"In this first volume, [the author] deals directly with how that tension between accommodation and group survival was played out in the setting of colonial America by cosmopolitan Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews. Confronted by a host society reluctant to fully accept Jews as part of civil society, the Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in colonial America were the first to establish a model of how these pulls could be balanced to assure survival"--Series editor forword.