Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History (review)

Many scholars in American Jewish history have anticipated this book eagerly, and it deserves applause from all. Recently, scholars have given increased recognition to the non-New-York Jewish experience, but the study of non-New-York communities has lagged. Lee Shai Weissbach has opened one of the most important of these avenues of study: Jews in the small towns of the United States.

This was a daunting task. As Weissbach points out, though the vast majority of American Jews have lived in cities, the majority of individual communities have been small. The data on these communities are usually fragmentary and/or must be culled from general local histories; institutional records—if they ever existed—are evanescent. This makes Weissbach's achievements in research and analysis particularly impressive.

His sample consists of 490 places throughout the United States that in 1927 had, according to the American Jewish Year Book, more than 100, but fewer than 1000, Jews. (In 1878, about 29 percent of American Jews lived in such places; in 1927, about 8 percent.) Though admitting this sample is "to some extent arbitrary" (31), Weissbach gives ample justification. He concentrates on what he calls the "classic era" of the American small town, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American small towns' period of "greatest salience" (7). This overlaps the massive immigration of East European Jews, though Weissbach covers the Central European migration in one chapter, to lay the groundwork. By emphasizing patterns—of settlement, institution-building, family life—he identifies three areas of fundamental difference between the small-town Jewish experience and the urban: occupation, community-building, and Jewish self-definition.

First, small-town Jews were distinguished by the way they earned their livings: virtually all were merchants. Central European Jews were an important component of small towns' commercial growth in the mid-nineteenth century. When East European Jews became a significant factor starting in the 1890s, their motivation, too, was business opportunity. Given the vagaries of the entrepreneurial life, small Jewish communities were "in a perpetual state of flux" (71). Although some families might remain in a town for generations, the largest proportion of Jews did not stay even their entire lives. The more successful were likelier to stay, meaning that nearly all small-town Jews were middle-class.

Second, in building Jewish community, small-towners faced unique challenges; intra-communal cooperation was much more in evidence than in the Jewish communities of the cities. Jewish institutions were usually organized as soon as more than a handful of Jews was available. Almost all of the subject towns had congregations—an impressive 89 percent in 1927. Some even had two, generally Reform and Orthodox. The synagogue building was the central address for the Jewish community: in fact, Weissbach points out, many "became, perhaps inadvertently, the very kinds of multi-faceted institutions that were being actively promoted in big cities . . . as 'synagogue centers'" (188). However, less than one-quarter of the communities had full-time rabbis (using 1919 as a sample year). They were forced to find creative alternatives for leadership: itinerant "reverends," rabbis borrowed from neighboring cities, rabbinical students, and knowledgeable local laity.

The small-town context also shaped Jewish identity in several ways. Especially noticeable is the much swifter and more complete transformation of traditional East European immigrants. By the 1930s, these immigrants were virtually indistinguishable from the descendants of the Central European migration. Even if in separate congregations, both groups were involved in civic and political activities, even in interfaith events. (By the 1950s, Orthodoxy had disappeared from small towns, usually because the congregations had moved into the Conservative movement.)

Also, Jewish separateness was shaped by the reality that in the "sometimes intrusive atmosphere of small town America" (242), each individual Jew was more exposed and likely to be viewed as representative of all Jews. Small-town Jews felt a greater personal need for Jewish communal life than did urbanites, and this reinforced the family feeling...