Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820-1914 (review)

194 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 broad rubrics of "merchant" and "industrial worker" should influence studies of other groups ofJews and their economic adjustment to America. Organized geographically by place of settlement in America, The Forerunners offers a compendium of information. The author has provided an array ofstatistics on residence, occupation, timing of the migration, and wealth, as well as biographical details galore. The book would, however, have benefited from a more sharply defined analytic framework and a greater sensitivity to developing some kind of conceptual context in which to make sense of the material. What, in the end, did it mean to the Jewish women and men who came to America from the Netherlands that they migrated from that particular place? How did the contours of life in Dutch society shape their responses to America? Hasia R. Diner Department of American Studies University of Maryland Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820-1914, by Avraham Barkai. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994. 269 pp. $40.00. In his Preface to Branching Out, the Israeli scholar Avraham Barkai states that "in more than one sense, American Jewry of the nineteenth century ... can be regarded as a branch of German Jewry" (p. xi). Making use of his expertise in German and German-Jewish history, Barkai has fashioned a work which places in the foreground the many linkages and similarities between the immigrants to America and those Jewish brethren left behind in the old country. Barkai commences his study by reviewing conditions in those parts of Germany (chiefly Bavaria, West Prussia, and Posen) from which the Jewish emigrants originated. Early nineteenth-century Germany was a place where most Jews struggled to eke out meager livelihoods as itinerant peddlers, small shopkeepers, or grain or cattle dealers. The typical Jewish emigrant was a young, unmarried male who saw little or no future in his homeland, not only because of bleak economic prospects but also because of a web ofa.nti-Jewish laws and regulations that blocked upward mobility. As Barkai aptly put it, emigration for Germany's young Jews was a "substitute for emancipation. " In their pioneer efforts to "emancipate" themselves from poverty, many of the newcomers, not surprisingly, entered pursuits with which they Book Reviews 195 were most familiar in the old country, that is, they became itinerant peddlers and shopkeepers. Barkai dispels much ofthe romantic mythology surrounding the lives of these people by demonstrating the infrequency of rags-to-riches stories. The careers of such depanment store magnates as Abraham Gimbel and Solomon Bloomingdale could be counted as notewonhy exceptions. Eventually, observes Barkai, the German-Jewish community in America attained solid middle-class status. To a large extent, economic prosperity was facilitated by the emergence of networks of storekeepers, wholesalers, manufacturers (chiefly ofwearing apparel), and imponers linked together by kinship and old-country ties. Very often, too, Jewish-owned banking firms provided needed capital to co-religionists denied loans by Gentile lenders. Links between GermanJewry and its American "branch" could also be discerned in the critical task of developingJewish religious institutions. In forming congregations and building synagogues, the newcomers were initially handicapped by their small and dispersed population as well as by a lack of funds and outside assistance. Only in a few east-coast localities could the German-Jewish immigrants have expected aid from already existing Sephardic congregations. Eventually, with the growth and concentration of population, congregations and synagogues began to spring up in many pans of the country. In 1850, 37 congregations existed in 14 states; by 1860 the number would increase to 77 in 18 states. Although Barkai notes that the impulse to establish religious institutions stemmed from the felt need of the newcomers to preserve their Jewish identities and traditions, he also underscored the imponance of the German connection by observing that "in the first years of the mass emigration, Jewish congregations in America regarded their dependence on the Jewish establishment in Germany as natural, and did not hesitate to turn to it for spiritual guidance and even material help" (p. 157). The author employed his knowledge of German affairs on both sides of the Atlantic to produce probably the best analysis to...