In 1654 a ship carrying twenty three Jewish refugees from the fall of Dutch Brazil reached New Amsterdam. The governor asked permission to expel them; the Dutch West India Company, some of whose shareholders were Jewish, refused, and told him to let them stay provided they cared for their own poor. The congregation founded then, Shearith Israel, still exists, which makes the oldest Jewish community in North America older than the English colony that replaced the Dutch one.
Everything else arrived the same way. German Jews came in the middle of the nineteenth century and built the Reform congregations of upper Manhattan; eastern European Jews arrived in millions after 1881 and filled the Lower East Side with synagogues, study houses, Yiddish theatres and newspapers. After 1945 Hasidic survivors rebuilt courts that had been destroyed in Europe, transplanting them whole: Satmar in Williamsburg, and Chabad in Crown Heights, whose emissaries now operate in more than a hundred countries and within which the question of whether the last rebbe was the messiah caused a serious rupture after his death in 1994.
The city holds the largest Jewish population of any city outside Israel. It was also the first Anglican foothold in the colony, with Trinity Church chartered in 1697, and it became the great Irish and Italian Catholic city of the country, with a cathedral on Fifth Avenue built for a population that had arrived poor.