There were less than ten thousand Jews in the New World three centuries after its discovery, and about two-thirds of them lived in the West Indies and in Surinam or Dutch Guiana in South America. While the communities in those far-away places are now larger in membership than they were at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, their comparative importance is much diminished. The two or three thousand Jews who lived in North America or in the United States one hundred years ago have, on the other hand, increased to nearly as many millions, the bulk of them having come in the last three or four decades. On this account neither our conditions nor our problems can be thoroughly understood without the consideration of the actual present. The plan of other works of this kind, to devote only a short concluding chapter to the present time, or to leave it altogether for the future historian, could therefore not be followed in this work. The story would be less than half told, if attention were not paid to contemporary history.