Review - American Jewish Archives

Volume XLVIII Fall-Winter 1996 Number 2
American Jewish
Archives
A Journal Devoted to the Preservation and Study
of the American Jewish Experience
Published by the Jacob Rader Marcus Center
of the American Jewish Archives
Gary P. Zola, Ph.D., Editor Designate
Frederic Krome, Ph.D., Managing Editor
Ruth L. Kreimer, Editorial Associate
Tammy Topper, Editorial Associate
Jacob Rader Marcus, Ph.D., Founding Editor (1896-1995)
Located on the Cincinnati Campus of the
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
Cincinnati New York Los Angeles Jerusalem
Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, ,President
Dr. Alfred Gottschalk, (3mcellor

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Published by theJacob Ruder Marcus Center of the
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of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of
Religion.
ISSN ooz-go5X
01998 by the American Jewish Archives

Contents
Letters to the Editor
Articles
139
Yaakov Ariel
"The Evangelist at Our Door: The American Jewish Response
to Christian Missionaries, 1880-1920. "
Yaakov Ariel argues that between 1880 and 1920, the American Jewish leadership
became increasingly preoccupied with Christian missionary activity. In particular,
the missionaries targeted new immigrants by providing social services and Amer-
icanization classes. Although these missionary societies were not unique, the
American Jewish response to missionaries was more forceful, and vocal, than at
any other time in history. American Jews saw these missionaries not only as a
threat to their community, but regarded them as a challenge to their claim of full
citizenship. The Jewish response, and the mind set of the Jewish leadership, re-
ceive detailed attention.
Yosef Salmon
"Mizrachi Movement in America:
A Belated but Sturdy Offshoot."
Within a few years of the first Zionist Congress in 1897 and the establishment of
Political Zionism, a religious Zionist organization, the Mizrachi movement, was
founded. Primarily appealing to religious Jews in Eastern Europe, the Mizrachi
movement made very slow inroads into the U.S. As in Europe, the Mizrachi move-
ment in the U.S. appealed primarily to Orthodox Jews.Yosef Salmon evaluates the
genesis and growth of the Mizrachi movement in America, paying particular at-
tention to its adaptation to the American Jewish landscape in the era before and
after World War I.

Review Essay
177
Ethnic Histo y in the 1990's-
The American Jewish Quest for Community. "
Sarna, Jonathan and Ellen Smith (Ed.)
The Jews of Boston -Essays on the Occasion
of the Centenary (1895-1995) of the Combined Jewish
Philanthropies of Greater Boston.
and
Cutler, Irving.
The Jews of Chicago - From Shetl to Suburb.
Reviewed by Tobias Brinkmann
Book Reviews
187
Godfrey, Sheldon J. & Judith C.
Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of Equality
in ~ritish Colonial America, 1740-1867.
Reviewed by Jay Eidelman.
191
Ashkenazi, Elliot, Editor.
The Civil War Dia y of Clara Solomon,
Growing up in New Orleans, 1861-1862.
Reviewed by Bobbi Malone.
195
Barkai, Avraham.
Branching Out: German Jewish Immigration
to the United States, 1820-1914.
Reviewed by Cornelia Wilhelm.

201
Binder, Frederick M. & David M. Reimers.
All the Nations Under Heaven:
An Ethnic and Racial Histo y of New York City.
Reviewed by Esther Romeyn.
209
Eisenberg, Ellen.
Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey 1882-1920.
Reviewed by Abraham D. Lavender.
215
Hyman, Paula E.
Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish Histo y :
The Roles and Representation of Women.
(The Samuel & Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies).
Reviewed by Linda J. Borish.
221
Sherman, Moshe D.
Orthodox Judaism in America:
A Biographical Dictiona y and Sourcebook.
Reviewed by Kimmy Caplan.
229
Ben-Joseph, Eli.
Aesthetic Persuasion: Hen y James, the Jews, and Race.
Reviewed by Ranen Omer.
235
Max Rosenfeld (Trans)
New Yorkish and Other American Yiddish Stories.
Introduction by Sanford Pinsker.
Reviewed by Lewis Fried.

239
Jacobson, Matthew Frye.
Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination
of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States.
Reviewed by Stephen Katz.
245
Baskin, Judith R. Editor.
Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing.
Reviewed by Susan Einbinder.
251
Kushnir, Beatriz.
Baile de Ma'scaras:
Mulheres Judais e Prostituica'o: as "Polacas" e suas assBciacoes de Ajuda
Mtitua.
(A Dance of Masks: Jewish Women and Prostitution.
The "Polish" and their Mutual Aid Societies).
Reviewed by Alejandro Lilienthal.
2-55
Schmidt, Gilya Gerda.
Martin Buber's Formative Years:
From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897-1909.
Reviewed by Rochelle Millen.
261
Index

Note To Our Readers
American Jewish Archives is in the process of editorial change.
Beginning with the current issue, Dr. Frederic Krome assumes the
position of Managing Editor. As of July I, 1998, Dr. Gary P. Zola,
the newly appointed Executive Director of the Jacob Rader Marcus
Center of the American Jewish Archives, will become the Editor of
American Jewish Archives. Dr. Zola succeeds the founding director
of the American Jewish Archives and the founding Editor of
American Jewish Archives: Jacob Rader Marcus (1896-1995).
The Editor will be appointing an Academic Advisory and
Editorial Board that will begin its work before the end of the
calendar year 1998.Together with the members of the Academic
Advisory and Editorial Board, the new Editors are committed to
maintaining the high academic standards that were established
by the Journal's founding editor and upon which our readers
depend.
Finally, we cordially invite our readers to visit the Jacob Rader
Marcus Center's web site at www.huc.edu/aja for regular updates
on news, events, and activities.

Letters to the Editor
Comments and response on the Walter Judah article
Dear Editor:
The first paragraph in the article by Dr. Theodore Cohen in the
Spring/Surnmer 1996 issue requires a correction. His statement that
"It was the first burial site for the members of Cong. Shearith Israel
and is the oldest Jewish cemetery in North America" does not square
with facts. He then follows that "This plot of land was granted to the
Jewish residents of New Amsterdam in 1656 by the unfriendly Peter
Stuyvesant" is without any foundation. The last quotation (footnote
2, p.7) refers to de Sola Pool's "Portraits Etched in Stone." Nowhere
on that page does de Sola Pool refer to this cemetery as the first Jew-
ish burial ground in North America. He only wrote that "Its long and
checkered history begins in 1682 when it succeeded the ground re-
luctantly granted in 1656."
Following page 485 of de Sola's book, Dr. Cohen might have contin-
ued two pages further to the Appendices and there he would have
found Rabbi de Sola Pool's conclusion of his search for "the little hook
of ground" granted in 1656. Enclosed are copies of those pages and
in his final paragraph he is "reluctantly forced to admit that we can-
not identify the location of the first Jewish cemetery of this city?
Therefore, rather than being "the oldest Jewish cemetery in North
America" it is the third oldest. It was preceded by the 1656 site of
which its location is unknown and the 1dT7 Jewish cemetery of Cong.
Yeshuat Israel in Newport, R.I.
Irwin J. Miller
Stamford, CT
Dear Editor,
Mr. Miller's comments regarding the location of the first Jewish
burial ground require clarification.
On February 22,1656, Peter Stuyvesant granted several early N.Y.
Jewish residents "a little hook of land situated outside of the cityUfor
use as a burial place. (David De Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, p. 8).
It would be the first Jewish burial ground in North America. (Jacob R.

136 American Jewish Archives
Marcus.The Colonial American Jew, 1:223). Although its location has not
been definitely ascertained, it has been accepted by some as being part
of the present cemetery (Elivera N. Solis, "Some References to Early
Jewish Cemeteries in New York City:' PAJHS, (1900) no. 8,136-39).
When the Chatham Square cemetery was cut through during the
construction of the New Bowery in May 1856,265 graves were moved
to Shearith Israel's 21 St. cemetery. Among them were the remains
and tombstone of Abraham Haim de Lucena, whose date of death,
(Menahem 26, 1669) was copied from the stone at the time of re-
internment (Rosalie Phillips, '% Burial Place for the Jewish Nation
Forever:' PAJHS 18 [~gog], 120). While Dr. Pool agrees that two individuals
Abraham and Abraham Haim de Lucena had lived in New
York in the 17th and 18th centuries, he curiously opines that the 1669
date of death of the older de Lucena was erroneous due to ''mistaken
identification and wrong calculation:' He further states that if
the older de Lucena had died in New York, he was presumably buried
in the earliest burial ground (Pool, Portraits p. 4548,489).
Therefore, inasmuch as the 1669 date on de Lucena's stone precedes
the subsequent purchases of burial space in 1681 and 1729
(Phillips, 93), it is reasonable to deduce that the location of the original
"hook of land:' and de Lucena's grave within it, are part of the present
cemetery. This date (1669) also precedes the establishment of the
Newport cemetery in 1677 (Encyclopedia Judaica, 5: 275).
Additionally, the tablet at the entrance to the Chatham Square
cemetery presently reads:
"This tablet marks what remains of the first Jewish Cemetery
in the United States consecrated in the year 1656 when it
was described as outside the city. . . . Erected in 1903 under the
auspices of.. . the American Jewish Historical Society"
Simply put, if so as prestigious and scholarly an organization as
the American Jewish Historical Society accepts the above information
as being accurate for at least almost a century, why shouldn't I?
Theodore Cohen, MD, FACP
Clinical Associate Professor
School of Medicine
New York University

The Evangelist at Our Door:
The American Jewish Response
to Christian Missionaries, 1880-1920
by Yaakov Ariel
From the 1880s to 1920 the Jewish community in America was
intensely preoccupied with growing Christian missionary activ-
ity. Community activists, scholars, journalists, and laymen reacted
strongly to the Christian proselytizing efforts and the alleged
missionary threat ranked high on the Jewish public agenda. The
Jewish responses to the presence of missionaries reflected the
concerns, insecurities, and sensitivities of the Jewish community.
The reactions serve as an indication of the varied feelings, values,
and aspirations of different groups within the Jewish population.
The response to the evangelization efforts further shed light on
Jewish attitudes towards Christianity and American society at
large.
The 1880s and 1890s saw the rise of a large and vigorous move-
ment to evangelize the Jews in America. Motivated by a biblical-
messianic understanding of the Jews and their role in history, the
missions pursued their cause for decades to come. The same years
also witnessed a large Jewish immigration from eastern Europe.
From the 1880s to the outbreak of World War I, about two million
Jews made their way to America, settling in poor quarters in the
largest American cities.'The new wave of Protestant missionary in-
terest in the Jews directed itself to the immigrant community. By
the 1910s were dozens of missions were operating in virtually all
Jewish neighborhoods in America. In some cities such as Chicago or
Philadelphia a number of missions were busy evangelizing the Jews.
New York had as many as ten.' Missions became part of the scenery
of Jewish areas in the American cities. Such evangelization centers
were busy preaching, distributing tracts, and offering relief ser-
vices for needy Jews, the latter in order to demonstrate Christian

140 American Jewish Archives
charity as well as help establish contacts between the missions and
potential converts.
The Jews did not remain indifferent to the aggressive attempts at
evangelizing them. Their responses were, however, far from unanimous
or consistent. They reflected not only indignation and the insecurity
of a minority group but also class difference~, self-interest,
and paradoxes. The group that encountered the missionaries on a
day-to-day basis were the masses of immigrants in the poor neighborhoods.
Arriving from eastern Europe, those Jews were generally
predisposed against Christianity. Many immigrants came
from tsarist Russia where Jews were restricted in settlement, education,
and occupation and were at times victims of pogroms. The vision
of the Christian faith, usually Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic,
or Roman Catholic in such areas was often that of a hostile oppressive
religion. Some Jews would utter shaketz teshaktzenu (thou shall
despise it) when passing a church. Yet for all its initial hostility and
suspicion, the immigrant community was far from unanimous in
opposing the missionaries. Its reaction was rather ambivalent, reflecting
a great amount of self-interest as well as curiosity.
Needy immigrants often approached the missions as consumers
of the various relief services the evangelizers provided.These services
included medical clinics, English lessons for the newly arrived,
sewing classes for women, and a variety of activities for children.
Taking advantage of the help the missions offered did not necessarily
imply any commitment or a desire to consider conversion. Many
poor Jews believed that they could receive the help and remain
immune to the missions' messages. Many of the newly arrived immigrants
also came to hear missionaries preach or to visit the missions'
reading rooms. Both missionary and Jewish sources as well
as the general press report that young Jews would go by the hundreds
at times to hear Christian missionaries preach.3 This involvement
also did not necessarily imply a tendency toward conversion.
The missions were part of the scenery of the Jewish neighborhoods
and many of the newly arrived explored the missions and their
messages as part of their encounter with their new environment
and its opportunities. Once their curiosity was satisfied they usually
ceased visiting the auditoriums where the preaching took

The Evangelist at Our Door 141
place. The general trend for the younger generation of immigrants
was to Americanize as Jews. Very few chose to convert.
Perhaps unexpectedly, members of the Jewish elite were most
troubled by the missionary presence. The German Jewish commu-
nity was by the turn of the century well established socially and
economically, much more at home in America than their east Euro-
pean brethren. It was precisely because of that reality that the
Protestant evangelization attempts alarmed that prosperous
group of Jews. The Jewish elite saw evangelization as a threat to
their status as equal American citizens, with the right to retain
their religious persuasion and yet be accepted as respected mem-
bers of the American community! Jewish leaders and activists
who came from that group resisted the missionaries' work, seeing
their struggle as a fight for Jewish dignity and equality. Jewish
American leaders regarded the missions' activity as an indication
that Christians did not respect the Jewish religion or believe it
could offer spiritual meaning and moral guidance to its adherents.
It was further an indication, in their eyes, that Christians did not
recognize the right of the Jewish nation to exist. Missionary enter-
prises, they contended, were consistent with the traditional Chris-
tian view that Jews were a people who long ago should have
realized the supremacy of the Church over the Synagogue and
dissolved into the Christian nations. Largely unaware of the
missions' more appreciative attitudes toward the Jews, they re-
garded the attempt to evangelize them as the result of centu-
ries-old hatred and rejection.
It was, therefore, not surprising that leading opponents of the
missionary movement came from the ranks of the well-established
German Jewish elite, often members or leaders of the Reform
movement in American Judaism. It was Jacob Schiff, the noted
financier and philanthropist from New York, a German Jew and
member of a Reform synagogue, who helped finance Adolph Ben-
jamin, a lifetime activist, in his campaign against the missionaries.5
Schiff and his social circle were almost never exposed to mission-
ary propaganda, but he obviously considered the antimissionary
activity a worthy cause.
The Reform leadership was particularly sensitive to the evange-
lization efforts. Perhaps the most noted and aggressive antimis-

142 American Jewish Archives
sionary spokesman during the late nineteenth century was Isaac
M. Wise (1819- goo), an architect of Reform Judaism in America.
Wise's activity in this area began before the resurgence of the
movement to evangelize the Jews in the 1880s. The scope of the
missionary activity from the 1850s through the 1870s was much
smaller, and Wise gave personal attention to almost every mission-
ary and every Jewish convert who became engaged in Christian
activity. He continued his vigorous antimissionary campaign well
into the 1890s. His sarcastic style found full expression in his at-
tacks on missionaries and converts! "The proselytizing fury is an
outrage on religion, is a blasphemy on the Most High, a curse to
the cause of humanity, hence the reverse, the direct opposite, of
true religion: he bitterly complained?
Some Reform leaders, such as Isaac M. Wise, looked down on
evangelical Christianity, considering it much inferior to their own
enlightened form of pure, rational monotheism. Reform Judaism in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had built a tri-
umphalistic Jewish theology, which presented Judaism as the lead-
ing moral force in the building of the modern world and as the
religion of the utopian future toward which the world was pro-
gressing? For these Reform leaders, the missionary endeavor was
particularly irritating. An attempt to evangelize the Jews cast doubt
on their self-image as an elite class, the "Brahmins" of the new age.
In addition, they believed that Reform Judaism provided Jews with
an ideology that allowed them to retain their Jewish identity and
also participate in the American commonwealth as full citizens.
The evangelical message asserted that good citizens and con-
structive members of society were only those who had
undergone a conversion experience and accepted Jesus as their
personal Savior. Reform Jews felt that evangelical missionary
efforts were a challenge to their secure position in society and
to their status as middle-class Americans.
Perhaps not surprisingly, missionaries for their part took a very
negative attitude toward Reform Judaism. They recognized that
this group of Jews had become comfortable, well-to-do, and influ-
ential, more so even than most evangelicals. They were living proof
that Jews could find their way into American society and be ac-
cepted without embracing Christianity. Missionaries sometimes pointed

The Evangelist at Our Door 143
to the unfortunate situation of the Jewish people throughout the
ages, ascribing it to their stubborn refusal to accept Christ? But the
German Jewish community in America was doing extremely well,
a reality that touched upon a sensitive evangelical nerve since it ex-
posed the inability of conservative Protestants to impose their val-
ues on the entire society and turn America into a "righteous
kingdom.^"" Reform Jews, like their progressive Christian counter-
parts, and like many liberal Jews and non-Jews, demonstrated by
their successes that evangelicals, with all their vigor, had not won
the day. In addition, many evangelicals found the concept of "Re-
form Judaism" strange and even irritating. Judaism for them was
monolithic and static; it could not reform without the acceptance of
Jesus as Lord and Savior. The Reform movement was a hollow pre-
tense, they thought, a rebellious attempt on the part of obnoxious
people. Some missionaries labeled Reform Judaism "deformedl'"
Evangelicals portrayed Reform Jews as fallen people who walked
in the darkness of Satan. Inasmuch as God did not seem to have
punished these Jews in this era, He was no doubt going to do so in
the next one. Reform Jews had no chance of survival,'"
In addition to their resentment over missionary activity, Reform
Jews found themselves on the defensive, facing attacks by Ortho-
dox Jews who blamed the Reform movement for Jewish apostasy
andconversions out of the faith. One such attack came from Britain's
Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz, who pointed to the conversion of three
graduates of the Hebrew Union College as a proof that the Reform
ideology led to apostasy.'3 Reform leaders found it necessary to de-
fend themselves. Gotthard Deutsch, a professor at the Hebrew Union
College, wrote to repudiate Hertz's claims. The three Refom Jews
who converted to Christianity, he claimed, came from Orthodox
homes and had Orthodox upbringing. Deutsch moved to list names
of prominent Orthodox converts to Christianity. Attempting to put
the blame at the Orthodox door, Deutsch then claimed that it was
the inability of Orthodoxy to provide answers and meaning that
turned Jews away from the faith. "If Orthodoxy cannot prevent the
next generation from being non-observant Jews or Reformers-and
it evidently cannot - is not Orthodoxy responsible for the apostasy
of the next generation, if such occurs?" he asked,'4
Orthodox and Reform Judaism would have been on less than

144 American Jewish Archives
agreeable terms without the missionary presence, but the latter
added to the ill feelings and mistrust. Rabbi Hertz's opinion was not
unique; Orthodox Jews blamed conversion to Christianity on the
turning away from"0bserving Torah and Mitzvot (commandments)."
If Jews adhered to their old religion they would have been immune
to the seductions of other religions. Strengthening the Orthodox ed-
ucational system was their proposed remedy to the missionary
threat. "The only way to counteract the pernicious influences of the
hypocritical missionaries,'' claimed Rabbi Mordecai Aaron Kaplan
of the Lower East Side, was by "the establishment of Talmud Torahs
(religious schools for children) and synagogue^."'^
At times spokesmen for the Jewish elite made an effort to per-
suade the Christian community, on moral grounds, that proselytiz-
ing Jews was inherently wrong.'7 Jews could not understand why
otherwise honest, intelligent Christians should support and, worse
still, be involved in evangelizing Jews. Perhaps if they were told
how the Jews felt about the matter they would give up on mission-
izing. The Jews who had been noted in the New Testament to be a
proselytizing people (Mat.23:15) had ceased evangelizing altogether
in the early Middle Ages as a precondition for living as a tolerated
minority in Christian and Muslim lands.'' Conversions to Judaism
were reduced to a minimum as they often posed danger to both
converts and community and were reserved to extraordinary cases
of people who knocked hard on the door and proved their sincerity ,
beyond all doubt. Necessity turned into virtue, and nonproselytiz-
ing became a characteristic of the Jewish religion. Jews, who consid-
ered their religious heritage a part of their ethnic and cultural
identity, could not understand why Christians could not leave them
alone and evangelize in their own quarters only. Jews, including ed-
ucated ones, were ignorant of the characteristics and motivation of
evangelical Christianity. Needless to say, when Christians who sup-
ported or were involved in proselytizing Jews were confronted with
the Jewish arguments against missionizing they were not persuaded.
They knew ahead of time that Jews would resent the attempts to
evangelize them and would misinterpret their meaning. They were
about to evangelize Jews whether the Jewish community liked it or
not? From their perspective, evangelism was legitimate and propa-

The Evangelist at Our Door 145
gating Christianity among the Jews was an act of goodwill and
kindness.
Jewish leaders did not object to evangelists working to bring
Christianity to the down and out in the non-Jewish population, but
Jews, they stated, were not in need of the Christian message. They
had their own religious tradition, which offered them all that they
needed spiritually and morally. The missionary endeavor was thus
an insult and a cause for indignation. "I can understand and I can
appreciate it when you and those like you go among the drunk-
ards, the thieves, the harlots, and the lost classes of our population
and try to redeem them. I cannot understand it that you should
think the Jews of Chicago to be not better than thieves. We 'damned
Jews: we thank you for your good opinion of us:' wrote in 1891
Rabbi Bernhard Felsenthal of Zion congregation in Chicago to
William Blackstone, founder and superintendent of the Chicago
Hebrew Mission.'" The most common method Jewish leaders used
in their struggle was to try to discredit the missionaries and con-
verts on moral grounds. Jewish opinion of both proselytizers and
proselytized was indeed very poor. Just as decent people did not
set out to induce Jews to abandon their fathers' faith, so sane and
loyal Jews would never convert to Christianity. Deceit was the only
means by which missionaries could make their way into the Jewish
community." The antimissionary crusaders wanted to share their
impressions with the general public and stir public ire against the
missionaries. Remarkably, Jewish antimissionary activists approached
the Christian evangelical community and shared their accusations
against missionaries. In some cases they succeeded in convincing
Christian supporters and cast doubt upon the integrity of some
missionaries." But these cases were rare. More often than not little
attention was given to such accusations. Supporters of the missions
expected Jews to blame the evangelists (and the converts they
made) and ascribe bad qualities to them.
Jewish antimissionary writers often described missionaries as
swindlers and impostors. They accused missionaries of fabricating
their personal histories, providing exaggerated accounts of their
successes, using dishonest methods to bring Jews to hear the
gospel, buying off converts, and embezzling the missions' assets
and giving false financial statements.'3 Some of the accusations

146 American Jewish Archives
sound almost unbelievable. If we were to accept Jewish reports, for
example, then Leopold Cohn, founder and director of a Baptist-
sponsored mission in Brooklyn, was not the former rabbi that he
claimed to be but rather a runaway crook; when he posed as penni-
less and appealed for financial support, he actually held consider-
able property and was using donations for personal gain that had
been given to him for the mission." Jewish critics of mission activity
were quick to point out that prominent converts were often pre-
sented as former rabbis, even if they had never been officially or-
dained.'5 The conversion of rabbis obviously filled missionaries with
great satisfaction and they boasted of such incidents with pride.26
Jews, for their part, were terribly embarrassed when rabbis con-
verted and contended that many who claimed to be rabbis were not
fully ordained. There were, of course, a few cases of fully ordained
rabbis converting to Christianity. Others had served, prior to their
conversions, as hazan-shochet (cantor-ritual slaughterer) or shatz-matz
(cantor-teacher), which meant that they held semirabbinical positions
in small Jewish communities. Although Jews often accused them of
being impostors, their claim to the rabbinate was not completely un-
founded.?
Jews rarely questioned the personal integrity of non-Jewish mis-
sionaries; they mostly directed complaints at Jewish converts who
had become engaged in evangelization work. Jews reacted much
more negatively toward Jewish converts involved in proselytizing
than toward non-Jewish missionaries. Gentiles couId be expected to
evangelize Jews but Jewish missionaries were seen as traitors twice
over. Not onIy had they defected from the Jewish camp, but they had
also pined the enemies in their struggle to destroy the Jewish faith
and Jewish national existence. They were bound to be vilIains.
There was a certain irony in the attitude of Jewish opponents of
missionary activity toward the propagation of Christianity among
Jews. On the one hand, Jewish leaders like Wise rejected the evan-
gelical impulse on the grounds that it implied intolerance of Judaism
and endangered the social and politicaI status of Jews in the Ameri-
can commonwealth. On the other hand, they were unwilling to
recognize the right of evangelicals to preach their message among
Jews, or the freedom of Jews to freely choose their reIigious beIief.
Reform Judaism differed on many issues with traditional Jewish atti-

The Evangelist at Our Door 147
tudes, but in this realm Reform rabbis manifested the traditional
Jewish response, asserting that Jews had an inherited, indelible com-
mitment to their religion. They could not walk away from it; their
Jewishness was not a matter of choice. The United States was a free
country in the sense that Jews were granted full civil liberties and
had an equal status in the community, but not in the sense that they
could choose their religious affiliation. Non-Jews were free to do so
but not Jews.
Members of the German Jewish elite were not the only ones who
tried to fight missionaries; some initiatives also took place in the
immigrant neighborhoods, where reaction to the missionaries was
far from being unanimous. A glimpse into conflicting Jewish atti-
tudes was provided by an article in the American Hebrew, the writer
of which described the following:
The missionaries have been active for some years in the neigh-
borhood of Park avenue and lo2nd street. A church there de-
voted to their uses is well lit up with electric lights and kept
warm in winter, and with lectures and entertainments the
children of the neighborhood are inveigled into attendance.
Even a Jewish religious school has been maintained by them at
times. Self-respecting people of the neighborhood have at dif-
ferent times taken the matter in their own hands and threat-
ened to withdraw their trade from the Jewish butcher, baker,
etc., who permitted their children to attend and take advantage
of their outings, vacations, parties and treats. These tradesmen
pleaded that no harm could come to their children, who
needed the clothing and gifts they got, that the place kept them
off the street, etc. It developed later unfortunately that the
butcher, baker, etc., were held in the grasp of the missionaries
by being allowed to hold services on the holidays for their own
private use, which netted quite a penny to them and the pity is
that they could not see the sinfulness of utilizing the mission-
aries' church with its crosses upon the seats and elsewhere, for
petty gainz8
The passage betrayed an elitist, condescending tone towardbutch-
ers, bakers, etc." Yet it revealed clearly the realities of Jewish coop-

148 American Jewish Archives
eration with and resentment toward the missions. It explained why
working-class Jews, themselves attached to Jewish tradition, al-
lowed their children to attend activities sponsored by missionaries.
As the report demonstrated, the parents did care about Jewish tradi-
tion; they were in fact observant Jews. But they did not think the
missionary message could affect their children very much and the
services the mission was offering their children outweighed the
danger of their becoming Christian. The article in the American He-
brew demonstrated the fact that the mission offered things the chil-
dren could not always obtain elsewhere. It pointed to differences of
class and opinion in the immigrant community. "Self-respecting peo-
ple of the neighborhoodresented the more popular approach, which
was willingness to accept benefits from the missions under the as-
sumption that "no harm could come to our children." Part of the
Jewish reaction was an attempt to address the lack of sufficient fa-
cilities for Jewish y~uth."~
Jonathan Sarna, who examined the Jewish reaction to Christian
missionaries in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth
century, has argued convincingly that missionary activity spurred
American Jews to organize and build educational, cultural, med-
ical, and charitable enterprises, which were intended among other
things to neutralize similar services the missionaries offered the
Jewish populations. Jewish leaders and benefactors were both em-
barrassed and worried by the help provided by missionaries. This
reality was undeniably true in the earlier period of missionary
activity in the United States (1820s-1870s) with which Sarna
deals?' By the 1880s-1890s American Jewry had developed a net-
work of educational, medical, and charitable organizations that
were reinforced in order to offer help to the Jewish immigrants
from eastern Europe who were pouring into American cities in un-
precedented numbers?' In addition to having an earnest desire to
help their needy brethren, the more established Jewish elite that-
sponsored the philanthropic initiatives was also motivated by the
desire to help the newly arrived integrate into American society.
The need tol'do something:' lest the missionaries use the unfor-
tunate conditions of poor Jews to capture their souls, was a sec-
ondary consideration duringthat period.Al1 that one could point to,
for the years 1880 to 1910, as Jewish efforts to fight the missionaries

The Evangelist at Our Door 149
by offering similar services are educational initiatives, many of
which were occasional and on a small scale. These initiatives included
such ventures as an Orthodox group raising money to
complete the establishment of a Talmud Torah by making a claim
to its effectiveness in combating missionary efforts, or a group of
Jews on New York's West Side deciding to conduct educational
work among the area's children as a means to counterbalance missionary
work among poor Jewish youth.3'
The aggressive missionary enterprises left their mark on Jewish
perceptions of Christian attitudes Toward Jews. Many in the
Jewish immigrant community became suspicious of Christian
charitable, welfare, or educational enterprises and at times were
convinced that any Christian willingness to show goodwill toward
the Jews was motivated by a hidden missionary agenda.
Such was the case with Jacob Riis, a journalist, photographer,
and urban reformer who wrote about the immigrant Jewish
community of New York.33 Riisls photographs, which reveal the
poverty and deprivation on the Lower East Side of New York,
can well explain why so many in the community were willing
to use the services the missions were 0ffering.3~ Riis's attempt at
carrying out urban reform work in the poor Jewish neighborhood
did not always meet with approval.35 Riis was not a missionary
and did not hold to a premillennialist-dispensationalist worldview.
His perspective was that of a progressive elitist, patronizing perhaps,
but not conversionist. Indeed, he expressed appreciative
opinions of Jews and stated that they did not need to abandon their
religi0n.3~ The urban reformer befriended Stephen Wise, a Reform
rabbi and an active opponent of missionaries, and invited him to
speak in the tenement center he operated in the Lower East Side.
Yet poor Jews, newcomers to American society who rarely encountered
members of the American Christian elite, could not figure
Riis out. After all, what was a Christian do-gooder doing in a Jewish
neighborhood? Unfamiliar with Riis's social and cultural background
they could not grasp his motivation. Considering the
resentment that Christian missionary "intruders" aroused among
many Jews, it was not surprising that Riis encountered suspicion.37
Although Jews did not always realize it, the missionary community
did not remain indifferent to the Jewish opinion. Missionaries

150 American Jewish Archives
took notice of the Jewish accusations, and their awareness of it
often shaped the mission's rhetoric, which argued with the Jewish
claims. Many among the mission's supporters and leaders became
increasingly aware of the bad reputation the missionary endeavors
acquired in the Jewish quarters and were afraid that it could affect
their evangelization work among the Jews. Among other things,
the missionaries discussed the Jewish accusations and asked them-
selves what steps they should take to eliminate the possibility of
such accu~ations.3~
The fact that many in the immigrant community came to hear
missionaries and use their services did not mean that opposition
did not occur in the poor neighborhoods. On the popular level,
immigrant Jews whom missionaries evangelized occasionally ha-
rassed missionaries, called them names, interrupted their services,
and tore up their tracts.39These were for the most part spontaneous
outbursts. Such actions, however, had little success in stopping the
missionaries from carrying out their work. Missionaries knew that
some amount of animosity on the part of individual Jews was in-
evitable and they were ready to face it.4' They saw such unpleasant
occurrences as a manifestation of ingratitude and evidence of the
spiritual blindness that afflicted Jews. Yet they were certainly not
discouraged. For some missionaries such negative reaction gave
more meaning to their work. It proved that their work made a
strong impact in the Jewish community, so much so that it aroused
anger and opposition. They advertised the incidents in the mis-
sion's journals. It served as a proof of their dedication and evidence
of the difficulties they were facing. If anything, such harassment
served, in a twisted way, to boost missionary morale and strengthen
the missionary cause in the evangelical community.
Some Jewish activists published guidebooks for Jews, offering
answers to some of the arguments used by the missionaries. One
such book was Lewis A. Hart's A Jewish Response to Christian Evan-
gelists?' Hart wished to provide his readers with the Jewish inter-
pretations of passages from the Hebrew Bible with messianic overtones
that missionaries used to persuade Jews that Jesus was the prophe-
sied Messiah. He wanted to provide Jews with arguments of their
own to counter the Christian claims. The author was aware that many
of the young Jews who were approached by rnissionaries,were puz-

The Evangelist at Our Door 151
zled by the Christian interpretation of certain biblical passages. He
believed that their resistance to the Christian message would be
strengthened by acquainting them with traditional Jewish interpre-
tations that could be used as counterarguments.
Hart's book, which included extensive quotations from the
Hebrew Scriptures, is reminiscent at times of the medieval Jewish-
Christian debates in which the Jewish spokesmen responded to
and tried to repudiate the Christian typological reading of the Bible
as a prelude to the New Testament. A Jewish Response to Christian
Evangelists, as well as similar guidebooks for Jews, was based on
the rather naive assumption that young Jewish men and women
would read the book even before they encountered missionaries
and heard their message, or immediately after such a meeting
took place. It was further based on the idea, just as naive, that
missionaries convinced Jews to embrace Christianity by concen-
trating on biblical exegesis. Discussing key biblical passages and
their meaning occupied undoubtedly an important part in the di-
alogue between missionaries and prospective converts. It was,
however, only one aspect and not necessarily the central one in a
much more complicated process of interaction between evangelists
and would-be converts. Other factors played an important role, in-
cluding the converts' quest for meaning and community in their
lives.4' It is doubtful, therefore, whether a decision for or against
the acceptance of Christianity depended on reading the counterar-
guments that guides like this offered.
Hart was not alone in writing books to coqbat missionaries. A
number of other community leaders wrote tracts that were in-
tended to give expression to the Jewish opinion on the Christian
missionary enterprise. Such publications did not necessarily pro-
vide a guide to Jews considering the missionary biblical exegesis
but often served as an apologia for Judaism, listed the Jewish objec-
tions to the missionary activity, and offered an opportunity for the
authors to let off steam. It is doubtful whether such books had any
influence on Jews considering conversion. Missionaries definitely
did not reverse their policy and cease evangelizing on account of
reading such expositions. Yet such books give evidence of the Jew-
ish perception of their own tradition. They also demonstrate the
pain the missionary offensive caused. Remarkably, the authors of

152 American Jewish Archives
such apologies came from the leadership of the Reform movement.
Louis Weiss, a rabbi in Columbus, Ohio, published Some Burning
Questions: An Exegetical Treatise on the Christianizing of Judaism.43 In
the same year another rabbi in the Midwest, Bernhard Felsenthal of
Chicago, published Why Do the Jews Not Accept Jesus as Their Messiah?*
Defending the right of Judaism to exist alongside Christianity,
both writers expressed the standard Jewish perception regarding
religious affiliation. In their view, those raised as Christians should
be Christian whereas those raised as Jews should remain Jewish
and should not be exposed to Christian evangelism, which the two
rabbis saw as a destructive intrusionP5 The midwestern rabbis
demonstrated some of the misunderstanding between Christians
and Jews over the issue of evangelism. For Jews, religious affiliation
was intertwined with their ethnic identity and was determined
at birth. For evangelical Christians, the definition of a
Christian was a person who had undergone a conversion experience
and had accepted Jesus as his or her personal Savior. They
were unwilling to restrict the work of propagating the gospel exclusively
to people who grew up in Christian homes. Moreover, as
far as they were concerned, evangelizing the Jews was a sign of
goodwill toward them.
The turn of the century witnessed a large Reform apologetic and
polemic literature that was intended to defend Judaism~~ Much of
that literature did not relate to evangelical Christianity and missionaries.
Instead it reacted to nonproselytizing liberal forms of
Christianity and came to explain to Jews who at times were
attracted to such religious communities why Christianity was not
in any way superior to Judaism. Weiss and Felsenthal echoed
some of these arguments, yet their books were not part of the
genre because they were designed to counterattack missionaries
and not Unitarians or Quakers.
A rather unusual literary treatment of converts to Christianity
was provided by Abraham Cahan, the prominent Jewish journalist,
whose writings dealt with the new realities and dilemmas of Jewish
immigrants in America. In "The Apostate of heg go-~hegg" (1899)
Cahan describes the travails of Rivka, alias Rebecca, alias
Michalina, a meshumadeste, a convert to Christianity, and a new immigrant
to America who joins a new agricultural village in Long Is-

The Evangelist at Our Door 153
land.47 Rivka's conversion in Cahan's story had nothing to do with
religious beliefs; she embraced Christianity in order to marry a
man she loved. But her relationship with her husband did not re-
place the close family ties she was privileged to have had before
her marriage. She becomes lonely and isolated and yearns for the
warmth and support her former Jewish environment had provided
her before her conversion. She begins an emotional, social, and
geographical journey home to her family and religion. But her love
for her husband does not allow her to settle back down with her
family, She is again on the road, miserable, restless, and devastated.
Although Cahan portray his fictional heroine with sympathy and
compassion, he nonetheless describes her as a torn, tormented per-
son, a lost soul. Cahan, a secular socialist, followed the traditional
Jewish outlook of the meshumadim, "the self-destroyed." In his de-
scription, which well reflected the popular Jewish outlook of the
time, joining Christianity was merely a social decision, devoid of
spiritual or theological persuasion. It was an unfortunate decision
based on miscalculation, for the new environment could not offer
the warmth, security and clear sense of identity the Jewish commu-
nity offered. Converts were wandering souls rejected in one com-
munity and strangers in the other. Cahan's short story, originally
published in a general American literary magazine, clearly re-
vealed the resentment of Jews, including secular ones, toward
apostates that was just as strong in America as in Europe. Jews in
Cahan's story could neither understand the heroine's choice nor
tolerate it and refused to relate to her again, unless she recanted. In
their world a meshumadeste was what it literally meant: she was
someone who destroyed herself.
A particularly sensitive issue for both the masses of Jewish immi-
grants and the Jewish elite was the evangelism of children. Jews felt
particularly vulnerable because they considered children to be more
"in danger" of being influenced by missionaries. In this case, too, the
heated Jewish reaction could be misleading. Evidently, many in the
immigrant community allowed their children to attend educational
and recreational activities sponsored by missionaries, overlooking
the evangelization agenda that sponsored such enterprises. For
many Jewish children, using the missionary facilities meant merely
that-using them, with no lasting effects on their religious persua-

154 American Jewish Archives
sion and communal loyalties. Yet the JewisE- community as a whole
saw the evangelization of children and teenagers as an almost
monstrous scheme. "Stealing Jewish Children," ran the title of an
article on missionary work among Jewish youth in the usually
calm the American Hebrew.@ Jewish public opinion was stirred to
action whenever a missionary attempt to convert teenage children
was crowned with success and rumors were spread of pressures
put on Jewish children to convert.
Such was the case when Esther Yachnin, a fifteen-year-old girl
from New York, converted to Christianity in 1911, an event that be-
came a cause celZbre.49 Yachnin was baptized, without her parents'
consent, at the Eighteenth Street Methodist Church, Brooklyn. Her
baptism stirred so much antagonism on both popular and organi-
zational levels that the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Organiza-
tions called a protest meeting. Participants at the gathering
demanded that the state of New York declare it illegal to prosely-
tize children. Jewish attempted unsuccessfully to introduce a bill
which would have made the proselytization of minors without the
consent of parents a misdemeanor. Even in New York, where the
Jewish population had considerable political influence, the legisla-
ture was not persuaded to pass such a law. Protestant influences
were stronger and the evangelical freedom to propagate the gospel
took precedence over the Jewish fear that its youth would be con-
verted.5'
The inconsistency in the relationship with missionaries charac-
terized not only the immigrant community but also the elite.
Despite their resentment at attempts to evangelize their people,
Jewish leaders did not refrain from cooperating with missionaries
when they felt that it would serve the Jewish cause. Such an
approach was evident in the relationship between the American
Zionist leadership and William Blackstone, founder of the Chicago
Hebrew Mission and one of the outstanding evangelical leaders at
the turn of the century. The hope that a Jewish national home
would be built in the Land of Israel was held both by evangelical
premillennialists like Blackstone and by the Zionists. In 1891,
Blackstone organized a petition to the president of the United
States, Benjamin Harrison, urging him to convene an international
conference of world powers that would decide to give Palestine

The Evangelist at Our Door 155
back to the Jews. In 1916, at the urging of the leaders of the Zionist
Federation in America, Blackstone renewed his petition. Zionists
like Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and
businessman Nathan Straus considered Blackstone's efforts advantageous
to the Zionist cause. They regarded him as a friend and
overlooked his missionary intentions.5'
Their resentment of the missionary enterprise led Jews to look
cynically on conversions, regarding them as inherently insincere
and most likely motivated by social and economic gains. Spiritual
meaning or religious persuasion had nothing to do with it, they
a~serted.5~ Jews, according to that view, converted either to escape
their unfortunate condition and enjoy the security and privileges that
the non-Jewish community could offer, or else to raise their social stahs,
gain acceptance by circles that had been closed to them, and win
new economic opportunities. In many cases, converts had merely
been "bought out" by financial promises made by propagators of
the Christian faith. "The majority of Hebrew Christians that fill the
churches of the missionaries of this city are mostly subventioned
legionnaires.. . these renegade Jews are not worth the notice of selfrespecting
men:' wrote Moritz Ellinger, the editor of the Menorah,
the organ of the B'nai B'rith order.53 Jews looked upon converts as
the scum of the earth, the rotten fruit on the Jewish tree, picked by
the enemies of Judaism, who were unable to reach any of the good
fr~it.54The idea that some converts might have been persuaded by
the Christian message and had embraeed Christianity after much
thought and inner struggle was a possibility their fellow Jews were
often unable to countenance. That the missionaries perceived themselves
as sincere friends of the Jews and saw their work as a manifestation
of goodwill were concepts many Jews could not understand.
The Jewish response to the growing missionary activity was
truly paradoxical. On the one hand, Jews portrayed attempts to
evangelize them as complete failures. "We are no longer indignant.
We have gone beyond that; we smile, pitying your fruitless efforts,"
wrote a Jewish activist in an open letter to a Christian leader whose
church carried on missionary work.55 Unacquainted with the ideology
and motivation of the missionaries, Jews somewhat innocently
assumed that the extensive missionary nefwork that was operating
to convert Jews and the zeal it displayed were aimed at the conver-

156 American Jewish Archives
sion of the entire Jewish population. As such, they viewed it as a
failure because only a relatively small number of Jews converted.
At the same time, Jews vociferously condemned the missions' ac-
tivities and carried out a propaganda campaign against them. If the
missionaries were having such poor results, why give them so
much attention and why bother to mobilize public opinion against
them? The answer is that while Jews sincerely believed that Chris-
tian evangelization attempts were failing miserably, these efforts
had nevertheless clearly touched sensitive Jewish nerves. As noted
above, the fact that American evangelicals saw a need to Christian-
ize the Jews was perceived as a signal of delegitimization, a denial
of the legitimacy of Judaism as a separate religion and of the right
of Jews to exist as a people with their own religious and cultural
outlook. Missionary activity obviously stirred up old fears and
frustrations, which resulted in a reaction that was disproportionate
to the actual loss resulting from the missionary activity.
In the last analysis, it was more than anything else the belief that
missionary activity posed a threat to their status in the American
polity that stiffened the heated reaction to evangelization efforts.
The Jewish elite and the newly arrived immigrants reacted differ-
ently. Yet both groups of Jews shared similar feelings about the
missionaries. The elite felt that the missionary agenda and the
beliefs it represented questioned the standing of Jews who had
built a home for themselves in America and considered themselves
to be among its proudest citizens. Many in the immigrant commu-
nity sensed that missionaries represented an attitude that could
stand in the way of their building such a home and attaining solid,
respectable standing in the community. It was therefore no wonder
perhaps that the Jewish attitude toward missionaries relaxed con-
siderably in the 1920s and i93os, when the Jewish community
reached the conclusion that missions did not affect their position in
the American polity and that the greatest dangers to their standing
in that society came from other quarters.
Yaakov Ariel is a member of the Department of ~ eli~ion
Studies at the Univer-
sity of North Carolina.

The Evangelist At Our Door 157
Notes
1. On the eastern European Jewish immigrants' life in America at the time see
Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America
and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Knopf, 1976); Gerald A. Sorin, The
Jewish People m America, vo1.3, A Time for Building, 1880-1920 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992); Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York Jews,
1870-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Neil M. Cowan and
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Our Parents' Lives: The Americanization of Eastern European
Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
2. On the missionary activity in those years see David Eichhorn, Evangelizing the
American Jew (New York: Jonathan David, 1978) 141-84; Daniel Joseph Evearitt,
"Jewish Christian Missions to the Jews, 1820--1935: Ph.D. dis., Drew University,
(1988), 98-375; James Wamock, "To the Jew First: The Evangelical Mission to Jewish
Immigrants, 1885-1915; Ph.D. dis., University of Washington, (1989).
3. For example, Eichhom, Evangelizing the American Jew, 168.
4. For example, Isaac M. Wise, A Defence of Judaism versus Proselytizing Christian-
ity (Cincinnati: American Israelite, 1889); Stephen S. Wise, Introduction to Samuel
Freuder, My Return to Judaism (New York: Bloch Publishing Co., 1908).
5. Jonathan D. Sarna, "The American Jewish Response to Nineteenth Century
Christian Missions:' Journal of American History 68 (1981): 42.
6. For example, in I. Wise, A Defence of Judaism.
7. Ibid., w.
8. On Reform Judaism during the period see Michael A. Meyer, Response to
Modernity. A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1988), chaps. 6-7.
9. For example, William E. Blackstone, The Heart of the Jewish Problem (Chicago:
Chicago Hebrew Mission, lgog), 16.
lo. Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 155-83.
11. Amo C. Gaebelein, The Conflict of the Ages (New York: Our Hope, 19331,147.
12. See Leopold Cohn, To Both Houses of Israel (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Beth Sar Shalom,
n.d.1.
q. Quoted by Gotthard Deutsch in his response to Hertz's accusation. Gotthard
Deutsch, "Has Reform Judaism Stimulated Apostacy" the American Hebrew, vol.
95, no. 12 (July 17,1914): 307.
14. Ibid.
15. For example, "Want to Drive Out Missionaries?" the American Hebrew, vol. 92,
no. 14 (January 31,1913): 399.
16. "Jews Warned Against Missionaries:' the American Hebrew, 92, no. 6 (Decem-
ber 6,1912): 182.
17. See for example the exchange of letters between F. de Sola Mendes, rabbi of
Shearith Israel in New York, and W.R. Huntington, rector of Grace Episcopal
Church in New York, following the decision of the New York diocese of the

158 American Jewish Archives
Episcopalian Church to engage in missionary work among the Jews. "Mission-
ary Work in New York,!' the Menorah 12, no. 5 (November, 1go6): 250-251. Hunt-
ington replied to de Sola Mendes justifying the evangelization of the Jews. He
argued that Jews were moving away from the religious beliefs of their parents,
becoming agnostics, and that there was a rise in Jewish crime in New York. He fur-
ther made the claim in line with the spirit of Jewish evangelism during the period
that by converting the Jews he did not mean to gentilize them and that he showed
sympathy to Jewish suffering.
18. On conversions to Judaism see, for example, Joseph R. Rosenbloom, Conver-
sion to Judaism: From the Bibtical Period to the Present (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union
College Press, 1978).
19. See, for example, William Blackstone's reply to Rabbi Bernhard Felesenthal of
December 8,1891; copy in Blackstone's Personal Papers, at the Archives of the Billy
Graham Center, Wheaton, Ill.
20. Felsenthal's letter to Blackstone, October 16, 1891, in Blackstone's Personal
Papers.
21. This is an underlying assumption in a number of Jewish pubIications. For
example, Eichhom, Evangelizing the American Jew, or Freuder, My Retum to Ju-
daism.
u. See a letter-pamphlet written and circulated by Alexander S. Bacon, a Baptist
lawyer from New York, dated July 12,1918, and addressed "to the Moderator and
Members of the Long Island Baptist Association." Copy in the American Jewish
Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
23. For example, Freuder, My Return fo Judaism; Eichhorn, Evangelizing the Ameni
can Jew; see also Max Eisen, "Christian Missions to the Jews in North America and
Great Britain:'Jewish Social Sfudies 10 (1948): 31-72.
24. Freuder, My Retum to Judaism, 16070; Eichhorn, Evangelizing the American
Jew, 17276; Eisen, "Christian Missions to the Jews: 35. Cohn's name does not ap-
pear in a book containing a list of the rabbis who functioned in Hungary, but this
of course, could be a consequence of his being ostracized by the rabbinicaI world
from which he emerged. P. Z. Schwartz, Schem Hagdolim (~rookl~n, N.Y.:
"Jerusalem" Publishing, 1959).
25. For example, Freuder, My Retum to Judaism; Eicmorn, Evarrgelizing the Ameri-
can Jew.
26. For example: George Benedict, Christ Finds a Rabbi (PhiladeIphia: Bethlehem
Presbyterian Church, 1932); Max Wertheimer, From Rabbinism to Christ: The Story of
My Life (Ada, Ohio: Wertheimer Publications, 1934).
27. After the conversion of Abraham Jaeger to Christianity, Isaac M. Wise, who
hd previously supported him and helped him obtain a position as a rabbi, turned
against him and declared that "It is not true that Mr. Jaeger is or ever was a
rabbi.. . "American Israelite, July 12,1872: 8.
28. American Hebrew, gi, no. 22 (Sept. 27 1912): 617.
29. "West Side Organization to Oppose Missionaries," American Hebrew, 95, no, 8
(June 19,1914): 219; "Want to Drive Out Missionaries?"

The Evangelist At Opr Door 159
30. Sarna, 'American Jewish Response to Missions:' 35-51; Jonathan D. Sama,
"The Impact of Nineteenth-Century Christian Missions on American Jews:' In Jewish
Apostasy in the Modern World, edited by Todd Endelman (New York: Holmes
and Meier, 1987), 232-54; George L. Berlin,Defending the Faith: Nineteenth Century
American Jewish Writings on Christianity and Jesus (New Albany, N.Y.: State University
of New York Press, 198~).
31. See, for example, Alexander M. Dushkin, Jewish Education in New York City
(New York: Bureau of Jewish Education, 1918), 45,53-54; Dushkin relates to educational
organizations that were established as early as the 1830s and continued
their work vigorously at the turn of the century.
32. Jeffrey S. Gurock describes the short-lived Jewish Centers Association, established
in 1906, as aimed mainly at combating the missionary efforts. "Jewish Communal
Divisiveness in Response to Christian Influences on the Lower East Side,
~goc~igio:' in Endelman, Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, 257; Gurock portrays
Orthodox Jewish activists as standing in the forefront of antimissionary
activity.
33. On Riis see James B. Lane, Jacob A. Riis and the American City (Port Washington,
N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974); Peter B. Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of
American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1884),
161-217.
34. See, for example, some of the illustrations in Rischin, Promised City.
35. Jeffrey S. Gurock, "Jacob A. Riis: Christian Friend or Missionary Foe?" American
Jewish History 71 (1981): 29-48.
36. On Riis and the Jews see Louis (Lewis) Fried, "Jacob Riis and the Jews: The
Ambivalent Quest for Communiv American Studies 20, no. I (Winter 1979): 5-24;
Richard Tuerk, "Jacob Riis and the Jews:' New York Historical Society Quarterly 63,
no. 3 (July 1979): 179-201.
37. Gurock, "Jacob A. Riis."
38. See Samuel Wilkinson, "The Moral Defensibility of some of the Methods
Employed in Jewish Missions:' Yearbook ofthe Evangelical Missions Among the Jews,
vol. I, ed. Hermann L. Strack (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1906),
60-67.
39. See for example "Jews Mob a Mission:' American Hebrew, 89, no. 18 (September
1911): 531; "Raiding the Missionaries," 617, describes a more premeditated
attempt at disrupting a missionary service. See also "Working Against Missions,"
American Hebrew, 92, no. 9 (December 27,1912): 264, which describes picketing
of a mission.
40. For example, Albert E. Thompson, A Century ofJewish Missions, 45; "Builders
of Israel or Anti missionaries," Prayer and Workfor Israel 7 (1916): 7-10; 0. F. Hinz,
"Some Discouragements in Jewish Mission Work:' Prayer and Work for Israel 9
(1918): 183-84.
41. Lewis A. Hart, A Jewish Response to Christian Evangelists (New York: Bloch
Publishing Co. 1906).
42. On the interaction between evangelists and prospective converts see Lewis R.

160 American Jewish Archives
Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993).
43. Louis Weiss, Some Burning Questions: An Exegetical Treatise on the Christianiz-
ing of Judaism (Columbus, Ohio, 1893).
44. Bemhard Felsenthal, Why Do the Jews Not Accept Jesus as Their Messiah?
(Chicago: Bloch and Newman, 1893).
45. Weiss, Some Burning Questions, 12-15. Felsenthal, Why Do the Jews Not Accept
Jesus? 3-6.
46. Berlin, Defending the Faith, 45-75.
47. Abraham Cahan, "The Apostate of Chego-Chegg:' Century Magazine, 59
(1899): 94-105.
48. "Stealing Jewish Children:' American Hebrew, 78, no. 22 (October 16, i903):
7054
49. Eichhom, Evangelizing the American Jew, 171 and 182-43; Gurock, "Jewish
Communal Divisiveness, 257.
50. See "Jewish Bill Against Missionaries:' American Hebrew, 89, no. 3 (May 19,
1911): 87. The article quotes non-Jewish resentment of the bill.
51. Yaakov Ariel, "William Blackstone and the Petition of 1916: A Neglected
Chapter In the History of Christian Zionism in America:' Studies In Contemporary
Jewry 7 (1991): 68-85.
52. Eichhom, Evangelizing the American Jew, 143; Arthur U. Michelson, From Ju-
daism and Law to Christ and Grace (Los Angeles: Jewish Hope Publishing House,
1934). 82-83.
53. Moritz Ellinger, "Editorial:' Menorah 14, no. 5 (May 1893): 320--23.
54. A striking example was Isaac M. Wise's rhetoric against converted Jews.
Eichhom, who records some of Wise's remarks, follows, to a large degree, in
his footsteps.
55. "Open Letter to Bishop Greer:' American Hebrew 99, no. 25 (December 27,
1916): 881.

The Mizrachi Movement in America:
A Belated but Sturdy Offshoot
by Yosef Salmon
The two volumes of Shivat Zion, edited by the journalist author
Abraham Jacob Slucki, were first published in Warsaw in 189i1and
reissued in 1899 without significant changes. It consisted of rabbini-
cal letters from all over Russia and Poland (in particular from Lithua-
nia), advocating the Zionist idea as expressed in the Hibbat Zion
Movement (also known as Hovevei Zion). The publication, sup-
ported by the Odessa Committee founded in 1890 to further Hov-
evei Zion settlement in Palestine, was motivated by the need to
bolster the dwindling support for the movement in the traditional
circles of Russo-Polish Jewry. The threat of secularism-the move-
ment's leaders and many of the immigrants to Eretz-Israel in the
1890s were nonobservant-was eating away at the initial support
of the traditionalists. By the end of the century many of them were
leaving the new Zionist organization.' The publication of Shivat
Zion represented an attempt to prove that traditional religion and
Zionism could coexist fruitfully.
The third edition of Shivat Zion was published in New York by the
American Mizrachi Movement in 1916. It was not an exact replica
of the European editions-many of the original rabbinical letters
were omitted and new ones were added- but it, too, was published
in the new American context for propaganda purposes. The late
date of the American publication reflects the tardy evolution of reli-
gious Zionism in America. It took time for the founding assump-
tions of European Zionism to become accommodated to the American
social context. The Orthodox Jews who emigrated from eastern Eu-
rope to America had to face the challenge, new to them, of cooper-
ating with the Reform Jews of western Europe who were already
established in the United States.
These factors delayed the establishment of the Mizrachi Move-
ment in America and led to differences in its historical develop-
ment.

162 American Jewish Archives
Certain features of the Zionist movement in the United States set
it apart from its counterpart movements in Europe. Founded while
the Hovevei Zion Movement was still active in Europe, it is fre-
quently treated in the literature as largely an import by the eastern
European immigrants.3 However, it eventually grew to include the
leadership elite of all sections of American Jewry, including the Re-
form Movement. At a relatively early stage it incorporated figures
who had not come from eastern Europe: Germans such as Bernard
Felsenthal and Gustav Gottheil; central Europeans such as Max
Heller and Stephen Wise; and also English Jews.+ Early American
Zionism was surprisingly reminiscent of the European Zionism of
the 1860s and 1870s in its search for Jewish self-identity.5 Although
the American Zionists were not threatened by a sense of physical
danger, they were sharply aware of their Diaspora status and of the
difficulties, at least in the first and second generations, of adapting
to the American way of life! The fact that many local Zionist soci-
eties also functioned as landsmanschaften indicates that their mem-
bers sought to create their own intimate social milieu because they
felt alienated from their New World environment.7
Orthodox Zionists in the United States faced special difficulties in
carving out their place in the Zionist federation. The term "ortho-
doxy" is problematic in the American context, up to the second
decade of the twentieth century everything that was not explicitly
"Reform" was considered "Orthodox." The distinctions between Re-
form, Conservative, and Orthodox, which were well defined in Ger-
manyby the mid-nineteenth century, took at least another half century
to gain currency in the United States? As with German Jewry, Ameri-
can Reform Judaism was largely hostile to the developing Jewish na-
tionalist movement. In Europe, the leadership of the Hibbat Zion
Movement was drawn mainly from east European Jewish intellec-
tuals, who were not religiously observant, and traditional rabbis
who were receptive to a modern way of life. As the Zionist move-
ment evolved, the east European leadership of Hibbat Zion was in-
creasingly replaced in the World Zionist Organization by central and
western European Jews. In America, however, by the 1890s the origi-
nal eastern European leadership was already being challenged by a
vocal minority of Reform rabbis (Gustav Gottheil, 1827-1903; Bern-
hard Felsenthal, 1822-1908; and Max Heller, 1860-1929), as well as by

The Mizrachi Movement in America 163
Orthodox and Conservative rabbis, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic
(Henry Pereira Mendes, 1852-1937; Sabato Morais, 1823-1897; Alexander
Kohut, 1842-1894; Bernard Drachman, 1861-1945; and Marcus Jas-
trow 1829-1903).
Whereas Zionism, for the east European immigrants, provided an
escape from alienation, the western and central European Jews
viewed it as a means to avoid disappearance in the great American
melting pot. It was therefore questionable whether such different
social aims could achieve satisfaction within a single Zionist move-
ment; years passed before the two factions learned to live with each
other within the Zionist Federation of America.
During the Hovevei Zion period, the leaders of the east European
wing of the movement were Dr. J. I. Bluestone, editor of the Hibbat
Zion Yiddish paper, Shulamit, and Wolf Schur, who edited the He-
brew Zionist journal, Ha-Pisgah. Bluestone represented modern
orthodoxy (known in the historical literature as the "Orthodox
maskilimff
9), then in the process of organization, while Schur voiced
the views of the radical Russian intellectuals. In Bluestone's opinion
(supported by the publisher Kazriel Sarasohn and prominent Rabbis
Jacob Joseph, Dr. Hillel Philip Klein, Zvi Hirsch Masliansky, Moses
Zebulun Margolis, Henry Pereira Mendes, and Bernard Drachman),
Eretz-Israel would provide a physical refuge for persecuted Jews
and a spiritual safeguard against assimilation in America.'" For Schur
and his supporters (especially the author Alexander Harkavy, the
former Biluite Dr. Moses Mintz, and the journalist Leon Zolotkoff),
Zionism filled the role of providing a sense of national identity for
secular Jews. Despite their divergent world views, the groups that
formed around Bluestone and Schur were able to cooperate, and to
form a common front against the central Europeans, who were mainly
Reform or Conservative Jews.
The first American Jews to respond to Theodor Herzl's call were
members of Hovevei Zion: Zev Wolf (William) Schur, Rabbi Meir
Kupstein, the journalist Michael Singer, among others. They
founded the Zentralverein der Amerikanische Zionisten." Support
soon came also from the Central European group of Reform lead-
ers: Felsenthal, Gustav and Richard Gottheil, Benjamin Szold, and
Stephen Wise. Though several American Jews came to the First
Zionist Congress (18973, not one of them represented an American

164 American Jewish Archives
Zionist organization. Shortly after the congress, various Zionist soci-
eties were formed, mainly in New York and its environs. These soci-
eties quickly coalesced into two competing organizations: the
Federation of Zionist Societies of Greater New York and Vicinity,
led by Richard Gottheil, and the League of Zionists of the United
States of North America, headed by Philip Klein and Michael
Singer.
Although the two organizations united, after a single year, to estab-
lish the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ, 1898), internal conflict
continued to influence the early history of American Zionism. The
executive committee in Vienna, headed by Herzl, made every effort
to deal evenhandedly with both groups, in keeping with its prefer-
ence for avoiding involvement in the internal politics of local organi-
zations. A delegate from each organization turned up at the Second
Zionist Congress; both were elected to the Zionist executive cornrnit-
tee: Gottheil representing the federation, and Klein the league.
The dispute was neither over trifling matters nor was it, in the
main, a question of personal animosities. The mutual mistrust
stemmed from profound cultural and ideological differences: the
tensions between the westem European "uptown" Jews and the
eastern European "downtown" Jews found strong expression in the
Zionist arena. The eastern Europeans refused to recognize their
central European brethren- especially those identified with the Re-
form Movement- as "authentic: "national" Jews; Jewish national-
ism and reform, they believed, were mutually exclusive." All of the
east Europeans, whether Orthodox or radical maskilim, voiced this
distrust again and again in their correspondence with the executive
committee in Vienna. The westemers, for their part, did not believe
in the east Europeans' organizational ability or public standing.
The developments in the Zionist Movement in the United States
were similar to those in the European Zionist Organization: in both
cases, the masses of east European Zionists demanded the leader-
ship, and the westerners finally gave in.'4
The conflictual milieu of the American melting pot goes far to ex-
plain why the Mizrachi Movement was established so much later in
America than it was in Europe. Splinter group after splinter group
formed and dissolved along the lines of the double chiasma: eastern
and central European Jews/western European Jews and halachically

The Mizrachi Movement in America 165
observant Jews/nonobservant Jews. Among those who refused to
join the FAZ were the Zionist societies of Cincinnati and Minneapo-
lis, and the Chicago "Knights of Zion; which was founded in Octo-
ber 1898. In addition, Bluestone, though a member of the New York
federation, founded the "Free Sons of Zion; an independent Zionist
order, in the face of FAZ opposition. In the succeeding years, vari-
ous attempts were made to establish a second American federation,
composed entirely of east European Jews: for example, the "United
Zionists of Greater New York and Vicinity: under the leadership of
Bluestone, Klein, Adam Rosenberg, Moses Mintz, and Rabbi Joseph
Zeff .'5
When Herzl finally chose to favor Gottheil over Klein, the latter
dropped out of Zionist activity for a while. In 1902, Bluestone was
recognized by the Zionist Executive as the legitimate representative
of the league (now called the United Zionists, as a federation dis-
tinct from that headed by Gottheil) to the Sixth Zionist Congress.16
h December 1903, an American branch of the Mizrachi Movement
(established within the Zionist Organization in 1902) was founded
in order to oppose the League.'7 Klein agreed to cooperate with the
new Mizrachi organization and even headed it, but this did not calm
the troubled waters. Some secular east European Zionists were un-
willing to identify with an Orthodox organization or to be subordi-
nated to a federation controlled by central European Jews. When the
United Zionist Movement fell apart in 1905, so did the American
~izrachi." Only in 1913, long after the Mizrachi World Organiza-
tion was founded at the Pressburg Conference in 1904, did the re-
vival of the American Mizrachi Movement begin.
In 1936, the American Mizrachi Movement published a jubilee
volume to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding.l9 Why
did Mizrachi reckon its existence in the United States from 1911, while
in actual fact it was not formally established until 1914? Was the or-
ganization simply trying to add three years to its seniority? It is true
that there was a loose American organization associated with
Mizrachi as early as 1912. After the American visit of the artist Her-
mann Struck (1911) an attempt was made, in June 1912, to establish
a Mizrachi center in Saint Louis, under Rabbi Dov Baer Abramowit~.~~
However, only on the eve of the Eleventh Zionist Congress (1913)
were demands to organize Mizrachi societies voiced in America.

166 American Jewish Archives
Although a national organization of Mizrachi representatives was
indeed established in the summer of 1913, and delegates were sent
to the Congress and to the Mizrachi Conference followed it:' this
organization seems to have been ignored by the organizers of the Na-
tional Mizrachi Conference took place in Cincinnati one year later. It is
from the latter that the Mizrachi Organization of America began to
count its conferences.
The Cincinnati conference of May 1914, which "officially" estab-
lished the Mizrachi Organization of America, was attended by seventy-
three delegates from about thirty local organizations who united
under the Mizrachi banner. After an agreement between the Amer-
ican Mizrachi delegates to the Eleventh Congress (with the sanction
of FAZ) and the Mizrachi World Organization was concluded in Sep-
tember 1913 to set up a branch of the organization in the United
States, Rabbi Berlin? the secretary of the parent organization was
invited to America to promote the establishment of the new branch.
His speaking tour from November 1913 to June 19x4 gave tremen-
dous impetus to the movement, due to his prestige as the son of the
revered "Netziv" of Volozhin and to his exceptional rhetorical and
organizational abilities.'3 Berlin did not find the objections to Zion-
ism among the ultra-Orthodox in America that he had found in
eastern Europe. Even the self-same rabbis who had been opposed
took up a different position upon emigration. They apparently real-
ized that ultra-Orthodoxy had no future in America and were thus
able to "anticipate only one hope-to return to the land of the fa-
thers."'4
Rabbi Berlin gave various reasons, overt and covert, for the choice
of Cincinnati as the venue for the conference. Overtly, the city was
centrally located on the North American continent: between east and
west, between north and south. Moreover, Cincinnati could boast a
strong Mizrachi society, which included experienced organizers and
wealthy members, such as Professor Nathan Isaacs, the society's
chairman, and Rabbi Abraham Jacob Gershon Lesser, head of the
strong Orthodox community, who was considered the dean of Or-
thodox rabbis of that period. The covert reason was the desire to
combat Reform Judaism on its home grounds, in Berlin's words: "to
establish a spiritual center (Hebrew: MerkaZ RuCHanI = Mizrachi),

The Mizrachi Movement in America 167
which might prove a rallying point between the Ultra-Orthodox
and Reform Jewry of America"."
By the time that the central Mizrachi organization was founded
in America, various Zionist societies in New York, Pittsburgh, and
Saint Louis had already identified themselves with the Mizrachi mode
of Zionism and practical work, such as the purchase of land in Eretz
-Israel, had been undertaken. As a purely East European move-
ment, the American Mizrachi was inclined to active involvement in
settlement and education rather than to the "spiritual" issues of the
Ahad-Ha'am type?6
Despite the existence of Mizrachi societies in New York and
Pittsburgh, the center of activity shifted to the Midwest. Meir Berlin
had been received with particular warmth there; even non-
Orthodox groups, such as the Chicago Knights of Zion, had opened
their doors to him. Most of the delegates at the first Mizrachi con-
ference in Cincinnati came from the Midwest (Chicago, Detroit,
Cleveland, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, and Toledo); only a few arrived
from New York, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. Rabbi Abramowitz of
Saint Louis was elected as president (he had been serving in that
capacity since the Saint Louis conference of the previous year), and
the majority of delegates elected to the central committee were
midwesterners.
The delay in the establishment of the Mizrachi Movement, which
some scholars (i.e., Friesel) attribute to weaknesses within the Or-
thodox camp:7 can better be explained by the independent stance
of the religious Zionists. Even before the official founding of the
Mizrachi Movement, the Mizrachi societies remained aloof from the
American Zionist leadership, which was western or central European
and non-observant. Although the American Mizrachi agreed to co-
operate with the FAZ, it insisted on its right to act as an autonomous
body; the Cincinnati conference passed a resolution not to join the
FAZ. The FAZ leadership, which had assisted in the founding of the
Mizrachi Movement of America, thus felt misled?' The protracted
conflict simmered between the two groups impeded the Mizrachi
organizational process. They were reignited by the election of Bran-
deis as president and by the return of Jacob de Haas (who had ear-
lier been vehement in his attempts to suppress the nonconforming
United Zionist) to the secretariat.'gEven when the leadership of the

168 American Jewish Archives
FAZ came into east European hands, with the appointment of Louis
Lipsky, Mizrachi fears were not allayed.
However, as the center of Mizrachi activity shifted progressively
from the Midwest to New York, cooperation with the FAZ increased.
At the Second Mizrachi Conference, held in New York in May 1915, a
decision was made to transfer the movement's organization depart-
ment-headed by Berlin-to New York. Although the central office
remained for the time being in Saint Louis, a shift in the orientation
of the Mizrachi organization began to be felt. Once the central of-
fice was also moved to New York, after the Third Conference (1916),
a chapter in the history of the American Mizrachi came to an end.
The midwestern leadership was replaced by leaders who had re-
cently emigrated from Europe: Berlin was elected president, and
Rabbi Judah Leib Fishman (later known as Rabbi Maimon) became
a member of the central committee. Berlin clearly annunciated his
conception of the American Mizrachi as an integral part of the
World Zionist Organization and a member of the Mizrachi World
Organization, ready to cooperate with any element within the Zion-
ist camp: "One should not force any Jew out of the organization for
the building of Eretz-Israel."3"
Although the East Coast representatives, who favored coopera-
tion with the FAZ, now took a more prominent place in the
Mizrachi leadership, the relations with the FAZ remained strained
for many years. On the one hand, the organization was aware that
its grassroots support came from east European Jews who were
suspicious of the federation. On the other hand, the leadership of the
FAZ feared that Mizrachi might trespass upon its turf. In addition,
the Mizrachi Movement was reluctant to subordinate its educa-
tional and public activities to the authority of the Zionist Organiza-
tion of America (established in 1918) or to the Zionist Provisional
Committee. The independence of the American Mizrachi had al-
ready exacted a heavy cost when, at the outbreak of the First World
War, the FAZ leadership tried to block the return of Rabbi Berlin to
the United state^.^'
More than any other Zionist organization, Mizrachi was concerned
with the difficulty of maintaining a Jewish, particularly an Orthodox,
identity in America. Mizrachi members in the United States were
convinced that the Zionist movement was duty-bound to establish a

The Mizrachi Movement in America 169
state in Eretz-Israel to which all Jews, including American Jews
(and especially Orthodox Jews), should immigrate. A resolution to
that effect was adopted at the First Mizrachi Conference in Cincin-
nati: "Mizrachi's major goal is to establish a safe life for the Jewish
people in Eretz-Israel, based on Torah and Judaism:"'and each delegate
received, along with his voting card, the slogan: "To the East, to the
East!. . . Only there does my soul seek its fulfillment!" Such senti-
ments went far beyond the scope of the debate as reflected in the
pages of Shivat Zion, in the days just before the First World War.
However, by the time of the Third Mizrachi Conference, held in
Chicago in 1916, two rival approaches had emerged. The first de-
manded a concentration on practical work in Eretz-Israel, while the
second advocated greater involvement in the contemporary Amer-
ican Jewish scene, for the preservation of Jewish religious life. The
latter won the day, determining the character of the Mizrachi Move-
ment in America for many years.33 Mizrachi fought, for instance for
a five-day work week, which would make Sabbath observance pos-
sible. The slogan "work in the present" in America set the American
Mizrachi Movement off from its movement in Europe. Whereas the
European movement was mostly concerned with the salvation of
Jews, the Mizrachi in the United States had engraved the salvation
of Judaism on its banner.34
The outbreak of the First World War, which caused the cessation
of Mizrachi activity in Germany, and the strong leadership of Rabbi
Meir Berlin brought the American Mizrachi to the center of the World
Mizrachi Movement. During the war years, the headquarters of the
Mizrachi World Organization, as well as those of the "Temporary
Zionist Executive," were established in New York. Mizrachi took a
prominent part in the intensive Zionist activities of those years: the
founding of the "Joint"; the organization of aid to the communities of
eastern Europe; the establishment of the American Jewish Congress;35
and the establishment of the Anglo-American Inter-Allied Mizrachi
Bureau, which served as the base for international postwar Mizrachi
adi~ity.3~ The American Mizrachi Movement also grew to an impressive
size, boasting thousands of members in the more than one
hundred societies scattered throughout the United States and Canada?
In the four years between the First (Cincinnati) and Fifth (Philadelphia)
Mizrachi Conferences, membership increased several hundred per-

170 American Jewish Archives
cent, an increase that paralleled that of the FAZ. By the time of the
first meeting of the American Jewish Congress, in December 1918, the
American Mizrachi had become one of the most important of the
Zionist organizations in the United
At the Second Mizrachi Conference in New York (May 1916), it was
agreed that Daniel Rosenthal publish an American edition of Shivat
Zion. In his introduction, Rosenthal explained that the original edition
was out of print, and that Slucki himself had transferred the
publication rights to the Mizrachi organization in 1913.39 In its republished
version, the book was undoubtedly designed to serve as
propaganda for the Mizrachi organization. Its distribution in the
New York branches of Mizrachi and the inclusion of the resolution of
the Third Mizrachi Conference (Chicago, 1~16) at the head of the volume
point in this direction. That resolution bore the stamp of practical
Zionism- emphasis on concrete activities in Eretz-Israel (settlement,
education, and aid to new immigrants) - characterized the American
Mizrachi Movement. The main supporter of the republication
of Shivat Zion was apparently Rabbi Judah Leib Fishman, who arrived
in America after having been expelled (together with other
leaders of the Yishuv) from Palestine by the Turkish authorities. Until
his return to Eretz-Israel after the war, Rabbi Fishman was very active
in the American Mizrachi Movement.
The Mizrachi leadership elected at the New York conference of May
19x5 authorized Rosenthal to republish Shivat Zion as a series of pamphlets.4"
However, because of a lack of funds, the intention to print all
of the letters had appeared in the original anthology never materialized.
We may assume that Rosenthal consulted Fishman in the selection
of letters for publication?' Clearly a deliberate choice was made
not to publish the letters of Rabbi Samuel Mohilever, who had
headed the traditional sector of the Habbat Zion Movement, and of
Rabbi I. J. Reines, the founder and first leader of Mizrachi. On the other
hand an article by Rabbi Fishman was added. Whereas the letters of
Rabbis Kalischer and Guttmacher were chosen because of their authors'
roles in the pioneering stages of Zionist activity, those of Berlin, Eliasberg,
Malbim, Trunk, Spektor, and Levin of Dinaburg were chosen
more for their authors' prestige in east European traditional society
than for their contents. Indeed, the editor explained that he had intended
to hold over the letters of Malbim, Trunk, Spektor, and Levin for

The Mizrachi Movement in America $71
the second pamphlet, but their brevity allowed him to find space for
them in the first. The letters were accompanied, for the most part, by
biographical annotations by Rosenthal, assisted by Rabbi Fishrnan.
The article by Rabbi Fishman, which was specially added to this
edition, deserves attention. Judah Leib Fishman was born in Bessara-
bia in 1875 and officiated as rabbi of the town of Ungeni. His career
spanned three generations of religious Zionism; he participated per-
sonally in the movement from the time of Hibbat Zion to the found-
ing of the state of Israel. A scholarly figure who knew how to combine
his literary work with political activity, his contribution to Zionist
thought and to the organization of religious Zionism on an interna-
tional level was most impressive. Only one personality in religious
Zionism, Rabbi Meir Berlin (Bar-Ilan), may be compared to him.
However, the latter- inasmuch as he died in 1949-had no influ-
ence upon the development of the state of Israel. Fishman's article
in Shivat Zion, which had previously appeared in the Mizrachi Ha-
Ivri, gives his impression of the religious life of the pioneers in the
moshavot in Eretz-Israel. His purpose was obviously to counteract
the rumors that the pioneers were secularizing the Holy Land, which
had induced doubts about whether religious Zionists should sup-
port the settlers.
Although Fishman's article in Shivat Zion contributed nothing es-
sentially new to religious Zionist thought, another article, which he
also wrote in America and published three years later as a pamphlet
in Hebrew and Yiddish, was destined to become the ideological
program of the Mizrachi World Organization. Here Fishman went
beyond the bounds of religious Zionist thinking in his insistence
that Jewish identity was primarily national rather than religious?
Rabbi Fishman's personal courage and spiritual boldness, evident
throughout his years of Zionist activity, enabled him to deliver a
clear-cut denunciation of the Agudat Israel opposition to Zionism. His
extreme view, however, was never accepted by the Mizrachi Move-
ment as a whole. Nevertheless, we may view Fishman's assertion that
the Torah was nonexistent unless the Jewish people living in home-
land as an extension of the revolutionary article by Mohilever opened
the European editions of Shivat Zion. Mohilever there expressed
preference for nonobservant Jews living in Eretz-Israel over the ob-
servant Jews of the Diaspora.

172 American Jewish Archives
The American edition of Shivat Zion thus became the official man-
ifesto of the Mizrachi Movement in the United States45 and may be
held responsible, at least in part, for the impressive increase in
Mizrachi membership during and after the First World War. Whereas
thirty Mizrachi societies sent delegates to the First Mizrachi Confer-
ence in Cincinnati, two hundred and thirty participated in the
Eighth conference^^ The Mizrachi Movement took over the leader-
ship of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada,
which laid the foundations of modem Orthodoxy in AmericaP7
Mizrachi made great contributions to Jewish life and education in
both America and in the settlement in Eretz-IsraelP8 Indeed more
American Mizrachi members fulfilled their Zionist ideology by actual
settlement in Eretz-Israel than did members of any other American
Zionist group.
Yosef Salmon is an Associate Professor at the Ben Gurion University of the
Negev, Israel.
Notes
1. See Yosef Salmon, "The Shivat Zion Book and Its Historical Background" (He-
brew), Eshel Beersheva 2 (1980): 331-35; and Religion and Zionism: First Encounters,
(Jerusalem), 1990, i5o-p.
2. Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 252-339.
3. Ben Halpem "The Americanization of Zionism 1880-1930"American Jewish
History, 69, no. 1 (September 197a), 17.
4. See Michael A. Meyer "Reform Judaism and Zionism in America" (Hebrew),
HaZionut 9 (1984): 95-110; and Evyatar Friesel, "The Meaning of Zionism and Its In-
fluence on the Religious Movements of American Jewry (Hebrew), Ziyonut v'Dat,
207; and Jonathan Sama, "Converts to Zionism in the American Reform Movement:'
33-53 in Ziyonut vtDat, ed. S. Almog, J. Reinharz, and Shapiro,( Jerusalem), 1994.
5. Jacob Katz, "Idea and Reality in Jewish Nationalism", (Hebrew), Molad Uanu-
ary-February 1959): 8-13, and "The Jewish National Movement: A Sociological
Analysis", (Hebrew), in Leumiyut Yehudit, Jerusalem, 1979, 15-35. For America see
Arveh Goren, "Zionism and Its Opponents in American Jewry (Hebrew), in
HaZiyonut u-Mitnagedeha ba-Am ha-Yehudi, (Jerusalem), 1990,356.
6. Meyer, "Reform Judaism and Zionism:' log; "The Aims of Zionism," Federa-
tion of American Zionists, (New York, 1889) (a declaration of principles in which
Gottheil expressed doubts about the future of Jewish life in America).
7. See the excellent study by Evyatar Friesel, HaTenu'ah ha Ziyonit be-Artzot ha-

The Mizrachi Movement in America 173
Brit, (Tel Aviv, 1970). 40, see 'Americanization of Zionism:' for a description of
Austro-Hungarian Society in New York; and Halpern, 17.
8. Yonatan Shapiro, Leadership of the American Zionist Organization: 1897-1930,
Illinois, 1971~26, refers to the Conservatives as the "Neo-Orthodox." Often the term
conseruative was simply used as a synonym for orthodox. See:C.S.Liebman ,"Orthodoxy
in Nineteenth Century America:' Tradition 6, no. 2 (1964), 132-40.
g. Hyman B. Grinstein, "Orthodox Judaism and Early Zionism in America," in
Early History of Zionism in America, ed. I.S. Meyer, (New York, 19581,219.
lo. Hyman B. Grinstein, "The Memoirs and Scrapbooks of the Late Dr. Joseph
Isaac Bluestone:' PAJHS 35 (1939): 54.
11. Friesel, HaTenu'ah ha-Ziyonit, 26-27.
12. Meir Bar-Ilan, Mi-Volozhin ad Yerushalavim, 1I,(Tel Aviv, 1~71). 448-51.
13. Friesel, HaTenu'ah ha-Ziyonit, 29-51.
14. See Melvil I. Urofsky, American Zionismfiom Herzl to the Holocaust, (New York,
1975). 149-50.
15. Friesel, HaTenu'ah ha-Ziyonit, 45.
16. Grinstein, "Memoirs," 58.
17. Friesel, HaTenu'ah ha-Ziyonit, 135-36.
18. Ibid., 51; and Grinstein, "Memoirs:' 59.
19. Mizrachi Jubilee Publication of the Mizrachi Organization of America: 1911-1936,
ed., P. Churgin and A.L. Gellman, (New York, 1936).
20. Friesel, HaTenu'ah ha-Ziyonit, 136, In The American Jewish Year Book: 1915-
1916,310, the founding of the Mizrachi Organization in America is dated June 5,
1912. On Abramowitz and his leadership, see Bar-Ilan, Mi-Volozhin, 68. See also
Aaron Peteshnik, "The Movement Between Two World Wars" (Hebrew), in Hazon
Torah ve-Zion, ed. Simon Federbusch, (New York and Jerusalem, 19601, 217-218.
See also Ha-Ivri, 1913,nos. e, 56.
21. See Ha-Ivri, 1913, no. 2,15. The society's announcement at Saint Louis implies
that it had secured the agreement of the executive of the Mizrachi World Organization
for the attempt to establish Mizrachi in the United States: see Ha-Ivri lgq,
no. 4.31. Rabbi Abramowitz from Saint Louis and Rabbi Ashinsky of Pittsburgh
were elected to the Mizrachi executive that was constituted at the menna Conference,
after the Eleventh Zionist Congress: Ha-Ivri, 1913, nos. 6-8,48. In preparation
for the Eleventh Congress, the American Mizrachi collected some 800 shekels. For
details of the Saint Louis conference and the institutions established see: Ha-Ivri,
nos. 10-11,7f3-77.
22. Rabbi Berlin was not invited to America to organize the Mizrachi Movement
but only to help increase its ranks. This is implied in the reports in Ha-Ivn', 19 y,
no. 13~92; 1914, no. I, 5-6;nos. 4-5,34.
23. See reports in Ha-Ivri, 1914, nos. 4-5.3934-36; no. 6,43-46; no. 7.49; no. 8,
58-59.
24. Ha-lvri, 1914, no. 11,84. Jeffrey Gurock writes that most Orthodox rabbis in the
United States supported Zionism because the majority were disciples of Russian
rabbis who had themselves favored Zionism. But where were the disciples of

174 American Jewish Archives
those rabbis who had objected to Zionism in Russia? Had they not emigrated to
the United States? See Jeffrey Gurock, "The Orthodox Jewish Organizations in
America: 1880-1930" in Almag et al. Ziyonut va-Dat, 270.
25. Bar-Ilan, Mi-Volozhin, 11, 472-75. The idea of infecting the masses in Cincinnati
with Zionist enthusiasm as an anti-Reform measure was common to the
American Zionist movement as a whole. See Urofsky, American Zionism, 166-167.
See also, in the same volume, Aaron Peteshnik, "The Movement:' 218-19. For a declaration
that the convening of the Mizrachi conference in the Reform stronghold
was deliberate, see Ha-Ivri, 1914, no. 5,58.
26. After the First World War, American Mizrachi sent word to Eretz-Israel that
its members intended to immigrate and settle on the land. See Berlin's letter to the
World Mizrachi Center, Jerusalem (January lo, 1921) in Iggerot Bar-llan, 109.
27. Friesel, HaTenu'ah ha-Ziyonit, 137.
28. On the visit to Chicago, see Ha-Ivri, 1914, no. 6,43.
29. Nathaniel Katzburg suggests that when Meir Berlin came to the United States
he harbored irredentist views of Mizrachi's position in American Zionism. In this
respect, Katzburg agrees with Grinstein, "Orthodox Judaism:' 221. Another possibility
is that Berlin was influenced by the position of the majority in the American
Mizrachi. See Iggerot Bar-Ilan, 18-20 and notes. Urofsky is also of the opinion that
Berlin, upon arrival in the United States, found that American Mizrachi leaders
mostly favored cooling relations with the FAZ. See Urofsky, American Zionism, 102.
30. Meir Berlin, "The Mizrachi and its Tasks" (Yiddish), Di Mizrachi Bevegung,
Saint Louis, 19x5, 7; and "What the Mizrachi Demands" (Hebrew), Ha-Ivri, 1914,
no. 2, lo.
31. Urofsky, American Zionism, 241.
32. DOV Baer Abramowitz, "The Mizrachi Colonial Fund in Di Mizrachi b'Vegung
(Yiddish), 12-15,21. See also Rabbi Lesser's address to the Cincinnati conference
in Ha-Ivri, 1914, nos. 910,68; and the address by Judge Spiegel in the same
volume.
33. Y.L. Maimon, Le-Sha'ah u-le-Dor, (Jerusalem, 196~), 61.
34. See Rabbi Ashinsky's address to the Cincinnati conference in Ha-Ivri, 1914, no.
11,82.
35. Berlin, "Mizrach and Its Tastes:'lo5; Mi-Volozhin, 11,513-516,525-528.
36. Bar-llan, 29.
37. Memorial Book ofthe Fifth Annual Conference of Mizrachi in America, 1918.
38. See Bar-Ilan, Mi-Volozhin, 11,527-528 For the =onist Movement in general and
the struggle to establish the WJC, see Urofsky, American Zionism, 178,183. Gedaliah
Bublick, one of the most prominent Mizrachi leaders in the United States, also
chaired the founding committee of the AJC; see Peteshnik, "The Movement," 221,
245.
39. The list of delegates at the Vienna conference indeed includes Slucki's name:
see Ha-Ivri, 1913, nos. &8,51.
40. Shivat Zion, (New York, 1916), title page. The Mizrachi conference at Vienna

The Mizrachi Movement in America 175
was held in the summer of 1913, and not in 1914, as Rosenthal claims; it therefore
preceded the Eleventh Zionist Congress.
41. On the title page the editor indeed thanks Rabbi Fishman for biographical in-
formation about the rabbis whose letters he published.
42. Shivat Zion, 30.
43. Y.L. Fishman, Te'udat ha-Mizrachi, (New York, 1919), and Vas iz der Mizrachi?
(New York, i9i9).
44. Meir Berlin repeatedly insisted that "national life and the spirit of the Torah
[are] ... the same thing with two names," Ha-Ivri, 1914, no. 2, p. 9.
45. Fishman,Te'udat ha-Mizrach:
46. Peteshnik, 46-48, "The Movement:' 222.
47. Bid., 220-221. The leader of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, Rabbi S.E. Jaffe
joined the Mizrachi. See Ha-Ivri, 1914, nos. 4-5,30, and Gurock, "Orthodox Jewish
Organizations:' 267-275.
48. Peteshnik: "The Movement:' 221-22.

Review Essay
Ethnic Histoy in the 1990s -
The American Jewish Quest for Community
Sarna, Jonathan and Ellen Smith, eds.
The Jews of Boston -
Essays on the Occasion of the Centena y (1895-1995) of the Combined
Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston.
Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995.353 pp.
Cutler, Irving.
The Jews of Chicago - From Shet2 to Suburb.
Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996.315 pp.
The early histories of the Jews of Boston and Chicago have little in
common. While the first Jews who reached Chicago and other
midwestern cities around 1840 were among the first settlers in
these (then) small cities and were thus accepted rather easily into
the larger community, the curious fact that almost no Jews lived in
Boston before 1840 can be traced back to a strong sense of exclusion
that prevailed in the metropolis of New England. To be sure, there
were old Jewish communities on the East Coast but only one in
New England: The origins of the Jewish community in Newport
date back to the middle of the seventeenth century.' For many
years Boston had the questionable reputation of being 'America's
most homogenous city; and, as Jonathan Sarna points out in his in-
troductory essay, Jews "were not particularly welcome" there (4). In
fact, the first Jewish congregation in Boston was founded only in
1843, at a time when some midwestern congregations were already
in existence. Jews who came to Boston before 1880 were few in
number and hailed mostly from eastern Europe. They remained
outsiders in Boston for many years to come, while, to give just one
example, one of the leading Jews (and Germans for that matter) in
Chicago, Henry Greenebaum, was considered as a potential candi-

178 American Jewish Archives
date for the post of mayor in the days after the disastrous fire that
ravaged through Chicago in 1871.' Jews from southern Germany
dominated the early Chicago Jewish community and the links of
the ethnic leadership to Germany on a spiritual and theological
level remained strong into the 1880s. The established German Jews
of Chicago, even if their own background was eastern European,
distanced themselves early on from recent eastern European Jewish
immigrants. In Boston, on the other hand, the German-Russian con-
flict was not much of an issue, since there were only a few estab-
lished Jews who were afraid to be identified with eastern European
Jewish immigrants. While the history of the Chicago Jewish com-
munity may be more typical than Boston's, it does stand out: In the
late 1920s, 300,000 Jews lived in Chicago only the Jewish communi-
ties in New York and Warsaw surpassed Chicago's in size. Chicago
was one of the early centers of Zionism in the United States and, at
the same time, the most outspoken representatives of the so-called
radical Reform movement were active in this city. However, with
the arrival of the eastern European Jews after 1880 the similarities
between Boston and Chicago Jews began to outweigh the differences,
and eventually the successive generations would move to
the same place, to suburbia.
On a first glance, the two books on the Jews of Chicago and Boston
share quite a few characteristics: Both are rather large bound and
attractive-looking volumes, illustrations and photographs abound
throughout the books, and, obviously, publishers and authors intend
to attract a rather large readership well beyond academia. On a superficial
level both books do a good job for the casual reader. They
cover the history of the Jewish communities from the first settlement
in both cities up to the present detailed bibliographies, name- and
subject-indexes, and, indeed, fascinating illustrations are provided.
Yet, while the study on Boston, published on the occasion of the
centenary of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of the Boston area,
is the first comprehensive attempt to cover this subject, several authors
in the past have already dealt with Chicago Jewish history.
More than seventy years ago Hyman Meites covered, in his encyclopedic
History of the Jews of Chicago (Chicago, ~ gq), the genesis
and development of the community in detail. On more than 700
pages Meites compiled an exhausting review of all Jewish institu-
- .
.

Review Essay 179
tions, associations, and congregations, providing several hundred
biographies of leading Jewish personalities, numerous illustra-
tions, and an appendix with reprinted documents. Meites's enor-
mous piece of work belongs to a particular genre, so, called ethnic
histories that praise a certain immigrant group and sometimes lack
the distance of academic histories. Within this field it excels, but
not because of its volume: Rather than praising the ethnic leader-
ship or the wealthy members of the group, the typical approach for
such works, Meites focused on the ties of community. For him it
was charity that tied the Jewish community together; in his portrait
the most worthy Jews were the ones who engaged in this realm.'
Only four years later the sociologist Louis Wirth came forward with
his classic study The Ghetto (Chicago 1928) that was based, in part,
on Meites's Histo y. Wirth compared the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt
in the early modern period with the immigrant-neigborhood of
eastern European Jews on the West Side of Chicago. Wirth's conclu-
sions are outdated today, partly because his portrait of the Frank-
furt ghetto was based on flawed studies, partly because the linear
assimilation model of the Chicago school of Sociology has long
been replaced by more complex models.4 However, Wirth provided
a detailed and intimate portrait of the Jewish immigrant neighbor-
hood based on his own research and he evaluated his source mate-
rials critically. Since the 1920s a few minor works on Chicago
Jewish history have also been published.5 Against this background
Cutler's work offers not many new insights. Cutler narrates the his-
tory of the Jews of Chicago in the first three chapters; the fourth
chapter is devoted to famous Jews in the arts, in academia, and in
business. In his last chapter Cutler gives a detailed and well-re-
searched account of the residential mobility of Chicago's Jews. For
no apparent reason Meites's work is (except for references) only
mentioned once in passing(lz1). The name of Louis Wirth, who
taught at the University of Chicago and who was, during his life-
time, one of the most famous American sociologists, shows up only
once in a list of Jewish academics. The short list of footnotes indi-
cates that Cutler used hardly any primary source material if so he
mainly relied on newspaper articles. Indeed, his most important
source is Meites; large parts of the first chapter (illustration and
text) were simply reproduced from Meites's book.6 What is clearly

180 American Jewish Archives
missing from Cutler's narrative is the attempt to put Chicago on the
map of American Jewish history.
A few paragraphs are devoted to the living conditions of Jews in
Germany and eastern Europe, but once the Jewish immigrants ar-
rived in the United States, they seemingly were already in Chicago. It
is noteworthy that important events of Chicago Jewish history are
either not mentioned or only touched upon in passing. Anti-
Semitism was never absent from Chicago, but Cutler treats this phe-
nomenon surprisingly superficially. Even the millionaire Julius
Rosenwald, a generous German-Jewish philanthropist, who turned
Sears and Roebuck into the world's largest mail-order house, was
excluded by Chicago's elite because of his Jewishness. Many Jew-
ish clubs were organized because Jews were excluded from gentile
associations. More such points could be raised, but it would be un-
fair to criticize Cutler for such omissions. His intention is not to
address a scholarly readership familiar with the particulars of
American Jewish history. He aims at a larger audience. Indeed, the
book belongs to the above-described genre of nonacademic ethnic
history. It differs from older such ethnic histories not so much in
content as in form. The most important criteria for these ethnic his-
tories are: a certain lack of critical distance, the emphasis of positive
achievements, a tendency to play down or omit negative experi-
ences of the group, and a strong focus on the locality, on the promi-
nent role of ethnic leaders, and on the loyalty of the ethnic group to
the United States. Trpically the structure of older ethnic histories
consists of a narrative account of the local history and the ethnic
group, followed by biographies of prominent members of group, and
sometimes a list of ethnic institutions was added. The main concern
of their authors was to demonstrate that the members of the group
were part of the American mainstream. Early in the twentieth cen-
tury Chicago's local historians usually ignored Jews, Poles, Swedes,
and other immigrants and, as James Grossman points out, for these
historians "immigration was merely something that happened,
and that created problems."7 Ethnic histories were written to chal-
lenge this perspective. The perception of Jewish immigration in
Chicago was particularly negative; the "Ghetto: the large Jewish
immigrant neighborhood on Chicago's West Side, was a constant
source of embarrassment for the German Jewish leaders. They feared

Review Essay 181
that anti-Semitic tendencies might be strengthened by the all too
visible Jewish immigrants in the "Ghetto:' and they supported a
whole range of Americanization programs for the eastern Euro-
pean Jews. Their fears were reinforced by the perception of Jewish
immigrants in the mainstream press. In 1891 the Chicago Tribune re-
ported: "On the West Side. .. one can walk the streets for blocks
and see none but Semitic features and hear nothing but the Hebrew
patois of Russian Poland!" A number of more openly hostile arti-
cles could be quoted. Meites, himself of eastern European back-
ground, intended to change such perceptions of Chicago's Jews by
giving a detailed account of the Jewish community life in the city
and of Jewish contributions to the well-being of the city and the na-
tion.
All the above, mentioned criteria apply to Cutler's book. He does
not spend any time with concepts or current debates among migra-
tion historians, nor does he develop a thesis. His exclusive focus is
Chicago and its Jews, and he narrates the important events and
tends to pass on negative experiences. The overall portrait of a
"noteworthy American- and Jewish-success-story"(280) is more im-
portant to him than details. A whole chapter is devoted to the likes
of Benny Goodman, Saul Bellow, Sidney Hillman, and others, all
ethnic leaders from today's perspective.
Some of these criteria also apply to the Boston volume. Twelve
authors contributed to this book, which is organized in three parts:
Jonathan Sarna gives in his brief introductory essay an outline of
the most important aspects of Jewish history in Boston against the
background of American Jewish history. He raises especially three
points:
I) Jews came late to Boston; the early community was small
and dominated by Jews from Posen rather than south Ger-
many.
2) Boston was never an easy place for Jews. They were dis-
criminated against, in the nineteenth century by Boston's
elites, in the first half of the twentieth century by the Catholic
establishment,which encouraged anti-Semitism and even vio-
lence against Jews. Eventually poor elderly Jews were forced
out of decaying neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s.

182 American Jmish Archives
3) But Boston, known for its brilliant academic institutions,
symbolizes also the academic achievements of American Jews
to this day.
The second part consists of five essays that cover the period
from colonial times to the present. The overall picture appears
more important than the details. Solomon Schindler, a German-born
Reform rabbi of national stature who was the leading
figure of the Boston Jewish community in the 1880s and
1890s (he also wrote the first history of Boston's Jews in 1889)~
would certainly have deserved more space.9 The third part
deals with selected topics such as Zionism, residential mobility,
architecture of synagogues, and the development of Jewish
philanthropy. It is not only Sarna's essay but especially this
third section that make the Boston volume a must for academic
readers interested in this topic. All the authors provide
much useful information on sources; indeed, some have used
primary source materials extensively. Still, some superficial elements
of "ethnic history" can be detected: The focus rests almost
exclusively on Boston's Jewsl; little is said about other
immigrants. One chapter deals with the "famous" Jews of
Boston. Most striking, however, is the fine design of "The Jews
of Boston? It bears a resemblance to Meites's Chicago volume
of 1924 and gives the volume a certain nostalgic touch. It
would certainly be most unfair to characterize this book simply
as a "coffeetable book: but it was clearly designed to appeal
to readers on an aesthetic level.
mat might have motivated the authors to write "ethnic history"
in the ~ggos? The 1990s differ much from the 1920s Jews have been
accepted into the mainstream and they are one of the most successful
immigrant groups in American history. Nevertheless, it is also a
critical period for Jewish communities in contemporary America.
In his introduction Cutler writes: "Before the present era of mobility,
Jewish life centered mainly around the neighborhood, which was a
vibrant, closely knit community." Cutler remembers an exhibit he
helped to organize in 1985: "I noticed that the largest and most enthusiastic
crowds seemed to congregate around the photos and maps
of old Chicago Jewish neighborhoodsU(xi). In the Boston-volume

Review Essay 183
similar sentiments prevail. Gerald H. Gamm notes about contem-
porary Jewish communities in Boston's suburbs "the fruit is at once
sweet and bitter. It is sweet because Boston's Jews have built commu-
nities . . . Yet it is bitter because those same achievements, the dream
of generations of Boston Jews, institutionalize the fragmentation of
the city's Jewish community. Blue Hill Avenue [a Jewish neighbor-
hood in the first half of this century] is now gone forever" (162).
Sherry Israel, who covers the period from 1967 to 1994 in the Boston
volume, notes the "challenge of the past thirty years . . . to maintain
a sense of connectedness amid this growing diversity" (124). A map
of the synagogue distribution in the Chicago volume illustrates the
dispersion of Jews in the Chicago area over the last 150 years: In
1888 a few German-Jewish synagogues were spread around the
center of town in 1918 a dense cluster of dots stands for the Ghetto
on the West Side where thousands of Jewish immigrants from east-
ern Europe lived. In the following years successive generations of
Jews moved up on the social ladder and thus eventually into the
northern suburbs of Chicago. In the 1920s Jews moved in large
numbers to Lawndale, a relatively small area a few miles west of
the ghetto, known among poor ghetto residents as "Deutsch-
land."" After World War I1 most Jews moved from Lawndale to
several areas on the Northside of Chicago and since the 1960s from
there to adjacent suburbs like Skokie, Evanston, and Winnetka. In
these areas Jews are dispersed, and while they are certainly over-
represented in suburbs like Skokie, the closeness of the Lawndale
neighborhood is lost. In Boston similar processes took place in ad-
dition, a large part of the Boston Jewish population is constantly in
transit; many young and professional Jews who attend academic
institutions in the Boston area rarely stay longer than a few years be-
fore they move on to pursue their careers elsewhere. Paul Ritterbrand,
a specialist of Jewish demography in the United States, ranks dis-
persion next to fertility and intermarriage as the biggest threat to
the survival of Jews as a group in American society. He writes: "I
cannot with confidence predict a rosy future for American Jewry as
a functioning ~ollectivity.'~"
These ethnic histories symbolize the longing for a closer, better
connected Jewish community. Cutler evokes the memory of a func-
tioning and close-knit community in the past as he describes the

184 American Jewish Archives
dispersion of Chicago Jewry. The volume on Boston is published to
celebrate the centenary of an institution that tied and ties this dis-
persing and transforming community together. In this context it is
memorable that Jewish communities in the United States faced
similar challenges early on; Chicago's United Hebrew Relief Asso-
ciation, the forerunner of what is today the Jewish Federation of
Chicago, was founded in 1859 to care for poor Jews in Chicago, but
it also served as the common platform for a community that was
splitting quickly along religious, regional, and social lines." Ameri-
canization has always been a double-edged sword for Jews. On the
one hand America made Jewish immigrants free; the movement of
most American Jews into the suburbs illustrates the unhindered so-
cial rise of successive generations of Jewish immigrants. On the
other hand, Jewish communities struggled early on against the
forces of assimilation and dispersion. This American paradox con-
tinues to challenge American Jews as a group, and the two vol-
umes on Boston and Chicago offer apt descriptions of Jewish
strategies to cope with this ambivalent challenge, while, at the
same time, the books are primary sources for future historians who
will interpret this paradox.
-Tobias Brinkmann
Tobias Brinkmann is completing his doctoral dissertation, a study of German
Jews in Chicago, 1840-1900, at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany.
Notes
I. Stephen Mostov, 'A Sociological Portrait of German Jewish Immigrants in
Boston: 1845-1861" (AJS Review, 1978) (3): 127f.
2. Chicago Tribune, October 21,1871. This event is not even mentioned by Cutler.
3. James R. Grossman, Introduction to the 1990 facsimile edition. In Meites, Histoy
of the Jews of Chicago, reprint, (Chicago ~ggo), without page number.
4. Jeffrey S. Gurock, "Time, Place and Movement in Immigrant Jewish Historiography:'
in Leo Landmann, ed., Scholars and Scholarship-The Interaction Between
Judaism and Other Cultures, (New York, ~ggo), 169-85.
5. The works are listed in Cutler's bibliography.
6. Areprint of Meites's History was published in 1990 by the Chicago Jewish Historical
Society and is still available in bookstores.
7. Grossman, Introduction.
8. "Our Russian Exiles." Chicago Tribune, July 19,1891.

Review Essay 185
9. For Schindler Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in an Urban Age, (Cambridge,
1954).
lo. Wirth, The Ghetto, 246.
11. Paul Ritterbrand. "Modem Times and Jewish Assimilation:' in The American-
ization of the Jews, ed., Robert M. Selzter and Norman J. Cohen, (New York 1995),
390.
12. Compare the speech of Liebmann Adler in 15th Annual Report of the United
Hebrew Relief Association, Chicago, 1874.

Book Reviews 187
Godfrey, Sheldon J., and Judith C.
Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth
of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740-1867.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995.396 pages.
In their 1955 essay, "The Acquisition of Political and Social Rights
by the Jews in the United States; Oscar and Mary Handlin described
the expanded freedoms experienced by Jews in the New World as
having arisen haphazardly, the result of the frontier conditions in a
newly emerging society. The process of Jewish inclusion into the
sociopolitical life of the United States "went forward not through
modifications of theory or law, which long remained European, but
rather through the practical pressure of the conditions of life which
were American!" Now, forty years later, another husband and wife
team have revisited this important topic. In their new study of Jewish
equality in British colonial America, Search Out the Land, Sheldon and
Judith Godfrey attempt to prove a much higher degree of intentional-
ity in the story of political and religious freedom in North America.
Search Out the Land traces the emergence of Jewish religious and
civil liberties in Britain's North American possessions from the 1740
passage of the Plantation Act, which gave Britain direct control of
naturalization of newcomers in its colonies, to the 1867 confedera-
tion of four British North American provinces into what is now called
Canada. Surveying all British colonies in North America the God-
freys try to show that Jews not only benefited from the "newness"
of colonial society but, also actively sought out political and reli-
gious freedoms, striving to further these freedoms once they had
established themselves in North America. In this way, the Godfreys
hoped not only to rewrite the history of Jewish contributions to
Canadian society but to reexamine the Jewish role in the develop-
ment of civil rights in the English-speaking New World as a whole.
This is no small task, and the Godfreys have presented an engaging
study, successful for the most part, but not entirely so.
The Godfreys embarked on this study by determining why Jews
chose to emigrate to some American colonies over others. They re-
viewed each colony's laws, determining what restrictions were faced

188 American Jewish Archives
by Jews. Their task was made more difficult because regulations regarding
Jewish settlement not only were formulated in the colonies
themselves, but were set by colonial governors and by the Colonial
Office in Britain, sometimes in "secret royal instructions"(xix). What
the Godfreys discovered was that from early on, British colonial
policy was aimed at enticing Jews to the New World by offering
them fewer restrictions than those they would have faced in Britain.
They did so out of economic motivations and were inspired by the
financial success of the Dutch colonies that had attracted many
Jews by offering them full equality with other merchants. Both the
Dutch and the British saw Jews as essential to colonial economic
health (51, 55). Instructions were often kept secret in order to avoid
public disquiet over giving Jews rights usually reserved only for
members of the Church of England (53). Though this secrecy resulted
in a hodgepodge of conflicting, and often confusing, royal
instructions and colonial administrators' decisions, it also created
the possibility of full Jewish civil and religious rights. These first
steps were in turn furthered by the petitions of British North American
Jews to be treated as equal to other English colonists.
Combining archaeological sleuthing, legal history, and oldfashioned
narrative, Search Out the Land challenges the prevailing
understanding of the Jewish contribution to early North American
society in important ways. First, Search Out the Land posits that many
more Jews than were previously identified were active in the establishment
of Canada. As the authors note, this is a history of the "ignored
founders of Canadian society, inasmuch as most historians
see Jews as having "had virtually no impact on the country's early
development"(xvi). But the Godfreys have discovered significant
Jewish participation in every step of British expansion into Canada.
In the 1750s~ for instance, a small but short-lived Jewish community
developed at Halifax, Nova Scotia, the first British settlement on
Canadian soil. The equality offered this early Jewish community
set important precedents for the development of liberal democracy
in North America. After the 1760 British conquest of New France,
the Jewish fur trading consortium "Gershon Levy & Co." was instrumental
in opening trade routes to the western Great Lakes and
beyond work that helped':. . give Canada an economic justification
as a countryU(gz).

Book Reviews 189
Despite the importance of these and other examples given in Search
Out the Land, its main story "is the development of a just society based
on equal rights . . . "(xxi). In this case, the Godfreys challenge the notion
that the United States led the New World in the establishment of re-
ligious and civil liberties, demonstrating that the Canadian side of the
story must also be considered in any discussion of the development
of equality in the New World. Because Jews made up a significantly
higher proportion of the English population in the formerly French
territory of Quebec (in the 1760s up to 12 percent of adult English
males were Jewish), they were accorded much more favorable treat-
ment than in other parts of the British Empire (97). By the 1760s,
Jews were being appointed to low, level government positions and
were permitted to swear Jewish oaths in order to hold these posts.
British Jews did not receive similar treatment until 1828, and Jews in
all but two of the thirteen colonies were not granted these rights un-
til later. These precedents allowed for "an acceptance of minorities
inconceivable in the Old World"(102) and offered later generations
of Canadian minority groups, Jews or otherwise, the opportunity
to press for ever greater political franchise. By the 1867 confedera-
tion of Canada, the Godfreys write, "British North America was al-
ready advanced and enlightened in its attempts to ensure that all
minorities were legally equalU(xxii). While the Canadian process
may have been different from that in the United States, the results
were the same.
Where Search Out the Land fails is in applying a twentieth-century
political self-awareness to individuals living in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The idea that Jews came to the New World
politically aware, seeking out civil rights not available in the Old,
as implied in this statement from the book's beginning: "The main
motivation of Jewish settlers who came to North America in the
eighteenth century was to escape the civil and political restrictions,
injustices, and inequalities of the Old World and to find equal op-
portunity as Jews in the Newn(xviii), is only credible if understood
from a purely economic point of view. But the Godfreys go on to
force this paradigm. "From the beginning:' they write, "equality was
the stated goal of New World societies.. ."(xix). If Jews came to the
New World seeking the greater freedom available here, it was because
they understood that without the impediments of alien status they

190 American Jewish Archives
could compete more effectively. Had political equality been the only
or even primary motivation, I suspect more Jews would have come
sooner, but the majority were either satisfied with their position in
Europe or too impoverished to make the attempt.
Though the Godfreys stretch their point a bit too far, all in all,
Search Out the Land provides a thoroughly researched and readable
account of the Jewish contribution to early North America. The God-
freys have challenged the prevailing historiography in an extremely
engaging way, and their work will undoubtedly spark much de-
bate. Search Out the Land broadens our understanding of the history
of North America and demonstrates the importance of examining
ideological developments in their broader contexts. This work will
surely be mandatory reading for students of Canadian Jewish his-
tory, while scholars of American Jewish history will also find it
very useful.
- Jay Eidelrnan
Jay Eidelman teaches Judaic Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in
Geneva, New York. He recently completed a dissertation entitled "In the Wilds of
America": The Early Republican Origins of American Judaism, 1790-1830.'' He has
a Ph.D. in Religious Studiesfrom Yale University. He completed his B.A. at McGill
University in Montreal, his hometown.
Notes
1. American Jewish Year Book 56,1946,48.

Book Reviews 191
Ashkenazi, Elliott, Editor.
The Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon:
Growing Up in New Orleans, 1861-1862.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.458 pages.
Elliott Ashkenazi's subtitle, "Growing Up in New Orleans:' aptly
encapsulates the central thrust of Clara Solomon's journal. As she
wrote in her diary (which she addressed as "Dear Philomen") from
mid-June 1861 through mid-July 1862, the precocious sixteen-yearold
revealed as much about her anxiety over familial and peer relationships
as she did her concerns for the Confede~acy that she held
in such high esteem. Ashkenazi came across the journal as he was
researching his earlier work on Louisiana's Jewish community' and
he immediately recognized the value of Clara's perspective of life
around her in Civil War New Orleans. The second of six daughters of
a comfortable (at least in the antebellum years) merchant, Solomon
Solomon, and his wife, Emma, Clara depicted intimate details of a
life-style typifying that of many assimilated Crescent City Jews.
The polyglot urbanity of their beloved city offered antebellum Jews
acceptance and social access and allowed them to identify primarily
as southerners without completely forsaking their Judaism. The intensity
of this loyalty becomes clear to us when we find Clara signing
her name, "Miss Clara Solomon, New Orleans, La., C.S.Aa1'(13)
and observing that one family friend "has a fine boy who glories in
the name 'Sumter Davis' [LevyIn(54). Like other Sephardic Jews of
the city, the Solomons nevertheless maintained their ritual at Dispersed
of Judah, the congregation largely underwritten by New
Orleans's leading nineteenth-century philanthropist, Judah Touro.
Although Clara's gentile classmates attended school on Saturday,
like most Jewish girls Clara honored the Sabbath. On the other
hand, she was not fond of attending Shabbat services and rarely
went. When she did, she responded to the social realities, not the
spiritual dimensions, of the experience. One Sabbath morning, for
example, right after Clara and her older sister entered the "Holy

192 American Jewish Archives
Place of God: Clara noted that "Divine angelic Flora engrossed the
greater part of my attention1'(263).
Clara idolized and idealized her father, who left the family be-
hind in New Orleans to follow the Confederacy to Virginia where he
served as a sutler to the troops, supplying them with clothing and
equipment. His absence was very difficult for his family, especially,
it seems, for Clara because her relationship with her mother was
very strained. In the individual photographic portraits included in
the text, Clara, though not homely, is the least attractive of the sis-
ters. Like a contemporary teenager, she worried excessively about
her looks, constantly comparing herself negatively to her older sister,
Alice, whom she adored. The female members of the family went to
a professional photographer to have portraits made to send their
father. When they received the finished products, Clara was dissat-
isfied with hers, complaining to her mother "that it is not pretty."
Her mother's reply drove a stake through her daughter's heart.
"'Well; said she, 'did you expect to make a pretty picture? DO ugly
people generally'?" Incredibly, Clara shared that awful moment
with Philomen: "Wasn't that cruel?"(zlg). No wonder poor Clara
was overly self-conscious and spent much of her energy in school
or in synagogue admiring those whom she deemed more attractive.
In spite of the obsessive concerns of adolescence, Clara displayed
more equanimity when she discussed the varied social interactions
between the Solomons and their friends. She painted a vivid pic-
ture of the visits back and forth, complete with the elaborate code
of social demands and constraints. These events dominated the
Solomon family's calendar. On one occasion, for example, after vis-
iting her friend, Rebecca Harris and her well-to-do husband, Clara
wrote, "Never in her girlhood fancies did her aspirations reach
higher than her present attainments; and not only with every com-
fort that wealth can bestow, but with a model of a husband"(306).
Later, in the same entry, Clara confessed, "Oh! mentally, ejaculated I,
this is the way to live, and I believe if I went often to aristocratic
houses, I would be unmanageable at home, I would be so dissatis-
fied. Whenever I turned at the table, there was a negro at my elbow
to administer to my every wantU(3o7).
The Solomon family had two domestic female servants - Ellen
Deegan, an Irish woman, and Lucy, an African American. Clara

Book Reviews 193
rarely referred to either and never worried about the larger issue of
slavery, except in reference to her mother's concerns about the pos-
sibility of Lucy's leaving after the city fell under Union occupation.
Clara realized that many house servants, even when welltreated,
were deserting their masters, but she understood that these slaves
"imagine no sacrifice too great with which to purchase freedom."
She believed that Lucy, vulnerable and "a tool in the hands of any-
one:' might be so tempted. True southerner that she was, Clara re-
mained unsympathetic. "Should one of mine [desert]:' she declared,
"I would inflict severe punishment, & should discard them for-
ever"(384).
While Clara did not dwell constantly on details of the Civil War,
she and her older sister, Alice, kept abreast of the news and eagerly
anticipated the arrival of the daily newspapers. Unfortunately, the
war transformed the Solomons' lives in ways they could scarcely
imagine during the more hopeful months in which Clara maintained
her diary. In addition to experiencing wartime shortages in sup-
plies and income, especially after New Orleans capitulated to the
Union forces, they anguished over the loss of friends and associates
in battle. When Solomon Solomon left home to supply Confederate
troops, he hoped that he could compensate for his absence by in-
creasing his family's economic security. His dreams, however, re-
mained unfulfilled. Those at home waited for long periods of time
just for word from him and even longer for money. From Clara's
concern, the reader realizes that this situation differed greatly from
the comfortable circumstances the family previously had enjoyed.
Ashkenazi has written an afterword in which he goes beyond the
temporal limits imposed by the diary and carries the Solomon story
closer to the present. Even though he never supplies a satisfying
analysis of Solomon's business failures nor his poor financial judg-
ment in guiding his family, Ashkenazi does tell us that when
Solomon returned from the war he did not return to his wholesale
business. Indeed, the Solomon family never regained its ante-
bellum standard of living, and Clara did not live happily ever after.
Although a significant document, the diary is long and often tedious
to read. Ashkenazi's notes could have been more helpful. He illu-
minates the references to the Civil War battles and personalities that
Clara mentioned, and he gives us some biographical information

194 American Jewish Archives
about the major players in the Solomon family's life, but he does not
provide enough interpretation of issues relating to mid-nineteenth
century women or to the social milieu of Jewish New Orleans. He re-
lies on the research efforts of a New Orleans genealogist to provide
information about the Solomon family beyond the scope of the diary,
but he would have done well to consult synagogue and other insti-
tutional records and the New Orleans Jewish Ledger to situate the
later generations of the Solomon family more accurately in the com-
munity and to give us a sense of how the Civil War changed Jewish
social mobility in New Orleans society.
-Bobbie Malone
Bobbie Malone received her Ph.D. in American history fvom Tulane University,
New Orleans, and has published Rabbi Max Heller: Reformer, Zionist, South-
erner, 1860--1929. She is the director of the Ofice of School Services at the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Note
1. The Business of Jews in Louisiana, 1840-1875, (university of Alabama Press,
1988).

Book Reviews 195
Barkai, Avraham.
Branching Out: German Jewish Immigration
to the United States, 1820-1914.
New York: Holmes and Meier 1994,269 pages.
Avraham Barkaifs latest book, Branching Out, strikingly reflects his
background as historian: The author is a lecturer in German history
at Tel Aviv University and through his interest in German social and
economic history and the history of the Jews in Germany has obvi-
ously found his way to the field of American Jewish history. It is
exactly this background that contributes heavily to his new approach
to the history of German Jewish immigration to the United States.
In contrast to the very qualified scholarly work Encounter with
Emancipation by Naomi W. Cohen, Barkai is interested in the ques-
tion of the extent and the degree of influence the Old World back-
ground and ties had on the immigrant community.
In eight well-documented chapters Barkai describes all the major
issues of German Jewish immigration to the United States and of
German Jewish community life in the New World. It soon becomes
obvious to the reader that the author is an expert on German Jew-
ish history. Barkai integrates his knowledge of the Old World con-
ditions to the development of the new American community. Thus
Barkai also attempts to trace the fate of individuals or groups that
had emigrated from a few German communities over time, based
on some archival material in Germany and the United States. The
lack of source material documenting the personal experiences of im-
migrants probably also explains why the author has mainly focused
on printed sources such as newspapers and periodicals of the Jew-
ish communities in Germany and America. The author gives plenty
of evidence, often in the form of statistics and quotations, although
sometimes the length and frequency of quotation irritate the reader.
It is most probably this comparative approach that leads Barkai
to conclude that there were two very different waves of German
Jewish immigration to the United States. These two waves quickly
merged and for a long time regarded themselves as a branch of
German Jewry. American German Jewry preserved a surpirsing
"continuity in separation: a cultural, religious, economic, and so-

196 American Jewish Archives
cia1 similarity to the German Jewish community, until the First
World War ended this era and the American German Jews started
to meld into a stronger American Jewish community.
The author starts out describing the exact political, social, and
economic background in which German Jewry lived at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. As one of his major hypotheses, he
differentiates German Jewish immigration to the United States be-
tween southern and southwestern Jews constituting the first wave
of German Jewish immigration from 1830 to 1860, and the often un-
derestimated Jewish emigration from the northern and eastern parts
of Germany after the Civil War to 1910.
The first Jews from Bohemia, Bavaria, Baden, Wiirttemberg, and
Alsace-Lorraine arrived in the 1820s and were part of a larger Ger-
man mass emigration from those regions. However, the Jewish im-
migrants were motivated by different factors than gentile Germans:
due to the Matrikel laws prevailing in southern Germany, many
young Jews could not marry or found a family in the community
where they lived. Thus they emigrated with a few savings which to
start. Besides social and economic reasons, the desire for political
emancipation motivated emigration. In addition, other factors led
the young Jews to decide for emigration: conscription, and the de-
sire to join already settled family members in the United States.
With the German revolution in 1848, the question of emancipation
was raised once again. Mainly it was intellectual Jews who decided
to leave the country of their birth, after they had faced new waves
of anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the revolution.
Despite the common image, the first arrivals of this group were not
"poor, soiled looking and underfed:' Barkai argues, but had already
belonged to a group of young middle-class Jews who were ambi-
tious and enterprising. They were often well trained in a "useful
handicraft:' making their living as artisans. Empirical evidence
from Jebenhausen, a small Bavarian village, proves there were also
more middle-aged families with children among the emigrants
than previously believed.
Following the traces of German Jewish immigrants from their
Old World communities to the New World, Barkai describes the ar-
rival of the young Jews in the New World, usually accompanied by
economic hardships, the loss of a community, and sometimes dis-

Book Reviews 197
appointment with earlier settled family members who did not feel
responsible for the immigrants' financial support. In this context,
the myth of the Jewish peddler is thoroughly examined by the au-
thor. Only one-third of the arriving immigrants have actually been
recorded as "peddlers" in their first years after arrival in the United
States. Although a large majority of the immigrants concentrated
in the commercial sector, selling mainly clothing and groceries, the
historical evidence proves that peddling was only a temporary oc-
cupation until most young Jews were able to establish a business of
their own after a few years. While successful, these businesses
were in contrast to the myth about the wealth of a few German
Jewish families, such as the success stories of the German Jews in
America: the Strausses, Seligmans, Bloomingdales, Kuhns, and
Loebs.
Although about 65,000 of the 150,000 German Jews lived in the three
major East Coast cities around 1860, New York City, Baltimore, and
Philadelphia, many of the immigrants proved highly mobile and
joined the westward expanison. Thus large, flourishing and impor-
tant Jewish communities were founded in the mid-nineteenth century
in cities like Cincinnati, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco,
and mining towns in California.
Although political emancipation was not questioned in the United
States, social adaption and acculturation by the Jewish immigrants
still faced gentile anti-Semitism. The Shylock image; the image of
Jewish materialism, greed, and commercial double-acting and anti-
Christian venegance and beliefs about possible patriotic disloyalty
continued to exist in America. Anti-Semitic attitudes found expres-
sion in violent assaults, attempts at economic restrictions, and the
Know-Nothing Movement. Tensions peaked during the Civil War,
when Jews had to face discrimination in the army, growing anti-
Semitism on the political scene, and questioning of their political
loyalty as citizens.
The Jewish reaction proved how heterogeneous the Jewish com-
munity in America was and how much they had already adjusted
to American conditions. When some of their leaders, who had
first avoided taking a political position, now tried to organize for
Jewish interests, they found that there was no nationwide support
for a united Jewish position on slavery or any other political ques-

198 American Jewish Archives
tions. Although American Jewry now started to organize interests
professional for the first time in its history, it was divided in two
camps on the issue of slavery, both trying to prove their loyalty to
their states of residence.
In contradition to what has generally been assumed in historiog-
raphy, Barkai proves from new demographic data that German
Jewish immigration after the Civil War was not reduced to "a mere
trickle" but numbered at least 70,000 immigrants until 1914. Those
postwar immigrants differed strongly from the first group. After
the emancipation of the Jews in Germany, many were educated,
came from middle-class families, and had a reasonable income.
Material need was not the motive for their emigration. They usually
followed their families, who had arrived before the war. Further-
more, these immigrants were now strongly attracted by the Ameri-
can success stories following the "rags to riches" myth. Increasing
German anti-Semitism influenced many German Jews in their deci-
sion to leave the old country. The new arrivals proved to be less
mobile in their settlement patterns than the first group of imrni-
grants, as they often stayed with already established family enter-
prises. The family connection made it extremly easy for the second
group of German Jewish immigrants to merge with the first group;
common culture, traditions, and strong family relations fostered
group cohesion and common values.
The highly interesting chapter "Americanization Delayed" focuses
on the German Jews' problem of adapting their dual ethnicity status
of a Jewish and a German identity to the American environment.
Culturally and emotionally, the immigrants were still strongly tied
to the old country and to family members. The common cultural
heritage and language also connected the German Jews to German
Gentiles in the New World. Barkai gives interesting examples of
how intensively German Jewish congregations were still under the
spiritual guidance of German Judaism from the Old Country. Be-
cause of the lack of an American Jewish institution of higher learning
for the education of rabbis. The Hebrew Union College was founded
only in 1875 in Cincinnati. The need for Americanization of German
Jewish life in the United States was felt when most congregations
and newspapers had to switch from the use of German to English

Book Reviews 199
for publications and sermons because of demands made by the
first American-born generation.
In the context of the immigrants' German identity Barkai tries to
give a new and more complex explanation of the Jewish immigrants'
relationship with the German immigant community in the United
'States. Until recently the "German identity" of the German Jews in
the United States had been overestimated as a "nexus of identity"
due to the historians' focus on the close settlement of the two groups
in some midwestern communities, even though the Jewish immi-
grants were following economic interests rather than the explicit
desire to be connected with a gentile German community. According
to Barkai, the situation in the big cities of the East Coast was quite
different. There Jews were surrounded not by a majority of Ger-
mans, but by many different ethnic groups.
Reports from Kleindeutschland, the New York City Jewish com-
munity, prove that many Jews and Germans seemed to have mixed
on all social levels. Barkai explains that this phenomenon was rather
due to the extreme anonymity of the big cities, which led to a larger
Jewish disaffiliation, so the German-speaking Jews often sought to
assimilate to the wider American community by first assimilating
to a German community. Once full adaption to the American envi-
ronment was achieved most German Jews lost their attachment to
the German associations and discovered a common identity as Jews.
This development might have also been supported by the growing
nationalization and identification with the new German reich, of
the German clubs after 1871, and the growing anti-Semitism, which
also influenced the German American communities. However, sen-
timental identification with Germany was primarily related to a
higher level of education, which many of the early immigrants
lacked. Regional studies show that the immigrants' group cohesion
was related to place of origin rather than to a desire to have contact
with gentile Germans. In the final chapters Barkai explains how the
German Jews dealt with the new east European Jewish immigra-
tion, which started in the 1880s. The bourgeois attempt of the Ger-
man Jewish philanthrophic societies and immigrant charities was
often misunderstood by the new immigrants, who wanted to pre-

200 American Jewish Archives
serve their cultural background. Because German and Russian Jews
hardly mixed, the German Jews increasingly found themselves as a
diminishing minority, their organizations turning into fortresses of
social seclusion. In this context, the reader might miss the mentioning
of the role of Zionism between the two Jewish groups. Paradoxi-
cally enough, it was the fear of growing social anti-Semitism which
led to founding of the first Jewish defense organizations, like the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, and that prevented a total
split of the American Jewish community at the beginning of the
century.
Although Branching Out cannot cover all aspects of German Jewish
history in the United States, it is an interesting and well-done
scholarly work contributing to the history of the German Jews in
America and might even inspire new research examining the long -
lasting connections of the two German Jewish communities.
- Cornelia Willhelm
Cornelia Wilhelm earned her Ph.D.from Ludwig-Maximilians- Universitat, Mu-
nich, Germany in Social and Economic History. She is currently working on the
history of B'nai B'rith, 1843-1925.

Book Reviews 201
Binder, Frederick M., and David M. Reimers.
All the Nations Under Heaven:
An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.353 pages.
In A11 the Nations Under Heaven, Frederick M. Binder and David M.
Reimers pay tribute to New York's long-standing tradition of ethnic
and racial diversity. Citing the lack of a comprehensive study of the
ethnic and racial history of the city, the authors set out to provide an
overview of the development of the pluralism that has become the
city's defining characteristic. In nine chapters they sketch the his-
tory of the successive immigrant groups that have populated the
city, adapted to its environment and opportunities, and, in the
process, transformed their own cultures as well as the city itself.
Following a well-known periodization, the authors distinguish
between pre-Revolutionary "old" (1789--1880) and "new" irnrnigra-
tion (1880 to World War I) and divide the post World War II era into
two periods, from 1945 until 1970 and from 1970 to the present.
While they pay particular attention to the dominant immigrant
groups within each period, they continue to follow the trajectories of
earlier arrivals. Thus, while the last chapter focuses on the "newest"
immigrants, specifically those of Caribbean and Asian origin, it
also charts the continued upward mobility of ethnic groups of
European descent and notes the racial divide that increasingly
characterizes the city's social, economic, and cultural infrastruc-
ture.
Adding layer after layer, the richness of the city's accumulated
ethnic pasts is gradually revealed. But what distinguishes this book
from other ethnic histories of New York is the perspective it offers on
the dynamics of interethnic relations and, in particular, on ethnic
and racial conflict. Prejudice based on religious, national, and racial
differences has continued to demarcate the limits of the tradition of
tolerance and pluralism on which the city prides itself.
New York's diversity has been the product of a complex set of
contingencies. Its foundations, Binder and Reimers argue, were first
laid under Dutch colonial rule. For the Dutch West India Company,

202 American Jewish Archives
which ruled the colony as a strict commercial venture, the main
priority was to attract as many settlers to the colony as possible, re-
gardless of religious affiliation or nationality Moreover, by institut-
ing a liberal policy with regard to religious freedom-a course
adopted from the mother country which demanded public confor-
mity to the Dutch Reformed Church while permitting freedom of
conscience and private worship - the New Netherlands did in fact,
from the outset, attract a more heterogeneous population than
neighboring colonies.
While commercial considerations have continued to shape New
York City's strong orientation toward pluralism, the balance be-
tween tolerance and conformity has always been a precarious one.
Its first test came in a series of conflicts that involved the position of
religious dissenters within the New Netherlands. Significantly, one
of these conflicts concerned the status of Jews.
The first group of Jews to arrive in New Amsterdam were refugees
from the Dutch colony of Recife who had fled after its capture by
the Portuguese in 1654. The twenty-three impoverished Jews arrived
to a hostile reception from the colony's authorities. Eventually
however, the religiously orthodox and bigoted director-general
Stuyvesant had to bow to instructions from the directors of the
West India Company- after intense lobbying by Dutch Jews, who
as investors and traders played a significant part in the company-
to be more lenient in his religious policy.
Nevertheless, the various restrictions that were imposed on Jew-
ish religious, commercial, and political activities, only to be gradu-
ally removed after intensive petitioning from the Jewish community,
serve as a clear indication that the Dutch "tradition" of tolerance
has to be seen in relative terms. Even after the colony went into
English hands in 1664, and various Protestant dissenters were
granted the right of public worship and institutional organization,
the new city council initially ruled that these rights were limited to
those of Christian faith. Nevertheless, by 1695 the first public syna-
gogue had been established in a rented space, and in 1730 the first
synagogue erected on American soil was dedicated in the heart of
Jewish settlement on Mill Street.
Excluded from the purview of tolerance were Native Americans,
against whom the Dutch early in the colony's history initiated a

Book Reviews 203
policy of brutality, thus initiating the future pattern of European-
Indian relations. Moreover, the history of race relations in New
York - in the perception of Binder and Reimers one of the most en-
during troubling aspects of New York history-was ominous from
its inception. Under Dutch rule the institution of slavery was rather
loosely defined, but its legitimacy was beyond questioning. Under
English rule, when the dire need for labor made slavery pivotal to
the colony's economy, the legal status of bondsmen gradually wors-
ened as owners defined their slaves as "propertyl' with few or no
rights. Although the American Revolution and the influence of En-
lightenment ideals did stimulate abolitionist sentiment, black New
Yorkers were not granted equal citizenship rights - a situation that
prepared a legacy of continued racial prejudice and discrimination.
By starting the ethnic history of New York in the colonial era,
rather than at the conventional point of departure (with the mass
migrations of the Irish and the Germans in the 1830s and 1840s),
Binder and Reimers subtly challenge the dominant historical pic-
ture in which the majority status of Anglo-Saxon culture is taken as a
given. As the Dutch and Anglo-Saxons reach upper-class status,
however, they disappear from view. At higher social ranks, ethnic-
ity is somehow translated into class. This is unfortunate, because
the ways in which "Knickerbocker" and especially "WASP" culture
achieved and maintained a social and cultural hegemony in New
York, using "descent" not only as a basis of exclusivity but as a
grounds for social and cultural exclusion, go unexamined.
The fact that the upper echelons of the ethnic and racial hierarchy
in New York apparently fall outside the frame of what Binder and
Reimers consider the "ethnic" history of New York is curious con-
sidering the fact that, in other respects, the authors do present a
long-term perspective that takes the transformations of ethnic
groups into account. Their approach conforms to a model in which
ethnicity in America is seen as a form of solidarity rooted in com-
monalities of culture, experience, and interest. Each ethnic group's
distinctive experience is seen as the product of a complex interplay
between the group's characteristics at the point of entry and the
conditions confronting the group at the time and place of settlement.
Ethnic solidarity generally is most pronounced in the first two gen-
erations after settlement, when group commonalities are strongest

204 American Jezuish Archives
and group culture is supported by an extensive institutional frame-
work, but the impact of these commonalities in culture and experi-
ence continues to be felt well beyond the second generation.'
It is this model, whose most well-known proponents include
Glazer and Moyruhan (1970); that inspires much of this book's orien-
tation. In analyzing the distinct experience and social positioning
of each group, the authors place particular emphasis on such fac-
tors as the cultural traits and occupational experiences of the group
upon arrival, motivation for migration and the rate of return mi-
gration, economic opportunities available to the group at the time
of settlement, and their areas of initial residence. They also give a
detailed account of the social and cultural matrix of ethnic commu-
nal life, singling out neighborhood, religion, fraternal societies, the
foreign language press, unions, taverns, theater, and festivals as
structures and institutions that supported and heightened the sense
of ethnic solidarity.
The overall chronological orientation of the book is traversed by
a number of recurring patterns, some of which, according to Binder
and Reimers, already emerge during the days of colonial New York.
The fierce commercial, social, and cultural competition between the
Dutch and English in the first decades of English control resulted
in strong ethnic tensions and political battles fought along ethnic
lines initiated a pattern of interethnic competition, which tends to
be most pronounced between those on the bottom of the social lad-
der. By the early 1700s, however, Dutch political and economic
dominance had decreased to such an extent that the Dutch, while
professing a deep allegiance to Dutch culture, gradually adopted
English language and customs out of social and economic neces-
sity. This adaption prepared the ground for increasing contact and
inter-marriage between the two groups and increasing assimilation
of the Dutch into English culture. This pattern of initial bicultural-
ism and ethnic allegiance, followed by acculturation, was to charac-
terize the trajectory of many future minority groups.
Already in the colonial years, Binder and Reimers note, varying
degrees of ethnic allegiance and acculturation between different
immigrant groups occurred. Comparing the rapid assimilation of
Huguenots into English culture with the continuous existence of
Jews as a separate community, residential pattern, social and eco-

Book Reviews 205
nomic prosperity, discrimination, religious organization, institu-
tional infrastructure, and continuous immigration of group mem-
bers emerge as important factors influencing the continuity of
ethnic group identity.
Other recurring phenomena include the initial residential concen-
tration of immigrant groups, economic specialization (the exploita-
tion of specific economic niches), and ethnic succession in terms of
class, neighborhood, and political dominance. Analyzing the social
trajectories of various immigrant groups-a component of the
book that recalls the ethnic stratification and mobility studies of
the 1970s -the authors conclude that small entrepreneurship consti-
tutes the most consistent avenue to social mobility, while education
typically moves the second and third generations up the social lad-
der.
While the emphasis on historical patterns brings relief and a nec-
essary focus to the wealth of material presented, it has some draw-
backs as well. The return of the same patterns in slightly different
guise at times threatens to turn the narrative into "variations upon
a theme." More significantly, however, the recurrence of a "pattern"
can easily becomes a substitute for a more thorough analysis. Binder
and Reimers present their findings in the indicative mood and shy
away from raising questions, entering debates, or drawing conclu-
sions. This approach makes the narrative not only lack a certain drive,
but lack analytical depth as well.
These elements might fall beyond the range of the authors' arnbi-
tion, which is to present a historical overview. But the fact is that,
in the current political climate in which immigration, as well as
federal support of education, welfare, and health care, are under
renewed attack, a book on ethnic history, such as the work under
review, is not without political ramifications.
It is in the later chapters, which focus on the most recent history
and deal with the complex issues of racism and race relations in the
city, that the lack of analytical rigor makes itself particularly felt. On
the one hand, New York is teeming with new immigrant groups who
seem to be "on track: as far as Binder's and Reimers' patterns are
concerned. On the other, race continues to be the big divider within
the city. Is the present situation simply a continuation of past pat-
terns, in which, as the authors note, racism, to a significant degree,

206 American Jewish Archives
can account for the fact that African Americans as a group have
consistently failed to conform to the patterns that have characterized
the social and economic trajectory of other ethnicities? Or, as
William Julius Wilson has argued in The Declining Significance of
Race (1978) and When Work Disappears (1996)~ have there been major
economic and social changes that have, for very specific reasons,
disproportionately affected African Americans and Puerto Ricans
and canceled out many of the advances made by these groups between
1945 and 1970?
The reason it is important to develop a more explicit perspective
on the present situation lies in the fact that data similar to those advanced
by Binder and Reimers have been used to promote very
conservative causes. For Thomas Sowell, for instance, in his Ethnic
America: A History? the dynamics of ethnic stratification- the fact that
immigrants start at the bottom and work their way up -delegitimize
the notion of the existence of a majority and a minority culture.
Similarly, the fact that Jews and Japanese have "succeeded" in American
society, against the odds of racism and bigotry, in his view, undermines
any idea of lasting and potentially debilitating effects of
racism. Moreover, because the one assured route to immigrant success
is individual entrepreneurship, federal assistance for public education,
according to Sowell, will have little or no effect on the
social mobility of those in the lower economic ranks. Needless to
say, arguments such as these, scientifically, leave a lot to be desired.
Unfortunately, politically, they do seem to have a wide currency.
By, from the outset, positioning black New Yorkers outside the
range of "tolerancel' the authors evoke a certain historical determinism
and place themselves at an analytical disadvantage. Racism becomes
a separate and timeless category, the one last remove from the
attainment of the promise of liberal pluralism, rather than a phenomenon
that can be deconstructed into its various component
parts, and is inflected by a particular historical context.
What exactly are the contingencies that have made the history of
African Americans diverge from that of other ethnic groups? Why
has racism toward African Americans proven to be more persistent
than racism toward other groups and other forms of prejudice
based on religious difference or national origin? How does the decline
of those prejudices shed light on the plight of African Americans?

Book Reviews 207
These questions are never explicitly debated but beckon considera-
tion. If the relation between tolerance and economics can be submit-
ted to analysis, why not the relation between intolerance and
economics?
While the authors do list several factors, such as the loss of man-
ufacturing jobs, the economic shift toward high-tech industries,
budget cuts, and the crisis in public education, to explain the fact
that, presently, African Americans and Puerto Ricans constitute the
bulk of what usually is referred to as a growing "underclass" in
American cities, they do not advance a cogent and sustained analy-
sis. One wishes for a more pronounced perspective, which would
have added intellectual depth to one of the most ardently debated
issues of our time. Nevertheless, for the careful reader, the message
stands out clearly enough.
-Esther Romeyn
Esther Romeyn is a doctoral candidate in America Studies at the University of
Minnesota.
Notes
I. For an enlightening overview of the changes in conceptions of ethnicity since
the 1960s, see Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, lggo), 16--21.
2. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes,
Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish ofNew York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1g70).
3. Thomas SowelI, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

Book Reviews 209
Eisenberg, Ellen.
Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey, 1882-1920.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995.218 pages.
This book is mostly about five Jewish farm colonies in southern
New Jersey. Alliance, the first Jewish farm colony in the United
States, was founded on May 9, 1882, with 43 families. Four other
colonies followed. Two of them, Carmel and Rosenhayn, were also
founded in 1882, Carrnel with 17 families and Rosenhayn with 6 or 7
families. Within a decade, Alliance expanded to form Norma and
Brotrnanville. By 1908 Alliance had 187 families and a total popula-
tion of nearly 1,000. Carmel had 144 families and a population of
795, and Rosenhayn had 98 families and a total population of 475.
These five colonies were dominated at first by Am Olam contin-
gents and were the largest and longest lasting Jewish agricultural
colonies in the United States.
Before getting into a detailed analysis of these five colonies,
Eisenberg discusses the Jewish background both in Europe and in
the United States. She begins with a chapter on the east European
background of the settlers, contrasting the settlers with other east
European Jewish immigrants. She follows with a chapter on mem-
bers, philosophies, and the experiments of the Am Olam, and she
completes her background material with a chapter on colony spon-
sors. These three chapters together, making up about half of the
book, give a good understanding of the background of the success-
ful and unsuccessful attempts at Jewish farming.
Eisenberg approaches her study with ideas and approaches that
not only add more depth to what has already been known but also
add challenging new information that broadens our perspective.
One of Eisenberg's major contributions is to use the newer histori-
cal approach of looking at immigrant origins. She is concerned
with the process of migration that shifted the center of Jewish popu-
lation from eastern Europe to the United States. While most other
studies emphasize the encounter of the immigrant with the host
country, Eisenberg also is concerned with "the circumstances of life
in the country of origin, and the process of migration that dispro-

210 American Jewish Archives
portionately affects certain regions, ethnic groups, occupational
sectors, and economic classes within the home country"(xix).
Using empirical analyses, Eisenberg asserts that migrants from
the South Pale were overrepresented among the early agricultural
colonists and that they differed ideologically and demographically
from later migrants. Jewish immigrants from the South Pale had been
more integrated into secular society and less religiously traditional
than Jewish immigrants from other regions of eastern Europe. They
were also comparatively more concentrated in the commercial sector
and in agricultural and agriculture-related occupations. After docu-
menting these differences, Eisenberg argues, persuasively in my opin-
ion, that differences in these premigration conditions are important
for understanding the shift from farming to mixed farming industry
and the shift from communal ownership to private ownership.
Another important, and perhaps controversial, point made by
the author is a challenging of the heavy emphasis usually put on
pogroms to explain migration. She suggests that "the focus on per-
secutions and on the mass nature of the movement tends to blur the
economic, geographic, and demographic factors that were equally,
if not more, importantn(4). This is a minority perspective but one
that seems to be supported by the author's data. Whether or not one
agrees with Eisenberg on this point, hopefully the attention to pre-
migration factors will become more important in the larger study of
Jewish migration.
Between 1881 and 1884, about twenty-four Jewish agricultural so-
cieties were established in the United States, about all through Am
Olam or at least with the involvement of some Am Olam members.
Because of its involvement, the Am Olam has been discussed previ-
ously in a number of sources. Eisenberg's thirty-six page chapter on
the Am Olam, however, is one of the best discussions so far because
of its attention to social class, occupation, and religious and other
demographic differences among Jewish groups, as we1 as with
non-Jews, in eastern Europe. Eisenberg briefly discusses some of
the other twenty-four Am Olam connected colonies but notes that -
with the exception of the five in southern New Jersey-all were ex-
tremely short- lived and not well documented. The New Jersey
colonies were different in that they were in a relatively temperate
climate and that they were conveniently located close both to mar-

Book Rwiews 21 1
kets and to cultural life in New York and Philadelphia. However,
the farmland was not good, and the close location to New York and
Philadelphia encouraged closer sponsor supervision and attracted
new settlers who did not share the Am Olam perspectives.
The chapter on sponsors is detailed, presenting much more concise
information than previously available to the general reader of
Judaica. This chapter helps set the stage for demonstrating, in the
remainder of the book, the extensive influence and control exerted
by sponsors in some colonies -including the five colonies in New
Jersey. The sponsors were mostly wealthy acculturated German
Jewish Americans who were interested in Americanization, capitalism,
and individualism. They wanted the colonists to learn English,
adopt American dress, and adopt such values as economic independence,
home ownership, and respect for private property. The
colonists shared little of this vision, so conflict was inevitable. The
sponsors also wanted to avoid the growth of unhealthy Jewish
ghettoes, which they feared would lead to anti-Semitism.They therefore
wanted to provide immediate employment for the refugees and
to counter anti-Semitic stereotypes of the unproductive Jew.
In the second half of the book, Eisenberg turns to a chronological
analysis of the Jewish agricultural and industrial colonies in Alliance,
Brotrnanville, Norma, Carmel, and Rosenhayn. She discusses
settlers and sponsors in the first years (1882-1890)~ the middle years
(1890-1910)~ and the later years (igios, 1920s~ and 1930s) characterized
by the dissolution of the colonies. Woodbine, futher to thesoutheast
in New Jersey, did not have clear connections to Am
Olam; sponsored by the Baron de Hirsch Fund, it receives brief discussion
for comparative purposes. The book really is about the five
colonies, however. Eisenberg discusses each of the colonies separately
but also interweaves the five colonies into a larger discussion
that shows how each colony was related to the others and to the
larger concept of Jewish farming.
Eisenberg makes various points that are important to a better understanding
of Jewish farming. For example, she helps debunk the
idea that colonists had no previous agricultural experience by showing
that at least significant minorities of colonists did have such previous
experience. This was especially true of settlers from the South
Pale. She suggests that "the popular notion among both historians

212 American Jewish Archives
and descendants that the colonists had no farming experience whatsoever
may result from an effort to explain the failure of so many
agricultural colonies"(118).
In addition to these specific points, a major contribution of the
second half of the book is the detailed analysis of the mixture of
farming and working in small industries that increasingly characterized
the so-called agricultural colonies. Eisenberg shows the importance
of sponsor ideology in the transition to mixed farming
industry, including the sponsors' role in selecting settlers who
matched their expectations. Eisenberg concludes that the Baron de
Hirsch Fund's consolidation of loans and its decision to create local
markets through supporting industry in the colonies was the single
most important factor shaping the colonies after 1890 and helped set
the tone for the twentieth century. From 1891 to 1905, when the Jewish
Agricultural Society and Industrial Aid Society decided that further
industrial growth in the colonies was not practical, almost all
new settlers engaged in industrial work instead of agriculture.
Sponsor investment, expansion of industry, and an influx of
nonagricultural and nonidealistic settlers led to "golden years" between
1900 and World War I, but cracks already had begun to appear
that would lead to the demise of the colonies by the 1930s.
Individual farmers, especially refugees from Nazism, continued to
settle on the land in the 1930s~ 1940s~ and 1950s~ but they settled as
individuals. Even as the colonies were fading, however, the Jewish
farm population was expanding rapidly in absolute numbers. The
settlements in southern New Jersey were no longer colonies but
rather were virtual suburbs of the Vineland Jewish community. By
the early 1950s about one thousand Jewish farming families were in
the Vineland area, the largest wave of Jewish settlers to the region.
Eisenberg notes that contemporary observers have placed much
of the blame for the demise of Jewish farming on a distaste of Jewish
youth for farm work, but she presents strong statistics to support her
argument that "it is apparent that much of the blame for this high
level of attrition can be traced to poor economic conditions in agriculture
relative to other fields" (162). She notes that attrition among
Jewish farmers reflected a national trend, that Jews entered farming
in the United States just as farming was beginning to decline for
non-Jews.

Book Reviews 213
Recognizing that the demise of the colonies has been taken by
many historians to indicate the failure of the Jewish farm colony
movement, Eisenberg argues that success or failure is best judged by
looking at the goals of the settlers and sponsors. One of the goals
shared by the ideologists of Am Olam, nonideological settlers, and
sponsors was the "normalization" of Jewish immigrants- the eco-
nomic, social, and cultural adaptation of Jewish immigrants to the
mainstream society. While, as noted, in the earlier years it was be-
lieved by sponsors and settlers that the adaptation would help re-
move anti-Semitism, for the later settlers adaptation was pursued
simply because it was the mainstream of the American way. They re-
alized that the professions, rather than farming, were the route to suc-
cessful integration into the American middle and upper-middles class.
Eisenberg agrees with Uri Herscher that farming actually would rep-
resent an abnormal occupational structure today. She agrees with
Judith Elkin (regarding Argentina) that although the New Jersey
colonies were failures as communal agrarian settlements, they were
highly successful in helping immigrants reach normalization.
Eisenberg's interest in Jewish farmers initially arose because her
husband's family had experience in the Jewish agricultural colonies
in Argentina, and her interest in looking at different immigrant ori-
gins was first aroused because of his family's South Pale back-
ground. She shows a good understanding of the Argentine Jewish
farming colonies through which more than one-fourth of the Argen-
tine-Jewish population entered Argentine society. While her goal is
not to compare Argentina and the United States, her awareness of
comparisons and contrasts adds insight to this book.
Eisenberg ends her book with a position that she has successfully
developed: "The disintegration of the New Jersey colonies occurred
not because Jews were incapable of farming but because they had
successfully joined the American mainstream, which was flowing
away from agriculture. A key goal of both sponsors and colonists-
normalization - had been achieved"(177).
Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey, 1882-1920, originally a
doctoral dissertation, is based on analyses of extensive primary and
secondary sources, seventeen interviews conducted by the author,
ten interviews conducted by Richard Brotman, and eighteen inter-
views conducted by the National Museum of American Jewish His-

214 American Jewish Archives
tory. When looking at Jewish farmer statistics by decade, some of
the sample sizes are small and should be viewed with caution.
However, despite some small samples, the overall patterns seem
clear. Moreover, Eisenberg's research and writing style seem to be
open minded, not dogmatic, an objective search for facts, not ideo-
logically driven, and a look at differences and complexities, not
preaching for only one position.
In addition to a few earlier works, in the last few years there have
been other new books on specific Jewish farming areas, including
Gertrude Dubrovsky's The Land Was Theirs:Jmish Farmers in the Gar-
den State (1992)~ Kenneth L. Kann's Comrades and Chicken Ranchers
(1993) studying Petaluma, California, and Abraham Lavender and
Clarence Steinberg's Jewish Farmers of the Catskills (1995). These books
have helped correct the image of American Jews as urban and in-
dustrial, business, or professional. Eisenberg's book is a welcome,
and highly recommended, addition to the small but growing atten-
tion to Jewish farming.
-Abraham D. Lavender
Abraham D. Lavender is currently teaching in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at Florida International University.

Book Reviews 215
Hyman, Paula E.
Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish Histo y:
The Roles and Rqresentation of Women.
The Samuel and Althea Strourn Lectures in Jewish Studies.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.197 pages.
Paula E. Hyman, a leading scholar in Jewish and women's history
offers a thoughtful and important discussion about the role of gen-
der in Jewish assimilation. The volume, short in length, examines
experiences of Ashkenazi Jews in four chapters, drawing on recent
scholarship about gender, assimilation, and Judaism. Hyman uses ma-
terial from the Jewish press in various countries, the women's own
writings, Jewish women's organizational records, advice manuals,
and Jewish literature. Hyman explains in her introduction her two
main goals in developing the book; "to reclaim the experience of
Jewish women as they accommodated to the socioeconomic and ide-
ological challenges of modernity in western and central Europe,
eastern Europe, and the United States, particularly in the latter part
of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth"; and
"to explore the role of ideas about gender in the construction of the
Jewish identity in the modern period(5).
Hyman clearly distinguishes between the "process" of assimilation
and the "project"of assimilation in her analysis of Jewish women's ex-
periences in her first chapter,"Paradoxes of Assimilation." The process
of assimilation, Hyman states, refers to the sociological process con-
sisting of different stages: beginning with acculturation, the integra-
tion of minorities into the larger majority institutions, and then the
"dissolution of the minority by biological merger with the majority
through intermarriage." In short, the process yields the minority
members' desire to be like the majority and the majority members'
willingness to have minorities participate in their society (13-14).
The project of assimilation embodies the "official response of Jewish
communal leaders in both Europe and the United States to emanci-
pation and was expressed in communal policy"(16). The project of as-
similation involved a public agenda about Jewish emancipation in
the nineteenth century, expressed by Jewish male elites.

216 American Jewish Archives
Central to both processes of assimilation, Hyman asserts the sig-
nificance of the gender factor. "Jewish women assimilated along with
their male kin, but they did so in different frameworks"(18). In the dis-
cussion of gender shaping women's roles and assimilation, Hyman
presents a perceptive analysis. She gives examples of the gendered
experiences, like Western Jewish women being confined to domestic
realms, similar to other middle-class women, and drawing on their
female qualities to participate in charitable public organizations. Yet,
according to male critics, such gender roles meant that Jewish women
were held responsible for perpetuating gaps in Jewish education in
their families. Although women played a more visible role in the
synagogue in social endeavors, this involvement actually repre-
sented a conservative position keeping women in the domestic
sphere. Hyman explains, "If the family was no longer succeeding in
transmitting Jewish knowledge and loyalty to the younger genera-
tion, then the guardians of the hearth had failed in their taskU(45),
and in the paradox of women's assimilation, Hyman remarks
astutely,"Blarning Jewish mothers for the decline in Jewish knowl-
edge and religious practices enabled Jewish men in western and
central Europe to continue the process, and the project of Jewish as-
similationr'(4g). Hyman's information about the gendered roles es-
pecially for middle-class Jewish women in assimilation is engaging,
clearly demonstrating women's participation in assimilation.
The analysis of gender yields new interpretations on Jewish
women's education. Hyman discusses the education of eastern Eu-
ropean Jewish women in the chapter, "Seductive Secularization:' The
interesting discussion provides an in-depth look at the problem of
training Jewish girls in the context of religious and socioeconomic is-
sues. The working-class woman was the dominant role; Hyman
states, "The socioeconomic and cultural contexts in eastern Europe fa-
cilitated women's assimilation through their work patterns and
access to secular education"(71). The use of women's memoirs and
personal writings augments this chapter. The debates about
women's roles in education, the family, and the public revealed that
eastern European women's assimilation experiences differed from
groups of women in the West.
For American Jewish historians and women's historians, Hyman's
examination of gender, Jewish American women, and assimilation

Book Reviews 217
provides valuable insights and covers important themes. On 'Kmer-
ica, Freedom, and Assimilation," Hyman investigates the complexi-
ties of Jewish women's roles, noting that, "In some ways, women
were agents of assimilation; in others, buffers against the disruptive
influence of the new societyn(g7). Hyman reiterates the work of re-
cent scholars in pointing 'out that for young immigrant Jewish
women clothing became a significant sign of their transformation
from a greenhorn to an American. In urban culture women gained
access to American fashions, pastimes, footways, while advertisers
sought these Jewish women as consumers. Most of Hyman's chapter
focuses only on the urban cultural world of Jewish American females,
yet some women participated in Jewish agricultural societies, after
coming to cities and then moving to Jewish farming communities in
Michigan and New Jersey, for example. Did exposure to "new styles
of clothing and new types of recreation" that "fostered a self-con-
scious separation of the immigrant from the Old Country and an as-
sertion of American identity" occur in areas outside major urban
ethnic centers? Exploring gender and the rural Jewish experience in
assimilation, as well as the urban Jewish experience, would add to
our understanding of assimilation in American society. Hyman de-
tails the ways the Jewish immigrant girls participated in more
heterosocial activities than did the previous generation of women,
and at times this involvement generated familial conflict over gender
relations. Many families perceived education for working-class
women to be "the most significant, though often frustratingly unat-
tainable, element of American freedoml'(lol-2). Hyman documents
the place of education in the lives of Jewish American girls through
memoirs of Jewish girls, semiautobiographical literature, and ex-
cerpts from the Jewish press.
The class and gender interests of American reformers promoting
Americanization of Jewish women focused on domestic concerns and
the appropriate moral behavior of girls. Hyman mentions the gen-
der aspect of women's and girls' opportunities for recreation and sport,
but she inaccurately portrays the kinds of physical recreation avail-
able to women at settlements like the Educational Alliance or Hull
House. In fact, Hyman draws on some of the earlier historical
scholarship on health, sport, and playground reformers of the Pro-
gressive Era, yet more current studies about sport and health his-

218 American Jewish Archives
tory and women's history give a fuller account of the recreation at
settlement houses for immigrant females. In particular, Hyman
claims that at the Educational Alliance, "Whereas boys had to partici-
pate in athletics and were encouraged to compete with teams from
other settlement houses, so that they might refute the charge that
Jewish men were physically weak and lacked courage, girls were
enrolled in more demure activities"(107). My own research in the
Educational Alliance Archives indicates that girls, too, were en-
couraged to engage in physical education classes and participated
in various gymnastics and sporting activities as a way to achieve
health and avoid the immoral pursuits of urban life; gender cer-
tainly shaped the physical recreation offered women, but reformers
and physical educators tried to promote health and physical activi-
ties, not only at settlements but at the Young Women's Hebrew Asso-
ciations. Hyman's lack of discussion on the importance of the Young
Women's Hebrew Association is puzzling given this institution's aim
to foster the assimilation of women. Moreover, Hyman states, "The
purpose of physical activity for girls was to teach them poise and
grace; strenuous games like basketball, field hockey, and all track
competition were deemed inappropriate for females" (108). Delv-
ing into the primary records of the Educational Alliance and other
Jewish settlements manifests a different situation; while certainly
gender limited sporting opportunities, Jewish women indeed played
basketball, especially since Senda Berenson, a Jewish immigrant
from Russia who was physical education director at Smith College
in the 189os, altered the rules for women's basketball to be more
team-oriented and less rough than the men's game, popularizing bas-
ketball for females. The Educational Alliance had a girls Athletic
Club, and several YWHAs offered basketball classes and leagues to
Jewish immigrant women. The physical well-being, as well as the
spiritual well-being, of Jewish American women deserves closer analy-
sis in the treatment of assimilation. Hyman's interpretation still proves
cogent when she states: "Americanization of young immigrant
women, as Jewishreformers understood it, entailed adopting of Ame-
rican middle-class gendered norms and values"(1og). Some Jewish
women asserted their roles in more public realms, and Hyman com-
ments that womenUutilized their acceptance of gender differences
in family life to expand the education of women as well as their do-

Book Reviews 219
mestic and social power and thereby to renegotiate the boundaries
between private and public spheres"(124).
In the final chapter, "The Sexual Politics in Jewish Identity," Hyman
provides an innovative exploration of anti-Semitism, gender, and
power relations in assessing Jewish men's response to their changed
role in society. According to Hyman, Jewish men desired to gain
economic and social power, but faced restrictions in society, and
"male Jews defined an identity that not only distinguished them from
women but also displaced their own anxieties upon women"(124-5).
Men as the target of anti-Semitism faced claims about their physical
weakness; attacks on their masculinity led them to "distinguish themselves
from women and to eliminate any hint of the feminine in
their self-presentation"(i53). Mentioning "Muscular Jewry" as one counterpoint
to anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish men's physical frailty, Hyman
remarks that physical fitness and nationalism became linked in
Zionism. Hyman reveals how women in America became the focus of
men struggling with their gender and Jewish identities, so that
American Jewish men "would inscribe their struggles upon the
character of women, and particularly upon their mothers"(157).
The representations of Jewish American mothers in the ~gjos, therefore,
revealed negative portrayals in the press and popular culture.
This chapter also examines American Jewish women's efforts to
participate on equal terms in communal institutions and to gain
education and expand their activities. Hyman concludes about
gender and assimilation in modern Jewish life that "Jewish men
and women have confronted the challenges of Western society on
different turfs. As they constructed Jewish identities appropriate to
their circumstances their behavior also differed because they experienced
the process of assimilation differentlyn(168).
Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jaoish History will interest historians
in Jewish studies, women's studies, gender studies, ethnicity, and
immigration. The omission of any visual representations and material
culture evidence in the text, however, detracts from points about
Jewish images, material life, and gender; graphics in the Jewish press,
advertisements for American products pitched to Jewish women, or
an actual representation of the male gender would strengthen the
discussion. In revising these lectures for publication, both written
and visual sources ought to have been considered in the book.

220 American Jewish Archives
Nonetheless, Hyman's handling of gender provides an excellent
contribution to Jewish history and readers will gain critical know-
ledge, as Hyman persuasively argues gender exists as a critical fac-
tor in Jewish assimilation. Hyman's chapters, read individually or
as a whole, significantly advance the study of Jewish history.
- Linda J. Borish
Linda J. Borish is Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan Univer-
sity.

Book Reviews 221
Sherman, Moshe D.
Orthodox Judaism in America:
A Biographical Dictiona y and Sourcebook.
Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1996.291 pages.'
Moshe Sherman's interesting book is the last of three biographical
dictionaries about some of the most central people and organizations
that influenced the major religious denominations within American
Jewry: Conservative, Reform, and Orthodox (in the order they were
published). The significance of this series is that it is the first of its
kind and will probably remain a main source of reference for years
to come, particularly vis-5-vis Orthodox Judaism in America - the
denomination that has received the least scholarly attention among
the three. Furthermore, these volumes seem to lay the groundwork
for numerous issues relating to American Jewish religious history,
a topic that has yet to be adequately researched.
In line with the format of the previous volumes, this book consists
of a general historical introduction to American Jewish Orthodoxy,
followed by the biographies of what the author defines as "a repre-
sentative sample of some of the many rabbis, educators, and phi-
lanthropists who have made contributions to American Jewish life
in general and Orthodox Judaism in particular" during the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries (ix). The last section includes a useful
essay on the "Orthodox Rabbinic Organizations in American Jewish
Life: a listing of "American Orthodox Rabbinic Periodicals: a list of
the "Presidents of the Rabbinical Council of America: and several
bibliographies of "selected newspapers, periodicals, and primary
and secondary sources.
In his preface, the author focuses on a few of the central problems
in writing a work of this nature: whom to include or exclude, limi-
tations of space, questions of historical accuracy, periodization, and
transliteration. Gathering and thoroughly analyzing such a large
amount of material of diverse nature-often written by Orthodox
authors with ideological agendas-is a very taxing responsibility
and the outcome of this process should be well appreciated by any
scholar. This book provides us with a wealth of invaluable material

222 American Jewish Archives
and data from English, Hebrew, and Yiddish language sources, much
of which has not yet been utilized by scholars, and it sheds light on
a cast of characters unknown to most readers. Consequently, this
source book allows us further to explore numerous aspects of Ame-
rican Jewish Orthodoxy.
Certain characteristics that emerge from the lives and activities
of the notables, all men, treated in this book lay a foundation for
numerous overlooked questions in American Jewish Orthodoxy,
such as :
I) Are there common characteristics among European rabbis
who immigrated to America? Can a prosopography be formed?
For example, the origins of the rabbis; their route of immigra-
tion and positions held, if at all, prior to crossing the Atlantic;
and the return, patterns to Europe of those who chose to do so.
2) What happened to these rabbi's children? Did they re-
main Orthodox, and did they also build careers within the reli-
gious arena?
3) What were the different stations of these rabbis and leaders
in America, and how many times did they move until settling
permanently?
4) Why did relatively much fewer Hasidim and Hasidic
rabbis immigrate to America at the turn of centuries, compared
with Mitnagdim?
Notwithstanding all the important and useful aspects of this
book, I would like to share a few of my misgivings regarding its
contents. Because the importance of the book lies in its details,
some of my comments will be of the same nature. In my opinion, the
author did not succeed in his main tasks as they are outlined in his
introduction. Unfortunately, a fair number of mistakes and inaccuracies
that could have been easily corrected remain uncorrected. This
oversight is particularly unfortunate due to the fact that American
Jewish Orthodoxy has not received adequate attention and I suspect
that years, if not decades, wiV go by d l these co~rections will be
made. Understandably, not all details can or should be written in
such limited space and format; however, what does appear could
have been done much better.
It should be noted that this volume differs from the two previous

Book Reviews 223
ones in that the author includes "only Orthodox leaders who are no
longer aliven(ix). Does this approach imply that one cannot find
American Orthodox leaders, rabbis, and rosh yeshivas living
among us who "have made their mark in recent times" or continue
to do so? If so, why is Orthodoxy different from Reform and Con-
servative? Undoubtedly, this was a conscious decision which, in
my opinion, the author should have explained. In addition, from a
geographic standpoint, the author refers to America and not North
America. However, surprisingly, he includes several rabbis who
never lived in America, such as Rabbis Graubart (81-3), Ochs
(159-60), and Rosenberg (178-80).
Sherman does not give us a clear explanation about the method-
ological guidelines that led him to include certain figures and ex-
clude others, except for an amorphous statement about those "who
have made contributions to American Jewish life in general and Or-
thodox Judaism in particularV(ix). For example, it could be easily
argued that the impact of Rabbi Gedalyah Silverstone (1871/2-1944)
on American Orthodoxy in general, and the Jewish community
in Washington, D.C., in particular, was far more significant than
that of Rabbi Album of Chicago (17-8), who is known primarily
due to his dispute with the Ridbaz. It is curious to note that Rabbis
Ebin (55-6) and Schwartz (192-93) are included, whereas central
rabbinical figures such as Abraham N. Galanti (1876-i936), Yoseph
M. Levin (1870-i936), and Abraham M. Shershevsky (1867-1927)
are missing. This also seems to be the case when examining Ortho-
dox newspaper writers and reporters, where the absence of people
like Hillel Melakhovsky and Ze'ev (Wolf) Schurr is noticed particu-
larly when Bondi (35-36) or Gelman (74-75) are discussed.
Interestingly, influential Orthodox cantors were not at all discussed
in this volume, even though some of them, such as Minkovsky and
Rosenblatt, had immeasurable impact on American Orthodoxy.
Printers and publishers, such as Benjamin Moinester, and many
other influential personalities in this field do not appear. Several
Hasidic rabbis, such as the Kloisenberger, have been overlooked.
One cannot help noticing the omission of Ephraim Deinard from
the biographies and, more surprisingly, the bibliographies. Finally,
on a different level, the Degel Harabanim organization was not

224 American Jewish Archives
mentioned in the essay on "Orthodox Rabbinic Organizations in
American Jewish Life"(225-50):
Understandably, the length of the entries varies significantly due
to the lack of material in some cases or the relatively low impact and
contribution to American Judaism and Orthodoxy in others. How-
ever, one cannot overlook a few striking differences that lead us to
wonder why certain personalities received far more attention, and
consequently space, than others, even though the wealth of sources
on each person is equivalent. For example, the entries on Bernard
Illowy (101-3) and Leo Jung (110-13) are more than twice the length
of the entry on Jacob Joseph (log-lo). When coming to Rabbi
Yoseph D. Soloveitchik, we find no less than five pages (202-7) that
include close to two and a half pages of references - a privilege that
several other prolific writers did not receive, such as Bondi (36) and
Eisenstein (59).
Acknowledging that this is the first attempt to draw biographical
sketches of important contributors to American Jewish Orthodoxy,
and granted that each entry is limited and therefore cannot include
all the details, I still believe that numerous inaccuracies could have
been avoided within the existing framework. As we shall see, this
defect relates to the author's awareness of the problematic nature of
the sources at hand and his attempt to present us with "a balanced
judgment:' "based on a wide selection of sources"(ix). A few exam-
ples will suffice.
One of the most important tasks in writing a biography is to be
as precise as possible about details. Rabbi Jacob Joseph is probably
the one Orthodox rabbi any academic student in American Jewish
history would learn about at some stage. In presenting his biography,
the author states that Joseph was born ca.1848 and "After attending
the Volozhin yeshiva . . . , Joseph went to Kovno to study with Rabbi
Israel Salantern(1og). Stating the year 1848 as Jacob Joseph's birth
date is common in most academically oriented sources; however, a
quick look at the facts proves it to be virtually impossible. All the
sources agree that Joseph learned in Volozhin under Rabbis
Soloveitchik and Berlin, which could not have been before 1853,
and that he studied with Salanter in Kovno, which probably took
place prior to 1857 when Salanter relocated to western Europe. Sev-
eral sources teach us that Joseph served as a "clergyman" at the age

Book Reviews 225
of eighteen, was offered the opportunity by the Russian government
to found a Jewish colony in Siberia in the late 1850s~ and
taught in a yeshiva in the early 1860s. If Joseph was born in 1848, he
must therefore have been five years old, more or less, when he entered
Volozhin, eight years old when he relocated to Kovno, and
ten to twelve years old when he started his rabbinic career. A quick
examination of Joseph's east European biography would enable us
to deduce beyond a doubt that stating "circa 1848" is wrong. This
mistake should once and for all be amended.3
Also in this entry, Sherman does not give us accurate information
about the congregation in which Joseph resided. At one point
he states that Joseph's shul was "congregation Tipheret Jerusalemff
(124); however, this is incorrect, according to scholars and numerous
primary sources. Joseph may have preached in other congregations,
but he presided primarily over Beth Hamidrash Hagadol.4
Last, but not least, the three additional editions of Joseph's book of
sermons, Lebeit Yaakov (1898,1900, and 1912-a decade after Joseph
died), are not mentioned, a fact that is of importance in any attempt
to assess the popularity of his sermons.
This kind of inaccuracy is repeated with regard to Rabbi Friederman
(70-72). In this entry, three sigruficant biographical details are either
not mentioned or mistaken. First, Friederman apparently held a
rabbinical position in Amsterdam prior to emigrating ,to America.
Second, he died on the tenth of Tevet 5696 -January 5,1936, and not
on December 16, 1934.5 Third, Sherman writes that Friederman
emigrated to America in 1893 and after serving as a rabbi in New
York relocated to Boston in 1896. It seems as though he did serve as
a rabbi in New York, but only for several months because in 1893 he
accepted an offer in Boston. A series of letters and notices published
during early 1893 reveals that congregation "Anshei Vilkomir" of
Boston chose Friederman to be their rabbi, contrary to the wishes of
the RaMaZ.6
It should be noted that like several other rabbis (Levin [133], for
example), Margolies (143-44) emigrated to America, returned to Europe,
and traveled back to America again, all between 1886 and
1889.~ Relying most probably on Rothkoff, Sherman states that the
Ridbaz become a dayan in Vilna in 1881(217). This raises several
questions regarding the Ridbaz's positions in the early 1880s~ such

226 American Jewish Archives
as his own words in a letter to another rabbi from 1884 in which he
refers to his recent appointment in Vilna? Rabbi Hirschenson left
Jerusalem not only because of his deteriorating "financial situation:'
as a result of the Turkish government's rules (934), but also due to
the fact that he was pursued by the zealots (kanaim) of Jerusalem.
Finally, in reading the entry on Judah D. Eisenstein (58-59) one
would not know about his important role in Agudat Hakehilot's attempt
to appoint a chief rabbi for New York's Jews.
Inconsistencies seem to appear in other levels of this work. For
example, several rabbis received doctoral degrees during their lives,
yet, while several theses topics are mentioned, others are omitted.
For example, Revel's (171) and Soloveitchik's (203) theses are cited
whereas we remain curious about those of Neches (155) and Ochs
(159). In names of people and places we find the same problem. For
example, Zhitovyan is spelled in two different ways (see 116 and 200);
the Chafetz Chaim appears at times as Chofetz Chaim (even though
only the latter appears in the index) and his name appears as Cohen
and as Kagan (see 71, 90, 145,196).
Understandably, it would be impossible to relate to all the offspring
of everyone discussed in this book. This, I assume, is the
reason that only those children who were central figures themselves
are mentioned. However, I must question why Louis Finkelstein
(68) and the children of the Bostoner Rebbe appear (96) while
Israel H. Levinthal, the son of Bernard L. Levinthal, and Haskel
Lookstein, the son of Rabbi Joseph Lookstein, both very important
and influential rabbis, are not mentioned.
A quick look at the references that appear at the end of each biography
and in the selected bibliographies shows that whereas current
Orthodox historiography is consistently, at times religiously, cited,
numerous scholarly works do not appear. Countless references are
made to Elberg, Gulevsky, Surasky, and Wolpin as well as to articles
published in the Jewish Observer in recent years and to Zionist
religious-oriented works (for just a few of many, see: 15,20,33,37, 41,
64/ 66,87/ 99, 103~ 117/ 123~ 129/ 139, 207, 222). Although some of these
sources contain valuable information, their respective writers have
an ideological agenda. Because there is a huge difference between Orthodox-oriented
sources from the turn of the century and those that
were written decades later, every source should be double-

Book Reviews 227
checked, in light of their ideological characters, be they implicit or
explicit. The worst mistake a scholar can make is to rely on these
kinds of sources, just as one would not rely solely on Judah D.
Eisenstein when telling the story of Jacob Joseph.9
A significant number of scholarly works do not appear in this book,
the absence of which accounts for several mistakes. This omission, in
complete contrast to the numerous Orthodox-oriented sources cited,
forces the reader to question the reliability of the "Wide selection of
sources" and "balanced judgment" to which the author refers in
his prefaces.'"
Unfortunately, the general and specific problems in this book ex-
tend beyond the boundaries of this review. Overall, this book is filled
with invaluable data and although it will undoubtedly spawn fur-
ther research and analysis, it is, in many respects, inaccurate and
even sloppy at times. Given the state of the field, it could be de-
fined in certain ways, in my humble opinion, as Hahmazat
Hasha'ah -a missed golden opportunity- borrowing Rabbi Yoseph
D. Soloveitchik's use of the term.
- Kimmy Caplan
Kimmy Caplan teaches American Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University and
Ben-Gurion University.
Notes
1. I wish to thank Professor Jay Harris for his helpful comments.
2. For a useful discussion of relevant methodological issues, see S. E. Berger, The
Design of Bibliographies: Obsentations, References and Examples, (London, i991), esp.
27-45.
3. See, for example: the New York Times, July 29,1902; the International Year Book,
(New York, 1902), 388; I. H. Daiches, Derashot Maharih, Leeds, 1920,545.
4. This is evident from the minutes of this congregation, located at the archives
of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, New York, Collection no. 365, as well as Jeffrey
S. Gurock's 'A Stage in the Emergence of the Americanized Synagogue
Among East European Jews: 1890-1910," Journal ofAmerican Ethnic Histoy vol. 9,
no. 2 (1~90)~ 16.
5. For his position in Amsterdam, see: A. A. Wieder, The Early Jewish Community
of Boston's North End, (Waltham, i962), 19-20. The references to Friederman on page
72 were all published prior to his death, except for one, which probably explains
this mistake.
6. Haiviri, January I, 1893; January 15,1893,7, and January ~2,1893~5.

228 American Jewish Archives
7. S. N. Behrman, The Worcester Account, (New York, 1954). 14-16,71,104-5,136-39.
I learned about this book from Dr. David Kaufman, to whom I am grateful.
8. The letter was published inMoriah 19 (7-9) [223-25], 5754,66.
9. For some of the characteristics of Orthodox historiography, see I. Bartal, "True
Knowledge and Wisdom: On Orthodox Historiography," Studies in Contempora y
Jew y 10 (1994): 17-2.
lo. For example: K. Caplan, "Dor Tahapukhot Beolam Hafukh: Harav Sivitz Vehaderush
Haivri Beamerika", Mehkarei Yerushalyim Bemahshmet Yisrael 11 (1993)
187-243; E. Deinard, Sifvat Yisrael Beamerika, (Jaffa, 1913)~ and his numerous other
works; R. Glogower, "The Impact of the American Experience Upon Responsa Literature:'
American Jewish Histoy 69, no. 2 (1979) 25770; A. J. Karp, "The Ridbaz,
Rabbi Jacob David Willowsky, 1945-1913,' in Perspectives on Jms and Judaism: Essays
in Honor of Wo2fe Kelman, ed. A. A. Chiel, (New York, 1978), 215-39; H.
Sprecher, "'Let Them Drink and Forget Our Poverty': Orthodox Rabbis React to
Prohibition:' American Jewish Archives 43, no. 2 (1991), 135-81; and Gary P. Zola,
"The People's Preacher: AStudy of the Life and Writings of Zvi Hirsch Masliansky
(18~6-19~~):' rabbinic thesis, Hebrew Union Colleg+Jewish Institute of Religion,
Cincinnati, 1982- the only comprehensive academic work on Masliansky, as far as
I know.

Book Reviews 229
Ben-Joseph, Eli.
Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews, and Race.
Landam, Md.: University Press of America, 1996.252 pages.
Henry James's reputation for anti-Semitism is generally under-
stood in relation to the famous report about the east European im-
migrant Jews of the Lower East Side that appears in his The
American Scene (1907). James's undisguised shock and dismay at what
he found seems to vacillate between horror over the poverty and
squalor he encounters and revulsion toward the punishment the
new immigrants appear to inflict on the English language. His
meeting with "terrible little Ellis Island" left him badly shaken,
feeling like a marginal outsider in his own homeland (after years
living abroad in self-imposed exile) as he wanders among the op-
pressive sights and sounds of the new ethnic neighborhoods.
Throughout The American Scene he describes a sense of rupture and
displacement but nowhere near as dramatically as in his frequent
references to the "swarming" Jewish masses. James's dread, in the im-
mediate aftermath of his visit to Ellis Island, is expressed in stir-
ringly apocalyptic language, a rhetoric that invites the reader to
identify with the author's enlightened sensibilities:
"I think that the simplest account of the action of Ellis Island
on the spirit of any sensitive citizen who may have happened
to 'look in' is that he comes back from his visit not at all the
same person that he went. He has eaten of the tree of knowl-
edge, and the taste will be forever in his mouth,"'
Presumably no reader will wish to be excluded from the status of
"any sensitive citizen" and will inevitably share James's abhorrence
for the damage that Italians, Jews, and other immigrants do to the
cause of an ideal homogeneous culture.
In view of such ingrained antipathy toward the presence of the
Other in culture, it seems surprising that until recently only a few
critics (notably Louis Harap in The Image of the Jew in American Litera-
ture) have attempted to sketch the wider dimensions of James's

230 American Jewish Archives
xenophobia and anti-Semitism in his earlier fiction, which an-
ticipated his return to the New World. Now Eli Ben-Joseph has con-
tributed a great deal more to our understanding of the full extent of
James's obsessive preoccupation with Jews. With admirable preci-
sion of thought and clarity of style (if not always eloquence or
depth), Ben-Joseph locates the uniqueness of James's anti-Semitism
while at the same time managing to link the novelist's representa-
tions of Irish, Italians, and Jews to the dominant cultural and scien-
tific discourses of his time.
Ben-Joseph wisely begins his study with an introduction to the
anti-Semitic conventions that seem to have been a part of James's
childhood and early adulthood. The author works deftly to contex-
tualize James in relation to his particular historical moment. One of
the great strengths of this study is Ben-Joseph's attentiveness to
often-neglected works, such as the early novel Roderick Hudson
(1875). which prepare the reader for the distasteful Jewish charac-
ters of later works such as "Professor FargoI1' The Impressions of a Cousin
and the greedy Italian-speaking Jew of The Golden Bowl (which is
really James's depiction of an American Jew). What Ben-Joseph
says of Roderick Hudson seems to be an equally relevant response to
James's later Jewish stereotypes: "Jews are here targeted peripher-
ally, unnecessarily, and even annoyingly for the sensitive reader, as
being perilous, grasping or lewd(@). Ben-Joseph's reading of
James's entire oeuvre suggests that James was faithful to an ethno-
centric hierarchy, an ideal of a coherent cultural order in which An-
glo-Saxons figure as the finest examples of humanity. In such an
aesthetics, Jews serve primarily as antithetic figures and blacks and
Native Americans warrant at best an "acerbic mere mention1'(qg). In
view of James's interest in the new realism, the disparity between
his stereotypes and fully realized human beings now appears par-
ticularly glaring.
In many ways, Ben-Joseph reveals his willingness to give the
novelist a fair hearing. His discussion of James's complex relation
to the Dreyfus case is particularly nuanced- James was a supporter
of Dreyfus and yet remained on friendly terms with anti-Semites
and anti-Dreyfusards like Paul Bourget. He even suggests that
James's infamous observations about the Jewish culture of the East
End in The American Scene actually appear quite mild when com-

Book Reviews 231
pared to Bourget's own vehemently anti-Semitic travelogue of New
York City. Ultimately however, Ben-Joseph suggests that James's
interest in the injustice of the trial proved to be moderate and fleet-
ing. But Ben-Joseph's zealous argument for James's anti-Semitism
leads to some curious omissions. His otherwise comprehensive ac-
count of references to Jews in the novelist's correspondence is dimin-
ished by the fact that he makes no more than a glancing reference to
James's friendship with the celebrated Jewish-American essayist
and poet Emma Lazarus, who shared James's fervent admiration
for George Eliot. This neglect is unfortunate because a great deal
might be learned from this relationship. As early as 1991, Carole
Kessner wrote about the friendship and correspondence between
James and Lazarus.' Their letters reveal that James was on friendly
terms with many Jews of his own class and, as Kessner points out,
James was quite critical of Julian Hawthorne's crudely anti-Semitic
"sequel" to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (Gwendolen: A Sequel to
George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda" [1g78]). James wrote letters introduc-
ing Lazarus to influential people in England and may have been in-
terested in Lazarus's interest in Jewish settlement in Palestine.
Ben-Joseph devotes several pages to a discussion of Eliot's Daniel
Deronda, concluding that James was unimpressed by the proto-
Zionist novel. But it is surely significant that in yet another letter
(this time to his sister Alice), which Ben-Joseph apparently has not
read, James gushes with effusive praise that: "Of course you have
read Daniel Deronda, and I hope you have enjoyed it a tenth as
much as I.. . I enjoyed it more than anything of hers-or any other
novelist's almost-I have ever read." Ben-Joseph does not speculate
on James's enthusiasm for this work, but if he had read James's let-
ter to Alice or researched his epistolary relationship to Lazarus, he
might have found an additional source of illumination on what
motivated the novelist to support Captain Alfred Dreyfus in such a
way that he risked old friendships.
Readers may take exception to certain liberties the author takes
throughout his study, exemplified by his statement that "James may
even have sought to reassure Bourget that although he objected to
perverting the legal system, as in the Dreyfus case, he was not al-
together happy about Jews in powerful places"(i40). No tangible
evidence is presented to sustain such a direct claim. Similarly, in

232 American Jewish Archives
his eagerness to unsettle James's reputation, he concludes that
James's critique of Prince Edward as "exceedingly vulgar" was
based solely on the fact that Victoria's successor had some Jewish
supporters. But Ben-Joseph's scholarship is generally competent. A
more serious problem is that it sometimes seems to lack the voice of
a critic ingenious enough to transcend what amounts to conven-
tional and even banal approaches to the problem of the image of the
Jew in literature. To claim that Henry James "looked askance at
Jews in an attempt to take the spotlight off his own background"(2)
seems disingenuous; an uncomplicated way to sum up the most
complicated writer of his age, Ben-Joseph's study cleaves hard to
this thesis.
Perhaps it is to his credit that Ben-Joseph refrains from determin-
ing whether James falls back on prejudice and caricature merely to
fill in the murkier margins of his literary canvas, or was guilty of a
more serious moral turpitude. James's readers may prefer to decide
these matters for themselves. Ben-Joseph is happy to let the facts
speak for themselves and does not speculate on why James was so
frequently drawn to the figure of the Jew when clearly that pres-
ence suggests a profoundly anxious estimation of their power and
culture, as if Judaism and Jews may have been rivals to him. He
demonstrates the wide-ranging presence of the Jew in James's nov-
els and cultural criticism without getting closer to the secret of what
is clearly an irresistible fascination. But the reader may feel the need
for Ben-Joseph's exhaustive survey to make at least this much clear:
scapegoating of Jews seems most likely to appear where the novel-
ist's narrative need for moral definitions struggles against his own
ambivalence and fear of collapsed distinctions. In other words,
James's attacks on Jews appear at textual moments of aesthetic cri-
sis, where the novelist fails to clarify cultural values and satisfac-
tory boundaries.
In spite of these quibbles, Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the
Jews, and Race must still be appreciated for what it is, namely a thor-
ough documentation of James's antipathy toward a variety of ethnic
and racial groups that exceeds in its scope all previous treatments of
the subject and that will surely stimulate a rich and controversial
debate, perhaps not any less significant than the rekindled argu-

Book Reviews 233
ment about T. S. Eliot that followed the appearance last year of An-
thony Julius's T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Litera y Form.
- Ranen Omer
Ranen Omer is completing his doctoral dissertation, on the relation of
American Jewish poets of east European descent to their Jewish cultural
identity, at the University of Notre Dame.
Notes
I. Henry James, The American Scene, ed. Leon Edel (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1968), 84-85.
2. See Carole Kessner, "The Emma Lazarus-Henry James Connection: Eight
Letters:' American Literary History vol. 3, no.1 (Spring 1991): 46-62.

Book Reviews 235
Rosenfeld, Max.
New Yorkish and Other American Yiddish Stories.
Introduction by Sanford Pinsker.
Philadelphia, Pa.: Sholom Aleichem Club Press
and the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations. 1995.266
pages.
Max Rosenfeld, who has selected and translated these stories, many
of which appeared in the Zukunft, points out that in addition to their
New York setting, they are concerned with the relationships between
men and women. The stories' uniqueness, he suggests, is that they
"deal with immigrant Jews in this country, and . . . the participants
expressed their deepest feelings in Yiddish."
There is much more to say. This volume repeatedly depicts those
without power and without success. New Yorkish enlarges American
political writing by depicting characters who help make American
life but rarely shape it. Civic writing, such as this, deepens our under-
standing of society by rescuing the lives of those who rarely become
part of our nation's official history. We are reminded that we have fre-
quently ignored the very human dreams and desires that make up a
national consciousness. On the one hand, this volume presents indi-
viduals longing for a redemptive love that usually never happens
or offers an occasion reducing a life to the moment of its pathos. On
the other hand, aspirations such as success, autonomy, and even a
hoped-for community are depicted as American fables, never to be
realized by those who believe in them. As a result, New Yorkish keeps
the full range of human life -its disappointments and endurance -
within our national literature and history.
The writers collected in this volume lived through the years in
which American Jewish life became conscious of itself as paradoxical.
It widened its understanding of modernity as it lost its intimacy
with the past. It marked out its literary landscape as it forgot its re-
ligious and folkloric centers. The authors in this volume recorded this
development; they lived it. Their origins are in Russia, Lithuania,
Poland, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia; many of their lives end in cities
suggestive of the explosiveness and exhaustion of national dreams -

236 American Jewish Archives
Los Angeles and New York. What ironies must have attended these
journeys and last years - some of the New Yorkish writers living into
the 1970s; Shea Tenenbaum and Shimshon Apter into the eighties.
They aged as their Yiddish-reading public diminished; their recog-
nizable Jewish New York garment district became the entry point of
the labor market for Hispanics and Orientals. Their struggles for
class-consciousness, for solidarity, and for unionization were left
behind by the affluent and rising lives of the Yiddish-speaking im-
migrants' children. After the '1950s, the representative writers of
American Jewish life - children of immigrants -recorded their pas-
sage out of urban ghettoes and discussed the embarrassment of
choices they had in America: careers, houses, lovers, identities, and re-
ligions. These authors were not enclave writers. Their past, so their
works argue, was not a future to be achieved. They wanted their
characters to participate in the capacious and worldly present.
The stories in New Yorkish are secular and often disputatious,
critiquing the American dream by often dealing with the laboring
day and an economy of "seasonal" work portrayed in terms of per-
sonal life. The New Yorkish writers knew that there is an economy
of, and in, passion. Protagonists bemoan their dark fate and be-
come helpless as jobs and enterprises collapse.
These writers discovered that character is richer than its cir-
cumstances. It seems to me that the stories in this work fight against
abstraction, in gathering the social immensity of individuality that
can be revealed only at the moment pressure is applied to the pre-
sent. The conservatism of the will is revealed. What might start to
read as a simple proletarian tale, Peretz Hirshbein's moving 'At the
Threshold:' for instance, cuts against the grain of expected historical
materialism. In Europe, a young girl whose mother accepts a sewing
machine and a free apartment is promised to a rich American suitor.
He pays for her passage to America, but she refuses to marry him,
never leaving the boat on which she came. Staring over the ship's
rail at the New York she will not enter, she sees "clearly the house
and the room where her sewing machine stood facing the old wil-
low tree. A breeze blew through its branches and the leaves
dropped to the damp autumn earth outside her window"(180).
Many of the New Yorkish protagonists live within what they per-
ceive as America, the New York that binds them to the sweatshops

Book Reviews 237
and the small stores that barely produce a profit. The geschaft, perhaps
someone's living room or kitchen used for socializing, or a picnic
as a looked-for event - these are the boundary markers of their
daily experience of America. The various writers of New Yorkish
want their characters to stay within this orbit, making their lives
opportunities to explore frustration and sometimes moral triumph.
(One exception to the urban portrait is Shea Tenenbaum's "Among
the Indians in Oklahomaff in which a Jewish immigrant from Poland
finds himself in Seminole, Oklahoma, making the rounds of its Jewish
families and discovering how intertwined his eastern European
past and American present are.)
A good number of these stories are poignant You can hear Chekhov,
Turgenev, Tolstoi, Flaubert, and Zola as well as Peretz and Aleichem
echoing in sketches about forlorn love, the vainglorious
boasting of small-time bosses, the hysteria of people trapped in
sour marriages, and the obstacles facing the small man. But why
stay within this European tradition? Writers such as Sherwood Anderson
and Sinclair Lewis transformed the American landscape
into a metaphor for emotional and intellectual impasse, thereby encouraging
other writers to see how locale itself summarizes and
represents maturation.
Literary traditions are prologues. The stories in New Yorkish are
"tryings out" of the American experience. Yet the Yiddish writers of
this volume had an enabling background. Who among their contemporaries
wouldn't be familiar with the challenges of irnmigration,
the working day, and the courage to remain humane,
subjects so easily introduced into these tales? This familiarity of
scene freed the writer from having to introduce to the reader an unfamiliar
background. The present could be quickly sketched, allowing
the author to focus on character and intention.
What American-born Jewish writers read these stories at the time
of their publication? I have no idea. But we can easily match the
New Yorkish writers, who seemed to labor without American literary
consequences, with other American writers whose works suggest
what kind of a common culture, and its motifs, could be
shared. Miriam Raskin's "No Way Out" is a remarkable companion
piece for Malamud's The Assistant; Shea Tenenbaum's "Among the
Indians in Oklahoma" well serves Dahlberg's portrait of a lonely

238 American Jewish Archives
youth in Bottom Dogs; Boruch Glazman's secularized midrash, "The
Hand of God: explores the meaninglessness of good intentions in
an industrial society, bringing to mind Gish Jen's often savage Typical
American. Raskin's "In the Shadows" provides us with an insight
into love as fulfilling self-development and can serve as an intrigu-
ing preface to Marge Piercy's complex meditation about love and
self-deconstruction in He She and It.
Some of the New Yorkish writers were remarkable talents. How
much richer our culture would have been if they had become known
earlier and certainly in their own lifetimes to an English-speaking
audience. Max Rosenfeld's efforts should encourage others to trans-
late more of this "lost" American writing.
-Lewis Fried
Lewis Fried is a member of the English Department at Kent State University.

Book Rwiews 239
Jacobson, Matthew Frye.
Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish,
Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.321 pages.
The strengths of this important study of immigrants imagining them-
selves issue from its focus and scope. Comparing and contrasting the
responses of Irish, Polish, and Jewish immigrants to their new-found
land of freedom and its temptations for assimilation, it argues that
"former centers did not necessarily lose their centrality"(2). Rather,
the American threat of a melting pot elicited cultural and structural
responses to promote a strong ethnic and national identity of each
group. And, as in the case of Polish nationalism, Jacobson asserts that
an especially strong national identity was fostered in the United
States, owing to the phenomenon of immigrant Poles of differing so-
cial strata who came together, shedding their distinctions in the name
of that which would ultimately unite them-Poland (13~34).
This study is certain to provoke many questions to further illumi-
nate the seemingly contradictory processes of group solidarity and
Americanization of immigrants at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Jacobson points to a number of factors that indicate the extent of as-
similation or nationalistic sentiment of each ethnic groupsocial, po-
litical, economic, religious, literary, theatrical, and so forth. He also
probes the conditions that have fostered incipient nationalism
among these groups, such as American nativism, anti-Catholicism
/anti-Semitism, and pressures from family back home. His thesis is
that the these factors "kept the nationalist idea of peoplehood and
identity alive in the diverse setting of the New World.. . [so that] pop-
ular culture offered a salve for the dislocations of modernity"(54,56).
The persistence of nationaI identity, as Jacobson demonstrates, has
continued into the twentieth century, affecting American policy and
the behavior of ethic groups. By considering these three groups to-
gether this study adds a dimension to our understanding of the
processes immigrants underwent in becoming Americans, and of
whether the conclusions are applicable to other immigrants, old and
new, in the Golden Land.

240 American Jewish Archives
Yet the book's strength is also its weakness and, in the case of its
covering of the issue of Zionist sentiments among Jews, its serious
flaw. For while the reader clearly discerns that the study's scope is
fixed, by and large, in the nineteenth century, with only some hesitant
and incomplete probes into the twentieth, much of the significant
activity of Zionism, and even the nationalistic self-realization of
the other groups, needs to be measured by twentieth-century developements,
when modern Poland, Ireland, and Israel were founded.
Most lacking of all, though, is the author's unsatisfactory, and incomplete,
analysis of Jewish ethnic and nationalistic activity, that is,
Zionism, during the twentieth century.
Focused as it is in the nineteenth century, Jacobson's study surprisingly
ignores the years during which Zionist activities began to affect
Jews, in the years immediately following the First Zionist Congress
of 1897. Jacobson does not explain, nor is there any justification for,
his arbitrariness in this case. One cannot stop at 1900 when dealing
with Zionism. The movement's initial three years were formative
ones, their impact on the general Jewish populace, not to mention
those immigrants making their way to the New World, is barely discernible
at such an early period. For just as the impact of the early
convocations of Zionists was beginning to trickle down to the
masses, and affect even Jews in the American diaspora, the study
falls silent. An uninformed reader will remain unaware that it is only
years later that Zionism begins to address the concerns of Jews in the
United States.
Though his declared intent is to explore national self-representation
by means of "the cultural production of narratives and presentationsU(7),
the author almost completely ignores the tension-laden
mirror of the Diasporic imagination of nationalist Hebrew literature.
In the case of Polish and Irish national sentiments, Jacobson does not
hesitate to draw on an impressive array of writers, among them
Mickiewicz, Sienkiewicz, and Conway to name but a few. Yet, when
it comes to Hebrew literature, the reader is left with the impression
that very little exists. The Hebrew literary tradition, as exemplified
by the likes of Bialik, Tschernichovsky, Greenberg, and Agnon, is
barely noted.
Hebrew literature is not merely the definitive medium through
which Jews have preserved their history, it is also the mirror of their

Book Reviews 241
cultural, ethnic, and national identity. No study of any national
group can omit its literary oeuvre, all the more so in the case of the
Jews. At a time when Hebrew and Yiddish literature were divided
primarily over the issues of national identity for the Jews, the place of
Jews in Europe and the United States, and their regard for 'Eretz Yisra'el,
it was Yiddish literature that became the domain of most proponents
of extraterritorialism anti- and non-Zionist sentiment. Though
a justifiable medium for illustrating the aspiration of Jews who chose
to remain in Europe, or even those reestablishing themselves in the
American diaspora, Yiddish literature is not the proper resource for
an examination or illustration of Jewish national feelings. So while Jacobson
selected to demonstrate the pro-Zionist (or proponents of what
he terms "Yiddish nationalism" [IO~I]) sentiments of some Yiddish writers
- among them Liessen, Rosenfeld - against non-Zionists such as
Mendele Makher [sic]Sforim, Peretz, Cahan, and Kobrin and concludes
that "Overall the relationship of Yiddish literature to Jewish nationalism
was deeply mixed(xxo), he pays but scant attention to that of Hebrew
literature and its overwhelmingly unequivocal stand on the
subject (94-95).
This reader would have been interested in seeing the contextualization
of the Hebrew language as a more central component in a
study that measures the national impulses still pervading Jewish immigrant,
and post immigrant, life in the United States. While the author
is correct in his assertion that the Yiddish press was the largest
conduit bringing information to immigrant Jews, with a readership
certainly exceeding the number of subscriptions by far, its numbers
should have been noted not for 1898 (Yiddishes tageblatt) but for the
post-1900 years, when the numbers of Jews in the United States ballooned
from an estimated million in 1900 to 4.5 million by 1925. In
short, the study misses the Jewish population it should have examined.
By overlooking the Hebrew component-press, culture clubs, theater,
journals, literature, religion, and so forth-the study effectively
neutralizes the images of Zionism and Jewish nationalism that have
followed Jewish immigrants from their east European lands of the diaspora
to their new-found diaspora. Hebrew publications, for instance,
though fewer than those in Yiddish, had the support of a few thousand
active readers, and one can only guess at how many listeners

242 American Jewish Archives
also took part, as per Victor Green's observation about journals' audi-
ences (57). Another observation in this regard is a need to consider the
force exerted by this core of dedicated nationalists on the public,
something which emerges, for example, in the post-World War One
formation of the American Jewish Congress.
Though begun in Europe, modem Hebrew literature "emigrated"
to the New World, flourishing for decades before its waning in the
second half of the twentieth century. Any serious engagement with
Hebrew literature presents the scholar with a wealth of evidence not
only as to the national aspirations of Jews but also, their ambivalence
in light of the American experience with its freedoms and threats
of assimilation. Early in the 19oos, the Hebrew poet B. Silkiner became
one of the first to set the thematic and stylistic tone followed by other
U. S. American-educated and newly immigrated writers-Efros, Lisitzky,
Bavli, Halkin, and Silberschlag, to name but a few. Silkiner's work,
bearing significant traces of Haskalah values and style, not only toed
the Zionist agenda but turned an eye to the American experience as
well.
Hebrew writers in the United States not only felt obliged to voice
their vision about America, to which many fled from more hostile lo-
cales in the European diaspora, but they also found themselves in the
precarious position of expressing the nationalist sentiments of Amer-
ican Jews. Moreover, many of them were instrumental in contribut-
ing thematically to the Hebrew literary scene by presenting the
potential fate of Jews in the New World against that of other minori-
ties who have been beset by those who brought European culture to
the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps more than literature in any other
language, Hebrew literature Americanizes itseIf in creating a vast
corpus bemoaning the fate of black people and the decimation of
Native Americans by the hands of European intruders, be they
Spanish or EngIish. So while writing so well of the anti-German
sentiments of Polish writers setting their works in the guise of the fate
of the American Indian, such as of Z. Brodowski (122-23), Mickiewicz,
and Sienkiewicz GSg-86), Jacobson misses the hundreds of pages in
Hebrew about the subject. Jews' diseovery of oppressed people other
than themselves, Na€ive Americans and African Americans, drew
Hebrew writers to inelude the lot of these people into the American-
ized corpusof Hebrew letters as a warning to their readers who were

Book Reviews 243
rapidly being assimilated into the new and open culture. They also
reminded Jews that, though their new land may be Golden, it also
threatened their existence. As in the case of the woman in Jewish soci-
ety, this thematic preoccupation exemplified Hebrew literature's
continued concern for the downtrodden and oppressed, for whom
American society can take measures to perform a meaningful tikkun.
Another issue in this notable work has to do with the extent to
which the immigrant experiences of Jews can be equated with the
other groups discussed in this study. Unlike the Irish and Poles, after
all, Jews did not leave their national homelands in order to settle in
the United States with a perception of the New World as an "exile"
from Europe. Their affinities for Poland are not the same as those of
gentile Poles. It is in this light that this reader noticed the paucity of
Jewish activists and intellectuals who took part in the Polish national
(and some Catholic) movements, which were organized in the United
States. It is a subject begging to be addressed, and one not noted by
Jacobson; namely were there Jews who took an active hand in Polish
national movements in the United States? If so why, and if not then
why not? The Jewish national agenda is again the issue that
receives the lesser attention in the author's avoidance of the Jewish-
national language and its impact on Jews in America.
- Stephen Katz
Stephen Katz is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Language and Literature
at Indiana University. He was a Bernard and Audre Rapoport Fellow of Ameri-
can Jewish Studies, 1997-98, at the Jacob Rader Marcus American Jewish
Archives, researching American Hebrew literature.

Book Reviews 245
Baskin, Judith R., Ed.
Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1994.382 pages.
Welcome! the tall woman comes to me
with a jar on her head
She asks about me in the neighborhood
"I am her friend and I ask about her."
(Iraqi Jewish women's song, from a lament for a woman friend)'
By its own definition, Women of the Word is a "collection of insightful
literary essays" conceived as a companion volume to Baskin's earlier
anthology, Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (19). A few essays
are very strong, offering the American reader access to unfamiliar texts
and authors, and are presented in a range of informative styles aimed
at wide readership. One is nonetheless left with the feeling that the
whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. The reasons are both
theoretical and organizational, and it seems useful to consider them.
Baskin's earlier work, Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, con-
tained historical essays surveying women's activities from biblical
through rabbinic, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and mod-
ern times. Baskin claims that "certain significant gaps: identified as
studies of eastern Europe, Israel, and Latin America, motivated the
sequel work (19). Yet while the earlier volume at least represented a
familiar sequence of canonical divisions in Jewish studies, the newer
essays do not. Despite two opening essays on the medieval and
Renaissance periods, Women of the Word focuses on nineteenth-, and
twentieth-century topics.
The shift in focus explains why the medieval and Italian Renais-
sance essays seem so poorly connected to all that follows. Both survey
representative attitudes toward women illustrated in literary and
polemical texts by men. It is true that there are not many options
for the medieval period. There is one extant medieval Hebrew
poem attributed to a woman, the wife of Dunash ben Labrat, and
there are fragments of Arabic verses by Qasmuna, the daughter of
Samuel haNagid.' Dishon, however, acknowledges neither. Still, it is

246 American Jewish Archives
curious that both essays also ignore lyric poetry. This omission leaves
them with mostly polemical and homiletical texts, and in Dishon's
case select maqamat with highly polarized female stereotypes. Dis-
hon credits the negative stereotype to "the misogynist traditions in
the Muslim and Christian cultures in which they lived1'(31), al-
though Jewish writers had plenty of internal resources to draw
upon for negative depictions of women. Moreover, "outside" influ-
ences equally inspired the lyrical love poetry of the Golden Age po-
ets and their descendants. Conventions vary considerably from
genre to genre, and author to author - compare Yaakov ben Elazar's
warrior-heroines with alHarizils fabliaux-women. True, medieval
Jewish writers reflect pervasive cultural attitudes among the
courtly and literary elite, but through a Jewish filter and in a Jewish
language. This point is made in the following essay, by Howard
Adelson, on the ambivalent portrayals of Jewish women in Italian
Renaissance literature.
Adelson provides an interesting survey of material. He relies on
literary debate texts, sermons, and polemical verse. He inexplicably
avoids both lyric and maqdma; both genres would have consider-
ably enriched his study. The polemical material is treated sometimes
as historical and sometimes as literary, a weakness in other essays
as well.
As the obvious interest of the book is the modern period, these two
essays sit uneasily among the others. They also create more gaps
than they bridge, particularly as there is no follow-up to any of the
Sephardic or Italian communities elsewhere in the volume. This
omission imposes a preordained homogeneity on the collectivity.
Kubovy treats Bejerano, a major figure, in terms of futuristic and
technological motifs. The Latina Jewish writers of Glickman's essay
are Ashkenaz. None of the essays treats Ladino or Arabic sources,
nor do any treat musical or folk genres, which would have
widened the range of themes and concerns defining women's
"texts" beyond the narrower, exclusively Western focus of Women
of the Word.3 Similarly, the liturgical composition of a poet like Far-
iha bat Yosef, an eighteenth century Moroccan woman, would have
made a lovely addition! as would essays on drama and film.
Amazingly, not a single voice is lesbian. But if the essays of Women
of the Word avoid what is nonwestern and nonrnodem, they also

Book Reviews 247
avoid the nonsecular, for reasons that are not clear. The introduction
states firmly the preference for secular Jewish literature (q), a preference
that implicitly confirms the writers' uniform sense that Jewish
religious and traditional values are inimical to Jewish women's
self-realization and expression. So, too, in Yael Feldman's essay, secular
nationhood and the hierarchy of concerns it imposes on its members
are hostile to women's self-expression. But if this is so, why not
organize the essays explicitly on this fault line?
Clearly, the pattern described by Norma Fain Pratt, in which
women would write "before marriage and after widowhood and
in terrible intellectual isolation (126)~ holds true for many more of
the women discussed in this volume than the radical Yiddish writers
of her essay, for example, Gluckel of Hameln (1645-1722) and
Dvorah Baron (1887-1957). This means, incidentally, that the middle
range of life, when literary men often produce the richest works
of their careers, is missing among women writers. The corresponding
conviction that women were ennobled by enabling either
individual males or the collective people, runs through many of
these stories.
As Janet Burstein puts it in her essay on American women's stories
of the 1920s~ "from both cultures a woman learned to look outward
to the needs of others, rather than inward to the demands of her
own 'soul'"(185). Thus, Rebekah Kohut (1864-1951) was trained from
childhood for a life of service to family and the Jewish people,
whose well-being "was more important than the state of my
soulU(184).5 Carole Kessner alludes to the same phenomenon when
she describes Marie Syrkin's shift from belle letters to a career "in
the service of Zionism and the Jewish people"(zo5). Amazingly,
and repeatedly, Jewish women writers put down their pens to tend
to the needs of others, clinging to the conviction that this was the
nobler choice even as it often silenced them. Burstein's reliance on
Horney in this essay is poignant and useful.
More troubling, theoretically, is the widespread assumption, in the
introduction and throughout individual essays, of a homogeneous
set made up of "Jewish women: unhappily reminiscent of
claims elsewhere that "woman" herself is a universal class of being. Is
it truly possible to speak of a "Jewish female struggle.. . to find a
voice"? (21) Such a claim seems dubious and naive, almost well-

248 American Jewish Archives
fully ignorant of the degree to which womanhood itself is a social
construct defined by powerful institutions and patriarchal forces.
Norma Fain Pratt's essay on Yiddish women writers in America between
1890 and 1940 is unusual in its attention to issues of class and diver-
sity, as well as in its acute observations on the gender divisions in
radical Yiddish circles in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The loss of audience experienced by these women was two fold:
both the Yiddish speakers and readers and the radical politics of
this period gave way to other voices.
Several of the essays take up questions they never get around to
answering, such as Hellerstein's limited treatment of canon issues in
a study of two Yiddish anthologies, Wexler's discussion of Yezier-
ska's "relation to form"(160, 178), and the long list of questions posed
by Horowitz about women's Holocaust memoirs (266), which are
forgotten in her conclusion (280). On the other hand, Lapidus Lerner's
essay on Esther Raab is sharp and focused; one can disagree with
some of her readings while appreciating the method and the texts.
Sokoloff's essay on Agnon's In the Prime of Her Life is a rich piece of
analysis, which explores not only the way Agnon creates a complex
female character but also how the traumas of young Tirzeh become
a metaphorical embodiment "of the struggle of the Hebrew language"
to achieve rebirth while dealing with its past (232). A wonderful essay,
it is marred only by the weak fit it has with the proclaimed agenda
of the anthology: like the medieval and Renaissance essays, it is a
study of a male construct of a female persona, and not a woman's
voice at all.
Not a personal fan of Cynthia Ozick, I found Blacher Cohen's es-
say surprising for the uniformity with which it depicted Ozick's
"prophetic" voice. Ozick "warns. .. chastises. .. rebukes. .. warns.. .
makes necessary distinctions.. . cautionsn(287); she "censures . . . in-
veighs.. . berates"(288). Indeed, she "compassionately views" Edel-
shtein, one of her literary creations, only when he "rail [sl against" and
"ridicules" other Jews, and then "transforms her sympathy into cas-
tigation"(289) for him as well. Ozick readers are forewarned.
Yael Feldman's study of Shulamit Hareven and Shulamit Lapid is
another masterful essay, reworked from an earlier article. She con-
centrates on a specific genre the "quasi-historical novel: which she
claims camouflages.. . in different degrees of displacement, the

Book Reviews 249
authors' struggles with questions of female subjectivity and gender
boundariesn(325). Thus Hareven's City of Many Days, largely dismissed
when it appeared in 1972, was a novel ahead of its time in terms of
both its feminism and its implicit critique of Zionist ideology (332).
For Feldman, Israeli women living under the real-life extension of
Zionist ideology are writing ',under seige, in a society fundamentally
unfriendly to their quest" that has "prevented the direct expression of
Israeli female subjectivityU(325). They are reduced to indirection and
"disguise:' The editorial choice to end the volume with this essay
once more suggests that the ideological trajectory conceived for the
collection is not necessarily that of the individual authors. Mysteriously,
this essay is not mentioned in the introduction at all.
Overall, one is struck by the inability of the essays, and their writers,
to speak among themselves, to generate some kind of dialogue
originating in a concerted response to a focused set of questions. In
this regard, it undoubtedly does not help that a full six of the essays
(those by Niger, Adler, Pratt, Hellerstein, Sokoloff, and Feldman) are
reworked from earlier publications. Still, there is room for much
browsing and reading here. The weaker essays are sociologically informative,
and the best ones are excellent. They are weakened by
the lack of any real editorial brace to hold them up together and by
the disjointed and naive assumptions that fail to serve that purpose.
The pretense to diversity is one of them, and the pretense to
universality is another. The better path would have been to give
these women writers a specific set of questions and let them talk together,
in their essays and across seas and centuries, and see what
they had to say. "I am her friend and I ask about her,!' runs a Judeo-
Arabic lament. Women of the Word does ask, but not clearly. It is less
clear how well it heard.
- Susan Einbinder
Susan Einbinder is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature at HUC-JIR, Cincin-
nati.
Notes
1. Yitzhak Avishur, Women's Folk Songs in Judeao-Arabicfrom Jews in Iraq [texts in
Judeo-Arabic with Hebrew translation, commentary, and introductionl,(Institute

250 American Jewish Archives
for Research on Iraqi Jewry, Israel, 198~). The song quoted is "bilhilem lagena 'Ihabab"
209--10, stanza 9. English translation is mine.
2. See James Mansfield Nichols, "The Arabic Verses of Qasmuna bint Isma'il ibn
Bagdalah," International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 13 (1981): 155-58: also Teresa
Garulo, Diwan de las Poetisas de al-Andalus (Hiperion, Madrid, 198~) 121-24.
3. Avishur, Women's Folk Songs. See also Shoshana Weich-Shahaq, "Rites of Passage
in Judeo-Spanish Poetry from Morocco" [in Hebrew], Peamim 30 (1987):
105-24; and Mishael Maswari Caspi, Daughters of Yemen, Berkeley, 1985.
4. See Yosef Chitrit, "Farlha bat Yosef: a Hebrew Poet in 18th Century Morocco"
[in Hebrewlin Pa amei Macarav, ed. Itzhak Bezalel (Jerusalem, 1983), 248-57.
5. Burstein cites Kohut's autobiography, My Portion, 66.
6. See Chandra Mohanty's essay "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses" in Colonial Discourse and Pos t-Colonial Tho y, ed. P. Williams
and L. Chrisman (New York, i9g4), 196-220. Mohanty critiques Western feminism
for defining women "as subjects outside of social relations, instead of looking at
the way women are constituted as women through these very structures"(zi3).

Book Reviews 251
Kushnir, Beatriz.
Baile de Mascaras; Mulheres Judias e Prostittticao.
As "Polacas" e suas associacoes de Ajuda Mutua.
(A Dance of Masks; Jewish Women and Prostitution.
The "Polish" and their Mutual Aid Societies).
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Imago Editora, 1996.258 pages. Portuguese.
No matter where Jews have established themselves, no matter for
how long their communities might have existed, their lives always
remain some kind of reenactment of a Fiddler on the Roof scene. They
feel to a larger or to a lesser degree not totally at ease living out their
Jewish identities in the context of, and in direct relation with, the
general society.
One of the less precarious examples of this principle has been the
North American Jewish community, where in spite of problems Jews
have become an intricate part of society and where bits of their culture
have found their way into everyday life. For instance, it is hard to
think of another country in the world that could have issued a
Hanukkah stamp as the United States did at the end of 1996.
While the situation of the Jews in the northern hemisphere might
not be perfect, south of the border it is outright fragile. I don't mean
by this possible episodes of anti-Semitism. I mean a fragile identity,
an image of themselves and a perception of how they are viewed by
the outside world about which Jews are hardly relaxed.
In this context two fringe groups hardly ever became conversation
topics in Jewish circles: on the one hand the Jews directly affiliated
with the Comm~~~Gst Party, and on the other the past existence of Jewish
prostitutes. Both topics would be rather forgotten by the members
of mainstream Latin American Jewish comrnunitites. In spite of being
in the midst of cultures, which in some cases welcomed them with
open arms, like my native Uruguay, Jews never found the means to
develop some kind of an indigenous identity.That is why the above,
mentioned groups could only make people feel uncomfortable.
Beatriz Kushnir's book, based on her master's thesis submitted to
one of Rio de Janeiro's universities, resurrects a subject many thought
would be finally forgotten. As the author lets it be known in her

252 American Jewish Archives
book (e.g., a footnote on page 209) and through a story published
in an Israeli biweekly (the Jerusalem Report, December 12, 1996) mem-
bers of the Brazilian Jewish community didn't receive her work
kindly.
The goal of Kushnir's book is to determine how a group, marginal
to the law and to the Jewish community, tried to establish institu-
tional structures that would allow its members to maintain their
identity and to support each other, inasmuch as they were immi-
grants.
We are presented with comparisons to similar organizations in
New York and in Buenos Aires. With regard to Brazil, while we are
privy to a more lengthy analysis of the existence and works of the
Associacao Beneficente Funeraria e Religiosa Israelita (Israelite
Benevolent Funeral and Religious Society) of Rio de Janeiro, other
chapters are devoted to the societies in Sao Paulo and Santos.
In all places the general pattern is the same. Prostitutes, their
husbands, and some of their pimp, establish synagogues and start
their own cemeteries. As time passes they also begin to take care of
the older women who are too frail to care for themselves. Eventually
the societies die a natural death, because there are no longer mem-
bers to keep them functioning.
It is remarkable how these women insisted on remaining Jew-
ish-probably because as far as identity is concerned they didn't
have anywhere to go. For the established Jews they were an un-
comfortable fact. For general society they were "who they were";
there also was the difficulty all Jews experienced of finding some
kind of link with the surrounding culture.
Overall the book succeeds in presenting the reader with a general
picture of the work carried out by these institutions. Beatriz Kush-
nir does a good job as well in making it clear that many of these
women were not exactly lured into coming to South America by men
who promised them marriage. Many knew exactly the purpose of
their trip and what would await them at their ports of arrival, and
in spite of attempts by organized groups to make them change their
course as they came off the ship, they went ahead anyway. We may
think, therefore, that perhaps these women saw prostitution as a
way out of eastern Europe. And maybe, even if many of them ended

Book Reviews 253
their days in poverty, they were able to put their descendants on
the way to a better life in this New World.
If seen this way, this whole historic chapter gets a very different
evaluation. However, we still know little about these women. Baile
de Mascaras includes long lists of all the members of the different
boards that took care of the affairs in the thee major Brazilian cities
surveyed in the book. Their names have been now made public, yet
Kushnir didn't have access to many primary sources. There are the
incomplete protocols of the meetings, police forms filled out about
many of the women involved in prostitution, and some (very few)
personal testimonies. Somehow one can feel the author's anguish
about this shortage of information.
Be that as it may, she has been able to put the story of Jewish
prostitution in Brazil in a certain perspective, shedding more light
on the subject than previously existed. However, a fuller account of
who these women were remains, maybe forever, in the dark, the
same darkness in which they worked. This probably should put
present-day members of the Latin American Jewish community at
ease. Not much else besides a name will be there to connect these
people to them. It's true that prostitutes are mentioned in the Bible.
But after all, those were somebody else's distant relatives.
- Alejandro Lilienthal
Rabbi Alejandro Lilienthal is a native of Montevideo, Uruguay, and before his re-
cent move to Waco, Texas, served congregations in Brazil for nearly ten years.

Book Reviews 255
Schmidt, Gilya Gerda.
Martin Buber's Formative Years:
From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897-1909.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 1995.177 pages.
When Martin Buber arrived in Vienna in 1897, an overtly anti-Semitic
city government was in power. The city of Mozart was now the city
of Karl Lueger and would later become the city of Hitler. Thus the
life of this Galician-born Jew from Lvov, raised by a grandfather who
prayed among Hasidim and edited the definitive scholarly edition
of the Midrash Lekach Tov, was to traverse varied yet intersecting
paths, in the tragic destiny of twentieth-century European Jewry. While
much is known about Buber's later years and his abundant writings,
the formation of his fundamental intellectual identity from the time
of university studies in Vienna is less familiar. It is to fill this gap that
Gilya Gerda Schmidt's carefully researched volume, Martin Buber's
Formative Years: From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897-1907,
comes. Professor Schmidt's study is a valuable contribution to Buber
scholarship.
As is well known from his later writings, Buber consistently
maintained an anti-rabbinic attitude in regard to Judaism. This atti-
tude was tempered somewhat when his collaboration with Franz
Rosenzweig on the German translation of the Tanakh began. A fas-
cinating aspect of Schmidt's study is the tracing of the circuitous
route that eventually ended in Buber's becoming a significant rep-
resentative of twentieth-century Judaism despite, or perhaps be-
cause of, his anti-rabbinic propensities. What is clearly demonstrated
is how the young Buber left both traditional Jewish practice and
learning, immersed himself in Nietzsche, Nicolas of Cusa, Jakob
Boehme, Schopenhauer, Kant, Schiller, and Scheiermacher, and
through them returned to reconfigure and transvalue (to adopt Niet-
zsche's term) the tradition of his ancestors. That Buber "discovers" in
Hasidism concepts, which are in early rabbinic sources, is thus ex-
plainable. Simply put, Buber understood the rabbinic tradition as a
heteronomous, constricting religious code. His lack of expertise in
rabbinic texts, as well as personal proclivities, led him to look al-

256 American Jewish Archives
most exclusively to German philosophy and Christian mysticism
as the guideposts for his religious searchings. Only then, influ-
enced both by the nascent Zionist movement and certain Hasidic
writings, as well as by the increasingly antiseptic ambiance of Ger-
man culture, did he return to his Jewish roots, especially the Hebrew
Bible, and call for Jewish renewal. It is a prescient sign of the mod-
ern Jewish predicament that Buber comes to speak for a tragically
endangered post-emancipation Diaspora Jewry through the influ-
ences of Christian mysticism, and perhaps the greatest Enlighten-
ment critic of Judaism, Imrnanuel Kant.
Let us take a look at Schmidt's illuminating discussion of Buber
and Nietzsche. When Buber arrived in Vienna in 1897, he already was
enamored of Nietzsche's writings, especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Nietzsche's emphasis upon aesthetics as the basis for morality, and
the proclamation of the death of God as the entree to a complete
transvaluation of values, resonated deeply within Buber; he too was
seeking new ways of understanding the conundrum of modernity.
So taken with Nietzsche was Buber that at age seventeen he began
to translate Zarathustra into Polish. Even in the 1913 precursor of I
and Thou, Daniel, the influence of Zarathustra is apparent. Buber
saw Nietzsche almost as a modern-day Hebrew prophet, railing
against the failures of metaphysics and morality in order to stem
the decay of culture. In Buber's words, Nietzsche
... "uncovered the feeble lies of our values and our
truths. . . . Instead of happiness for the greatest number, he con-
sidered the creation of great people and great ideas to be the
purpose of humanity." (Buber, "Ein Wort uber Nietzsche; 13,
quoted in Schmidt, 240.
Nietzsche is clearly a source of Buber's wide-ranging notion of re-
newal. In strange anomalous fashion, Nietzsche becomes through
Buber a determining force in the transformation of "the ancient
foundation to the twentieth century via his own, Dionysian dithy
rambs"(26).
Professor Schmidt's analysis of the influence upon Buber of the
various strands of German philosophy is excellent, if brief. The dis-
cussion of Hasidism, however, is problematic. As others have noted-

Book Reviews 257
Gershom Scholem and Steven T. Katz among them - Buber's whole
explication of Hasidism is in many ways unreliable. Buber correctly
saw the founders of Hasidism not as negators of the tradition but
as liberators of old forms (53). Buber had criticized Kant for the negative
function of will in his philosophy, a repression of the senses.
He viewed traditional Judaism similarly and praised Hasidism for
creating Jews "regenerated in feeling"(53). Interestingly, Buber saw
the inner liberation of the Jew in Hasidism preceding chronologically
political/social freedom, that is, the Emancipation. One of Buber's
tasks thus became a transplantation of this internal freedom into a
Jewish world struggling with external liberation.
Buber perceived Hasidism as facilitating the relationship between
God and the individual, a notion he felt had been stymied in the
world of the ghetto and rabbinic learning. But it is quite a jump
from that to Buber's notion that the goal of Hasidism was to enable
"the human being to become a law unto him or herselfU(53, 74). One
basis for Buber's claim is his assertion that in Hasidism "the law is
not the purpose of life"; rather, "the purpose of life is love"(74).
This poses several problems. First, one might inquire as to what
the purpose of the law indeed is (a question that to my knowledge,
Buber doesn't pose in that form) rather than inquiring into "the purpose
of life: Second, the notion that Hasidism rejects halakhah and
creates a social and religious model based solely on subjective will
and autonomous law is simply incorrect. Buber's resistance to -if not
outright hostility toward - halakhah prevented him from appreciating
the objective/subjective dialectic within halakhah. He viewed Judaism
in black and white; rabbinic Judaism and halakhah were
black, while Hasidism was white. This is, of course, a misleading
simplification. Interestingly, Buber's philosophy of dialogue was an
attempt to overcome the objective/subjective stalemate into which
Western philosophic thought had fallen, to postulate another way
of viewing reality. He never came to appreciate the Talmudic texts
that accomplish the same task, albeit without philosophical terminology.
Judaism would find anathema the kind of subjectivity Buber
claims prevails in Hasidism.
Professor Schmidt provides an insightful discussion of Buber's
early years, his commitment to German romanticism, his ideas of
Hasidism, and his struggles with Zionism. The text is well written,

258 American Jezuish Archives
aside from the occasional lapse in prepositional form (e.g.," Buber
was very active for the Zionist cause"[g3]) that should have been
caught by the editor. Buber's notion of rabbinic Judaism as "castrat-
ing" and himself as the guide, through Hasidism, into an autonomous
Judaism (112) in which true peoplehood will be found places a
sober intellectual limit on the fruitfulness of some of his later for-
mulations.
Professor Schmidt has considerably enhanced Buber scholarship
as well as our understanding of German Jewry at this time. I am grate-
ful for her contribution.
-Rochelle Millen
Rochelle Millen is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion, Wittenberg
University.

Abramowitz, Rabbi Dov Baer, 165,167
Adelson, Howard, 246
Adler, Cyrus, 7
Adult Education, 4,5
Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews,
and Race, (Ben-Joseph, Eli), reviewed,
229-233
Ahah Ha-Am, 4
African-Americans, 62
All the Nations under Heaven:An Ethnic and
Racial History ofNew York City, (~inder,
Frderick M. & David M. Reirners),
reviewed, 201-207
Alliance, New Jersey, 209,211
Alternatives to Assimilation: The Response of
Reform Judaism to American Culture, 1840-
1930, (Silverstein, Alan), reviewed, 121-
Index
125
Am Olam, 209-214
The American Scene, 229-230
The American Hebrew, 145148,154
American Jewish Congress, 170
American Jewish Historical Society, 136
American Retail Federation, 68
American Revolution, 2% 88
Americanization of immigrants, 52-~7~62,
121,198-199,239
Anderson, Sherwood, 237
Anglo-American Inter-Allied Mizrachi
Bureau, 169
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, 11%
200
Antisemitism
Britain, 75-77,80
Christian roots, 79
Germany, 77
Russia, 80
Shylock Image, 197
U.S, 75-81,117-120
Vienna, 255
Antisemitism in America, (Dinnerstein,
~eonard), reviewed, 75-81
Antisemitism in America Today: Outspoken
Experts Explode theMyths, (Chanes,
Jerome R. Editor), reviewed, 117-120
Apter, Shirnshon, 236
Arbell, Mordecai ("Rediscovering ~ucacas"),
35-43
Ariel, Yaakov ("The Evangelist at Our Door:
The American Jewish Response to
Christian Missionaries, 1880-~gzo"), 139-
160
Amoff, Rabbi, 8
Aronson, David, 55-56
Aruba, 35
Arzt, Max, 8
Ashkenazi, Elliot, Editor, The Civil War
Diary of Clara Solomon, Growing up in
New Orleans,r861-1862, reviewed, 191-
194
Ashton, Dianne, book review, 87-90
Assimilation,
Americanization of immigrants, 52-5~
62,121,198-199,239
Class, 217
Process, 215-216
Role of Gender, 215-220
Baile de MascarasMulheres Judais e
Prostituicao: as Polacas e suas associacoes de
Ajuda Mutua, (Kushnir, Beatriz),
reviewed, 251-253
Ball, Senator Joseph, 47
Baltimore, MD, 197
Banister, Joseph, 76
Banton, Michael, 75
Bargman, Daniel, book review, 103-108
Barkai, Avraham, Branching Out: German
Jewish Immigration to the United States,
1820-1914, reviewed, 195-200
Bnrnard and Michael Gratz: Their Lives and
Times, (Fish, Sidney M.), reviewed 87-89
Baron de Hirsch Fund, 211-212
Baskin, Judith R Women ofthe Word:]ewish
Women and Jewish Writing, reviewed,
109-116

262 American Jewish Archives
Bat Mitzvah, 7
Bederly, Samson, 4
Bellow, Saul, 181
Ben-Joseph, Eli, Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry
James, the Jms, and Race, reviewed, 229-
233
Bergman, Daniel, book review, 103
Berlin, Rabbi Meir, 166,171
de Betancourt, Marcos Francisco, 38,40
Binder, Frderick M & David M. Reirners, All
the Nations under Heaven: An Ethnic and
Racial History of Nm York City, reviewed,
201-207
Blackstone, William, and the Chicago
Hebrew Mission, 154
Bloom, Isaac, 27
Bluestone, Dr. J.I., 163,165
Editor, Shulamit, 163
Bokser, Ben Zion, 12
Bonaire, 35
"Borscht Belt", 97
Borish, Linda J., book review, 215-220
Branching Out: German Jewish Immigration to
the United States, 1820-1914, (Barkai,
Avraham), reviewed, 195-200
Brandeis, Louis, 155
Brazil, 103-107
National Identity, 103
Racial Concepts and Policy, 103-105
Breyer, Stephen, 91-92
Brickner, Bamett, 12
Brinkmann, Tobias (Review Essay: "Ethnic
History in the I~~O's"), 177-185
Brooklyn, N.Y., 146,154
Brooklyn Federation of Jewish
Organizations, 154
Brotmanville, New Jersey, 211
Buber, Martin,
Antisemitism, 255
ChristianMysticism, 256
Galicia, 255
Halakhah, 257
Hasidism, 255-258
Nietzsche, 255-256
and interpretation of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, 256
Vienna, 255
Zionism, 256-258
Buchanan, Pat, 118-119
Bunon, Samuel, 28-29
Burstein, Janet, 247
Bush, George, (U.S. President), 72
Cacao Trade, 39
Cahan, Abraham, The Apostate of Chego-
Chegg (18991,152-153
Camp Cejwin, 13
de Canas, Jose Francisco, 36,38
Caplan, Kirnmy, book review, 221-228
Caracas, Venezuela, 36-37
Camel, New Jersey, 209,211
Catskills, N.Y., 97-102
Cayenne, 36
Census, U.S. (1880,1890), 97-98
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 122
Chafetz (Chofetz), Chaim, 226
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 80
Channon, Henry "Chips", 78
Chanes, Jerome R. Antisemitism in America
Today: Outspoken Experts Explode the
Myths, reviewed, 117-120
Chatham Square Cemetery, 23,135,136
Chicago, ILL., 139,145,152,197
Cincinnati, Ohio, 61,65,122,165,166,197-
198
Mizrachi Conference (May 1914), 166-169
Cincinnati Enquirer, 65
The Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon,
Growing up in New Orleans, 1861-1862,
(Ashkenazi, Elliot, Editor), reviewed,
191-194
Clinton, Bill, (U.S. President), 72
Clinton, Hilary Rodham, 72
Cohen, Naomi W., 195
Cohn, Leopold, 146
Cohen, Theodore ("Walter Jonas Judah and
the New York Yellow Fever Epidemic of
1798"). 23-34,135, ~6
College of Philadelphia, 27
Columbus, Ohio, 63,152
Coolidge, Calvin (u.s. President), 63
Corcos, Cantor, 36
Coughlin, Father Charles, 118
de Cuebas, Bacilio Antonio, 40
Curacao, 35-36
Cutler, Irving, Editor, (The Jms of Chicago-

From Shetl to Suburb), reviewed 177-185
De Haas, Jacob, 167
Deutsch, Gotthard, 143
Dinnerstein, Leonard
(Antisemitism in America), reviewed,
75-81, book review, 117-120
Dinkins, David L. 93
Disraeli, Benjamin, 76
Drachman, Bemard, 163
Dubrovsky, Gertrude, book review, 97-102
Duke, David, 118,119
Durkheim, Emile, Influence on Kaplan, 11
Duskin, Alexander, 12
Dutch Colonial Empire, 35-37,41,202-202
Dutch West India Company, 201-202
Eidelman, Jay, book review, 187-190
Einbinder, Susan, book review, 245-250
Eisenberg, Ellen, Jewish Agricultural Colonies
in New Jersey, 1882-1920, reviewed 209-
214
Eisenhower, Dwight D. (US. President), 68
Eisenstein, Rabbi Ira, 3,9, lo, 12-14
at Columbia College, 10
Creative Judaism (1936), 12
at Jewish Theological Seminary, lo
Eisenstein, Rabbi Judah David, 6,226
Elazar, Daniel J. ("Aunt Rose: A Memoir"),
45
Elazar, Yaakov ben, 246
Elkin, Judith, 213
Ellis Island, 229
Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda, 231
Elliot, T.S., 233
Evian Conference (1938), 106-~g
Farrakhan, Louis, 118
Federation of American Zionists, 164
Federation of Reconstructionist
Congregations and Havurot
(later Reconstructionist Federation of
Congregations, and Jewish
Reconstructionist ~ederation), r
Federation of Zionist Societies of Greater
New York and Vicinity, 164
Felsenthal, Rabbi Bemard, 145,162,163
"Why do Jews not Accept Jesus as their
Messiah?", 152
Index
Feldman, Yael, 247-248
Femandes, Andres, 40
First World War, 169,172
Fish, Sidney M., Barnard and Michael Gratz:
Their Lives and Times, 87-89
Fishman, Rabbi Judah Leib, 168,170-171
Fishman, Sylvia Barack, Follow My
Footprints: Changing Images of Women in
American Jewish Fiction, viewed 109-116
Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of
Women in American Jmish Fiction,
(Fishman, Sylvia Barack), reviewed 109-
116
Ford, Gerald, (U.S. President), 71
Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 11
Franks, David, 87
"Free Sons of Zion" (New York), 165
Fried, Lewis, book review, 235-238
Friedman, Murray, book review, 91-96
Friedeman, Rabbi, 225
Friedman, Reena Sigrnan ("The Emergence
of Reconstructionism: An Evolving
American Judaism, 1922-1945~'), 1
Friends of Reconstructionism, 13
Gabriel of Barcelonia (Fray), 39
Garnm, Gerald H., 183
Gender,
Assimilation and Americanization, 52-
5~ 62,121,215-220,237
Class, 217
Literature, 245-249
Process, 215-216
Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jmish
History, (Hyrnan, Paula E.), reviewed,
215-220
Gershon Levy & Co., 188
Ginsberg, Ruth Bader, 91-92
Giuliani, Rudolph, 93
Glazman, Baruch, "The Hand of God", 238
Glueck, Dr. Nelson, 70
Godfrey, Sheldon & Judith C., Search Out the
Land: The Jms and the Growth of Equality
in British Colonial American, 1740-1867,
reviewed, 187-190
Goldman, Rose Barzon, 45-60
Bessarabia, 46
Communism, 45

264
Hubert Humphrey Presidential
Campaign, 52
Jewish Identity, 52-57
Marriage to Sam Goldman, 47
Photo 49
Talmud Torah, 55-57
Veterans Groups, 47
45,57-59
Goldman, Solomon, 8
Goldstein, Israel, 12
Golub, Jacob, 12
Goodman, Benny, 181
Goodwin, George M., book review, 83-86
Goslings, Cornelius, 35
Gotheil, Gustav, 162,163
Gottheil, Richard, 163-165
Grant, Madison, author of "The Passing of
the Great Race", 77
Gratz Family (Bernard, Hayim, ~ichael),
87-89
Greenbaum, Henry, 177
Grossman, James, 180
Habirna, 4
Habonim, 4
Hadassah, 4
haNagid, Samuel, 245
Harap, Louis, The Image of the Jew in
American Literature, 229
Harding, Warren G. (U.S. President), 63
Hareubeni, Dr., 4
Hams, Rebecca, 192
Harrison, President Benjamin, 154
Halifax, Nova Scotia, 188
Handlin, Oscar & Mary, 187
Hareven, Shulamit, 248
Hart, Rabbi Lewis A., "A Jewish Response to
Christian Evangelists", 150-151
Haward College, 27
Hashiloach, 4
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 78
Hebreo, Samuel, 38
"Hebrew Christians", 155
Hebrew Literature, 240-241,245,248-249
Hebrew School and Culture, 3-4
Hebrew University, 4,13
Hebrew Union College, 143,198
Heller, Rabbi Bernard, 8
American Jewish Archives
Heller, Rabbi Max, 162
Herscher, Uri, 213
Hertz, Rabbi Joseph, 143
Herzl, Theodor, 163-165
Hibbat Zion (Hovevi Zion), 161-163
Hicks, William Joynson, n
Hillman, Sidney, 181
Hirschbein, Peretz, 236
Hirschenson, Rabbi, 226
Holmes, Colin (Review ~ssay), 75-82
Holocaust, 118
Hoover, Herbert, (U.S. President), 64
Hore-Belisha, Leslie, 78
Hosack, Dr. David, 29
Hyman, Paula E., Gender and Assimilation in
Modem Jewish Histoy, reviewed 2x5-222
Isaacs, Nathan, 166
Israel, Edward, 12
Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Special Sorrows: The
Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and
Jewish Immigrants in the United States,
reviewed, 239-243
Jaher, Frederic Cople (A Scapegoat in the New
Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-
Semitism in America), reviewed, 75-81
James, Henry, 229-231
The American Scene, 229-230
The Golden Bowl, 230
Roderick Hudson, 230
Jastrow, Marcus, 163
Jebenhausen, Bavaria, 196
Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey,
1882-1920, (Eisenberg Ellen), reviewed
209-214
Jewish Agricultural Society, 98,212
Jewish Center, Manhatten, 2,6
Jewish Colonization Association, 106
Jewish Community, Latin America
Antisernitism, 251
Brazil, 252-253
Prostitution, 252-253
Uruguay, 251
Jezuish Farmers of the Catskills: A Centuy of
Survival, (Lavender, Abraham D. and
Steinberg, Clarence B.) reviewed, 97-102
Jewish Institute of Religion, 7

Jewish Military Service, U.S., loo
Jewish Population,
U.S. 18th century, 26
German-Jewish Elites, 141,147
Immigration, 139
Jewish Physicians, U.S. 18th century, 27-28
Jewish Theological Seminary, I,% lo, 13,14,
15
Jewish Women,
Assimilation, 215-216
Class and Domestic concerns, 215
Experiences, 215
Literature, 109-115
Moral Behavior, 217
Socio-economic challenges, 215
Young Women's Hebrew Association,
218
Jews and the New American Scene, (Lipset,
Seymour Martin and Rabb, Earl),
reviewed 9195
The Jews of Boston - Essays on the Occasion of
the Centenary (1895-1995) of the Combined
Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston,
(Jonathan Sama and Ellen Smith,
Editors) reviewed, 177-185
The Jews of Chicago - From Shefl to Suburb
(Irving Cutler, Editor), reviewed, 177-185
Johnson, Lyndon B. (U.S. President), 70-71
Joseph, Rabbi Jacob, 163,224
Judah, Andrew, 27
Judah, Benjamin, 28
Judah, Bernard Samuel, 28
Judah, Jessie, 26
Judah, Samuel, 26
Judah, Walter Jonas, 23-34
Death, 29
Epitaph, 31
Medical Studies, 26-29
Patemal Grandparents, 26
Tombstone (picture), 30
Yellow Fever Epidemic, New York City,
29-31
Judaism,
Conservative Movement, 1,7,9,14,15,
122
Conversion to, 14
Orthodox Judaism, 7,122,161-162
Reform Movement, 1,7,15,141-14,147,
151,161-162,164
Kadushin, Max, 8,12
Kaplan, Rabbi Mordecai, 1-16
Excommunicated by Union of Orthodox
Rabbis, 12
Judaism as a Civilization, 10-12
'ANew Approach to Jewish Life", 8
'A Program for the Reconstruction of
Judaism", I
Reconstructionist (~agazine), 12
Retires from JTS, 14
"The Thirteenth Wants", 6
Katz, Steven, book review, 239-243
Katz, Steven T., 257
Kennedy, John F. (U.S. President), 68-70
Kentucky, 83-86
Kessner, Carole, 231
King's College, Medical School of, 2~28-29
Klausner, Joseph, 4
Klein, Philip, 163,163-165
Kleindeutchland, 199
"Knights of Zion" (Chicago), 165,167
Knox, Robert, author of "The Races of Man",
77
Kohn, Eugene, 12
Kohut, Alexander, 163
Kohut, Rebekah, 247
Kupstein, Rabbi Meir, 163
Kushner, Tony, 78
Kushnir, Beatriz, Baile de Mascaras:Mulheres
Judais e Prostituicao: as Polacas e suas
associacoes de Ajuda Mutua, reviewed,
Labrat, Dunash ben, 245
Landsrnanschafien, 162
Lang, Leon, 12
Lapid, Shulamit, 248
Lavender, Abraham D. and Steinberg,
Clarence B. Jewish Farmers of the Cafskills:
A Century of Suruival, reviewed, 97-102
Lavender, Abraham, book review, 209
Lazarus, Harriet S. ("Hail to the Chiefs"),
61-73
Photo, 69
Lazarus, Meta Marx, 63
Lazarus, Simon, Jr., 63
League of Zionists of the United States of

266 American Jeu lish Archives
North America, 164
Lemer, Lapidus, 248
Lesser, Rabbi Abraham Jacob Gershon, 166
Lesser, Jeffrey, Welcoming the Undmsirables:
Brazil and the Iewish Question, reviewed
103-108
Levy, Nathan, 87
Lewis, Sinclair, 237
Lichtenstein, Diane, book review, 109-116
Liebman, Charles, 15
Lilienthal, Alejandro, book review, 251-253
Lincoln, Abraham, (U.S. President), 61
Lipset, Seymour Martin and Rabbi Earl, Jews
and the New American Scene, reviewed 91-
95
Lipsky, Louis, 168
Levinthal, Bernard L., 226
Levinthal, Israel H., 226
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 77
London School of Economics, 76
Longworth, Nicholas, 64
Los Angeles, Ca., 93
de Luccena, Abraham Haim, 136
McCarthy, Joseph, 67
Magnus, Judah, 4
Malone, Bobbie, book review, 191-194
Marcus, Jacob Rader, 135-136
Margolis, Moses Zebulun, 163
Marion, Ohio 63
Martin Buber's Formative Years: From German
Culture toIewish Renewal, 1897-1909,
(~chmidt, Gilya ~erda), reviewed 255-
258
Masliansky, Zvi Hirsch, 163
Masonic Activities, 27
Meites, Hyrnan, 178-181
Mendes, Hemy Pereira, 163
Menorah Journal, 1,2
de Mesquitam Benjamin Bueno, 23
Mikve Israel (Curacao), 39
Miller, Irwin, 135,136
Millen, Rochelle, book review, 255-258
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 45,46,47,164-165
Minnesota, 47-48,50-51
Mintz, Dr. Moses, 163,165
Mixed Seating in Synagogues, Question of,6
Mizrachi Conferences, 166-170
Mizrachi World Organization, 165
Mohilever, Rabbi Samuel, 170
Monfante, Arausz, 37
Montero de Espinos, Juan Jacob, 37-38
Attack on Jews, 38
Morais, Sabato, 163
Neuleiningen, Germany, 61
Nuemberger, August, 63
Newport, R.I., 177
New Amsterdam, 27,135
New Orleans, 191-194
New York City, 23-29,167-168
African-American Community, 206-207
Common Council and the Yellow Fever
Epidemic, 24
Immigration phases, 201
Japanese-American Community, 206
Race Relations, 201-207
Yellow Fever Epidemic, (1798), 23-24
New York State, 99,139,149
New Yorkish and Other American Yiddish
Stories, (Rosenfeld, Max, Editor),
reviewed, 235-236
Nixon, Richard M. (u.s. President), 71
Norma, New Jersey, 209
Odessa Committee, 161
O'Donnell, Frank Hugh, 76
de Olavarriaga, Pedro Jose, 40
de Olivares, Juan de, 40
Omer, Ranen, book review, 229-233
Orthodox Iudaism in America: A Biographical
Dictiona y and Sourcebook, (Sherman,
Moshe D.), reviewed, 221-228
Ozick, Cynthia, 248
Palestine, I, 4,13
Pedder, John, 77
Philadelphia, Pa., 87-88,98,139
Phillips, Rosalie, 136
Pittsburgh, 167
Plantation Act, 187
Pratt, Norma Fain, 247,248-249
Quakers, 152
Rabb, Esther, 248

RaMaZ, 225
Raskjn, Miriam, "NO Way Out", 237
Reagan, Ronald, (US. President), 72
Reconstructionist Board, 12
Reconstructionist Chapters, 8
Reconstructionist Movement, I,% 8-51? 13-14
Becomes a Denomination within
Judaism, 14
Publications
High Holy Day Prayer book, 13
Machzor, 13
New Haggadah, 5, y
Sabbath Prayer Book, 5,13
Shir Hadasho, 13
Reconstructionist (Magazine), 12-13
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College,
Philadelphia, I, 14
Riis, Jacob, 149
Rollman, Henry, 63
Rollman, Madeline, 62
Romeyn, Esther, book review, 2 g
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 64-65
Roosevelt, Franklin D. (U.S. President), 64-
65
Rosenberg, Edgar, 81
Rosenberg, Adam, 165
Rosenfeld, Max, Editor, New Yorkish and
Other American Yiddish Stories, reviewed,
235-238
Rosenhayn, New Jersey, 209,211
Rosenthal, Daniel, 170
Rosenwald, Julius, 180
Rothschild family,
Rubenovitz, Herman, 7
Russia, 140
Rutgers College, 27
Saint Louis, 165,167
Salanter, Rabbi Israel, 224
Salgado, Juan, 40
Salmon, Yosef ("Mizrachi Movement in
America: A Belated but Sturdy
Offshoot"), 161-175
San Francisco, CA, 197
Santa Irmandad (''The Holy
Brotherhood"), Tucacas, 38-39.40
Sarasohn, Kazriel, 163
Sarna, Jonathan, 148
Index 267
Sama, Jonathan and Ellen Smith, Editors
(The Jews of Boston), reviewed 177-185
A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The
Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in
America, Uaher, Frederic Cople),
reviewed, 75-d1
Schiff, Jacob, 141
Schindler, Solomon, 182
Schmidt, Gilya Gerda, Martin Buber's
Formative Years:Frorn German Culture to
Jm'sh Renewal, 1897-1909, reviewed 255-
258
Scholem, Gershom, 257
Schur, Wolf, 163
Editor, Ha-Pisgah, 163
Scult, Me1 (Kaplan biographer), 6,7
Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth
of Equality in British Colonial American,
1740-1867, (Godfrey, Sheldon & Judith
C.), reviewed, 187-190
Sedakah Fund to aid victims of the Yellow
Fever epidemic, 25
Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 23,25
Shearith Israel, Congregation, 23,26,135
Sherman, Moshe D., Orthodox Judaism in
America: A Biographical Dictiona y and
Sourcebook, reviewed, 221-228
Shivat Zion, Edited by Abraham Jacob
Sluck'i, 161,169-172
Silverman, Morris, 8
Silverstein, Alan, Alternatives to Assimilation:
The Response of Reform Judaism to
American Culture, 1840-1930, reviewed,
121-125
Sion Wiesenthal Center, 117
Singer, Michael, 164
Slucki, Abraham Jacob, 161,170
Smith, C.W., 76
Smith, Goldwin, 76
Society for the Advancement of Judaism, 2-
9r14-15
Publications
Blue Book, 5
"Code for Ethical Practice", 5
Selections from the Psalms for
Responsive Reading, 5
SAJ Review, 8-9,lo
Society for Jewish Renascence, 7

268 American Jewish Archives
de Sola, Pool, 135
Solis, Elivera N., 136
Soloman Family (New Orleans), 191-194
Sowell, Thomas, 206
Spanish, 35-43
Spanish Caracas Company, 39
Spanish and Portuguese Synagogues, 27
Special Sorrows: The Diaspon'c Imagination of
Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the
United States, (Jacobson, Matthew rye),
reviewed, 239-243
Steinberg, Milton, 12
Stewart, James Garfield, 65
Straus, Nathan, 155
Stricker, George, 65-66
Stricker, Hedwig Kramer, 61
American Civil War, 61
Phoenix Society, 61-62
Stricker, Sidney, 64
Strausses (German-Jewish ~mmigrants), 197
Struck, Hermann, 165
Stuyvesant, Peter, 23,135
The Synagogues of Kentucky's Past,
Perspectives on Kentucky's Past:
Architecture, Archaeology, and Landscape,
(Weissbach, Lee Shai), reviewed, 83-86
Taft, Charles l?, 62-63
Taft, William Howard, (u.S. President), 62-
63
Temple Bethel, New York, 8
Tenebaum, Shea, 236-237
"Among the Indians in Oklahoma", 237
Timayenis, Telemachus Thomas, 76
Touro, Judah, 191
Truman, Harry, (u.S. President), 67
Tucacas, Venezuela, 35-43
Union of American Hebrew Congregations,
122
Union of Orthodox Rabbis, 12,172
Unitarians, 152
United Zionists, 165
de Varrio, Juan Jose, 40
de Villalonga, Jorge, 39
Warsaw, 161
Weiss, Louis, 152
Weissbach, Lee Shai (The Synagogues of
Kentucky's Past, Perspectives on Kentucky's
Past: Architecture, Archaeology, and
Landscape), reviewed, 83-86
Weizmann, Chaim, 4
Welcoming the Undersirables: Brazil and the
Jewish Question, (Lesser, ~effrey),
reviewed 103-108
Wertheimer, Jack, 6
West India Company, 39
Whitfield, Stephen, book review, 121-125
Wieman, Henry Nelson, 11
Wilhelm, Cornelia, book review, 195-200
Wilson, William Julius, 206
Winkler, Meyer, 8
Wirth, Louis, 179
Wise, Isaac Mayer, 142,146
Wise, Dr. Stephen, 7,155,162-163
Wistrich, Robert, 79
Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish
Writing, (Baskin, Judith R.) reviewed,
log-116
Women's Suffrage, 6
World Zionist Organization, 162
Yellow Fever, description, 23-24
Yiddish Culture, 235-238
Yiddish Literature, 235-238,248
Young Judea, 4
Zeff, Rabbi Joseph, 165
Zentralverein der Amerikanische Zionisten,
163
Zion Congregation, (chicago, ~ll)., 145
Zionism, 4,45,57-59,154-155,247
American, 162,240-241
Congress,
Eleventh, 165
First, 163
Second, 164
Sixth, 165
Martin Buber, 255-258
Zionist Organization of America, 4,155
Zipin, George, 124
Zolotkoff, Leon, 163
Zukunft, 235