The Price of Whiteness

Jews, Race, and American Identity

Eric L. Goldstein

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691207285
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

What has it meant to be Jewish in a nation preoccupied with the categories of black and white? The Price of Whiteness documents the uneasy place Jews have held in America's racial culture since the late nineteenth century. The book traces Jews' often tumultuous encounter with race from the 1870s through World War II, when they became vested as part of America's white mainstream and abandoned the practice of describing themselves in racial terms.
American Jewish history is often told as a story of quick and successful adaptation, but Goldstein demonstrates how the process of identifying as white Americans was an ambivalent one, filled with hard choices and conflicting emotions for Jewish immigrants and their children. Jews enjoyed a much greater level of social inclusion than African Americans, but their membership in white America was frequently made contingent on their conformity to prevailing racial mores and on the eradication of their perceived racial distinctiveness. While Jews consistently sought acceptance as whites, their tendency to express their own group bonds through the language of "race" led to deep misgivings about what was required of them.
Today, despite the great success Jews enjoy in the United States, they still struggle with the constraints of America's black-white dichotomy. The Price of Whiteness concludes that while Jews' status as white has opened many doors for them, it has also placed limits on their ability to assert themselves as a group apart.

PART I
THE JEWISH “RACE” IN AMERICA, 1875–1895

CHAPTER 1
“DIFFERENT BLOOD FLOWS IN OUR VEINS”:
RACE AND JEWISH SELF-DEFINITION IN
LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

IN 1887, Solomon Schindler, rabbi of Boston’s Temple Israel, delivered a Friday evening sermon to his congregation on the topic “Why Am I a Jew?” Schindler spoke of the universal task of Judaism, its superior logical foundation, and its concordance with reason in explaining why he was a follower of Jewish religious teachings. But first and foremost, he emphasized, his connection to Jewishness was a matter of “race.” Despite the fact that the Jewish nation had disappeared from the earth, Schindler told his congregants, “it remains a fact that we spring from a different branch of humanity, that different blood flows in our veins, that our temperament, our tastes, our humor is different…. In a word, we differ [from non-Jews] in our views and in our mode of thinking in many cases as much as we differ in our features.”¹

The use of “race” as a positive means for self-description among American Jews has not been well documented by historians and, given the contemporary implications of the term, most likely comes as quite a shock to the modern reader. Even more surprising is the fact that this self-description was employed by Schindler, one of the most radical exponents of nineteenth-century Reform Judaism, a movement usually seen by scholars as having distanced itself from strong expressions of Jewish particularism in its attempt to adapt to the American setting. What Schindler’s remark testifies to, however, is the pervasive use of racial language as a means for Jewish self-definition in late-nineteenth-century America, even among those most anxious to take their place in American life. By “race” nineteenth-century Jews meant something different from “ethnicity” in its present usage. Their conception of Jewish distinctiveness was one rooted not in cultural particularity but in biology, shared ancestry, and blood. Such overt racial discourse has usually been treated by modern Jewish historians as the province of antisemites, yet racial language also served as an attractive form of self-expression for Jews.² American Jews drew comfort from a racial self-definition because it gave them a sense of stability at a time when many familiar markers of Jewish identity were eroding. Despite its strong biological thrust, the racial definition of Jewishness did not impede Jews’ identification with American society and institutions during these years. Because non-Jews of the period generally saw the “Jewish race” in a positive light and defined it as part of the white “family” of races, Jews had few reservations about defining their communal bonds in racial terms. Race, then, fit the needs of Jews to define themselves in a changing social landscape, allowing for emotional security and a degree of communal assertiveness without threatening their standing in the larger white world.

The Setting: Shifting Social Boundaries

The social conditions that promoted a racial self-definition among Jews in America did not emerge until the 1870s. Before that decade Jews preferred to describe themselves in ways that furthered their unimpeded acculturation into American life. During the nineteenth century, Jews in the United States—largely immigrants from Central Europe—enjoyed a level of inclusion unmatched at that time in any other setting. While Jews in many European countries had obtained the same rights as other citizens, their exclusion from certain national institutions often prevented them from being seen as authentic Germans, Frenchmen, or Englishmen. By contrast, America had no royal family, no established church, no landed aristocracy; its national culture was more fluid, diverse, and open to new influences. Under these circumstances, Jews felt themselves to be an integral part of American society and adopted American ways with zeal. They changed their habits of dress, their language, their dietary and leisure practices, and even their mode of worship to conform to American styles.³ They spoke of themselves as a religious community because they felt such a description would ease their adaptation to a country that respected religious diversity. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a champion of Americanization and the emerging spokesman for the country’s Jews, expressed this sentiment in 1859: “We are Jews in the synagogue and Americans everywhere.”⁴

Despite the speed with which Jewish immigrants from Central Europe adapted to American customs, manners, and mores, however, these changes did not reflect a thorough integration of Jews into the intimate social circles of their non-Jewish neighbors. While Jews publicly stressed their identity as a religious group, they continued to spend their leisure hours with other Jews, marry other Jews, and express their strong social bonds through an elaborate network of communal institutions. Across the country, clubs and fraternal organizations served as focuses for Jewish social solidarity, which often proved more durable than ties to the synagogue. A historian of the Chicago Jewish community estimates that by the late nineteenth century these organizations had eclipsed the synagogue as the major institutions of Jewish life in the city.⁵ For men, fraternal lodges such as B’nai B’rith, often with their own elaborate rituals, served as what historian Deborah Dash Moore has called a “secular synagogue” and became a more popular form of Jewish affiliation than the religious congregation.⁶ Jewish women remained more devoted to religious observance than their male counterparts, but these pursuits remained only part of a larger sphere of activity where Jewishness was expressed in social terms.

Of course, the openness of American culture and the desire of Jews to attain a position of prestige in American life prevented their complete isolation from non-Jewish social activities. Jewish men were often welcomed in German-American athletic and singing societies and frequently joined Masonic lodges.⁷ In some cities there were social clubs that catered to both Jews and non-Jews. But in general, before the 1870s Jewish immigrant men had little extensive social interaction with non-Jews, and Jewish immigrant women had almost none. Even in smaller Jewish centers, where social contact between the two groups was more common, Jews still preferred to meet non-Jews in organizations such as Atlanta’s Concordia Association, where Jews formed the majority.⁸ At the Los Angeles Social Club, an organization of similar composition, young Jewish women usually attended only those events at which most of the men were Jewish.⁹ This pattern suggests that Jews formed their own clubs not merely as a result of social discrimination but because of an assumption by both Jews and non-Jews that, despite some interaction, each group would carry on separate social relations. What Max Vorspan and Lloyd Gartner have said of Los Angeles during this period seems to have been the rule for the rest of the country as well: “there was a line of social assimilation beyond which the Jews voluntarily did not go.”¹⁰

By the 1870s, however, the line that had distinguished Jewish and non-Jewish social circles began to grow less distinct. More than a decade after immigration from Central Europe had reached its peak, Jewish immigrants and their children were beginning to attain a level of wealth and social prominence that brought them into closer contact with non-Jews. While social exclusivity did not vanish in either group, Jews and non-Jews increasingly met one another at the theater, at summer resorts, and in certain social clubs. Such interaction was further encouraged by the rise of a younger generation that no longer took the social divide between Jews and others for granted.

The blurring of social boundaries created a feeling of uncertainty and uneasiness on the part of both Jews and non-Jews. The loss of those distinctions that had given shape and definition to their lives left each group scrambling to erect new boundaries that would help provide stability in this time of change. For some non-Jews, especially those vying for upward mobility in the wake of the Civil War, social discrimination against Jews became a way of asserting their claim to membership in polite society. The late nineteenth century saw a growing number of resorts and public accommodations closed to Jews due to the demands of non-Jewish customers, while clubs, lodges, and other social and civic organizations that had once admitted Jews now began to exclude them. Citing Jewish vulgarity and “clannishness,” these status-conscious non-Jews enacted restrictions to prevent what they saw as the dangerous leveling of social distinctions.¹¹

For Jews, the shifting social boundaries of the period posed an even greater challenge. Despite the rise in social discrimination, the last decades of the nineteenth century brought the Jewish immigrants from Central Europe unprecedented opportunities for social integration. While these opportunities made Jews ebullient, they also raised anxieties about what borders were to remain between them and the rest of society. Much of this anxiety stemmed from the tension between Jews’ impulse for integration and their desire to maintain a distinctive Jewish identity. Jews’ history of persecution and social exclusion had imbued them with a strong minority consciousness that was not easily surrendered and that led them to place a high value on group survival. Since social ties were seen as the protective force that had guaranteed Jewish continuity in the past, most Jews were reluctant to break these bonds. And while others were less concerned with preserving a level of social distinctiveness, even those most anxious for integration retained an emotional attachment to the Jewish group. In 1889, the American Hebrew jokingly commented on the large class of Jews who could say, “But still I’m a Jew / Although it is true / There’s nothing that’s Jewish / I care for or do.”¹² In fact, whatever their level of Jewish commitment, Jews became more self-conscious about their Jewish identity as they became increasingly immersed in a non-Jewish world.

Given their emergent sensitivity to the question of identity, American Jews were unnerved by trends during the 1870s that underscored the dangers social integration posed for Jewish cohesion. Occasionally these fears were fueled by events of spectacular force, like the “apostasy” of Felix Adler, the son of a prominent New York rabbi who left the Jewish community to form the Society of Ethical Culture in 1876.¹³ More commonly, however, they focused on marriages between Jews and non-Jews, which were occurring on a small but previously unheard of scale. While the exact rate of intermarriage is unknown for this period, the increasing concern expressed in the Jewish press indicates a perception among Jews that its rise was undermining the basis of Jewish peoplehood. “In America such marriages become alarmingly numerous,” complained Rabbi Bernhard Felsenthal in 1879. “The aversion against entering into family connections with non-Jews is not so strong any more as it used to be, particularly if the family is in good social and financial position.”¹⁴ The American Hebrew predicted that further intermarriages would spell the end of both Judaism and the Jews. The problem, it explained, was not only religious, but also “ethnological and sociological.”¹⁵

If alarm was voiced over intermarriage, the shapers of communal discourse—largely men—also became concerned over the increasing exposure of Jewish women to non-Jewish social circles. Before the 1870s, Jewish women had remained more isolated from social interaction with non-Jews than their husbands, fathers, and brothers, allowing men to assign them responsibility for the preservation of Jewishness in the home sphere. Although this perceived responsibility stemmed largely from Victorian gender roles, Jewish men argued that women’s position as guardians of Jewish survival was central to Jewish tradition.¹⁶ As a result, when mixed-sex forms of leisure became more popular and allowed Jewish women greater opportunities to meet those from other backgrounds, many of their male counterparts feared that they would abandon their posts.

While wives were thought to be in danger of ceding their responsibilities, Jewish men raised special concern about the vulnerability of unmarried women to the allure of assimilation and defection. “Maftir,” the San Francisco correspondent of the American Israelite, expressed this anxiety in an 1880 letter that described the marriage of a local young woman to a non-Jew. The Jewish community had long since accustomed itself to men who married outside the community, he wrote, but “when … a Jewish girl links her fortune with that of a Christian, the thing looks, as yet, quite different, because it is not in style.”¹⁷ If this marriage unsettled San Francisco Jewry, an 1875 report confirmed a fear among American Jews so widespread that “few Jewish fathers or brothers, no matter how lax in their religious observances, would think of introducing a Christian gentleman to their daughters or sisters.”¹⁸ The Jewish community expressed even greater alarm three years later, when a daughter of Isaac Mayer Wise was secretly married to one of her brother’s non-Jewish friends.¹⁹ Since Jewish men had cast women as the representatives of the Jewish home, many in the community feared that the increasing social interaction of Jewish women with non-Jews threatened the ultimate dissolution of the Jews as a social unit.

Thus, the 1870s introduced a new challenge American Jews would face through the close of the century: how to articulate their attachment to Jewishness in the face of social trends they feared were eroding Jewish cohesiveness. Although religious tradition had already begun to wane in the first decades following immigration, social exclusiveness, endogamous marriage, and the concentration of women in the private sphere had all combined to keep the social boundaries between Jews and non-Jews more or less stable through the 1860s. The weakening of these practices in the socially fluid period following the Civil War necessitated a new means for Jews to mark the boundaries of Jewishness. At the same time, the rise of social discrimination made them anxious to counter accusations that they were “clannish” and hostile to fellowship with other Americans. If their concern for maintaining group boundaries increased, they still wished to continue their drive for social acceptance unabated. Under these circumstances, Jews created a rhetorical strategy that stressed their desire for distinctiveness without undermining their claim to full membership in American society. At the center of this strategy was the language of race, which served particularly well in meeting both needs.

Race as a Framework for American Jewish Identity

Jews had long been understood as a “race” in Western societies. According to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, racial terminology was applied to the Jews as early as the fifteenth century, when Purity of Blood Statutes were enacted in Spain to restrict Christians of Jewish descent from holding cert...