The Struggle for Cultural Identity

N EVERTHELESS, IN THE THREE DECADES before the Civil War, it was precisely one of the “reverends,” Isaac Leeser, who came closest to filling the vacuum of American Jewish religious leadership. A protean figure, Leeser functioned as sermonizer, writer, translator, organizer, and interfaith diplomat. Ironically, his own Jewish education in Prussian Westphalia consisted almost exclusively of a cheder , a parochial primary school. At the age of fourteen he enrolled in a secular school in Münster, and his Jewish education thereby ceased. In 1824, at the age of nineteen, Leeser immigrated to the United States to work in an uncle's general store in Richmond, Virginia. There, assisting the local chazzan, he found himself obliged to master the Sephardic ritual within a matter of weeks. He did, and managed also to devote renewed attention to traditional Jewish texts. Becoming proficient in English within two years, young Leeser soon acquired a modest following by dint of lucid sermons and an ingratiating series of articles on the “essence of Judaism” for a Richmond newspaper. Indeed, it was the latter that won him an invitation in 1829 to become chazzan of Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel congregation.

By then Leeser had formulated his Bible-centered approach to American Judaism, with its emphasis on popular sermons. Openly acknowledging his debt to the American Protestant ministry and its concern for biblical studies and “Biblical Tract” societies, Leeser himself in later years translated selected chapters of the Hebrew Bible into readable—non-archaic—English, then proceeded to translate both the Sephardic and Ashkenazic prayer books. Yet Leeser's greatest impact was achieved through his sermons. He published them and mailed copies to virtually every Jewish congregation east of the Alleghenies, then followed up with personal visits to-many of them. Physically quite homely, with a prognathous jaw and a nearsighted squint, lacking a wife and children, Leeser compensated by the sheer dynamism and diversity of his activities.

One of the most important of those enterprises was Leeser's monthly congregational newsletter, Occident , begun in 1843. The nation's first English-language Jewish newspaper, Occident for several decades was also by far the most widely read. Within its eighttotenpage format, Leeser published extracts of his sermons, homilies, descriptions of his travels, news items, and financial appeals from European and outlying American-Jewish communities. With a kind of Rotarian enthusiasm, he could write, in a typical column of 1846:

Although a fragile conduit of Jewish information, Occident was prized by its readers as much for its tone of indefatigable optimism as for its news items and opinions.

In the pages of Occident , too, Leeser was a vigorous advocate of Jewish literary creativity. “It is really a pity,” he insisted, “that a people so naturally intelligent should have furnished so small an amount of literary production in England and America, and of this, so little towards the elucidation of our religion.” The man was not naive. He understood that German remained the language of most American Jews, that their preoccupation was economic survival, not literary self-expression. Even so, there had been modest préfigurations of creativity. One of these was Penina Moise. The Charleston-born daughter of Sephardim who had fled the 1791 slave insurrection in Santo Domingo, Moise was a plain-featured spinster who found solace in composing devotional hymns and verses. Some of these appeared in literary journals, and one, “To Persecuted Foreigners,” published in the Southern Patriot in 1820, strikingly anticipated Emma Lazarus's “New Colossus” of seventy years later. It was a response to anti-Jewish riots in Germany:

In 1833, Moise's collection, Fancy's Sketch Book , became the first book of verse published by an American Jew. If little of this poetasting was inspired, the quiet heroism of Moise's life evoked respect. Desperately poor, she supported her aged, bed-ridden parents by making lace and embroidery. Later she and her spinster sister eked out their subsistence as mistresses of a girls' academy. Although blind the last fifteen years of her life, Penina Moise did not stop teaching or writing until her death at age eighty-six.

For his part, Leeser was determined that no literary effort of Jewish content, however pedestrian, would lack for readers. To that end, in 1845 he established in Philadelphia the Jewish Publication Society. The society managed to publish fourteen volumes, most of them reprints of small, pietistic works originally put out in London, but also including Leeser's own book, The Jews and Their Religion . The venture ended in 1851 with the destruction of the press's stock by fire. Afterward, not an issue of Occident appeared without at least its minimal quota of poetry or fiction. Virtually all the contributors were women, among them Celia Moss, Marion Hartog, Rebecca Hyneman, Grace Aguilar, and Sarah Cohen. Their writing, melodramatic and often mildly hysterical, is long forgotten.

A more urgent concern for Leeser was Jewish education. It was a wasteland. American-born Jews tended to register their children in Christian “academies.” Immigrant parents would not touch these institutions. In the 1840s, the immigrants' indignation touched off a brief upsurge of private (nonsynagogue) Jewish day schools, which taught both secular and Jewish subjects. Several of these institutions were first-rate. An “academy” established by Dr. Julius Sachs in 1859 developed into possibly the best private school in New York. Yet the “Jewish” course offerings soon were dropped, and with the growth of the public school system most Jewish families lost interest in private education of any kind. Although traditional Jews occasionally sent their children to a talmud torah —a supplementary or afternoon school devoted to Jewish religious subjects—few of these after-hours study sessions were effective, and their registration was minimal. As in the colonial period, it was the synagogue chazzan who normally tutored boys for their bar mitzvah.

Over the years, then, even the most acculturated American Jewish parents felt compelled to give attention to the educational lacuna. The growing prevalence of intermarriage terrified them all, whether in remote towns or in large Eastern cities. Early in the century, New York Jewish society had been rocked when the daughter of Joseph Simon, an eminent Jewish businessman, married into the patrician Schuyler clan. Simon's granddaughter, Rebecca Gratz, herself the product of a “fully” Jewish union, lived with the pain of that estrangement, and with the even more intimate humiliation of her youngest brother's marriage to a Christian. The Gratzes were among the nation's oldest and best-connected Jewish families, after all. Presumably they shared the obligation of setting the tone for newer waves of immigrant Jews. Rebecca Gratz felt that duty personally and profoundly. A belle of Philadelphia society, she had been eclectic in her youthful friendships. Among her Christian admirers, Washington Irving was impressed by her beauty and charm, and particularly by her devotion to his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman, whom Rebecca nursed during her fatal illness. In England, later, Irving described Rebecca Gratz lovingly to Sir Walter Scott. The description seems to have registered, for on it Scott evidently modeled the Rebecca of his Ivanhoe . After publishing the novel, Scott wrote to Irving in 1819: “How do you like your Rebecca? Does the Rebecca I have pictured compare well with the pattern given?” The interfaith love affair surely did. Like her aunt and brother before her, Rebecca Gratz fell in love with a Gentile—in her case, Samuel Ewing, son of the president of Yale University. But despite his ardent pursuit, she would not marry out of the faith, and, accordingly, never married at all. Instead, she devoted the rest of her seventy-eight years to philanthropic and other communal causes.

It was the welfare of Jewish children, not surprisingly, that became the obsession of this gentle spinster's life. Contemplating the success of the Protestant Sunday-school movement, Gratz wondered if it might be a likely model for Jewish youngsters. She discussed the idea with her minister, Isaac Leeser, and the great man agreed wholeheartedly. With his support, Gratz thereupon raised the initial funds for the Hebrew Sunday School Society in Philadelphia, and in 1838 the prototype school was opened. The going was slow. Textbooks were nonexistent, and Gratz and other volunteer teachers had to make do at first with adapted Christian primers. Eventually Leeser himself produced a series of Jewish texts, with simplified Bible and history lessons, some of them accompanied by two-tone sepia illustrations. He was also a frequent visitor to classes. “With his strangely pock-marked face, gold spectacles and inexhaustible fund of ever-ready information,” recalled Gratz, “... he knew every child and teacher, called each by name, and nothing was too trivial or intricate to claim his clear explanation.” Still, for all the effort expended, years would pass before the Sunday-school concept gained root in Jewish communities outside Philadelphia. VJ2g/96FU6xeA3nftYSkKGt9hD77VWB/uvEv/WOy1fLfLwavHCKTJnf/9ldFGH4Z