Most Jewish USA possible

So roughly double the OTL number? Probably the easiest way would be to butterfly away the creation of Israel/Zionism and have them migrate to America instead of Palestine.
 
5% can be attained just by having Jews keep higher birth rates. Toss in continuing to allow Jews in after 1924 and/or taking in Holocaust victims (both before and after the war), and you can crush that number.

EDIT: Of course, getting those changes in policy to happen...
 
Maybe better immigration via a Jewish founding father? Someone who can score key victories in the revolutionary war and thus establish Judaism in America's founding myth. This could butterfly away some antisemitism and encourage immigration of families, as I think IOTL for a long time the biggest Jewish immigrants were single young men.
 
Keep communism but butterfly israel and the holocaust, you end up with millions of jews in a precarious situation following 1989, then you could have a new wave of orthodox jews coming in the 1990s after anti semitism has been heavily reduced in the USA.
 
You'd have to massively accept Jewish migration from Europe (which is where the largest population of Jews existed), and also work to exclusively relocate and transplant said Jews across the country. At the beginning of the 1700s there was 1.4 million Jews in Europe, which might be the optimum time to start migrating people. Perhaps if the British Empire was less tied to German politics via Hannover and more tied to Polish and Russian politics they might have been convinced or interested in funneling their Jews (to start) over to the Americas to sort their friends of a problematic minority.

Do it well enough and maybe you get Jewish-dominated colonies across North America rather than WASP states.
 
Jews peaked at about 3% of the US population in the 1920's IIRC. It's correct to say that if Israel never came into into existence it wouldn't be too hard to increase that number.

In the post-Soviet era something like 1.5 million Russian Jews immigrated to Israel, have the majority of them come to the US instead.

Maybe an even easier thing would be to just not have the 1920's immigration restrictions come into existence as well.
 
WI in the early 1700s "colonial Zionism" develops? The Jews manage to get enough capital from someone to establish a "New Israel" somewhere in the Americas--maybe OTL Georgia or Nova Scotia?--and joins the American colonies. From there, they somehow write their state constitution to guarantee a cultural establishment of Judaism without violating the Seperation clause...
 
The Great Awakening involves mass conversions to Judaism or the founders adopt Judaism, or some variant where America is Zion, as the national religion.

One the other religions are banned all Americans would be Jews.
 

Zwinglian

Banned
The Great Awakening involves mass conversions to Judaism or the founders adopt Judaism, or some variant where America is Zion, as the national religion.

One the other religions are banned all Americans would be Jews.
If the founders banned Christianity all Americans wouldn’t be Jews the founders heads would be chopped off
 
If we can butterfly most of the deaths from the Holocaust then there might be up to 32 million Jews alive today. If the Holocaust is partially mitigated by America allowing immense Jewish immigration (instead of drastically restricting it through quotas etc.) then a huge proportion of those Jews could have migrated to America. Most of the world's Jews could end up in America if the success of Zionism is also partially mitigated (by e.g. increased anti-Jewish-immigration measures in the British mandate so Jews fleeing European oppression head to America, or make Israel lose the '48 war so all the Jews that fled from Arab & Muslim states would go to America instead, etc.).​

Unless (as @Galba Otho Vitelius proposes) there's a huge wave of Jewish conversion, that's probably max between fifteen and thirty million Jews in America. There are currently OTL 325.7 million Americans. And assuming literally nothing else changes from OTL, that means an absolute max 1/10th of the current USA. Which is pushing the limits of plausibility: it requires almost all of the world's Jews to live in America and for America to otherwise be exactly the same population. Both are unlikely imho
 
If we can butterfly most of the deaths from the Holocaust then there might be up to 32 million Jews alive today. If the Holocaust is partially mitigated by America allowing immense Jewish immigration (instead of drastically restricting it through quotas etc.) then a huge proportion of those Jews could have migrated to America. Most of the world's Jews could end up in America if the success of Zionism is also partially mitigated (by e.g. increased anti-Jewish-immigration measures in the British mandate so Jews fleeing European oppression head to America, or make Israel lose the '48 war so all the Jews that fled from Arab & Muslim states would go to America instead, etc.).​

Unless (as @Galba Otho Vitelius proposes) there's a huge wave of Jewish conversion, that's probably max between fifteen and thirty million Jews in America. There are currently OTL 325.7 million Americans. And assuming literally nothing else changes from OTL, that means an absolute max 1/10th of the current USA. Which is pushing the limits of plausibility: it requires almost all of the world's Jews to live in America and for America to otherwise be exactly the same population. Both are unlikely imho

Exactly. I'd also add that there are a number of different factors to measure: fertility and mortality rate fo the group and the total population, mostly. Simply saying "hey let's move these people from one place to the other" doesn't change the demographics of a reasonably populated country.
 
Have Israel lose the 6 Day War. You’d get plenty of Jewish refugees fleeing to the US.

If the US would take them.

Don't forget that the US only became a firm Israeli ally after the war. The US in June 1967 might well take only "a few" Jews (maybe even a few hundred thousand), with nativists and supporters of realpolitik coming together to avoid bringing in lots of foreigners and pissing off the Arabs at the same time. There's also a logistical issue. Palestinians fled by land, Israelis are going to be taking anything that floats to Cyprus, and then...? Worst case, you end up with permanent refugee camps a la Palestinians - but also, frankly, lots of corpses no matter how you cut it.
 
For some reason, all of Europe, Russia and MENA become antisemitic, but don't kill their Jews and don't want to convert them either, expelling them instead?

For higher birthrates, you may need a stronger, earlier ultra-orthodox movement, but I have no idea how to achieve that.
 
WI in the early 1700s "colonial Zionism" develops? The Jews manage to get enough capital from someone to establish a "New Israel" somewhere in the Americas--maybe OTL Georgia or Nova Scotia?--and joins the American colonies. From there, they somehow write their state constitution to guarantee a cultural establishment of Judaism without violating the Seperation clause...
There actually was a large Jewish community in the American South- in Charleston, South Carolina, to be exact. They were mainly Sephardic Jews and were well enough integrated into American society at the time that Judah P. Benjamin, a Jew, was a major Confederate leader during the Civil War.
 
There actually was a large Jewish community in the American South- in Charleston, South Carolina, to be exact. They were mainly Sephardic Jews and were well enough integrated into American society at the time that Judah P. Benjamin, a Jew, was a major Confederate leader during the Civil War.

Most of these Sephardic Jews were of Caribbean origin, people that went to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies as New Christians and later got involved with the sugar industry and slave trade as the Dutch and English offered them religious liberties. As the Caribbean economy stagnated, they migrated to the US. Judah P. Benjamin himself was born in the Virgin Islands. This was a very compact community, completely unrelated to Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews that migrated en masse from the former Polish Commonwealth.
 
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