by Paul Johnson
Reform was the mode of Judaism most likely to appeal to the highly successful businessmen who were now beginning to emerge as major figures on the American scene. Such were the banker Joseph Seligman (1820-80), to whom President Grant offered the Treasury, and Jacob Henry Schiff (1847-1920), who became head of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in 1885. As with the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War brought out the organizational and financial skills of many Jewish bankers, contractors and clothing-suppliers, and from the 1860s onwards the Jews were a power in American business, especially in New York. Their massive philanthropy provided Judaism with a well-endowed institutional framework, and inevitably this had a strong liberal orientation. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations was established in 1873, Hebrew Union College two years later, the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1889. The Pittsburg Platform (1885), drawn up by Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, which rejected all Torah laws ‘such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization’, became the standard creed of Reform Judaism until 1937. It rejected the old rules on diet, purity and dress, asserted that Jews were ‘no longer a nation, but a religious community’, denied the resurrection, heaven and hell, dismissed a return to Zion, and presented messianism as the struggle for truth, justice and righteousness in modern society—in which it would participate alongside other religions and people of goodwill generally.124
Hence at the time of the great emigration, American Jewry seemed fated to remain yet another strand of the worthy fabric of New World religiosity, wearing and fading imperceptibly into the whole. The panic set in motion by the 1881 disaster changed that prospect irrevocably. In the decade 1881-92, Jews were arriving in the US at the rate of 19,000 a year; in the decade 1892-1903, the average jumped to 37,000 a year; and in the twelve years 1903-14 it averaged 76,000. These two million refugee Jews had very little in common with the quarter-million genteel, Reformist, well-heeled, American-minded and increasingly apprehensive established Jews who greeted them. They were overwhelmingly Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox or hasidic, wild-eyed and frightened, superstitious and desperately poor. For the first time, American Jewry began to fear new arrivals, especially in such staggering numbers. They rightly judged that an anti-Semitic reaction was inevitable.
Hitherto, mainstream Protestant America, like England before it, had been papist-baiting rather than Jew-baiting. But since the Civil War, when the Jews had been perceived as war-profiteers, anti-Semitism had become noticeable. In 1876, a hotel on the New Jersey coast announced publicly in the newspapers that it would not admit Jews. The next year Joseph Seligman himself was refused admission to the leading hotel in the resort of Saratoga. Jewish businessmen then bought several Saratoga hotels, and as a result, throughout the New York area, resort hotels split into those which would, and those which would not, accommodate Jews. The habit spread to masonic lodges and country clubs, and some schools and colleges began to adopt a numerus clausus, on Russian lines.
The mass arrival of poor Ashkenazi Jews in New York naturally force-fed the growth of this new anti-Semitic sub-culture. But, infinitely more important, the immigrants gave the kiss of life to American Jewry. They transformed it from an exercise in gentility, doomed to mortify, into a vibrant creature of an entirely new kind—a free people, cradled in a tolerant republic, but shouting their faith and their nature from the rooftops of a city they turned into the greatest Jewish metropolis in the world. Here was a true City of Refuge, and more than that—the nucleus of a power which in time would exert itself effectively on behalf of Jews throughout the world.
The wealthy Jews of New York did not yet grasp the opportunities the flight from Europe would create. If, like so many events in Jewish history—like the massacres of 1648, for example—it could eventually be interpreted as part of a providential plan, bringing triumph from tragedy, that was not how they saw it at the time. To do them justice, they stifled their apprehensions and did all in their power to welcome and absorb the eastern masses. But some were more perceptive. Among those who worked for the Jewish immigrant relief agency set up on Ward Island was the young poetess Emma Lazarus (1849-87). Her talent had been detected and cultivated by Emerson. She burned with romantic zeal for Jewish culture, ancient and modern. She translated the great medieval poet Judah Halevi. She translated Heine. She saluted Longfellow’s moving poem on Newport Cemetery but deplored its dismissive ending: ‘And the dead nations never rise again.’ It was not true! The Jews would rise again! She came of an old and wealthy Sephardi family, but she saw in the poor Ashkenazi Jews pushing their way through US immigration with their bundles the elements of a future army which would rebuild Jerusalem in America, or in Israel—perhaps in both. She defended them against anti-Semitic smears in the magazine New Century (1882). She grasped, perhaps better than anyone else in America at that time, the true significance of the American idea and the American reality to the persecuted poor of Europe. When the Statue of Liberty was raised at the entrance to New York harbour, her sonnet, ‘The New Colossus’, gave Liberty an immortal voice:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss’t to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
In particular, Emma Lazarus understood the meaning of America for world Jewry. Would not in time the huddled masses stand upright, grow strong and stretch a powerful hand from the New World back to the Old? Her poem, ‘The Banner of a Jew’, is Zionist. Her ‘An Epistle to the Hebrews’ (1882-3) foresees a revival of Jewish civilization through mutual action from America and the Holy Land. In the wretched refuse of Ashkenazi Jewry accumulating in the New York slums she saw not only life but hope.125
There was certainly life, in daunting abundance. When the new arrivals flooded into New York, the fashionable German-type synagogues moved uptown on Manhattan. The refugees crowded into the Lower East Side, into one and a half square miles bounded by the Bowery, Third Avenue, Catherine Street, 14th Street and the East River. Here, by 1910, 540,000 Jews were crammed into what were called Dumbbell Tenements, their shape determined by a 1879 municipal regulation which required airshafts. They were five to eight storeys high, 25 feet wide, 100 feet deep, each floor with fourteen rooms, only one of which got any light. The heart of New York Jewry was the ultra-dense Tenth Ward, where 74,401 people lived in 1,196 tenements spread over forty-six blocks (1893). This meant a density of 701.9 people an acre. Here too was the source of the ‘needle trades’, in which most of the immigrants were employed, cutting and sewing ready-made clothes, working a seventy-hour week, twelve to a tiny room. Already by 1888 234 out of 241 New York clothing firms were Jewish; by 1913 it was New York’s biggest industry, 16,552 factories, nearly all Jewish, employing 312,245 people.
Was this sweated labour? It was. It was also the great engine of upward mobility. The refugees arrived frightened and submissive. A Yiddish newspaper noted (1884): ‘In the philanthropic institutions of our aristocratic German Jews you see beautiful offices, desks, all decorated, but strict and severe faces. Every poor man is questioned like a criminal, is looked down upon; every unfortunate suffers self-degradation and shivers like a leaf, just as if he was standing before a Russian official.’126 Twenty years later, the submissive spirit had gone. An entire Jewish-led labour movement had been created and established its power through four dramatic strikes. By their needles, too, the eastern Jews pushed their way into independence and respect. The average stay of Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side was only fifteen years. Then they moved on, first to Harlem (once a wealthy German-Jewish quarter), then to the Bronx and Washington Heights, then to Coney Island, Flatbush, Boro Park and the Eastern Parkway. Their children went to colleges and universities; vast numbers became doctors and lawyers. Others became small businessmen; then big businessmen. Across America, one-time Jewish pedlars had created mail-order firms, epitomized by Julius Rosenwald’s Sears, Roebuck. In
New York, Jews moved from small stores and workshops to vast department stores. The family of Benjamin Bloomingdale from Bavaria, who opened a dry-goods store in 1872, had 1,000 employees in their East Side shop by 1888. The Altman Brothers had 1,600 in their store. Isidor and Nathan Straus took over R.H. Macy. Other family groups created Gimbels, Sterns and, in Brooklyn, Abraham & Straus. By the 1900s, with a million Yiddish-speakers, New York had the world’s largest Yiddish press, selling 600,000 copies daily, and with four major titles: Warheit (radical and nationalist), Jewish Morning Journal (Orthodox and conservative), Forward (socialist), Tageblat (Orthodox and Zionist). But Jews soon dominated the New York printed word in English too. Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Arthur Ochs ran the New York Times, Dorothy Schiff and J. David Stern the New York Post; and in time great Jewish publishing houses emerged—Horace Liveright created Liveright & Boni, George Oppenheim and Harold Guinzburg created Viking Press, Richard Leo Simon and Lincoln Schuster made Simon & Schuster, Bennett Cerf developed Random House and Alfred Knopf founded Alfred A. Knopf. By this time Manhattan and Brooklyn each had Jewish settlements of over 600,000. In the Bronx Jews were 38 per cent of the total population; in New York as a whole Jews made up 29 per cent, by far the largest ethnic group. With 1,640,000 Jews (1920), New York was easily the biggest Jewish (and Yiddish) city on earth. In 1880, American Jewry was just over a quarter of a million out of a nation of fifty million; forty years later, in a nation of 115 million, it had jumped to 4.5 million, an eighteen-fold increase.
There was no possibility of this immense Jewry simply merging into its American background. It was the epitome and summation of all Jewry and contained in its ranks some of the most passionate exponents of Judaism in its most rigorous form. In 1880 some 90 per cent of American’s 200-plus synagogues were Reform institutions. But their dominance was untenable as the new arrivals made their voice and power heard. In 1883 there was a notorious scene at the first graduation dinner at the Hebrew Union College, the main, Reform-controlled rabbinical seminary in the US. Shrimp and other non-kosher food was served. There was uproar, and many distinguished rabbis walked out in outrage and disgust. Thereafter a rapid realignment of American Jewry took place. In 1886 the Conservatives founded their own Jewish Theological Seminary. The Orthodox also formed an institutional framework. Even by 1890, 316 out of 533 US congregations were Orthodox. In time, a threefold structure emerged, with the Conservatives in the lead, the Orthodox second and Reform a mere third. By 1910 the spread of varieties of American Judaism was enormous. The wealthier Reform synagogues had preachers in Anglican-style robes, English services, mixed seating, choirs and organs. Rabbi Judah Magnes, of the fashionable Temple Emanu-El, proudly told his New York congregation that year: ‘A prominent Christian lawyer of another city has told me that he entered this building at the beginning of a service on Sunday morning and did not discover that he was in a synagogue until a chance remark of the preacher betrayed it.’127 But within five miles it was possible to find Jewish congregations where the Maharal of Prague, the Ba’al Shem Tov or the Vilna Gaon would, each in turn, have felt equally at home. By that time too, American Jewry represented every strand of secular Judaism. It was not yet in a position to point overwhelmingly in a particular direction, let alone provide leadership for world Jewry. But it was becoming organized: in 1906 the American Jewish Committee was established. It was building up numerical, financial, economic and above all political strength, to constitute a huge supportive force once Jews throughout the world reached a majority consensus on their future. All this was the direct consequence of the 1881 tragedy.
But there were other consequences. It was as though history was slowly solving a great jigsaw puzzle, slipping the pieces into their place one after another. The American mass Jewry was one piece. The next piece was the Zionist idea. The events of 1881 pushed that forward too. Before the Russian pogroms, the great majority of Jews saw their future as assimilation in one form or another. After them, some Jews began to look for possible alternatives. The axis of Jewish speculation shifted. It became less optimistic and assured, more agitated—and therefore more imaginative and creative. The Russian horrors made Jews think: was it not possible to bring into existence an ideal community where Jews were not merely safe, not just suffered, or even tolerated, but welcomed, at home: a place where they, and not others, were masters? Of course Zionism was not new. It was as old as the Babylonian exile. Had not the psalmist sung: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’?128 For more than a millennium and a half, every Jewish generation, in every Jewish community, had contained one or two who dreamed of Zion. Some had fulfilled the dream personally by going there: to Tiberias, to Safed, to Zion itself. Others had thought to found little congregations or colonies. All of these, however, had been religious Zionists. In one way or another they hoped to precipitate the messianic action. That was the idea of the German rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874) who, in 1836, asked the Frankfurt Rothschilds for funds to buy Erez Israel—or at least Jerusalem itself—from Mohammed Ali, in order to start the process of ingathering. In 1840, after Sir Moses Montefiore and Adolphe Crémieux had succeeded in rescuing the Damascus community, Rabbi Judah Alkalai (1798-1878), of Semlin near Belgrade, conceived the notion that this specific operation could serve as a model for a more general coming together of world Jewry as a nation-force, with modernized Hebrew as its language, and Palestine as a future kingdom for the Messiah he almost hourly expected. He propagated this plan in numerous pamphlets and settled in Erez Israel himself, to display his sincerity.
From the 1840s there were secularizers who dreamed of Zion too. Moses Hess (1812-75) went from Hegelianism to socialism, like Marx, but he soon recoiled from the (to him) soulless internationalism of the collective whether in the theoretic version of Marx or the practical efforts of Lassalle in Germany. Like many Jews he began to return to his roots in middle age, but his recovery of Judaism took the form of nationalism rather than religion. The nation-state, he began to see, was the natural unit of historical development. Hence enlightened Jews who went all out for complete assimilation were betraying their own natures. In 1859 he was exhilarated by the way in which Italy, another ancient nation long fragmented, achieved its national identity again. Why could not Jewry stage its own risorgimento? In his great book Rome and Jerusalem Hess put the case for the Jewish nation-state.129 It would avoid, on the one hand, the excesses of the maskils who wanted to assimilate themselves out of existence and, on the other, the Orthodox who really wished to ignore the world altogether. It would enable the Jews, by the state they created—repudiating both the superstitions of Christianity and the orientalism of Islam—to realize the Jewish idea in practice and so be a political light to the gentiles. At the same time it would allow them to achieve their own redemption not by Marx’s negative proposal to destroy their traditional economic functions, but by the positive act of creating an ideal state.130
But all these Zionist ideas—and there were many others-envisaged some kind of settlement in or around Jerusalem. Even Mordecai Noah eventually came round to the view that his idealized Jewish community should be nearer the banks of the Jordan than the Niagara. Jews had periodically drifted to Palestine in small numbers. But not even Alkalai had actually set up a colony. Yet without an initial process of colonization, how could a new Zion, religious or secular or both, emerge? Once Jews thought of colonization, they tended to turn to Britain. She was the great colonizing power of the nineteenth century. She was well on her way to acquiring a quarter of the earth’s surface. Moreover, Britain was peculiarly receptive to Jewish idealism, especially of the Zionist variety. As we have seen, her great Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, had actively supported a modest resettlement of Palestine. Her great Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had looked even further. His novel Alroy describes its hero’s quest to restore Jerusalem to the Jews. The theme recurs in his more substantial Jewish novel Tancred. Of course Disraeli could be dismissed as a rom
antic and highly imaginative Sephardi, who in fact pursued a pragmatic career in British politics. But Disraeli was quite capable of realizing his cloud-capped visions. In India he turned a commercial company into a glittering empire. He usually kept his practical Zionist schemes to himself, but they were there. In 1851 he took a stroll through Lord Carrington’s park at High Wycombe with his colleague Lord Stanley. Stanley noted in his journal:
The day was cold; but although usually very sensitive to influence of weather, he seemed to forget the thermometer in the earnestness with which, halting to enforce his views the better, and standing by the side of a plantation, he explained the details of his plan. [Palestine], he said, had ample natural capabilities: all it wanted was labour, and protection for the labourer: the ownership of the soil might be bought from Turkey: money would be forthcoming: the Rothschilds and leading Hebrew capitalists would all help: the Turkish Empire was falling into ruin: the Turkish govt. would do anything for money: all that was necessary was to establish colonies, with rights over the soil, and security from ill-treatment. The question of nationality might wait until these had taken hold. He added that these ideas were extensively entertained among the [Jewish] nation. A man who would carry them out would be the next Messiah, a true Saviour of his people.
Stanley added: ‘Though I have many times since seen him under the influence of irritation or pleasurable excitement, this is the only instance in which he ever appeared to me to show signs of any higher emotion.’131 Disraeli may have reverted to this idea on his death-bed. There is a tradition that he died muttering to himself in Hebrew.132
In his Jewish and Zionist sympathies Disraeli was not merely reflecting his racial origins; he was also part of the English philosemitic tradition. English writers in particular, brought up on the King James Bible, had a profound interest in the Jewish past, often accompanied by a strong sympathy for their present predicament. Byron’s Hebrew Melodies was an instance. There was, of course, the constant temptation to present Jews in fiction as unpleasant or anti-social archetypes. Charles Dickens succumbed to this in Oliver Twist (serialized 1837-8), where the evil Fagin is crudely labelled ‘Jew’, though his Jewish characteristics are not obvious. There was a lot of Jewish crime in London, especially among the poor Ashkenazi community. Jews were among the first of those transported to Australia; when the system ceased in 1852 at least 1,000 Jews had taken part in it. Among them was Isaac (‘Ikey’) Solomons, known as ‘the Prince of Fences’.133 Dickens was supposed to have based Fagin on him. But Dickens hotly resented claims that Oliver Twist was anti-Semitic. Almost as if to refute them, in Our Mutual Friend (serialized 1864-5), he portrayed one of his most saintly characters, Mr Riah, ‘the gentle Jew in whose race gratitude is deep’.