Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (review)

Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed. By Gerald Gamm. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 384. $39.95.)

Large-scale social change can be hard to see while it is happening and even harder to explain afterwards. In twentieth-century American cities, the complex interactions of racial, ethnic, and religious populations play out undetected in the ordinary events of everyday life. Streets and neighborhoods do not, in our perceptions, shift overnight from one group to another; rather, the countless decisions people make about where to live and what kinds of community institutions to support can seem unconnected and random. Only with time do patterns emerge. The great merit of Gerald Gamm's study of the Catholic and Jewish neighborhoods of modern Boston is that it carefully balances the forces, visible and invisible, which caused those groups to behave as they did.

A political scientist with historical interests, Gamm emphasizes the structural reasons which led--"allowed," perhaps--the city's Jews to move to the surrounding suburbs, while keeping Catholics (mostly, but not exclusively, Irish) rooted in the city proper. In particular, he sees the institutional infrastructure of religion as determinative. Because of their understanding of what constituted a synagogue or temple, Jewish congregations could pick up and follow their members when they moved out of the Roxbury and Dorchester districts to the nearby towns of Brookline and Newton. Since the temple was wherever the people were, it moved when they did. Gamm's prime example of this is the Reform Temple Mishkan Tefila, which moved five times between its founding in 1895 and its arrival at its present site in the suburbs in 1958. The Catholic stronghold of Saint Peter's parish in Dorchester, by contrast, has occupied the same church building since 1891. Given their different notions of congregational membership, rootedness, and authority (Gamm's three categories of analysis), these parishioners were less willing to leave their neighborhood. As a result, it was Boston's Catholic population which bore the brunt of (and, often, took the blame for) later urban turmoil, especially that associated with desegregation of the public school system in the 1970's.

Gamm's thesis is persuasive as far as it goes. He helps explain apparently disproportionate rates of outmigration and suburbanization. But what does it mean to say that "Catholics stayed" in the city? Parishes and schools certainly did stay put, but many Catholic individuals and families moved to the suburbs no less eagerly than their Jewish neighbors, their places in the city taken up by very different ethnic populations, especially Hispanics and, more recently, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Haitians. To lump all these groups together, just because they share membership in the same church, is to risk eliding important distinctions. Moreover, Gamm is a little loose in his application of the term "suburb." Sometimes the word denotes one of the distinct towns outside of Boston, each with a very different character from that of the city; sometimes it denotes a residential neighborhood within Boston. These districts may indeed have their own feel and traditions, but they are all nonetheless part of the larger political entity that is the city and therefore subject to its dynamics. Even so, Gamm's book joins a growing shelf of books which explore the complex twentieth century history of America's cities, and it is particularly welcome for its reinsertion of the role of religion into the discussion.

James M. O'Toole
Boston College

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