The Jews' Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America by David S. Koffman (review)

Considering the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the period of peak US expansion and national consolidation, Koffman sets out to understand encounters between Jews and Native Americans. "How did American Jews make use of Indians, both real and imagined, as their ambitions in America as both Americans and Jews transformed? How did American Jews understand the place of Native Americans in their own quests for integration and advancement or for helping ensure justice and equality in America? How did Jews, a newly arrived 'clannish' group in a country celebrated for its diversity, openness, and meritocracy, see themselves as related to, distinct from, or refracted by those other quintessentially 'tribal' Americans? [H]ow did Jews put Indians to use in their efforts to remain Jewish or recreate Jewishness in America"? (3).

Chapter 1 looks at "pioneer" Jews who moved to the western US, seeing themselves "as colonial whites and their own settlements, hardships, and accomplishments as heroic contributions to the winning of the American West." They "acted as unabashed agents of colonialism as a way of combatting anti-Semitic stereotypes that criticized Jewish men for lacking brawn or not pulling their weight in the nation's military operations…Western Jews cast themselves as recapitulations of the original pilgrims, clearing the path for commerce and settlement through their efforts at both engaging Indians in productive capitalism and subduing them through acts of violence. They viewed Indians as both impediments to and vehicles of their participation in the march toward civil progress" (15). In Chapter 2 Koffman discusses Jewish attitudes toward land, arguing that "immigrant Jews absorbed and fueled America's quest for imperial acquisition in the West, helping form part of its potent vision of expansionism and an equally martial vision of manhood. Nineteenth-century Jewish desire to feel existentially rooted in the new land fueled much of what Jews worked through in their imaginations of and encounters with Native Americans" (15). Chapter 3 presents Jewish merchants and the economic encounter with American Indians, the most prominent manifestation of face-to-face meetings between members of the different groups. Jews who "went west primarily as small businessmen to pursue wealth…constructed meaning out of their roles as traders and linked this Jewish occupational profile to the nation-building process," in which "Indians provided an intimate foil for Jews keen on having petty trade recognized as beneficial for expansion." One intriguing subset of the Jewish-Amerindian commercial interaction comprised the "Jewish Indian 'curio' dealers…who positioned themselves between red and white worlds as half Indian, half ethnographer experts, representing the Indians whose 'Indianness' they sold in the form of cultural objects" (16).

In Chapter 4 Koffman turns to the "acculturated, enfranchised Jews of the urban east who devoted considerable efforts to justice for Native Americans" in the early twentieth century's climate of rising xenophobia (16). "American Jews and Native Americans fretted over their exclusion from the mainstream American body politic; both feared that white America's assimilatory aspiration for them would lead to their cultural obliteration." Amerindians "provided Jews with a useful and malleable rhetorical tool for confronting tensions around assimilation and disappearance, naturalization, citizenship, and the idea of 'adoption' versus naturalization" (17).

Chapter 5 describes a "cadre of Jewish pro-Native activists" in and beyond Washington, DC (17). Acting out of "Jewish enlightened self-interest," this set of "Jewish bureaucrats, lawyers, and philanthropists […] worked on behalf of Indian causes," finding "power and influence in the federal government for the first time in America under the Roosevelt Administration," playing a fundamental role in "drafting, passing, and implementing the 1934 [Indian Reorganization Act], consolidating federal case law on Indian affairs, and promoting Indian cultural, economic, health, education, and political interests" (17–18). At the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Jews "consistently linked Indian uplift with an articulation of minority rights and cultural pluralism within the United States and on international stages that went beyond Indian...