The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora (review)

In The Forerunners Robert Swierenga painstakingly chronicles the history of Dutch Jews in the United States. Dutch Jews were forerunners in the colonial settlement in New Amsterdam, but more importantly in the early national period of the United States. “The Dutch played an integral part in every pioneer Jewish congregation, educational endeavor, and charitable organization in America until at least [the] mid [nineteenth] century . . .” (p. 14). As the quote suggests, this is a history of the individual and collective contributions of Dutch immigrants to many aspects of American Jewish life.

Swierenga divides Dutch Jewish immigration to the United States into three waves: a first during the Napoleonic wars, when the immigrants tended to come from a somewhat higher social strata, be involved in international business, and have a sense of separate identity as Jews based on their pre-migration experience. A second wave from 1825 to 1870 of postemancipation Jews were more Dutch both in language and culture, and adhered strongly to the Amsterdam Orthodox tradition, so strongly that it alienated many who sought change over time. This group consisted of petty merchants, retail storekeepers, and clothing dealers and their families. The third and final wave, from 1870 to 1915 was less committed to religion, focussing instead on secular and socialist organizations. This working class group had experience in the trades, and associated with Judaism mainly in social and charitable societies.

Swierenga organizes the book according to geography more than chronology. After an introduction on Jewish life in the Netherlands and a discussion of Dutch Jewish migration up to 1830 generally, he launches into the study of cities where Dutch Jews settled. He devotes one chapter each to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco, as well as one long chapter divided into eight subsections on Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis. Swierenga provides information on not only the three Dutch ethnic synagogues of the 1840s and 1850s, but also the activities of Dutch men (and to a much lesser degree Dutch women) in other congregations, cemetery and benevolent associations for each community. He traces Dutch Jewish families’ economic activities, their social lives, and the religious currents within their congregations. The level of detail approaches genealogical in many cases, as in the marriage patterns of the second generation, where spouses from Dutch Jewish families still were common partners.

As in all of Swierenga’s works on Dutch immigrants, which are numerous, the census forms a major source for this book. Chapters include various tables with household level data, whether the occupation and address, or maps illustrating neighborhoods where Dutch Jews lived. The two appendices feature Dutch Jewish heads of household and working adults enumerated in the censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1870 for New York and Philadelphia. Published local community histories and Jewish archival records and periodicals, synagogue records and some general histories fill out the palette of source material. All of these provide the basis for extensive details on certain aspects of Dutch Jewish life.

Swierenga amply fulfills his primary goal of providing a history of Dutch Jews. In so doing he notes their secondary (if not tertiary) affiliation as Dutch. Within a couple of generations their Dutchness disappeared into a larger American Jewish identity. This perhaps best explains the lack of information on this group, and why it is a historian of Dutch Americans with a general interest in religion who writes it.