Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

January 7, 2026

The Jewish Immigrants Who Democratized American Banking

The East Side J.P. Morgan.

Among the immigrant communities of late-19th-century New York City, a few Jewish entrepreneurs created new kinds of small banks designed to provide credit to the poor and often foreign-born. These institutions wedded Jewish communal solidarity with economic freedom. The most prominent of these was founded by Sender Jarmulowsky, a Polish Jew and former yeshiva student who moved to Germany and began selling passage to the U.S. on credit. Rebecca Kobrin describes the man who became known as “the East Side J.P. Morgan.” 

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