City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set

8 Beyond the Synagogue in Antebellum New York

151 Historian Naomi Cohen argues that Jewish “emigration foreshadowed a secularization of their faith.” The act of choosing to emigrate, separating from the community in Germany, as well as other central European countries, in itself repudiated tradition. Jewish newcomers wanted to fit into American society as quickly and easily as possible. Yet, while many immigrants grew lax in observing ritual law and chose not to join a congregation, they did not cease to identify as Jews. The vast majority married within their faith. For these Jews, institutions beyond the synagogue allowed them to maintain a coherent unity.1 ■ New York in the Antebellum Era When Isaac Mayer Wise, the future leader of the Reform movement in America , disembarked in New York in 1846, he recalled witnessing “such rushing, hurrying, chasing, running,” the likes of which he had never seen before. The culture of this “large village” did not impress him. The source of his displeasure stemmed from New York’s entrepreneurial energy as the city, in the three decades before the Civil War, became the nation’s most vibrant municipality. Spurred by the emergence of the Erie Canal as the entrance to the West, by the city’s enterprising merchants, by an industrious workforce, and by a massive influx of Irish and German immigrants, New York grew from a seaport of 200,000 in 1830 to a metropolis numbering 814,000 individuals in 1860 (and a metropolitan area of well over a million).2 The growth in entrepreneurial energy that Wise encountered, to be matched by an ever more vigorous democratic politics and a maturing American culture , was part of the second phase of American republicanism, also known C H A P T E R 8 Beyond the Synagogue in Antebellum New York 152 ■ h av e n o f l i b e r t y as the Age of Jackson and the antebellum era. A population rapidly growing from the inflow of immigrants from Germany and Ireland witnessed major advances in industry and agriculture, the growth of manhood suffrage, and an ever more competitive and hard-fought political scene. This was the period of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, stressing the pervasiveness of the democratic spirit throughout the United States, an ethos that reinforced the republican disdain of aristocracy and privilege. It was also an age that produced enormous wealth, much of it concentrated among the elite entrepreneurs who lived in American’s prominent cites, men such as I. M. Singer, inventor of the Singer sewing machine, an instrument that revolutionized the garment industry. No city was more representative of these new strains of republicanism than New York, America’s cultural and financial capital.3 At the hub of the nation’s growing rail system, Gotham became America’s leading manufacturing center. The city housed the nation’s garment trade, major iron works, and a multitude of assorted industries such as the Singer Sewing Machine Company. New York’s merchants established the country’s first department stores. New York became the axis of the nation’s communication network. Telegraphy permitted almost instantaneous news of business and current events. The rise of the rotary press, with a capability of producing two hundred thousand copies per hour, allowed an 80 percent drop in the price of a newspaper. Dailies and weeklies blossomed, and their pages enticed both the elite and working classes with news, politics, sports, court trials, theater, investigative expos és, and gossip about the rich and famous. They ranged from the New York Herald (circulation of fifty-two thousand in 1853) to low-circulation weeklies. The latter included two English-language newspapers aimed at the Jewish population, the independent Asmonean, edited by English immigrant Robert Lyon, and the Orthodox Jewish Messenger, edited by Reverend Samuel Isaacs, rabbi of congregation Shaaray Tefilah, newspapers that give us an invaluable picture of the Jewish community in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.4 Housing the New York Stock Exchange and the Gold Exchange, New York was the American center of market speculation. Its banks provided the investment capital for the West and the South. The California gold rush brought the city both capital in newly minted gold and an outlet for its manufactories supplying western speculators. New York developed close ties to the South: its bankers accepted slave property as collateral; its brokers sold southern Beyond the Synagogue in Antebellum New York ■ 153 railroad and state bonds; its...