The history of Jews as individuals and Judaism as a religious body in America cannot be disentangled from the history of rights. In every era, from the arrival of the first Jews in New Amsterdam in 1654 through the end of the twentieth century, Jewish life in the United States has been deeply influenced by the particular set of rights that Jews enjoyed or to which they considered themselves entitled.

Much of what came to be distinctively American in the lives of American Jews historically flowed from the existence of those rights, which far outstripped those of other Jews in other places. Although it is hardly notable that Jews in the United States expected and received more rights than Jews in Russia or Poland, for example, their benefits as American citizens outstripped those of Jews in most other Western liberal democracies. If nothing else, Jews in the United States did not have memories of a conflicted and tense process of emancipation, such as the Jews of England, France, and especially Germany endured. With some minor exceptions, no state legislature and certainly not the U.S. Congress ever debated the merits or demerits of Jews or their worthiness for inclusion in the polity. English, French, and German Jews did have such memories.

Even the basic nature of American Jewish communal patterns derived from those rights. Because of the nonestablishment clause of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, possibly derived from the American reality of religious heterogeneity, the state, broadly defined, did not interfere with the internal affairs of the Jewish community.

The history of Judaism in America from the 1820s through the end of World War II falls into two unequal time periods. The long century from the 1820s through the middle of the 1920s took its basic shape from the fact that three million European Jews immigrated to the United States. The second, much shorter, from the end of mass migration until 1945, reflected the increasing American nativity of the Jewish people as well as their steady journey into the educated middle classes.

In the 1820s and before, Jews constituted a tiny fraction of the American population, limited in their settlement to a few eastern seaboard cities as well as to a number of emerging inland communities like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. They maintained a relatively invisible persona and did not seek to impress the American landscape with markers of their presence. They did little to make other Americans aware of their presence, and their religious institutions constituted the dominant forms of Jewish communal life. In most places they maintained only one synagogue, and it constituted the only functioning center of Jewish life, taking care of the Jews' religious, educational, and charitable needs.

By 1945, while Jews still constituted a minority in a predominantly Christian populace, never making up more than 4 or 5 percent of the population, they assumed a prominent place in American society. They drew attention to themselves as Jews.