by Susan Jacoby
When an entire family buries its origins, it is reasonable, in the absence of an obvious trauma, to assume that the process occurred over several generations. Though it seems highly unlikely that Max and Eve Jackson Jacoby were observant Jews—none of their children received any sort of Jewish education—the names they gave the children in the 1860s suggest that they were still attached to certain Jewish naming traditions. Their only daughter, born in 1862, was given the peculiar name of Geppy, which sounds like a nickname but is actually the legal name on her marriage certificate. Since the Jacobys preferred Teutonic names, Geppy may have been a Germanization and feminization of a Hebrew name like Gedaliah. Max and Eve’s first son, Levi Harold, was the last Jacoby who would bear a definitively Jewish given name.
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IN 1995, I tracked down Uncle Harold’s file in Columbia University’s collection of materials, called Columbiana, on alumni and faculty. It is a voluminous record, for my great-uncle spent his entire academic career at Columbia, from his undergraduate years through graduate school to his appointment as Rutherford Professor of Astronomy and director of the university’s observatory. The clippings chronicle a life filled with scholarly honors. They also, in unambiguous black-and-white, reveal a progression away from all that the name Levi signifies. He enters the university as Levi Harold and is still Levi Harold when he graduates with the Class of ’85. A few years later, as a graduate student and teaching assistant, he becomes L. Harold Jacoby. Before he marries Annie Maclear, the initial has also been eliminated. In the newspapers, my great-uncle is always Professor Harold Jacoby or “the distinguished Professor Harold Jacoby.” With the twentieth century, the name Levi vanishes forever from the Jacoby family tree. What, I wonder, did old Max think of this?
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SOON AFTER finding Harold’s curriculum vitae in the Columbia archives, I managed to track down his one surviving grandson, Maclear (Mac) Jacoby Jr., a mathematics teacher and tennis coach at Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland. Mac’s father, Maclear Jacoby Sr., was married in 1921, to Margaret Augusta Platt, by an Episcopal bishop who was a cousin of the bride. When I met Mac for the first time—neither of us had been aware of the other’s existence before 1995—he told me that no one in his generation had any idea that Harold Jacoby had begun his life as Levi. His grandfather’s Jewish origins had been as taboo a subject in Mac’s by then impeccably Episcopal family as in mine. “I once asked my mother whether Grandfather’s family was Jewish,” Mac recalled, “since I was pretty sure Jacoby must be a Jewish name. She said, ‘Oh, well, they weren’t really Jews.’ ” My father, who had heard of his uncle Harold’s existence but knew nothing about the fate of Harold’s children and grandchildren, had no idea that Harold’s descendants had not only become genuine Episcopalians but had married into a clerical family.
By the time my own grandfather was born in 1870, his parents placed his Jewish name—Nathaniel, after Max’s father—in the middle and gave him the non-Jewish first name Oswald. This was (and is) a common strategy among acculturated Jews who wish to honor their origins in some subtle way. Such strategies amount to a private tip of the hat to the past; they neither require the owner to consciously abandon his Jewish name nor leave a printed record of deracination for nosy descendants. When I began looking into my grandfather’s and great-uncle’s lives, I wondered why, in view of their obvious desire to distance themselves from their origins, neither man changed his last name. The answer now seems quite simple to me: both men achieved success at an early age, and a name change would have been more trouble than it was worth. Harold and Oswald had both published articles in professional journals by their mid-twenties; a change of last name is no asset for someone whose professional identity is already established. Moreover, Max lived until his elder son was in his forties and the younger in his late thirties: a father may look with equanimity upon a son’s sloughing off a Jewish first name but be deeply disturbed by a rejection of the family name.
In the next generation, perhaps more surprisingly, neither Uncle Ozzie nor my father ever considered changing his name. Ozzie laughed uproariously when I asked him why he hadn’t, since he had lied about his religion (he declared himself a Congregationalist) at the time of his marriage in 1932. “I was already famous as a cardplayer,” he said, “and I’d made a name for myself as Jacoby Maybe I could have changed my name to something distinguished early on—‘the bridge whiz Oswald James, a distant relative of the distinguished writer Henry James…’ Seriously, seriously, I never thought about it. Don’t you think that would be disrespectful to my ancestors?” My father said much the same thing, even though his refusal to consider a name change ran directly counter to his desire to conceal his Jewishness. “What you call your religion isn’t really that important,” he said. “God is God is God—I know, you don’t believe in God at all, but for me He matters. But who can respect a man who changes his name? My father and his father were Jacobys. I was born a Jacoby and I’m going to die a Jacoby. My grandchildren are going to be Jacobys.”
No one can accuse my uncle and my father of suffering from a foolish consistency. They probably would have shared the reaction of Joseph Seligman, the German-born founder of the powerful nineteenth-century banking house that earned the Seligmans the label “the American Rothschilds,” when his brother suggested in the 1870s that it was time for the distinguished family to change its name to something less Jewish. “I agree that you should change your name,” Seligman was said to have told his brother. “I suggest you change it to Schlemiel.”
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MY GREAT-GRANDPARENTS could not have raised their family during a more auspicious period for Jews in America than the two decades after the Civil War. Though the American Jewish population quadrupled as a result of immigration between 1850 and 1880—from roughly 50,000 to more than 210,000—the influx of German Jews had not aroused the conspicuous anti-Semitism that would greet the much larger immigration, of less assimilated Russian and Eastern European Jews, in the 1880s and 1890s. Jews like the Jacksons and the Jacobys were virtually indistinguishable from other Americans in appearance and behavior. Even the manner of worship of more observant German Jews did not set them apart from Christian Americans; Reform Judaism, with services mainly in the vernacular rather than in Hebrew, had arisen in Germany out of the modernizing spirit of the Jewish Enlightenment and proved to be an even more perfect fit for a country founded upon the separation of church and state. If that formal separation sometimes broke down in practice, the Bill of Rights nevertheless provided a freedom and protection that Jews had never known in even the most enlightened parts of Europe. In New York, where a third of American Jews were concentrated by 1850, the descendants of Sephardic Jews—who had arrived before the American Revolution—often evinced more discomfort than gentiles at the growing presence and influence of German Jews in the city. Whatever anti-Semitism existed in New York before and immediately after the Civil War, it was not translated into institutionalized discrimination that would impede a man in his attempts to make money, provide his children with a better education, and live more or less where he pleased and how he pleased.
New York, which had prospered during the war, also experienced a sustained economic boom as soon as peace was restored. The number of millionaires in the city increased at least fiftyfold during the decade after the war. My great-grandfather was not a millionaire, but everything about the way he lived, traveled, and educated his children suggests that his business fared extremely well during this period.
In 1861, Max brought his bride to a townhouse in the Murray Hill area. This was not the fashionable location it would later become as society moved uptown, but the East Thirties were a good address for a man who had started a business only four years earlier. Some of the money may have been Eve’s; the massive sterling silver tea service she brought to her marriage (Granny Jacoby passed it on to Uncle Ozzie) suggests that the Jacksons of English descent had done very well indeed in the New World.
Max trav
eled at least every other year to Europe, always stopping in Germany and Austria and always taking his wife, one of his children, or, as in 1871, the entire family The September 14, 1880, edition of The New York Times, in a column chronicling customs violations of affluent New Yorkers (part of the news then considered fit to print), offers a revealing glimpse of Max’s way of life. “Among the passengers on the ship Brittania,” the Times reported, “was Max Jacoby, the William Street lithographer. He was traveling with his wife and daughter and declared that his five trunks contained nothing dutiable. Customs seized $1,000 worth of cloaks, underclothing, silk stockings and other fancy articles. Mr. Jacoby declared that part of the clothes had been worn and the rest were purchased for the use of his daughter, who fell ill and was therefore unable to wear them.” One thousand dollars in 1880 translates into more than $25,000 today—a formidable stock of fancy articles by the standards of any era. This episode not only attests to Max’s affluence but suggests a certain ethical elasticity (at least where money was concerned) that was replicated, in one form or another, in the next two generations of Jacoby men. Max must have made amends to customs and changed his ways (or been more careful not to get caught), because there is no further evidence of his having had anything other than a spotless business and personal reputation.
Meanwhile, Max was pursuing his version of the American Dream by educating both of his sons in private schools, with the rigorous background in the classics and modern languages required by the Columbia entrance examination. His daughter, as was the custom in most upper-middle-class homes, was tutored privately. Another generation would pass before even the wealthiest, most cultivated Jewish (and non-Jewish) families gave any thought to preparing daughters for a higher education.
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AN ATTEMPT to reconstruct the lives of one’s ancestors provides a focused lesson, in a way no impersonal history can deliver, on the invisibility of most women’s lives before the twentieth century. The only sources of information about ordinary (and even many extraordinary) women are their letters and diaries, and the Jacobys preserved almost no personal papers. As far as the Jacoby men were concerned, it was my good fortune to find public records of their doings in the Columbia alumni files and the morgues of the city’s newspapers. But my great-grandmother and great-aunt, like most women, left no public traces of their existence. They owned no property, attended no universities, wrote no books, joined no professional organizations. When they died, their lives as wives and mothers were not considered important enough to merit obituaries. Family photographs, and a silver plate entwining her initials with her husband’s on the occasion of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1886, offer the only concrete evidence (apart from her children) that Eve Jackson Jacoby existed. Her daughter, Geppy, left even fewer traces—but the only surviving photograph of her as a young woman reveals a good deal about the family’s willingness to discard whatever attachment it had retained to Judaism as a religion.
On June 29, 1881, at age nineteen, Geppy married Albrecht von Liebenstein, a German baron, in a civil ceremony in New York’s City Hall. The marriage ceremony, with the groom in the full regalia of a Prussian officer, was witnessed by the German consul in New York. This was the family’s first mixed marriage, for the Baron, as he was called respectfully by the next generation, was definitely not Jewish. The civil ceremony suggests that Geppy did not convert to Christianity in order to marry her baron; that the marriage was witnessed by the German consul indicates that the young couple planned to live in Germany at some point. It seems unlikely that a man who chose to be married in full German military uniform, clutching the distinctive Prussian helmet in his arm while posing for his wedding pictures, would stay in America forever.
Geppy may have met her husband on one of her many trips to Germany with her father. Marriages between Jews and gentiles were unusual but far from unheard of in the newly unified Germany of the 1880s, where Jews had finally been granted full civil rights. (A half century later, the descendants of such couples would find the course of their lives drastically altered by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which classified them as Jews or Aryans according to the number of Jewish grandparents. Geppy’s and the Baron’s children, half-Jews, would have been classified as first-degree Mischlinge—literally, “mixed breed”—and their legal status would have been determined by whether they themselves had married Jews or gentiles. Their grandchildren, quarter-Jews—assuming that Geppy was their only Jewish grandparent—would have been deemed second-degree Mischlinge, retaining the rights of German citizens. These distinctions did not, however, survive the Final Solution. By 1942, second-degree Mischlinge with an “especially unfavorable appearance in racial terms” were to be classified as Jewish solely on the basis of their appearance. In some of these cases, sterilization was proposed as an alternative to extermination. In the end, most of the Mischlinge trapped in wartime Germany were deported to extermination camps.)
At first, I intended to make every effort to trace the Liebenstein family in Germany in order to find out what happened to my great-aunt, but I soon concluded that Geppy did not live long enough to have children. After her wedding portrait—the petite Geppy is a full head shorter than her dashing groom with the handlebar mustache—my great-aunt disappears from the family records. Whether or not Geppy returned to Germany with her husband, she surely would have appeared in the many post-1890 family photographs if she had been alive. Max and Eve continued to travel widely after their children married, and they would have kept snapshots of their first grandchildren. When Aunt Edith was born in 1907, she was given Geppy as a middle name in memory of her aunt. In typical Jacoby fashion, the details of Geppy’s death—when, why, and how—were never discussed. Ozzie said his father had adored his older sister, who was nine when Oswald Nathaniel was born and who used to call him “my baby.” Geppy had been her father’s pet, and my grandfather told Ozzie that Max had been ecstatic at his daughter’s marriage into “a fine old German family.” When Geppy died, Max was so heartbroken that he never talked about her again. At first I doubted the truth of this story, wondering whether Max might have been less than ecstatic at his daughter’s marriage to a Prussian officer. However, everything I have learned about my great-grandfather argues against his having been an inflexible patriarch who would have cut his daughter out of his life because she had married a gentile—even if he disapproved of her choice. And there is no reason to suppose that he did disapprove of mixed marriages. The family album shows him on good terms with his son Harold after he married a Christian—and not in a civil ceremony but in a full-fledged Episcopal church service. My guess is that Geppy died in childbirth, still a common occurrence even in well-off nineteenth-century families with access to the best contemporary medical care.
Who was that sweet-faced girl, the young bride who left only her niece’s middle name as evidence that she was ever a part of my family? Did she have any ambitions beyond being her father’s pet and her husband’s darling? Was she as smart as her brothers, who entered one of the best universities in America when they were only fifteen? Did she love Goethe and Schiller, as her father did? I know only that by virtue of her marriage to a German aristocrat, Geppy escaped the peculiarly American dilemmas of her younger brothers, who began their adult lives at a time when America was reinventing anti-Semitism in a form far less virulent than its counterpart in the Old World but no less psychologically painful to its targets.
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IN 1877, four years before Levi Harold Jacoby began his freshman year at Columbia, the community of “Forty-Eighters”—as German Jewish immigrants of my great-grandfather’s generation were known by then—was shaken by the first widely publicized case of anti-Semitic social discrimination in the United States. This episode, now forgotten by everyone except historians of American Jewry, was especially traumatic to the German Jewish community because it involved Joseph Seligman (the same Seligman who had sneered at his brother’s suggestion that they change their last name), the most influ
ential and prominent Jew in America at the time. As a banker who had helped finance the Union Army during the Civil War, Seligman was so devoted to his adopted country that he hired the quintessentially American booster, Horatio Alger, to tutor his sons. (Alger was also Benjamin Cardozo’s tutor while he, like my grandfather, was preparing for the Columbia entrance exam.) Seligman had always stayed with his family at Saratoga’s elegant Grand Union Hotel during his annual summer vacation in upstate New York, but when he arrived in June 1877, having reserved his usual suite, the eminent banker was greeted by a desk clerk who told him, “Mr. Seligman, I am required to inform you that Judge Hilton [the Grand Union’s administrator] has given instructions that no Israelites shall be permitted in the future to stop at this hotel.” Unlike many such insults, the whole matter became front-page news—especially in New York—when Seligman issued a public letter describing the incident in detail and accusing Hilton of “shameless bigotry.” Hilton replied in his own open letter. “As the law yet permits a man to use his property as he pleases, I propose exercising that blessed privilege, notwithstanding Moses and all his descendants may object.”
At the time, my great-grandfather already owned a summer home near Saratoga Springs. As a Jew who was both successful and acculturated, he must have been painfully affected, if only in a psychological sense, by the Seligman-Hilton affair. If a man as powerful as Joseph Seligman could be turned away, how much more vulnerable was a Jew who was merely, as the Times put it, a William Street lithographer. And a man whose German origins were of fairly recent vintage.
Although the New York establishment press generally condemned the action of the hotel owner, “Hebrews Need Not Apply” signs began appearing outside resort hotels in vacation areas throughout the country. To avoid the humiliation of being turned away, German Jews established their own hotels and summer vacation communities. Two decades later, the new Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe would in turn be excluded from the Our Crowd resorts.