Against a backdrop of European unrest, immigration to America flourished in the nineteenth century for European Jews as for other groups. Two waves of immigration brought Jews to New Mexico, the first largely of German men in the 1840s and 1850s and the second of Eastern Europeans with the coming of the railroad to New Mexico in the 1880s. This book lights the drama that unfolded for these young Jewish merchants, tradesmen, in cases labourers, who were linked in their homeland through a complex web of intermarriage and who built quite successfully on their cultural and social relationships to become among New Mexico"s most prominent, productive citizens.