Review - American Jewish Archives

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-