The Jews of Public Perception

J EWS IN PRIVATE life, meanwhile, concentrated upon the more pedestrian tasks of earning their livelihoods and of achieving a wider measure of social respectability and acceptance. Obstacles still lingered. Among the German-Gentile immigrant population, transplanted stereotypes of the Jew were not easily dissipated. If the German sought a better chance for himself in the United States, not infrequently he denigrated the Jew's presence there as somehow tainted, usually by intimations of draft-dodging or tax evasion. A stock early-nineteenth-century figure in comic German-American literature, the Jew also was the “missionary of Kleider-Kultur ,” endlessly pulling victims into his Bowery secondhand clothing store. If a Jew enjoyed the amenities of life, his upward mobility became the object of caricature. In a wicked allusion to New York Jewish theatergoers, a German-language journal in 1848 suggested:

You will, dear reader, recognize them at a glance by the way they carry their elbows. But should your eyes not recognize them—well, then, your nose will let you know in the midst of which species you find yourself.

If these portrayals normally lacked their Old World venom, they helped preserve the Jewish image of trickster and cheap-jack. Occasionally they cut even closer to the bone. The Boston correspondent of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums noted in 1841 the frequent charges of Jewish fraud that appeared in German-American journals. In 1867, “Germania,” the German-American fire insurance company, instructed its agents to transmit all Jewish applications to the head office for “special evaluation.” When Jewish communal leaders in New York protested, Germania's chairman explained in an open letter to the New Yorker Handelszeitung that the company's policy applied not to “respectable” Jews but to “second-hand goods dealers, hucksters, adventurers, Jewish war profiteers.” The notion of the Jewish small merchant as an insurance-collecting arsonist was so widespread that it appeared in German-American anecdotes and songbooks.

Did these stereotypes have any basis in fact? To a limited extent. The aggressiveness of secondhand-clothing dealers and country peddlers was as much a topic of bemusement, even embarrassment, among Jews as among Gentiles. A prominent Jewish “reverend,” Isaac Leeser (see this page ), pleading for wider vocational diversity, cautioned that “the very nature ... of seeking a livelihood by means of small trading of this sort has a debasing influence on the mind.” Yet the incidence of peculation was never higher among Jews than among non-Jews. It was instructive that newspaper cartoons of the time had a field day with the epic fraud, corruption, and greed that infected all levels of commerce and government. The objects of their gibes almost invariably were Gentiles. So, as a rule, were the occupants of American prisons. Nevertheless, the attitude of the “native” toward the Jew was not significantly more benign than that of the German immigrant. At best, Americans still regarded the Jew with wary curiosity. In politics, Mordecai M. Noah's ancestry became a prime target of his Whig opponents. In Florida, David Levy, a veteran politico who worked his way up to the United States Senate, encountered so many crude references to his Jewishness that he changed his name to Yulee and disaffiliated from Judaism altogether. In Pittsburgh, one John Israel abandoned his campaign for public office when he failed to convince voters that he was not a Jew. In 1832, James J. Stark, a Georgia legislator, labeled his public opponent, Dr. Phillip Minis, “a damned Jew [who] ought to be pissed on.” Following local custom, Minis then called Stark out, and in the ensuing duel killed him.

Neither did Jews encounter a bed of roses in the marketplace. Even as insurance companies withheld policies, banks often withheld credit from Jewish shopkeepers. The rationale was the tendency of Jewish retailers to invest in inventory rather than in such redeemable collateral as homes and land. The credit reports published by the R. G. Dun and J. M. Bradstreet companies specifically identified Jewish businessmen as “Hebrew” or “Israelite” or “Jew,” and embellished their evaluations. Thus, of Joseph Schwartz, Middle, Missouri; “a German Jew ... tricky ... slippery German.” Moses Bloom, Cincinnati: “Very sharp Israelite... . bound to have the best of a bargain if possible and to be dealt with cautiously.” Ackerland, Goodheart & Co., Peoria: “Jews in every sense of the word... . ” I. H. Heinsheimer, Burlington, Iowa: “Has all the money making and money saving characteristics of his race.” A clothing merchant in Indianapolis: “We should deem him safe but he is not a white man. He is a Jew, and that you can take into account.” A sizable clothing firm in Cincinnati: “They are Jews and little reliance can be placed on their representations.” Small wonder that Jewish businessmen, especially peddlers and storekeepers, depended so heavily upon their fellow Jews for start-up credit.

The Jewish image that emerged in early American journalism similarly was of a huckster and a “Shyloek.” Walt Whitman wrote dismissively of “dirty looking German Jews” roaming New York's Broadway. George G. Foster's widely read travelogue, New York by Gaslight (1850), devoted an entire chapter to the Jewish business enclave on lower Broadway: “There can be found the ‘fences,' or shops for the reception and purchase of stolen goods,” he observed. “These shops are of course kept entirely by Jews.” A visitor would have no difficulty identifying the denizens of lower Broadway. “The roundness and suppleness of limb, the elasticity of flesh, the glittering eye-sparkle, are as inevitable in the Jew ... as the hook of the nose which betrays the Israelite as a human kite, formed to be feared, hated and despised, yet to prey upon mankind.” Early American popular literature further embellished the stereotype. The Judas play, a standard offering in Western towns, presented as stock figures the opéra-bouffe Jew peddler or grotesque Shylock.

There was little ideological fervor in these portrayals. Nevertheless, in the hands of mass-market writers, the money-obsessed Jew became a literary cliché of the early nineteenth century. In 1844 a wildly popular novel, George Lippard's The Monks of Monk Hall , began its ten-part serialization in the Saturday Evening Post , before appearing in book form the following year. Interwoven with its sinister gothic setting of lushly decorated rooms, underground vaults, death pits, and eerie illumination, The Monks of Monk Hall described a scheme to forge letters of credit and embezzle $200,000. The master forger is a Jew, Gabriel Van Gelt, whose “horse's head [was] affixed to a remnant of a human body... . ‘Jew' was written on his face as clearly and distinctly as though he had fallen asleep at the Temple of Jerusalem ... and after a nap of three thousand years had waked up in the Quaker City in a state of perfect and Hebraic preservation.” In the end, Van Gelt is hanged by his fellow scoundrels. The Monks of Monk Hall went through thirty editions in four years. A parallel series of unappetizing Jewish heavies appeared in the widely read novels of Charles F. Briggs. The Adventures of Harry Franco (1839) portrays an innocent bumpkin cheated by a Mr. Isaacs, a man with “a nose both high and long, and his eyes were very black, but large and heavy; his hair was black and crispy, and he had a stoop in his shoulders.” Other novels by Briggs, and those of his contemporary, the prolific John Beauchamp Jones, were similarly replete with unsavory Jews—and with libidinously exotic Jewish daughters, who usually were redeemed at book's end by conversion and marriage to a Christian.

Yet if literature popularized stereotypes, it was incapable alone of vitiating firsthand relationships with living Jews. These contacts not infrequently were equable, occasionally cordial. As the nineteenth century progressed, James Gordon Bennett's rabble-rousing New York Herald could at one moment revile Jews as cheap-jacks who “deserve to be hung high as Haman for their charlatanism,” and then find numerous Jews who were “excellent men, excellent fathers, excellent husbands, excellent citizens.” “It is strange,” mused the Boston Daily Gazette , “that a nation that boasts so many good traits should be so obnoxious.” In his memoirs, Joseph Jonas, the first Jew in Cincinnati, recalled that fifty-two Gentiles contributed twenty-five dollars each to help construct the city's first synagogue. At the consecration in 1835, “the crowd of our Christian friends was so great that we could not admit them all... . ” An early Jewish settler of Chicago, Leopold Mayer, described Jews serving as officers of the city's best-known political and fraternal organizations, Jews attending balls and festivals who “were never in the least looked upon as undesirable.” As late as mid-century, Jews rarely evoked active hostility—or, in truth, much serious interest one way or the other. jgEPFTVGIwUc+FJ3q2eoNVvhUWOoNXQzW1egPCFt6bqN2vKwjgCOT/WxHdhjFFFc