Is it possible for the Jewish American population to be as large as the Irish American population?

This includes any people who aren't entirely of Jewish descent, such as they are mixed with other ethnicities, as long as they identify as having Jewish ancestry and Jewish last names are rather popular, along with at maximum a holiday similar to St. Patrick's day, but for Jews. I would also be curious if a holiday from a large Jewish population could develop in the US, similar to Halloween, which has Celtic origins. The holiday could be as Americanized as possible, as long as it has explicitly Jewish Roots.( Christmas doesn't count for Jewish Roots). But, mainly I am asking if a Jewish American population could reach the size and effect of the Irish American population( with lots of people claiming Jewish descent , similar to how lots of people claim Irish descent in OTL USA).
 
Sure, if you go back early enough. Maybe have the English decide to kill two birds with one stone, expelling all the Jews in England to the New World where they'll prove useful as settlers. Population growth occurs much like in OTL's 13 colonies. By the time of the American revolution, one of the colonies is majority Jewish and very populous. The Founding Fathers take no issue with this as better a Jew than a Papist, and many Jews serve in the Revolutionary Army and some form of American republic is formed as OTL.

The only problem is go back far enough, and America as we know it is completely disrupted. I'm not sure what the best window of time would be to introduce Jews to the 13 colonies. But demographically, the answer is either an early enough settlement of Jews in the English colonies, or a mass migration later on. I figure the latter is more difficult than the former to swing politically, hence my outline for an idea.
 
From 1290 until 1655 the Jewish population of the UK was essentially zero. After 1655 Jewish immigration was not prevented but was fairly small. What this means is that if you want Jews in the USA in numbers to equal or exceed the Irish you need to have emigration from Germany and Eastern Europe in the early late 1700s or early 1800s. Small numbers of Jews came to North America before the mid-1800s, but the first big wave was from Germany in the post 1848 wave. The problem is that emigration from the large pool of Jews in Poland, Russia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe was almost impossible prior to the mid 1800s. Getting from Poland or Russia to America absent railroads to take you to a major port, or absent better sea connections especially steamships, would be possible only for small numbers of Jews - and some of the countries would not be happy to let them go in spite of how poorly they were treated.

The Irish had the advantage of being as close to North America as any Europeans, and getting to a port of embarkation is easy. Prior to the American Revolution there were already a fair number of Irish in the USA, providing a resource for new immigrants as well as a source of information via letters to people in the old country (an important motivator for emigration).

There are not enough Jews in England between 1655 and 1776 that their expulsion to North America would make any impact.
 

Cryostorm

Monthly Donor
Only way I can see is if you have the Jewish population of Europe and the Middle East decide that the US is the best place to form a new "home-land" and that the US does not restrict Jewish immigration.
 
Only way I can see is if you have the Jewish population of Europe and the Middle East decide that the US is the best place to form a new "home-land" and that the US does not restrict Jewish immigration.
Both can be done if the Russian Empire becomes more brutal with it's progroms,( giving Jews more of a reason to escape Europe) and the US averts it's anti immigration policies, allowing more Jews to immigrate to the US.
 
Another challenge that would have to be addressed is the family size of the various cultures; Irish tended to have large families, so even if a lot of Jews make it over here, the Irish will expand faster.
 
Only way I can see is if you have the Jewish population of Europe and the Middle East decide that the US is the best place to form a new "home-land" and that the US does not restrict Jewish immigration.

Zionism in Israel is quite an old movement, but I could see some Hasidic leader leading his flock to Oregon or Texas.
 
The big problem is that more than twice as many Irish immigrated to the US as Jews during the big period of 1880-1925, though that doesn't explain all of the discrepancy, which is 5-fold. Further explanations include the fact that American Jews had fewer children on average than Irish immigrants or their children, and the fact that the Irish intermarried more readily with other groups and tended to keep the label (which was less the case with Jews, historically).

I guess improving conditions in Ireland could result in less Irish immigration, and a greater emphasis on just removing Jews from Russia and Austria-Hungary and Prussia instead of Zionism proper could help, too. But still, it's a fairly tall order.

One idea I've played with in the past, though, is to have more restricted Jewish immigration to the the US and send many more of them to Canada, where the same number of Jews could be a much large proportion of the population and thus have an outsized effect on culture and politics.

Sure, if you go back early enough. Maybe have the English decide to kill two birds with one stone, expelling all the Jews in England to the New World where they'll prove useful as settlers. Population growth occurs much like in OTL's 13 colonies. By the time of the American revolution, one of the colonies is majority Jewish and very populous. The Founding Fathers take no issue with this as better a Jew than a Papist, and many Jews serve in the Revolutionary Army and some form of American republic is formed as OTL.

The only problem is go back far enough, and America as we know it is completely disrupted. I'm not sure what the best window of time would be to introduce Jews to the 13 colonies. But demographically, the answer is either an early enough settlement of Jews in the English colonies, or a mass migration later on. I figure the latter is more difficult than the former to swing politically, hence my outline for an idea.

As someone else pointed out, there were no Jews in England until the Civil War. Also, the first Jews in what would become the US were a group of Dutch Jews who came to New Amsterdam after the Dutch were expelled from Brazil. There are old Jewish communities in the US, mostly Sephardic, but they were always very modest in number and mostly kept their noses clean and self-contained. Modern American Jewish culture is almost solely the child of the great migration of 1880-1920ish from former Poland-Lithuania.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
Your big problem is Jewish endogamy. In 20th century America, Jews tended to marry Jews much more frequently than Irish married Irish, meaning more people ended up having a bit of Irish blood but identifying slightly with their heritage. It's quality v. quantity, you got more Irish than Jews, but the Irish were less Irish than the Jews were Jewish. Also, there were more Irish to start with.

You need to reduce Irish immigration (no potato blight, or more brutal English policies in 17th and 18th century Ireland would do that), or increase Jewish immigration, and then make it more likely for Jews to marry out but retain a Jewish identity. This is very difficult given Judaism was a religion rather than an "ethnicity" as such until zionism and anti-semitism intervened to make it one, I suspect that many early zionists would have been uninterested in non-religious quarter-Jewish Germans, it was only after the war that the more general definition of who was a Jew was widely accepted.

Your other option is to make Irish ancestry less important as a cultural signifier in the US. That would make people less likely to identify as Irish past the first generation. After all, the largest single component in the white American gene pool (and a pretty large one in the black gene pool too) is British, but next to nobody identifies as "British American". A largely Protestant Ireland loyal to the King would remove the attractiveness of representing yourself as "Irish-American" in the US.
 
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Perhaps you could have some Spanish Jews settling in America after the Alhambra Decree of 1492, but I don't think that the Catholic Kings would like that at all.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
Perhaps you could have some Spanish Jews settling in America after the Alhambra Decree of 1492, but I don't think that the Catholic Kings would like that at all.

They'd have to find it first, Columbus didn't get back from his first voyage until 1493, and nobody saw North America until Cabot in 1497. North Africa and the Ottoman lands were a much better bet for Spanish Jews, which is why most of those who didn't convert went there. A European colony in North America without regular supply from Europe was dead in the water, even with a supply line Roanoke went tits up.
 
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