The Chimera of Jewish Unity

A LTOGETHER, MUCH OF Leeser's effort was an investment in an uncertain future. One of his most fervent dreams was for Jewish organizational unity. Surely there were issues of ritual, dietary regulations, burial, divorce, women's and widow's rights that needed standardization among the various synagogues? Without structure, Jews in America were becoming more than nativized; they were becoming atomized. Isaac M. Wise recalled:

As early as 1841, then, Leeser came up with the scheme for a union of American Jewish congregations, functioning with a single liturgy and under a single “ecclesiastical” board, in the manner of his muchadmired Episcopal colleagues. The proposal died a swift death in the face of both traditionalist and modernist opposition. So did a later scheme for a bet din , a religious court to decide issues of Jewish law. And so did yet another project, a rabbinical seminary, Maimonides College.

If Jews could not find common ground for religious unity, Leeser speculated, perhaps they could achieve cohesion on more general issues affecting Jewish rights at home and abroad. Here too, however, he suffered defeat. It happened that there was a Jewish cause célèbre in 1840—the Damascus Blood Libel, the imprisonment of thirteen Syrian Jews for the alleged ritual murder of a Catholic priest. To secure their release, Jews in Western Europe won the intercession of their respective governments. American Jews shared in the diplomatic effort. From Secretary of State John Forsyth they elicited an official letter of protest to the Syrian authorities. Ultimately, most of the captives were released (several had died in prison). But Leeser experienced mixed emotions. Although gratified by the deliverance of the prisoners, he was saddened that the board members of “aristocratic” Shearith Israel had refused to share in the effort, even on an issue of Jewish life or death. Far removed from their own austere Sephardic origins, these putative grandees of America's mother synagogue had declined to be “manipulated” by a “mob” of Central Europeans. Their attitude was shared by Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel congregation, and even by San Francisco's Temple Emanuel, founded by lower-middle-class Bavarian Dorfjuden .

Now in late middle age, and convinced that his efforts for his people had failed, Leeser was suffering recurrent bouts of depression. By mid-century the number of synagogues had reached one hundred sixty, but the spiritual leadership and educational programs of these congregations were feeble. Their functions, too, had atrophied. Over time, with the dispersal of Jews to all corners of a vast continent, the sheer range of Jewish philanthropic and fraternal activities outstripped congregational resources. If twenty-seven synagogues were operating in New York in 1860, so were forty-four (essentially secular) charitable and benevolent associations. These included the North American Relief Society for Indigent Jews in Palestine, Jewish Orphan and Indigent Asylum, Jews Hospital, Jewish Dispensary, Hebrew Benevolent Society, Society for the Education of Poor Children and Relief of Indigent Persons, Montefiore Mutual Benefit Society, Bachelors Hebrew Benevolent Loan Association. Philadelphia's five synagogues were overshadowed by its seventeen philanthropic and fraternal societies, Baltimore's three congregations by its eleven societies—and so it went. For that matter, even the most impressively titled philanthropy often doubled as a façade essentially for social intercourse.

Thus, in middle-sized and smaller towns, the focus of Jewish intermingling became the lodge. It was an American innovation, linking the benevolent society's burial and insurance functions with the embellishments of ceremony, ritual, and honorific titles. Indeed, not a few acculturated American Jews were themselves active in the Masons, Knights of Pythias, and Odd Fellows. On the other hand, recent immigrants tended to prefer a lodge adapted to their still-vigorous German-Jewish ethnic needs. Accordingly, in 1843, twelve young German Jews, all of them New York retailers who gathered periodically for card-playing at Sinsheimer's Lower East Side saloon, came up with the notion of an organized Jewish fellowship. Eight of the group were members of the Masons or Odd Fellows. Only one was a devoted synagogue-goer. Plainly, they were seeking a respectable structure for their Jewish gregariousness. Their title for the new Verein was Bundes Brüder, until they were persuaded that the Hebrew name B'nai B'rith—Sons of the Covenant—was more dignified.

More portentous yet in its original German, the credo nicely cosmeticized the Order's functional obligations of collecting five dollars from each of its members to establish a widow-and-orphans fund, a sick fund, a burial fund. It provided the rationale, too, for a florid assortment of Masonic-style regalia, rituals, catechisms, grips, and passwords; for its officers to bear exalted Hebrew titles—Grand Nasi (president), Grand Aleph (vice president), Grand Sopher (secretary). The amalgam of pomp and function evidently struck a responsive chord. By 1861, B'nai B'rith lodges were operating in every major Jewish community in America.

Indeed, by then B'nai B'rith was transcending its initial, limited role as a benevolent fund, or even as a vehicle for status-satisfaction. It was becoming an instrument of acculturation. Its leadership encouraged social intermingling among the “brethren,” not merely to fortify the bonds of good fellowship but to enable the immigrant to learn from the established veteran, to allow the backward and uncouth newcomer to emulate his better-educated and more refined predecessor. In this manner, the Order presumably would help shatter the unflattering stereotype of the Jew and enable him to win swifter respectability and social acceptance in America. It was plainly a role the synagogue could not fulfill, no more than the synagogue could meet the requirements of education, philanthropy, or social communication. The United States simply was too large, its demands of space, time, and energy too rigorous, for the limited resources of the classical synagogue- kehillah . All but inexorably, an open and voluntaristic society was transforming the ancestral communal patterns of an immigrant minority. Indeed, well before mid-century, the challenge to American Jews no longer was to consolidate their religious or political freedom. It was to find a way of preserving their historic group identity against the matrix of a wider Americanization. ycIvABUva7j2NLx7Xjs8s85aNZfmhad3JNrgyOmsT0/O7T8G7ckt93GgvYEwp2Hq