Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism

Introduction

Introduction Writing just one year after immigrating to Albany, New York, from his native Bohemia, a young rabbi, Isaac Mayer Wise, expressed a boundless optimism about the future of Judaism in America. In this 1847 letter to the editors of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in Leipzig, Wise assured those living under oppressive laws in Central Europe that Judaism “develops far more swiftly and splendidly in the sunlight of freedom.”1 God had opened the gates of America—­a“magnificent homeland to protect us,” Wise wrote. In the ensuing decades, until his death in 1900, Wise would lead the development of a thoroughly American Judaism when the clouds of prejudice would, from time to time, eclipse the sunlight of freedom.2 During those darker moments, Wise and other men would work to clear the obstacles on the path to a modern American Judaism. From the 1840s through a particularly vicious spike in Judeophobia during the Civil War and into the Gilded Age, American Jews made steady but painfully difficult advancements toward modernity. This study examines the major events during this period, both in the United States and places far from American shores, that spurred the Jewish community to Americanize every facet of life, unify their fractious congregations, and engage more forcefully in partisan politics. Anti-­Semitism inAmerica has been cyclical and for the most part mild in relation to periods of anti-­ Semitic agitation in Europe, and it was mild compared with native-­ born attitudes toward Chinese immigrants on the West Coast during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hasia Diner, a historian of the Jewish immigration to the United States, notes that although the Chinese and later other immigrant groups were branded as unwanted, Jews were not.3 And American Jews did not experience any sentiments comparable to the persistent and often violent racism against African Americans and Native Americans that has existed throughout U.S. history. 2 Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism Between 1848 and 1860, the U.S. Jewish population tripled to 150,000. Most of the new arrivals were German-­speaking immigrants leaving a Central Europe torn by the revolutionary activity of 1848, and they constituted a community that“affirmatively sought public anonymity,”in Diner’s words.4 However,during the 1850s, members of this religious minority, striving to fit into the mainstream of American life, recognized that they lacked the ability to influence events that affected their very survival.5 In 1840, in a dark corner of the Ottoman Empire, Jews were tortured to confess to a medieval blood libel, a belief that Jewish ritual demanded the blood of Christians. A decade later, certain Swiss cantons barred Jewish businesses, both Swiss and American. And in 1859, the Vatican ruled that Edgar Mortara, a Jewish child in Bologna who was secretly baptized by a housekeeper, should be separated from his parents to live with a Catholic family. In each case, congregational disunity—­ some termed it congregational anarchy—­ and Jewish ambivalence about exerting their political rights as Americans proved crippling liabilities. Often bitter rivals, Orthodox and Reform rabbis endlessly debated the fine points of liturgy and ritual and, most important, who should speak for American Jewry. Then came the national calamity of Civil War, which fully awakened Jews to their vulnerability even in a country as enlightened as the United States. While instances of discrimination and crude anti-­ Semitic images had appeared in popular culture since colonial times, an anomalous spike in Judeophobia on both sides of the conflict brought American Jews to the realization that not only disunity but the habits and even occupations they brought from the Old World would make them convenient scapegoats during times of severe social and economic distress. Imagining the Foreign Enemy The Civil War was no doubt a transformative event in American history, comparable only to the fight for independence from Britain or the restructuring of American society that came with the New Deal and World War II.6 Not only was the country as a whole transformed politically, economically, and culturally, but so were the individual groups that constitute America, as there was no refuge from the all-­ consuming conflict. African Americans received their freedom, southern whites could no longer speak of secession, and men with capital and ideas were invigorated by an unimpeded drive to the West and the strong postwar economy. Introduction 3 Surges in nationalism in both the Union and...