ABSTRACT
The year of the discovery of America marks also an important date in Jewish history: the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Up to the period of the Inquisition the status of the Jews in Spain and Portugal had been a favored one, compared with that of the Jews in the rest of Europe. It is true, however, that the conception which the Sephardim built up of their own worth has made them a distinct aristocracy in the communities in which they were the original Jewish settlers. German Jews had begun to trickle in, and at first had been received into the established Sephardic congregations. The status of the Jews in New York changed little when that city was taken over by the British in 1664. Around 1845, when the Jews of Poland were first conscripted into the army, the immigration from Russian Poland increased considerably.
