Deutsche Juden in Amerika: Bürgerliches Selbstbewusstsein und jüdische Identität in den Orden B’nai B’rith und Treue Schwestern, 1843–1914 (review)

This engaging study breaks new ground in American Jewish history by offering a detailed account of the B’nai B’rith order and its women’s organization, Treue Schwestern (Faithful Sisters). In five chapters, Deutsche Juden in Amerika (German Jews in America) provides novel insights into the dynamics by which nineteenth-century German-speaking Jewish immigrants built community and created a progressive middle-class American Jewish identity in a political and social context that differed significantly from the European setting.

The first chapter on Jewish life in America between 1820 and 1850, and on the European origin of the immigrants, contains some misunderstandings about the European Jewish situation but overall provides a useful background for the story of the B’nai B’rith that Cornelia Wilhelm begins to recount in chapter two. There, she locates B’nai B’rith at the intersection of the Jewish Reform movement and secular values of enlightened universalism such as Menschenliebe (love of humanity). She describes how the order was inspired by German, German Jewish, and American models of voluntary associations and secret lodges, including the Free Masons, the Society of Friends in Germany, and the Odd Fellows in the Unites States. Wilhelm provides much fascinating detail on the actual founding of B’nai B’rith and the organization’s ceremonies and grades; and she also reports that B’nai B’rith owed some of its core values and ideas to the influence of a group of Jewish democrats who had left Germany after the failed revolution of 1848 and settled in New York. These immigrants propagated humanitarianism, an active religion of love (Liebesreligion), and belief in progress, and also had close ties to the German women’s movement.

In fact, it constitutes one of the most important achievements of this book that Wilhelm provides an account of the 1848 founding, the structure, the mission and ideas, and the activities of America’s first women’s order, the Jewish Unabhängiger Orden Treuer Schwestern (Independent Order of Faithful Sisters). Jewish women in America thus followed the example of their sisters in Germany who, from the first decades of the nineteenth century on, had begun to take the lead in establishing and running independent women’s associations. Yet unfortunately Wilhelm was not able to take these recent findings in German Jewish history into account in her discussion of the Treue Schwestern.¹

In her third chapter, on the period between 1850 and 1875, Wilhelm describes how B’nai B’rith, combining the features of a mutual aid society with the commitment to self-improvement, social responsibility, and a forward-looking Jewish religiosity, expanded to become the only nationwide Jewish organization in the United States. The order attracted members from a broad social spectrum and established not only hospitals and Jewish orphanages, but also public libraries that offered lively cultural programs. Wilhelm thus shows how B’nai B’rith created a public Jewish presence in American society and shaped American Jewish identity. Moreover, Wilhelm’s account offers new insights into the well-known conflict between the German Jewish intellectual elite of the east coast, which included leaders such as David Einhorn, and a more populist movement, centered in Cincinnati, that Isaac Mayer Wise used to pursue his ambitions.

The Treue Schwestern expanded at a slower rate than the men’s order, since the organization continued to be more selective than B’nai B’rith in admitting new members. In fact, the Treue Schwestern, whose members conducted their affairs with great competence and self-confidence, gained, in 1874, not only the status of the male order’s official sister organization but thereby also blocked the formation of B’nai B’rith women’s auxiliaries with a potentially larger female membership. As the fourth chapter on the last decades of the nineteenth century...