Zion in the Valley: The Jewish Community of St. Louis (review)

The communal history is probably the most common genre in the literature of American Jewish history. The quality of these studies varies enormously, from the vanity publication with its lists of communal leaders and philanthropists to the scholarly monograph based on a doctoral dissertation. Some of these studies have been commissioned by the community; others have been a "labor of love" written by a longtime member of the community. Walter Ehrlich's study of St. Louis Jewry falls into the latter category. He does not disguise his love of the city and his long association with it. In fact, he uses elements of his own and his wife's experiences to advance his narrative.

Professor emeritus of American history and education at the University of Missouri—St. Louis, Ehrlich is an American political historian who has written on such topics as presidential impeachments, the Dred Scott case, and the U.S. constitution. This is his first work in American Jewish history.

Ehrlich's two-volume study is the first substantial history of the Jewish community of St. Louis, whose population has remained at about 60,000 since the 1920s. The first volume of his work, which covered the nineteenth century, appeared in 1997. Ehrlich's first volume followed a basic chronological approach. He chose a topical approach for this second volume on the twentieth century to accommodate the many different threads of activities, increasingly factional divisions, and growing diversity of the community. Even with this topical approach, however, Ehrlich struggles to keep the multifaceted elements of the community and its history moving forward.

Ehrlich declares in his preface that he is a believer in narrative history and eschews the desire of some historians to "carefully analyze his or her research primarily to interpret the past for how it has influenced the present" (p. ix). Ehrlich's theme in volume two of his study is "how these two [Eastern European and German] communities overcame their differences and created an 'American' Jewish community" (p. ix). This is neither novel nor insightful. It is also insufficient to understand and interpret the history of St. Louis Jewry. While conflict between German Jews and the new arrivals from Eastern Europe was important in nearly all American communities in the first decades of the twentieth century, its significance declined dramatically after the Second World War. Moreover, even in the first half of the century, when the schism existed and mattered, it is not a satisfactory explanation for all of the events that Ehrlich chronicles. The story is more complex than he suggests.

It is perhaps a surprising complaint to lodge against such a lengthy, detail-packed study, but much is missing from this study. Ehrlich overwhelms the reader with minutiae—of internal communal disputes, such as the battle over serving kosher meals to patients in the Jewish Hospital, and of individual triumphs, such as the St. Louis participants in the World Maccabi Games or the inductees in the St. Louis Jewish Sports Hall of Fame—but he never helps us understand why any of this matters.

Most glaringly absent from this study is the city of St. Louis itself. Ehrlich provides almost no local context for his study. Who else lived in St. Louis? What were the city's primary industries and how did Jewish economic activity relate to them? What were the city's fortunes in the different decades of the century? Who were the city's movers and shakers and what was the nature of their relationship with the Jewish community? What kind of neighborhoods did Jews choose when they began to leave the near north side (known as the Ghetto), then later leave University City and Clayton, and eventually the city proper? Ehrlich may not have felt the need to describe these different neighborhoods, since he assumed that his audience of...