In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America by Shari Rabin
  • Mara W. Cohen Ioannides
Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2017. 208 pp. $40.

Shari Rabin's Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America is a welcome addition to the small but growing examination of the evolution of Judaism in the United States. Most histories examine the patterns of migration to the U.S. and the economic patterns present within them. This one, however, overlays Jewish migration to the New World with the westward flow of Jewish people within American culture.

The second wave of Jews to arrive in the U.S. were the German Jews who fled what we now call Germany between 1820 and 1840, along with their Christian neighbors who left for very much the same reasons. However, this was also the time when Judaism was undergoing a reformation in the same European region. Jewish leaders were fighting over the idea of remaking Judaism for modernity. The secularly educated Jewish leaders saw Judaism as practiced as full of superstition. The religiously educated Jewish leaders saw these reforms as destroying Judaism. It was the reformers who arrived on [End Page 171] the shores of the New World to a Jewish community that had already instituted some reforms.

Rabin's first chapter tells the reader about this migration. Using specific immigrants, she shows how these German Jews adjusted to America. There were many issues to resolve, for example if one could break Jewish law and work on Saturday—the Jewish Sabbath—and how Sunday closing laws were addressed when many Jews closed their businesses on Saturday as well. Rabin exposes the vitriolic language that was wielded in state houses from coast to coast when these Sunday closing laws were questioned by Jews who, on religious grounds, could not work on Saturday. In a country that professed equality for all, the anti-Jewish sentiment was particularly disturbing.

The second chapter addresses how German Jews in far flung frontier areas maintained their Jewish identity. Families in Europe feared the isolation of small towns and that the homelessness of peddling in America would woo their children away from Judaism and towards Christianity. Rabin discusses how the American Jewish press provided much needed religious and cultural connections to those in the hinterlands. Jews joined Christian fraternal orders to make business connections and friends, but, as Rabin explains, they craved their own cultural experiences. Thus, they developed their own fraternal orders. She also follows the developments during the mobility of western expansion that influenced how houses of worship were established.

The third chapter addresses family life. Most German Jewish immigrants were men, and they sought female companionship. Rabin explains the conflicts that arose in the New and Old Worlds when single Jewish men married women they knew or wed Jewish women through arrangement. She uses some of the same immigrants discussed in earlier chapters, as well as some new ones, as examples. The resulting interfaith marriages and subsequent children caused problems in defining who could belong to the Jewish community, given that Jewish law states that religion is passed maternally. The ways these mobile Jews addressed other issues of Jewish law, education, and community are all carefully and thoughtfully addressed.

How the practical cultural and spiritual concerns of Judaism were addressed in the New World is examined in the fourth chapter. The same people presented in the earlier chapters are presented here. Rabin discusses how starving Civil War soldiers justified eating pork, a non-kosher meat, and how families far from civilization observed the food restrictions of [End Page 172] Passover, the festival celebrating the Biblical Exodus story. Most interesting here is the presentation of how Jews justified reading texts written by nineteenth-century U.S. Christians to help them understand their Judaism.

Rabin's fifth chapter examines the problem of how these mobile Jews created community. Its title, "A Congregation of Strangers," plays off the Jewish saying "We are strangers in a strange land" (from Exodus 2:22), which refers to the condition of Jews forever living in the diaspora...

pdf