The history of the Jews in Colonial America begins upon their arrival as early as the 1650s. The first Jews who came to the New World were Sephardi Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam (New York City). Later major settlements of Jews would occur in the port cities: Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah.
The Jewish settlers immediately faced discrimination, similar to and often more intense than that suffered by other religions, Catholics, Lutherans, and Quakers. The Jewish settlers played a role in the trading business of the colonies, but were often faced with anti-Jewish discrimination from both governmental entities and individuals.https://archive.org/details/jewsincolonialam0000reis/page/120/mode/2up - pages 118-122
Early individual arrivals
Joachim Gans Joachim Gans was a Bohemian-German Jew born in Prague, Kingdom of Bohemia. Gans was a renowned metallurgist and mining expert, who was recruited by Sir Walter Raleigh for the 1585 expedition to found a permanent settlement in the Virginia territory, which became the Roanoke Colony.
Elias Legarde Elias Legarde (or Legardo) may have been a Sephardic Jew who arrived at Jamestown, Virginia on the merchant ship Abigail in 1621. Legarde appears in the muster of Anthonie Bonall. Legarde was from Languedoc, France, and was hired to go to the colony to teach people how to grow grapes for wine. In 1628 Legarde leased 100 acres on the west side of Harris Creek in Elizabeth City, Colony of Virginia.
Solomon Franco One of the first Jews known to have lived in northern North America was Solomon Franco, a Sephardic Jew from Holland who is believed to have settled in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1649. Franco was a scholar and agent for Immanuel Perada, a Dutch merchant. He delivered supplies to Edward Gibbons, a major general in the Massachusetts militia. After a dispute over who should pay Franco (Gibbons or Perada), the Massachusetts General Court ruled on May 6, 1649, that Franco was to be expelled from the colony and granted him "six shillings per week out of the Treasury for ten weeks, for sustenance, till he can get his passage to Holland."
Solomon Pietersen Solomon Pietersen was a merchant from Amsterdam who came to New Amsterdam (in Lower Manhattan, today's New York City) in 1654. In 1656, Pietersen became the first known American Jew to intermarry with a Christian; though there are no records showing Pietersen formally converted, his daughter Anna was baptized in childhood.
Jacob Barsimson On July 8, 1654, Jacob Barsimson left Holland and arrived aboard Peartree on August 22 in the port of New Amsterdam (in Lower Manhattan, where Wall Street is today). Barsimson was employed by the Dutch East India Company and had fled the Portuguese settlements in the New World, which had captured a formerly Dutch settlement and established the Portuguese Inquisition there.
Asser Levy Asser Levy (Van Swellem) is first mentioned in public records in New Amsterdam in 1654, in connection with the group of 23 Jews who arrived as refugees from Brazil. It is likely he preceded their arrival. Levy was the (kosher) butcher for the small Jewish community. He fought for Jewish rights in the Dutch colony and is famous for having secured the right of Jews to be admitted as Burghers and to serve guard duty for the colony.
Dutch Brazilian Sephardi group
The first group of Jews in the northern colonies disembarked in early September 1654, shortly after Barsimson. Barsimson is said to have met them at The Battery upon their arrival. This group was made up of 23 Portuguese Jews from the Netherlands (4 couples, 2 widows, and 13 children). Like Barsimson, they had fled from a former Dutch settlement; the group had emigrated from Dutch Brazil after the settlement was conquered by the Portuguese. Fearing the Inquisition, the Jews left Recife. They originally docked in Spanish Jamaica and Spanish Cuba, but the Spanish did not allow them to remain there. Their ship, Ste. Catherine, went to New Amsterdam instead, settling against the wishes of local merchants and the local Dutch Reformed Church. Colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant, upon complaint from these groups, attempted to have the Jews expelled. He wrote a letter to the directors of the Dutch West India Company dated September 22, 1654:
The Jews who have arrived would nearly all like to remain here, but learning that they (with their customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians) were very repugnant to the inferior magistrates, as also to the people having the most affection for you; the Deaconry also fearing that owing to their present indigence they might become a charge in the coming winter, we have, for the benefit of this weak and newly developing place and the land in general, deemed it useful to require them in a friendly way to depart, praying also most seriously in this connection, for ourselves as also for the general community of your worships, that the deceitful race—such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ—be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony to the detraction of your worships and the dissatisfaction of your worships' most affectionate subjects.
However, the directors of the Dutch West India Company included several influential Jews, who interceded on the refugees' behalf. Company officials rebuffed Stuyvesant and ordered him, in a letter dated April 26, 1655, to let the Jews remain in New Amsterdam, "provided the poor among them shall not become a burden to the company or to the community, but be supported by their own nation":
We would have liked to effectuate and fulfill your wishes and request that the new territories should no more be allowed to be infected by people of the Jewish nation, for we foresee therefrom the same difficulties which you fear, but after having further weighed and considered the matter, we observe that this would be somewhat unreasonable and unfair, especially because of the considerable loss sustained by this nation, with others, in the taking of Brazil, as also because of the large amount of capital which they still have invested in the shares of this company. Therefore after many deliberations we have finally decided and resolved to apostille [annotate] upon a certain petition presented by said Portuguese Jews that these people may travel and trade to and in New Netherland and live and remain there, provided the poor among them shall not become a burden to the company or to the community, but be supported by their own nation. You will now govern yourself accordingly.
Upon the capture of the colony by the English in 1664, the rights enjoyed by the Jews were not interfered with, and for twenty years they appear to have lived much as before the establishment of English rule, though with slight increase in their numbers. Jews had previously been barred from settling in English colonies, as they had been banned from all English territory for 400 years. Oliver Cromwell (British Protector from 1649 through 1660, through his son Richard) lifted this prohibition, and the founding of the first major Jewish settlement soon followed in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1672, Rabba Couty attained prominence with his appeal to the King's Council in England from a decree passed against him by the courts of Jamaica, as a result of which one of his ships was seized and declared forfeited. His appeal was successful and established the rights of Jews as British subjects. This appears to be the first case in which a colonial grant of naturalization was recognized as valid.
New York
In 1685, the application of Saul Brown (originally Saul Pardo) to trade at retail was denied, as was also that of the Jews for liberty to exercise their religion publicly. That they did so privately in a place of worship is evident from a map of New York, dated 1695, which shows the location of a synagogue on Beaver Street, also that Saul Brown was the minister, and that the congregation comprised 20 families. Five years later, the site of the synagogue was so well known that, in a conveyance of property, the premises were referred to as a "landmark." In 1710, the minister of the congregation, Abraham de Lucena, was granted exemption from civil and military service by reason of his ministerial functions, and reference is made to the enjoyment of the same privileges by his predecessors. The minutes of the Congregation Shearith Israel of New York begin in 1729, when it was located on Mill Street, and refer to records dating back as far as 1706. This congregation was established on Mill Street, in 1730, on a lot purchased two years before, the first synagogue in the now United States.
It would thus appear that the religious rights of these early Jewish settlers had been secured in the beginning of the 18th century, and that they enjoyed many political rights. An act passed by the New York General Assembly on November 15, 1727, provided that when the oath of abjuration was to be taken by any British subject professing the Jewish religion, the words "upon the true faith of a Christian" might be omitted. Three days later, an act was passed naturalizing one Daniel Nunes da Costa. A bitter political controversy of 1737 resulted in the decision by the General Assembly that Jews should not be allowed to vote for members of that body.
In 1740, Parliament passed the Plantation Act, specifically permitting Jews to be naturalized in the colonies. Previously, however, the New York Colonial Assembly had passed numerous special acts of naturalization, some of which were applicable to individuals only; others, more general in character, said that Jews could be naturalized without taking oath "upon the true faith of a Christian." Between this time and the Revolutionary War the Jewish community in this colony increased slowly, with immigrants coming mostly from Spain, Portugal, and the West Indies.
During the French and Indian War, Jacob Franks was the royal agent, in association with a British syndicate, for provisioning the British forces in America; his dealings with the crown during this period exceeded £750,000.
Upstate New York settlement
Although most of the earlier immigrants settled in New York City, a few settled beyond its limits, some even as far as the confines of what now constitutes the state of Pennsylvania. In 1661, when Albany was but a trading-post, Asser Levy owned real estate there, but between that date and the early years of the nineteenth century there are no records of any settlers in that town. They were not there in sufficient numbers to form a congregation until 1838, and they had no rabbi until 1846.
In New England
A group of Jews settled in Newport, Rhode Island in the late 1600s due to the official religious tolerance of the colony as established by Roger Williams. In other parts of New England there were probably occasional settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the intolerance of the Puritans rendered impossible the establishment of any religious communities. According to several sources, Moses Simonson, who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621, may have had Dutch Jewish ancestry.Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter : a History (1997), pg. 22 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0231108419 An interesting personality is that of Judah Monis, who became a convert to Christianity and filled the chair of Hebrew in Harvard College from 1722 until his death in 1764.