The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora (review)

192 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 Italian merchants. Not only were there changes in the direction of trade and in the composition of the personnel participating in it, but also in the commodities traded. Indeed, according to Constable, there were "profound shifts in the structure of the Iberian economy and its role in late medieval international commerce" (p. 240). Even during this later period, Muslim and Jewish traders did not entirely disappear. However, Constable notes that "in most areas (especially Andalusia) their numbers-and their economic influence-were greatly reduced" (p. 252). Furthermore, the Iberian Peninsula itselfwas becoming part of Europe and would remain so thereafter. Constable draws upon a wide variety of sources in many languages for her information. These include European archival records, Arabic historical, geographical, and legal texts, Judaeo-Arabic documents from the Cairo Genizah, travelers' accounts, and occasionally poetry and other works of belles lettres. With impressive skill, she synthesizes these diverse materials together with the studies of other scholars of medieval socioeconomic history into a coherent and compelling picture of commercial life over a period of longue duree. Norman A. Stillman Binghamton University The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora, by Robert P. Swierenga. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. 465 pp. $37.95. In The Forerunners, Robert P. Swierenga, probably the pre-eminent historian of Dutch immigration to the United States, has performed a useful service to students of American Jewish history and has provided a much-needed antidote to the literature. He has shown in meticulous detail that the old dichotomy of German and Eastern European, or the slightly more sophisticated tripartite division, Sephardic, German, and Eastern European, needs to be thought of in more complicated ways. From the end of the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century Jews migrated to the United States from the Netherlands. They brought with them a range of civic and Jewish experiences that set them apart from the other Jews migrating at the same times. They thought of themselves as Dutch. They created institutions, both synagogal and benevolent, that spoke to their "Dutchness," and they made a living in ways that distinguished them from their co-religionists from elsewhere in Europe. Book Reviews 193 The Dutch Jewish migration to the United States, according to Swierenga, took place in three distinct stages. Although the first wave of immigrants, arriving in the period 1790-1825, had not experienced emancipation before their entry into the United States, they represented something of a Jewish elite. A mixed lot, they mirrored Dutch Jewry itself, and counted among their number both Sephardim and Ashkenazim, although the latter predominated. As a result of the Ashkenazi predominance , these Dutch Jews, many of whom had close connections to English before migration, blended into the American Ashkenazi majority. Their extensive commercial ties in the Americas, particularly the Caribbean, facilitated their migration. The second group of Dutch Jewish immigrants who came to America, those of the period from the 1820s through 1870, also demonstrated an interesting blend of cultures. Unguistically Yiddish speakers represented the majority amongst them, but they had already come to be enmeshed in Dutch culture. Solidly middle-class, these observant Jews, who clustered in New York but also formed secondary communities in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and Baltimore, fashioned for themselves Dutch benevolent societies and congregations, hoping to hold on to their minority Dutch identity in the midst of the overwhelmingly Central European Jewish majority in America. The last group of Dutch Jewish immigrants consisted of the community 's proletariat. Cigar makers, operatives in the diamond industry, and other manual laborers came to America from 1870 through the outbreak ofWorld War I. Less religious than their earlier compatriots and coreligionists , they had become socialists before migration and they brought that ideological legacy with them to America. Swierenga has expanded our categories of analysis in delineating AmericanJewish hiStory. In addition to forcing students ofAmericanJewish history to move away from simple, national boundaries, he has also pointed out some important issues that surely will be points for further research. The Netherlands, like England, Rumania, parts ofPoland, and the Austro-Hungarian empire, housed multiple Jewish communities, different minhagim. The Jews migrating to...