Necrology: William Toll

William “Bill” Toll, longtime professor of Judaic Studies and American history at the University of Oregon, died on December 20, 2015 following heart surgery. With his passing, the field of American Jewish history has lost a devoted researcher, innovative thinker, inspiring professor, and cherished colleague.

Born in Philadelphia in 1941, Toll studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned both his bachelors and master’s degrees in American History. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley for his Ph.D., completing his dissertation, The Booker T. Washington-W.E.B. Du Bois Controversy: The Conflict of Negro Racial Ideals During the Progressive Era in 1972. After teaching at the University of Michigan, Toll moved to Eugene, Oregon where he taught at the University of Oregon for over forty years. Beginning in the History Department, Toll would later serve as Senior Instructor in that department and in the Judaic Studies program established in the late 1990s. His courses included American Jewish History and a course on Racism and Anti-Semitism.

Bill Toll’s early publications focused on African American history, including his first book, The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory from Reconstruction to the Pan African Congresses (1979) and a number of journal articles published from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Engaged in the emerging social history movement, Toll used several of these articles to challenge the historic neglect of race in mainstream American history and to suggest new approaches for its incorporation.

It was during the late 1970s that Toll began to turn his attention to American Jewish history. In 1982, his seminal study The Making of an Ethnic Middle Class: Portland Jewry over Four Generations was published by SUNY Press. This study, a model of social historical research, paired census records, school enrollment data and city directories with membership lists of synagogues and B’nai B’rith chapters to meticulously map the social and occupational networks of Jewish Portlanders, and to place them in the city. Complementing quantitative research with extensive use of oral histories, Toll traced the evolving relationships of several waves of Jewish migrants as they entered the city, established themselves, and built social, educational, and cultural institutions. Using oral histories to provide insight into the life of an ethnic community, Toll’s careful study charted the ways in which Jewish Portlanders first reproduced ethnic divisions between Germans and East Europeans in their congregational and fraternal organizations, and then overcame them as the sons and daughters of East Europeans entered the middle class. Placing as much importance on the networks of women as those of men, Toll traced the development of Jewish female society, charting the activities of groups such as the Portland Section of the Council of Jewish Women. At a time when many historians overlooked women’s roles in community development, Toll demonstrated the key roles that women played in shaping the community’s social and political initiatives.

Building on this pioneering work, Bill Toll’s work on the historical development of Jewish communities in Oregon and other parts of the West would continue until the end of his career. Detailed analyses of communities such as Portland and Trinidad, Colorado, led to several broader, thematic works on “frontier Jews,” including essays focusing on occupational development, social identity, family formation, and inter-generational change. His contributions were included in a number of critical anthologies focusing on Jews in the West, including Moses Rischin and John Livingston’s Jews of the American West (1991) and Ava F. Kahn’s Jewish Life in the American West (2002), and his was a significant voice in comparative discussions of “peripheral” Jewish communities and regionalism in American Jewish history. The culmination of his work on Jews in the West came in Jews of the Pacific Coast: Reinventing Community on America’s Edge (2009), co-authored with Ava Kahn and this author, a comprehensive monograph, covering the period from the Gold Rush to the end of the 20th century. In one of his final contributions to the field, Bill Toll was one of the featured historians interviewed for The Jewish Frontier, an Oregon Public Broadcasting documentary completed...