Coming to America: The Reception of Sepharad and Ashkenaz in America

Whether exceptional or not, American Jewish history is full of extraordinary moments, personalities, and motifs. The relatively late arrival of European Jewish historians to this realization, Salo Baron excepting, cannot and should not obscure the richness of the Jewish experience in the United States. It is to the credit of the towering figure of twentieth-century American Jewish historiography, Jacob Rader Marcus, that a vast array of source materials has been available to generations of researchers, who have drawn on them to convey that richness with ever-expanding nuance and sophistication.

One of the characteristic features of Marcus’s worldview, his four-part periodization of American Jewish history, has not necessarily stood the test of time. In 1958, Marcus delivered his presidential address to the American Jewish Historical Society in which he identified the following periods of American Jewish life: (1) the Sephardic Age (1654–1840); (2) the German Age (1841–1920); (3) the (concurrent) Eastern European Age (1852–1920); and (4) the American Age (1920–). It was the last that spawned ‘‘a homo novus, the American Jew’’ — fully at home in his country and assimilated into its cultural norms.

There is an upward, teleological arc to this narrative that rises from the travails of immigration to the security of America, as well as from the varieties of cultural difference to the prospect of social compatibility with the American world. Marcus’s scheme implies a unidirectional process of cultural reformation in two regards: in temporal terms, each phase effectively superseded the preceding one; and spatially, arrival in America, especially by the final phase, meant that lingering native cultures would soon wane.

Recent scholarship has agitated for a more dynamic understanding of the social field in which Jews in the United States have operated. This scholarship has expanded and rethought the borders of Jewish cultural activity, arguing that the vectors move in multiple directions — not only from Europe or the Middle East to America but in the other direction as well. In recognition of the vitality of research in the field, this issue of JQR is devoted to differing facets of the American Jewish experience. The essays collected here, some from recognized experts in American Jewish history and others from those better known in other areas of scholarship, demonstrate that the creation of an American homo novus was not simply — or at all — a matter of leaving behind old cultural traces but rather a case of the often uneasy coexistence of competing cultural sensibilities into the twentieth century.

The first essay, Aviva Ben-Ur’s ‘‘Kabbalistic Pharmacopoeia,’’ does the service of expanding our angle of historical vision from the United States per se to the Atlantic at large. Ben-Ur follows the career of a fascinating book held in the Katz Center library, Ta‘alumot ḥokhmah Composed over the course of 150 years in multiple languages and countries, the text is a repository of medical, folk, and culinary practices, with a persistent kabbalistic theme overall. It contains remedies, receipts, and transport documents revealing a journey that crisscrossed the Americas (and Europe) and reminds us that the commonly denominated ‘‘America’’— that is, the United States — was part of a much larger cultural ecosystem.

The next essay, Ber Kotlerman’s ‘‘Going through the Seven Circles of Hell,’’ shifts our focus back to U.S. shores and to one of the most prominent forms of American culture: film. The allure of film for American Jews, and recent immigrants among them in the early twentieth century, is well known. Far less well known is the allure of film for the great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, who was, an earlier biographer noted, ‘‘a big admirer and trembling worshiper of the cinema.’’ This passion even prompted Sholem Aleichem to try his hand at writing a script in 1915 in Yiddish, which he brought with him to America in the hope of having it produced. Kotlerman offers a careful analysis of the script Little Motl, noting the intriguing filmic influences that Aleichem drew on and the artistic choices he made.

The...