Kinship, Ethnicity and Voluntary Associations

Jewish Family Life in New York City

William E. Mitchell

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351510004
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Sociology

How can Jewish relatives who range in residence and occupation from a Scarsdale doctor to a Brooklyn butcher, and who diverge in religiosity from an Orthodox cantor to a ham-eating atheist, maintain close family ties? It is a social truism that families with conflicting life styles scattered over a sprawling urban area fall apart. Even those families with a strong sense of duty to stay together begin to lose their cohesiveness as members' contacts become increasingly erratic and highly preferential. In "Kinship, Ethnicity and Voluntary Associations", William E. Mitchell describes how these intimate, spirited, and often contentious family clubs are organized and how they function.This project delves into family circles and clubs, two remarkable social innovations by New York City Jews of Eastern European background, that attempt to keep relatives together even as the indomitable forces of urbanization and industrialization continue to split them apart. The family circle first appeared on the New York City Jewish scene in the early 1900s as an adaptive response to preserve, both in principle and action, the social integrity of the immigrant Jewish family. It consisted of a group of relatives with common ancestors organized like a lodge or club with elected officers, dues, regular meetings, and committees.Family circles and cousins' clubs continued to exist as important variant types of family structure in New York Jewish communities for many years. Mitchell, in this work, deals with the challenging problems of how Jewish family clubs happened to emerge in American society and their theoretical implications for contemporary kinship studies. The research methods used in the study include a combination of intensive informant interviews, participant observation, and respondent questionnaires. This is an unusual, innovative contribution to cultural anthropology.

1. The Jews of New York City

Who invented the idea of Jewish family clubs? We simply don't know. But a lot is known about the New York City Jewish community during the years of immigration and settlement when the clubs were first formed. It is important information not only as cultural background data for this study but directly pertains to later discussions about how these clubs came into existence and the models within the Jewish community on which they are based.

Today in New York City there is no "Jewish community" in the sense that it is represented in the larger community by a single organization as its spokesman. The Jews of New York are not a unified group but are heterogeneous both culturally and physically and have a multitude of often competing political, social, economic, and religious organizations.¹ There are also some Jews who, although maintaining a Jewish identity, are less interested in things "Jewish" and have affiliated with community associations that are not based on Jewish ethnicity. The only "Jewish" factor that all New York City Jews have in common today is that they are descendants of individuals called "Jews" and by a rule of descent are also "Jews". But it was not always this way.²

From the middle of the seventeenth century until the nineteenth, the Congregation Shearith Israel was New York's only synagogue and the accepted spokesman for a united Jewish community. But the unity was broken beyond repair with the establishment of a rival synagogue, the Congregation Bnai Jeshurun, in 1825, and a subsequent rash of other new synagogues established by successionist groups. Since this date no single organization has been able to speak with unanimity and authority for all New York Jews. As the cultural diversity among them became more marked and their numbers within the city increased, so did the number and types of organizations increase to meet their changing social and economic needs in a rapidly changing urban society. The family circle and cousins' club are but two of the more recently established organizations to meet these needs.

New York’s First Jews: The Sephardim and Ashkenazim

The Jews of New York City have a long and often rousing history. The first Jew to settle in New York, then the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, was Jacob Barsimon, an Ashkenazic Jew who arrived in 1654. He was followed later in the same year by 23 Sephardic Jews who were expelled from the Dutch colony of Pernambuco in Brazil when it was retaken by the Portuguese. A few Jews arrived from London and the West Indies soon after England took over the colony in 1664, and a few French Jews are reported to have immigrated by way of England in 1696. But the bulk of the early population, although small was comprised mainly of the descendants of the Sephardic Jews (sometimes referred to as "Portuguese" or "Spanish" Jews) who had earlier lived in Portugal and Spain, and the descendants of the commonly named Ashkenazic Jews who had earlier lived in Germany. However, most of the early Ashkenazic Jews who settled in New York came from Holland and England.

The Ashkenazim and Sephardim are two important subcultures of international Jewry and joined together to make New York's first Jewish community. It was an unusual union for the Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities were rigidly separate in the contemporary European cities. For one thing the Sephardim considered themselves to be the Jewish aristocracy and encouraged endogamy. But the two groups were different in other ways, too; they differed in language (the Sephardim spoke Portuguese, the Ashkenazim German), pronunciation of Hebrew, synagogue customs, and in their style of dress and food preferences.

For the first 50 years of New York Jewish history the Sephardim were the more numerous and the acknowledged leaders of the Jewish community. During this period New York was little more than an overgrown trading post and the Jewish community was not yet a hundred strong. Shearith Israel, the only synagogue and Sephardic in ritual, was the place of worship for Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike. By 1695 the Jewish population had finally reached 100 in a city of about 4,000 (See Table 1). By this time the Jews were fairly evenly divided between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, but by 1729 the Ashkenazim were in the majority, a majority that would continue to grow until they, in turn, were outnumbered by the great migration of Eastern European Jews to New York's Lower East Side in the late nineteenth century.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the Jewish population of New York remained relatively small. Although only a hundred Jews lived in New York in 1695, 100 years later there were only 350 although the city had become the largest in the United States with 33,000 inhabitants. It took until 1825 for the population to reach an even 500.

The Jews who immigrated to New York during the colonial era appear to have been poor. Grinstein (1945:24) writes:

The Ashkenazim from Germany, Poland, and Holland came to America, for the most part, because they wanted to raise their standard of living. It was the lower rather than the upper classes among the Jews who joined the immigrant group. Few of the Jews of early New York knew Hebrew; a Jewish scholar was a rarity. Most of the immigrants seem to have been poor, many actually penniless. Save for the Marranos, who may have possessed some wealth, no rich Jews came or seemed to want to come to America.

There are also indications that these early Jewish immigrants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came alone and that the tradition of families immigrating together did not develop until the nineteenth century.

Perhaps both of these factors helped Jews to assimilate quickly to the pattern of the broader community while maintaining a Jewish religious identity. According to the statement of a German officer at the time of the Revolutionary War, (Glanz 1947:20) New York Jews were indistinguishable from other citizens and this probably applies equally to an even earlier date. And Weinryb (1958:9) has documented how the early Jews, at least linguistically, were moving away from their traditional languages to the exclusive adoption of English:

In this connection it is significant to note that the minutes of Congregation Shearith Israel of New York City are written in Portuguese up to 1741, and later in a mixture of that language and English. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, English is employed exclusively. In 1757 the Congregation demands a cantor "who will be able to teach the children Hebrew with translation into English and Spanish", but five years later only Hebrew and English are required. Furthermore, the leadership was rapidly losing all contact with Hebrew. In 1728, of the 17 people signing the regulations of Shearith Israel, only three (all having Ashkenazic names) employed Hebrew script. By 1746 it was only one out of 47. In 1761 the first English translation of the holiday prayer book (machzor) was published in America. In the preface to the 1766 edition it is stated that many understand very little Hebrew, others none at all. ... In short, American Jews of the second half of the eighteenth century seem to have had much in common with the non-Jews with whom they frequently congregated and with whom they did business.

During the period of Dutch rule in New York the Jews were required by law to live in a separate section of the city, but

Table 1. The early Jewish population of New York City*

Year	Number of Jews in New York City	General population of New York City	Percentage
1695	100	4,000	2.5
1750	300	13,000	2.3
1794	350	33,000	1.1
1809	450	96,000	0.5
1815	350	. . . .
1820	450	123,000	0.4
1825	500	166,000	0.3
1836	2,000	270,000	0.7
1840	7,000	312,000	2.2
1842	10,000	. . . .	. . . .
1846	12,000	371,000	3.2
1850	16,000	515,000	3.1
1855	30,000	629,000	4.7

* From Grinstein (1945:469). These Jewish population estimates are based variously on the number of seats in the synagogues, the consumption of matzoh, and other data. The general population figures for New York City are given in round numbers. For a discussion of the problems inherent in Jewish demography, see Seligman (1958).

Grinstein (1945:30) indicates that the law was never really enforced. He does say, however, that "the earliest Jewish neighborhood was on Whitehall Street, probably near the tip of Manhattan Island". When the British took the colony in 1664, the Jewish ghetto law was not reinstituted and the Jews of New York have never been forced to live in legalized ghettos. They have tended, however, just as other large ethnic groups in New York have done, to group themselves in separate neighborhoods. During the colonial period of New York, the Jews clustered in close proximity to their synagogue on Mill Street. In the eighteenth century as the city grew in population and economic strength, its boundaries expanded and some Jews began moving "uptown". But even as late as 1818...