B'nai B'rith: the first Jewish body spanning America

By the 1840s a second wave was coming—from the German lands, where after the failure of the revolutions, and under laws restricting whom Jews might marry and where they might settle, there was little reason to stay. They arrived poor and began as peddlers with a pack, working the farms; a generation later they kept stores. The Strauses, Guggenheims, Lehmans and Sears descend from that.

There were many congregations and all of them apart: the Sephardi Shearith Israel, German ones, Polish ones, each with its own rite. On 13 October 1843 twelve men met at Sinsheimer's coffee house on Essex Street and founded B'nai B'rith—a society that admitted a man whatever his rite. It paid widows, buried the dead, tended the sick, and later built hospitals and orphanages.

American Reform begins in the same years: the Reformed Society of Israelites formed in Charleston in 1824, and with the arrival of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise the movement acquired its institutions—the prayer book Minhag America (1857), the Union of congregations (1873), the college in Cincinnati (1875) and the Pittsburgh Platform (1885), which declared the laws of food and purity no longer binding.

The answer to the platform was the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (1886), out of which the Conservative movement grew. In a single generation American Jewry divided into denominations—a division Europe had not known in that form.