ABSTRACT
Of the three thousand Jews in the United States about the year 1818, when Illinois was admitted into the union, only one apparently had ventured as far west as Illinois. The first Jew to arrive in the swampy region around Lake Michigan known as Chicago was a peddler, J. Gottlieb, in 1838. During the three decades between the time of the first Jewish arrivals in the city and the great conflagration, the Jewish settlers, coming as they did from German communities that had sent great numbers of non-Jewish pioneers to the West, were on friendly terms with the growing German population of the city. As in the communities from which they came, so in Chicago, the Jewish settlers soon felt the need of establishing those immediately essential institutions of communal life such as the synagogue and the burial society.
