by Susan Jacoby
Oswald N. Jacoby, counselor at law, was born in the city of New York on December 24, 1870. He is descended from a German family, his father having come to this country a short time subsequent to the German revolution of 1848. This stirring period in the history of Germany had inspired the elder Jacoby to seek in the New World that freedom of opinion which the efforts of the revolutionists had failed to secure in his native land. He was possessed of considerable means and within a few years, he had established the importing and publishing house of Jacoby & Zeller, at 104 and 106 William Street, which continued to do a prosperous business at the same locality for nearly 50 years. Mr. Jacoby was married to Eve Jackson, the daughter of an old New Yorker of prominence.
This excerpt forced me to revise my long-held belief that there was about as much substance to the legend of the Jacoby family’s lost fortune as there was to Uncle Ozzie’s claim that Copernicus was a distant Jacoby ancestor. I had never placed much credence in my father’s tales (since the money was long gone by the time he was born) or in my hyperbolic uncle’s memories of a Rubens painting that had once hung in his grandfather’s house (though Ozzie was old enough—barely—to remember a grandfather who died in 1907). But I would soon conclude, after I learned from other sources that the firm of Jacoby & Zeller was an art importing and publishing house with close ties to German, Austrian, and Dutch art dealers, that the Rubens story is not entirely implausible. Valuable artworks are, after all, among the first possessions to be sold when a once-affluent family comes down in the world.
The Men of Affairs profile is as interesting for what it attempts to conceal as for what it reveals about the family’s origins. The claim of German descent was common among second-generation American Jews of my grandfather’s background; German antecedents were considered far more prestigious than Polish or Russian origins by Jews and gentiles alike. By 1907, when New York was being transformed as a result of the huge migration of poor, Yiddish-speaking Jews from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and Russia, it would have been important for an ambitious man like my grandfather (and his elder brother, Harold, who had just been appointed director of Columbia University’s astronomical observatory) to distinguish himself from the rabble of the unassimilated by emphasizing his German background. (A decade later, when the United States declared war on Germany, the German connection would not seem so desirable for Jewish or non-Jewish German-Americans.)
Maximilian Jacoby was just eighteen when, in order “to seek in the New World that freedom of opinion which the efforts of the revolutionists had failed to secure in his native land,” he left Germany from the port of Bremen as a second-class passenger on one of the transatlantic steamers that were just beginning to replace sailing ships. Born in 1831, he belonged to a generation of German-speaking Jews who—particularly if they attended German universities—were more and more likely to cast off their Hebrew first names. Moseses were transformed into Maximilians; some Miriams even went so far as to take that most Christian of all feminine given names, Maria. Maximilian Jacoby’s name attested to his own acculturation, while his second-class ticket (most immigrants traveled in steerage) attested to the relative affluence of his family. Still more suggestive is the fact (omitted from the Men of Affairs article but included in later writings by his sons) that the young man had been a student at the University of Breslau before his departure for New York in 1849. Only the most ambitious Jewish families, with at least some money to spare, could have afforded to send a son to a university. Maximilian’s political opinions may well have played a role in his decision to emigrate, since assimilated, well-off Jews were much less likely than poor Jews to leave Germany in the 1840s and 1850s. The tumultuous events of 1848–49 had drawn many university students and faculty into the agitation for democratization. When the movement failed, many of the participants, however marginal their involvement may have been, concluded that they had no future in Germany. Moreover, politically involved Jews were doubly vulnerable as a wave of post-1848 governmental repression was, inevitably, coupled with a rise in popular anti-Semitism. (In 1852, Bismarck made a threat that, while not specifically anti-Semitic, summed up the threatening nature of the political environment for educated, urbanized Jews—and anyone else—with democratic sympathies. Cities, he declared, did not reflect the values of “the true Prussian people,” who were to be found in the countryside. “If the cities were ever to revolt again,” Bismarck warned, the true Prussia “would know how to make them obey, even though it had to erase them from the face of the earth.”)
When my great-grandfather landed in New York, he was part of the second wave of Jewish immigration, between, roughly, 1820 and 1880, often described by historians as the “German” period of American Jewish history (as distinct from the earlier Sephardic period and the post-1880 era dominated by immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia). In fact, a considerable proportion of the so-called German immigrants from 1820 to 1880 were extremely poor, Yiddish-speaking Jews who had lived in Posen and Silesia. (The regions became part of a unified Germany in 1871 but remained a source of contention between Poles and Germans. Much of the territory, including the city of Breslau, was ceded to Poland at the end of World War II.) The Jewish immigrants from these eastern areas—especially those who came from small towns—did not have family roots (as the Sondheims of Frankfurt did) that extended back several generations on German soil.
While Maximilian Jacoby was far from poor, his family background in the Old World would not have impressed the Our Crowd merchant princes and bankers who could trace their lineage in Germany for centuries. Although my great-grandfather spoke German, was a student at Breslau’s old and distinguished university, and was as well versed in German culture as any of the Our Crowd Jews, his family probably came from somewhere farther east. Breslau was one of the cities that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, served as a magnet for Jews moving westward, seeking better economic prospects and fleeing the anti-Semitic persecutions that were more virulent in the small towns and rural areas of Poland and Russia than in Germany. The growing city was a center of Jewish as well as secular learning, and there a Jew might, if he were so inclined, acquire the dual education espoused by proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment. (But there is no evidence whatsoever that my great-grandfather was exposed to serious Jewish learning or, for that matter, to the rudimentary Jewish education required to become bar mitzvah.) In cities like Breslau, Jews—especially if they had been there more than a generation and achieved a modicum of economic security—identified with the better-educated Germans rather than with the Polish (and German) peasants who were also emigrating from the countryside.
In any event, Maximilian’s enrollment at a prominent German university makes it clear that his parents, whatever the degree of their own assimilation, wanted their son to make his way in the German society that had, since the last decades of the eighteenth century, been expanding (albeit grudgingly, slowly, and unevenly) the economic and civil rights of Jews. While generally barred from owning land or entering most professions at the start of the nineteenth century, small numbers of German Jews nevertheless moved into the middle and upper middle classes through trade and finance. And while the overall German middle class was still relatively small in the 1840s, it was huge by comparison with the virtually nonexistent bourgeoisie in a Polish society divided between a tiny upper crust of landowning aristocrats and an impoverished peasantry of near-feudal status. Some Jews managed to accumulate capital in spite of numerous discriminatory taxes, residence restrictions, and legal obstacles to Jewish marriages. With perseverance and money, the same Jews could obtain a secular education at both the secondary and university levels. The late-twentieth-century view of the history of German Jewry, colored as it is by our knowledge of the Holocaust, makes it difficult to appreciate that for a Jew in the middle of the nineteenth century, even before full legal emancipation, Germany was nevertheless a far more desirable—and safer—place to be a Jew than the lands farther east. In my great-grand
father’s generation, significant numbers of German Jews began to consider themselves Germans first, Jews second (and to assume that their non-Jewish countrymen shared this view of the Jews in their midst).
Even after the transatlantic migration, Jews like Max Jacoby demonstrated a lifelong, unbreakable attachment to the German language, German literature, and German culture as a whole. Max made sure that each of his three American-born children learned to read and write German; both of his sons spoke German fluently and enjoyed reading German poetry. My grandfather, who loved Shakespeare deeply and passed that love on to his children, wrote a paper during his sophomore year at Columbia analyzing several nineteenth-century translations of Shakespeare from English into German.
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IN 1967, a year after my grandmother’s funeral, Stephen Birmingham’s Our Crowd, an account of the rise of the German Jews in New York, became a best-seller. Knowing little more than the bare fact of the family’s long-hidden Jewishness, I was struck by Birmingham’s observation that “in future generations, in New York, it would become a matter of some importance whether such and such a Jewish family, with a German-sounding name, had been a true native German family…or a stranger from the east, passing through.” The passage revived a long-forgotten image of my stern New York grandmother, waving her hand dismissively as she talked about the Polish origins of the Jacoby family. Max Jacoby, she said repeatedly, had been only one generation removed from a village in Poland when he came to America. “It takes more than one generation to make a gentleman,” she would add, grudgingly acknowledging that her father-in-law had been a well-educated man and had spoken accentless, perfect German (“though he still spoke English with an accent after fifty years in New York”). Then she would use a word that sounded in my child’s ears as “osjuice,” something I presumed to be a variant of orange juice. “My father said he never expected a Sondheim would marry one of the osjuice,” she explained—as if I should know what she meant—“but that this was America, and who you were before did not matter so much.” When I asked Dad what his mother was talking about, he shook his head and said he had no idea. Thirty years later, reading a passage about Hitler’s expulsion of foreign-born Jews from Germany, I realized that she could only have been referring to the Ostjuden, the Eastern Jews who still evoked the disdain of a Sondheim of Frankfurt even as her own children proceeded to obliterate the memory of having been Juden of any kind. A friend has suggested that my grandmother must have combined the German Ost with the English “Jews.” I know better. Like my father, Granny Jacoby regarded the word Jew as an unspeakable vulgarity.
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IN 1871, Max took his wife, Eve, and their three children—nine-year-old Geppy, six-year-old Levi Harold, and the year-old Oswald Nathaniel—on a trip to Europe. In Vienna, they posed for a formal family photograph in evening dress. This is a precious document to me, since it is one of only two pre-1890 pictures of the Jacobys that have survived.
At forty-one, Max is a slender, youthful-looking man, with dark brown eyes, a neatly trimmed beard, and reddish-brown hair just beginning to gray (if the color wash of the photograph is reasonably accurate). Unsmiling (like nearly everyone who posed for photographs in the Victorian era), he nevertheless projects a hint of the sensuality that is so much more obvious in the snapshots of my beardless grandfather at the same age. Eve Jackson Jacoby, at thirty-six, personifies what used to be called “a fine figure of a woman.” A massive gold pendant, framed by a low (as low as was proper in 1871) portrait neckline, sets off the creamy, slightly fleshy shoulders that were a hallmark of female beauty in the nineteenth century. With her dark hair swept upward to reveal a high forehead and sharp gray eyes (my father’s and my eyes) that look as though they miss nothing, Eve conveys the gravity of a powerful matriarch.
The only member of the family who “looks Jewish” is Levi Harold, a lanky boy much darker and swarthier than his parents or siblings. Geppy is a carbon copy of her mother and Oswald a golden-haired pudding of a baby, his head swathed in the ringlets Victorian mothers refused to cut off until their little boys were well out of the toddler stage. (As Harold reached middle age and began to gray, he would become much less “Jewish-looking” than the younger brother who had been a fair-haired baby.) The portraits leave no doubt that the Maximilian Jacobys have become a wealthy family with a secure place in the world: if Max’s parents did indeed start out in a shtetl, their son traveled even farther in twenty-five years than they could have expected when they sent him to the university in Breslau.
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IT IS probable that Max already possessed some capital when he arrived in New York, because he managed to acquire an older partner, Jacob Zeller, and to establish himself in business on William Street, by 1857. Max was only twenty-six when the house of Jacoby & Zeller began importing decorative and fine art objects, publishing art books and monographs in German, and producing high-quality lithographs. The firm also mounted art exhibitions; the New York Public Library’s precomputer card catalog includes an entry for a portfolio from an 1866 Jacoby & Zeller show. For me, the catalog entry proved to be a cruel tease, because the actual portfolio has disappeared from the library’s permanent collection.
The 1850s were wonderful years for anyone attempting to build almost any kind of business in New York. The previous decade had marked the beginning of the transformation of New York from a seafaring town into a mercantile capital. Fueled by the gold pouring into the American economy from California, prices on the New York Stock Exchange rose in a heady spiral as irresistible to contemporary speculators as the bull market of the 1990s would prove to be for their great-grandchildren. Even the panic of 1857, during which only one commercial bank (owned by the German Jewish Seligman family) managed to remain open, failed to slow the growth of New York for long. Within two months after the reopening of the New York banks, gold deposits had more than tripled.
A firm selling expensive art and decorative objects with European cachet could hardly have failed to do well in a city with a burgeoning nouveau riche population eager to furnish its newly built homes and advertise its prosperity. Moreover, the publication of books in German reinforced the Jacoby & Zeller firm’s marketable connection with European art, taste, and culture. There was a substantial and growing market for German-language publications in the 1850s and 1860s, spurred not only by the desire of recent immigrants from Germany to read books in their native language but also by the high regard for German culture among educated Americans. Private German tutors were in great demand, and many well-educated but impecunious political émigrés found their first jobs in the homes of New Yorkers who wanted their children to acquire a cultural background money alone could not provide. (This aspect of New York life in the decade after the Civil War is exemplified by the character of Professor Bhaer in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The impoverished professor, a recent émigré from Germany, courts Jo with lines from Goethe while teaching German to the children of their New York landlord.) For a man like my great-grandfather, there were both business and social advantages to be gained by stressing his links with Germany.
At thirty, only three years after the founding of his business, Max had attained enough financial success and stability to win the hand of the daughter of “an old New Yorker of prominence.” The marriage was a step up for a man who had been in the United States only twelve years, for, regardless of how prominent Eve’s father may or may not have been, the family was well off and had settled in New York in 1814. Eve was born in Flushing, Queens, in 1840. According to a biographical sketch supplied by my grandfather for the Columbia University alumni files, the Jacksons were “of English extraction.”
Eve Jackson, like her husband, was Jewish—and her family may also have come originally from Poland. (Before their name was Anglicized, the Jacksons might have been Jacobys themselves.) A century ahead of the great Jewish migration to America from Eastern Europe, Jews from Poland and Russia began settling in England, which became a permanent home for
some but served as a way station on the road to America for many others. Like the Jews who had been in Germany for only one generation before moving on to the New World, the Jewish immigrants from England dropped any mention of their eastern origins after a generation in America. To be known as a German Jew was better than to be known as a Polish Jew; to be “English” was better than both. This accretion of social distinctions and small snobberies, stripped of Jewish associations, was to remain important to the Jacobys well into the twentieth century.
Uncle Ozzie gave me a plausible explanation of the Jackson family’s decision to come to America, though I don’t doubt that he embellished the story he heard from his father. According to Ozzie, the Jacksons were cloth merchants in England, suspected of having evaded the British blockade by shipping wool to the former colonies during the War of 1812. With the war over, the Jacksons decided (perhaps one step ahead of His Majesty’s tax collectors) to set sail for the country that had provided them with a handsome profit. Flushing was a logical place for a family of merchant Jews to settle. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the town already had a 150-year history of religious tolerance. The first settlers, in 1643, were English Puritans who had immigrated to Holland to escape religious persecution and then made their way to America. These Flushing Puritans proved to be much more tolerant than their coreligionists in Massachusetts. At the end of the seventeenth century, Flushing welcomed Quakers who were being persecuted and driven out of New England. In the 1820 census, six years after the Jacksons apparently settled in Flushing, three Jackson families are listed in nearby census tracts. One is a Daniel Jackson, and Eve’s younger brother—Dano the pawnbroker, born in 1845—was named after his dead grandfather. The Jacksons of that generation were apparently Jewish enough to follow the custom of not naming children after living relatives.