Review - American Jewish Archives

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-