American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader

By Gary Phillip Zola and Marc Dollinger

Presenting the American Jewish historical experience from its communal beginnings to the present through documents, photographs, and other illustrations, many of which have never before been published, this entirely new collection of source materials complements existing textbooks on American Jewish history with an organization and pedagogy that reflect the latest historiographical trends and the most creative teaching approaches. Ten chapters, organized chronologically, include source materials that highlight the major thematic questions of each era and tell many stories about what it was like to immigrate and acculturate to American life, practice different forms of Judaism, engage with the larger political, economic, and social cultures that surrounded American Jews, and offer assistance to Jews in need around the world. At the beginning of each chapter, the editors provide a brief historical overview highlighting some of the most important developments in both American and American Jewish history during that particular era. Source materials in the collection are preceded by short headnotes that orient readers to the documents’ historical context and significance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611685114

Book preview

Society

INTRODUCTION

American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader contains ten chapters, covering the history of Jews in Dutch and British colonial America and the United States from 1654 to the present. The first chapter explores the Dutch and British colonial periods, from the original permanent settlement in North America by Jewish immigrants in 1654 until the outbreak of revolution in 1776. It investigates the significance of the immigration and acculturation process, exploring the ways early American Jews negotiated their lives in the midst of a varied, and often changing, colonial experience.

Chapter 2 examines the profound impact of the Revolution on American Jewish history. From the creation of the United States in 1776 until 1820, when westward expansion and the rise of Jacksonian America brought dramatic change to the new nation, American Jews debated the merits and risks of joining the patriots, first in their civil protests against the British crown and eventually in armed conflict. This chapter also explores how American Jews responded to debate over the concentration of power in a central government, whether in the Confederation period between 1776 and 1787 or in the Constitution-based early national period between 1787 and 1820.

The antebellum period, between 1820 and 1860, is the focus of chapter 3. During this era, more than a hundred thousand new Jewish immigrants from Central Europe settled in the United States, changing the demographic profile of American Jewry. Some of these newcomers settled in the Northeast, but many struck roots in the Midwest and the South. Others rushed westward to California after 1849 together with the masses of Americans who flooded into the Sacramento Valley in the hope of finding gold. The enormous influx of Central European Jewish immigrants also influenced the character of the American synagogue, which slowly adapted itself to its American setting. The liturgical dominance of the Spanish-Portuguese rite used in all the synagogues established during the eighteenth century was superseded by the Ashkenazi ritual carried to U.S. shores by Jewish immigrants mainly from Central Europe. These new trends included a diversity of ideological approaches to the practice of Judaism in America. Many advocated the ideals of Reform Judaism, while others vehemently insisted that a traditional albeit Americanized ritual was the best way to safeguard the future of Jewish life in the American nation.

Chapter 3 notes the regional influences that culminated in the irrepressible conflict—the Civil War. Regional differences among Jews emerged as northerners and southerners debated the questions of slavery and states’ rights. American Jews on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line weighed the attitudes of their neighbors against their own perspectives as Jews. At the same time, the massive westward migration had spawned new Jewish communities in locales such as San Francisco, Portland, and Denver, thereby creating new generations of American Jews with historical experiences that were notably different from their coreligionists’ experiences in the East, Midwest, and South.

Chapter 4 focuses on American Jewry and the Civil War, the bloodiest military conflict in all U.S. history, presenting primary source documents that pertain to Union loyalists and Jewish Confederates alike—including government leaders as well as ordinary citizens. This chapter also explores the topic of Jews who resided in the border states, where the question of firm allegiance to the North or the South often proved difficult. Finally, it includes some materials that examine the relationship between African Americans and Jews in this period.

Chapter 5 explores the immigration and acculturation of Eastern European Jews to the United States between 1880 and 1924. This chapter begins with life in the Old Country and then details the experiences of first-generation American Jews as they encountered both opportunities and challenges. Within the religious sphere, rabbis adapted Judaism to their new surroundings. Leftist Jewish immigrants created and joined labor unions, adjusting their views to the realities of the nation’s larger political culture. Intracommunal tensions also surfaced as established American Jews of Central European origin sought to Americanize new arrivals in their own image. An Americanized form of Zionism emerged in this period, as did a growing American eugenics movement that surprisingly enjoyed the support of a number of Jewish leaders. Finally, this chapter includes some documents concerning American Jewry and World War I. These materials shed light on how a new generation of American Jews—immigrants or children of immigrants—responded to their nation’s call to arms.

Chapter 6 covers American Jewish life in the 1920s and 1930s. The 1920s at once reflected the enormous successes of a Jewish community on the heels of a massive two-million-strong migration from Eastern Europe just as it revealed the depth of anti-Jewish sentiment in a nation recoiling from the dramatic social and economic changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For American Jewry, the post–World War I years were filled with conflicting experiences of social acceptance and rejection. Men like Louis Brandeis (1856–1941), Benjamin Cardozo (1870–1938), and Bernard Baruch (1870–1965) assumed prominent positions in the nation’s government. Theatergoers were enthralled by Edna Ferber’s (1885–1968) play Showboat, which in 1927 became a musical hit thanks to the collaborative efforts of Jerome Kern (1885–1945) and Oscar Hammerstein (1895–1960). At this same time, however, the famed automaker Henry Ford (1863–1947) was publishing his own twisted version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, while nativism across America’s heartland inspired the U.S. Congress to establish a national origins quota system that all but ended Jewish immigration.

The same contrasting circumstances continued into the 1930s, when many American Jews enjoyed unprecedented access to the corridors of power through Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Jewish thinkers helped the Roosevelt administration formulate its policies, while Jewish government workers led the charge for innovation in government. At the same time, Hitler’s popularity in Germany inspired American antisemites to step up their campaigns against Jews. Boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses by the Nazis in Germany were met with attempts by American Jews to boycott German goods in the United States. The popularity of antisemites such as Father Charles Coughlin (1891–1979) and growing nativist sentiment, stirring opposition to U.S. participation in the European war, worried American Jews, who feared a backlash should they advocate the overthrow of Hitler. Of course, all these developments took place in the context of the Great Depression, which cast a pall of anxiety and uncertainty over American Jews, just as it did over the nation as a whole.

Chapter 7 investigates American Jewish life during World War II. The chapter details American Jewish responses to the U.S. entry into the war and focuses especially on how wartime Jews reacted as word of the Shoah (Holocaust) reached American shores. As conditions for European Jewry deteriorated in the 1930s and early 1940s, American Jews began to realize that no other Jewish community in the world was in so strong a position to exert itself on behalf of the embattled Jews of Europe. Suddenly, American Jewry, which had never been viewed as a great spiritual center of Jewish life, found itself thrust into a leading role on the world Jewish stage. Yet as the documents in this chapter illustrate, American Jews were not of one mind as to how best to respond to the unfolding calamity in Europe. The community was fragmented, uncertain, and completely inexperienced in responding to a crisis of this magnitude. Some felt constrained by the war itself and were fearful that too specific a push for European Jews could be viewed by their neighbors as dual loyalty and by the U.S. government as an attempt to compromise Allied war aims.

Chapter 8 looks at American Jewish life in the early postwar years. Throughout American history, Jews have tended to congregate in cities and urban areas. Although some farming communities did exist from the early years of Jewish settlement in America, most Jews flocked to the business and commerce centers of the East Coast. In the post–World War II era, though, American Jews moved, en masse, to the suburbs, reinventing Jewish life while they took advantage of the economic growth, declining antisemitism, and educational opportunities of the 1950s. Whereas the 1930s brought grave economic depression and the 1940s a world war and the Shoah, the 1950s launched a new generation of college-educated, home-owning American Jewish professionals who joined the anticommunist Cold War consensus and celebrated their social acceptance into mainstream America.

At the same time that many American Jews were themselves enjoying increased acceptance into the broader surrounding culture, they stepped up their engagement in the civil rights movement in the South. A hallmark in American Jewish history, the disproportionate participation of Jews in the African American movement for racial equality has emerged in the historical literature as an exemplar of American Jewish commitment to justice and compassion, and as evidence of a continuing commitment to Judaism’s prophetic impulse. Yet a close examination of the primary sources reveals a more layered and complex story that undermines earlier filiopietistic analyses. Most southern Jews did not join their northern coreligionists in the high-profile public protests of the movement, and although some took heroic action on behalf of racial equality, most preferred to express themselves with what historians have referred to as quiet voices. Similarly, while most northern Jews were generally more widely embracing than southern Jews of the Supreme Court’s famous 1954 ruling that rendered segregation unconstitutional, only a small percentage of the community was actively involved in the civil rights movement. When the civil rights movement shifted to America’s urban centers a decade later and the focus turned to economic justice and opportunity, many northern Jews remained on the sidelines in a manner that paralleled some of the earlier southern Jewish responses.

Chapter 9 examines the impact of the social protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s on American Jewish life. In just a ten-year span, the high-profile civil rights and free speech social protest movements gave way to more militant, and occasionally violent, actions against the Vietnam War. The Black Power movement inspired a host of ethnic, racial, and gender groups to organize. For Jews, these changes seemed to betoken a sad end to a once-optimistic time of interfaith and interracial cooperation. By the 1970s, though, American Jews enjoyed an ethnic and religious renewal informed by an intensity similar to that which characterized the social protest movements of the time. The second-wave feminist movement, too, inspired Jewish women to press for equality in American society as well as within Jewish life. The primary source materials documenting this era reflect the complex, and sometimes paradoxical, relationship between American Jews and their historic partners in other racial and ethnic groups. This chapter also highlights a number of documents that shed light on American Jewry’s influence on popular culture in the 1960s.

Chapter 10 looks at American Jewish life in the contemporary period. Since the 1960s, profound demographic changes in American Jewry have launched a fierce debate over the current state of Jewish life. As Jews have enjoyed greater and greater integration into the mainstream of American life, intermarriage rates have increased, while levels of Jewish education and religious observance have diminished. Even though the data from community and national surveys all tend to affirm these assimilationist trends, scholars, as well as Jewish communal leaders, often disagree over their meaning and import. To some, the increased numbers of non-Jewish spouses signal detachment from Jewish life and a generation of children and grandchildren without the basic knowledge necessary for Jewish continuity. Others, though, are opportunistic, pressing for greater outreach to intermarried families in a larger bid to increase and strengthen American Jewry.

As these chapters unfold, readers will begin to discern several broader themes that characterize the entirety of the American Jewish experience. Although each chapter tackles a specific era, the documents concomitantly contribute to the telling of a larger narrative. Jonathan D. Sarna articulated four overarching characteristics that not only help readers frame the past but also remind us of a central idea informing the study of the Jew in the American world: American Jewish history is American history. Collectively, the documents in this book illuminate the four characteristics that Sarna delineated. Over the course of their history, American Jews have exhibited (1) a belief in the promise of American life; (2) a faith in pluralism; (3) a quest for success; and (4) a commitment to Jewish survival.¹

In their research, scholars employ a wide variety of primary source materials that collectively contribute to their overall ability to reconstruct the past. Traditional primary source documents include letters, newspaper articles, government records, and personal diaries. Social historians, those interested in studying the lives of everyday people, look as well toward material culture—objects that document the day-to-day patterns of human existence in various times and places. These might include a person’s home furnishings, clothing, and work tools, or even his or her favorite books, magazine subscriptions, or art. In recent times, new technologies have created even more source materials for scholars. Still and motion picture cameras, for example, have captured graphic images of people, events, and places, while the personal computer has enabled scholars to identify, analyze, and even recreate data in ways that earlier generations of academics could not begin to envision.

Within the academic world, historians debate one another over the primary sources they choose to employ as well as the conclusions they draw from them. Some gravitate toward political documents that tell the story of established leaders, while others prefer to explore primary sources that reveal insights into the larger populace. Still others choose subjects of inquiry focused on particular themes such as class, race, gender, or religion. The monographs and books these researchers produce reflect these variegated methodological approaches, and these works differ from one another in scope, focus, and interpretation. Over time, we can observe trends in both the subjects historians engage and the conclusions they draw from their research. Rather than simply retelling a single historical narrative, scholars use primary sources to fashion new interpretative frameworks for different historical events and eras. Historiography, the study of the way history is written, develops fields of inquiry and guides scholars as they determine new directions for their continuing research.

This reader employs a variety of primary source documents, and it is important to bear in mind that all genres of primary source material must be analyzed judiciously and prudently. Letters and various forms of correspondence enable a researcher to eavesdrop on conversations that occurred between two or more correspondents. Social historians utilize letters as a lens into the lives of individuals whose experiences largely have been ignored by scholars more interested in reading public documents issued by national leaders. Political historians employ letters, especially those private in nature, as an important source in understanding the thoughts and ideas behind a leader’s policies. But letters contain predilections that can mislead the unsuspecting scholar. Oftentimes, for example, letters are informed by the interpersonal relationship between the writer and the recipient as well as by the biases of the letter writer. The subjects engaged in letters, the style in which subjects are described, and the various points made (and ignored) also can reflect more about the mind-set of the letter writer than about the events he or she is addressing.

Similar to letters, journals and diaries offer historians an insider’s view into the private thoughts and attitudes of their subjects. These documents reveal background information and perspectives that frequently never reach the public record. Journals and diaries provide researchers with a remarkably personal window into the private ruminations of the writer on a range of subjects that have historical significance. Yet the very private nature of these documents can sometimes lead to misapprehension. Some journal writers knew that their reflections would one day be read by others. In these instances, the author may have been writing for posterity and not to record unfiltered personal impressions.

Government records are important sources because they show the position of one of the most significant historical actors, broadly speaking, in U.S. history—the government itself. Scholars of the American Jewish experience, interested in understanding the development of Jewish life, often rely on proclamations, laws, and written documents emanating from various government officials. Yet as with other primary sources, government records must be read carefully. These sources frequently provide little background information, and the final document reveals little of the internal debates and the eventual compromises often associated with democratic government processes.

This reader also makes use of many other types of primary sources, including Jewish communal records, newspaper articles, petitions, memorials, maps, quantitative data, and topical sermons, that shed light on how various issues and concerns were discussed in their own era. We, the editors, have also inserted a select number of documentary images that function as primary source material and not as illustrations or illuminations. In other words, these documentary images offer useful information or visual data that enrich our understanding of the past.

Ultimately, it is our hope that this new source reader will reinforce an appreciation of the symbiotic relationship that has typified the American Jewish experience for more than 350 years. In presenting primary source materials that focus on Jews living in America, we have simultaneously presented a documentary history that contributes to a fuller appreciation of life in America as a whole. We thus begin this new source reader with a slightly amended version of the words Joseph L. Blau (1909–1986) and Salo W. Baron (1895–1989) used to introduce the noteworthy documentary history they authored fifty years ago: Here, then, are collected a number of documents illustrating all phases of Jewish life in the United States from 1654 to 2013.²

NOTES

1. Jonathan D. Sarna, The American Jewish Experience, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1997), xiv–xv.

2. Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron, The Jews of the United States, 1790–1840: A Documentary History, vol. 1 of the Jacob R. Schiff Library of Jewish Contributions to American Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), xxiv.

1Creating Community

THE AMERICAN JEWISH EXPERIENCE DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1654–1776

For colonial-era Jews, immigration, acculturation, and civic status emerged as the central themes of the American experience. In some ways, colonial Jews, who numbered just hundreds in the seventeenth century and a few thousand by the time of the American Revolution, had certain characteristics in common. A significant number of colonial Jews worked in the commercial trades and lived in economic centers such as Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Charleston. Whether they were of Central European ancestry or traced their roots to the great Jewish community of the Spanish empire, colonial Jews worshiped according to the Spanish-Portuguese liturgical rite. These pioneering Jewish settlers also faced common challenges and experienced similar opportunities as they adapted to their new lives on the North American continent.

Yet their experiences as immigrants and then as colonial Jews also reflected a broad, and varied, acculturation process. Different local laws and customs in each of the thirteen colonies revealed the competing motives of British colonialism. The first Jewish community in North America sprang to life in September 1654 when twenty-three refugees from the Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, arrived in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The story of this first Jewish settlement reveals that these pioneering Jews were determined to secure their status. They sought to remain in the colony, and they asserted themselves in an effort to ensure their civil rights. This trend continued after New Amsterdam became New York. Later, Jews began to settle in other North American colonies such as Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia, where the allure of the mercantilist system was particularly strong in these colonies’ port cities. Yet these Jews wanted more than economic opportunity; they also wanted civil equality and a social setting wherein they could fulfill their desire to worship openly as Jews. This is why they avoided those colonies that were founded as havens for particular Christian religious groups, such as the Puritans, which tended to limit the immigration and influence of religious outsiders. Across colonial America, Jews strove to achieve an elusive goal: civil equality in a Christian-dominated society. What that meant, and how it was achieved, differed among American Jews, as the documents that follow illustrate.

Colonial Jews also developed new approaches to religious life. With such small numbers, American Jews in this period lacked the critical mass to build large Jewish organizational structures or to establish the kind of associational networks that would arise during the nineteenth century; therefore, colonial Jewish life was synagogue-centered. Jewish colonists interacted freely with non-Jews, and the phenomenon of intermarriage—an unusual occurrence for Jews who lived in the Old World—became a familiar trend in colonial America. It has been estimated that perhaps as many as one in every four Jews married a partner from a non-Jewish family.

American Jews fashioned their religious lives according to Jewish tradition as well as to the larger religious and civic culture of their surrounding communities. Synagogues, for example, tended to emulate current architectural trends. As the movement for greater democratic control of American government institutions gained traction in the colonies, so too did the democratic spirit influence the governance documents of the American synagogue and, ultimately, other Jewish organizations.

These major themes from the colonial period would recur throughout the course of American Jewish history.

BEGINNINGS

1.01—RABBI ISAAC ABOAB DE FONSECA, RECIFE, BRAZIL, N.D.

Rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca (1605–1693) served as the spiritual leader of Recife’s Jews from 1642 until 1654. Portuguese-born, Aboab was raised in France and Amsterdam. He became a rabbi while in Amsterdam and later served the community’s Congregation Bet Israel. His first years in Recife witnessed a flourishing Jewish community aided by Dutch colonial authorities who respected religious pluralism. Beginning in 1646, though, a series of Portuguese raids on Recife unsettled its Jewish community. When Portuguese forces recaptured their onetime colony in 1654, they evicted its Jewish residents, who fled to Amsterdam, the Caribbean, as well as the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in North America. The second image is a painting of Recife by Zacharias Wagenaer (1614–1668). Wagenaer (also spelled Wagener, Wagenaar, or Wagner) was the son of a German illustrator who lived in the Dutch colony during the late 1630s.

Source: PC-11, AJA.

1.02—RECIFE, BRAZIL, BY ZACHARIAS WAGENAER, N.D.

Source: PC-3616, AJA.

1.03—PETER STUYVESANT, MANHATTAN, TO THE AMSTERDAM CHAMBER OF DIRECTORS, SEPTEMBER 22, 1654

In the letters that follow, Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant (1612–1672) communicates with the Dutch West India Company on the status of New Amsterdam’s recent Jewish arrivals. While Stuyvesant opposed a permanent Jewish community in his jurisdiction, owners of the West India Company, which included some Jews, rallied behind the Jewish immigrants. In April of 1665, the directors informed Stuyvesant of their decision. The Jewish refugees would be allowed to travel and trade and to live and remain in New Netherland provided the poor among them shall not become a burden to the company or to the community . . . [and] be supported by their own nation.

The Jews who have arrived would nearly all like to remain here, but learning that they (with their customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians) were very repugnant to the inferior magistrates, as also to the people having the most affection for you; the Deaconry [which takes care of the poor] also fearing that owing to their present indigence [due to the fact that they had been captured and robbed by privateers or pirates] they might become a charge in the coming winter, we have, for the benefit of this weak and newly developing place and the land in general, deemed it useful to require them in a friendly way to depart; praying also most seriously in this connection, for ourselves as also for the general community of your worships, that the deceitful race,—such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ,—be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony, to the detraction of your worships and the dissatisfaction of your worships’ most affectionate subjects.

Source: As printed in JAW, 29–30. Reprinted with permission of the AJHS, from PAJHS 18 (1909): 4–5, 19–21.

1.04—AMSTERDAM JEWRY’S SUCCESSFUL INTERCESSION FOR THE JEWISH IMMIGRANTS, JANUARY 1655

To the Honorable Lords,

Directors of the Chartered West India Company,

Chamber of the City of Amsterdam

The merchants of the Portuguese nation [the Sephardic Jewish community] residing in the City [of Amsterdam] respectfully remonstrate to your Honors that it has come to their knowledge that your Honors raise obstacles to the giving of permits or passports to the Portuguese [Sephardic] Jews to travel and to go to reside in New Netherland, which if persisted in will result to the great disadvantage of the Jewish nation. It can also be of no advantage to the general Company but rather damaging.

There are many of the nation who have lost their possessions at Pernambuco and have arrived from there in great poverty, and part of them have been dispersed here and there. [Pernambuco, or Recife, the stronghold of Dutch Brazil, was captured by the Portuguese, January 1654.] So that your petitioners had to expend large sums of money for their necessaries of life, and through lack of opportunity all cannot remain here [in Holland] to live. And as they cannot go to Spain or Portugal because of the Inquisition, a great part of the aforesaid people must in time be obliged to depart for other territories of their High Mightinesses the States-General [the Dutch government] and their Companies, in order there, through their labor and efforts, to be able to exist under the protection of the administrators of your Honorable Directors, observing and obeying your Honors’ orders and commands. [The West India Company owned the young Dutch colony of New Netherland.] It is well known to your Honors that the Jewish nation in Brazil have at all times been faithful and have striven to guard and maintain that place, risking for that purpose their possessions and their blood. . . .

Your Honors should also consider that the Honorable Lords, the Burgomasters of the City and the Honorable High Illustrious Mighty Lords, the States-General, have in political matters always protected and considered the Jewish nation as upon the same footing as all the inhabitants and burghers. Also it is conditioned in the treaty of perpetual peace with the King of Spain [the treaty of Muenster, 1648] that the Jewish nation shall also enjoy the same liberty as all other inhabitants of these lands.

Your Honors should also please consider that many of the Jewish nation are principal shareholders in the [West India] Company. They having always striven their best for the Company, and many of their nation have lost immense and great capital in its shares and obligations. . . .

Therefore the petitioners request, for the reasons given above (as also others which they omit to avoid prolixity), that your Honors be pleased not to exclude but to grant the Jewish nation passage to and residence in that country; otherwise this would result in a great prejudice to their reputation. Also that by an Apostille [marginal notation] and Act the Jewish nation be permitted, together with other inhabitants, to travel, live, and traffic there, and with them enjoy liberty on condition of contributing like others. . .