Challenge: With a POD after 1750, Jewish settlers and natives in the Pacific Northwest create many small and medium businesses based on fisheries

[Petike]

Your challenge, should you accept it, with a POD after 1750, is the following:

- Have Jewish settlers from Europe and elsewhere settle in larger numbers in the coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest.
- The Jewish settlers gradually befriend various coastal native ethnicities of the Pacific Northwest, up to southern Alaska.
- The combined efforts of the Jewish settlers and the traditional know-how of the native peoples create an interesting form of cooperation concerning coastal fisheries.
- The settlers and the natives cooperate on founding small and medium businesses based on the coastal fisheries, and later, sea fisheries. They make a pretty penny on selling dried and icebox-freezed fish to customers in western North America, and later the wider world. The business scene is small and medium enterprise, since there are both economic and logistic reasons why larger settler-and-native corporations wouldn't be as competitive with other PNW settlers (or maybe only one or two corporations, at most).
- In time, the settlers create a branch of some of their fishery businesses, focused on the export of kosher fish ingredients.

 

[durante]

Louis Riel: Hero, heretic, nation builder

A celebration of the real Louis Riel, Métis leader and Manitoba founder, on the 150th anniversary of the Red River Resistance and the 175th of his birth

canadiangeographic.ca

Louis Riel, a métis considered the Founding Father of Manitoba, had once proposed turning Vancouver Island into a homeland for Jews. Being invited there by indigenous (or part-indigenous, depending on who you ask) could help things along.

Correction: it appears "New Judea" was on the BC mainland and according to this article at least, expectation was on condition of converting to Christianity.

Some of the first settlers in the region came from John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company; finding a way to increase Jewish involvement in this company may also help.

Question: how far back does the Jewish love affair with salmon go? It's the staple food of the PNW peoples

 

[twovultures]

While the communities were somewhat suspicious of each other, they did have some cultural interchange and cooperation in the alt-history mystery The Yiddish Policeman's Union where the state of Alaska was turned into a territory for Jewish refugees.

Perhaps in an alternate version of that alternate universe, a member of the Verboever Hasidic sect who drives the plot of the book makes friends with some of the local Tlingits, they open a joint fishing venture, and then the success of that drives more members of the group to seek similar partnerships, resulting in the sect going into fishing business instead of organized crime.

 

[durante]

@Meshakhad you may be interested

 

[Chrispi]

Can I fit elements of this challenge into my long-running FWOAN (British victory at Saratoga in 1777) setting Rapt? I can see British Jews get on board with the idea of buying shares in the Oregon Company (similar to the HBC, only west of the Great Divide) along with a lot of other GB nonconformists and malcontents. Not only do the Oregonian Jews do well trading with the natives, they start recording their language and culture and advocate for their citizenship and voting rights in the colonial Legislature in *Portland.

Things are far from smooth sailing for them, though, as they remain a smaller minority and many other groups carry the old Jew-hatred with them, but generally people keep a good distance away from each other and mind their own business. With Oregon's transformation from being a British colony to a constituent realm of the Empire of North America, the Jewish community largely supports unionism and railway connections back east. Furthermore, persecutions and pogroms of their bretheren in Europe make them support diaspora communities all along the coast, from New Albion all the way to Alaska.

 

[durante]

Can I fit elements of this challenge into my long-running FWOAN (British victory at Saratoga in 1777) setting Rapt? I can see British Jews get on board with the idea of buying shares in the Oregon Company (similar to the HBC, only west of the Great Divide) along with a lot of other GB nonconformists and malcontents. Not only do the Oregonian Jews do well trading with the natives, they start recording their language and culture and advocate for their citizenship and voting rights in the colonial Legislature in *Portland.

Things are far from smooth sailing for them, though, as they remain a smaller minority and many other groups carry the old Jew-hatred with them, but generally people keep a good distance away from each other and mind their own business. With Oregon's transformation from being a British colony to a constituent realm of the Empire of North America, the Jewish community largely supports unionism and railway connections back east. Furthermore, persecutions and pogroms of their bretheren in Europe make them support diaspora communities all along the coast, from New Albion all the way to Alaska.

One minor nitpick: thats the Northwest Company. An alt-Northwest Company could be called the Columbia Company, but the British didn't call the area Oregon.

My best PoD for earlier involvement of the British in the PNW is the possibility for Alexander Mackenzie to meet George Vancouver when they were both on the BC coast in 1793 (Alexander Mackenzie came overland from the east, Vancouver via boat across the Pacific, apparently they only missed each other by a few weeks). If they had met, they would have realised about 10 to 20 years earlier than OTL how close the Northwest Company's territory was to the Puget Sound area, which was known to be a lucrative source of (mostly otter) furs.

 

[PrinceofApathy]

Following, for obvious reasons.

 

[HyperMuscularDemon]

How likely is the possibility that Jewish merchants and traders who arrive in the Pacific Northwest will intermingle with the Native Americans produce a Jewish Native American community?

 

[Meshakhad]

How likely is the possibility that Jewish merchants and traders who arrive in the Pacific Northwest will intermingle with the Native Americans produce a Jewish Native American community?

Unlikely. Jews don't actively seek converts. There will no doubt be individual cases of Native Americans converting to Judaism (especially in the case of intermarriage) but I don't see large-scale conversions as realistic, especially when converting to Judaism generally entails some level of abandonment of the convert's prior cultural identity. There's no scenario where there are a significant number of Jews in the PNW but no Christians, and there's no reason I can think of for a tribe to convert to Judaism instead of Christianity.

That said, one possibility of a significant Jewish presence could be the preservation of more Native American beliefs. Any Native community in regular contact with Europeans will suffer greatly from disease. IIRC, medical aid was a major Christian vector for missionary work. Jews could also provide medical aid, but wouldn't try to convert them. And all it would take is one honest conversation between a rabbi and a shaman for the Natives to get the idea that they really ought to write down their stories and traditions. So maybe we get a more robust Native religious tradition or two that resists Christianization.

 

[durante]

The Very Jewish History of the UK's Poshest Smoked Salmon | The Nosher

In the late 19th century, Aaron “Harry” Forman, fled the pogroms of Odessa and arrived in London’s East End, where ...

www.myjewishlearning.com

There's definitely something here. Around the turn of the century, salmon was an important Jewish trade, especially in New York and London. Maybe Jews in the PNW could connect the salmon fisheries here to retailers in NYC and London (eventually).

 

[Chrispi]

One minor nitpick: thats the Northwest Company. An alt-Northwest Company could be called the Columbia Company, but the British didn't call the area Oregon.

My best PoD for earlier involvement of the British in the PNW is the possibility for Alexander Mackenzie to meet George Vancouver when they were both on the BC coast in 1793 (Alexander Mackenzie came overland from the east, Vancouver via boat across the Pacific, apparently they only missed each other by a few weeks). If they had met, they would have realised about 10 to 20 years earlier than OTL how close the Northwest Company's territory was to the Puget Sound area, which was known to be a lucrative source of (mostly otter) furs.

Further clarification: the North West Company was founded in Montreal in 1779, two years after Saratoga, many years before the Columbia Rediviva sailed to the west coast and up the mouth of the great River of the West, which up to then was also called the Oregon River. British maps labeled their claim to the northwest area as New Albion, which I mentioned earlier.

 

[PGSBHurricane]

I think an interesting POD could be if France maintained control over Louisiana and/or Canada after the Seven Years' War. If that's the case then the British could focus their efforts on the Pacific Northwest as a second place for major colonies in North America. As far as Jews go, the British could invite some from Britain or mainland Europe to settle there even though they'd probably be a minority.