Upheaval and Efflux in Central Europe

T HUS J OHANN G OETHE VOICED his people's mystic admiration for the New World. Between 1815 and the eve of the Civil War, two million German-speaking Europeans migrated to the United States. By 1875, the number would grow again by half. From the Atlantic seaboard cities to the new trans-Allegheny states, Swabian and Palatine regional dialects vied with English as a daily vernacular. As early as 1851, a group of German communities actually petitioned Congress to declare the United States a bilingual republic.

The initial impetus for this human tidal wave was the ruination left by the Napoleonic Wars. Subsequently, agricultural enclosures and the inroads of the early Industrial Revolution merely compounded economic chaos. From 1815 on, by the tens and hundreds of thousands, villagers and city-dwellers alike sought a new future overseas. Their destination of choice was overwhelmingly the United States. Gottfried Duden's Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America (1829), with its vivid descriptions of American political and social opportunities, became a catalyst for hundreds of articles, essays, and books, for innumerable discussions on the New World. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, as individuals and family groups alike, Germans traveled by river barge, by horse and wagon, and by foot; piled up in North Sea port cities; jammed the docks, the streets, the poorhouses; overflowed into the countryside. If they could not afford ocean passage, they signed on as indentured servants.

Jews were among them. Indeed, well before the American Revolution, German Jews comprised the majority of Jewish settlement in the colonies. Yet their numbers in the eighteenth century were minuscule, and during the Napoleonic Wars their immigration stopped altogether. It did not revive until the 1820s, In common with most Central Europeans, Jews suffered from postwar desolation and the trauma of adjustment to a preindustrial society. In backward southern and western Germany, however, particularly in Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Hesse, and the Palatinate, Jews experienced an additional refinement of political oppression. Without special letters of “protection” from their governments, they were barred from the normal trades and professions. If a Jewish youth sought to marry, he was obliged to purchase a matrikel , a registration certificate costing as much as a thousand gulden. For that matter, even a matrikel holder had to prove that he was engaged in a “respectable” trade or profession, and large numbers of young Jews were “unrespectable” peddlers or cattle dealers. Facing an endless bachelorhood, then, many preferred to try their fortunes abroad.

No less than their Gentile neighbors, Jews were seized by the image of a golden America, “the common man's utopia.” They, too, read the numerous guide-and travel books then being circulated by shipping agents and United States consulates. More important, they read and endlessly discussed letters from relatives and friends in the New World or letters published in the German-Jewish press. Often these newspapers added their own editorial encouragement to depart “Why should not young Jews transfer their desires and powers to hospitable North America,” observed the Allgemeine Zeitung des judenturns in 1839, “where they can live freely alongside members of all confessions... [and] where they don't at least have to bear this?” In 1840 a correspondent for the Israelitische Annalen wrote: “From Swabia ... the emigration-fever has steadily increased among the Israelites of our district and seems about to reach its high point. In nearly every community there are numerous individuals who are preparing to leave the fatherland ... and seek their fortune on the other side of the ocean.” The Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums reported that all young Jewish males in the Franconian towns of Hagenbach, Öttingen, and Warnbach had emigrated or were about to emigrate. From Bavaria, by 1840, at least ten thousand Jews had departed for the United States.

It was an emigration largely of poorer, undereducated, smalltown Jews. Most were single men. Unlike their Gentile neighbors, Jewish families rarely were able to sell a homestead large enough to cover a group departure. Afterward, however, once settled and solvent in America, émigrés could be depended upon to send for brothers, sisters, fiancées. Thus, Joseph Seligmann (later Seligman), who would achieve eminence in America as an investment banker, departed Bavaria in 1837 at age seventeen, sent for his two eldest brothers in 1839, and for a third brother two years after that. By 1843, seven more brothers and sisters and his widowed father had been brought over. It was a chain reaction of emigration.

Yet, even the trek to a European port city was a harsh challenge in the early nineteenth century. In common with other Germans, the early Jewish emigrants made their way by coach, wagon, or foot to staging points at Mainz and Meiningen, before continuing on to Hamburg, Rotterdam, or Le Havre. With them they took packages of dried kosher food, and often family Bibles and prayer books. Any talisman was welcome. Wilhelm Frank, who helped establish the Jewish community in Pittsburgh, recalled his departure from Burgpreppach, Bavaria, in 1819:

In a letter to his family that same year of 1819, a young Würtemberg Jew, Wolf Samuel, described his ship voyage:

Not all voyages went as “safely.” In 1931 an aged woman recalled her own odyssey from Tresteny, Poland, in 1856. With her parents and five brothers and sisters, she traveled by covered wagon to Danzig. From Danzig, the family sailed for Liverpool, and from Liverpool to Boston:

The migration never stopped. In 1820, some thirty-five hundred Jews were living in the United States. By 1840, their numbers reached fifteen thousand; by 1847, fifty thousand. Like their predecessors, most of the immigrants gravitated to the cities. New York continued as their first choice. In 1840, ten thousand Jews lived there, in 1850, sixteen thousand—30 percent of the American Jewish population. By 1850, six thousand Jews lived in Philadelphia, four thousand in Baltimore. There were valleys as well as peaks in the new Jewish demography. Charleston's Jewish community shared in their city's dignified decline after 1820, when steam vessels became less dependent on the southern, trade-wind route to America. By contrast, a new and vital Jewish nucleus sprang up in the inland city of Cincinnati. From the 1830s on, paddle steamers served as the backbone of western commerce, and Cincinnati's location on a convenient bend in the Ohio River made it a natural gateway to the markets of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. By 1840, some one hundred fifteen thousand people lived there—a majority of them German immigrants. Possibly fifteen hundred of these were Jews. By 1860, ten thousand were Jews.

Urban concentration also reflected a Jewish vocational pattern. As in Europe, Jews in America dealt extensively in clothing. Portable and nonperishable, clothing resisted the vicissitudes of the market. Cheap, secondhand garments were particularly merchandisable. Indeed, prior to the Civil War, trade in “old clothes” outweighed that in new clothing. As early as the 1830s, secondhand clothing became virtually a Jewish monopoly. Writing in 1845, Cornelius Matthews left a naturalistic description of the “ol' clothes” shops on New York's Chatham Street:

In their urgency to win a foothold, immigrant Jewish clothiers also pioneered the technique of installment payments. It was an irresistible lure for buyers.

As in Europe, a characteristic early Jewish offshoot of shop retailing was peddlery, especially on the agricultural frontier, where general stores were far between. The immigrant Jew was by no means an original in country peddling. Throughout the eighteenth century, it was the itinerant Yankee who dominated the field. By the 1800s, however, the Yankee had settled into a small-town storekeeper, and the German Jew was free to cater specifically to his fellow Germans, whose language, tastes, and needs he understood from the Old Country. Thus, starting out from his initial port of call, the immigrant made his way from New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore to the hinterland. His routes were determined by the new canals and roads to upstate villages and Western farm sites, and particularly by the Ohio River system, the region encompassing the largest German population. By 1850, some ten thousand country peddlers—overwhelmingly Jews—were at work in the United States, and by 1860 perhaps fifteen or sixteen thousand. A complex economic network sustained them. Eastern Jewish manufacturers supplied Jewish wholesalers in such large Western cities as Cincinnati. Cincinnati Jewish wholesalers supplied local Jewish retail merchants. Local Jewish retail merchants in turn provided goods on consignment to Jewish peddlers, who fanned out to isolated farm families throughout the Ohio Valley. The system functioned identically in upstate New York or western Pennsylvania.

In whichever region, the country peddler's lot was a hard one. On the road in a strange land, barely negotiating the English language between German-speaking outposts, he was exposed to taunts, bullying, robbery. Above all, he suffered from loneliness. Characteristic was the lament of Abraham Kohn, a twenty-three-year-old Bavarian immigrant who arrived in America in 1842 and set to work immediately pack-peddling in New England:

It was a poignant moment when one encountered a fellow Jew. “On Saturday afternoon, May 20th,” wrote Kohn (working on the Jewish Sabbath), “I saw a peddler pass by. ‘Hello, sir,' I hailed him. ‘How are you?' It turned out to be be Samuel Zirndorfer from Fürth. Alas, how the poor devil looked. Thus one man with eighty pounds on his back meets another with fifty pounds on his back some four thousand miles away from their native town. If I had known of this a year ago, how different things might be now!” Nevertheless, by hard work and thrift, the immigrant could progress from pack peddler to horse-and-cart chapman, then to the proprietorship of a tiny general store, or even to wholesale distribution. Eventually he might share in the actual manufacture of clothing. In this fashion, Cincinnati, Rochester, Baltimore, and of course New York became important Jewish manufacturing and distribution centers. SRLqUtIH8pf0DJx3ZGEg4FOl0e5VbYxCupLWRiakkeFSvR3vdp0RYWtPePrgfD5+