize Judaism and adapt it to the norms of the New World where the Jewish people enjoyed the full rights ofthe American citizenship. Adapting the Jewish religion to the conditions of the American capitalistic society, the reformers attempted to stopassimilation and preserve the influence of Judaism on the Jewish population of the United States. Notably, the Judaism reform in the UnitedStates was more radical than in Germany. As for the Conservative Judaism, one may claim that it originated from the United States.Immigrants, who arrived in the beginning of the XX century, enriched the existing confession with a well developed form of Americanizedorthodoxy. Such tendency of the newly arrived immigrants contrasted greatly to the purely confessional and philanthropical Judaism that wasalready in place. So, by the beginning of the XX century, Judaism in the USA comprised of three branches that differed from each other notonly theologically but also socially and ethnically. The Reformist Judaism was mainly supported by the Americanized and well-to-dodescendants of the German Jewish. The Orthodox Judaism was backed up by the petty bourgeois and Eastern-European Jewish people. TheConservative Judaism was followed by the well educated Jewish people of the Eastern-European and German descent. In the beginning,these differences led to a full-blown conflict between the two Jewish communities - the newer, "ethnic" community and the older,assimilated one. But after a while, the confrontation subsided and the Jewish communities adapted to each other by slightly changing theirconcepts of Judaism in order to make them more compatible with each other. Later on, a lot of the contradictions and discrepancies betweenthese branches, as well as the ethnical and social differences in the make-up of their followers, became gradually subdued.

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