A minute percentage of the population of early America, Jews settled primarily in seaport towns, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, and Savannah during and after the colonial era and Richmond and Baltimore during the late 1700s and early 1800s. A handful resided in rural sections of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In each of the towns in which they settled, their first communal religious action was the acquisition of land for a cemetery. Traditional Jewish religious law requires burial in ground surrounded by a wall or a fence, thereby creating an enclosure in which only Jews are interred. In New Amsterdam, mainland North America's earliest Jewish colonists acquired land for a cemetery in 1656 and twenty-six years later, in 1682, the reappearance of a small Jewish presence in New York necessitated purchase of cemetery land a second time. Subsequently, wherever a new Jewish community took root, consecration of a cemetery connoted the permanent appearance of the Jewish religion in that new location.
By contrast, synagogues were constructed long after a Jewish presence developed. Because traditional Jewish law permits communal worship in virtually any location, congregations gathered at first in private homes or in homes rented for services, waiting many years, or until the community deemed itself sufficiently well established, to build houses of worship. In New York, for example, services were held in a private home as early as the 1690s, and they continued to be held privately for a generation. It was not until 1728 that the congregation embarked upon construction of a synagogue, dedicating it for use in 1730 and subsequently adding a ritual bath, a school, quarters for a hired caretaker, and a booth for the autumnal festival of Sukkoth (Festival of Booths). Similarly in Philadelphia, a Jewish community began to form during the late 1730s, but its members did not construct a synagogue until 1782, while in Charleston and Savannah synagogues were not erected until 1794 and 1820, respectively. In Newport, however, action was swifter. A new Jewish community emerged there during the 1740s and early 1750s, and it had formulated plans for a synagogue by 1754; it broke ground for the synagogue in 1759 and began to worship in it in 1763, although the congregants were unable to complete the structure until 1768.
Whether within the private home or later in the synagogue, the Sephardic rather than the Ashkenaz-ic rite was the one that the congregations followed. Most of the Jews who settled in the colonies during the seventeenth century were Sephardim, that is, the descendants of Jews who originated in Spain and Portugal. While Ashkenazim, or Jews who originated in central and eastern Europe, also appeared in America during the seventeenth century, the small population was preponderantly Sephardic. Consequently, the Sephardic rite became the American rite, and it continued to prevail until the 1820s, despite the fact that, as early as 1720, Jews of Ashkenazic descent were in the majority. Notwithstanding their larger numbers, the Ashkenazim accepted the Se-phardic system of worship in keeping with another fundamental principle of religious law, namely, that established custom has the status of law as long as the custom in question conforms to the norms of Jewish halacha (traditional religious law). The Ash-kenazim may well have maintained their own customs and traditions within the privacy of their homes, but at communal worship they adhered to the Sephardic rite. Signs of conflict among early American Ashkenazim and Sephardim surfaced in Charleston and Philadelphia late in the eighteenth century and again in New York around 1820, leading in 1825 to the creation of the first congregation in North America to follow the Ashkenazic rite. The Ashkenazic ritual became the norm thereafter throughout the United States, owing to a large influx of Jews from central and eastern Europe after 1820, although the congregations that dated to the colonial period continued to adhere to the Sephardic tradition.
In their spiritual lives and in questions pertaining to the legal and customary requirements of normative, traditional Judaism, early American Jews did not have the guidance of trained rabbis. Unlike their counterparts in the Caribbean colonies belonging to Britain (Jamaica and Barbados) and the Netherlands (Curaçao), Jews in mainland North America did not secure the employment of ordained rabbis, and there is no indication in surviving records that they even attempted to obtain such expertise. Save for several brief visits by rabbis from abroad, and with the additional exception of requests for rulings that were directed to rabbinic authorities in London and Amsterdam, the Jews of North America were largely on their own. Judaism in early America was therefore almost entirely defined and maintained by laypersons.
That they endeavored to enforce compliance with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices is evident from the disciplinary methods the leaders of the Jewish community employed. These ranged from a simple admonition to withholding honors in the synagogue, expulsion from membership, and denial of the right to burial in the community's cemetery. In theory, the leadership could also have imposed the herem, or excommunication, a severe penalty that required members of the community to shun the punished individual not only in the synagogue but outside as well, commercially and socially. In practice, however, the sanction of excommunication appears to have been rarely invoked.
The fact that such disciplinary methods were believed to have been necessary reflected the extent to which some American Jews as early as the mideighteenth century deviated from tradition in their private lives. There were no organized attempts to reform Jewish law and practice prior to 1824, when a group within the community in Charleston proposed to revise the synagogue service and then, between 1825 and 1833, congregated separately and formulated a prayer book that introduced a number of theological reforms. Moreover, there is little to suggest that Enlightenment skepticism and rationalism provoked dissent from Orthodoxy (a term that was not employed until the late nineteenth century). Nevertheless, tendencies to abandon strict Sabbath, festival, and dietary laws did exist, although many early American Jews were scrupulous in their fidelity to tradition. Deviations that occurred among the traditionalists are attributable not to intent but, rather, to the absence of rabbinic authorities in America who could resolve questions of Jewish law and who could provide adequate instruction to a Jewishly undereducated laity.