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Subject: Jewish Life in America

EARLY JEWISH LIFE IN THE USA

When we last left off the Jews of America -- at the beginning of the 19th century -- there were only about 6,000 of them. The idea that there was freedom in America as long as you were not "too Jewish," kept most Jews away.

That changed in the 1830s when the Jews of Germany began to arrive.

The German Jews were not "too Jewish." They were either Reform Jews who had dropped the basic tenets of traditional Judaism (see Part 54 for details), or they were "enlightened" secular Jews who had dropped Judaism altogether.

By 1850 there were about 17,000 Jews living in America; by 1880 there were about 270,000.

Most of these Jews moved to the New York area, which at this time had a Jewish population of 180,000. It would soon grow to 1.8 million.

In New York City, the Jewish area was the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The ones who made it quickly moved up to the Upper East Side. And these Jews did remarkably well in the New World. Some famous names of those who made it rich quick were:

* Marcus Goldman, founder of Goldman, Sachs & Co.

* Charles Bloomingdale, founder of Bloomingdale's department store

* Henry, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman, founders of Lehman Brothers

* Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb, founders of the banking firm Kuhn, Loeb and Co.

* Jacob Schiff, Loeb's son-in-law and a major American finacier

* Joseph Seligman, who started our as a peddler and who became one of the most important bankers in America.

These are just a few famous names. There were many others. (For their stories, see Our Crowd by Stephen Birmingham.)

AMERICAN REFORM MOVEMENT

The German Jews of New York built the largest Reform synagogue in the world, Temple Emanuel on the Upper East Side, and many others. By 1880 there were about 200 synagogues in America, the majority (90%) of them Reform, because these were the Jews who were coming to America.

With this migration, the focus of the Reform Movement moved from Germany to the United States. In America, the Reform movement continued in the tradition of its German origins, spelling out its idealogy in the famous "Pittsburgh Platform," which was drawn up and adopted in 1885 at a Pittsburgh convention of its leadership:

* "We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine, and today we accept as binding only its moral laws, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adopted to the view and habits of modern civilization..

* "We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state...

* "We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state...

This last statement -- which detached the American Reform Movement from the 2,000-year-old Jewish longing to return to the Land of Israel (in imitation of the ideology espoused by the German Reform Movement) -- is the reason why early American Reform Jews did not support the Zionist Movement, or the foundation of the State of Israel, as we shall see in future installments.

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE

The founding father of the American Reform Movement was Isaac Meyer Wise (1819 to 1900). He was a German Jewish immigrant who was the founder and the first president of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, which opened in 1875. It was the first American rabbinical seminary, and it had unusually liberal standards. Writes Joseph Telushkin in Jewish Literacy (p. 393):

"One issue that sets the Reform rabbinate apart... is its refusal to impose any religious standards on its rabbis. In many ways, this is a continuation of Reform's historical commitment to free inquiry. Today, quite literally, there is no religious action a Reform rabbi can take for which he or she would be thrown out of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the official body of Reform rabbis."

When, in 1883, the first graduating class of Hebrew Union College was ready to receive its diplomas, the seminary threw a lavish banquet.

The graduation banquet of Hebrew Union College served one traif dish after another.

The more traditional attendees were horrified when course after course presented one traif [non-kosher] dish after another: clams, soft-shell crabs, shrimps, frogs' legs, and ice cream following a meat meal.

(For more on this infamous banquet see Critical Documents of Jewish History edited by Ronald H. Isaacs and Kerry M. Olitzky, pp. 60-61.)

The so-called "traif banquet" compelled the more traditional Jews -- who thought that the Reform had gone too far but who did not want to be Orthodox -- to find another alternative, and it led to the founding of another movement within Judaism.

THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

In 1887, traditional Jews who were offended by the ideology of the Reform Movement founded an alternative to the Hebrew Union College. It was called the Jewish Theological Seminary, and it became the bastion of the new, purely-American, Conservative Movement.

The head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a respected Jewish scholar from Cambridge, England, named Solomon Schechter (1850-1915) helped shape the ideology of the new movement. In his work, "The Catholic Israel," Solomon

Schechter spelled it out. (He chose a poor title for his work -- by "catholic" he meant "universal.")

"It is not the mere revealed Bible that is the first importance to the Jew but the Bible as it repeats itself in history. In other words, as it is interpreted by tradition. Another consequence of this conception of tradition is that neither scripture nor primitive Judaism but general custom which forms the real rule of practice. Liberty was always given to the great teachers of every generation to make modifications and innovations in harmony with the spirit of existing institutions. Hence a return to Mosaism would be illegal, pernicious and indeed, impossible."

While the Conservative movement did not agree with the Reform movement's policy of discarding Jewish observance and traditions, Schechter's words and the Conservative movements philosophy represented a radical departure from the traditional Orthodox) attitude toward the interpretation and application of Jewish law.

One of the pillars of traditional Jewish belief is that those rabbis who lived closer to the National Revelation at Mount Sinai had a clearer and greater understanding of Jewish law and its application. Rabbis in later generations, while still being great scholars, did not have the same clarity as these earlier scholars and therefore, did not possess the same authority to interpret and apply Jewish law. Practically speaking, this means that modern rabbis cannot uproot or discard decisions rendered by those rabbis who lived in Talmudic times.

The Conservative Movement discarded this principle and ruled that if a Jewish law was in some way at odds with modernity, contemporary rabbis could drop or alter the law in keeping with the spirit of the time. While this change in philosophy may sound small, the consequences have shown themselves to be significant. While the official policy of the modern Conservative (Masorati) Movement advocates observance of the commandments, the majority of Conservative congregants do not observe even the most basic of commandments such as the Laws of Kashrut and sabbath observance.

In other words, the ideology of the Conservative Movement would be to uphold the Torah as the revealed word of God, but that the interpretation of that word of God need not uphold to tradition as passed down from Moses.

THE GREAT MIGRATIONS

This then was the spiritual state of the majority of American Jewry -- defined chiefly by the German Jews who migrated in the 1830s -- when the great migrations from Eastern Europe began around the turn of the century.

The poorest of the poor came to America. They had nothing to lose except their Judaism.

How many Jews came to America in this time period?

As noted earlier (see Part 57) between 1881 and 1914, some 50,000 Jews left Eastern Europe every year to a total of 2.5 million Jews, most of whom came to America.

These Jews very the poorest of the poor. They had little to lose in coming to America (except perhaps their Judaism).

And, alas, this is what happened. The great rabbis did not come among them, and lacking teachers and religious leaders to act against the pressures from the Americanized German Jews, these poor Eastern European Jews assimilated quickly. (We will examine the problem of assimilation in America in future installments.)

The pious, yeshiva-educated Jews did not come in the great migrations. For the most part, the rabbis -- fearing that America was the Golden Land of Assimilation disguised as the Golden Land of Economic Opportunity -- preached against immigration.

Writer Arthur Hertzberg in The Jews of America (p. 157):

"In 1893, the most distinguished moralist among the rabbis of Europe, Israel Meir Ha-Kohen [better known as the Chafetz Chaim]... went beyond exhortation; he ruled against mass migration to America. He knew that this emigration could no longer be stopped, but he pleaded with those who would heed the views of rabbis to prefer persecution in Russia to economic success in the United States...

"These opinions became so fixed that they would remain firm among the major leaders of European Orthodoxy even in the inter-war period, as the situation of European Jewry was radically worsening for all Jews, for all socio-economic classes."

THE TIRED AND THE POOR

While the German Jews for the most part succeeded easily in America, life was much harder for the Eastern European Jews who came in the great migrations. We find, for example, at the beginning of the 1900s there were 64,000 families packed into 6,000 tenement houses of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

These poor, religious Jews of Eastern Europe reflected badly on the Reform German Jews that preceded them.

These poor, Yiddish-speaking, religious Jews reflected badly on the German Jews that came before them and who by this time had become quite Americanized. Therefore, the German Jews set out to get these Russian Jews to acculturate as quickly as possible and they invested heavily in this cause.

Their underlying fear was anti-Semitism. This fear was real, because despite the religious tolerance of America, anti-Semitism was alive and doing well in the New World. There were no pogroms, but there was social isolation and other types of discrimination.

For example, in 1843, a dozen young men applied for membership to the Old Fellows Lodge, but were refused membership because they were Jews. (They organized a club of their own -- called the Independent Order of B'ani B'rith.)

Another example: in 1869, Joseph Seligman, the well-known banker, was refused hotel accommodations in Sarasota Springs, New York, the summer resort for the well-to-do of his day because he -- no matter how rich and famous -- was a Jew.

If those Jew who made it were not good enough to mingle with American non-Jews, one can just imagine how the unwashed immigrant masses were viewed.

In 1894, Henry Adams (a descendants of John Quincy Adams) organizedthe Immigration Restriction League to limit the admission to America of "unhealthy elements" -- Jews being first among these.

In his famous book, The Education of Henry Adams, he wrote about those he was trying to keep out of America:

"Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow - not a furtive Jacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs..."

He found many supporters for his cause, but he did not win. Indeed, one might say he lost when in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a Jew -- Oscar Straus -- as the first Jew to serve in the U.S. cabinet, and as the secretary of commerce and labor (whose purview of responsibility was immigration).

However, the anti-Semites did not give up easily, as we will see next when we examine the factors which led to the baring of the evil face of anti-Semitism in the 20th century.

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