Sustaining an Ancestral Heritage

I N A LETTER to the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1843, a correspondent in New York observed:

It was a fair assessment. The language of Jews in the United States remained German for decades after their arrival. In the synagogue as in the home and shop, German remained the medium of discourse and sermon. As late as 1875, in Detroit, Congregation Beth El rebuked its rabbi for daring to preach in English rather than in the language of “higher culture.” It was a matter of pride, in the words of Rabbi Bernhard Felsenthal, that Jews in America remained “spiritually and culturally” German.

No German Gentile hurled himself more passionately into the activities of his kinsmen on American soil than did the Central European Jew. Notwithstanding initial German-Gentile reserve, even bemusement, Jewish participation in German societies, organizations, and institutions was intense and tireless. Well-educated and articulate, rabbis were especially prominent in German activities. Isaac Mayer Wise founded, in 1850, the German Literary Association of Albany, and served as its president for many years. The group held its meetings in his synagogue. When a national Sangerfest (choral festival) was scheduled for Cincinnati in 1870, Rabbi Max Lilienthal was elected its president. In 1893, Simon Wolf, a spokesman for Jewish causes in Washington, D.C., was elected president of the local Schillerbund, the preeminent German-American cultural society. Jews delivered the principal oration at the local Turnverein Independence Day pageant in Detroit, at the German Maifest in Memphis, at the Turnverein festival in Lancaster. Jews were leading members of almost every city's Gesangverein (singing society), including the Arion, New York's largest. Dr. Abraham Jacobi, a hero of Vienna's 1848 revolution, was a founder of the national Gesangverein of North America.

Max Cohnheim founded New York's German-language theater, and for decades Jews remained the theater's best-known writers, producers, directors, and patrons. Heinrich Conried (né Cohn), formerly a star of the Vienna Hofburg Theater, served as director of the Germanlanguage Thalia Theater through the 1880s, then of the “Conried Opera Company,” and finally spent a dozen years as owner-producerdirector of the Irving Place Theater, the leading home of German drama in the United States. Equally prominent in the German-American press, Jews were editors of the Musik Zeitung , the New Yorker Sozialistische Zeitung , the Allgemeine Zeitung , the Staats Zeitung . As in Europe, they played a founding role in the German-American labor movement. Charles Schiff was a leader of the Sozialreformassoziation, Sigismund Kaufmann of the Socialist Turnverein, and Max Herzheimer, Abraham Jacobi, and Max Cohnheim of the Amerikanische Arbeiterbund. Jews served as branch officers of these organizations in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati.

It was in their Jewish identification that the newcomers were rather more equivocal. As late as mid-century, prospects for Jewish ethno-religious survival in the United States were only marginally better than they had been in the colonial period. Jews had yet to achieve a demographic base in relation to the population as a whole. They made up one-tenth of 1 percent of the American people in 1790; one-twentieth of 1 percent in 1820; one-fourth of 1 percent in 1850; one-half of 1 percent in 1860. As late as 1850, too, a majority of the Jewish immigrants still were likely to be bachelors. As they scrabbled for a livelihood in the American hinterland, these lonely men could barely maintain even a semblance of their Jewish traditions. Moving from New England to the upper Ohio valley, our faithful peddlerdiarist Abraham Kohn wrote in palpable anguish:

More tempting than baptism, surely, was the nuptial companionship of Gentile women. In New Orleans, by 1840, the rate of intermarriage had reached 50 percent. In smaller communities it was almost certainly higher. With few exceptions, the children of these unions were reared as Christians.

Yet it was hardly isolation or anomie alone that undermined Jewish tradition. The Jews who responded to the challenge of the New World often were fleeing the parochialism of European Jewish life as much as the constraints of Gentile Europe. If they were not consciously abandoning Judaism—men like Abraham Kohn plainly were not—neither was their ancestral tradition likely to remain the obsession of their lives. Even in later waves of immigration, those Jews who were prepared to assume the risks of departure and settlement in the New World tended to be the least pious. Among other Americans, too, for that matter, the austere religiosity of the early colonial period had begun to fade. The inroads of the Enlightenment, the sheer physical distance from Church centers and Church authority, the adaptability required to conquer the vast American continent—all exerted their impact. Would not Jews, too, drift from their religious moorings? Struggling to learn a new language and to earn a living, they were not likely to give much thought to matters of religion beyond the bare minimum of a synagogue, a burial plot, and, if possible, the social companionship of other Jews.

In any case, there remained no kehillah in the United States, no authoritative Jewish community council in the European tradition, or even in the initial pattern of the earliest colonial American synagogues. During those earlier years there was but one minhag , or model of ritual observance, and it was that of the Sephardic tradition. The Central European newcomers accepted that tradition for many decades, and long after they outnumbered their Sephardic predecessors. By the early nineteenth century, however, their deference had faded. In some measure, the Sephardim themselves were responsible. Numerically overwhelmed by Central Europeans, they camouflaged their insecurities in exclusivity. It became common now for the “veterans” to reject Ashkenazic participation in their communal activities, to remain aloof from German charitable ventures. In 1825, when Central European members of Shearith Israel proposed the establishment of a Jewish hospital, the Sephardim disdained to join in the venture. Fifteen years later they refused participation with the Ashkenazim in a communal protest against the Damascus Blood Libel—the imprisonment of several Syrian Jews on trumped-up charges of ritual murder (see this page ).

For their part, the Central Europeans in their growing numbers felt confident and gregarious enough finally to organize their own congregations along “ethnic” lines. As early as 1795, a group of German-Jewish immigrants broke from Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel to found the German Hebrew Society (subsequently Rodeph Sholem). Thirty years later, the disgruntled German congregants of New York's Shearith Israel left en bloc to establish their own synagogue, B'nai Jeshurun. In Cincinnati and other Midwestern communities, Germanspeaking newcomers similarly were founding their own congregations. By 1840, of the nation's twenty-one largest congregations, fifteen were German-speaking and functioning under the Ashkenazic rite. But there were schisms within schisms. In 1828, a number of Polish Jews withdrew from Congregation B'nai Jeshurun to found the Anshe Chesed congregation, which they adapted to the more intimate folkmores of Eastern Europe. The fragmentation transcended issues of language and ritual. The Old World's social barriers lingered in America. Central Europeans did not feel comfortable praying cheek-by-jowl with the Hinterberliner —ostensibly, the more backward Jews from Eastern Europe—and still less so intermingling with them in a network of congregational activities. By 1861, of twenty-seven Jewish congregations in New York alone, at least six distinct ethnic-linguistic communities had developed. In this unfolding heterogeneity, what likelihood was there of maintaining the old European discipline, or even respect for a congregation's moral authority,?

That authority was further undermined by the ongoing dearth of ordained rabbis. For European Jews of authentic rabbinical learning, the United States, bereft as it was of Jewish books, seminaries, and scholarship, appeared little more than a cultural wasteland. It was left, accordingly, to the lay chazzan, the self-proclaimed “reverend” who functioned as cantor, reader, preacher, educator, circumciser, kosher slaughterer, and general factotum of his untutored local congregation. In 1842, a correspondent for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums described the plight of a New Orleans congregation whose “reverend” was a Mr. Markes:

Even the arrival of the first ordained rabbis, beginning with Abraham Rice in 1840, effected no revolution of “spiritual” leadership. It was the parnas , the lay president, who set congregation policy. The rabbi, chronically underpaid and muzzled on political issues, often was banned even from attending public meetings. The less the rabbinate offered in prestige and material rewards, the less it attracted capable men. RH9Rjf8FdN5uWz9OeH/isCjhak6/TCLcmL8dAEU+byEBjz5AePd/maJQct0CpbP0