Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  The visible success of so many German Jews, the beginning of the influx of poorer Jews from Eastern Europe, and the social pretensions of the Gilded Age all contributed to the development of new, informal American forms of social anti-Semitism (as distinct from the institutionalized discrimination in the Old World) that closed doors open to Jews only a generation earlier. During the Seligman-Hilton controversy, the New York City Bar Association blackballed a Jewish applicant for the first time—a more significant form of discrimination, because it involved a professional organization, than any restrictions at a resort. Soon afterward, Greek-letter fraternities at the City College of New York banded together to exclude Jews. The thought of exclusionary fraternities playing an important role in the social life of City College, known for extending higher education to generations of poor immigrants, is a comical one today. But in the 1880s, when Uncle Harold and my grandfather entered Columbia, college men, at both public and private institutions, took fraternities seriously. My great-grandfather had prepared his two sons to enter an elite institution of higher education and to become whatever they wanted to become in America. At just that point, it was becoming clear that some American possibilities did not extend to Jews. The social restrictions of the 1880s and 1890s prefigured the restrictive covenants and “gentleman’s agreements” that began to proliferate before World War I.

  The social anti-Semitism of the Gilded Age pushed upper-middle-class German Jews in two not always mutually exclusive directions. Many retreated into their own organizations, which continued to emphasize German, as distinct from Jewish, antecedents until America went to war with Germany. Others, especially those who looked like gentiles and had attenuated ties to the Jewish community, began to disappear into the larger society through intermarriage. In the 1880s, my great-grandfather began attending meetings of the Society for Ethical Culture, an organization that attracted Jews, mainly of German descent, who were ready to abandon traditional Jewish observance but were not about to become Christians. The society had been founded in 1875 by Felix Adler, the son of the rabbi of New York’s Temple Emanu-El. Adler graduated from Columbia and was ordained a rabbi in Germany, where he went on to study at the University of Heidelberg. There he was exposed to the newest biblical criticism, based on many recent linguistic and archeological discoveries, that questioned previous interpretations of both the Torah and the Christian Gospels. And there the young rabbi lost his belief in divine revelation. Ethical Culture evolved out of Adler’s attempt to construct a spiritual basis for living, absent belief in a personal God. While the organization would eventually attract financial support from some non-Jews (mainly upper-class mavericks like John D. Rockefeller Jr.), its American leaders were almost entirely Jews of German descent. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Ethical Culture was a way of staying just a little—a very little—bit Jewish, of maintaining some sense of connection to Jewish ethical traditions while abandoning Judaism as a religion. That is why it was rejected not only by the new and more traditionally observant immigrants from Eastern Europe but also by most of the older generation of Reform Jews, who had so effectively adapted the form of their religion to their new country. Ethical Culture was a product of the scientific discoveries and rationalism that posed a challenge to all traditional religions in the latter decades of the Victorian era; the society was devised by men who were filled with doubts but still longed to hear something more than Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of what had once been the sea of faith.

  I doubt that Max was surprised or horrified either by his elder son’s marriage to an Episcopalian or by his younger son’s agnosticism. But I suspect he would have been utterly astonished, in view of his adherence to a creed based on humanist ethics and rationality, at the notion that three of his grandchildren would end their lives, nearly a century later, as converts to the Catholic faith.

  Neither my father nor my uncle Ozzie had any real understanding of how their father’s Jewishness had affected his life, but I believe the family’s twentieth-century rejection of its origins was rooted in the experiences of those two brilliant young men, Levi Harold and Oswald Nathaniel, in the New York of the 1880s and 1890s. Their father had built a business that enabled his sons to go to school with members of the true American upper class—but the upper class, at that very moment, was inventing new social barriers designed to keep out not only “the wrong kind” of Jews but also all “Israelites.” The Jacobys considered themselves the right kind of Jews, but both Harold and Oswald, as they entered adulthood, must already have become attuned to the double message that neither my father nor Uncle Ozzie ever forgot in the following century: Jews are better than other people. Also worse.

  IV

  Brothers

  FOR MUCH OF MY adult life, I was fascinated by the complicated relationship between my father and his elder brother—a tense and rivalrous, but always loving, connection that deepened by the end of their lives into understanding and acceptance of each other’s foibles and strengths. Growing up in a home with aggrieved parents—so disappointed in each other that there was never enough love to go around—Ozzie and Dad might easily have become strangers or enemies. They had no model of brotherly love, for their father and his elder brother had long been estranged by the time they died, within a year of each other, in the early thirties. As brothers and as men, my father and his brother managed to avoid replicating the pattern of the previous generation. It was a near miss, though, for Dad and Ozzie bore the dual burden of memory and memory loss—the personal memory of their father’s ruined life, the family’s lost memory of the social and psychological history that helped make Oswald Nathaniel Jacoby who and what he was. Today, I cannot think about the two brothers I knew without conjuring up the earlier pair of Jacoby brothers I never knew, the brothers who, by the end of the nineteenth century, seemed poised to fulfill the deepest hopes that impelled their father to leave Breslau fifty years earlier.

  —

  IN 1886, a year after his elder brother received his bachelor’s degree, fifteen-year-old Oswald Jacoby entered Columbia College School of Arts, as the undergraduate division was called at the time. Of the seventy-four entering freshmen, at least seven, judging from their last names, were Jews. That total—more than 9 percent of the class—offers one indicator of the success attained by many German Jewish immigrants of my great-grandfather’s generation, who by then were able to afford the best possible education for their sons. Moreover, the class may have included more Jewish (or half-Jewish) students, with last names that did not reveal their origins. At the time, the small student body was drawn mainly from well-off, old New York families that had sent their sons to Columbia for generations. Benjamin Cardozo, who entered Columbia as a freshman a year before my grandfather, was one of the few students who was a Jew as well as a representative of “old” New York. His mother’s family, immigrants from England, had settled in the city around 1750. One of her ancestors, Gershom Seixas, was the first Jew (and the last, until Cardozo himself) to serve as a Columbia trustee.

  —

  WHAT WAS it like to be a Jew at Columbia during the 1880s? The answer may have been very different for Cardozo from what it was for Max’s sons, who definitely belonged to the “new” New York. Harold, who focused on a future in science from an early age and evinced little interest as an undergraduate in activities unconnected with his academic pursuits, may have seen the matter differently from Oswald, an extrovert of wide interests and a member of numerous student organizations. The yearbook of Oswald’s graduating class records that he was a coxswain in the annual Columbia spring regatta, a violinist in the Columbia College orchestra, and a member of both the popular undergraduate Shakespeare Society and the Barnard Literary Association (the college debating society). He and Cardozo may have become friends through their common involvement in debating, one of the few extracurricular activities that attracted the future Supreme Court justice. Cardozo, not a joiner by temperament, might have pledged
a fraternity had he so desired—in spite of his being a Jew and in spite of the tarnishing of the once-spotless Cardozo family name by a political scandal involving his father. However, Columbia classbooks from that era make it clear that by the 1880s, most Jews were already excluded from social fraternities.

  My grandfather was a young man who would have wanted to belong to a fraternity. Unlike Cardozo, Oswald was gregarious, athletic, and physically precocious. Standing nearly six feet tall when he entered Columbia at fifteen, he projected the brand of male charisma that earns a young man the admiration of his contemporaries. After winning a scholarship in English literature in his junior year, he was elected president of the Shakespeare Society as a senior (an honor that had as much to do with popularity among other students as with academic distinction). Yet neither his academic honors nor his friendships could get him into a fraternity. Uncle Ozzie remembered his father’s bitter words on the subject. “When I was a freshman at Columbia in nineteen nineteen, Father told me not even to think about pledging a fraternity because they didn’t want anyone who was too smart. It still rankled with him that he hadn’t been asked to join. Didn’t bother me a bit. I told Father I had no desire to be around dummies. Being left out of a fraternity isn’t the blow of a lifetime, you know. But for Father—yes-yes-yes-yes—it was a great insult.” (Ozzie, like my dad, spoke in such rapid-fire fashion that it was often hard to understand him. In moments of excitement, he would sometimes break into a stream of yesses that resembled the barking of a dog.)

  “Yes-yes-yes,” Ozzie growled, “there was a lot of Groucho Marx in Father—you know the line, CI wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.’ But he did want to belong to clubs that wouldn’t have him.” Ozzie himself took considerable pleasure in the knowledge that his status as a bridge champion had earned him an invitation to join the Dallas Country Club, an institution not noted for its hospitality to Jews or anyone else perceived as less than a full-blooded, white, Christian (but not Hispanic Christian) American. In 1964, when Barry Goldwater was running against Lyndon Johnson for the presidency, Ozzie looked around the table at his cardplaying cronies and declared, “You know the difference between us? You’ll vote for Barry Goldwater for president but you wouldn’t want him in this country club. I’d let him into the club but I sure don’t want him in the White House.”

  From a late-twentieth-century perspective, it may seem petty to emphasize the importance of an anti-Semitic social slight to my grandfather, a young man who, after all, had everything else going for him. But the young do take such matters seriously: it has often been noted by biographers that the financier Bernard Baruch never got over his anger at having been blackballed from a fraternity at the City College of New York. Moreover, my grandfather was an extremely ambitious young man, and his social experiences at Columbia must have taught him the bitter lesson that however much he achieved, and however well liked he was as an individual, some doors would still be closed to him as a Jew.

  His elder brother, who had an even more brilliant academic career as an undergraduate, clearly drew the same conclusions about the social and professional liability attached to being unmistakably identified as a Jew. One wonders whether Annie Maclear’s parents would have welcomed a son-in-law named Levi as enthusiastically as they welcomed Harold. Annie and Harold met while he was spending several months in the vicinity of Capetown in order to conduct astronomical observations for his doctoral thesis; the area around the Cape of Good Hope had long been a favorite site for astronomers studying the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. It was not surprising, in view of the prominence of Annie’s grandfather, the Astronomer Royal, that a visiting scientist would be introduced to the Maclears. Harold’s and Annie’s granddaughter, Eve Van de Water Thew (another of my newly discovered cousins, she was named for our great-grandmother, Eve Jackson Jacoby), says the Maclears, whose professional and social standing in Capetown was far higher than their financial standing, regarded the obviously affluent young American as a good catch for their daughter. Mrs. Thew is the child of Harold’s only daughter, Eve Marion, who married Edward Terhune Van de Water in 1923 in yet another Episcopal ceremony, presided over by a priest who was a relative of the groom. The younger Eve grew up (like her first cousin, Mac Jacoby Jr.) knowing that there had been a terrible falling-out between her grandfather and my grandfather but not knowing why. “No one ever explained,” she told me. “I’m sure that Granny Annie—that’s what we called her—knew, but it wasn’t something that was talked about. I just understood as a child that we—the descendants of Harold—didn’t have anything to do with them—‘the other Jacobys.’ We were very well aware that we were related to the famous bridge columnist, but no one reached out and tried to get in touch with him. That’s how sensitive the subject of ‘the other Jacobys’ was in the family.”

  Of course, the children of the estranged Jacoby brothers were first cousins. Uncle Ozzie, who was already a teenager by the time of Harold’s and Oswald’s falling-out, certainly did know his cousins, even though he never talked about them in later life. The long-lost family photo album includes several pre-1915 pictures of the two Jacoby families together. In a later snapshot, the teenage Ozzie is clowning around a swimming pool with his cousin Eve (Mrs. Thew’s mother). But a few years later, there would be no trace of “the other Jacobys” at Eve’s wedding.

  Mrs. Thew spent her girlhood in Westport, Connecticut (on the same street as her cousin Mac), where Harold and Annie lived after his retirement from Columbia. At that time, restrictive covenants were the rule in most upper-class, old-line WASP Connecticut towns within commuting distance of New York. Westport had only a handful of Jewish residents in the thirties and forties (though it was never as tightly closed to Jews as nearby Darien, cited in the postwar novel and movie Gentleman’s Agreement as a prime example of a community determined to maintain its anti-Semitic restrictive covenants). Mrs. Thew says she doubts that either her mother or Mac’s father knew that Harold’s real first name was Levi. “I don’t even know whether my grandmother knew that,” she says, “though she obviously must have known that the Jacoby family was originally Jewish. I certainly didn’t know as a child that Jacoby was generally a Jewish name, but I feel that she must have known. It didn’t come up for me, since my name was Van de Water. But I can remember later, much later in life, when my cousin Mac came to visit, people would sometimes ask, ‘What kind of a name is Jacoby?’ With a little edge to the question. As I got older, I began to wonder more and more what really happened in the previous generation.”

  The marriage between Annie and Harold—unlike my grandparents’ marriage—seems to have been an unqualified success. Annie, a learned young woman with a deep interest of her own in science and history, was an asset to her husband in his role as a rising young star at Columbia, not because her grandfather had been the Astronomer Royal at Capetown (although that didn’t hurt) but because she was a socially adept woman of great charm and vivacity, capable of carrying out to perfection the duties of a faculty wife. Invitations to her afternoon teas, a Columbia faculty bulletin noted, were prized because of the liveliness of the discussions and the excellence of the cake and sandwiches. Harold, who became an expert in the application of rapidly evolving late-nineteenth-century photographic technology to astronomical observation, rose swiftly at Columbia. At twenty-nine, even before receiving his doctorate, he had been appointed an adjutant professor. From 1904 until his retirement in 1929, he was a full professor and, for most of those years, director of Columbia’s observatory.

  Ozzie said his father always described his brother as “a brilliant bore.” My dad, who was only a baby when the elder Jacoby brothers broke off contact with each other, seems never to have met his scholarly uncle. By then, my grandfather had ample reason to envy his brother, who lived in a beautiful house near the university on Morningside Heights (while the Oswald Jacobys lived in Brooklyn’s inelegant Flatbush section), had achieved an unbroken string of professional s
uccesses, and was widely quoted in the New York press on every conceivable scientific issue.

  Professor Jacoby was always in the news; the architects of the new Grand Central Terminal thought so highly of him that they commissioned him to prepare a map of the constellations for the main lobby’s glorious azure ceiling. That ceiling, glowing with all of its original brightness since the renovation of Grand Central in the mid-1990s, has been beloved by generations of New Yorkers but was a source of some embarrassment to the original builders—and Harold—when the station opened in 1913. An observant commuter pointed out that the constellations, while certainly beautiful and impressive, were reversed on the ceiling. The contractors passed the buck to Uncle Harold, who had supplied the map, but he maintained with considerable indignation that either the contractor or the workmen had turned his chart the wrong way when they began transferring the paper design to the ceiling. I believe my great-uncle’s version of the story, since it seems unlikely that the head of the Columbia Observatory would have failed to place the stars in their proper order.

  Until I looked up Harold’s file in the Times morgue, I had no idea that he had anything to do with the creation of the Grand Central ceiling. If my father, Edith, or Ozzie ever knew about the connection between their uncle and a famous New York landmark, they had forgotten it by the time I began asking questions about the family. That in itself suggests the depth of the breach between Harold and my grandfather: silence and distance bred more silence and distance. Had Harold not been prominent enough to receive considerable press coverage, and lengthy obituaries, I would never have known anything about him other than the fact that he had once been a professor at Columbia.