Jews on the Frontier

Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America

Shari Rabin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479869855
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia ebraica

Winner, 2017 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies from the Jewish Book Council An engaging history of how Jews forged their own religious culture on the American frontier Jews on the Frontier offers a religious history that begins in an unexpected place: on the road. Shari Rabin recounts the journey of Jewish people as they left Eastern cities and ventured into the American West and South during the nineteenth century. It brings to life the successes and obstacles of these travels, from the unprecedented economic opportunities to the anonymity and loneliness that complicated the many legal obligations of traditional Jewish life. Without government-supported communities or reliable authorities, where could one procure kosher meat? Alone in the American wilderness, how could one find nine co-religionists for a minyan (prayer quorum)? Without identity documents, how could one really know that someone was Jewish? Rabin argues that Jewish mobility during this time was pivotal to the development of American Judaism. In the absence of key institutions like synagogues or charitable organizations which had played such a pivotal role in assimilating East Coast immigrants, ordinary Jews on the frontier created religious life from scratch, expanding and transforming Jewish thought and practice. Jews on the Frontier vividly recounts the story of a neglected era in American Jewish history, offering a new interpretation of American religions, rooted not in congregations or denominations, but in the politics and experiences of being on the move. This book shows that by focusing on everyday people, we gain a more complete view of how American religion has taken shape. This book follows a group of dynamic and diverse individuals as they searched for resources for stability, certainty, and identity in a nation where there was little to be found.

Part I

Movement and Belonging

1

Wandering Sons of Israel

Europe, America, and the Politics of Jewish Mobility

In 1848 Isaac Leeser looked to the liberal revolutions under way across the Atlantic and felt lucky. Well aware of the long and messy struggle for Jewish citizenship rights in Europe but hopeful about this opportunity for change, he published an editorial in his newspaper, the Occident and American Jewish Advocate, entitled “The Future.” In it, Leeser told his fellow American Jews,

Those who are natives or long residents of the United States . . . who have never had to obtain the permission of the police before they could depart from their domicile on a journey ever so short, of pleasure or business, unless they preferred to become acquainted with the comforts of a prison-house; can never realize what the nations of Europe have to glory over.1

At this moment, when it seemed that the Jews of central Europe might finally be treated as equals, Leeser took pains to convey the depths from which they would be lifted. He did so by referencing what was, to American Jews, the most obvious and yet profound of their many newfound rights: mobility. Jews had moved before, but, as Leeser indicated, they had been subject to governmental controls and/or limited in their geographical trajectories. Now their movement was freighted with endless opportunities but also with unprecedented challenges.

Jews had long been associated with mobility, a result of Christian violence and deep-rooted cultural representations. Already dispersed and without their own country, Jews throughout the Middle Ages were excluded from certain vocations, banned from landownership, and periodically expelled. This mobility fueled and was reinforced by the myth of the “Wandering Jew,” whose cruelty to Christ at Cavalry had doomed him to walk the Earth until the second coming. Even in the United States, novels such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (1860) and Herman Melville’s Clarel (1876) perpetuated this image of Jews’ collective guilt and outsider status.2

The flesh-and-blood Jews roaming the expanding American continent understood and experienced mobility very differently, however. Movement was no longer a sign of strangeness, but a necessity for economic success and a privilege, one that was denied to many European Jews and to some Americans.3 Indeed, for American Jews, mobility was both an outcome and a cause of their racial categorization. Historians of race have long argued that American Jews became white in the early twentieth century as a result of protracted social and cultural processes.4 In the eyes of American law, however, Jews have been white from the beginning, a profound distinction from European governments that classified Jews as Jews. For American Jews in the nineteenth century, moving throughout an expanding continent, the effects of this new status were particularly dramatic.

Many Americans remained ambivalent about the effects of mobility, however, even among white men. On the one hand, westward expansion and economic success depended on bold movement into seemingly uncharted territory. On the other hand, excessive mobility seemed a threat to pious families and communities; the line between heroic adventurer and suspicious confidence man was unnervingly fine. Jews proved particularly confusing within this system, as politicians, diplomats, generals, and ordinary Jews themselves juggled racial, religious, and economic understandings of Jewish identity. Amidst this confusion, Jews and others would find that the full fruits of American life required the willingness to move and to submit to the consequences.

Immigration, Movement, and European Law

Jews had been present in North America at least since 1654, and by 1820 Jews in the American colonies numbered a few thousand, largely residing in port cities on the Eastern Seaboard. By 1877, mass migration multiplied this population many times, to 250,000. Though most Jewish migrants initially came from German-speaking lands, especially Bavaria, over the course of the nineteenth century their origins diversified, including places like England and Russia, Bohemia and Alsace. Among the early members of the Pittsburgh Jewish community in the 1850s, for example, were men from Prussia, Würtemberg, Bavaria, Hamburg, Baden, Darmstadt, Posen, and Vilna, as well as a few from England. In the 1860s they were joined by a few Dutch and Galician Jews, as well as more Lithuanians and Prussians. Of the nine Jews living in Los Angeles in 1851, one was from France, two were from Poland, and six were from German lands.5

A variety of factors encouraged the mass migration of Jews and other Europeans to the United States in this period, including advances in transportation technology, the social ruptures of industrialization, rising birth rates, and political upheaval, including the failed liberal revolutions of 1848–1849 in which Leeser had placed such hope. For Jews, the drawn-out struggle for Jewish civic and political rights proved an additional motivation.6 Immigration historians have shown that from Posen, more than two Jews left for every non-Jew who did. Even though Jews were only 1.5 percent of the Bavarian population, they constituted 5 percent of that kingdom’s emigrants to America. As a result, between 1818 and 1871, Bavaria’s Jewish population declined in absolute numbers. Even after some rights were granted to them piecemeal, Jews continued to migrate to the United States, seeking economic opportunity, social equality, and free mobility.7

Although Jews had a long history of movement in Europe, it was one marked by intense, if uneven, regulation. European governments were notable for three particularities: religious establishments, an expansive system of registering, documenting, and monitoring residents, and a persistent recognition and differentiation of ethnic, religious, and even economic groups, including, if not especially, of Jews. In the medieval period, European rulers had dealt not with individuals, but with local Jewish communities, which had the power to grant or deny the right of settlement to coreligionists.8 Many governing bodies in central Europe required Jews to pay a body tax, or Leibzoll, in order to enter cities and cross borders. Expelled from England in 1290, Jews were not readmitted—and then only informally—until the 1650s, decades after England’s settlements in America had begun. After expulsions in the fourteenth century, Jews were not admitted to most parts of France until the revolution in 1789. Smaller towns and regions, especially in northern Italy and Germany, took to expelling Jews periodically throughout the medieval period and into the early modern era, and the devastating expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s redistributed Jewish populations across the globe, creating a transatlantic Sephardic diaspora that was mobile but still subject to governmental controls. It was the Portuguese exertion of such power that led to the first Jewish community in what would become the United States, a group of refugees from Recife, Brazil, who traveled to New Amsterdam.9

Into the nineteenth century, European governments—especially Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and the German states—continued to regulate mobility and to differentiate among Jews and other groups. This project was given new life by exclusivist strains of romantic nationalism, which argued that the nation was formed by a near-mystical connection between the land and the culture of its people.10 This understanding of nationhood encouraged states to reinforce borders, monitor movement, and identify and surveil citizens, residents, and foreigners alike through internal passes, external passports, and a variety of other documents. As one 1854 English travel guide wryly noted, “the passport is the proof of a German’s existence.”11 Also required were Heimatscheine, certificates of nationality and residency rights required for domestic travel, and Sicherheitskarten, residence permits. In some Prussian towns, documents known as Aufenthaltskarten were required to prove legal entry and residence. These documents recorded the holder’s religion, ethnicity, and/or economic position as a relatively fixed bureaucratic category.12 This meant that even though many governments contemplated and enacted emancipatory laws, which gave Jews some citizenship rights, they continued to classify them as Jews. As a result, they were encouraged in some occupations and discouraged in others, their religious lives were conducted through government-supported Jewish communities, and their possibilities for landownership, residence, and travel were limited.

In their memoirs, written many years after the fact, Jewish migrants emphasized the hurdles they faced in order to move. William Frank, of Burgpreppach, Bavaria, who would become a founding member of the Pittsburgh Jewish community, traveled regularly as a journeyman weaver, but upon resolving to emigrate to America, had to obtain police permission to travel. He was warned that he would be arrested if he went further than the town of Edenkoben, about 175 miles away. Nonetheless he traveled to a cousin in Landau, just past Edenkoben, who found a stage driver willing to lie to officials to get him into Weissenburg, on the French side of the border. From there he was able to get to the port at Le Havre and on to America.13 The largest portion of Jewish immigrants to the United States were Bavarians like Frank, who were fleeing from particularly harsh restrictions on mobility, residence, and everyday life. In 1813 the still-new kingdom of Bavaria had passed a decree enacting, among other restrictions, the much-despised Matrikel, a registry of Jewish households in a particular place. Jews could move to a new place or marry only if another Jewish family had departed. Though Bavaria was only the size of South Carolina, Jews were banned from residing in the capital city, and it was decreed that “settlement in excess in communities where Jews already live, or settlement in areas where there are as yet no Jews, can be permitted only by the highest authority.” Non-Bavarian Jews could not enter the kingdom, and individual villages regularly forbade Jewish settlement altogether.14

While it is notoriously difficult to pinpoint the numerous, inconsistent, and ever-changing policies of nineteenth-century central European governments, Jews throughout German-speaking lands were treated as a distinct group. Their religious activities were supported through Gemeinde, official local communities funded by Jewish taxes. At the same time, they were subject to myriad policies variably intended to minimize Jewish populations and/or to eliminate economic and religious distinctiveness.15 These policies included restrictions on mobility similar to those found in Bavaria. In 1854 Philip Whitlock, who had moved from his Russian hometown just across the border into Prussian Wloclawek (Leslau), found that he was expected “to procure a pass from the government to leave the country—or travel anywhere.” Seeking to emigrate to America but unable to afford the bribe that would procure him the necessary papers, he kept going, managing to narrowly avoid passport checks upon entering and exiting Berlin and again when boarding the ship in Bremen. Over fifty years later, Whitlock vividly recalled, “It is almost impossible to describe the fear and anxiety that I felt during that trip to Berlin, not knowing if this man [who aided him] will be successful in passing me, having in mind that I might be arrested and sent back to the place where I was born.”16 Movement, Whitlock found, inevitably brought Jews into confrontation with the state.

Around half of German-speaking Jews lived in Prussia in the mid-nineteenth century, under twelve regional systems. Among acculturating Berliners, Poseners in the east, and their many coreligionists in between, all but a tiny number of elite Jews were restricted in their place of residence, with protection rights transferable only to a family’s first-born child.17 Such policies were also in place in the Habsburg Empire and the smaller German states. Eventual immigrant Adolf Hoenig remembered of Budapest in the 1850s that “no stranger could easily establish residence in the city. Every bird who flew in had to be reported to the police where he was given a passport with exact description of his personality.”18 Jews had to have certificates like the one granted in 1850 to Rubin Abeles of Hochlibin, Bohemia, which gave him a four-year extension on his residence and declared him to “belong to the community . . . and hold the right to reside there.” Rural Jews in Baden were first granted freedom of migration in 1862, while in Saxony Jews were allowed to live only in Dresden and Leipzig, and even then in very small numbers with considerable restrictions.19

Amid these dizzying regulations, already in 1837 the German Jewish newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums reported, “Young men . . . cannot obtain right of settlement. What is left for them to do, but to search for another fatherland?”20 Over the course of the nineteenth century, Jews were gradually admitted to more towns and cities, and yet their residence and travel—like all political rights—continued to be considered contingent and revocable. Moving from one state to another was even more difficult than moving within a given state. Governments concerned with the integrity of the nation feared absorbing greater numbers of Jews, especially poor ones from places like Alsace in the west and Russia in the east. As one European Jewish historian put it, “the choice of residence in the pre-emancipation period [was] more dependent on legal factors than on the individual desires of the persons concerned.”21 Full emancipation came in 1871, with the creation of a unified Germany, and even then, the Gemeinde system remained firmly in place for another five years, maintaining official ties between individual Jews, their communal institutions, and the government.22

Further east, in Russia, the legal and political structures were different but the experience of monitored mobility was much the same.23 During his time in Russia in the late ...