JEWS

JEWS. In September 1654, twenty-three Sephardic Jews sailed into New Amsterdam's harbor aboard the St. Catherine. Fleeing the collapse of Dutch colonial rule in Brazil, the Jews sought refuge in New Amsterdam. They received a cold welcome from New Amsterdam's governor, Peter Stuyvesant, a Calvinist who viewed Jews as "blasphemers of the name of Christ" as well as a potential burden on his colonial coffers. Undeterred, the Jews appealed to brethren in Amsterdam to intervene on their behalf to the directors of the Dutch West India Company.

They succeeded. In 1655, the directors granted Jews permission to settle in New Amsterdam as long as they did not worship publicly, a right Jews had enjoyed in both Brazil and Amsterdam, and they assumed total responsibility for their indigent. In the colonies, economic potential often outweighed religious affiliation, and most white people enjoyed an equality of opportunity. The colonies consistently complained of labor shortages and the directors knew that Jews made good colonists: they quickly established roots in their new home, they remained loyal citizens, they developed international trade networks through contacts in Europe and the Caribbean, and wealth tended to flow along these networks. By forcing the poor Jews who arrived in 1654 to become a viable colonial population, perhaps the directors hoped that the new arrivals would stimulate needed economic growth. Beginning with New Amsterdam, Jews established communities in numerous colonial port cities, including New Port (1677), Savannah (1733), Philadelphia (1745), and Charleston (1750).

Establishing Communities

The Jews who settled in Dutch and, after 1664, British North America participated in a broad international migration that continued well into the twentieth century. They were Sephardim, part of the Iberian-Jewish diaspora created by the expulsion of all Jews from Spain and Portugal during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Soon, Ashkenazi Jews, who traced their roots to northern and central Europe, began to join the Sephardim. Generally poorer, and differing in religious ritual and Hebrew pronunciation, the Ashkenazim constituted the majority of American Jews by 1720.

Immediately upon arrival in North America, Jews established the necessities of full political and religious freedom. In 1655, the Jewish community received permission to construct a cemetery so they could bury the dead according to Jewish religious ritual. In 1656, one year after Lutherans lost their right to worship in their homes, Jews gained that exact privilege. After two years of legal wrestling, Asser Levy, one of New Amsterdam's, and later New York's, most prominent Jews, won Jews burgher rights—citizenship—in 1657. Although Jews did not receive the official right to worship publicly until the end of the seventeenth century, the nascent community worshiped in a building on Mill Street commonly known as the "Jew's Synagogue." The building, which included a mikveh, or ritual bath used primarily by women for rituals associated with family purity laws, served as colonial Jews' house of worship until 1728, when they established Shearith Israel, North America's first permanent synagogue.

Outwardly, the Jews who settled in America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not be distinguished from their neighbors. This, as well as the low number of marriageable Jews, led to the emergence of intermarriage as a common feature of American Jewish life. Jews differed from their peers, however, in their professional activities. Whereas non-Jewish immigrants tended to work in agriculture or artisanry, Jews concentrated in commerce. Relying primarily upon family and community ties, Jews established trade networks among the colonies, with the Caribbean, and with Europe. These business arrangements provided Jews with the bonds necessary to sustain religious, cultural, economic, and familial interests. By 1730, when about 300 Jews lived in New York, only two Jews listed occupations other than commerce.

While most Jewish merchants traded in rum, hardware, spices, candles, lumber, and fur, some found the most lucrative commodity to be African slaves. Lured by the promise of substantial profit, Jewish notables from the shipping center of Newport, Rhode Island, participated in the traffic of humans. Moreover, like many of their white neighbors, Jews in both the North and the South owned slaves. In fact, the 1703 census revealed that 75 percent of Jewish households owned slaves. Because slavery functioned as the central determinant of American political, economic, and social systems, owning—or seeking to liberate—slaves existed as a central feature of American life for both Jews and non-Jews alike until the Civil War (1861–1865).

The American Revolution and subsequent ratification of the Constitution legitimized the rights and ad hoc privileges that had organized American Jewish life during the past century. The Constitution instituted the legal separation of church and state—a condition of existence quite different from Europe, where religion could determine an individual's political and legal rights.

Nineteenth Century Arrivals

Beginning in the 1820s, a new migration of Jews from Europe began, one that would continue unabated until its climax during the first decades of the twentieth century. Jews migrated westward between 1820 and 1920 in response to upheavals in European society caused by political emancipation, industrialization, and urbanization. Unlike other immigrant groups, that often returned to Europe after earning enough money to sustain a family, Jews tended to immigrate permanently.

Between 1820 and 1880, the Jewish population in America rose from 4,000 to almost 250,000. Historians usually refer to members of this first wave as "German" immigrants, but the name is incorrect. Jewish immigrants who arrived in America between 1820 and 1880 generally left from areas eventually included in unified Germany (1871) or countries deeply influenced by German culture, such as Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia. Yet the pre-1880 contingent also included many Jews whose culture was decidedly Polish, from Silesia and Posen, provinces annexed by Prussia and later assumed into unified Germany, as well as Lithuania, western Russia, and Galicia. These Polish and Eastern European Jews, characterized by poverty, religious traditionalism, and the Yiddish language, more closely resembled the Jews who would begin their exodus to America in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

By the Civil War, Jews lived in over 160 communities in America. Many earned their keep by peddling, a profession that required no initial investment and functioned entirely on credit. Moreover, if successful, an itinerant peddler could earn enough to become a store owner. At a time when few retail stores existed outside the large cities, peddlers provided rural Americans and ethnic neighborhoods with their everyday necessities. Peddlers bought their supplies in large cities like New York, Chicago, or St. Louis and set out either for the hinterlands or the city streets. With their wares slung over their backs, on horse-carts, or on pushcarts, they roved from town to town or neighborhood to neighborhood selling small items like buttons, stoves, glass, needles, old clothes, and plates. Peddling resulted in the creation of extensive peddler-supplier-creditor networks in which Jews across the United States became linked in a collective endeavor to earn a living from the constant pulse of supply and demand. Indeed, this network of peddlers, general stores, and wholesalers served as the foundation for the evolution of the American department store.

Early Judaism in America

After the establishment of Shearith Israel in 1728, synagogues began to spring up wherever Jews settled, including the Touro Synagogue in Newport (1762) and Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia (1782). These first synagogues followed the traditional Sephardic rite. In 1801, resenting Sephardic control over synagogue administration and ritual, a group of Ashkenazim in Philadelphia formed the first "second" synagogue in an American Jewish community.

Because no ordained rabbi arrived in the United States until the 1840s, American Judaism developed almost entirely by improvisation. Moreover, due to their white skin color and their position outside the scope of nativist concerns with Irish Catholics, American Jewish modes of worship and religious institutions developed relatively free from outside interference. Laypeople generally led congregations and a synagogue's board determined religious ritual. Negotiating Jewish tradition, congregational demands, and desires for social acceptance, Jewish leaders oversaw a burgeoning American Judaism as chaotic and diverse as its new homeland. By the close of the 1800s, three major institutions—the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations—all claimed to speak for American Jewry.

Starting in 1870, the same processes that had led earlier arrivals to immigrate to America—market capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and growing anti-Jewish violence—set in motion a new migration from eastern Europe to America. Between 1870 and 1924, when Congress officially legislated the end of free and open immigration, the 2.5 million Jews who immigrated to the United States radically altered American Jewry's demography, social structure, cultural life, and communal order.

Adjusting to America

After crossing the Atlantic, Jewish immigrants landed at Ellis Island. There, they encountered employees of the U.S. government, who checked papers and performed rigorous medical exams, and representatives of settlement houses or the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, organizations founded in the late nineteenth century to guide immigrants through landing procedures and provide financial aid, shelter, professional training, and acculturation skills. Whether meeting a family member already established in America or arriving alone, most immigrants headed directly from Ellis Island to one of the major ethnic neighborhoods that saturated America's cities, such as Chicago's West Side, Boston's North End, downtown Philadelphia, or New York's Lower East Side.

The immigrant neighborhood bustled. A cacophony of life, work, and leisure, one square block could hold among its tenements workshops of the garment trades, synagogues, saloons, cafes, wives, children, intellectuals, political functionaries, religious students, gamblers, con artists, and prostitutes. By 1910, 540,000 Jews lived within the 1.5 square miles considered the Lower East Side, cramped into five-or six-story tenement houses. Entire families, as many as seven or eight people, lived in three-or four-room apartments. Often, they took in boarders to help pay the rent. Usually a single male, the boarder would occupy one full room in the tiny apartment, cramping the rest of the family into even smaller quarters.

In order to meet their monthly expenses, every family member earned wages. Generally poorer and more religious than their predecessors, the new arrivals made work a top priority. Unlike their predecessors, the Eastern European Jews who arrived in the decades surrounding the

turn of the century tended to be skilled laborers, primarily in the garment industry. In fact, in 1900, one out of every three Jewish immigrants labored in the garment trades, although cigar making, peddling, and butchering were also popular professions. Due to the pressure to earn money, women, working in the needle trades, and children, who labored on assembly lines or in the streets selling whatever possible, joined men in the factories, back-room sweatshops, and small street stalls.

To compensate for these tough conditions, Jews developed an array of cultural and political responses to their new environment. The Yiddish theater offered low-cost, high-quality performances of original plays, translations, comedies, and variety shows. Likewise, socialism and Zionism became the dominant secular ideologies of the immigrant neighborhood. The language of these political ideologies, Yiddish, served as a source of literary and theatrical productions. Between 1885 and 1914, over 150 Yiddish dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and yearbooks appeared in print.

Jewish immigrants also produced institutional responses to immigration. Modeled after American fraternal orders, Jews organized landsmanschaften, societies for individuals who originated from the same town. The landsmanschaften provided various forms of financial aid such as sick and bereavement benefits, and organized small synagogues, lectures, and social opportunities. Trade unionism also provided Jews with opportunities for mutual aid and political expression. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, the most famous of the Jewish trade unions, organized in 1900 to provide support to the thousands of women working in the needle trades. The union opened a health center, experimented in cooperative housing, provided unemployment and health insurance and retirement benefits, and offered recreational and vocational programs. In 1909, the union participated in one of the largest strikes to date, known as the "Uprising of the 20,000," where women shirtwaist workers protested their poor salaries, poor working conditions, and culture of sexual abuse.

The ethnic neighborhood served primarily as a way station for new immigrants. Although it served as the first place of residence for a tremendously high percentage of immigrant Jews, its piteous living conditions encouraged immigrants to move to better neighborhoods as quickly as possible. In these areas of second settlement, public schools, interethnic contacts, and American popular culture all served as a cauldron of integration, tutoring immigrants and their children how to look, sound, and act like Americans. Indeed, by the 1930s, American Jewry became, for the first time, a largely native-born population. Thus, when the depression hit, Jews, like all Americans, suffered financial hardship, bankruptcies, and barriers to financial and educational advancement, as well as the disappointment of the expectations that accompanied general upward mobility.

Following World War II (1939–1945), in which over half a million American Jews served in the armed forces, American Jewry experienced a profound period of social and economic mobility. The Holocaust caused many American Jews to approach life with a new sense of responsibility. Now the world's largest Jewish community, American Jewry aimed for success, both as Americans and as Jews. Most important, they aimed to eradicate the distinctions that had marked earlier generations. Because of the opportunities offered by the GI Bill, Jewish men and women entered higher education in record numbers. As a result, by the end of the twentieth century most of America's 6 million Jews claimed college degrees, worked in white-collar jobs, and enjoyed comfortable lifestyles. Moreover, Judaism experienced a second period of transformation.

As America's Jews became increasingly assimilated, they diversified from the orthodoxy that had characterized the eastern European immigrants to more Americanized forms of Jewish expression. The birth of the State of Israel catalyzed the American Zionist movement. Numerous Jews participated in a wellspring of Jewish cultural expression in literature, academia, dance, and film. Others chose new religious opportunities. Some found "modern" Orthodoxy, a movement to combine traditional Judaism's strict lifestyle constraints with the realities of modern American society. Others chose the Havurah movement, which sprang up in the 1960s. Influenced by 1960s counterculture, members of havurot rejected traditional Judaism's formalism and sought to invest Jewish ritual with greater spirituality and attention to social justice. Most American Jews, however, identified as Re-form or Conservative, American Jewry's mainline religious movements.

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