AHC: US state settled by Jewish People

Like the Mormons, you'd need this to be a deliberate decision, rather than some gradual movement.

How about a wealthy Jew gets the idea to plant a Jewish colony out in the west and deliberately encourages Jews to settle there? As others have noted, Jews tend towards urban living, so the idea would be to build a new city.

The first possibility is grabbing a choice spot on the West Coast, but that seems difficult to sustain. Everybody was heading out that way. Oh, you could attract a lot of Jewish settlers, but they'd swiftly find themselves a minority. A better option is to pick a spot on the way out west. Others have suggested Idaho, but my thought is either Colorado or Wyoming - stop just before you hit the Rockies. More people would be willing to make the trek if you tell them that they won't have to cross the mountains, and you can make money by selling last-minute supplies to settlers.

The two best options I could see would be Cheyenne and Denver. In either case, the challenge is now to prevent the initial Jewish settlement from becoming a historic footnote. Perversely, the best option I can think of would be not having the transcontinental railroad come through. If the OTL route is followed, then Denver seems the better choice. Having the city be majority Jewish would probably discourage gentile settlement sufficiently to keep a Jewish majority, as long as there's a deliberate campaign to attract new Jewish immigrants, especially the huge waves coming in the late 19th century. You'd also need the Jews to settle Colorado beyond Denver (not hard, really).
 
Honestly I could see Wisconsin or some other Midwest state becoming that territory that they settle in, maybe the Dakotas?
 
Would there be hostility or solidarity between these two historically persecuted religious groups?
Between Mormons and Jews? I would guess they would avoid each other and maintain cautious compatibility. The persecution of the groups had very different bases. The Jews weren't Christian in an intolerant Europe. Their dominance in business earned them disrespect that affected the whole community. Mormons, on the other hand, were a new sect, and from their founding in the early 1830's to their departure from Nauvoo, their problems came from members who did not respect the rights of others, plus a reputation for extraction of excess drayage fees from traffic on the Mississippi River. When they dispersed in 1846, those problems disappeared.

You need a POD that encourages the Jews to go west in an independent movement. It needs to happen before statehood in the Rockies.
 
Would there be hostility or solidarity between these two historically persecuted religious groups?
Perhaps. One of the biggest points of friction is the Mormon tendency to baptize non-Mormons postmortem. For obvious reasons, this tends to be very offensive to Jews.

The only way I could really imagine such a deliberate community decision would be to circumvent the OTL wave of German Jewish immigrants and bring the Eastern European Jews in fifty or a hundred years earlier. (See my earlier comment about OTL waves of Jewish immigration.) And after giving it some thought, it might not be impossible.

The Baal Shem Tov, who founded the Hasidic movement within Judaism, was born in Poland in the 1700s. The Hasidic movement came to dominate Jewish life in eastern Europe i.e. the Pale of Settlement, and is organized as a collection of tightly-knit communities of religious Jews following a dynasty of Rebbes who hold "court." One of the most famous in America is the Chabad-Lubavitch movement: that community began in the Belorussian village Lyubavichi ("Lubavitch" in Yiddish), fled Russian antisemitism to Poland in the 1930s, and again fled to Brooklyn when the Holocaust began. There are now over 10,000 Chabad Hasidim in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The largest community is Satmar, which may number anything between 50,000 and 120,000 members. (Jewish religious law generally does not permit a direct census of the Jewish community, so accurate estimates of religious populations are hazy at best.)

If European antisemitism became worse faster and earlier, it's possible that a Hasidic community would flee Europe entirely and head to America a century early. If American antisemitism also trends to the worse, an American Hasidic community might move eastwards much as the early Mormon community did. But even if all that happens - and I'm not sure how it would - it'd be difficult to get them to dominate an entire American state, let alone a single city.

Mormons are both a proselytizing religion and intentionally tried to birth as many new Mormons as possible through plural marriages. This is how they skyrocketed in population in about two centuries from a few dozen to sixteen million worldwide (six and a half million of which live in the United States). I honestly don't think that any Jewish sect could replicate their specific success ... but I think they could come close. Mormons today have an American average birth rate of 3.4 children per household. Orthodox Jews have a 4.1 children-per-household birth rate in America; in Israel, the non-Haredi Orthodox birth rate is comparable (4.2) but the Haredi birth rate is a staggering 6.9 children per household! So, you know, holy crap.

(Note: Haredim, also called "ultra-Orthodox Jews," are a subset of Orthodox Judaism. They are the ones who wear black hats all the time. There are roughly two groups of Haredim: Misnagdim, the people who don't follow the Baal Shem Tov's philosophy, and Hasidim, the people who do.)

A Jewish-majority state is theoretically possible. The necessary steps as I see them would need to be:
  1. An earlier increase in eastern European antisemitism by about a century. At minimum, Catherine the Great and her successors would need to be even more brutal than they historically were. OTL Catherine the Great created the Pale and forbade Jews from living east of it, and her grandson Tsar Nicholas I began the violent oppression in earnest. I can imagine that one of the two rulers between Catherine and Nicholas I could have been more brutal.
  2. More contemporaneous western European and American antisemitism generally. There are a lot of factors that could lead to this. It's not impossible.
  3. A Hasidic dynasty flees Russia, then Western Europe, and goes to America. Again, this isn't that inconceivable. A large number of Hasidic communities did just that; all we're doing is pushing that a century earlier than OTL.
  4. One or more Hasidic communities flee American antisemitism and go West, but stop somewhere along the way to start their own community outside of an already existing major city. This is the really difficult bit. I don't know why they'd do that or where. Unless America actually has pogroms like Europeans did, I don't really see how this could happen. But if it does happen early enough, then it might be enough to snowball into a state. A smallish state. But it's not necessarily unimaginable.
 
If a massive Jewish migration happens before 1800, it will not have the benefit of the Louisiana Purchase or the steam boat. It would most likely settle around the Great Lakes. A state with a Jewish majority would be smaller than the OTL states. Communication would be a big issue, so far from an ocean.
 
Mormons are both a proselytizing religion and intentionally tried to birth as many new Mormons as possible through plural marriages. This is how they skyrocketed in population in about two centuries from a few dozen to sixteen million worldwide (six and a half million of which live in the United States). I honestly don't think that any Jewish sect could replicate their specific success ... but I think they could come close. Mormons today have an American average birth rate of 3.4 children per household. Orthodox Jews have a 4.1 children-per-household birth rate in America; in Israel, the non-Haredi Orthodox birth rate is comparable (4.2) but the Haredi birth rate is a staggering 6.9 children per household! So, you know, holy crap.

Didn't the Mormons abolish polygamy pretty early on? I don't think it was that large of a factor in their population growth. I think the bigger factor was their very active proselytizing.
 
Didn't the Mormons abolish polygamy pretty early on? I don't think it was that large of a factor in their population growth. I think the bigger factor was their very active proselytizing.
I think it was a requirement for Utah became a state in 1896. So it was abolished generations ago.
 
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