It Might be said that there were successive tides of 'Jewish .emigration to America from European •countries, fairly well separated from each other in • time. During the first 250 years after the discovery of America the settlers were •mainly Jewish immigrants of Spanish-Portuguese stock, with a sprinkling of German, French, English and Polish Jews. German Jewish emigration becomes consider able only about the time of the American Revo lution (though evidence is accumulating that it took upon itself larger dimensions and at an earlier period than is commonly believed) ; it was stimulated by the reactionary measures fol lowing the Napoleonic wars and the Revolution of 1848, and began to include emigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later on an increasing number of Poles. The Russian Jewish exodus, which began about 1881, was by far the heaviest of these various currents of emigration, and was itself succeeded or rather joined by a Rumanian-Jewish wave about 1900.
Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Colo Before the discovery Jews were ac tively identified with the fate of America, as may be said without reference to the curious and once widely accepted theory that the American Indians are descendants of the lost Ten Tribes. Emilio Castelar, the late Spanish statesman and historian, referring to the co incidence that the Jews were expelled from Spain in the year that Columbus started on his first voyage of discovery—a circumstance noted by Columbus himself in his journal, and repeatedly thereafter commented upon by Jew ish historians— makes this observation: It chanced that one of the last vessels transporting into exile the Jews expelled from Spain by the relifpous intolerance of which the recent!yy created and odious Tribunal of the Faith was the embodiment passed by the little fleet bound in search of another world. whose creation should be new born, a haven be afforded to the quickening principle of human liberty, and a temple reared to the God of enfranchise' d and redeemed coaecienoes.
But Jewish aid to Columbus Was not limited to Jews accompanying him on his first voyage (including Luis de Torres, a new convert to Christianity, who went as interpreter because of his knowledge of Arabic, and settled before 1500 in America), nor to the circumstance that Columbus carried with him, as aids on his voy age, a sea-quadrant called °Jacob's Staff,* in vented by a Spanish Jew. and astronomical tables and charts invented by another Jew. The more significant and important fact is that Jewish financiers at the Spanish court were his leading patrons, and advanced the money for his voyage, as evidenced by original account books still found in the Spanish archives; so that it was a mere recognition of this circtnn stance that induced him to address the first two letters (now justly famous, and the earliest copies of printed editions of which command thousands of dollars from book-fanciers) nar rating his discovery to those two secret Jewish friends, Luis de Santangel, chancellor of Aragon, and Gabriel Sanchez, royal treasurer. In the light of such facts the late Herbert B. Adams wrote that `not jewels, but Jews, were the real financial basis of the first expedition of Columbus)) The revenues needed to fit the second expedition were secured from• the proceeds of the property of which the ex polled Spanish Jews were despoiled by the In quisition at the time of their expulsion from Spain.
In spite of prohibitions upon Jewish settle ment in Spanish and Portuguese Ameriea,, many Jews rapidly emigrated to the New World from among those exiled from Spain and Portugal; occasionally, in spite of the incon sistency involved, in view of those prohibitions, Jews and Jewesses were forcibly transported to America by the state through the agency of the Inquisition. By 1548 Jews • are referred to not merely as having settled in Brazil, but as introducing sugar-culture there, which they transplanted from Madeira. The smoking of tobacco had been introduced tolEuropeans even before 1500 by Luis de Tortes, a companion of Columbus. Occasionally, enormous sums money had to be raised and given to the Crown in order to effect suspension or revocations of prohibitions upon Jewish settlement in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. But the In guisitioin and its terrors were introduced even into the New World; hence Jews found it visable to try to conceal their faith: under the cloak of Christianity; and it is principally in the records of the Inquisition that we find proofs of the Jewish practices of many of these settlers called Marranos or secret- J ews — whose trials commonly rest:bed in imprison ment, frequently in death at the stake, and at- all events followed by confiscation of their property.
In Brazil, Jewish settlers actively aided the Dutch in effecting their conquest of thaiucourr try, about 1620, after which the Jews en muse threw off their Christian disguise and publicly professed their own religion. The Dutch West India Company (q.v.), which obtained the pro prietorship of Brazil, had many influential Jewish stockholders, and under their auspices large numbers of Jews from Portugal, Hol land and Germany emigrated. Jewish resi dents referred to about 1640 as owning the principal sugar-plantations of Brazil, and as heavily interested in the diamond industry then developing there; and there is also evi dence that a Jewish literature. sprang up in Brazil at this time. Some idea of their num bers may be gathered from the fact that at the time of the surrender of Recife buco) to the Portuguese, after its recapture from the Dutch, soon after the middle of the 17th century, that city alone contained about 5,000 Jews, even after many had departed from the city. In smaller numbers they were also established in other cities of Brazil, in Mexico, Peru, the West Indies and at other points. The Dutch capitulation of Brazil in 1654, led to their flight in large numbers from that country, their migrations leading them north ward, particularly to the West Indies, and one party of refugees even becoming the nucleus of a Jewish settlement at New Amsterdam (New York city) in 1654. Many, however, remained in the South American colonies, and their Jewish identity was gradually lost under the hostile influences at work. The settlements under Dutch auspices at Surinam, Cayenne and Curacao are reserving of particular attention.