Emerging Metropolis

New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920

Annie Polland, Daniel Soyer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814771211
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Emerging Metropolis tells the story of New York’s emergence as the greatest Jewish city of all time. It explores the Central European and East European Jews’ encounter with New York City, tracing immigrants’ economic, social, religious, political, and cultural adaptation between 1840 and 1920. This meticulously researched volume shows how Jews wove their ambitions and aspirations—for freedom, security, and material prosperity—into the very fabric and physical landscape of the city.

CHAPTER 1
Neighborhood Networks

In the middle of the nineteenth century, European and American visitors to New York knew to stop by Chatham Street, a commercial district just to the northeast of City Hall, at the base of the Bowery. So characteristic of New York with its commercial hustle and bustle, Chatham Street’s ramshackle storefronts and frenzied merchants almost begged for inclusion in travel accounts. In their colorful depictions, pants and shirts hanging off signs and rustling in the wind seemed designed to ensnare unwary passersby; once so detained, the hapless marks were susceptible to the “gentle” yet persistent enticements of “natty, blackbearded, fiercely mustached” Jewish merchants, who had a beguiling way of selling a fellow clothes that did not fit. The accounts’ descriptions of the flapping layers of fabric, the waist-length beards, and the devious mannerisms not so subtly marked these businessmen as ethically and even racially suspect. One observer declared that a “Yankee shopkeeper” would have no hope of succeeding on Chatham Street; his presence was a “physical impossibility.” Yet another observer suggested that P. T. Barnum create a museum or circus out of the activity there. Jewish writers, too, often preferred to dissociate themselves from the area; Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise’s memoirs summarily dismissed Jewish Chatham as “a disgrace.”¹

Indeed, Wise’s distaste for Chatham Street was indicative of his dislike of New York in general when he arrived in 1846 from Radnitz, Bohemia. Wise surveyed Broadway all the way to Canal Street, reporting, “The whole city appeared to me like a large shop where every one buys or sells, cheats or is cheated. I had never before seen a city so bare of all art and of every trace of good taste; likewise I had never witnessed anywhere such rushing, hurrying, chasing, running.”² Chatham Street thus exemplified a business current that pulsed through all of Manhattan. A contemporary observer, Cornelius Mathews, disparaged Chatham commerce but suggested that this very competitive spirit was after all part and parcel of New York’s history and future and that the terrain itself inspired a competitive spirit among its inhabitants: “This street, reader, was in the old times of this Island, a warpath of Manhattan Indians to the west; civilization hath not affected it greatly. The old red men scalped their enemies, the Chatham Clo’men skin theirs. So little difference have two-hundred years in changing the character of mankind!”³ Whether or not one accepts Mathews’s suggestion that Chatham Street’s soil fostered this fierce competitive drive, his account leaves no doubt that Jews’ commercial ambitions had made them a highly visible part of New York life.

While Cornelius Mathews returned home and Isaac Mayer Wise journeyed on to Albany and then Cincinnati, those who were most engaged with the Chatham Square street scene remained to live and work there. The clothing business was not a literary curiosity for them but rather the means through which they could stitch together a new life in America. From the mid-1820s to the 1880s, the area around Chatham Street, especially the south side, remained a touchstone for immigrant Jews arriving in New York. There they found housing, work, and community. Although many of these Jews moved on to other neighborhoods to the east and north within a few years, a continuous influx of immigrants maintained a constant Jewish presence. Those who settled learned to navigate the neighborhood. Jewish residents of Chatham Street interacted with its diverse populations yet also created sites of Jewish interest. The twists and turns of Mott, Mulberry, and Orange Streets introduced them to a vast array of New Yorkers—Irish carpenters, African American laborers, and German brewers—as well as to Henry L. Goldberg, who in 1852 is listed in the New York City directory as a “scriber of the Pentateuchs” at 63 Mott Street. Unflustered by flapping merchandise or peddlers’ entreaties, Jewish immigrants soon learned that the handsome three-story New York Dispensary on the corner of Centre and White not only offered medical attention but also housed temporarily several congregations, including Shearith Israel, Anshe Chesed, Shaarey Zedek, and Beth Israel.⁴ A Bayard Street tenement’s staircase led to Gittel Natelson, who sold wigs to married Jewish women and arranged matches for those yet unmarried.⁵ Jews discovered that a saloon’s rear room might be a meeting place of a B’nai B’rith lodge or that Newman Cowen’s Canal Street glass warehouse doubled as a charitable distribution site at the beginning of each Jewish month.⁶ More important, this neighborhood provided opportunities to pioneer—to find occupations, to forge partnerships, and to start congregations. In seeking advice and finding companionship, newly arrived immigrants also received the impression that in a few years’ time, they too might be in a position to help the next wave of newcomers.

In the vanguard of a century of migration that eventually brought nearly three million central and eastern European Jews to the United States, Chatham Jews by the end of the nineteenth century had created the neighborhood and industrial web of associations that made New York a magnet for immigrant Jews and made Jews garment manufacturers for the nation. Upon arrival, mid-nineteenth-century immigrant Jews tended to settle around Chatham Street, in the so-called Five Points. By the 1850s, Jews also formed a “conspicuous” segment of the German-speaking immigrants in Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, located to the east of the Bowery, in an area later known as the Lower East Side.⁷ In the first few decades of the century of migration, many immigrants continued the journey west, but enough remained to make New York home to approximately forty thousand Jews, 25 percent of the United States’ Jewry by 1860 and approximately 5 percent of New York’s population.⁸ By 1880, New York Jews numbered close to eighty thousand, and many of them were firmly established in the middle class and living uptown.

They ascended by carving out their own place in the city’s “niche economy.” Jews from Bavaria, Prussia, Bohemia, and Poland came with experience in trade and peddling.⁹ In New York, they applied this experience wholeheartedly to dry goods and the used-clothing trade. They then parlayed their foothold in the used-clothing business into a pioneering role in the ready-made garment industry, both as manufacturers and as marketers, guiding Americans to what was then a novelty—ready-made clothing for middle-class and even upper-class people. By the end of the century, they thus left an unmistakable imprint on the city’s economy and in so doing also set a pattern for future Jewish immigrants’ relationship to the city.¹⁰ The needle trades were New York’s largest manufacturing sector, employing large numbers of more recent Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, who provided the industry with the cheap labor necessary for its rapid growth.¹¹

Neighborhood Beginnings

From the colonial period until the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Jews, like most New Yorkers, lived and worked in the area to the south of City Hall. The Jewish community’s sole synagogue, Shearith Israel, had been located on Mill Street since the early eighteenth century. By the late 1810s, the more prominent Jews had already moved farther north, to the west of Broadway, on the “quiet, tree-shaded blocks” of upper Greenwich, Laight, Charlton, Greene, and Wooster Streets. From there, New York’s wealthier families could still walk to their businesses and their places of worship.¹² Poorer Jews from England and central Europe had begun to settle to the north of the synagogue as well, though they followed other newcomers to the east of Broadway, on Broome, Houston, Lispenard, Canal, and Franklin Streets. But while the Protestants could choose among an array of churches, many reflecting class, denominational, and ethnic differences, all Jewish New Yorkers, regardless of wealth or neighborhood, headed to Shearith Israel.

Much more than simply a place of worship, Shearith Israel was also the Jewish communal center, providing access to kosher meat, Passover matzos (unleavened bread), and education. A hazan, or prayer leader, led services in Hebrew, and men and women sat separately, according to traditional custom. Early leaders of the congregation had instituted the Sephardic rite, emanating from Spain, whose pronunciation of Hebrew and order of prayers differed from those of the Ashkenazi, or central and eastern European, rite. Though the majority of New York Jews were of Ashkenazi descent by 1728, Shearith Israel maintained what had become a New York Sephardi rite. Despite these traditional elements, however, changes in Jewish life reflected New York’s environment of relative freedom and openness. Whereas traditional Jewish communities in Europe could exert force over the population through the threat of herem, or excommunication, America’s more tolerant environment diminished this threat. In the absence of sanctions, many members of Shearith Israel led less than fully observant lifestyles outside the synagogue. More recent immigrants tended to follow the law more scrupulously than did older members. Moreover, to the ears of these more observant Ashkenazi newcomers, the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew seemed strange. But Ashkenazi Jews seeking changes encountered entrenched opposition.

Tensions came to a head in April 1825, when the English-born Barrow E. Cohen refused to make a traditional charitable contribution for the honor of reading the Torah. Shearith Israel’s leaders deliberated over their course of action, ultimately forgoing the imposition of a fine in favor of a milder reprimand. Unsatisfied, Cohen and the newer, traditionalist Ashkenazi immigrants seized an opportunity to demand the right to conduct a separate morning service within the congregation, one requiring more stringent Sabbath observance by its leaders. While the Shearith Israel elite was willing to discard the fees for participation in the service, it rejected these signs of independence. The leadership feared that separate services would breach the unity of the congregation and sensed that the growing numbers of newcomers threatened longstanding rituals and traditions and, more pointedly, its authority. The venerable Shearith Israel could no longer contain the diversity of its congregation, and a contingent separated to form B’nai Jeshurun, thereby setting in motion a pattern of splintering and diversity that characterized New York Jewish congregational life for the next two centuries.¹³

Contemporary observers blamed the breakup of Shearith Israel on the growing geographic spread of the Jewish population. Edmund Blunt’s 1828 Picture of New York attributed the split from Shearith Israel to the fact that “the increase of the city has left few families in that neighborhood [where Shearith Israel was located], and this, with the great increase, and the continued arrivals from the continent of Europe, rendered it necessary to erect a new temple.”¹⁴ The seceders themselves cited “the distance at which many lived from the Spanish and Portuguese house of worship.”¹⁵

Neighborhoods reflected variations in class, occupations, and points of origin, which often led to different modes of daily life. While the more established Shearith Israel leaders who lived to the west of Broadway might have used oil lamps, coal stoves, and ice boxes, those on the eastern side inhabited dilapidated and hastily subdivided wooden homes and depended on candles, oil lamps, and found wood. Clearly, those who lived to the west of Broadway and constituted the leadership of Shearith Israel could more easily afford the twenty-five-cent dues for Torah honors than could newly arrived immigrants living to the east. This class division reflected broader trends in New York City religious congregations—in Protestant churches, newcomers protested pew rentals that they could ill afford.¹⁶

Eventually, the Ashkenazi Jews who created B’nai Jeshurun rented a former church on the corner of Canal and Elm, in the very heart of Five Points, New York’s immigrant working-class neighborhood. And by 1833, Shearith Israel had rebuilt its synagogue on Crosby Street, closer to its more established members. Though B’nai Jeshurun and Shearith Israel cultivated a working relationship, this division marked a turning point in New York Jewish communal life.

Until the 1820s, New York’s five hundred Jews united fairly easily as a minority, and the congregational unit could contain and foster community. But increasing numbers of immigrants diversified the Jewish population and its institutions. A more pronounced upper class and a growing working-class population emerged, as the varied hometowns of the new immigrants and their desires for more stringent observance of Jewish law sparked additional differences. American democracy and freedom encouraged individual Jews to aspire to leadership positions within the synagogue. No single institution could contain these variations, as the earlier congregation had done. Neither could one congregation accommodate all the would-be leaders, who over a thirty-year period called into being twenty-seven congregations.

When Jews did go to synagogue, they went to pray and to socialize. But, increasingly, New York Jews found alternative places not only to socialize but also to buy kosher meat and to engage in acts of charity. New York Jews spent more time beyond the confines of the synagogues—in tenements, on the streets, and in the market. They interacted with non-Jewish New Yorkers on a daily basis, forming relationships that influenced synagogue life and encouraged new patterns of Jewish association. New York synagogue-goers adapted what they learned from New York politics, business, and society to introduce such new trends within the synagogue as elected officers and Jewish ministers able to represent the congregation in ecumenical gatherings and to deliver English-language sermons. But daily life in New York also inspired the formation of new, more secular forms of Jewish community—including Jewish newspapers, social clubs, libraries, hospitals, lectures, and charities. Thus, the story of New York synagogues and their various divisions, while telling, is not the story of Jewish New York. Rather, we can find the story of Jewish New York in the markets, tailor shops, saloons, and butcher stores where Jews formed an ethnic economy and forged neighborhood networks. These more informal networks in turn influenced synagogue structure and shaped new forms of associational life for New York Jews.

Raphael Cowen was one of the new immigrants who built the diversified Jewish community in New York. In the mid-1840s, Cowen left his hometown of Graetz in Prussia to seek work as a tailor’s apprentice. He first made his way to Janowicz, Posen, where he met and married Julia Manasseh. The Cowens journeyed to Manchester, England, in search of economic opportunity but soon left for New York. They joined a migration of 150,000 Jews from central Europe to the United States between 1820 and 1880. As central Europe transitioned from a society of estates, in which Jews served as middlemen between peasants and nobles, to an industrial society, many Jews faced dismal economic prospects. Matrikel laws, restricting Jewish marriages in Bavaria and elsewhere, made it all but impossible for young Jews to establish households. While the slightly better-off went to larger cities in search of work, poor young Jews migrated to the United States. Migration accelerated in the 1850s. Letters home and newspaper articles heralded economic opportunities and spoke of helping hands extended by fellow Jews.

Jewish immigrants thus joined a great migration streaming out of various regions of Germany. Indeed, Jews tended to emigrate in larger proportions than did their non-Jewish neighbors, who were also leaving in large numbers. For example, while Jews made up 1.5 percent of the Bavarian population, they composed 5 percent of the Bavarian migration to the United States. Whereas most Germans who emigrated tended to be slightly better-off peasants, coming as family units, Jews arrived with little money and often in groups of single men and women. Most important, whereas the majority of German emigrants sought farmland, Jews opted for towns and cities.¹⁷

Whether young immigrant Jews left Prussia, Bavaria, or Bohemia, they shared characteristics: lack of formal education, little money, and hardly any knowledge of English. Like all immigrants to New York, they desired communities in neighborhoods that could help them adapt to their new surroundings. When the Cowens arrived in 1849, they “sought that section of the city that was then the destination of German Jewish immigrants. . . . Finding countrymen they knew, [they] located near them on Mott Street, and [Raphael] set out as a boss tailor.” Julia gave birth to Nathan soon after their arrival in March 1849, and their son Philip was born in 1853, when they had moved a few blocks to the corner of Canal and Mulberry.¹⁸

The Cowens passed their first years in Five Points, where difficult living conditions were offset by familial and communal ties. Five Points, so called due to the five-cornered intersection of Anthony, Orange, and Cross Streets (now Baxter, Pa...