Von der Gemeinde zur "Community": Judische Einwanderer in Chicago, 1840-1900 (review)

Brinkmann's study of the Jewish community in Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century addresses the context of German and Jewish immigration, the relationship between class, ethnicity, and religion, aspects of association and acculturation, and the complexity of ethnicity in a modernizing America. The author announces his main research interest as the development of fundamentally new, different forms of Jewish "Gemeinschaft," that is, he wants to know when the Jewish community or communities in Chicago emerged, which structures they produced, and how they developed in light of assimilation and ethnicization processes. Since—unfortunately—he has chosen a diachronic rather than a topical approach, the second chapter summarizes the history of Jewish emigration from Germany, its motives, paths, networks. The third chapter outlines the rise of Chicago as a fast-growing American city and focuses on the Jewish element in this urban development. These two chapters mainly rely on secondary material. Chapters 4 to 6 chronicle the development of Jewish community life: the pioneer generation (1840–1855), community building in the new fatherland (1860–1870), and the community in crisis (1870–1880). Chapter 7 introduces the "other" Jews from Russia and their impact on existing community structures, and Chapter 8 addresses issues of modernization affecting the German-Jewish community from 1880 to 1900.

Chapter 2: While between 1860 and 1914 almost 50 million people left Europe for North and South American, the number of ca. 100,000 Jews emigrating from German and some 10,000 from neighboring regions between 1815 and 1880 seems rather small. However, as the author argues, in relation to their share in the population they were over-represented. Bavarians, driven by the search for improved social and economic conditions, more personal freedom, and fear of repression, developed a well organized network for migration to Chicago between 1840 and 1860. These people played a prominent role in the emerging Jewish community.

Chapter 3: At first, it is the well established Jewish community of New York that introduces a scheme to guide the newly arrived out of the city and into newly opening terrain in the west. However, Jews soon moved from the hinterland into the emerging urban center of Chicago, taking up professions, first as the proverbial and despised peddlers, but soon building up small businesses and carving out a niche in the newly emerging textile industry. We learn of the establishment in the 1840s and 1850s of the Jewish Burial Ground Society, the first religious community (Gemeinde), a lodge of B'nai B'rith, and the United Hebrew Relief Association. The arrival of Jews from Posen (the German-occupied part of Poland) as well as the conflict between conservative/traditional and reform concepts of theology and religious practices soon made the concept of a unified, German-style, Jewish community obsolete. Charity work became the glue that pasted together the new network which was now based on voluntarism and diversity. The author also addresses the issue of antisemitic prejudices. While in the 1850s Jewish business people were still confronted with the "Shylock image" and stigmatized as unreliable, in the 1870s and 80s their business success and trustworthiness as well as their patriotic performance in the Civil War (as shown in the following chapter) was acknowledged.

Chapter 5 outlines the development from the outbreak of the Civil War up to the Great Fire in 1871. In close cooperation with the "German community" the Jews mustered a contingent which became part of the German troops. The task was to defend American freedom, and parallels between the slavery of African Americans and the ancient suffering and persecution of the Jewish people were drawn. During the war very little anti-Jewish propaganda was voiced in the English press. In the remainder of the chapter the Jewish population is situated in the social and geographic landscape of the city by using a list of donors for the Jewish Hospital as assembled...