How Did The Status Of Jews Change In The Late 18th And 19th Centuries?

The American Jewish Feel through the Nineteenth Century: Clearing and Acculturation
Jonathan D. Sarna and Jonathan Golden Brandeis University ^©National Humanities Eye

American Jewish history commenced in 1492 with the expulsion of Jews from Spain. This activity set off a menstruum of intense Jewish migration. Seeking to escape the clutches of the Holy Inquisition, some Jews in the sixteenth century sought refuge in the young Calvinist democracy of Holland. A century later, hundreds of their descendants crossed the body of water to settle in the new Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil, where Jewish communal life became possible for the starting time fourth dimension in the New Globe. When Portugal recaptured this colony in 1654, its Jews scattered. Refugees spread through the Dutch Caribbean, beginning fresh Jewish communities. A boatload of almost 23 Jews sailed into the remote Dutch port of New Amsterdam and requested permission to remain. This marked the beginning of Jewish communal life in Due north America.

Colonial Jews never exceeded one tenth of i percent of the American population, yet they established patterns of Jewish communal life that persisted for generations.

Starting time, about Jews lived in cosmopolitan port cities like New York and Newport where opportunities for commerce and trade abounded, and people of diverse backgrounds and faiths lived next.

2nd, many early American Jewish leaders and institutions were Sephardic, pregnant that their origins traced to the Jewish communities of the Iberian peninsula. Sephardic Jews maintained cultural hegemony in Jewish life into the early nineteenth century, although by then Ashkenazi Jews, meaning Jews who traced their origins to Germany, had long been more numerous.

3rd, Jews organized into synagogue-communities. Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Newport each had one synagogue that causeless responsibility for the religious and communal needs of all local Jews.

The American Revolution marked a turning point non but in American Jewish history, only in mod Jewish history by and large. Never earlier had a major nation committed itself so definitively to the principles of freedom and democracy in general and to religious liberty in particular. Jews and members of other minority religions could dissent from the religious views of the majority without fearfulness of persecution. Jews however had to fight for their rights on the land level, and they continued to face up various forms of prejudice nationwide. However, many Jews benefited materially from the Revolution and interacted freely with their non-Jewish neighbors. Having shed blood for their land side by side with their Christian fellows, Jews as a grouping felt far more secure than they had in colonial days. They asserted their rights openly and, if challenged, defended themselves both vigorously and self-confidently.

In the nineteenth century, American Jews, seeking to strengthen Judaism against its numerous Christian competitors in the marketplace of American religions, introduced various religious innovations, some of them borrowed from their neighbors. Immature Jews in Charleston, dissatisfied with the "apathy and neglect" they saw manifested toward their faith, somewhat influenced by the spread of Unitarianism, fearful of Christian missionary activities that had begun to be directed toward local Jews, and, above all, passionately concerned most Jewish survival in a free lodge, created the breakaway "Reformed Social club of Israelites for Promoting Truthful Principles of Judaism According to Its Purity and Spirit." This was America's beginning Reform congregation, with an abbreviated service, vernacular prayers, and regular sermons. Traditional congregations besides "Protestantized" some of their practices, introducing regular English language sermons and more decorous modes of worship.

Meanwhile, communal leaders, led by the Traditionalist Jewish religious leader of Philadelphia, Isaac Leeser, emulated and adjusted Protestant benevolent and education techniques--Sunday schools, hospitals, the religious press, charitable societies, and the like--in order to strengthen Judaism in the face of pressures upon Jews to catechumen. Among other things, Leeser produced an Anglo-Jewish translation of the Bible, founded a Jewish publication society, and edited a Jewish periodical, The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, which attempted in its pages to unite the various voices of the American Jewish customs. He likewise rallied his community to respond to incidents of anti-Jewish persecution around the world.

Even though Ashkenazic Jews outnumbered Sephardic Jews as early as 1720, the starting time German Jewish immigrants joined Sephardic synagogues rather than founding their own institutions. As poverty, persecution, and political disillusionment swept through Central Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, German and Smoothen Jewish clearing to America swelled. Distinctly German language-speaking Jewish institutions multiplied. Jews also moved beyond the Eastern seaboard at this time, seeking opportunities in the frontier communities of the Midwest, S, and West.

In the 1840s, in contrast to the early on American model of synagogues run by a hazan (cantor) or lay leadership, immigrant rabbis began to assume the pulpits of American synagogues. Some sought to promote Orthodoxy, while others merged the ideology of German language Jewish Reform with the practices of American Protestant denominations and created a new American version of Reform Judaism. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati, a leader of American Reform Judaism, sought to develop a Minhag-America (American liturgical custom) that would unite Jews effectually moderate Reform Judaism. The founding of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873) and Hebrew Union College (1875) in Cincinnati sought to actualize his vision. Just even as rabbis hoped to unite the community, the greatest legacy of the so-called "German menstruum" is actually Jewish religious multifariousness. By the Ceremonious War, every American Jewish congregation had at least two synagogues, and major ones had iv or more.

Perhaps brothers, an Orthodox Jew and a U.S. Navy engineer pose in New York City during the Civil War.
Courtesy of Robert Marcus

The Ceremonious War divided Jews much as it did the nation as a whole. There were Jews in the North and Jews in the South, Jews who supported slavery and Jews who condemned it, Jews who fought for the Union and Jews who fought for the Confederacy. If in many respects the Civil State of war affected Jews much as information technology did other Americans, in that location were nevertheless 3 features of the struggle that affected Jews uniquely.

First, wartime tensions led to an upsurge of racial and religious prejudice in America, and Jews, both in the North and in the Southward, proved to be user-friendly scapegoats. Even famous Americans slipped into anti-Semitic stereotypes when they meant to condemn i Jew lone.

Second, Jews in the Northward (not in this case the South) had to fight for their right to have a Jewish army chaplain--no piece of cake task, since by law an army clergyman had to exist a "regularly ordained minister of some Christian denomination." Although President Lincoln himself urged that this law be amended, it took heavy Jewish lobbying and over a year of hard work until the subpoena to the law was passed.

Tertiary, and about shocking of all to Jews, they had to face the most sweeping anti-Jewish official gild in all of American history--General Order No. 11, published on December 17, 1862, that expelled all Jews from General Grant's military department. An irate and highly prejudiced response to wartime smuggling and speculating, crimes engaged in past Jews and not-Jews akin, it met with forceful Jewish protests. Within xviii days, thank you to President Lincoln, the order was revoked.

In the 1880s, the profile of Jewish immigration to the Usa was profoundly changed by the pogroms directed against the Jews of Russia, leading to an infusion of young Eastern European Jews who were religiously traditional and spoke Yiddish [the historical linguistic communication of Ashkenazic Jews; a dialect of High German language that includes some Hebrew elements]. Swept into a new and alien civilization, cut off from loved ones left backside, and in many cases forced to violate religious tenets one time held love, immigrants frequently spent lifetimes trying to reconcile what they had left behind with what they had gained. Many cursed Columbus and wondered aloud if their travail was justified. A few returned to Europe. But in the wake of the infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and subsequent persecutions in Russian federation and elsewhere, the promise of American life shined ever brighter. By 1924, close to two million Eastern European Jews had immigrated to America's shores.

Initially many native and German-built-in Jews in America looked down on these newcomers as social inferiors and felt ambivalent toward them. They saw themselves outnumbered, feared that

Greeting card for Rosh Hashanah [Jewish New year], ca. 1900
Translation of the Hebrew:
"And Yous will cast all of their sins into the depths of the bounding main" (Micah seven:19)

Courtesy Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Athenaeum

immigration was provoking antisemitism, and worried that the East Europeans would never assimilate. However, bad equally feelings sometimes became, well-nigh of these Jews continued to work long and difficult on behalf of the East Europeans. The latter, meanwhile, strongly identified with American society and labored to Americanize. In the twentieth century, when problems such as immigration restriction and bills aimed at abrogating America's commercial treaty with Russia arose, German language Jews and Eastern European Jews stood shoulder to shoulder; they planned strategy together. Bonds of kinship, in the end, proved far stronger than petty in-group squabbles.

Guiding Student Discussion

Still the small size of the Jewish community in early on America, information technology is important to emphasize to students that American Jews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like their counterparts in the larger society, established patterns that subsequent generations carefully followed. American Judaism, at this time, became both voluntaristic and pluralistic. In America a Jew'south faith was not registered with the state, as it was in most of Europe, and observance depended upon the individual. In a sense, at that place came to be as many Judaisms every bit in that location were Jews. Like and so many of their Protestant counterparts, Jews resisted the hierarchical religious authorization structures of Europe. No nationwide "master rabbi" emerged and no religious organisation wielded unchallenged authorisation. Instead, a spectrum of Jewish religious movements competed for adherents, each insisting that its strategy lonely provided hope for American Judaism's survival. Ultimately, of course, each strategy sought to balance between American norms and values and the sometimes alien demands of Jewish tradition--a balancing act familiar to any number of minority groups in the United States.

While Protestant practices inevitably influenced the direction of American Jewish religious life, Jews monitored Protestant missionary efforts with caution. Activities that Protestants viewed as benevolent (like offering money and free education to the Jewish poor) seemed provocative to Jews, almost inducements to catechumen. Jews also took affront at the distinctions that some Protestants drew between the "mythical Jews" that they learned almost in church and the "Jews next door" who seemed altogether dissimilar. Educators tin can effectively employ these themes to hash out intergroup relations, stereotypes, and the tensions between majority and minority in the American feel.

The story of Jewish immigration to America can exist incorporated into broader discussions concerning clearing and the promise of American life. Students should understand the manifold challenges that immigrants faced every bit they sought to pursue liberty and opportunity while all the same seeking to retain their cultural identity. They should also explore the ambivalence so commonly felt toward immigrants, even past those who themselves descended from similar roots and shared the immigrants' heritage and faith.

Historians Debate

A key question in American Jewish history concerns the relative influence of Old and New World patterns on American Jews, a debate that echoes the longstanding controversy over whether or not America itself is historically unique. In terms of the Reform Motility in Judaism, some scholars thus view information technology as mostly an adjunct of German language Reform Judaism, while others are more impressed past its distinctively American qualities. Similarly, some view nineteenth-century American Jewish history as a whole as an "encounter with emancipation," thereby defining it in terms of a central paradigm in European Jewish history--the struggle of Jews to gain total civil rights in Europe in the belatedly 1800s. Other scholars are more impressed past the differences between the European and American Jewish situations. American Jewry, they insist, was "post-emancipation" from the start.

A unlike kind of question concerns the nature of nineteenth-century Jewish immigration to the U.s.. Earlier historians spoke of iii immigration waves--the Sephardic catamenia, the German language period, and the East European period. More recent scholars accept challenged this periodization. Not but are in that location vast overlaps between the different periods (East European Jews found their way to America even in colonial days), but we at present know that Jewish immigration was much more than variegated and complex than in one case believed, involving Jews from many unlike lands. In the mid nineteenth century, for example, there were more Shine-Jewish immigrants to America than German ones. At least one historian advocates dropping the earlier periodization altogether to focus on the full century of Jewish immigration, beginning in 1820, that transformed American Jewry from a tiny community of some 3,000 Jews to a customs that was more than ane thousand times larger--indeed, the largest Jewish community in the world.

For other primal issues in American Jewish history, besides as an extensive bibliography, run into Jonathan D. Sarna, ed., The American Jewish Experience: A Reader (second ed., 1997). Primary sources may be found in Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the American Globe: A Source Book (1996) and Morris U. Schappes, A Documentary History of the Jews in the U.s.a., 1654-1875 (3rd ed., 1971). The well-nigh thorough scholarly treatment of colonial American Jewry is Jacob Rader Marcus'southward The Colonial American Jew (1970). For a recent briefer handling, come across Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1820 (1992). On the Revolutionary menstruation, Samuel Rezneck's Unrecognized Patriots: The Jews in the American Revolution (1975) provides a helpful narrative, and Jonathan D. Sarna, Benny Kraut, and Samuel K. Joseph, eds., Jews and the Founding of the American Republic (1985) contains the major documents. For a skilful overview of the early national period, see the start volume of Jacob Racer Marcus, United states of america Jewry, 1776-1985 (1989). Biographies of leading American Jews of this period include Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (1981), Gary P. Zola, Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788-1829: Jewish Reformer and Intellectual (1994), and Lance Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (1995).

The key questions apropos Cardinal European Jewish immigration circumduct around religion and identity. Avraham Barkai'south Branching Out (1994) and Naomi Westward. Cohen's Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United states, 1830-1914 (1984) describe continuities and discontinuities betwixt the American and High german Jewish experiences, while Leon Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820-1870 (1976) traces the development of American Judaism as a procedure of ethnic religious innovation. Hasia Diner in A Time for Gathering: The 2nd Migration, 1820-1880 (1992) offers a broader portrayal of this menses, paying attention to Alsatian and Polish Jews, equally well as to issues of gender. The key book on the Civil State of war is Bertram W. Korn, American Jewry and the Ceremonious War (second. ed., 1970).

Because most of the contemporary American Jewish community descends from Eastern European Jewish immigrants, much of the literature of American Jewish history documents their story. Irving Howe'due south World of Our Fathers (1976) synthesizes much of what was known to that time. More recently, Susan Glenn'south Daughters of the Shtetl (1990) captures the challenges that faced Jewish immigrant girls, peculiarly in the labor movement. Jonathan D. Sarna, People Walk on Their Heads: Moses Weinberger'southward "Jews and Judaism in New York" (1981) makes bachelor an Orthodox rabbi'due south perspective on America from 1887. Finally, Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (1997) focuses on the immigrants themselves and how they "exercised a high degree of bureau in their growing identification with American society."

Jonathan Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History in the Section of Well-nigh Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. In addition to his publications cited in this essay, he is the co-editor of Minority Faiths and the Protestant Mainstream (University of Illinois Press, 1997) and The Jews of Boston (1995). He edits Brandeis Studies in American Jewish History, Culture and Life with the Academy Press of New England, and co-edits the American Jewish Civilisation Series at Wayne State University Printing. He is currently writing a new history of American Judaism to exist published past Yale University Press.

Jonathan Golden is a enquiry and educational activity assistant with Professor Sarna at Brandeis University and too a didactics banana with Professor Jay Harris at Harvard University. He holds an 1000.A. in Jewish pedagogy from Hebrew College in Boston. He recently co-authored an article with Professor Sarna on noteworthy events in Judaism in 1998 for the 1999 World Book Year Book.

Address comments or questions to Professor Sarna and Mr. Golden through TeacherServe "Comments and Questions."