The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In Russia, rabbis had long warned their congregations that Westernization of the religion would spell its undoing. Steeped in centuries of Orthodoxy, the Men of the Book had spent their days bowed at the eastern walls of their synagogues, endlessly studying the Talmud, dissecting its exhortations, preparing commentaries on the Holy Word, and commentaries upon commentaries—often at the expense of any other kind of labor or scholarship. In most Eastern European congregations, the reading of secular books had been banned—for how could the words of mere men be allowed to compete with the Word of God? From this had grown the belief, which the Eastern Europeans had brought with them to America, that work other than Talmudic scholarship was unworthy of the Jew, that poverty was the pious Jew’s lot, that pursuit of Mammon was unrighteous. That the uptown German-Jewish businessmen had not only grown rich, but had also tailored their religion to fit more easily into the Christian mode in the process, seemed sheer apostasy. To the Germans, who saw themselves as “Americanized,” this attitude merely seemed unenlightened—backward, ignorant.

  Simple statistics also offered an explanation for the increasing East-West, German-Russian mutual antipathy. In 1870, the number of Jews in New York City had been estimated at eighty thousand, or less than nine percent of the city’s population. With the exception of a handful of crusty, aristocratic, and ingeniously interrelated Sephardic families who had been living in the city since the mid-seventeenth century, most of these families had come originally from Germany—driven out not so much by religious persecution (though there was some of that) as by taxation and the threat of conscription into the German armies. Since their numbers were small, their arrival in New York had been a nonevent, and their presence in the predominantly Christian city went relatively unnoticed. They lived very quietly, almost deliberately so, preferring inconspicuousness to ostentation. They worked hard and, in the process, had gained a reputation for probity. As bankers, they had established valuable international connections with such powerful British and European firms as Hambro’s and the House of Rothschild. During the Civil War, while amassing considerable fortunes of their own, they had helped establish the Union’s credit overseas at a time when President Lincoln’s treasury desperately needed it.

  As merchants, the Strauses of Macy’s, the Rosenwalds of Sears, Roebuck, and the Altmans of Altman’s had provided the city with high-quality merchandise at fair prices. As publishers, the related Ochses and Sulzbergers offered a newspaper that was responsible, even essential. As families, they kept to themselves, and if they had any desire to storm the gates of Mrs. Astor’s Christian circle they were too proud to show it. (Indeed, the German Jews often left the impression that theirs was the more difficult social sphere to storm.) They projected just the opposite wish—to leave the established structure of Christian society exactly as they had found it. The German Jews, in other words, were assimilationists only up to a point, and had prudently not tried to push beyond that point. It might be added, too, that many of the German Jews were blond, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed. In appearance, they did not stand out against the prevailing look of the population. They flowed pleasantly—not with it, but alongside it.

  And yet, by 1906, nearly ninety thousand Jews were arriving in New York City every year, most of them from Russia and Poland. (Because the Russians and the Poles seemed indistinguishable, all these immigrants were grouped as “Russians.”) Now the Jewish population of the city stood at close to a million, or roughly twenty-five percent of the total population, and by 1915 there would be nearly a million and a half, or twenty-eight percent. In sheer numbers, the Jews of New York seemed to be overtaking the non-Jewish population. And, massed together on the Lower East Side, they were nothing if not conspicuous.

  They arrived looking like bindle stiffs—hobos with their worldly possessions, slung over their shoulders in gunny sacks. The men were swarthy skinned, often bearded and side-curled. They were poor, and looked it: ill-clothed, ill-shod, often sickly. They were nearly always in need of baths and fumigation—and smelled it. They looked, and were, frightened—and what is more alarming than a look of terror in a stranger’s eyes? There was something even more off-putting in their collective appearance: they looked not only fearful, but defiant, wary, suspicious. They looked poor, and yet they did not look abject, the way Americans tend to think poor people ought to look. The immigrant Jews from Eastern European lands conformed to no previous immigrant image. As a group, they were not beggars. There were no outstretched Jewish hands asking for alms. At the same time, though poor, they seemed curiously proud. There were certain means of livelihood that, though readily available to them, they were unwilling to perform. Immigrant Italians, Irish, and Swedes lined up for jobs helping to dig the tunnels for New York’s subway system, and lay its tracks; not the Jews. Irish girls happily took positions as cooks, parlor maids, and children’s nurses for rich families, but not the Jews. Scotsmen worked as coachmen, footmen, and chauffeurs, and Englishmen worked as butlers, but the Jews would have none of these occupations. It was not that they had no taste for hard, physical labor. Jewish newsboys raced through the streets night and day delivering papers; Jewish girls toiled long hours in sweatshops working at sewing machines, and brought piecework home with them at night. A Jewish youth seemed to have no reluctance to work as a singing waiter in a restaurant; why did he refuse to buttle in a rich man’s house? Why would he not join the police force or the fire department the way the Irish did? Was mere something innately repugnant about wearing a uniform? It was all very perplexing. The phrase “doing one’s own thing” had not yet come into the language, but that was what the Eastern European Jews seemed bent on doing, and through it all, they seemed buoyed up by some inner strength or fire. They were feisty, fractious, independent, argumentative—bickering shrilly and incessantly with one another. They seemed almost to wear a collective chip on the shoulder.

  To make understanding these newcomers more difficult, they had names that were unpronounceable. How was one to deal with a name like Yaikef Rabinowski, or Pesheh Luboschitz? They spoke a language, Yiddish, that sounded a little like German but was written in Hebrew characters—backwards, from right to left. Even the German Jews described Yiddish as a “vulgar jargon,” despite the fact that Yiddish, which is Judeo-German, was a language comprehensible to native Germans, from the lowliest peasant to the members of the kaiser’s court. In short, these new arrivals appeared exactly to fit Emma Lazarus’s description of immigrants in “The New Colossus,” which was inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor—“wretched refuse” of Europe’s teeming shore. And they kept coming.

  The newspapers, reporting on this strange new breed of immigrants, did not help speed their welcome. The Eastern European Jews were “ignorant” and “primitive,” and “the dregs of society.” Whenever the newspapers ventured into the Lower East Side—which they did periodically with scented handkerchiefs pressed to the journalistic nostrils—there emerged stories of “horrible conditions in the Jewish quarter,” and of overcrowding in filthy tenements, vivid descriptions of vermin, garbage, marital disorders, insanity, violence, gangs of “cigarette-smoking street toughs” (cigarette smoking was regarded as a certain sign of depravity), alcoholism, starvation, prostitution, and crime. The newspapers were soon speaking of the Lower East Side in terms of “the Jewish problem,” and it was a problem the self-respecting, quasi-assimilated German Jews could have done without. The Eastern Europeans were giving all Jews a bad name, and they threatened the Germans’ carefully acquired “Americanization.”

  A generation or so earlier, the German-Jewish immigrants had started out as peddlers, and the later-arrived Russians had come to the logical conclusion that peddling was a good Jewish way to earn a living in America. But times had changed somewhat. The Germans—usually on foot, but sometimes with the luxury of a horse and wagon—had done their peddling in the rural reaches of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the South, where they provided a much-needed service to farm fa
milies who lived miles always from the nearest villages and stores. The nineteenth-century Jewish peddler with his wares—thimbles, watches, underwear—had been a welcome figure on the horizon. At the various farms where he stopped he was often given food and shelter and other forms of hospitality. But now, in the twentieth century, thanks to men like Julius Rosenwald and his invention—the Sears, Roebuck mail-order catalogue—plus the introduction by the U.S. Post Office of rural free delivery in 1903 and parcel post ten years later, the rural foot peddler had become obsolete. So the new Jewish peddler now took to the streets of New York.

  This new breed of peddlers, with their ramshackle carts—most of them homemade or adapted from cast-off baby buggies—peddled mostly to each other. Certainly no uptowners came to the Lower East Side in search of pushcart bargains, though occasional tourists ventured down just for a look at the raucous scene. The Jewish Lower East Side, furthermore, was a strictly defined area: between Houston Street on the north, Monroe Street on the south, the Bowery on the west, and the East River docks and warehouses on the east. These bordering streets were literally battle lines. To the south of the Monroe Street boundary—or frontier—lived the hostile Irish. West and north lived the equally hostile Italians and German Catholics. As more immigrants arrived, much as the “Jewish quarter” tried to press outward, the more tightly it became compressed. Its narrow streets contained not only tenements but synagogues, factories, warehouses, and shops, and the area contained only one tiny park. Soon this wedge-shaped piece of real estate had more than seven hundred inhabitants to the acre and, by the turn of the century, it was reported that the population density of this strip of land had exceeded that of the worst, most crowded sections of Bombay. Into this scene of extreme congestion pushed the pushcarts. The Lower East Side became a massive traffic jam of peddlers’ pushcarts, laden with everything from soiled rags to fresh chicken soup. One didn’t stroll on the Lower East Side; one shouldered one’s way through the pushcarts and the massive crowd of pushing humanity. Vehicular traffic was impossible, and the East Side air was redolent of the commingled odors of pushcart merchandise. By 1906, the pushcarts had become a civic nuisance, a “disgrace” to the great city. They were even, by a jump of the imagination, made to sound morally dangerous. Because the pushcarts filled the streets from one side to the other, so the argument went, Jewish youngsters were deprived of the only outdoor spaces they might have otherwise had for play. Thus deprived, it followed, the Jewish youth turned naturally to crime, the girls to prostitution, and it was true that in an area so tightly packed with people, Jewish prostitutes did offer their services out-of-doors.

  And the pushcart scene did seem—to the uninitiated outsider, at least—to be full of fury and violence. Again, this had a great deal to do with the fiery and passionate Russian personality. The Germans, as a group, were staid and taciturn. In their businesses, deals were concluded with a nod or a handshake. The Russians, by contrast, were noisy, brash, assertive, and high-strung. They shook their fists and beat their breasts to make their points. Unhappy with a price, they didn’t merely shrug; they wailed. And since many of the pushcart vendors were women, who became the family breadwinners in order to leave their husbands to the higher calling of Talmudic study, this added shrillness to the already high decibel level in the streets. When not hawking their wares through Hester Street at the top of their lungs, the vendors seemed to spend their time vociferously disagreeing with one another in the little East Side coffeehouses. While physical fighting was rare, there seemed to be an excessive amount of verbal conflict—all of it, from the German point of view, quite unseemly.

  The Russians had also developed their own brand of grim, self-mocking street humor, which the Germans found more than a little vulgar. Bits of doggerel were set to music and sung in the streets and coffeehouses, reflecting the Russians’ way of life and their wry views of it. One such, translated from the Yiddish, went:

  Rent money and landlord,

  Rent money and landlord,

  Rent money and landlord,

  You have to pay your rent.

  When the landlord comes,

  you doff your hat;

  Won’t pay your rent?

  Then out with your furniture!

  At the same time, the Yiddish theater was filled with agony, passion, and wild laughter at the Jewish comedians. Uptown, of course, the Germans preferred to be entertained by the calming strains of Strauss, Mendelssohn, and Mozart.

  A final difference between the two breeds of Jews was political. The Russians had arrived with their souls afire with socialism, with the stirrings of the Bolshevist movement, and were already struggling to form trade guilds and unions to do battle with the “bosses.” But the Germans by now were contented capitalists, conservative supporters of President Theodore Roosevelt. The Russians appeared to pose a real threat to the American way of life as the Germans had learned to enjoy it, and it seemed essential that this Jewish radicalism be nipped in the bud, that the Russians be retrained in the “proper” way of American political thinking. To this end as well, Julia Richman and her ilk had set their high-minded goals.

  Of course, on the surface, it might seem that it would have been easier on the Germans if they had simply ignored the increasingly embarrassing presence of their very visible coreligionists from Eastern Europe—to have disowned these people who claimed to be their spiritual cousins. And no doubt there were many who would have preferred to do just that. But, led by men like Schiff and Marshall, who argued that the Talmudic principle of zedakah, or righteousness, was involved, the German-Jewish uptowners, with an almost audible collective sigh, decided to take up the philanthropic burden of the unpopular unfortunates. The most palpable initial problem appeared to be urban overcrowding, and for a while the United Hebrew Charities and the Baron de Hirsch Fund—a $2,400,000 trust established by the German capitalist for the specific purpose of helping Jewish immigrants to settle peacefully in America—embarked on several programs designed to persuade Europeans to settle elsewhere than in New York City.

  These organizations, trying their best to sound charitable, pointed out that the “country air” in New Jersey and the Catskill Mountains, or even farther away on the western plains, would surely benefit the immigrants. A plan was devised whereby boats carrying Jewish immigrants would be diverted to the Southwest, to such Gulf ports as Galveston. But nothing quite worked. The Russian Jews were an urbanized people—even the rural shtetls were organized as tightly packed minicities—and were unused to farming, physically and psychologically ill-suited to becoming cowboys or ranchers. Besides, they wanted to settle where their own like-speaking and like-thinking friends and kin had settled, and that was inevitably New York.

  In 1888, as a result of the Germans’ charitable efforts, two hundred Jews were actually shipped back to Europe in cattle boats. But what were two hundred out of hundreds of thousands? Merely a tiny dent in what was increasingly described in warlike terms as an “invasion.” Uptowners, more and more alarmed, attempted to have laws passed in Washington to restrain further immigration, and Public Health Service standards for admission to the United States became more and more stringent. But the tide could not be stopped.

  The only solution, it seemed, was for the Germans to try, if possible, to reshape these shabby people along what the Germans considered acceptable lines. The United Hebrew Charities began providing free lodging, meals, medical care, and counseling for new immigrants. It sponsored uplift-intended lectures and classes—on the English language, on American morals, manners, modes of dress, on the dangers of socialism—all designed to teach the poor Russians the unwisdom of their former ways. To support these programs, the Germans dug deeply—if at times begrudgingly—into their pockets because, as usual, Louis Marshall and Jacob Schiff were setting the stiff-upper-lip, noblesse oblige example, and insisting that others do the same. When refugees overflowed Castle Garden* and the rooming houses nearby, the New York commissioner of emigration opened the Wards Islan
d buildings, and Schiff personally contributed ten thousand dollars for an auxiliary barracks. Together, Schiff and Marshall established small-loan societies to help the immigrants get into businesses other than pushcart vending.

  But of course gratitude is a notoriously difficult emotion to arouse in the breasts of charity’s recipients, particularly when the gift is bestowed in the spirit of rebuke. And the most galling, to the Germans, thing about their philanthropy was that the Russians didn’t seem grateful at all. In fact, when they accepted it, they seemed to accept it resentfully, angrily. Given out of hard feelings, it was taken with feelings that were even harder.

  The fact was that the conditions on the Lower East Side that the Germans found so “appalling” did not seem so bad to the Russians. That the Germans should have judged them so the Russians at first found puzzling, and finally found infuriating. To be sure, living conditions were not that much better than they had been in the old country, but they were not that much worse, either. In their urban ghettos and in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement—that 386,000-square-mile area stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, which included the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Lithuania, and much of Poland—the Russians had spent generations learning how to live with overcrowding, and how to live, as it were, in layers and in shifts. A people can deal with a lack of elbow room in one of two ways: by lashing out at one’s neighbors, or by huddling against them for warmth and comfort like mountaineers lost in a winter blizzard. The Russians had found it practical to do the latter. With the resilience and ingenuity that often emerge among a people confronted by a common enemy, the Russian Jews had learned to adapt their lives to uncomfortable situations, to turn disadvantages into advantages.