The history of the Jews in San Francisco reflected, and was shaped by, the history of San Francisco in many ways.

When the discovery of gold in California was made public knowledge, in 1848, migrants and immigrants poured in from all over the world, including many Jews. The majority of the Jews came from the German-speaking countries of Central Europe, especially Posen and Bavaria; some came from England, France and the part of Poland which was then part of Russia, and a few were Sephardim.

Thirty Jews held the first Jewish services on the West Coast on Rosh Hashanah, 1849, in a wood-framed tent on Jackson Street near the waterfront. Since they had no sacred Torah scroll made of parchment, they used a printed copy of the Torah. High Holiday services were held one year later in Masonic Hall on Kearney Street, by which time the congregation had probably obtained a Torah scroll. (By the next year, another had been donated by the famous British-Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore.) The congregation rented space on Bush Street until they could build a synagogue. In 1851, a Torah reader was appointed, although at a nominal salary. One of the members of the congregation taught the congregants’ children without payment.

By March 16, 1851, $4,400 had been raised from among the Jewish community to build a synagogue. But on April 4, 1851, the congregation split, over religious differences between German and Polish religious customs, into two congregations, Emanu-El and Sherith Israel. A recession delayed Temple Emanu-El’s ability to raise the money to build a synagogue; so did the “Great Fire” of May, 1851, and the immense property damage it caused. Its synagogue was finally built in 1854, and consecrated on September 14.

In July, 1854, its first rabbi, Julius Eckmann, arrived. The first two places where Congregation Sherith Israel met were destroyed by fire; the congregation built a synagogue on Stockton Street in 1854.

In a way, the Jews were continuing a tradition started by the Protestants who came to San Francisco (even before the Gold Rush) of religious groups who came to San Francisco without a house of worship, and making do with other places to meet and hold services. People “met in homes, hotels, courtrooms, rented halls, aboard ships abandoned in harbors, or even under canvas, and made their compacts with the Lord.”

But unlike the Jews, most or all of the Protestant groups arrived in San Francisco with a minister and a Bible. Ministers were often chosen in the Eastern, Southern or, sometimes, Midwestern United States, by authorities in their religion, to be sent to San Francisco. Other ministers tried to persuade their congregations not to go to San Francisco; when that failed, they would go to San Francisco themselves to provide at least some spiritual leadership. Three weeks after the American flag was raised over Yerba Buena, on June 7, 1846, a ship of Mormons arrived and their leader, Elder Samuel Brannan, began holding services in the plaza (the first wedding is reported to have been performed in a room the Mexicans had used as a prison.

One difference between the Mormons and most other religions that came to San Francisco is that the Mormons brought their congregation with them.) Two Methodist preachers came to San Francisco at the beginning of the Gold Rush; the Methodists held their services in the pre-fabricated, cloth-topped house of one preacher, while the other preacher led the service. The Episcopals preached their first sermon in the adobe hotel in the existing settlement’s plaza.

The first Presbyterian services were held in “a schoolhouse, the newly built First Baptist Church, a Customs House storeroom, and the Superior Court chambers in the City Hall”; their first official meeting-place was a large tent purchased from a mining company.

These are examples of the rather crude, humble beginnings of society and institutions in San Francisco. The progression of places these religions, including the Jews, held their services in the earliest years of San Francisco illustrate the growth of San Francisco from a boom town, to a more permanent city, to a European-style city, in a few years.

The very names of the first two Jewish congregations are significant: Emanu-El and Sherith Israel were the two most important synagogues in New York, the biggest city in the United States and an East Coast city. This is an example of the desire of San Franciscans to try recreate the solidity and order of the older parts of the United States, once people started to stay in San Francisco instead of just passing through it on the way to the gold mines. And the name “Emanu-El” (”God is with us” in Hebrew) may express gratitude for the Jews’ safe arrival in San Francisco, for the journey there was dangerous for everyone.

The activities, the fortunes and misfortunes, of Jews in the early years of San Francisco reflect the experiences of San Franciscans in general. Many Jewish immigrants made good money quickly as merchants, at odd jobs, and through luck arising from conditions of the Gold Rush (e.g., a man named Morris Shloss was given $100 for the wooden crate in which he stored his wagon, as soon as he got off the boat, by a man who wanted the box as a workshop by day and to sleep in by night).

They often lost everything they had even more quickly, especially to fires and robberies, and after bad luck they sometimes turned to mining and gambling.

Many of the Jews who came to San Francisco were unsuccessful; some gave up and left, if they had enough money to do even that; and not all survived. As Alexander Mayer, who had arrived in San Francisco in February of 1851, reported in letters to his uncle in Philadelphia, four merchants (Reuben Greenbaum, M. Baker, O. Nusbaum, and O. Rosenthal) had died in a fire and were buried in the same coffin at the Israelite Cemetery. Mayer himself lost his property in a fire, and after that and other setbacks, he eventually returned east.

These details (except for the dead merchants who were buried at the Israelite burying ground) reflect the general fortunes and misfortunes of the people of early San Francisco – including getting worn out from disasters and changes, fires, losses, alternating from odd job to odd job.

That was true in the case of a man named Abraham Abrahamsohn. Of the many odd jobs that Abrahamsohn performed, most of which would have perfectly represented the experiences of most [white] immigrants of the time to California, there was one odd job that was only part of the Jewish experience: that of a mohel [ritual circumciser].

On March 30, and April 6, 1851, the Jewish community was split over whom to elect the community shohet (ritual butcher). The German Jews and the Polish Jews supported rival candidates. The split occurred in the second week of April, into Congregation Emanu-El, composed mostly of German Jews (and a few Sephardim); and Sherith Israel, composed largely of Poles, Englishmen, and people from Posen (at the time, a province of Prussia).

The character of early San Francisco might well have had a lot to do with the nature of Temple Emanu-El, and why it became a Reform temple when Reform Judaism was in its infancy. Many Jews in San Francisco were already breaking the (Orthodox) Jewish laws by the time the split happened, including the laws of kashrut (purity of food) (the Seligmann brothers, who contributed a great deal of money for the building of a synagogue, did not keep kosher, and one of them became the president of the congregation).

This lack of keeping to the (Orthodox) Jewish laws reflected partly that the majority of Jews in San Francisco were German Jews, who were more westernized and tended to be less orthodox than those of Eastern Europe, but it also reflected the frontier-society, rough-and-tumble, rule-breaking, adapting nature of San Francisco, the newness, lack of traditions, the society made up entirely of immigrants.

It is probably no accident that the “capital” of Reform Judaism in the United States was not New York, which had the largest Jewish population, or any of the other East Coast cities with large Jewish populations, but Cincinnati, which was a fairly young, recent city, having grown as a city only since 1794.

These are some of the ways that the experiences of Jews in San Francisco reflected, and were shaped by, the history of San Francisco.