Chapter 1
Enlightened Nationalities
In mid-December 1894, two men stepped off a Southern Pacific train in Benson, Arizona, and walked across Main Street through a drizzling rain toward the Grand Central Hotel. With its self-proclaimed reasonable rates, first-class rooms, and the best of meals, it was the logical choice for the men who wrote their names in the hotelâs register: Adolph Sutro and Levi Strauss.
Benson was an important hub for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and millions of dollars in silver from nearby Tombstone passed along its rails. Anyone wanting to visit Benson from San Francisco could get there on a direct SP train in just a little over two days. Men from all walks of life and business found themselves in town, and the names Sutro and Strauss were familiar throughout the West.
Sutro, for example, had made millions with the âSutro Tunnel,â which drained off the excess water from the silver mines of Nevadaâs famed Comstock Lode, making the ore easier to extract. He held property all over San Francisco, opened a public bath for his fellow residents, and had just been elected mayor of the city.
Strauss was a prominent San Francisco merchant, philanthropist, and the man behind a new kind of denim work pants, reinforced with metal rivets for strength. Ads for his famous trousers appeared regularly in the Tombstone Epitaph newspaper, which published the two names within a list of the Grand Centralâs recent arrivals in its December 16 issue.
The appearance of these names on page three of the Epitaph, next to the story about a stage robbery, most likely didnât cause a stir. It should have, though.
Because the men were impostors.
Both Sutro and Strauss were in San Francisco when their doppelgangers got off the train. Levi Strauss was in court telling Judge Hebbard why he was unable to serve on the Grand Jury. Adolph Sutro was talking with his staff about the upcoming visit of General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, who would arrive in San Francisco on the 17th.
In the days before mandatory identification and wide use of photography, it was fairly easy to pretend to be a prominent figure from another state. All you had to do was wear a broadcloth suit and, considering the snow that threatened at wintertime in Benson, a fine, heavy overcoat. No one would ever know who they really were, and the two fraudsters doubtless received excellent service during their stay at the Grand Central.
This wasnât the only time someone used the power of the Levi Strauss name to gain an advantage. In 1898 a well-known California bunco artist named George Bowers showed up in Los Angeles. There he bought some expensive clothes, equally expensive champagne, and booked a room at the Van Nuys Hotel. He then skipped out on his bills and fled to Sacramento. Before leaving, he shipped himself six valises of ill-gotten goods using the name Levi Strauss. He was arrested when he arrived in Sacramento and hauled back to Los Angeles, along with his luggage. He was unable to prove his âLevi Straussâ identity, so the police kept the bags and their contents.
What kind of man inspires such bizarre imitation? Getting your name in the newspaper isnât enough. That name has to be associated with integrity, wealth, business, or culture. And it doesnât really matter how you got there.
Humble origins were no deterrent to anyone wanting to get ahead in the city spawned by the Gold Rush. Immigrant Jews, like Strauss and Sutro, after escaping the European laws that so restricted their lives, found a refreshing lack of anti-Semitism in San Francisco and throughout the Golden State. As early as 1857, a reporter for the Daily Alta California newspaper wrote an article praising Jews, calling them one of the âenlightened nationalities.â
But that was far in Leviâs future. His early life, like that of his fellow Jewish newcomers, began as humbly as what nineteenth-century Bavaria had on offer.
Hirsch Strauss knew every tree, path, house, and village in his territory. A peddler who lived life on his feet, he carried household goods, news, and gossip to the customers on his turf, which ringed the region around his home in Buttenheim. He shared this life with hundreds of other Jewish peddlers, who walked or rode across the Bavarian hills, a place familiar to so many tourists today thanks to years of Oktoberfest advertising. But to Hirsch and everyone in his family, home was really called Franconia.
Named for the sixth-century Germanic tribe called the Franks, Franconia was one of the five duchies of medieval Germany. Later folded into the Holy Roman Empire, it had its own identity in the northern portion of todayâs Bavaria. Even today, people who live in the area will be the first to tell you that they are Franconians, not Bavarians. They are proud to claim Buttenheim as one of their own, whose fame extends beyond its reputation for fine beers. The village is part of Upper Franconia, and in the Middle Ages it was a market town and a stop on an important trade road that linked Hungary, southern Russia, and northeastern Germany together, both commercially and culturally.
Buttenheimâs main street is the Marktstrasse, or Market Street, and on November 16, 1780, Hirsch Strauss, son of Jacob and Meila, was born at Marktstrasse 134. He had an older brother, Lippmann, born in 1774, but no one knows how many more siblings there might have been. Jacob was a cattle trader, one of only a few acceptable occupations for rural Jews in Franconia; the others included leather, horse, and oil traders. Another was peddling, the work that young Hirsch chose when it was time to take up a trade.
Another Buttenheim resident, Madel Baumann, was born in 1787, and she and Hirsch were married sometime around the summer of 1811. Their children soon began to arrive. Jacob was born in 1812, when the family was living at Marktstrasse 33. He was followed by Rösla in 1813, who was born at Marktstrasse 83, a few doors away, where Hirsch and Madel had recently moved. Jonathan was next in 1815, followed by Lippmann in 1817, and Maila in 1821.
Less than nine months after Mailaâs birth, Madel Strauss died, at age thirty-five. Widower Hirsch, who spent days at a time away from home, needed to find another wife to help take care of his five children. Female relatives or neighbors would have helped him for a while, but that couldnât last. The children ranged in age from nine months to eleven years, and given the demands of his wandering life, he could never have raised them alone. No one expected him to, either.
On November 14, 1822, Hirsh, now forty-three, married Rebekka Haas, another Buttenheim resident. Born on July 6, 1800, at Marktstrasse 76, Rebekkaâs parents, Seligmann and Henela, were, like Hirschâs father, local cattle traders. Rebekka and Hirsch lived in his home just up the street at number 83, and on December 24, 1823, their daughter Vögele was born. Then, on February 26, 1829, they welcomed their last child and only son together. The boy whom America would transform into the man called Levi Strauss began life with the first name Löb.
Young Löb was born into a society that believed it had âemancipatedâ its Jews and given them the rights of full citizens. In reality, Jews had only those rights that made the Bavarian government and Christian society comfortable.
A dip into books about Bavaria will rarely mention its Jewish history. To be fair, the regionâs Jewish population was never a majority. Jews first show up in the historical record in the tenth century, as traders in gold, silver, metals, and even slaves, and they were also money lenders. But over the next seven hundred years Jews were repeatedly expelled or exterminated, allowed to return, and then forced to leave their homes again. At the end of the seventeenth century they began to trickle back in, and by the early nineteenth century nearly all Bavarian Jews lived in the Franconian region of northern Bavaria.
When Bavaria became a kingdom in 1806 under the new King Maximilian I, the government had to figure out a way to incorporate its newly acquired lands and diverse peoples into a cohesive state. Jews had slowly made some civil gains during the Napoleonic era: the right to attend schools in 1804 and the right to bear arms in 1805, for example. But these advances revived medieval fears that a socially integrated and prosperous Jewish population would be harmful to Christian life and business. In 1809, a new law declared that Jews were a religious society only, a Privat-Kirchengesellschaft. This meant that they were citizens of Bavaria in terms of their duty to the state but were restricted when it came to their actual rights.
Then, on June 10, 1813, Bavaria codified this law even further into the Judenedikt, known also as the Jew Law, the Jew Decree, or the Emancipation Law. Its thirty-four articles turned the regionâs Jews into secular, German citizens, and removed their standing as a purely religious group. Cunningly written to appear as though Jews were on the receiving end of greater privileges, in reality the new law placed an iron grip on every aspect of Jewish life, from the political to the most personal. Jews could now engage in occupations that had been closed to them in the past, but the government did not want this success to translate into greater numbers of actual Jews. The law severely restricted immigration into Bavaria, and each village had to maintain a Matrikel, or register of all Jewish residents. Only those who were listed on the Matrikel could marry or change their residence within the boundaries of the kingdom.
In addition, the right to marry was limited to the eldest son in the family. A younger son could marry only if a childless couple gave up a spot on the register for him, if he married a widow represented on the Matrikel, if he left his village and married in another, or if a place on the list opened up. And, of course, these conditions had an equally profound effect on young women, whose opportunities for marriage were tied to their villageâs eligible men. Unsanctioned unions and illegitimate births were sometimes the result.
In their status as a Privat-Kirchengesellschaft, Jews had complete autonomy over the organization of their communities, from maintaining a treasury and collecting taxes, to the operation of schools and synagogues, seeing to the creation and maintenance of cemeteries, choosing rabbis, and imposing justice. Each community had a lay leader or chairman, called the ParnaÎČ, chosen by the heads of each local family.
Religious life was very traditional, though there was a dearth of rabbis, because the one Yeshiva or seminary where they could be trained was in faraway FĂŒrth, near Nuremberg, and it was closed by 1830. Where there was no rabbi, the ParnaÎČ was the religious leader. Synagogues were small and rarely looked any different from the buildings that surrounded them. There were no âghettoesâ in Bavaria, though most Jewish families lived conveniently near the synagogue and ritual bath. Under the Judenedikt, however, the government was in charge of how Jews practiced their faith. And now that Jews were citizens of Bavaria they were expected to live as secular people. They were allowed complete freedom of worship, but rabbis had to have command of the German language, be registered on the Matrikel, and be free of the âblemishâ of usury. Only villages overseen by a local police force could have a rabbi. Congregations without a synagogue could worship in private homes, but Jews could not have secret private gatherings for any other reason.
Cattle trading was a traditional and important occupation for rural Jews such as Jacob Strauss and Seligman Haas, Löb Straussâs grandfathers. But its value to the Jewish community went deeper than livestock management. It was part of a village-to-village market economy that dealt in both cash and credit. By law Jews couldnât buy land to feed the cattle that they bought to resell for food and hides. So they made contracts with Christian peasants; they would pasture a cow or two and maintain them in exchange for a portion of the animals when they were eventually sold. Jewish dealers also bought day-to-day necessities from local craftsmen for cash and sold what they needed for credit. They were a vital link in Franconiaâs economic life.
Peddling was an older and even stronger tradition. The word for peddler in German is Hausierer, or house-to-house trader. This word, and this profession, could mean everything from hauling a wealth of goods in a substantial wagon drawn by healthy animals, to the pack of small household items that the poorer men carried on foot and that they displayed on a tray held by a strap looped around their necks.
However they conducted their trade, peddlers were Bavariaâs local and international mercantile connection. They also served as creditors to free-holding landed peasantry and small craftsmen. With no railroads to link small towns and major cities, peddlers were essential to Bavarian commerce. They were also a conduit for communication. Walking or riding from village to town to city, peddlers carried news of the region and messages from family and friends to those separated by geography and economics. Distance receded and life was made more convenient when the familiar face of the peddler came into view.
Peddlers worked within a system called medina, the Hebrew word for territory. Each peddler had his own medina; it could be a village, a medium-sized town, an individual client, or a combination of these. However, a peddlerâs own home village was considered neutral and open to anyone. Those who could not afford a horse and wagon sometimes became small shopkeepers. But the majority filled a pack with needles, scissors, fabrics, and other household items and walked their medina, usually returning home for the Sabbath each week. In some areas the shortcuts they took through forests or open fields were called Judenwege or Judenpfade by Christians: âJewsâ paths.â
Once in effect, the Judenedikt decreed these traditional occupations off limits, and Jews were forced to take up farming and crafts. There were some exceptions, though. Men who were already engaged in peddling before 1813 and could not learn any other trade were allowed to continue. Others learned a new trade on paper but practiced the old one in reality.
The government didnât just consider the economy in its attempts to modernize Jews. It also inserted itself into the deepest and most personal parts of everyday Jewish life.
Children of both sexes were required to attend public schools along with Christian children, though Jews could open their own schools if the teachers they hired were appropriately educated and were subjects of King Maximilian. Jewish children could receive religious education but not until they proved they had received a certificate from a secular, preparatory school.
Language also fell under the Judenedikt. By the 1820s, Bavarian and Franconian Jews were required to speak Judeo-German, a dialect of German with Hebrew characters. It became the language used for daily life. Men and most women had a rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, but it was mostly for ritual use.
Business records, in addition to birth, marriage, and death registers, and the minutes of community meetings, now had to be kept in German. This put a strain on women more than men who, in their mercantile contacts with Christians, had more opportunity and need to learn written and spoken German. But even so, it was a difficult cultural change that extended even into identity.
Jews now had to adopt German family names, if they did not have them already, though the government did not make any pronouncement about first names, as long as they werenât used as surnames. This threw over the traditional practice of using a fatherâs first name as his childrenâs surname. A man named Isaac whose fatherâs name was Abraham would be called Isaac Abraham, for example. It took nearly twenty years after the adoption of the Judenedikt for this change to take effect, and by that time most children were being given German rather than Hebrew names, though the practice was not universal.
The Judenedikt left its mark everywhere, from individuals to entire villages. Buttenheim, and the Strauss family, were among them.
The Buttenheim of Löbâs childhood had a small but thriving Jewish community, and he was surrounded by all the cultural symbols of his familyâs faith: a synagogue, ritual bath, school, and cemetery. Jews had lived in Buttenheim off and on since around 1450, and by 1668 four households of sixteen people made up the entirety of its Jewish settlement.
Since the Middle Ages local laws had prevented Jews from buying houses in Franconia unless they were abandoned or uninhabitable. Around 1525 a few Jewish families began to settle in the ruins of what was called the Upper Castle, finding both building materials and a legal loophole in order to settle permanently in Buttenheim. The castle was the former property of local Christian barons, and it was destroyed and rebuilt a few times until its final abandonment during the upheaval of the Thirty Yearsâ War in the 1640s. Soon after settlement, Buttenheimâs Jews established their first, simple synagogue at the Upper Castle location.
In 1740 construction began on the second, and permanent, synagogue. Under its low roof were a prayer hall, schoolroom, and a number of apartments. It had the traditional separate halls for men and women, and the Torah shrine was placed against the east wall. The ritual bath was added later to the northern side of the building, with the nearby Deichselbach River supplying the water.
According to contemporary accounts, the inside of the Buttenheim synagogue was not only appropriately designed for worship but was also beautiful. The inner walls were stenciled with designs featuring grapes, leaves, and laurel wreaths. Columns topped with Corinthian capitals flanked the Ark, and other parts of the building bore carved inscriptions in the Rococo style. Candles provided illumination, of course (and in fact were the only lights used until the 1930s), and the building was lined with windows. The community must have...
