The Rag Race. How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire by Adam Mendelsohn (review)

The maturation of a post-Marxian “economic turn” in the field of Jewish history has been in the making for quite a while now. Adam Mendelsohn’s new book on the garment trade in America, Britain, and the British Empire is not just a worthy contribution to this growing stream of scholarship; it is, in many ways, a milestone. It is not “just” about the dynamics of consumer patterns, or labor history, or ethnic networks, or Jewish-Gentile relations, or the globalization of commercial activity. It is about all of these at once. The Rag Race, a painstakingly researched work of comparative social and economic history, deals with what is arguably the keystone in the entire structure of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Western Jewish economic history: THE industry that was almost legendary for providing jobs and an entrepreneurial niche for hundreds of thousands of immigrant Jews on both sides of the Atlantic. Mendelsohn shows just how much about the “rag race” we did not really understand before.

He has, in the process, asked entirely new questions and reformatted some of our standard assumptions. What were the historical connections between the seamy trade in second-hand clothing and the eventual minting of a new market in standardized, ready-to-wear apparel? What were the differences between London, Leeds, and Manchester on the one hand, and New York and Chicago, on the other, in terms of business environment, labor recruitment, and the means of ascent from workbench to front office? What did the advent of large emporia do for the supporting branches of manufacturing and, particularly, for small-scale workshops? What is the truth behind the old claim that the American Civil War proved to be a source of bounty for Jewish marketing and manufacturing innovators? Why did the opening of a market in ready-made women’s wear create crucial commercial advantages for small manufacturers? Why did timing mean all the difference between catching up with an industry on the rise and finding oneself more or less limited to life-long blue-collar employment?

Mendelsohn’s treatment of these and other pertinent issues lead him to conclude, “The prosperity of Jews in the United States was not wrought by magic and genius.... But for the confluence of structural forces ..., the fortunate positioning of Jewish immigrants on the edges and then at the center of the unfolding industry, and considerable individual effort aided by ethnic cooperation, the outcome would have been subtly or substantially different (228).” The author’s finely nuanced calibration of various factors is what makes this such a fine work of scholarship, one that will remain a standard-bearer in the social and economic history of Western Jewry for a long time. Moreover, its implications are by no means limited to the realm of Jewish studies.

Among Mendelsohn’s chief contributions is his chronological focus, which spans mainly the six decades or so from the 1820s to the early 1880s. Although this may come as a surprise to readers whose expectations are informed by sweatshop memories dating from the early twentieth century, there are cogent reasons for ending, rather than starting, with the early years of the mass Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. The nineteenth-century focus allows the author to argue persuasively that there is more continuity in the garment industry story than we imagined. The reasons for the working conditions and market opportunities in the industry as they appeared after the 1880s can and must be sought in the 1840s and 1860s, and indeed, even earlier. We can thus more or less skip lightly over what was once a major hurdle in Jewish migration history (particularly in the American case) – that is, the distinction between the Central and East European migrants, respectively. This more or less fits in with the temper of the more recent literature, which tends toward unifying the Euro...