Tongue Ties: The Emergence of the Anglophone Jewish Diaspora in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Tongue Ties:

The Emergence of the Anglophone Jewish Diaspora in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Neither Rebecca Gratz nor Isaac Leeser ever traveled to the dusty town of Geelong in Victoria, Australia. But their ideas did.¹ Geelong was certainly no center of Australian Jewish life: the community mushroomed from 11 Jews in 1848 to 128 Jews in 1861 before beginning a steady decline.² Although a congregation began meeting for worship in 1849, and built a temporary synagogue in 1854, there was only intermittent service from a hazan and no regular supply of kosher meat. A town hotelier, Benjamin Levien, served no pork at his hotel.³ His young daughter, Harriet, struggled to obey the dictates of Jewish law in this unpromising frontier environment. Geelong, she wrote, was a "small town" with "very few Jews, and none of them well acquainted with our religion (that is to say the Spirit of it although they may know some of the peculiar forms)." She first looked to the Bible for answers to her religious questions but was left with further uncertainties. Could her brother expect the six men he employed on his farm "at a very high rate of wages" to work on the Sabbath? Was it permissible to "play chess, music, to dance" on the festivals as some of her Jewish neighbors claimed? Did the menstrual laws described in Leviticus apply to her in the Antipodes? While her doubts and difficulties were unexceptional, her solution was revolutionary. In 1856 Harriet Levien wrote to Isaac Leeser in Philadelphia. She preferred to put her questions to him directly, she wrote, rather "than to a stranger, for you are not such to me, although I am to you, as I have long been acquainted with you through your writings; indeed it was your 'Catechism for younger children' which first aroused in me the wish for a fuller knowledge of our law." There was "much more" that she wanted to learn about Jewish law and eagerly hoped that he would answer her questions "plainly and decisively."⁴ Although it is not known whether Leeser ever responded, Harriet later organized a Sabbath school in Geelong modeled on the Hebrew Sunday School established by Rebecca Gratz in Philadelphia, where she and other young women taught classes of up to thirty children.⁵

Harriet Levien's search for the "Spirit" of Judaism was the local manifestation of a number of much larger transnational trends.⁶ Her seemingly mundane actions—inspired by far-off Philadelphia—reveal the first stages of a radical transformation in modern Jewish history, the emergence of an Anglophone diaspora that knitted the Jewish communities of English-speaking countries into a new cultural, religious, and social sphere. From the 1840s onwards, Jews moved in substantial numbers to English-speaking societies across the globe. The Jewish population of England and the United States grew significantly. New communities formed in the expanding settlement colonies of the British Empire: Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the British Caribbean. Although separated by oceans that took weeks to traverse, these communities increasingly shared a culture specific to Anglophone Jewry. Ties of language and trade encouraged the circulation of information, ideas, customs, and fashions. This common cultural cargo, transported with the tides between widely dispersed communities, produced a distinct English-speaking Jewish diaspora. This Anglophone entity has since become what Jonathan Sarna has called the "largest and most culturally creative Jewish diaspora in the world."⁷

The neglect of this diaspora by scholars of American Jewish history is unsurprising. Hitherto, historians of nineteenth-century American Jewry have eschewed a transnational approach, with a few notable exceptions. Some early work looked for British influences on American developments.⁸ Scholars of the "German" wave of European immigration to America have become far more attentive to immigrant origins and their continuing contacts with the heimat.⁹ Similarly, debates around the genesis of the Reform movement in the United States...