Review - American Jewish Archives

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-
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.