History of the Jews (66 page)

Hence at the time of the great emigration, American Jewry seemed fated to remain yet another strand of the worthy fabric of New World religiosity, wearing and fading imperceptibly into the whole. The panic set in motion by the 1881 disaster changed that prospect irrevocably. In the decade 1881-92, Jews were arriving in the US at the rate of 19,000 a year; in the decade 1892-1903, the average jumped to 37,000 a year; and in the twelve years 1903-14 it averaged 76,000. These two million refugee Jews had very little in common with the quarter-million genteel, Reformist, well-heeled, American-minded and increasingly apprehensive established Jews who greeted them. They were overwhelmingly Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox or hasidic, wild-eyed and frightened, superstitious and desperately poor. For the first time, American Jewry began to fear new arrivals, especially in such staggering numbers. They rightly judged that an anti-Semitic reaction was inevitable.

Hitherto, mainstream Protestant America, like England before it, had been papist-baiting rather than Jew-baiting. But since the Civil War, when the Jews had been perceived as war-profiteers, anti-Semitism had become noticeable. In 1876, a hotel on the New Jersey coast announced publicly in the newspapers that it would not admit Jews. The next year Joseph Seligman himself was refused admission to the leading hotel in the resort of Saratoga. Jewish businessmen then bought several Saratoga hotels, and as a result, throughout the New York area, resort hotels split into those which would, and those which would not, accommodate Jews. The habit spread to masonic lodges and country clubs, and some schools and colleges began to adopt a
numerus clausus
, on Russian lines.

The mass arrival of poor Ashkenazi Jews in New York naturally force-fed the growth of this new anti-Semitic sub-culture. But, infinitely more important, the immigrants gave the kiss of life to American Jewry. They transformed it from an exercise in gentility, doomed to mortify, into a vibrant creature of an entirely new kind—a free people, cradled in a tolerant republic, but shouting their faith and their nature from the rooftops of a city they turned into the greatest Jewish metropolis in the world. Here was a true City of Refuge, and
more than that—the nucleus of a power which in time would exert itself effectively on behalf of Jews throughout the world.

The wealthy Jews of New York did not yet grasp the opportunities the flight from Europe would create. If, like so many events in Jewish history—like the massacres of 1648, for example—it could eventually be interpreted as part of a providential plan, bringing triumph from tragedy, that was not how they saw it at the time. To do them justice, they stifled their apprehensions and did all in their power to welcome and absorb the eastern masses. But some were more perceptive. Among those who worked for the Jewish immigrant relief agency set up on Ward Island was the young poetess Emma Lazarus (1849-87). Her talent had been detected and cultivated by Emerson. She burned with romantic zeal for Jewish culture, ancient and modern. She translated the great medieval poet Judah Halevi. She translated Heine. She saluted Longfellow’s moving poem on Newport Cemetery but deplored its dismissive ending: ‘And the dead nations never rise again.’ It was not true! The Jews would rise again! She came of an old and wealthy Sephardi family, but she saw in the poor Ashkenazi Jews pushing their way through US immigration with their bundles the elements of a future army which would rebuild Jerusalem in America, or in Israel—perhaps in both. She defended them against anti-Semitic smears in the magazine
New Century
(1882). She grasped, perhaps better than anyone else in America at that time, the true significance of the American idea and the American reality to the persecuted poor of Europe. When the Statue of Liberty was raised at the entrance to New York harbour, her sonnet, ‘The New Colossus’, gave Liberty an immortal voice:

 

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss’t to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

 

In particular, Emma Lazarus understood the meaning of America for world Jewry. Would not in time the huddled masses stand upright, grow strong and stretch a powerful hand from the New World back to the Old? Her poem, ‘The Banner of a Jew’, is Zionist. Her ‘An Epistle to the Hebrews’ (1882-3) foresees a revival of Jewish civilization through mutual action from America and the Holy Land. In the wretched refuse of Ashkenazi Jewry accumulating in the New York slums she saw not only life but hope.
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There was certainly life, in daunting abundance. When the new
arrivals flooded into New York, the fashionable German-type synagogues moved uptown on Manhattan. The refugees crowded into the Lower East Side, into one and a half square miles bounded by the Bowery, Third Avenue, Catherine Street, 14th Street and the East River. Here, by 1910, 540,000 Jews were crammed into what were called Dumbbell Tenements, their shape determined by a 1879 municipal regulation which required airshafts. They were five to eight storeys high, 25 feet wide, 100 feet deep, each floor with fourteen rooms, only one of which got any light. The heart of New York Jewry was the ultra-dense Tenth Ward, where 74,401 people lived in 1,196 tenements spread over forty-six blocks (1893). This meant a density of 701.9 people an acre. Here too was the source of the ‘needle trades’, in which most of the immigrants were employed, cutting and sewing ready-made clothes, working a seventy-hour week, twelve to a tiny room. Already by 1888 234 out of 241 New York clothing firms were Jewish; by 1913 it was New York’s biggest industry, 16,552 factories, nearly all Jewish, employing 312,245 people.

Was this sweated labour? It was. It was also the great engine of upward mobility. The refugees arrived frightened and submissive. A Yiddish newspaper noted (1884): ‘In the philanthropic institutions of our aristocratic German Jews you see beautiful offices, desks, all decorated, but strict and severe faces. Every poor man is questioned like a criminal, is looked down upon; every unfortunate suffers self-degradation and shivers like a leaf, just as if he was standing before a Russian official.’
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Twenty years later, the submissive spirit had gone. An entire Jewish-led labour movement had been created and established its power through four dramatic strikes. By their needles, too, the eastern Jews pushed their way into independence and respect. The average stay of Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side was only fifteen years. Then they moved on, first to Harlem (once a wealthy German-Jewish quarter), then to the Bronx and Washington Heights, then to Coney Island, Flatbush, Boro Park and the Eastern Parkway. Their children went to colleges and universities; vast numbers became doctors and lawyers. Others became small businessmen; then big businessmen. Across America, one-time Jewish pedlars had created mail-order firms, epitomized by Julius Rosenwald’s Sears, Roebuck. In New York, Jews moved from small stores and workshops to vast department stores. The family of Benjamin Bloomingdale from Bavaria, who opened a dry-goods store in 1872, had 1,000 employees in their East Side shop by 1888. The Altman Brothers had 1,600 in their store. Isidor and Nathan Straus took over R.H. Macy. Other family groups created Gimbels, Sterns and, in Brooklyn, Abraham & Straus.
By the 1900s, with a million Yiddish-speakers, New York had the world’s largest Yiddish press, selling 600,000 copies daily, and with four major titles:
Warheit
(radical and nationalist),
Jewish Morning Journal
(Orthodox and conservative),
Forward
(socialist),
Tageblat
(Orthodox and Zionist). But Jews soon dominated the New York printed word in English too. Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Arthur Ochs ran the
New York Times
, Dorothy Schiff and J. David Stern the
New York Post
; and in time great Jewish publishing houses emerged—Horace Liveright created Liveright & Boni, George Oppenheim and Harold Guinzburg created Viking Press, Richard Leo Simon and Lincoln Schuster made Simon & Schuster, Bennett Cerf developed Random House and Alfred Knopf founded Alfred A. Knopf. By this time Manhattan and Brooklyn each had Jewish settlements of over 600,000. In the Bronx Jews were 38 per cent of the total population; in New York as a whole Jews made up 29 per cent, by far the largest ethnic group. With 1,640,000 Jews (1920), New York was easily the biggest Jewish (and Yiddish) city on earth. In 1880, American Jewry was just over a quarter of a million out of a nation of fifty million; forty years later, in a nation of 115 million, it had jumped to 4.5 million, an eighteen-fold increase.

There was no possibility of this immense Jewry simply merging into its American background. It was the epitome and summation of all Jewry and contained in its ranks some of the most passionate exponents of Judaism in its most rigorous form. In 1880 some 90 per cent of American’s 200-plus synagogues were Reform institutions. But their dominance was untenable as the new arrivals made their voice and power heard. In 1883 there was a notorious scene at the first graduation dinner at the Hebrew Union College, the main, Reform-controlled rabbinical seminary in the US. Shrimp and other non-kosher food was served. There was uproar, and many distinguished rabbis walked out in outrage and disgust. Thereafter a rapid realignment of American Jewry took place. In 1886 the Conservatives founded their own Jewish Theological Seminary. The Orthodox also formed an institutional framework. Even by 1890, 316 out of 533 US congregations were Orthodox. In time, a threefold structure emerged, with the Conservatives in the lead, the Orthodox second and Reform a mere third. By 1910 the spread of varieties of American Judaism was enormous. The wealthier Reform synagogues had preachers in Anglican-style robes, English services, mixed seating, choirs and organs. Rabbi Judah Magnes, of the fashionable Temple Emanu-El, proudly told his New York congregation that year: ‘A prominent Christian lawyer of another city has told me that he entered this
building at the beginning of a service on Sunday morning and did not discover that he was in a synagogue until a chance remark of the preacher betrayed it.’
¹²⁷
But within five miles it was possible to find Jewish congregations where the Maharal of Prague, the Ba’al Shem Tov or the Vilna Gaon would, each in turn, have felt equally at home. By that time too, American Jewry represented every strand of secular Judaism. It was not yet in a position to point overwhelmingly in a particular direction, let alone provide leadership for world Jewry. But it was becoming organized: in 1906 the American Jewish Committee was established. It was building up numerical, financial, economic and above all political strength, to constitute a huge supportive force once Jews throughout the world reached a majority consensus on their future. All this was the direct consequence of the 1881 tragedy.

But there were other consequences. It was as though history was slowly solving a great jigsaw puzzle, slipping the pieces into their place one after another. The American mass Jewry was one piece. The next piece was the Zionist idea. The events of 1881 pushed that forward too. Before the Russian pogroms, the great majority of Jews saw their future as assimilation in one form or another. After them, some Jews began to look for possible alternatives. The axis of Jewish speculation shifted. It became less optimistic and assured, more agitated—and therefore more imaginative and creative. The Russian horrors made Jews think: was it not possible to bring into existence an ideal community where Jews were not merely safe, not just suffered, or even tolerated, but welcomed, at home: a place where they, and not others, were masters? Of course Zionism was not new. It was as old as the Babylonian exile. Had not the psalmist sung: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’?
¹²⁸
For more than a millennium and a half, every Jewish generation, in every Jewish community, had contained one or two who dreamed of Zion. Some had fulfilled the dream personally by going there: to Tiberias, to Safed, to Zion itself. Others had thought to found little congregations or colonies. All of these, however, had been religious Zionists. In one way or another they hoped to precipitate the messianic action. That was the idea of the German rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874) who, in 1836, asked the Frankfurt Rothschilds for funds to buy Erez Israel—or at least Jerusalem itself—from Mohammed Ali, in order to start the process of ingathering. In 1840, after Sir Moses Montefiore and Adolphe Crémieux had succeeded in rescuing the Damascus community, Rabbi Judah Alkalai (1798-1878), of Semlin near Belgrade, conceived the notion that this specific operation could serve as a model for a more general coming together of world Jewry as a
nation-force, with modernized Hebrew as its language, and Palestine as a future kingdom for the Messiah he almost hourly expected. He propagated this plan in numerous pamphlets and settled in Erez Israel himself, to display his sincerity.

From the 1840s there were secularizers who dreamed of Zion too. Moses Hess (1812-75) went from Hegelianism to socialism, like Marx, but he soon recoiled from the (to him) soulless internationalism of the collective whether in the theoretic version of Marx or the practical efforts of Lassalle in Germany. Like many Jews he began to return to his roots in middle age, but his recovery of Judaism took the form of nationalism rather than religion. The nation-state, he began to see, was the natural unit of historical development. Hence enlightened Jews who went all out for complete assimilation were betraying their own natures. In 1859 he was exhilarated by the way in which Italy, another ancient nation long fragmented, achieved its national identity again. Why could not Jewry stage its own
risorgimento?
In his great book
Rome and Jerusalem
Hess put the case for the Jewish nation-state.
¹²⁹
It would avoid, on the one hand, the excesses of the
maskils
who wanted to assimilate themselves out of existence and, on the other, the Orthodox who really wished to ignore the world altogether. It would enable the Jews, by the state they created—repudiating both the superstitions of Christianity and the orientalism of Islam—to realize the Jewish idea in practice and so be a political light to the gentiles. At the same time it would allow them to achieve their own redemption not by Marx’s negative proposal to destroy their traditional economic functions, but by the positive act of creating an ideal state.
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