Many scholars have explored the conundrum that similar reforms of Judaism—such as introducing “decorum” and banning the auction of honors—had been spreading in Europe in the previous two decades, but that many of the Jews of South Carolina were of Sephardic heritage and unlikely to be guided by these trends. An early historian of Charleston’s Jewish community, Rabbi Barnett A. Elzas (1867–1936), who served many years at Beth Elohim, has noted the number of times that reform proponents cited changes under way in Holland, Germany, and Prussia as their inspiration. But other experts suggest that Sephardic Jews had their own impetus to discard many Talmudic doctrines.
For example, Rabbi Allan Tarshish, another historian of South Carolina Jews, speculates that the Sephardic Jews of Charleston were influenced by a spirit of challenging the Talmud that dated from the “converted” Jews who practiced their religion in secret to escape persecution in Spain.22 In addition, research by Jakob J. Petuchowski, a scholar at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, has shown that Jews who escaped from Spain for Holland and Italy were taken aback by the dominance of rabbis in other parts of Europe who hewed rigorously to Talmudic rules of conduct. As Sephardim grew in status in Europe, they started to feel that the Messiah delivering Jews back to Palestine may have been a worthy goal for the destitute Jewish flotsam and jetsam of Europe, but not for the wealthy business classes emerging in the seventeenth century of northern Europe. They interpreted the words of Jeremiah—“And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace” (Jeremiah 29:7)—as meaning that it was in fact a Jewish obligation to remain and flourish in the Diaspora.23
Those historians who argue that the marranos, while living secret lives, relied only on the Bible (most likely in Latin) to remind them of their Jewish heritage, and not the copious rabbinic teachings it spawned, cite the example of Uriel Da Costa (1585–1640?), a Jew from Portugal of parents who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism to escape persecution. As a youth, Da Costa fled to Amsterdam, reexamined his Jewish heritage, and became disenchanted with rabbinic Judaism consumed by legalisms and doctrines. His book An Examination of the Traditions of the Pharisees outlined his case. Unfortunately, Da Costa’s skepticism did not turn out well. Ostracized, he wandered back and forth between Amsterdam and Hamburg, and was eventually excommunicated. He ended up killing himself. Da Costa’s writings may have influenced Spinoza, and Spinoza’s so-called heresies were also well known to Jews around the world.24
Whatever the factors that led to Judge Butler’s ruling, it was significant that while he grounded his reasoning in process, he was seen to have largely legitimized the cause of reform, change, and adjustment to new patterns in society and artistic expression. He also used dramatic language that evokes the spirit of the times: “The granite promontory in the deep may stand firm and unchanged amidst the waves and storms that beat upon it, but human institutions cannot withstand the agitations of free, active and progressive opinion.” The judge praised all sides for making their case “with uncommon learning and ability.” But his ruling was decisive.25
The reformers had won. They not only established the right to interpret Jewish law their own way. They also consolidated the principle that each Jewish community could determine its own practices, based on a democratic process and without interference by a minority citing traditional Jewish law as enforced by the state. Their cause of transforming Jewish practice was soon to be buttressed by a major demographic shift in American Judaism.
Four
THE GERMAN IMMIGRANTS
The South Carolina organ controversy raged through Charleston in what had been, as much as anyplace, a center of Jewish life in America. But in the 1840s, the demographics of the American Jewish population were changing because of a new factor: the influx of German Jewish immigrants. These immigrants would have a decisive impact on practices and beliefs in the decades before and after the Civil War.
They were part of a large flood of immigrants from Central Europe, including the German states, the Austrian empire, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Baltic states. From 1820 to the Civil War, 1.7 million Irish and 1.3 million Germans came to the United States, unleashing an anti-immigration backlash in a country of 31 million people in 1860. That hostile response was epitomized by the establishment of the Native American Party, or “Know-Nothings,” in 1854. Jews were only a small portion of this wave, and for that reason, perhaps, Jews were not singled out in the nativist antipathy of the era.1 At the opening of the 1840s, the United States sheltered only 18 formally organized Jewish congregations. By 1855, the number exploded to 76 congregations. That number grew to 277 by 1877. The first “official” census of Jews, in 1878, measured their population at 250,000, which meant that the Jewish population had grown at nearly fifteen times the rate of the nation as a whole.2 Although many of these Jewish newcomers were single men looking for opportunities who had left their families behind, nearly a third of the new immigrants came with wives and children.3
An irony was that the German states had encompassed a region where some Jews prospered and became part of the commercial, cultural, and intellectual class. It was thus, at one level, an improbable place from which the major portion of American Jews would flee. But a new wave of violence and hatred also flared in Germany in the post-Napoleonic era, erasing any possibility of complacency among prospering Jewish families, not to mention the many more such families subsisting as subjugated and impoverished citizens on farms and in villages and cities.
Northern Europe had not become a home for Jews until the closing days of the Roman Empire, and probably later. Their movement north was hastened after the empire adopted Christianity and split apart. Through the Middle Ages, Jews lived through occasional periods of tolerance disrupted by bouts of persecution and punitive regulations, including requirements that they live isolated in ghettos. In these separated communities, they developed a communal existence underscored by loyalty to rabbinic tradition. These factors led Ashkenazic Jewry to become more inward and insular, more attached to Jewish law, and perhaps less cosmopolitan than Sephardic Jews, whose elite scholars were influenced by outside cultures, particularly Muslim intellectuals. But over time, elite educated Jews who had managed to prosper because of their business abilities as traders, bankers, and travelers became more worldly and successful, while the non-Jewish world came to depend on their financial skills. A handful of successful banking families like the Wertheimers helped to finance various wars among Europe’s imperial families.
The rise of nation states following the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, which ended in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, unleashed a new round of tyranny and violent intimidation in German-speaking lands, scattering Jews eastward into Poland, Russia, and Slavic parts of the old Holy Roman Empire. There they embraced an increasingly fervent piety, later evolving into Hasidism. These pietistic Jews did not influence the Jewish experience in America until they immigrated at the very end of the nineteenth century.
Following the breakup of Napoleon’s empire at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Germany remained a collection of states and principalities. (It was not to become fully unified until after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.) Jews in these lands faced a series of calamities in that period, including failed harvests, unemployment among peasants who had fled to the cities, and savage anti-Semitism. The “hep-hep” riots of 1819 were so called because the rioters shouted “Hep! Hep!” at Jews, mimicking a foul command of shepherds, although some experts say the cry stood for the Latin Hierosolyma est Perdita (“Jerusalem is lost”). The violence erupted in Würzburg and spread throughout the German confederation, with rioters murdering Jews and destroying their property. A virulent recrudescence of anti-Semitic propaganda focused on repealing the rights granted Jews by Napoleon after the French Revolution.
In the stressed German economy, Jews became an easy object of fear. German governments imposed new restrictions
on Jewish rights, including the right to marry, rescinding those granted by the French. The turbulent failed political uprisings of 1830 and 1848 exacerbated these hatreds in places such as Bavaria and Posen, where Jews following Polish customs were dubbed “Poles” by other Germans. These conditions, along with the fear of military conscription, drove thousands of German Jews to immigrate to America as well as to the east. Many immigrants were men, but many also were women who had worked as domestic servants, seamstresses, or shopkeepers in family businesses that had fallen on hard times.
The Jews’ migration was a small but significant part of a larger flood of what eventually totaled five million Central Europeans to the United States in the nineteenth century. Along with millions of Irish fleeing famine conditions in their native land, they formed the first mass migration to American shores. Upon arriving, they wrote to family and friends to join them. German newspapers and books also spread the word and promise of freedom. “Here we are all the same, all the religions are honored and respected and have the same rights,” an early German Jewish immigrant, Aaron Phillips, wrote to his parents in Bavaria. “An Israelite with talent who does well, can like many others achieve the highest honors.”4 In some cases, whole communities in Central Europe decamped, often settling in proximity with Catholic or Lutheran communities from Germany and continuing to speak German or Yiddish in their adopted country. Jewish records show that in the 1840s and 1850s, Abraham Lincoln encountered many immigrant Jewish shopkeepers and businesspeople in his travels in Illinois and throughout the country, some of whom later became political allies and supporters in the presidential campaign of 1860 and in the White House.5
The new influx changed the nature of the Jewish identity and experience in several ways. First was economic, as Jews sought livelihoods in far-flung parts of the country as peddlers, where they confronted challenges to maintaining Jewish practices. Second was their interest in setting up secular institutions such as hospitals, orphanages, news publications, social clubs (including Masonic lodges), and various types of charities. These organizations often commanded loyalty far greater than their synagogues did and supplanted them in setting rules for Jewish identity. Third was the fact that an emigration of rabbis from Germany brought more concrete influences from changes in doctrine and practice under way in the old country, while lay leaders of congregations continued to hold sway in setting standards of conduct.
Economic opportunities and difficulties were probably paramount in transforming Jewish identity, however. The early decades of the century brought a construction of new canals, roads, and railroads, helping to transform an agrarian American economy based on barter and exchange to a new system of markets in which farm goods and manufactured products could be transported over long distances. An indispensable feature of the new economy was a remnant of the old—peddling, an occupation, along with moneylending and small shopkeeping, that Jews had filled for centuries in Europe and took to by the thousands in America.
A successful peddler could purchase a wagon and a horse or two for the sale of stoves, furniture, and other heavier goods. Though Jews could own land in America, for the first time in fifteen hundred years, they avoided farming for the most part and chose to follow this route. As a result, Jewish peddlers leveraged their skills into ownership of retail stores and banking businesses. The great financial powerhouse families spawned by the Seligman and Lehman brothers, Marcus Goldman (Goldman Sachs), Solomon Loeb (Kuhn, Loeb), Meyer Guggenheim, and Julius Rosenwald (of Sears Roebuck) all started with peddling. Julius Ochs, the father of Adolph Ochs, future owner of the New York Times, had ambitions to go to college after emigrating from Bavaria in the 1840s, but his brother-in-law with whom he lived “refused and sent him off with a pack.” Isaac Bernheim, after arriving from Germany, sold goods while traveling on horseback through Pennsylvania and went on to make a fortune after founding the I. W. Harper brand of bourbon whiskey in Kentucky. Other stalwarts of the march toward prosperity were Edward Filene from Poznan (who started as a peddler, tailor, glazier); Lazarus Straus (a peddler and country store owner); Adam Gimbel from Rheinland-Pfaltz (who started in farming); Jacob Kaufmann (a peddler and son of a horse and cattle trader); Henry, Emanuel, and Mayer Lehman, from Würzburg, who started with a dry goods store in Montgomery, Alabama, expanded as cotton merchants and traders, and eventually founded the investment firm Lehman Brothers; and the owners of Goldsmith’s department store in Memphis, Rich’s in Atlanta, and Sanger Brothers in Dallas. In San Francisco after the Gold Rush, Levi Strauss (born in Bavaria) opened a dry goods business and later collaborated with Jacob Davis, a tailor, to create a new kind of denim work pants using rivets at the seam, known eventually as blue jeans. All these fortunes were started with German-speaking people who arrived in America with little wealth.6
It was a hard life. Peddlers led a lonely existence, trudging along fields and dusty or muddy roads in rain, snow, and sweltering heat, often with packs weighing more than 150 pounds. They slept in open fields or in derelict barns and rooming houses, deferred marriage and friendship, scrounged for food, and relied on family networks for sales and credit.
“The greater part of the Jewish young men went peddling,” a practitioner recalled about his days in New York in the early 1800s. “There were two or three Jewish merchants who supplied peddlers with ‘Yankee notions,’ which they called Kuttle Muttle.”7 (“Cuddle-muddle” was a popular American expression referring to a secret language or mumbling jargon.) Of course, Jews did more than peddle. They ran boardinghouses and were artisans, seamstresses (a popular job for women), bakers, paper hangers, pocketbook makers, gold and silver smiths, lace weavers, engravers, shoemakers, hatters, tailors, and cigar makers. One of their goals was to achieve self-employed status. Showing some defensiveness, The Occident, a popular paper published and edited by Isaac Leeser, reported in 1857 that while peddling was the best known occupation of many Jews, everyone should “know well enough that we have lawyers, medical doctors, bankers, some politicians, a few teachers, authors and ministers, some shipping merchants and auctioneers, and a very few farmers, and here and there a butcher, a baker, a distiller, a brewer, a tavern-keeper, a manufacturer, a miner, a billiard-table maker, an apothecary, a smith, a produce and cattle-dealer, a painter and glazier. . . .”8
The story of the Seligman family was instructive of how Jewish identity came under pressure. The Seligmans came originally from Baiersdorf, a tiny village in Bavaria, and rose to become known in the nineteenth century as the “American Rothschilds.” The old-world patriarch, David Seligman, had been the village weaver. Joseph, the eldest son, was persuaded to go to America by his mother when the weaving business faltered under pressure from mechanized textile making. David feared that his son, while overseas, would drift from his religious teachings, including Sabbath observance and keeping kosher. Rumors had it that many Jews in America were succumbing that way. The challenge confronted Joseph immediately when pork and beans were the only foods available in steerage to America in 1837.
Joseph Seligman’s first job was as a cashier clerk in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania, to which he moved because a cousin lived there. Restless for other work, Seligman noticed that men and women on nearby farms had to come into town for necessities, so he invested his small savings in jewelry, watches, rings, knives, bolts of cloth, ribbons, lace, thread, handkerchiefs, underwear, shawls, tablecloths, sewing equipment, and other wares. Placing these items in a heavy pack, Joseph Seligman headed off on foot through rural Pennsylvania. Soon he asked his two brothers, William and James, to leave Bavaria and join him in America. “They were a strange-looking lot, the three Seligman brothers and peddlers like them—bearded, shaggy-headed, their faces dusty from the road, in long ill-fitting coats and baggy trousers, walking in mud-caked shoes, with a shuffling gait, stooped under their packs—but how they looked didn’t matter to them,” Stephen Birmingham writes evocatively in Our Crowd. They were also plagued on their routes by attacking dogs and children cal
ling them “sheeny” or “Christ-killer.” But by 1840 the brothers made enough to open a headquarters and later a shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and they sent for still more family members. 9
Determined to become an American businessman, Joseph shaved and combed his hair back, just as his father feared. James invested in a horse and wagon and headed south, returning with $1,000 in profits. In 1841, the Seligmans moved to Mobile and then back north again to New York, having set up a network of stores in the South. The rest of the family, including the weaver David and his wife, Fanny, joined them in 1843. They shifted some of their operations to upstate New York, and in Watertown, the Seligmans befriended a young first lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant, stationed nearby. By the time of the Civil War, Seligman had moved into banking and finance, helping to raise funds for the Union cause with bond sales. In the Gilded Age, J. & W. Seligman & Co. was one of the country’s leading financiers, investing in railroads, steel industry, shipbuilding, mining, and the Standard Oil Company.
The dramatic upward climb of the Seligmans and other storied Jewish families has contributed to Jewish American lore. The tales are authentic. But many Jews fared far less well, ending up in poorhouses, orphanages, asylums, and other places where charities looked after them. They had to improvise and innovate in their business challenges while also remaining anchored in Judaism, a difficult task. Many Jews failed in business and remained impoverished, though their stories are less celebrated. “Jewish economic mobility in the nineteenth century has intrigued historians, just as it has been enshrined in American Jewish mythology,” writes the historian Hasia Diner. “The self-congratulatory ‘rags to riches’ saga has been held up as the paradigmatic Jewish experience. The mobility seems to have been real, although less universal and less rapid than usually thought.”10
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