The Chosen Wars
Page 11
The world these Ashkenazi immigrants left behind had been governed in all aspects of life by Jewish law, Jewish courts, and rabbinical decree. Jews in Europe had been guided by an elaborate code of behavior—how to observe the Sabbath and holidays, the clothes one wore, relations between husband and wife, and all manner of other regulations, some derived from the Torah, reputed to contain 613 separate commandments, and others from later tradition and Talmudic interpretation. In the new world of individual choice on religion, peddlers were often the first Jews to arrive in various towns or regions in cities ranging from Rochester, New York, to Sioux City, Iowa, to Atlanta and San Francisco. In such far-flung places, isolated and lonely, distant from the framework of Jewish life, they had to adjust their traditions.
One of the biggest challenges was keeping kosher. Inevitably, the practice declined. Ritual slaughtering calls for swift action with a specially sharpened knife. Trained kosher slaughterers had to be sought out far and wide, but rabbinic authorities who could ensure that their duties followed proper procedure were scarce. As a result, internal squabbling erupted within Jewish communities over whether kosher butchers were following the correct practices. Many communities gave up on the possibility of kosher-style meats, which were often prohibitively expensive.
Another problem was social. Because of dietary restrictions, Jews could not easily sit down with non-Jews at a meal. Avoiding pork was easier than adherence to other dietary restrictions, such as not mixing dairy and meat, and having separate dishes for each, and many nonobservant Jews fell away, while trying to keep more strictly kosher during Passover and other holidays. Ads in papers sought to recruit a Jewish “jack-of-all-trades” for smaller communities—someone who could slaughter meat, teach, chant during services, and also perform circumcisions.11
Keeping the Sabbath, which Jews are commanded to observe by not working, was also difficult. Many states had “blue laws” requiring retail stores to close on Sunday, which meant that Jews closing their stores on Saturday lost significant business from Christian customers doing weekend shopping. Many contemporary accounts note instances of Jews giving in and keeping their stores open, and others who went out of their way to observe the day of rest. A missionary to the Delaware Indians recalled, for example, a visit to a Jewish merchant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to fill a business order but was told he could not pay him until the next day, a Sunday. Instead, the merchant got a doctor neighbor to pay the missionary, presumably to be repaid himself the next day, which certainly puzzled the visiting missionary who later complained that “he might as well have done the business himself.”12
Diaries left by peddlers made it clear that for all those who tried to follow Jewish laws, others had little choice but to abandon the rituals of their faith, however tortured they were by the dilemma. “God of Israel,” a peddler wrote in his diary in 1843, “Thou knowst my thoughts. Thou alone knowest my grief when, on the sabbath’s eve, I must retire to my lodging and on Saturday morning carry my pack on my back, profaning the holy day, God’s gift to His people Israel.”13 Another diarist, Abraham Kohn, a native of Bavaria, wrote of the Jews he discovered upon arriving in New York: “O misguided fools, led astray by avarice and cupidity. You have left your friends and acquaintances, your relatives and your parents, your home and your land, your language and your customs, your faith and your religion—only to sell your wares in the wild places of America, in isolated farm houses and tiny hamlets. . . . For the first time in my life I have desecrated the Sabath in such a manner. But circumstances give me no choice. May God forgive me!”14 (Kohn himself went on to Chicago eventually, opened a store there, and became acquainted with Abraham Lincoln.15)
As in the colonial period, intermarriage posed a major challenge for Jews as they spread through the country in the early nineteenth century. To avoid such a prospect, Jews often had to import brides or return to Europe to seek mates. Sometimes they advertised for brides in old-country newspapers and paid for them to make the arduous ocean journey to the United States. Thus, many Jews, primarily men, married outside the faith, amid popular fiction portraying instances of families heartbroken over such occurrences.
For all their gravitation to integrate in secular society, Jews left a record in diaries, letters, and other accounts of their fear of letting down their forebears and forgetting their roots. Typical of these accounts was the letter from a religious teacher to Moses and Yetta Alsbacher as they journeyed from Unsleben (Bavaria) to Cleveland. “Resist and withstand this tempting freedom and do not turn away from the religion of our fathers,” the letter beseeched the couple. “The promise to remain good Jews must never and should never be broken during the trip, nor in your home life, nor when you go to sleep, nor when you rise again, nor in the rearing of your children.”16
To counter such enticements, Jews brought prayer books, Bibles, prayer shawls, phylacteries, shofars, and Torah scrolls from Europe to their new communities. They counted on fellow Jews who knew the way of the law, including kosher butchers, ritual circumcisers, teachers, and cantors—confident, but perhaps not so confident, that their traditions would be maintained. To some foreign visitors, it was impressive that the Jews of America tried so hard to hang on to their traditions. “The religious rites, customs, and festivals of the Jews are all strictly observed,” a Canadian visitor wrote in 1812.17 But Rebecca Samuel, a young woman, wrote to her parents in Hamburg, in Yiddish, that she was pulling up stakes in her home in Petersburg, Virginia, to move to Charleston: “Jewishness is pushed aside here,” she lamented. The handful of Jews in the community “are not worthy of being called Jews. . . . The way we live now is no life at all.”18
A powerful factor contributing to the decline of rabbinical rules in these decades was a kind of Jewish genius for organizing themselves along secular lines outside the authority of the synagogue. In the Old World of the ghettos of Europe, the kahal—the name of the organizational structure of government in ancient Israelite society—served as the autonomous government of Jewish communities authorized by the secular governments under which Jews lived. These organizations undertook taxation and law enforcement, but they answered to the clerical authorities that prescribed laws of civil conduct. Such an arrangement was not applicable to the United States, which obviously did not authorize official self-governing institutions among Jews.
To replicate self-governing institutions of their tradition, the Jews turned to their own voluntary civic organizations that in many cases supplanted the authority of the rabbis and other religious figures. It was these organizations that they turned to for economic security and support in times of crisis, friendship, and community. They were grassroots groups that did not seek to impose doctrines. Rather, they embodied a new American attitude of live and let live among Jews. 19
These organizations involved themselves in education, philanthropy, recreation, community service, and “defense” of Jewish identity against proselytizing or attempts to convert. Some also became activists on behalf of those Jews persecuted overseas. A major cause célèbre was the arrests in Damascus of thirteen prominent Jews accused of murdering a Christian monk to carry out a religious ritual. Another was the seizure by papal authorities of a six-year-old boy, Edgardo Mortara, abducted from a Jewish family in Bologna in 1858 on the grounds that a former servant had baptized him when he fell sick as an infant. Jews from around the world, and across the United States, rallied in protest, marking one of the earliest episodes of their organizing over a political cause. Their activism was to no avail. Edgardo eventually became a priest, taking the name Pius after Pope Pius IX, who defended the kidnapping. News of these outrages was spread through a proliferating group of secular publications, such as the Asmonean (1849–58), the Jewish Messenger, founded in 1857, and the Hebrew Leader, founded in 1859. They helped galvanize the Jewish community as a unified political force among disparate communities.
The preeminent civilian group implicitly challenging rabbinical authority was B’nai B’rith (Childr
en of the Covenant). Founded in 1843 by recently arrived German immigrants at Sinsheimer’s saloon on Essex Street in New York, it spread across the country rapidly, in some communities where there was no synagogue. Initially the Germans called themselves Bundes Brüder (Brothers of the Covenant), but they chose a Hebrew name to be more universally appealing to all Jews.
B’nai B’rith’s mission was to serve the struggling Jewish community by taking care of the poor, sick, disabled Jews and those widows and orphans from broken families. Maintaining Jewish practices was not high on its agenda. A distinguishing characteristic of B’nai B’rith was its adoption—soon to become common among many Jewish organizations—of various practices of the Masonic movement, universally popular among many religious adherents in the United States, including secret handshakes, regalia, and passwords sometimes adopted from Hebrew (“Shalom Aleichem!”) that were secret only to the world outside Judaism. Soon other nationwide fraternal societies sprouted, such as the Order of B’rith Abraham, the Free Sons of Israel, Masons, and Odd Fellows. The men who joined could do good and also do well. While performing community service, they could network on behalf of their businesses.
Some of these organizations inevitably revolved around the Polish, Eastern European, Hungarian, and of course German ethnic identity of the immigrants, known as landsmannshëftn. Women’s organizations and literary societies grew up around them, and they sometimes hired rabbis and held religious services for High Holidays when there were no synagogues. They did not ignore Sabbath and dietary rules entirely. Many, for example, debated whether they should keep open on Sabbath, for activities not proscribed by the Talmud. In 1874, the New York YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) came up with an ingenious compromise. It decided to keep the building open on the Sabbath for “light” exercise only, a ruling that banned the trapeze and horizontal bars as “too strenuous” and thus a violation of the ban on work.20
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, some rabbis complained that the various newly founded lodges and clubs undermined their authority, drew members away, and actually encouraged indifference to religion. They warned that these secular organizations were weakening Jewish prayer, study, and traditions, not strengthening them.
But it was undoubtedly true that these organizations filled a spiritual need among adherents. Jews founded a New Israelite Sick-Benefit and Burial Society in 1841 in New York, which was an overtly secular effort to provide alternatives to synagogue-based burial. After B’nai B’rith, various Hebrew Benevolent Societies arose, along with Young Men’s Hebrew Associations (the first of which was established in Baltimore in 1854). Such groups built boardinghouses and set up cemeteries, orphanages, and hospitals in the spirit of tsedakah, the Hebrew word for “charity.” These organizations helped Jews navigate the new world, including its criminal justice system, while improving their community in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike.
Synagogues were expanding at the same time that secular groups took root. But ironically, the proliferation and fractiousness of synagogues—many of them with differing rites, ideologies, and ethnic backgrounds—contributed to their loss of collective influence. Communities throughout the country struggled to provide for kosher procedures, cemeteries, Hebrew education for children, and adjustments of prayers in Hebrew, sometimes in conflict and rivalry with one another. As congregations proliferated, the number of congregations increased in older communities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and St. Louis. Many congregations split apart from others, and various attempts to unify synagogues failed.
No single synagogue or organization could claim that it alone represented Jews, and no single organization of synagogues had the ability to raise funds to thrive in the new landscape. In New York, the growing number of synagogues disagreed over such matters as the ritual slaughter of animals and the baking of matzo. In San Francisco, a dispute between immigrants of German and Polish ancestry in a tiny Jewish community led to two separate synagogues being established in the years after the Gold Rush. Temple Emanu-El represented the wealthier German-born Jews, a source of resentment among the Polish-born Jews at Sherith Israel. In Boston, at Ohabei Shalom, ethnic animosity simmered for years, erupting over the engagement of a new rabbi in 1854 as Germans and Poles split into angry factions. “The dissension grew hotter and hotter until the minority bolted,” Rabbi Solomon Schindler of Temple Adath Israel recalled many years later. The defectors angrily ran off with the synagogue’s accounts and even its shofar for the new congregation. To fill the middle ground in such disputes, commercial butchers and bakers wrested responsibility for keeping kosher away from synagogue leaderships.
In the field of education, the role of synagogues also waned in the nineteenth century, as cities established public school systems that could draw students of all faiths. In 1854, New York had seven schools attached to congregations. Nonreligious private schools also sprang up. But the shortage of religious school teachers made it difficult for these institutions to continue. Teachers were constantly being hired and fired, and many of them had to carry out other responsibilities, like serving as hazans or even doing housekeeping chores, like taking care of the mikveh, or ritual bath. B’nai Jeshurun set up an “educational institute” in 1852, but it foundered and closed three years later. Scholars looking into the state of education in this period find records replete with complaints about bad teaching and chaotic classrooms. At Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia, a teacher was reprimanded for beating his students. Maybe his frustration was understandable. The records show that students were setting off firecrackers, urinating in front of the girl students, and attempting “to imitate a circumcision.”21
In 1853, New York City took over the schools of the Public School Society, shortly after state law in New York forbade religious instruction in 1842, making it possible for Jews to feel more comfortable in secular schools. As a result, the takeover dealt a blow to religious schools and by extension, it dealt another blow to the authority of many New York synagogues.22
The Jews of mid-century America were thus becoming more prosperous, more willing to challenge authority, and more willing to adjust their beloved traditions to fit into secular society. Understandably, they wanted their rabbis to accommodate their wishes. But the path toward that goal would prove contentious.
Five
GERMAN RABBIS IN AMERICA
In the early decades of America, many educated Jews fulfilled the role of rabbi as congregations established themselves. They even called themselves rabbis in some cases. But it was not until the 1840s that the United States was able to welcome fully trained rabbis into the Jewish community.
For the most part, the rabbis came from German lands, part of that wave of new German immigrants. But if there was any hope among traditionalists that the new rabbis would impose order, history was to dictate otherwise. By the time rabbis could exert control, Jewish communities had grown accustomed to deciding rules and customs on their own. Some of the German rabbis brought rigid doctrines and rules embodied by the Talmud’s 613 commandments that they then sought to dictate to the Jewish communities they served. But many others came bearing the culture of ferment and change that had started and spread in their homelands two decades earlier. Either way, the world of the American synagogue was not what they were accustomed to back home. Isaac Leeser, the preeminent traditionalist figure in Jewish circles of mid-century America, was taken aback, if not appalled, by what he found in America. “We have no ecclesiastical authorities in America, other than the congregations themselves,” he wrote. “Each congregation makes its own rules for its government, and elects its own minister, who is appointed without any ordination, induction in office being made through his election.”1
The pattern of secular, or lay, control of religious practices was similar to that of proliferating sectarian identities in American churches. Christian religions underwent turbulent change as Americans turned to different and conflicting paths toward God. That
tumult and “awakening” of Christian fervor was destined to influence the character of American Judaism.2
Such influences were inevitable in a society founded on religion from the beginning. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony sometimes saw themselves as heirs of Jewish tradition by establishing a “New Jerusalem” in the New World. In some respects, the Puritans convinced themselves that they, not the Jews, were the inheritors of the legacy of the Hebrew Bible, even as they continued to express intolerance of the Jews themselves.3
In the eighteenth century colonial era, America experienced a wave of religious revival known as the First Great Awakening, mirroring a similar evangelical wave in England. This period seems to have been a time of “awakenings” in general. Although historians find virtually no connection between this first “awakening” of Christians and anything comparable among Jews, it is striking that Hasidism—a movement of Jews searching for a personal connection with God through pious devotion to their rebbes, or grand rabbis—arose in Poland and later throughout Central Europe around the same period.
The First Awakening was characterized by powerful preaching and a yearning for salvation epitomized by the fire-and-brimstone sermonizing of Jonathan Edwards, who extolled the absolute sovereignty of God’s judgment over human conduct. There is little evidence of any influence of this first “awakening” of the early 1700s on early American Jewish life, except that these Christians uniformly viewed Jews with toxic sympathy—heirs to a great tradition but errant in their refusal to recognize that their doctrines should yield to those put forward by followers of Jesus Christ.