The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (review)

Racism is repugnant. But is race? Sophisticates dismiss it as no more than a social construction, a figment that lacks a decisive biological basis; and Jews have been among the many groups denying that "race" should be applied to them. Racism should have been thoroughly discredited long before it was buried in the rubble of the Third Reich; at least in the United States, such bigotry had by then ceased to be entirely respectable. But as Eric L. Goldstein demonstrates in this judicious foray into American intellectual history as well as American Jewish history, race itself was an idea that proved to be not only elusive but nearly inescapable, not only enigmatic but vexingly resilient. For all the terrible mischief that it has caused, Jews themselves could not quite disenthrall themselves from its power, because so many of them ascribed their loyalty to one another to their blood and not merely to a shared religion. Disraeli, who worshipped as an Anglican, was wrong in proclaiming that race trumps every other historical principle. But nothing better illustrates the sort of complications that The Price of Whiteness illumines than the frequency with which he was taken for a Jew—by other Christians as well as by (his fellow?) Jews.

Goldstein's account opens in the last third of the nineteenth century, when the division of humanity into races was a pervasive and influential ideology (hardly limited to Disraeli), when white supremacists were extending their legal as well as cultural hegemony in American society, and when masses of Eastern European immigrants were pouring through the gates to transform the Jewish community. For the first time in Western history, a significant Diaspora community had located itself in society where another minority was more stigmatized—indeed, far more despised, and dehumanized. In 1885 Mark Twain published a novel in which a steamboat accident is reported. "Anybody hurt?" Aunt Sally asks. "No'm," Huck Finn replies. "Killed a nigger." "Well, it's lucky," she retorts, "because sometimes people do get hurt."

If Jews in such a society had the formidable advantage of being white, they also wrestled with the paradox of being not only white. In Victorian America race and color were not yet synonymous (as they would be a century later), so that in an 1887 sermon, for example, the Reform Rabbi Solomon Schindler of Boston's Temple Israel could assert his membership in the Jewish "race." Compared to non-Jews, he announced, "our temperament, our tastes, our humor . . . our views and . . . our mode of thinking in many cases [distinguish us] as much as we differ in our features" (quoted on p. 11). No wonder then that nativists could pick out disagreeable inherited traits with which to stereotype Jews (from avarice to effeteness, from physical ugliness to spiritual sterility) and could express doubt whether such a race could be absorbed into America. Rabbis like Schindler, plus other communal spokesmen (editorialists, educators, social scientists), joined the conversation and claimed that the Jews were a race that harbored memories, ideals, interests, and allegiances of their own. If Jews were denied a destiny that was singular and were required merely to be attached to the dominant race, such communal figures wondered whether whiteness did not exact too high a price. Hierarchy in America was so evidently color-coded that Jews could readily see the value to whiteness. Its price, however, was also apparent; and Goldstein's book is most intriguing in showing how equivocal and varied was the Jews' effort—from the late nineteenth century down to the present—to define themselves.

Too rigorous a categorization in terms of race—and Jews implied that they could not be smoothly integrated into America, that they were inassimilable. Too loose a definition—and the sense of separateness might be forfeited, and the viability of a continuous communal life might be imperiled. Even when race seemed an ineluctable part of the vocabulary of group relations, however, alternatives were of course available. Zionists...