Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (review)

In 1940, Lebyl Feldman, a South-African Yiddish writer, penned an elegy to Oudtshoorn, the South African ostrich farming center known as the "Jerusalem of Africa," where Jews served a new God, the ostrich (xii). Deftly capturing the rituals and ceremonies involved in the "worship" of this new deity is Sarah Abrevaya Stein's eloquent Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce. This book not only describes the intricacies of this long-forgotten, Jewish-dominated industry, but also demonstrates the ways in which the field of Jewish history would benefit from the serious study of Jewish business and economic practices. Until recently, as historian Jonathan Karp points out, scholars wrote about the Jewish past as if it were "a head without a body," with an overemphasis on Jewish "intellectual and spiritual life" to the neglect of more mundane topics, such as the economic activities that enabled Jews to put food on their tables.¹ The general avoidance of studying Jews' involvement in modern global commerce, Stein further points out, has obscured how and why Jews undertook particular "commercial practices" for clear historical reasons (8).

Stein fills this lacuna by offering the reader a captivating account of the numerous material ties binding Jews together in the procurement, finishing, and production of ostrich feather goods. In a tale ranging from Lithuania to South Africa to Tripoli to London to New York, Stein narrates how in the 1880s a "feather boom" engulfed the Western Cape colony as a result of Western women's desire for prized fluffy plumage to redefine their femininity. She ends her story in 1914 when the great feather bust took place at the outbreak of the First World War, as plumage went out of fashion when women became more sartorially austere due to the severity of the war. Throughout these decades, Jews were overrepresented in all the various pockets of the feather trade. Because of the "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks," Jews succeeded in the feather industry, Stein contends, "because they had a background in similar industrial and mercantile trades, because they had contacts across the Anglophone Eastern European and Mediterranean Diasporas, and because many were immigrants poised to move into new or expanding industrial niches" (12). In her discussion of the migratory path of ostrich feathers and their Jewish purveyors, Stein eloquently demonstrates not only why Jewish historians must pay more attention to their subjects' links "to capital and international exchange," but also why "economic historians…[interested in] commodity chains" and "cultural historians [interested in] the terrain of supply" as well as "historians of colonial economics" must all think long and hard about how Jews and "Jewishness" molded the complex development of trans-hemispheric commerce in the last century (11–13).

The book's organization is both geographic, following the journey taken by an ostrich feathers from African bird to luxury fashion item, and chronological, following this industry from its boom years in the 1880s to its bust in 1914. Beginning in South Africa, where 90% of feather merchants were Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Lithuania, Stein then turns her attention to London, where the feathers were brokered almost exclusively by Jews. With a short detour to North Africa, where many of the London brokers had familial and business connections and the feathers were treated in the late nineteenth century, Stein then turns her attention to the United States. Focusing first on New York's Lower East Side, where the feathers were applied to garments, hats and other luxury goods, Stein interrogates the relationship of this industry to the larger garment industry. Vividly portraying the daily lives of the young Jewish women who prepared the feathers for sale and often fell ill due to the dust and fluff they inhaled, Stein links their efforts to organize this industry to the larger effort of feather entrepreneurs in North America to free themselves from dependency on African feathers through the creation of...