The Independent Orders of B'nai B'rith and True Sisters: Pioneers of a New Jewish Identity, 1843-1914

By Cornelia Wilhelm

Explores the roles of the two oldest American Jewish fraternal organizations in the process of American Jewish identity formation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780814337059

Cornelia Wilhelm

Cornelia Wilhelm is currently DAAD Professor at the Departments of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University. She also teaches as Professor in the Department of History at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. She is author of Movement or Association? Nazi Volkstumspolitik among German Americans 1933–1945, German Jews in the United States: A Guide to Archival Collections, and German Jews in America: Bourgeois Civil Self-Awareness and Jewish Identity in the Orders B’nai B’rith and True Sisters.

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The Independent Orders of B’nai B’rith and True Sisters

The Independent Orders of B’nai B’rith and True Sisters

PIONEERS OF A NEW JEWISH IDENTITY, 1843–1914

Cornelia Wilhelm

Translated by Alan Nothnagle and Sarah Wobick

© 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

15 14 13 12 11            5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilhelm, Cornelia, 1964–

[Deutsche Juden in Amerika. English]

The independent orders of B’nai B’rith and True Sisters: pioneers of a new Jewish identity, 1843–1914 / Cornelia Wilhelm; translated by Alan Nothnagle and Sarah Wobick.

p. cm.

Translation of: Deutsche Juden in Amerika by Cornelia Wilhelm. Stuttgard, Germany: Steiner Verlag, c2007.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3403-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Jews, German—United States. 2. B’nai B’rith. 3. United Order of True Sisters. I. Title.

E184.353.W55413 2011

943’.004924073—dc22

2010048304

This English edition has been translated from the original German publication, Deutsche Juden in Amerika, by Cornelia Wilhelm. © 2007 by Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany. All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to B’nai B’rith International and the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation for their generous support of the publication of this volume.

Typeset by Westchester

Composed in Adobe Garamond Pro and Walbaum

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. The Independent Orders of B’nai B’rith and True Sisters, 1843–50

The Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, 1843

The Independent Order of True Sisters, 1846

2. B’nai B’rith as Platform for an American Jewish Identity, 1850–75

Growth, Development, and Function of the Order

The Order and the Shaping of American Judaism

3. The Lodges at the Center of Jewish Identity Formation

Community Building, Self-definition, and Representation

Civil Self-awareness and Becoming American

The Development of a Jewish Social Service System and Modern Jewish Identity

True Sisters and Modern Jewish Womanhood

4. B’nai B’rith as Mass Organization, 1875–1900

Identity Crisis, Disintegration, and New Departures

B’nai B’rith and the Reform Movement

True Sisters and the Formation of a Jewish Women’s Movement

5. Adapting to New Challenges, 1900– 1914

B’nai B’rith and the Progressives

Representing Jewish Interests in America

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book is the result of many years of in-depth research that has been funded by full-time fellowships with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and—in the exploratory phase—by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Until now the questions this study explores have remained largely un-addressed, even though, or perhaps because, the topic of the study focuses on a complex transatlantic relationship in German and American Jewish history that needs to be explained in a larger transnational framework reaching beyond the limits of a national history or a single ethnic group’s history. The understanding of the historical dynamism and the evaluation of the order’s legacy require the understanding of cultural concepts of a people on the move and in transition to a new civil bourgeois identity, in this case between Germany and the United States. It is my hope that this study will help promote a transnational approach to American ethnic history that offers new venues to understand the changing world of the immigrant.

The German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, has supported this effort tremendously by publishing the original version of this book in German in 2007 and by dedicating a volume of its Reference Guides to German Jews in the United States. I would like to thank its former director Christof Mauch for his support in widening the transnational perspective and for negotiating an English-language version for Wayne State University Press with its original publisher, Steiner Verlag in Stuttgart.

When I initially embarked on the project, I had just completed a dissertation and first book in transatlantic history on the Nazis’ attempt to utilize German Americans as an element in their larger political plan.¹ Working in this context, I noticed a large absence of works on German Jews in the United States. Their immigration history was well documented; however, beyond their immigration, many aspects of their relationship with American Jewry and with the non-Jewish German community as well as their cultural ties to Germany were rarely discussed.² As a result I chose to explore the B’nai B’rith, the oldest secular Jewish organization with its fascinating history, for a second book (and German habilitation).

A newcomer in Jewish history, I had a lot of encouragement to pursue the project from my mentors Reinhard Doerries and Berndt Ostendorf as well as Michael Brenner, who just arrived at the University of Munich in time to become my Habilvater. I would particularly like to thank Michael A. Meyer, Karla Goldman, and Jonathan Sarna, who, from day one, accompanied me throughout my research with continuous critical interest and numerous suggestions, providing me with their full intellectual support. They quickly helped me find my way around a research field that represents far more than mere ethnic history.

The collection of the archives of B’nai B’rith International in Washington, DC, proved to be particularly significant and useful, and formed the organizational-historical framework of this study. Burt Lazarow, Sidney Clearfield, and Dan Mariashin not only have allowed me to use these materials but also have actively encouraged me to pursue my research. Likewise, the Klutznick Museum’s curators Ori Soltes and Diana Altman and particularly Hope Miller, who worked in the museum in 1997 and 1998 and was assigned to help me around the collection, rendered me great active support in my work on a day-to-day basis. Here I found predominantly printed sources, namely, the annual proceedings and reports of the seven American grand lodges and the reports of the order’s general assemblies, which are not to be located in such density and completeness in any other American archive. My research there also uncovered material from the order’s early years, the minutes of the New York lodge, the individual correspondence of the founders and comprehensive data of the order, and statistical surveys from the individual districts—information that is often contradictory and incomplete and that was only published up to the mid-1870s and thus cannot be used for the preparation of extended statistical equations. Although B’nai B’rith never systematically archived its materials, alongside the proceedings and reports there is a collection of leaflets, memoranda, letters, and brochures stored in Washington in approximately 130 Hollinger boxes. This material is categorized according to subject, although it unfortunately no longer states the original provenance of the file material. The collection was processed, ordered, and indexed by the former archivist Hannah Sinauer. Among other things, this collection includes ritual books, constitutions of the order, membership lists, and documents of individual institutions of the order. All of this was reviewed during the writing of this study. In this context it is worth mentioning the almost completely intact correspondence books of President Leo N. Levi, which provide an entirely new insight into an epoch of the order’s work with eastern European immigrants. These books have been a vital source for understanding the order’s situation in the years between 1903 and 1905.

However, despite this source basis, the lack of correspondence and papers from individual leaders from the order’s early period allowed only for a structural examination of the order, making it difficult to understand it within the complex network of the emerging American Jewish communities. The source base did not allow me to identify internal conflicts in a subtly differentiated way, to distinguish between individual opinions and the order’s identity and thus to evaluate the order’s developmental dynamics as a central factor of American Jewish identity. Nor were the files of individual departments or committees systematically collected. Thus the development of intellectual advancement, the order’s expansion to Europe and the Middle East, and the discussions among Jewish representatives within the order remained largely hidden, or else they could only be laboriously reconstructed on the basis of other sources. Such a source base is also lacking in regard to the relationship between B’nai B’rith and Zionism. While the order’s publications surprisingly avoided the discussion of Zionism, one gets the impression that this movement was not only looked down upon but almost completely hushed up. However, on this issue in particular one must make a distinction between the official opinion of the order and the individual opinions of its members. Clearly, no blanket judgments on the position of German Jews are permissible; the studies by Mark Raider and Tobias Brinkmann have pointed out and emphasized that a distinction must be made between an abstract relationship to Palestine as the site of an ethnic Jewish identity and political Zionism. This caveat also applies to this study, which only presents the position of B’nai B’rith as an organization—and only on the basis of existing sources—but cannot reconstruct the undoubtedly wide-ranging positions of individual spokesmen or lodges on this topic, which stretched from categorical rejection all the way to simultaneous membership in the Zionist Federation of America, as in the example of Bernhard Felsenthal, and which changed continually after 1890.³

Between 1997 and 2002, Hebrew Union College, the Jewish Institute of Religion and the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and the Klau Library became much more than just research centers but instead turned into a unique home away from home, intellectually and personally. This was due not only to the outstanding research conditions but also to the many personal encounters on campus and its family-like atmosphere to which so many of the staff contributed. I would like to express special thanks to Gary Zola and his team, who reached far beyond the American Jewish Archives to help me gain access to numerous smaller collections in the possession of Jewish congregations and organizations.

My presence in the Cincinnati area for several years enabled me to elicit information on the anchoring of the order’s history within a broader context and to follow up on these leads. This occurred through a systematic perusal of the central contemporary press in the Periodicals Center of Klau Library: the Occident, Sinai, the Israelite, and Die Deborah, along with the order’s own publications the Menorah, B’nai B’rith News, and the associated weekly Jewish Times. At the same time, the American Jewish Archives with their vast holdings of papers from individual persons and organizations made it possible to place the order’s role into a broader framework, to examine its activities in individual communities, and to study its relationship to non-Jewish society. Of particular value were the files of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the papers of Isaac M. Wise, Bernhard Felsenthal, David Einhorn, Simon Wolf, Isaac Leeser, and Kaufmann Kohler. It was possible to compare them with the files of the Second and Sixth districts, which are available in the American Jewish Archives (AJA) and which are also highly fragmented. My work in the AJA gave me insights into the differences and commonalities between the order and the emerging Reform movement, a relationship that, despite a high degree of ideological convergence and spiritual affinity, developed in a highly complex fashion on the community level and required continual redefinition.

One great surprise during the course of this study was the discovery of archival material on the Independent Order of True Sisters (UOTS), which had previously lain unused and unknown and which made a comprehensive examination of this organization—revealing its very essence and its close relationship to B’nai B’rith—possible in the first place.⁴ It also contributed to opening up an entirely new aspect of the order’s influence over time and to placing its identity and work into a new, gender-specific context. Starting with a visit to Abigail Lodge of the UOTS in Albany, at the time the order’s national headquarters, I was granted access to the lodge’s archive with the constitutions, ritual books, and minutes of Emanuel Lodge of New York and portions of Der Vereinsbote and the Ordens Echo by Rita Lipkin and Marian Cohen, its former presidents. It was this unexpected discovery that made my study of the feminine side of the Jewish order possible.⁵ Gradually, I was able to complement research from this collection, which contains within it the oldest files on the history of the UOTS, with materials on Johanna Lodge in Chicago from the Chicago Jewish Archives and on Jochebed Lodge in New Haven from the New Haven Colony Historical Society. Here too, the perusal of relevant newspaper literature, such as the Jewish Times, and the use of material from other archival collections pertaining to B’nai B’rith, allowed me to contextualize the order’s history.

In regard to the order’s early history, I am particularly grateful for the active support of the American Jewish Archives and its director Gary Zola for contacting the as yet incomplete archive of the New York congregation of Emanu-El and its archivist Fran Hess, who, in this difficult developmental phase, provided me with extraordinary assistance by making material from the collection of the former rabbi Hyman G. Enelow available to me. Without their assistance, this study would not be what it is today.

I particularly owe it to the effort of Dan Mariashin and Diana Altman that B’nai B’rith International in Washington, DC, was able to raise a substantial amount of funds for the translation of this book. These funds and a publication grant of the Littauer Foundation in New York made it possible for this study to appear in English. My thanks also go to my colleagues Alan Nothnagle in Berlin, who translated the original German version of this book into English, and to Sarah Wobick, who dedicated extra work to this project to make the wording of the complicated nineteenth-century German philosophical terminology comprehensible for modern-day English readers.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the many friends who accompanied and supported me over the course of my work. These include Hasia Diner, Stephen Whitfield, Eric Goldstein, Roger Daniels, Jonathan Cohen, Ina Remus, Joan Friedman, Sibylle Flickinger, Gregory Greiff, Janice Blumberg, and Tobias Brinkmann.

I dedicate this book to my parents, who contributed in so many ways to the successful completion of this project and made this research a very happy personal journey.

Introduction

The founding of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith—Hebrew for Sons of the Covenant—in New York City in 1843 sparked the development and dissemination of a new Jewish identity in America. This identity was a sign of American Judaism’s profound integration into both the public sphere and the civil self-image of the United States, and it continues to influence the Jewish community today.¹ It is based on the construction of explicitly Jewish civil virtues—emphasizing reason, education, character, morality, and humanity as elements of a modern Jewish identity—coupled with the notion of social universality, thus allowing them to unfold on a society-wide basis. After all, it was believed that it is only the interaction between a person’s individual virtue and universal sociability that allows human action to develop a truly civil society, based on the interaction of free, equal, and reasonable individuals.²

In the eighteenth century, the Jews’ desire for civil emancipation and embourgeoisement was articulated by European Jews and also promoted by territorial rulers in their efforts to transform their various groups of subjects into modern citizens. In the course of this modernization process, some branches of Judaism viewed traditional lifestyles and the Jewish particularism they promoted as barriers on the path to a civil identity that would supposedly preserve Jewish identity. Thus, within Judaism a young, enlightened, and secularly educated intellectual leadership supported efforts for a religious reform that would allow Jews to develop a modern civil identity alongside their religious identity. This led to the formation of the Reform movement within Judaism, originally a loose group of modern Jewish theologians who sought to reformulate the historical mission of Judaism: they viewed it not as a particularist obligation but rather as a universalistic mission of Judaism toward humanity, a special duty to put Judaism’s eternal, unadulterated content into practice, leading it out of the narrow world of the congregation or synagogue and into society as part of the civil world. To this end, modern Jewish identity would need to assume a form that could communicate itself to civil society, find its place there beyond the dogmatictheological sphere, and make itself accessible to a broad lay community.

In central Europe, attempts at both secular and religious reform and civil emancipation regularly clashed with traditional religious structures and with the state authorities, who approached the legal emancipation of Judaism in a sluggish and often contradictory manner. These difficulties persuaded many Jews to immigrate to the United States.³

Between 1840 and 1870, a total of more than six million European immigrants reached the United States.⁴ One hundred forty thousand of them were Jewish immigrants who arrived from the German-speaking countries of central Europe during this period. They represented the first major wave of German Jewish immigrants, and they were not unacquainted with religious modernization tendencies.⁵ Since the days of Moses Mendelssohn in the eighteenth century, the Jewish intellectual elite and a growing new generation of educated middle-class Jews had been discussing ways to make a new, modern Judaism part of civil society.⁶ In concert with social emancipation, steps were taken toward a religious reform of Judaism oriented to the critique of reason. This was pursued by the laity and young rabbis to ensure the survival of the Jewish religion in the modern world. However, the implementation of their ideas was blocked by the established Jewish intellectual elite, who were not prepared to deviate from their traditional positions, and by the states, which regulated the organization of religion.⁷

In the United States, religious freedom and the strict separation of church and state had been laid down in the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791 and represented one of the foundations of the American commonwealth in contrast to the old European order.⁸ Here, Jews were essentially ordered to take part in the public discourse in an unprecedented manner. Thus, they suddenly were forced to prove that Jewish identity could be combined with a civil American identity. Civil emancipation—at least for men—was effectively achieved through the mere act of immigration; freedom of religion and the separation of church and state largely prevented the exclusion of Jews.

In the mid-nineteenth century the order’s founders, all of them immigrants from German or German-speaking territories in central Europe, established a Jewish lay organization to create a form of Jewish community and religiosity that used the American fraternal system based on voluntary association to enable its members to redefine their role as Jews in American society and to coordinate this role regularly with the changing demands of civil society. Within this context, the special meaning of religion and religiosity in American society in the form of public religion practically drove Jews to find their place in the public sphere: immigrant Jews preserved their identity as a religious-ethnic group and adapted it to the modern age by realizing the notion of a Jewish mission within American civil society in an almost ideal fashion. By the simple act of founding a lodge, immigrant German Jews created a vehicle that made it possible to experience an American Jewish identity beyond ecclesiastical-dogmatic boundaries: the secular organization allowed Jews to reinvent themselves as Jews with a peculiar mission in a civil bourgeois and national American framework, while the lodge community decisively shaped this new identity, imbuing it with civil virtues, practical religiosity, and a Jewish way into American civil religion.

Such a civil religion in the American context had developed in the colonial era and was a result of the interpretation of America as a new Zion, whose social order would consciously rediscover itself according to ethical-religious values in opposition to those of Europe. The two religious awakenings and the founding of the United States as a nation-state reinforced this close relationship between American society and politics and a quasi-religious interpretation of the nation as the bearer of an American exceptionalism. Despite the strict separation of church and state, such an exceptionalism depicted the secular meaning of the nation within a religious framework and also availed itself of a wide-ranging religious rhetoric within the civil arena. This civil religion repeatedly motivated religious movements to engage in social activism within the civil sphere and, not least, gave rise to the American mission to improve the world, which also expressed itself in American foreign policy.⁹

Now that Jewish identity could also be modeled and experienced on a civil level, each member’s self-awareness and role as a Jew in society could be redefined. This was even more the case since the tiny, ethnically and religiously diverse Jewish community at the beginning of the nineteenth century lacked cohesion and a common identity as American Jewry.¹⁰

The integration of the Jewish minority into the American commonwealth and into the self-conception of the state was further eased by the fact that the United States defined itself as a nation based on an Old Testament motif, namely, the covenant with God, and employed the history of the people of Israel as an explanatory framework for America’s statehood and mission.¹¹ As a typical product of the Enlightenment, the young American republic declared itself to be a commonwealth rooted in morality and natural religion on the model of Rousseau’s Contrat Social.¹² The republic’s identity was based on the history of the Puritans, a religious group that had been persecuted in England. The Puritans arrived as the first European immigrants to Massachusetts and had already established a sort of constitution during the voyage on the basis of such a covenant. Thus the young republic defined itself as a successor to Israel, as a new Zion, whose statehood did not grow from the idea of the old nation-states but rather from a commitment to the Enlightenment, tolerance, and republican values.¹³ Just like Canaan in days gone by, America was to offer the persecuted peoples of the world a haven and integrate them as part of a national mission for justice. Through this definition of American identity, religious motifs were deeply anchored in the young nation’s public life. This vision unleashed energies within individual citizens that challenged them to become involved as Americans citizens on a secular level on the basis of religious motivation.¹⁴ One can say that it allowed individual members of the American nation, specifically the various ethnic and religious immigrant groups, to integrate as quickly as possible—even before their complete assimilation—and to open up to them the possibility of identifying themselves as Americans before they had abandoned their specific group identities. This definition of an American identity granted Jewish immigrants, who sought civil emancipation and the freedom to practice their religion, a unique perspective in realizing a civil Jewish identity that would allow them to remain Jews and simultaneously become Americans.¹⁵ Today, assimilation studies teach us that the preservation and construction of one’s own ethnic identity and the formation of ethnic groups in the period following the Civil War in no way slowed the acculturation process of late-nineteenth-century mass immigration but actually accelerated it.¹⁶

The transition from a communally structured society to a modern society of mobile individuals, freed of ethnic and familial ties, and the powerful influence of the Enlightenment also influenced the religious self-conception of Americans at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Unlike the kehillah-style European synagogue, the American congregation had almost exclusively religious, rather than communal, functions. The American congregation was organized by its male congregants in democratic fashion, rather than by a religious establishment or by the state. Jews were under no compulsion to join a congregation and faced the challenge of living up to new religious and civil role models as Americans.¹⁷ As regards religious life, historians have observed the development of typically American patterns, which were primarily characterized by five factors: religious freedom, the separation of church and state, the growing individualism of the congregations (denominationalism), the acceptance of the concept of voluntary organization (voluntarism) in religious life, and the development of a patriotic piety that highlighted the secular mission of the American nation and that was expressed in the development of an American civil religion.¹⁸

In this way, the order presented its members with their moral duty as Jews toward humanity. Accordingly, the self-awareness of the individual member was strengthened just as his role as a Jew within society was redefined. Furthermore, the order demonstrated to its members their moral obligations as Jews toward humanity, coordinated the idea of a Jewish mission with the American self-conception on a practical basis, and motivated its members to step forward as Americans and Jews in the new public sphere. Thus B’nai B’rith succeeded in firmly anchoring a Jewish civil religion within the more general American civil religion and continually synchronizing it with the central parameters of American identity.¹⁹ As a central platform for the shaping of a new national civil Jewish consciousness, B’nai B’rith had chosen a path that would make the order into a model, mirror, and focal point for Jewish lay identity in America time and time again, even though it led to the founding of new secular Jewish organizations. Thus the civil consciousness promoted by B’nai B’rith was expressed and continued in various organizations of American Judaism, such as the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the federations, and the community relations councils.

This study will analyze both the dynamics and self-awareness of B’nai B’rith, particularly the lifestyle it propagated of the Jew as citizen. The latter can be seen as an expression of Jewish identity and modernity, and, as such, this study will try to explain it within the context of a newly emerging American Judaism. It will show how the order and its members became the central vehicle for a conceptual transfer of the goals of a progressive German Judaism to the social and religious reality of America in the period between 1840 and 1914, thus fundamentally shaping this era—which American Jewish history characterizes as the German period—not only through the immigration of German-speaking Jews, but also through the transfer of religious and social ideals. We can understand the strength the term German Jewry gained on American soil and how it was instrumentalized in the creation of an acculturated elite with a distinct civil consciousness when we realize that in the mobile and open society of the United States the term German Jew originally described individuals who spoke German, had access to German intellectual culture, and used both to reinvent themselves as American citizens through German philosophy and progressive-bourgeois notions such as education, humanity, brotherhood, and democratic practice, thus achieving rapid access to the American middle class. Whereas in the 1840s and 1850s the term primarily referred to an immigrant’s origin and cultural roots, a closer look shows that it changed as immigration from eastern Europe increased: it did not represent merely a shared conceptual basis or access to a religious and intellectual school. Instead, it became the essence of a materially and socially exclusive middle-class identity that distanced itself from new immigrants and religious traditionalists. After 1880, the term denoted an unambiguous vehicle of social stratification.²⁰ Increasing modernity and universality in both the religion and the order’s structure now undermined the preservation of the Jewish communal spirit. This represented a serious problem for the convictions underlying this concept of a modern Jewish identity. In retrospect, it became the basis of a negative image of German Jews.²¹

Modernity and universality also continually threatened the order’s function as an intermediary between Judaism and society, between the group and the public, without which B’nai B’rith would have lost its fascination, energy, and meaning. Time and again, the order was faced with the question of how Jewish it still had to be, or even could be, to integrate its members into an American public sphere and, at the same time, how American the order had to be to remain Jewish. This question masked the central preoccupation of B’nai B’rith, namely, the need to constantly redefine its identity on account of the tug of war it waged between Jewishness and larger society/ universalism so that both elements could be integrated into the order’s identity. This issue remained throughout the history of B’nai B’rith and the True Sisters. In fact, this factor led to the founding of the women’s organization, since a Jewish identity in America would have been inconceivable without providing Jewish women with access to civil society, thus giving them an identity within the framework of public religion.

The following chapters are thus concerned with the development of both orders, the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith and the Independent Order of True Sisters, whose development was closely linked during the German period of American Judaism and which profoundly influenced this epoch.

It is remarkable that the organization’s role model function and the debate on the order’s influence over time have aroused little discussion in historical scholarship. After all, the American Jewish community stands out because of this special self-awareness and a wide range of civil organizational forms. Although the self-conception of Jewish identity in America has certainly been discussed elsewhere, pertinent studies on the order’s history have neglected to link the role of the oldest national Jewish organization with this self-conception: the studies by Edward Grusd and David Malkam lack a scholarly approach.²² Deborah Dash Moore, in her predominantly institutional-historical approach to the topic, has described the B’nai B’rith as a secular synagogue, scarcely touching on questions regarding the lodge’s function in relation to society as a whole, the redefinition of an active, meaningful religiosity, or its position within the religious discussion of the nineteenth century.²³

The term secular synagogue overlooks the strong universalism and civil mission of the order, which is not solely secular despite its strong presence in the civil sphere. Rather, it is strongly religiously motivated, though it reaches outside and beyond the dogmatic religious realm. After all, a central biblical theme, namely, the covenant with God, has been both the focus and touch-stone of this ostensibly secular organization. It is questionable whether a modern Jewish identity can simply be labeled as secular against the background of Jewish history and a Jewish self-conception based on the blending of ethnic and religious elements.²⁴ The same also applies to the order’s character: although this organization, founded as an order, acted outside of dogmatic, biblical, and confessional boundaries and stressed universalism and individual morality, it was essentially founded upon the same biblical values to which all monotheistic religions trace their roots, thus providing it with a strong and internal religious focal point for its nonreligious, nonconfessional activities and the propagation of individual morality. In the case of B’nai B’rith, elements of Jewish religiosity and its symbols were not eliminated, as they were in Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Society, but remained largely intact.²⁵ They were merely adapted to the demands of modern society.²⁶

The lodge’s special organizational form became the central vehicle for the transformation of Jewish identity. B’nai B’rith succeeded in linking tradition to modernity and the individual to society as well as to the nation. In the face of modernization, it maintained the ethno-religious community and simultaneously adapted it to American society in both form and values. The chief instrument of this process was brotherly love as a fundamental concept of the order. This aspect was particularly expressed in the development of a meaningful practical religiosity that allowed its members to demonstrate their morality and respectability beyond traditional boundaries and thus to adapt them to such Protestant patterns as the Social Gospel movement. We can, of course, speculate if lodge membership served to help Jewish entrepreneurs to counteract anti-Semitic prejudice from their Christian business partners and to underline their respectability, since businessmen constituted an overwhelming part of B’nai B’rith membership.²⁷ Nevertheless, the term secularization can only be applied to the founding and objectives of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith in a highly selective fashion, and only with a religious connotation.²⁸ Unfortunately, the term secular synagogue fails to fully analyze the order’s function within the modernization process, because at this point it becomes clear that the order deliberately distanced itself from the sphere of established religion, the synagogue or congregation, and viewed itself as a modern-day complement to it. And yet, by virtue of its name Sons of the Covenant, the lodge created a critical link to the Old Testament and to the missionary task of Judaism arising from this covenant, whose instrumentality will be explained later on.²⁹ Historians have pointed out that while the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith provided a secular framework to express Jewish identity, it was anything but a religion-free space.³⁰ Instead, the historical place and function of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith must be sought and understood within the framework of social and religious modernization. The order sought to embody not just a contemporary but also an exemplary progressive identity far ahead of its time, thus fulfilling one of the most important characteristics of a modern movement.³¹

Although modernization theories have received considerable criticism in recent years and do not represent a closed theoretical system, they can help us better analyze and explain the complex historical contexts of social transformation processes.³² They have proven to be a particularly apt tool for examining the changes of religious and ethnic groups during their assimilation and acculturation process in America, the latter having been regarded as an ideal historical model for modern society in general and as such the natural support structure for the acculturation of immigrants. This framework makes it possible to go beyond the narrow boundaries of ethnic history. It helps to lay out a relationship and effective history of ethnic organizations and groups—in this case, B’nai B’rith—and to analyze the order’s relationships both within the Jewish communities and within American society. In this way we can see the extent to which the identity patterns of B’nai B’rith were stimulated and intensified by America and American faith in progress. In the newly founded American republic, which successfully freed itself from European feudalism and clericalism, there seemed to be no barrier to the construction of a new, egalitarian society founded on the principles of reason. This break with European tradition made America into the very symbol of continuous social renewal and transformation in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The prospect of both participating in the creation of a nation that had broken with European tradition and linking one’s own religious task as a bearer of progress with the civil integration of Judaism motivated many emancipation and reform-minded European Jews to immigrate and acculturate as quickly as possible. This was facilitated by the way that, by the mid-nineteenth century, American faith in progress and the conviction that the individual and society could be positively transformed through constant renewal and character formation had mutated from a philosophical school into a broad popular belief. Thus, the individual immigrant with his conception of history and religion encountered support—even admiration—and complete acceptance in American society. Jewish faith in progress received positive feedback from society as a whole and was promoted even further than would otherwise have been possible. As the history of B’nai B’rith shows, new variants of the American progressive spirit have ever and again brought renewal to the order. They have coordinated it with both general cultural phenomena and American civil religion to allow the order to remain anchored within American public culture.³³

Modernization theories have aided us in placing transformation processes that have been falsely interpreted as secularization into a larger, transnational framework. For example, the cultural transformation processes of various religious and ethnic groups that have immigrated to the United States can be viewed as religious modernization processes, and their role in American society can be understood in a new and broader context.³⁴ In the case of the German Jewish immigrants who founded the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith in New York City in 1843, as among other groups, it was not the social changes in the United States that represented the dawn of a conceptual and organizational transformation of religious forms and contents within these groups. Instead, the latter can be traced to an intensification of existing impulses from the Old Country that were discussed there during the emergence of a modern civil society: the emphasis on the individual and individual experience in the understanding of religiosity. Individual morality had been a key element of the individual’s transformation toward a new religious self-conception. In the Christian religion, this transformation was frequently expressed as a religious revival that molded personalities eager to realize personal opportunities within a new and much broader society.

The developing Jewish Reform movement in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Germany expressed its desire for the religious modernization of traditional Judaism through the rejection of meaningless religious rituals and forms by emphasizing rationality and the essence of Judaism as genuine religiosity to thus develop into a religious community within civil society.³⁵ Social mobility, and particularly the uprooting associated with emigration, encouraged these religious groups to seek new identity patterns following their arrival in the United States. These patterns offered them a certain orientation from their old community but were also intended to facilitate the acculturation process into the new society and to make full use of its possibilities. The so-called voluntary associations, which offered these religious groups a new contemporary form in which to express their religiosity and which included the lodges, were typical of these identity and community-creating confraternities. They assumed a key role in the definition of a new American identity. While the associations maintained their group character inwardly, they also overcame the traditional and exclusive definitions left over from the Old Country—for example, regional origin and close confessional bonds—and defined themselves within the group as an egalitarian group of brothers and sisters.³⁶ This is a pattern we find translated into practice virtually without adjustment in the male Independent Order of B’nai B’rith and the female Independent Order of True Sisters. Toward the outside, these societies supported a learning process aimed at adapting them to the norms and behavioral patterns of their new surroundings. Within the organizations, this process reinforced a special emphasis on and preoccupation with ethical behavior and strengthened the renewal of the old religious and moral notions underlying new fundamental social patterns.³⁷ The lodge model with its system of degrees, which promoted the individual’s efforts toward greater morality and education, served this purpose. In this way the lodges succeeded in halting the immigrant’s disorientation, thus helping him to shape an identity compatible with his new environment in a process of conversion to a new identity.

Profoundly significant for the definition of a new identity for immigrant groups was the concept of a covenant with God. The covenant united the individual group members within a community and at the same time served as a bridge to American national identity, which also defined itself on the basis of this motif.³⁸ Thanks to this convergence, it was possible to synchronize the immigrant group’s identity and vision of the future with American civil religion. The religious theme of the covenant provided both a principle of authority and a dynamic vision of the future for the identity seekers.³⁹ The experience of social and religious uprooting, the transformation process, and the recreation of a community combined into an experience that certainly reinforced religious bonds but also modified them and provided them with a new, meaningful character. This experience was by no means secularizing. Instead, it helped revitalize religiosity. It did not attempt to recreate old patterns but rather emphasized the universalistic element of the religious experience, the commonalities of faith and humanity. The order was propelled by the idea of overcoming narrow religious boundaries and dogmas and was thus deeply committed to uniting the human family within a religion of humanity.⁴⁰

The central role of the covenant with God was reflected in the name B’nai B’rith. Although it is unknown whether the name was deliberately selected to underline Jewish universalism, this assumption seems highly likely within the historical context of the naming process.⁴¹ The principle of the covenant served as a key element of a broadly conceived definition of a form of modern Judaism that succeeded in anchoring both traditional and modern elements in its organization in such a way that the identity of the Jewish religious community could be maintained, while allowing individuals to experience themselves as both members of this community and as meaningful members of American society.⁴² Within the modernization process of Jewish identity, the covenant principle served as a vehicle to overcome the old particularist tradition in the following ways: it shifted meaningful personal engagement into the center of a new Jewish religious self-conception; it linked different levels of community and society, thus underlining the necessity of adapting the social institutions of Judaism to the new demands; and finally, it defined the relationship between Jews and non-Jews within the framework of the mission theme on a new, universalistic, nonparticularist level.⁴³

CHAPTER 1

The Independent Orders of B’nai B’rith and True Sisters, 1843– 50

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the emerging Reform movement began showing its first effects on the religious life of Jewish communities in America. Although as early as 1824 Congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston—apparently without any direct contact with the German movement—introduced some moderate reforms regarding the length and form of the worship service, Jewish communities in America began to experience profound transformations with the onset of mass immigration from Germany.¹ Particularly important was the immigration of spiritual leaders, an educated and inspired laity, and especially ordained rabbis, most of whom had received doctoral degrees at German universities.

In the mid-1840s rabbis Leo Merzbacher and Max Lilienthal served in the German congregations Anshe Chesed and Emanu-El in New York City.² Although Congregation Anshe Chesed continued to follow a more traditional ritual, Merzbacher cautiously introduced reforms there before he left that congregation and became the spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El. For example, he confirmed boys and girls, set up a choir, and abolished the wearing of a Scheitel, the traditional Jewish head covering for women.³ These changes must have been supported by the laymen of the congregation, led by the mechanic Henry Jones from Hamburg, who served as the president of the congregation and as a member of the board of directors, and by the pediatrician James Mitchel from Prague, who later became the secretary of the Congregation Emanu-El.⁴ Also, the congregation Har Sinai Verein in Baltimore was led exclusively by laymen until 1854, when they successfully recruited the German rabbi David Einhorn for their congregation. Isaac M. Wise, who took on the pulpit of Temple Beth El in Albany, had received only traditional training as a rabbi. Max Lilienthal, foreshadowing the modern type of rabbi, touted his doctorate from the University of Munich and was considered an intellectual leader upon his arrival. In the 1840s, Temple Emanu-El in New York City and Beth El in Albany began introducing such innovations as a choir, the abolition of the women’s balcony later on, and a shortening and adjustment of the worship service.

These early reforms were consciously based on the content of the German Reform movement and its emphasis on reason and moral ethics in the Jewish religion, as demanded by Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim in their conception of a modern, socially integrated Judaism.⁵ The nineteenth-century bourgeois ideal of Bildung (i.e., education, including the heart and soul, refinement, character-formation, and self-improvement) served as the chief vehicle for Jewish acculturation and the standard for a civil Jewish identity. The development of a civil-secular Jewish identity and the social emancipation of the Jews proceeded hand in hand with the adaptation of religious identity to the Jews’ new role as citizens.⁶

At the beginning and middle of the nineteenth century, an intense debate emerged among the spiritual leaders of German-speaking Judaism on how such a modern Jewish identity and religiosity could be defined to permit a modern Jew to view him-or herself both as a Jew and as a central component of civil society—in other words, as both a part of a religious community and a part of modern society. The principle of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man propagated by the Reform movement defined the religious identity of the modern Jew as being at the center—and as a solid member—of the human family.

The leaders of the Reform movement solved the dilemma of how to maintain Jewish identity and Jewish universalism by essentially turning the original motif of Jewish particularism—namely, God’s covenant with Abraham and the resulting commitment of Israel to its mission—inside out.⁷ The mission and the