City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set

Conclusion

255 Early in this book, I noted that it would have been inconceivable for one of the twenty-three poor Jewish immigrants from Recife living in the lonely community of New Amsterdam in 1654 to envision that this company outpost would ultimately grow to a city of eight million and a Jewish population of over two million. It would have been equally difficult for them to foresee that the city would number over eight hundred thousand in 1860, including a Jewish population of over forty thousand. Their home in Amsterdam , the most hospitable city in Europe for Jews at the time, numbered only a few thousand Jewish inhabitants. The growth and changes in New York over the two centuries between their landing and the Civil War were remarkable in nurturing both a major Jewish population and a significant center of Jewish culture in the United States. These changes came step by step over the 211 years after those first Jews arrived at the dreary, distant settlement of the Dutch West India Company. The first decade under Dutch rule, from 1654 to 1664, saw individual Jewish traders striving to gain political and economic rights with personal perseverance and help from their Amsterdam compatriots. They created a legacy that endured through the next two centuries and beyond. The long English colonial era transformed the city into the most hospitable municipality for Jews in the entire world. The small Jewish population of thirty to forty families constructed the first synagogue in North America, Shearith Israel, living as a synagogue community in the tradition of London and Amsterdam. Shearith Israel remained the city’s only Jewish house of worship for nearly a century. Jewish leaders became merchants of standing in a city devoted to commerce, Conclusion 256 ■ h av e n o f l i b e r t y and the Jewish community enjoyed widespread acceptance, participating in New York’s financial and, to a limited degree, civic and political life. During the years of the early republic, the city’s Jewish community embraced the wave of republican enthusiasm, moving from a synagogue community toward fuller integration in the life of the city, including the marketplace, social organizations , and the fierce partisan politics of the 1790s. The antebellum decades witnessed a massive influx of German and other European Jews, causing the Jewish population to increase from five hundred to forty thousand in just thirty-five years. The new population triggered an explosion of new synagogues , some elegant to display the prominence and wealth of leading Jewish citizens, some small to serve the needs of poor immigrants. The Jewish community acquired far more visibility in the city, building a hospital and an orphanage, becoming a force in the Democratic Party, publishing two weekly newspapers, and serving as a forum for debates between advocates of Reform and Orthodoxy. New York entered the international arena as one of the centers of world Jewry. Following the Civil War, the United States experienced far-reaching economic growth. Major industries in steel, copper, oil, and agricultural equipment , along with the growth of mass-produced consumer goods and the establishment of an advanced banking system, produced vast fortunes and the emergence of financiers and industrialists more renowned than the president of the United States, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan. In this world of advanced capitalist development, the ideas and ideals of the American Revolution began to recede into a distant past. Social Darwinism , monopoly capital, and labor-management conflict dominated American society. For the Jews of New York City, the decades following the Civil War also were a time of momentous changes. Men who had immigrated before the war rose to occupy eminent financial and social positions. The Seligman, Lehman, Schiff, Loeb, and Warburg families built elegant mansions on Fifth Avenue and accumulated vast fortunes. Moreover, in the Gilded Age the city added not tens of thousands of new Jewish immigrants, as in the antebellum era, but hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, largely from eastern Europe. This new population, together with the pre–Civil War generation, transformed New York City Jews into the largest Jewish community in the world. With their Conclusion ■ 257 growing prominence, New York’s Jews aspired to a leadership role in national and even international Jewish affairs. This large, powerful population owed much to their predecessors. The sense of citizenship, the experience of equality and integration into...