The early Jewish communities in North America were all established by Sephardi Jews of the Western Sephardi tradition. The first congregation in North America, Shearith Israel, also now known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, was founded in New Amsterdam (New York) in 1654. Four other congregations in what became the United States, all Sephardi, antedated the American Revolution—in Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah. Almost all the Jewish immigration to the United States through the nineteenth century was composed of Jews of European background.

Early in the tw…