Review - American Jewish Archives

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