Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (review)

Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed. By Gerald Gamm (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999) 384 pp. $39.95.

Institutions, and the rules they live by, made the difference in why Jews left Boston and why Catholics stayed when, after 1950, the pressure of racial succession intensified. But though Gamm is aware that "the [white] middle-class abandonment of cities has been a consequence of many factors, including federal and local housing programs, highway projects, public housing, blockbusting, redlining, urban renewal, the deterioration of urban schools, crime, homeowners' associations, and prejudice," he has written a book meticulously describing how the rules and functioning of Jewish synagogues and Catholic parishes over-determined the rapid departure of Jews from Boston's huge Dorchester--Roxbury neighborhood. Gamm chooses to deemphasize that even Catholic parishes were eventually much reduced in their white populations. His argument, however, which rests on the stark contrast that existed between Jews and Catholics in the 1950s and 1960s, when both groups were of comparable socioeconomic status, is largely persuasive. Seldom has the process of neighborhood change been so closely examined. Almost reverently, Gamm provides a marvelous sense of the texture of Jews' and Catholics' institutional life.

Put far too simply, the American synagogue was a rootless, highly portable institution centered on its members. Jewish religion and ritual was not dependent on the presence of a rabbi. The Catholic parish, by contrast, took its definition entirely from territorial boundaries established by the hierarchy; authority flowed from top to bottom: No priest, no Catholic practice. Catholic rules worked to strengthen the attachments of both Catholics and non-Catholics to their neighborhoods, causing them "to confront racial change with greater violence and less panic" than Jewish neighborhoods (22).

The divergent governance of Jewish and Catholic institutions already had shaped the patterns of Boston ethnic neighborhoods throughout the twentieth century. An important corollary to Gamm's main thesis is that the departure of middle-class Jews from the city began in the watershed decade of the 1920s. Gamm thus revises the theses of many scholars who have stressed the short-term forces generated by events of the 1960s, particularly the actions of government, realtors, and banks that resulted in the swift collapse of the Jewish neighborhood of Mattapan during the time of the ill-fated urban-renewal program known as b-burg. The "stark differences in Jewish and Catholic attachments to the old neighborhoods were fully apparant by the early 1920s, and race was irrelevant to them: by the 1950s, when African Americans began rapidly settling in formerly Jewish and Catholic sections of Dorchester and Roxbury, the basic outline of the urban exodus was three decades old" (186).

The key to understanding this process, according to Gamm, is that while Jewish sections of Dorchester and Roxbury remained Jewish from the 1920s to 1950s, their internal class composition changed. Middle-class Jews moved out to more affluent suburbs, such as Brookline and Newton, to be replaced by lower-middle and working-class Jews, thus weakening the financial base of synagogues in the older neighborhoods.

This is a book for historians, sociologists, urban geographers, and anyone else interested in twentieth-century Boston. At times repetitive, and filled with detail that might appeal only to those with a personal attachment to the institutions involved, Urban Exodus nevertheless tells a compelling story. The only serious reservation concerns Gamm's seemingly arbitrary separation of institutional rules from culture, which can make his argument appear almost monocausal at times.

Ronald P. Formisano
University of Florida

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