JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ography: A. Mirodan, Dictionar neconventional, 1 (1986), 90–98;
A.B. Yoffe, Bisdot Zarim (1996), 208–11, 441–42.
[Dora Litany-Littman and Abraham Feller / Lucian-Zeev
Herscovici (2nd ed.)]
BALTIMORE, city in Maryland, U.S. When Abraham *Rice
of Bavaria accepted the rabbinic post at Baltimore Hebrew
Congregation in 1840, the congregation became the first in
America to employ an ordained rabbi. While Baltimore Jewry
remains justly proud of this distinction, for Rabbi Rice, the
experience was not a happy one: as he famously wrote his
mentor in Germany, “The religious life in this land is on the
lowest level, most people eat foul food and desecrate the Sabbath
in public…. Under these circumstances my mind is perplexed
and I wonder whether it is even permissible for a Jew
to live in this land.”
In Baltimore’s defense, Rice’s comment did not apply to
Baltimoreans alone; his words pointed to the state of American
Jewry in the mid-19th century. As an immigrant port of
entry and border town between North and South, as a gateway
to the nation’s interior and a manufacturing center in its own
right, Baltimore has been well-positioned to reflect developments
in American Jewish life. Yet the Baltimore Jewish community
has maintained its own distinctive character as well,
reflective of the personality of Baltimore itself – a city known
for its cohesive communities, periodically fractious citizenry,
and occasional eccentricities.
Settlement Patterns and Demographics
Founded in 1729 on an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay in the
colony of Maryland, Baltimore remained a small waterfront
village until emerging as an important trading center in the
late 18th century. Few Jews arrived in the early years. In addition
to the town’s slow start, they may have been deterred by
Maryland’s discriminatory constitution, which required that
public office holders swear an oath of allegiance to Christianity.
Not until the Maryland legislature passed the “Jew Bill” in
1826, enabling Jewish public officials to swear a substitute oath,
did Jews achieve full civic equality in the state.
Greater religious toleration and a rising economy came
at the right time to draw a good number of the Jewish immigrants
beginning to stream into America from German lands.
Baltimore’s Jewish population surged from around 125 in 1825
to approximately 1,000 in 1840 and more than 8,000 in 1860.
By 1880, Baltimore had some 10,000 Jews, mostly of Bavarian
and Hessian origin. This profile would soon change dramatically,
however. The mass migration of East European Jews
that gathered force in the 1880s made an immediate impact,
with Baltimore attracting many early arrivals, particularly
from Lithuania. The city’s Jewish population reached 24,000
by 1890, 40,000 by 1907, and 65,000 by 1920. Although Lithuanians
continued to have a major presence, Baltimore received
Jewish immigrants from across Eastern Europe between the
1880s and 1920s. The city also welcomed subsequent waves
of Jewish migration, notably German-Jewish refugees from
baltimore
Nazism in the 1930s, Holocaust survivors in the post-World
War II era, Iranians in the late 20th century, and Soviet and
post-Soviet Jews in the late 20th century.
The diversity of Baltimore’s Jewish population mirrored
that of the city itself. As a busy immigrant port of entry, Baltimore
became a multi-ethnic patchwork of neighborhoods.
East Baltimore, the original site of German Jewish residence,
became the area of settlement for most East European Jewish
immigrants. American-born descendants of German Jews began
moving to more affluent precincts on the city’s northwest
side by the late 19th century, where they tended to re-concentrate
in predominantly Jewish enclaves. This pattern continued
through the 20th century, as Jews moved away from the old
East Baltimore neighborhood to a succession of residential areas
in northwest Baltimore. As each Jewish sub-group moved
up the economic ladder and into wealthier surroundings, its
place was often taken by a less well-off sub-group.
At the turn of the 20th century, some 92,000 Jews lived
in Baltimore: around one-quarter within the city limits, 70
percent in suburban Baltimore County, and the remainder in
Carroll County. Most resided in predominantly Jewish areas
in the northwest part of the metro region, in places such as
Upper Park Heights, Mount Washington, Pikesville, Reisterstown,
and Owings Mills. Jewish households made up 6 percent
of households in the Baltimore area.
Economic Life
From the beginning, Baltimore’s Jews found opportunity
for economic advancement, though never without struggle.
Widow Shinah Etting arrived in 1780 with five children and
opened a boardinghouse; another widow, Judith Cohen, came
with her children in 1803. Their sons rose to become prominent
business and civic leaders. The German Jews who settled
in Baltimore after the Ettings and Cohens started primarily as
poor peddlers and small shopkeepers. In time, most achieved
a measure of success. German Jewish entrepreneurs were
the pioneering founders of Baltimore’s most well-known retail
establishments: Gutman’s, Hutzler’s, Hochschild Kohn’s,
Hamburger’s, and Hecht’s. Others established small clothing
manufacturing firms that became the basis of Baltimore’s nationally
significant garment industry.
East European immigrants found a niche in the lowest
rungs of that industry. Harsh conditions and low pay led
them to forge a dynamic labor movement that met with bitter
employer opposition, and for many years Baltimore’s garment
industry was wracked by strikes and lockouts. In 1914 the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Sonneborn firm, one
of the nation’s largest men’s clothing factories, signed a landmark
collective bargaining agreement. During the struggle,
Orthodox leader Rabbi Avraham Schwartz interceded on behalf
of workers about to be fired for refusing to work on the
Sabbath, enlisting the support of the Sonneborn family’s Reform
rabbi, William Rosenau.
Many East European Jews left the sweatshops and factories
(or avoided them altogether) to set up small family enter-
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