Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: From Caste to Class (review)

There was a long-standing "myth" about nineteenth-century eastern European Jewry, represented primarily by Mark Zborowski's and Elizabeth Herzog's book Life is With People (1952), which pictured shtetlekh filled with relatively stable, mostly poor, intensely faithful Jews who wanted nothing more than to live righteous lives, earn a modest living, and educate their sons in Torah and Talmud. But despite the critical acclaim accorded Life is With People, and notwithstanding its many reprintings, Zborowski's and Herzog's version of life in the Jewish "little-towns" of eastern Europe gave way in the face of systematic and intense research in the late twentieth century to a more complex and nuanced portrait of a heterogeneous group life for Jews in the Russian Empire, inside and outside the Pale.¹

Professor Eli Lederhendler agrees with much of what recent historians and anthropologists have had to say about Jews in eastern Europe and especially about those who migrated to America. But in Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: From Caste to Class, he challenges important parts of what he thinks is a new "myth." He seems to accept the following facts: since as early as the seventeenth century, shtetlekh had not been stable, if they ever were; there were skeptics as well as believers living in them, restless gymnasium students alongside Yeshiva bochers; and, for a time, some moderately prosperous Jews, even a sprinkling of rich ones, residing inside and outside of the small towns, mostly among a mass of kleine menshn. He is also aware that class-consciousness was manifest not only in attitude—arrogance on the one side, deference or resentment on the other—but also in institutions, even, for example, in separate shuln for the workers and some up-scale models for the "aristocrats."

In a methodical, meticulous, and often brilliant way, however, Lederhendler, in Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, begins to depart from the more modern "myth." He agrees, of course, that by 1897 more than half the Jews in eastern Europe lived in cities and, as Ezra Mendelsohn in Class-Struggle in the Pale (1970) demonstrated so masterfully, that many worked in factories. But he is not so sure that a Jewish proletariat actually developed, or that Jewish labor organizers—or, for that matter, most Jews—had brought with them from the shtetlekh to the urban areas their Judaic, prophetic, communal, mutual-aid values and belief systems.

Lederhendler's new book is a contribution to the historical dialogue that posits that eastern European Jews, remaining in small towns in the rural hinterlands, grew poorer and poorer in the face of modernization in the economies of the Russian Empire. That the elimination of middleman positions, the growth of railroads and of farmers' cooperatives, and the prohibitions against Jews entering certain vocations and professions radically destabilized Jewish old world communities is undeniable. But Lederhendler contends that this impoverishment of the Jewish masses and this "breakdown" of traditional Jewish culture prevented Jews from adhering to many scripturally ordained mitzvot as well as to the commands of tsedakah, communal responsibility, interdependence, and general mutuality.

He agrees that Jews, like many other poor people in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Russia, were set in motion by an absence of economic opportunity in the old world compared to the openness of industrializing countries in the new, especially the United States. He is, however, less convinced that, while all groups were on the move, Jews were even more so because of the additional push of antisemitism and the pull of religiocultural needs to "achieve" or "accomplish." His disagreement leads him some distance from the thesis that those who came to America—the students and youngsters, and the handful not so young; the radicals and political neophytes; the men and women, some with work experience, others without—brought with them the already changing but still rich Yiddish-speaking culture of eastern Europe. Nor does he give more than a...