Reform Judaism, Reconciliation Romance, and the Civil War: Nathan Mayer's Differences and Nineteenth-Century Reform Jewish American Life

Then he folded his arms around her, and kissed her sweet brow."United in love," he said, "notwithstanding former differences.""United forever," she replied.¹

Thus ends Nathan Mayer's 1867 novel Differences, but it could be the conclusion of any number of reconciliation romances published in nineteenth-century America: lovers, one Northern and one Southern, having been divided by "former differences"—a pleasant way to refer to the Civil War—are finally "united forever," as is, presumably, the nation. It is a standard plot…but what happens to this popular story line when these American characters are Jewish? When the "differences" of the title are not just about region but also about religion, about the future of Judaism in America? Nathan Mayer's novel, one of the first works of fiction to depict the contemporary lives of American Jews, employs the popular trope of regional reconciliation romance to explore the connections and tensions between American and Jewish identities at the close of the Civil War, a time when citizenship and identity were open questions for many Americans. Mayer criticizes some aspects of the American Jewish community and indeed deploys the standard antisemitic trope of crassly commercial merchants, while also noting that their social shallowness is echoed by that of the surrounding Gentile community. At the same time, Mayer argues that individuals can and must cultivate a deliberate and proud Jewish American identity for themselves and their families, but that this must be a specifically Reform identity, one that cares more for Jewish continuity than theology or ritual. The novel implicitly argues that, if American Jews can think of Judaism as a religion rather than an ethnicity, such that they are open to conversion while still firmly maintaining their Whiteness, then the country can live up to the protagonist's name, "Welland."

Most characterizations of Jewish American fiction begin with the socalled ghetto narrative of the late nineteenth-century eastern European immigrants. However, we must push this beginning point back by at least thirty years, to the mid-century arrival of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in the United States. Wise, who shaped Reform Judaism in America, came to New York from his native Bohemia in 1846 and was appalled by the lack of culture that he found among American Jews. He claimed that most leaders could not "read unpunctuated Hebrew"—presumably including Torah scrolls—and did not have "the least knowledge of Judaism, its history and literature" and that "ignorance swayed the scepter, and darkness ruled." He was equally appalled at the state of Jewish "modern culture," finding that, aside from the plays of Mordecai Noah—which had no explicit Jewish content—"nothing worthy of note had been accomplished in that quarter." He hoped to remedy this deficiency, and when he settled in Cincinnati in 1854, he almost immediately began writing and publishing The Israelite (later The American Israelite), one of the first Jewish magazines in the United States. The weekly magazine regularly included fiction, for one of Wise's aims was to "familiarize the reading public with the brilliant periods of Jewish history in fictional form, in order to appeal by this means to the growing youth so as to awaken in them Jewish patriotism." His goal was twofold: to Americanize Jews and to simultaneously Judaize them, as it were; he wanted them to be patriotic about both the United States and their Jewish heritage.² The fiction in the magazine was thus historical in theme, often about the Rabbinic period. Wise's own novels, frequently published under the pseudonym "The American Jewish Novelist," were regularly serialized in his magazine and sported titles such as The Last Struggle of the Nation: or, Rabbi Akiba and His Time (1856), The Combat of the People: or, Hillel and Herod: An Historical Romance of the Time of Herod I (1858), and The First of the Maccabees (1860). Wise's periodical, the publication source of most early Jewish American fiction, obviously inclined toward reform, but Wise himself hoped that Judaism would unite across those differences; perhaps fiction...