by Ray Monk
Even so, the surname remained, and it was as ‘culturally distinctive’ as a name can be, identifying its bearers’ ancestors both geographically and ethnically. ‘As appears from his name,’ one of Oppenheimer’s professors once wrote in an academic reference, ‘Oppenheimer is a Jew.’ If, ignoring Haskalah, one clung to the notion of Judaism as defining a race, a nation or a tribe, rather than simply a religion, then the professor was correct. After the Napoleonic decree of 1808, which required Jews to take a surname, ‘Oppenheimer’ was the name adopted by those Jews who lived in the area around the small and fairly obscure town of Oppenheim, which lies in the Hesse area of Germany, between Mainz and Worms, not far from Frankfurt. With regard to J. Robert Oppenheimer, what ‘appears from his name’ is that his ancestors were among those Hessian Jews. Could he look upon them and say, ‘These are my people’? Well, after his political awakening in the 1930s, when his relatives – like all Jews in Germany – were facing the horrors of the Nazis, his determination to play a part in defeating Hitler’s regime did suggest some feeling of kinship with the victims of the Third Reich. But, until then, his reaction to his German Jewish relatives was to look upon them as if they came from a very distant time and place. When, as a child, he went to Germany on a family visit and met his grandfather, Benjamin Oppenheimer, who still lived just a few miles away from Oppenheim, his impression (or so he later recalled) was of ‘an unsuccessful small businessman, born himself in a hovel, really, in an almost medieval German village’. This, one feels, is the impression of a child used to the wealth of the Upper West Side and the modernity of twentieth-century Manhattan; whether Benjamin would be regarded as ‘unsuccessful’, his birthplace a ‘hovel’ and his home town ‘medieval’ by people with less exalted standards is, I think, doubtful.
The ‘almost medieval village’ was presumably Hanau, a town north-east of Oppenheim, where Benjamin Oppenheimer lived and where his son, Julius, was born in 1871. Julius spent just seventeen years in Hanau before, in 1888, leaving for America. Whatever the truth about Benjamin Oppenheimer’s circumstances, the family clearly had aspirations for a better life than was possible in Hanau and, like many other German Jews, thought they could fulfil those aspirations in America. Julius’s younger brother and sister, Emil and Hedwig, joined him a few years after he had set sail, and Julius himself was following the example of his two uncles, Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld (‘Sol & Sig’ as they were known in the family), who had migrated to the United States a generation earlier.
The ambition may have come from Benjamin’s wife, Babette Rothfeld, since the two uncles in question were her brothers. ‘Sol & Sig’ left for America in 1869, nearly twenty years before Julius Oppenheimer came to join them, but more than thirty years after the ‘Second Migration’ had begun. In those thirty years or so, a great deal had happened to the German Jewish community in America. Or, rather, one should say that in those years the American German Jewish community had been created, its development demonstrating both that the United States could indeed realise many of the hopes expressed in Max Lilienthal’s letter, and that it could not entirely live up to the promise of being a land in which the ‘old strife’ between Jew and Christian had been forgotten.
By 1869, the German Jewish migrants who had landed in America thirty or so years earlier had formed a successful social group, among whom were a surprisingly large number of families that had become extremely wealthy. Within a single generation, the Seligmans, the Lehmans, the Guggenheims, the Schiffs, the Goldmans and the Sachses had all amassed vast fortunes and become founders of some of the best-known, most successful and most powerful financial and commercial institutions in America. They had also created a fairly tight-knit community, known to its members as ‘Our Crowd’, a Jewish version of the more conspicuously wealthy group of families – the Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans, Roosevelts, and so on – that constituted New York’s gentile high society during this period. ‘Our Crowd’ was a self-consciously cohesive community, whose members worshipped together at the Temple Emanu-El (the Reform Jewish synagogue, whose imposing building on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1868, was a symbol of the success and aspirations of the German Jewish community), socialised together, took holidays together and chose their wives and husbands from each other’s families. The conformity of this community was satirised by one of its members, Emanie Sachs, in her novel Red Damask:
Our crowd here. They cover their walls with the same silks. Why there isn’t a house we go to, including Sherry’s, that hasn’t a damask wall. They go to the same dentist and the same grocer and the same concerts. They think alike and act alike and they’re scared to death not to talk alike. The men go to jobs their fathers or grandfathers created, and all they do is sit at their desk & let the organisations work.
Behind the conventionality satirised by Sachs was an earnest desire among the wealthy German Jewish community in New York to ‘fit in’, both with each other and with the wider society. As the names given to the Seligman offspring illustrate, what these prosperous German Jews wanted, perhaps above all, was to be accepted as Americans.
The loyalty this generation of German Jewish migrants felt towards the United States had its origin in the contrast between the restrictions they had experienced in Germany and the freedom and opportunities they had found in America. Until the Civil War, America had been for these migrants almost everything that they had been promised it would be. Of course, every Jew in America would, at some time or other, have come across anti-Semitic prejudice, but the state itself was not anti-Semitic; there was no institutionalised anti-Semitism enshrined in law, decree or officially sanctioned customs. In the years during and after the Civil War, however, this began to change, partly because of the conspicuous success of the German Jews, and partly because life in the United States for everyone during these years became darker and more troubled.
Most notoriously, in December 1862, eighteen months into the war, General Ulysses Grant issued an order calling for the expulsion of Jews from the military district under his command, which included the states of Mississippi, Kentucky and Tennessee. The justification for this extraordinary order was the suspicion that Jews were engaged in illegal cotton trading. A month before he ordered the expulsion, Grant had issued an order banning Jews from travelling south into the cotton states. When this did not stop the black-market trading, he resorted to expulsion.
Grant’s expulsion order came as a great shock to Jews throughout the United States. Writing in 1912, the Zionist Max Nordau remarked that Grant’s order showed ‘how thin the floor between Jews and Hell was (and most probably still is) even in enlightened free America . . . What an object lesson to Jewish optimists.’ It was the first time that Jews in America had faced anti-Semitism in an institutionalised, officially sanctioned form, and they reacted to it not with resignation and disappointment, but with an angry refusal to accept it. A campaign against the order was organised, including petitions and delegations to the President (at least one of which was led by the aforementioned Max Lilienthal), and, although the episode was a blow to those who believed in America as a land free from Jew-hatred, perhaps the most remarkable thing about it was how quickly the President gave in to the protests. On 3 January 1863, just a few weeks after the order had been issued, President Lincoln instructed Grant to revoke the order. It was therefore, after all, still possible to believe in the United States as a nation without anti-Semitic prejudice, although its image in that respect had been badly tarnished.
In 1869, the year Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld arrived in New York, Ulysses Grant, having recently been elected President, began what would become, after re-election in 1872, an eight-year period in office. Despite his ill-judged expulsion order in 1862, he was not regarded as an enemy of the Jews. Rather, the opposite. Perhaps the reaction to his notorious order and the humiliation of having to rescind it had made him wary of upsetting Jewish opinion, for among his friends and political allies were many prominent Jews, including Joseph Seligman, whose family
company by 1869 had a working capital of more than $6 million and who was at that time acknowledged as the leader of the New York German Jewish community.
In a remarkable move, Grant offered to make Seligman Secretary of the Treasury, an offer which the flattered but surprised Seligman turned down. Grant nevertheless kept up friendly relations with Seligman, and, throughout Grant’s tenure in office, Seligman was a regular invitee for lunch at the White House. Partly because of his contacts with high office, Seligman was at this time, one of his biographers records, ‘becoming more Americanised, more gentilised, losing some of his feeling of Jewishness’. He began to spend less and less time at the Harmonie Club, the leading German Jewish gentlemen’s club, and more time at the predominantly gentile Union League Club.
What Joseph Seligman seemed determined to prove was that it was possible for a Jew to be accepted by – and, indeed, into – the very highest tier of American society. Unfortunately for him, and for the Jewish (particularly the German Jewish) community as a whole, events in the 1870s appeared to show that there were quite definite and insuperable limits to such acceptance. Seligman’s first harsh lesson in this respect came in 1873, when he attempted to establish the first Jewish commercial bank (Seligman & Co. had previously been, as all Jewish bankers in the US at that time were, merchant bankers only). Despite having a name chosen to sound as English, as non-German and as non-Jewish as possible (the ‘Anglo-California National Bank’) and despite having at its head Richard G. Sneath, ‘the first gentile and first non family member to be given a place of importance in a Seligman enterprise’, the bank was, as Seligman had to concede after just a few years, a failure. ‘The Bank would have more friends among the Americans,’ Sneath advised Seligman, ‘but for their foolish prejudices against the religion of the bank.’
Further indications that, among wealthy Americans, these ‘foolish prejudices’ were on the increase were to follow. In 1877, in an incident that became famous as the ‘Seligman Affair’, it was brought painfully and unambiguously home to Joseph Seligman and to the country at large that Jews – even immensely wealthy Uptown German Jews, who loved America with more passion than they loved their Jewish heritage and who had friends in the very highest places – were not accepted in polite American society. The incident that forced the issue occurred when Seligman and his family tried to book into the Grand Union Hotel, the grandest hotel in Saratoga, and quite possibly the grandest in the whole United States. It had been owned by Alexander Stewart, the owner of A.T. Stewart & Company, the largest retail store in New York, who had a jealous dislike of Seligman, especially of his friendship with Grant. When Stewart died in 1876, his estate was managed by his friend, Judge Henry Hilton. For some years the Grand Union Hotel had been losing business, and Hilton decided that this was because its upper-class guests did not want to mix with Jews. When the Seligman family appeared at the hotel, therefore, they were told that it no longer accepted ‘Israelites’.
Seligman’s response was to write a public letter to Hilton, which was published in all the main newspapers throughout the United States. In the furore that followed, most newspapers and the bulk of public opinion took Seligman’s side. The comic weekly Puck probably captured the prevailing view of the affair when it accompanied a two-page cartoon with an editorial that declared: ‘But in this country the Jew is not ostracised. He stands equal before the law and before society with all his fellow-citizens, of whatever creed or nationality.’ The clergyman Henry Ward Beecher devoted to the incident one of his famous sermons, ‘Gentile and Jew’, in which he declared his ‘love and respect’ for Seligman.
Despite these public declarations of support, the incident inspired other upper-class hotels and clubs to follow Hilton’s lead, and the sentence ‘Hebrews need not apply’ became a common sight in advertisements for such places. In 1879, the New York Herald newspaper ran a story on ‘The Jews and Coney Island’, in which they interviewed Austin Corbin, the president of the Manhattan Beach Company, which had just taken the decision to ban Jews from its hotel and its beach. ‘We cannot bring the highest social element to Manhattan Beach if the Jews persist in coming,’ Corbin said. ‘They won’t associate with Jews and that’s all there is about it.’ The whole Seligman Affair, judges Stephen Birmingham, the author of ‘Our Crowd’: The Great Jewish Families of New York, ‘was to have a profound psychological effect on German Jewish life in New York, making it more defensive and insular, more proud and aloof and self-contained, more cautious’.
Joseph Seligman himself was a broken man after the Saratoga incident and lived for just three more years after it. Very few people had tried harder than he to lose whatever ‘cultural distinctiveness’ came from being German and Jewish. In his final years he took a further step in this direction when he gave public support to a movement that might be seen as an attempt by German Jews to lose their Jewishness without either becoming Christian or abandoning the ethical principles central to Judaism. It was called the Ethical Culture Society and it came to provide the spiritual milieu within which J. Robert Oppenheimer was raised.
The leader of the Ethical Culture Society was Felix Adler, a German Jew whose father, Samuel Adler, was, from 1856 to his death in 1873, the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, the spiritual centre of ‘Our Crowd’. When Samuel Adler died, Felix, then just twenty-two years old, was invited to deliver a sermon at the Temple Emanu-El, presumably as a prelude to being invited to take his father’s place as rabbi. However, the sermon he gave, ‘The Judaism of the Future’, effectively put paid to any possibility there might have been of him succeeding his father. At the same time, however, it inspired in the minds of many who heard it a vision of what Reform Judaism might evolve into.
In the sermon Adler spoke of the ‘ruins’ of religion, among which he explicitly included Judaism, and asked the question: what remains when the ruins are removed? His answer, which would form the basis both for the Ethical Culture Society and for the Weltanschauung in which Oppenheimer was brought up, was: morality. Judaism, Adler proclaimed, was well placed to provide leadership to the religion of the future, since it always had been, essentially, a religion of deed rather than creed. In this sense, Adler claimed, Judaism as a moral force ‘was not given to the Jews alone’, but rather had a destiny ‘to embrace in one great moral state the whole family of men’.
Adler’s talk of the ‘ruins’ of Judaism did not go down well among the majority of the congregation of Temple Emanu-El, and he was never asked to address the synagogue again. However, for a small but influential minority his view of the ‘Judaism of the Future’ seemed to be the perfect solution to two pressing problems: 1. how to be a Jew if one did not actually believe any elements of the Jewish creed; and 2. how to combine being a good Jew with being a good American.
After a career as a rabbi was denied to him, Adler was offered, and accepted, a professorship in Hebrew at Cornell University. While there, he ran into trouble when he was accused of being an atheist, but, back in New York City, moves were afoot to attract him back as the head of the Judaism of the future – the vision of which he had outlined in his divisive sermon. And so, in 1876, Adler gave a talk in New York in which he announced the establishment of a new organisation, the Ethical Culture Society. This was to be a religion without religious belief, a ‘practical religion’. ‘We propose,’ Adler announced:
to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual . . . freely do I own to this purpose of reconciliation and candidly do I confess that it is my dearest object to exalt the present movement above the strife of contending sects and parties, and at once to occupy that common ground where we may all meet, believers and unbelievers, for purposes in themselves, lofty and unquestioned by any . . . freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man . . . Diversity in the creed, unanimity in the deed. This is that practical religion from which none dissents. This is that Platform broad enough to receive the worshipper and the infidel. This is that common ground where we may all grasp hands as brothers united
in mankind’s common cause.
‘Adler’s proposal for a new movement,’ Howard B. Radest, a historian of the movement has written, ‘had the virtue of completing an Americanisation without betraying what his listeners regarded as the core of their Jewish faith – its prophetic tradition . . . It was, we suggest, no accident that Adler’s address echoed the First Amendment to the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, for at Cornell Adler had traced the connection between prophetic and democratic values.’
The Ethical Culture Society received its certificate of incorporation in February 1877. It was not then, nor was it ever, a mass movement. In some ways it was more like an exclusive club: to become a member one needed the sponsorship of another member. ‘The Sunday Meeting,’ Radest writes, ‘was a social occasion, too. Here one greeted old friends, came to see and be seen, came to be entertained.’ It was not a religion at all, still less a proselytising one. ‘Ethical Culture seemed to make it difficult for people to discover it or, having discovered it, to find their way into its ranks. In some circles the impression still exists of a rather select group.’
