The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America

“If thou art one . . . whose pilgrimage from Palestine we trace, Brave the Atlantic . . . a Western Sun will gild thy future day,” wrote Charleston, South Carolina’s Penina Moise in 1826.¹ Her poem expressed the promise of freedom and good fortune in America that convinced over 250,000 European Jews to leave their towns and villages for the United States between 1820 and 1880.² Few of those who left could have read her work, written in English and published in a periodical in South Carolina, but many of Europe’s Jews had already heard promises of a better life in the United States. They read similar thoughts expressed in Yiddish, the language most commonly used by Jews in central and eastern Europe, as well as in German. In newspapers, magazines, and, most convincingly, in letters sent by relations and friends who had already made the trek to America, opportunity and freedom beckoned.³ Yet, for Jews who cared deeply that their religious lives continue to be shaped by trusted religious leaders and reliable religious resources, America, where in 1820 no properly ordained rabbi could be found, appeared a wild place, unfit for them. Only the combined force of worsening economic dislocation and political and legal oppression pushed Jews to leave central and eastern Europe. The Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century effectively blocked emigration, but by 1820 that barrier had dropped. They were attracted to America with promises of a better life, undertaking an ocean voyage of over two months by sailboat in the early days of the migration, less than two weeks by steamboat toward its close.

Their immigration transformed the American Jewish population from the approximately twenty-five hundred individuals mostly clustered along the Atlantic seaboard at the start of the century. They continued to come during the much larger migration of Jews from further east in Europe who lifted the American Jewish population to almost one million by 1900.⁴ Most arrived as young adults, and their ideas and energy gave new vibrancy to American Jewish life. They supported new congregations, charitable organizations, schools, fraternities, women’s clubs, and literary associations. At the century’s end American Jews provided the intellectual and financial support for a Jewish encyclopedia that marked the emergence of Jewish scholarship in America.⁵ This essay will explore nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants’ integration into American life and the politics, charitable activities, religion, and associations they created. In order to explain those developments, we need first to understand their reasons for coming to America.

Julius Brooks’s story is typical. An adventurous young man from a small village near Breslau with few prospects as an apprentice weaver, Brooks changed careers after meeting “a peddler who told him what fun it was to travel . . . the many beautiful places to be seen; . . . also what a lot of money he made.” In 1847, when Brooks was twenty-two, he came to America, but returned to Europe after five years to see his family again and to marry. In 1853 he and his new wife, Fanny, traveled by ship and wagon train to California and, after some years, settled in Salt Lake City.⁶ Peddling provided Brooks and hundreds of Jewish immigrant young men with a way to thrive in many regions of the United States, as Mark Bauman explains about the South in his essay in this volume. A majority of newcomers like Brooks came from small towns across Galicia and Posen, Lithuania and Bohemia, Alsace, Baden, Bavaria, and Hesse, and other towns and villages of the Rhine Valley and eastward in Poznan and Silesia.⁷

European Jews peddled because they rarely were permitted to own land and usually were restricted from more remunerative crafts. In some areas of Europe Jews were forbidden to trade with non-Jews, but Jewish traders most often provided the necessary links in a larger economy. From the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, when various areas of Europe shifted from subsistence farming and small craft shops to commercial agriculture and industrial labor, traditional economies were transformed and more than five million uprooted immigrants left their European homelands for the United States. When railroads and other improvements in transportation made it possible to move goods to distant markets, Jews who had previously peddled the countryside to bring goods to farmers lost their familiar place in Europe’s economy.⁸

Many Jewish immigrants brought skills in weaving, shoemaking, tailoring, baking, and butchering, but, as historian Hasia Diner has explained, in nineteenth-century America most Jewish men began as peddlers, small shopkeepers, and agents who mediated between farmers and the larger markets and manufacturers, usually trading in dry goods as agents for more established Jewish businessmen in urban centers.⁹ Some Jewish women peddled in urban areas. Peddling brought many nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants to smaller towns and rural areas in the South, Midwest, and West.¹⁰ As nineteenth-century America opened new land to farmers and developed its manufacturing base, Jews who had peddled the countryside in central Europe found that rural Americans also sought their services. Some peddlers developed new products to answer their customers’ needs. After Baltimorean Rosanna Dyer married Joseph Osterman, the couple moved to Galveston, Texas, where they sold cornmeal biscuits that remained edible in a saddlebag for days, made according to Rosanna’s own recipe.¹¹ In Sacramento, California, Bavarian-born Levi Strauss and his partner, Jacob Davis, patented denim pants with metal rivets to provide California’s silver and gold miners with sturdier trousers, and denim jeans were born.¹²

Peddlers often began their labors tramping the countryside carrying a pack of fifty or more pounds filled with items to sell. They hoped to succeed to a wagon and ultimately to a small general store where a wife and other family members would share duties. Jewish communities grew in these small towns as peddlers returned each Sabbath to the local “hubs” of Jewish life. Through peddling, Jewish settlements sprang up in new small towns and then, as small shopkeepers found the means to relocate to larger “regional” centers like Cincinnati, Chicago, and San Francisco, peddling expanded Jewish populations in midsized cities. The Civil War’s unprecedented economic demands spurred upward mobility in the North. By 1870 Jews owned 1,750 businesses in New York City, which had become a major Jewish population center and one of the country’s largest mercantile centers. By the century’s last decades, bankers Schiff, Seligman, Lehman, Kuhn, and Loeb and department store magnates Strauss, Bloomingdale, Gimbel, and Altman comprised a Jewish elite.¹³

These settlements transformed the American Jewish map. The century’s opening years found the largest Jewish settlement gathered in Charleston, South Carolina, whose state constitution assured free exercise of religion and whose bustling trade with England offered economic opportunity that supported a lively cultural life.¹⁴ Charleston was one of the five original port cities where colonial Jews gathered in sufficient numbers to support a synagogue. Jewish immigration from 1830 to 1870 caught the rush of western migration in the United States, and by 1877 Jews comprised nearly 8 percent of California’s population.¹⁵ By century’s close, synagogues thrived across the continent, in larger centers like San Francisco, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Boston and in smaller towns like Albany, Oregon, Trinidad, Colorado, and Tucson, Arizona.¹⁶ Most individuals in those communities were immigrants who arrived first in eastern ports in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. New York City, with the largest immigration center and a booming economy, far outdistanced all other Jewish communities in America in its size and its array of Jewish resources. By 1887 New York City was home to the largest Jewish community in the world.

Jews in nineteenth-century America, whether native or foreign born, fully participated in American society yet experienced the trials of minority existence. Numbering less than 1 percent of the American population, they enjoyed far greater freedom and acceptance in America than they had experienced in Europe, but antisemitism lived here too. Historian John Higham remarked that “alone among European immigrant groups . . . Jews . . . lost in reputation as they gained in social and economic status.”¹⁷ Stereotypes of Jews gaining enormous wealth by illegal means had long been part of European folklore and non-Jewish settlers from Europe brought that folklore with them to America. Newspaper editors occasionally published anti-Jewish diatribes when a local economy faltered. Forty years before Penina Moise encouraged Europe’s Jews to relocate, a Charleston newspaper accused Jews arriving there from Savannah of bringing “ill-got wealth.”¹⁸ During the Civil War’s economic upheavals those accusations became common. When the South’s economy weakened because of manpower losses, Union blockades, and scorched earth military practices, Southerners responded with anger and fear. Some accused Jewish shopkeepers of hoarding goods to drive up prices when most items were simply no longer available at prewar prices, if at all. Northerners reacted similarly to the war’s upheavals. In 1862 Union general Ulysses S. Grant evicted all Jews from a territory under his command that included Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi for presumed violations of wartime trade regulations, an order soon rescinded by President Lincoln after Jewish protest. Later in the century, as Reconstruction—the country’s first attempt at racial integration—ended with laws establishing racial segregation, other outsiders also felt the sting of prejudice. Increasing numbers of hotels, schools, and resorts banned Jews along with African Americans and Asians. By the century’s close a self-defined “white” Anglo-Saxon Protestant social elite had placed its schools, businesses, and clubs beyond the reach of Jews and others it deemed outsiders. Despite those difficulties, Jews felt themselves to be part of America. Historian Jonathan Sarna noted that in the first six decades after the revolution “some 28.7 percent of all marriages involving Jews . . . were intermarriages.”¹⁹ Since colonial days Jews had served in America’s civic associations, militias, and armed services. Nineteenth-century Jewish men voted in elections and contributed to political parties. Jews joined local Masonic lodges, fire companies, militias, athletic clubs, relief associations, and helped to establish libraries, schools, and orphanages.²⁰ One Jewish Freemason explained that, like Judaism, Masonry taught of “One Supreme Architect . . . of the Universe” and that it “teaches us to live together in peace and . . . brotherly love.”²¹ Some Jews were elected to political office. In 1841 Florida’s David Levy Yulee became the first Jew to serve in the United States Congress; he later served as senator. At mid-century between eight and ten thousand Jews fought in the Civil War, most for the North where the majority lived; only about twenty thousand Jews resided in the South.²² Many Jewish soldiers were recent immigrants, like Marcus Spiegel who enlisted in the Ohio Volunteers. After arriving in America in 1849, Spiegel married Quaker Caroline Hamlin, who converted to Judaism, and fathered three children before joining the armed services in 1861. By the time he died from battle wounds three years later he had attained the rank of colonel.²³ Other young men fought for the Union near their birthplaces, like Kentuckian Cary Gist Gratz, killed at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek.²⁴ During the war at least three Union officers of Jewish origin were breveted generals. Northern Jewish women often worked with local groups to provide bandages and clothing for soldiers. Louisiana senator Judah Benjamin later served the Confederacy as attorney general, secretary of state, and secretary of war. Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, a widow from Marietta, Georgia, became the first woman to oversee a branch of the Confederacy’s Chimborazo Hospital, which became the largest hospital in the Western world by war’s end. Some Jewish Southerners refused to fight for either side. Major Alfred Mordecai, a Virginian who had received his military training at West Point, spent the war years among his wife’s family in Philadelphia. South Carolina judge Solomon Heydenfeldt relocated to California after publishing his condemnations of slavery in the 1840s.²⁵

In the American far West, Jewish immigrants lived more easily amid diverse local populations made up of migrants from around the country, immigrants from Europe and Asia, and indigenous Mexicans. Marc Lee Raphael has suggested that by the time Jewish immigrants reached the West they had learned American language and customs.²⁶ By the century’s close, citizens in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Tucson had elected Jewish mayors.²⁷ Across the country nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants embraced integration into the gentile world.

The United States Constitution made it possible for Jews to defend their rights in American law courts, and many Jews believed that American principles echoed Judaism’s values.²⁸ The Bill of Rights, ratified with the Constitution in 1789, prohibited the United States government from both establishing a national religion or inhibiting religion’s free exercise, but individual states worked out their own versions of religious rights at a slower pace. In Maryland nearly thirty years of struggle to allow non-Christians to serve in public office culminated in an 1825 ruling that Jews could take the oath of office on their Bible only if they also signed a document “declaring their belief in an afterlife of rewards and punishment.”²⁹ New Hampshire finally granted its Jews full equal rights in 1877, the last state to do so.

Jews also joined other American religious minorities to defeat measures that restricted their rights as citizens. Throughout the century Sabbatarian Christian groups and politicians took measures to ban labor on Sunday. Such laws were first upheld most strictly in New England and in some southern towns, but soon also were implemented in the West. These laws pressured Jews to labor on their own Saturday Sabbath in order to be employed by gentiles or to keep the patronage of their Christian customers. Economic need forced Jews who did not work on their Saturday Sabbath to labor on Sunday. In 1833 Alexander Marks was prosecuted by the town council of Columbia, South Carolina for keeping his store open on Sunday. The court rejected his argument that he observed a Saturday Sabbath by closing his store on that day and ruled that the Sunday Sabbath was to be enforced universally.³⁰ As these cases arose in various states, Jews, along with Seventh Day Adventists, Unitarians, and others, fought for their rights to observe their own—or no—Sabbath.

Jews also prevailed upon American legislative bodies to assist their coreligionists facing crises abroad. Like Penina Moise, Jews in the United States often viewed America as the solution to the oppression Jews faced elsewhere. But while Moise imagined Jews integrating into American society, statesman, journalist, and playwright Mordecai Manuel Noah imagined a colony for Jews situated on Grand Island in the Niagara River near Buffalo, New York. In 1825, after purchasing the land and gaining the support of members of the New York state legislature, Noah announced the opening of this colony, named Ararat after the site where Noah’s ark was said to have landed, and placed a marker on the island in the course of an elaborate dedication ceremony. Yet no Jews came. Russian and Austro-Hungarian political leaders may have suppressed news of Ararat, and many European religious leaders distanced themselves from it.³¹ American Jews preferred to live among other Americans in towns and cities rather than in a Jewish agricultural colony. Yet, Noah’s Ararat indicates early America’s readiness to accept Jews as well as American Jews’ dawning awareness that Jewish life in Europe was growing untenable.

At mid-century American Jews tried to engage the United States government in assisting coreligionists overseas. When a Capuchin monk and his servant disappeared from Damascus, Syria in 1840, that city’s Jews were accused of killing them in order to use their blood in making Passover matzo—a falsehood called the blood libel. The incident culminated in the torture and sentencing to death of seventy-two Jews; thirty-two thousand more Jews were suspected of complicity. The United States government registered its outrage even before American Jews spoke out, but Jews in many American cities soon organized protest meetings where non-Jewish politicians and clergymen urged the United States government to try to secure a fair trial for those arrested. Yet international outcry from United States and European political and Protestant religious leaders had little effect.

American Jews in 1858 again tried to intervene on behalf of coreligionists abroad. In Bologna an eight-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, fell ill and was secretly baptized by a servant in his household. Catholic authorities deemed the boy a Christian and took him from his home to be raised by the Roman Catholic Church. American Jews and Protestants joined in organizing protests, which, like those fifteen years earlier, failed to achieve their goal.³²

Those failures motivated American Jews to organize the Board of Delegates of American Israelites in 1859, their first attempt to create a national Jewish organization. Officers of the BDAI were lay leaders, not clergy, and, although the organization originally hoped to focus on both religious education and charitable efforts, it proved able to mobilize widespread support only when working to assist coreligionists abroad and when fighting for equal rights. When the United States government established a Christian chaplaincy to serve Union soldiers during the Civil War, the BDAI helped to obtain approval for Jewish chaplains two years later. Yet, representing less than 1 percent of the American population and with only half of America’s Jewish congregations choosing to participate in its projects, the BDAI never became a powerful organization. Its efforts to convince the United States government to secure for its Jewish citizens treatment equal to that of United States Christian citizens when traveling in Switzerland achieved some success in 1866, but the same effort in Russia came to naught.³³ Success there was not achieved until 1911. Ultimately, by century’s close, another organization, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, absorbed the BDAI’s goals and responsibilities.³⁴

In the colonial era Jews provided charity as individuals or through their congregations. But three factors motivated Jews to find new ways to care for poor men and women. Repeated economic downturns impoverished many Americans, and as the number of immigrants outnumbered native-born Jews, congregations often found themselves unable to care for the increasing number of indigents. By 1801 Charleston’s Jews had organized a society to arrange foster care for orphans. Second, few states granted married women property rights, and many charitable societies hesitated to assist a married woman who might be subject to an irresponsible husband. Most important, Christian charitable societies usually required their petitioners to hear evangelical instruction. More prosperous Jews often shouldered exceptional duties in solving those problems. In 1819 Philadelphia’s wealthy Rebecca Gratz (1781–1869) organized women from her congregation to form the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, the first nonsynagogal Jewish agency in America. Because the FHBS offered charity only to Jewish women, who were not counted as members of any congregation, it created bonds that bridged congregational and ethnic differences among Jewish families. Thus needy Jewish women around the country as far as Mobile, Alabama appealed to the FHBS. Only one year after the FHBS formed, New York’s oldest congregation, Shearith Israel, organized its own FHBS.³⁵ The FHBS remained an independent women’s organization and provided a base for new Jewish women’s agencies in Philadelphia. Expecting that Jewish women would be “foremost in the work of charity,” Gratz rallied them to provide charity, religious education, and foster care.³⁶ By the end of her life Gratz had organized the FHBS (1819), the first Sunday school for Jewish children (1838), and one of the earliest foster homes for Jewish orphans (1855) in America. Soon women’s benevolent societies were among the first organizations created in new American Jewish communities. In 1883, one year after the Tucson Citizen noted the presence of Jews in that city, its Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society and a men’s fraternity, B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant) had formed.³⁷

By the 1820s Jewish men also organized local mutual aid and charitable associations like Philadelphia’s United Hebrew Benevolent Society, in which both immigrant and native-born Jewish men took active roles. These organizations also spanned congregational loyalties and often required their members to fulfill certain Jewish laws they deemed fundamental, such as circumcising their male children and marrying according to Jewish law. Because needy Jews might not join congregations, these charitable societies strived to maintain what they deemed minimal Jewish obligations. Like the women’s charitable societies, these small men’s charities also proliferated. By 1860 twenty-three different charitable societies served Jews in Philadelphia, and thirty-five assisted Jews in New York City.³⁸

The needs of injured Civil War soldiers exacerbated the problems Jews faced in hospitals where they were subject to evangelical efforts, where they could not obtain kosher food, and where Jewish doctors could not find employment. In New York, where a hospital for Jews existed since 1852, an entire ward was given over to military needs.³⁹ Elsewhere, however, hospitals required a far greater financial commitment than many smaller communities could muster. Ultimately, Jewish hospitals emerged in very different ways, as the case of Pennsylvania can illustrate. Jewish soldiers received medical aid at any one of Philadelphia’s several military hospitals. When local Jews learned that a number of their coreligionists had died without any attention by Jewish clergymen, they opened a Jews’ hospital in 1866 largely because of the energy of local B’nai B’rith lodges. But in Pittsburgh, a smaller community in the western part of the state, the scene was very different. There Jews took the first steps toward a Jewish hospital in 1898, when the Hebrew Ladies Hospital Aid, religious female immigrants from Lithuania who provided kosher meals for Jewish patients, petitioned the Pennsylvania state legislature for permission to establish a hospital for Jews.⁴⁰

Civil War and immigration needs moved larger Jewish communities to bring their diverse charitable societies under a more efficient umbrella, like St. Louis’s United Hebrew Relief Association. Yet all the charitable efforts made in mid-century were dwarfed by the needs of more than seven hundred thousand Jews who arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1900. Most of these newcomers were impoverished Jews from eastern Europe, escaping severe economic and legal disabilities as well as violence organized against the myriad small Jewish towns clustered in the western area of Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. Most new immigrants settled in the industrial centers of America’s cities, especially the garment industry near New York’s port of entry and the cigar-making factories in Philadelphia and Boston. These factories demanded both skilled and unskilled labor but required little knowledge of the English language. Many of the immigrants spoke Yiddish, a language rooted in Hebrew, German, and Polish that had become the lingua franca of European Jews. American-born Jews and mid-century immigrants alike believed that these newcomers needed guidance in American ways as well as charitable assistance and set out to meet those goals.

New organizations, small and large, soon took shape. Sisterhoods of Personal Service, organized by New York’s Reform Temple Emanu-El, became popular among Reform women in cities like New York and Chicago where many impoverished Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe lived. Such sisterhoods promised both sensitive care and discipline in apportioning their largesse.⁴¹ Yet the newcomers soon overwhelmed local resources such as these, and in 1899 American Jews established the National Conference of Jewish Charities to efficiently marshal charitable resources nationwide.

With mid-nineteenth-century immigrants from central Europe, a “diverse and pluralistic” Judaism developed in America.⁴² The United States Constitution guaranteed unprecedented levels of religious freedom, and both Christians and Jews revived and reformed their religions, with many Americans changing religious affiliations.⁴³ Soon after the Constitution was ratified, in 1795, the first Ashkenazic (central and eastern European) congregation formed in Philadelphia, breaking away from Mikveh Israel. Like many new congregations, it began as a separate prayer group within the larger congregation, when individuals met to worship according to customs familiar to them from their European homeland. Calling itself Rodeph Shalom (Seekers of Peace) it was only the first of such ethnic congregations organized in many towns by new immigrants. By mid-century Philadelphia boasted five separate congregations, each with its own distinctive melodies, Hebrew dialects, and customs. In New York the first central European Ashkenazic congregation did not organize until 1825, but by 1860 that city’s Jews supported twenty-seven different congregations.⁴⁴ By then “every major Jewish community had at least two synagogues.”⁴⁵ Even within congregations, as Jonathan Sarna points out, disputes about what constituted appropriate religious behavior were common, made all the more difficult to solve by the fact that individuals disagreed about which religious authority ought to settle their arguments.⁴⁶ As Jewish population centers grew and the numbers of congregations multiplied, religious diversity expanded and religious authority lost its power.

While nineteenth-century Jews diversified Jewish practice, they also articulated a new religious philosophy. Those leading the push for change drew on Enlightenment ideals of reason and universalism, focusing on Jewish ethics and faith. New periodicals reached local, regional, and national readers, and each religious innovation sparked discussions, retorts, reactions, and evaluations that were published in these periodicals, defining Jewish life in new ways. These exchanges expressed Jews’ varied understanding of both Judaism and America. Different factions in American Judaism came to champion liberalism, biblical authority, or the pull of tradition. Although Philadelphia’s Rodeph Shalom emerged peacefully from Mikveh Israel, other congregations were marked by strife. In Charleston, South Carolina some Jews began to urge more revolutionary changes in religious practices. Many traditional Jewish practices, like obtaining kosher meat, were difficult to maintain. Frontier conditions sometimes made regular travel to public worship impossible. Feeling compelled to labor on Saturday, many Jewish men chose the workplace over worship. Synagogue worship itself came under scrutiny since an increasing number of congregants lacked mastery of the Hebrew prayers and sought to bring English into the historically Hebrew worship service. Isaac Harby, a leader among those in Charleston seeking changes, explained that for prayer to “proceed from the heart . . . it must proceed from understanding.”⁴⁷ Organized Judaism became a collection of voluntary associations, and the rabbi’s vocation, which historically consisted largely of teaching and adjudicating matters of Jewish law, became more like that of a Protestant minister, delivering sermons at worship, overseeing religious education, and performing pastoral duties to congregants in crisis. The changes Jews made to their religious and communal lives reflected their participation in their local American economies and regional cultures as much as it did their understandings of the meaning of Jewish life and faith. Embracing both American and Jewish ideals, they transformed their Judaism into something that looked very much like some varieties of Protestantism.

The first effort to reform an American Jewish congregation occurred in Charleston in 1824. Challenged by the religious ferment among their Christian neighbors, by the ideas of individualism and liberality that marked the postrevolutionary era, and by the growing religious apathy among Jews in their community, some of Charleston’s Jews petitioned the synagogue board for changes. Historian Marc Lee Raphael explained that their petition’s rhetoric suggests that they understood the similar transformations taking place among Jewish congregations in Amsterdam, Westphalia, Berlin, and Hamburg, all European cities where newly emancipated Jews were modifying Jewish worship in an effort to adapt Judaism to the demands of Christian society. Like those Europeans, Charleston’s reformers requested a weekly sermon along with commentary on the Torah reading, some vernacular (in this case, English) prayers, and greater solemnity and dignity at services. Rebuffed by fellow congregants at Beth Elohim (House of God), reformers in Charleston formed the Reformed Society of Israelites, the first significantly reforming congregation in the country. Although the society disbanded within a decade, its members rejoined the synagogue, Beth Elohim, where their influence grew. After 1841, when Gustavus Poznanski became its minister, Beth Elohim implemented the changes the reformers had sought.⁴⁸

Penina Moise wrote most of the 1842 English language hymnal compiled for Beth Elohim’s new worship services, which included organ music. Instrumental music had been banned from Jewish worship for centuries as a sign of mourning for the ancient temple in Jerusalem. But English language hymns sung to organ music helped more American Jews to participate in worship, as many of them, especially women, had little understanding of Hebrew. English language hymns became a centerpiece in worship services conducted by other reforming congregations later in the century. Thirteen of Moise’s hymns were so well received that they were included in the hymnal used by Reform Jews as late as 1932.⁴⁹ Yet, in 1824, Charleston stood alone among reforming synagogues, and a larger movement to reform Judaism waited two decades for its influence to spread.

From 1825 through 1868 Isaac Leeser (1806–1868), an immigrant from Wesphalia, led efforts to revive and reinvigorate traditional Judaism. Becoming religious leader of Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel in 1824, Leeser so shaped his era through his dedication and skill that historians have referred to it as the Age of Leeser. He came to the United States with a good Jewish religious education—far more than all but a handful of American Jewish men had obtained—although he was not trained for the rabbinate. Perhaps because he lacked mastery of rabbinic texts, historians have seen Leeser’s theology as bibliocentric, focusing on the Hebrew Bible rather than later rabbinic work.⁵⁰ However, his biblical focus suited the American environment that was dominated by Protestant Christianity, itself bibliocentric. Although he was expected to do little more than to lead prayers at worship, prepare boys for their bar mitzvah, supervise a kosher butcher, and represent Mikveh Israel in civic parades and on school boards, he moved well beyond those routine duties. Soon after he began his tenure at Mikveh Israel, women of the congregation requested that he deliver sermons in English, which he offered at the close of the standard worship service. Leeser collected and published those sermons in ten volumes, making them available to a wide reading circle. Many American rabbis followed this example. Because most American Jews had little grasp of Hebrew, Leeser translated the Hebrew Bible into English, compiled a new prayer book with updated translations for his congregants at Mikveh Israel, and translated Jewish textbooks used in Germany for American children. He established the first school of higher Jewish education in America, Maimonides College, in 1867, which graduated only three students before it was forced to close its doors at his death.

Perhaps the most influential of Leeser’s creations was the Occident and American Jewish Advocate, an English language periodical that he edited and published from 1843 to 1868. Circulated to Jews in the eastern and southern United States, the Occident carried Leeser’s editorials on many issues of interest to Jews, such as reports on legal battles over Sunday Sabbath laws and instructions for celebrating upcoming holidays. It also featured articles by Leeser and other knowledgeable Jews on the meanings of weekly Torah readings. It conveyed news from European towns where many of the families of American Jews still resided and showcased original inspirational poems and short stories by Jewish women. Finally, the Occident published annual reports and news from Jewish congregations and charitable societies around the United States in order to encourage more American Jews to engage in similar activities. American Jewish congregations, like Protestant congregations, hired, supervised, and fired their clergy through a board of lay leaders, and men like Leeser turned to print media to expand their authority and provide national leadership.⁵¹

Women who contributed to the Occident provided readers with Jewish versions of the sort of women’s religious literature that abounded in English language magazines and fictional volumes. Leeser had been raised by his grandmother, and he believed women’s devotion to Judaism to be vital to a thriving Jewish life in America. Jewish women often were approached by female evangelists who urged them to convert, asserting that Christianity valued and respected women to a greater degree than did Judaism. To counter those assertions, Leeser felt that Jewish women needed to be inspired by Jewish heroines and instructed by knowledgeable Jewish women. To that end, Leeser edited Englishwoman Grace Aguilar’s important theological volume, The Spirit of Judaism, first published in 1842, which was reprinted twenty times and continued to be sold in the United States into the twentieth century. Along with Spirit, Leeser saw to it that most of Aguilar’s works, fiction as well as didactic literature, found an American audience. Her poetry, often based on biblical characters and themes, encouraged Pennsylvanian Rebekah Hyneman to compose poems also featured in the Occident. British sisters Marian Moss Hartog and Celia Moss Levetus contributed short stories depicting women in scenes from ancient Jewish history as well as contemporary life.⁵² Those British writers found a ready audience among American Jewish women.

American Jewish women attended worship in larger numbers and on a more regular basis than was common in the congregations of Europe, where synagogues were nearly entirely a male arena. American women’s galleries featured lower balustrades with more openwork in their design so that women could more easily view and participate in the service led from below. New synagogues in New York and Philadelphia enlarged the seating space allotted to women who joined in synagogue worship on a regular basis.⁵³ Jewish women may have been influenced by the values of the larger American society whose values, drawn from Christianity, linked religiosity with attendance at a house of worship.

Both American and Jewish values strongly encouraged women to participate in charitable activities and religious education and the relationships formed in women’s galleries proved a foundation for early charitable and educational endeavors. Deeply felt religious faith motivated many Jewish women to take on the duties of religious educators. Assuring her sister charitable society coworkers that “our labor will not be lost to that Allseeing Eye that searches out the smallest . . . good and (helps it grow)”⁵⁴ in 1838, Rebecca Gratz and other Mikveh Israel women organized a Sunday school for Jewish youth, called the Hebrew Sunday School. American Jews developed Sunday schools because they suited the American parameters of Jewish life. In most states laws prohibiting Sunday labor made Sunday available for religious instruction. Often Protestant schools conducted “sweeps” that ushered nearby children into their classrooms, and the HSS women sought to keep Jewish children from such entrapments. Working without pay, Gratz joined Simha Peixotto and Rachel Peixotto Pyke, two sisters who conducted a secular school in their home, to open the Hebrew Sunday School. Initially, they adapted Protestant textbooks, but, with Leeser’s assistance, the women soon wrote their own catechisms and graded primers and studied Judaism in order to instruct their pupils. Many other women volunteers gave their time to both teaching on Sunday mornings and to their own education in Judaism.

The HSS provided the only formal Jewish education available to Jewish girls, and, as educators, to American Jewish women. It offered coeducational classes where Jewish boys and girls from all parts of the city could meet, a benefit of the school the founders hoped would contribute to the formation of Jewish marriages. Its small classes encouraged emotional bonds between student and instructor and among classmates. Seeking to further religious practice, curriculum concentrated on the basic principles of Jewish belief and explanations of Jewish holidays. Students earned rewards for attending any of they city’s synagogues. Informally, HSS instructors would alert FHBS members to needy children they met in Sunday school and arrange for older children to find positions with Jewish employers who would allow them to attend synagogue on Saturdays. By 1900 Philadelphia’s HSS served over 4,000 students in several branches. It continued to serve Philadelphia’s children over 150 years after its founding.

Limited to two hours of instruction each week, Sunday schools attained limited academic results. Yet the HSS women dramatically advanced American Jewish education. Outside of New York City resources for Jewish education were severely limited. In most towns Jewish boys received training for bar mitzvah and little else. So successful was the HSS that within two years similar schools were organized by women in Baltimore and Charleston. Women of Sheareth Israel in New York organized a similar short-lived school.⁵⁵ By the late nineteenth century Jewish Sunday schools became standard for small communities with limited resources as well as for most Reform Jewish congregations. Jewish Sunday schools in West Coast towns focused on Bible stories and holidays.⁵⁶ Through these schools the image of the Sunday school teacher became one of female intelligence, respectability, and leadership among both Christians and Jews.

In 1854 a new periodical advocated a new vision of what Jewish life could be. The Israelite, later renamed the American Israelite, was edited by Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900), who, over the next few decades, shaped the nascent efforts in reforming Judaism into a full-fledged Reform movement, complete with its own union of affiliated congregations (Union of American Hebrew Congregations, founded 1873), seminary (Hebrew Union College, founded 1875), and professional rabbinic association (Central Conference of American Rabbis, founded 1889). Based in Cincinnati, Wise had arrived in the United States from Bohemia in 1846 and first served as rabbi in a congregation in Albany, New York. His flamboyant personality brought him into conflict with his congregants, and he soon departed for an Ohio congregation, Bene Jeshurun, where he remained. His program for liberalizing Judaism sparked keen interest, especially among the Jewish immigrants struggling to make their way in a new country, among American-born Jews in towns with few Jewish resources, and among Jews who worried that their children might abandon Judaism entirely if not given an alternative to the traditions they found too restrictive. By 1860 the Israelite was the most popular Jewish magazine in the country, spreading Wise’s influence far and wide.⁵⁷

The Reform program Wise advocated urged simplifying Jewish practice, shortening worship services, and altering the traditional prayer book to emphasize ethics drawn from the Hebrew prophets and faith in God. It rejected dietary laws and some traditional customs—such as praying with heads covered. The worship service featured mixed male and female seating, choirs of men and women, a sermon in the vernacular delivered by the rabbi along with vernacular prayers. These changes were part of a larger movement begun in Germany in the early part of the nineteenth century. But in America Reform’s popularity largely rested on its fit with American culture shaped by Protestantism’s bibliocentric outlook and suspicion of ritual, the real lack of Jewish resources in many parts of the country, and the demanding pace of American life. Many Jews embraced Reform. Led by lay leaders like Moritz Loth, in 1876 the UAHC created Educational Aid Societies to raise funds for indigent rabbinical students at HUC and especially asked women to participate. By 1879 fifty-two societies, including those in Omaha, Galveston, Kalamazoo, Winona, Mississippi, and Wheeling, West Virginia raised $1,353. They continued to support HUC in this manner into the twentieth century.⁵⁸

Wise urged UAHC congregations to greater equality for women and many Reform congregations replaced the women’s gallery with mixed seating. Female readers of his Die Deborah, a German-language newspaper primarily for women readers, conveyed their perspectives. In 1857, two years after circulation began, one female Detroit reader argued that women ought to receive full emancipation in the synagogue and that the morning prayer said by men that thanks God for not creating them female ought to be stricken from “all prayer books.” She explained that in her experience American Jewish communities began when Jewish women insisted that their husbands band together to hire a butcher who could assure their households kosher meat. “The glorious tree of Judaism . . . would have toppled . . . if its roots were not buried so deeply in the hearts of pious female Israelites,” she explained.⁵⁹ Such letters alerted Wise to potential allies for change he would find among women.

By 1885 the UAHC stood as the sole organization of Jewish congregations. Yet less than half of American synagogues affiliated and congregational practices varied. Most UAHC congregations demanded the solemnity during religious services that their Protestant neighbors deemed appropriate for worship, despite the fact that such behavior ended the polyphonic chant, individualized pacing, and informal chatting familiar to traditional synagogues.⁶⁰ But different UAHC congregations prayed in Hebrew, English, or German, conducted Sabbath worship on Saturday or Sunday, maintained some or none of Judaism’s dietary laws, and read from an array of different prayer books. Many but not all Reform congregations eliminated the bar mitzvah ceremony for boys, providing their children instead with coeducational Sunday school instruction that culminated in a newly designed confirmation ceremony. By allowing local congregations autonomy, UAHC thrived and Reformers achieved some unity.

Unlike Wise, David Einhorn (1809–1879), a more intellectual and radical reformer based in Baltimore, insisted that Jewish Reform must be more fully grounded in philosophy and that the rabbi’s primary role was to instruct his congregants in a sophisticated Jewish theology that blended Judaism with German idealism. For Einhorn, religious practices should proceed from philosophy. Einhorn’s approach seemed destined to fail in America’s pragmatic-culture, but when his brilliant and erudite son-in-law, Kauffmann Kohler (1843–1926), a graduate of Hebrew Union College, rose to lead Reform at the century’s close, lengthy and sophisticated sermons delivered by rabbis became the centerpiece in many Reform religious services. In 1885 American Reform clergy attempted to bring order to their movement by outlining a set of principles they hoped would unite them. Yet leaders were unsure if that agreement, later referred to as the Pittsburgh Platform, would succeed in inspiring their laity. Kohler, who called for the meeting, admitted that the greater problem facing Reform was not disagreement among congregations but the “appalling indifference . . . among the masses.”⁶¹

Some among the masses saw things differently. Galveston, Texas B’nai B’rith leader Leo Napoleon Levi (1856–1904) condemned reform rabbis for concerning themselves too much with oratory and too little with the practical guidance congregants needed to raise their children as Jews.⁶² Benjamin Franklin Peixotto (1834–1890), editor of B’nai B’rith’s journal, the Menorah Monthly, refuted Reform’s claim that Judaism was only morality and argued that “ritual, too, was needed to express man’s feelings and emotions.”⁶³ More tradition-minded leaders like Leeser, his successor at Mikveh Israel, Sabato Morais (1823–1897), an ordained rabbi from Livorno, Italy, and Henry Pereira Mendes (1852–1937), rabbi at New York’s Sheareth Israel, believed that Reform encouraged Jews to apathy by jettisoning facets of Jewish practice that would enrich their religious lives. In the 1880s Morais began organizing a rabbinic seminary to train American rabbis in traditional Judaism after attending the 1883 graduation at Hebrew Union College of the first rabbis trained in United States. Wise had invited all of the major Jewish religious leaders to celebrate the important event. Wise hoped ultimately to unite all American Jewish congregations, but the graduation banquet made that dream impossible. The menu included shellfish, a food forbidden to Jews by both rabbinic directives and biblical law. Ultimately, the dinner convinced some that Reform had gone too far and that traditional Judaism needed new advocates. Forever after referred to as “the treyfe (unkosher) banquet,” it proved a pivotal moment. Ironically, the Reform movement that had jettisoned dietary laws was thwarted in its attempt to unite all American Jews—by a dinner.

In 1886 Sabato Morais led efforts to establish the Jewish Theological Seminary Association, a more traditional rabbinical school, which accepted students the following year. A coalition of New Yorkers and Philadelphians worked together to keep the seminary on its feet, but it foundered until New York financier Jacob Schiff lent the venture his considerable support. Schiff’s family worshiped in a Reform synagogue, but he hoped that an American-style traditional seminary would train rabbis who could help the many observant Jews among the eastern European newcomers adjust to American culture. Morais and Mendes agreed that the new seminary ought to be located in New York City, where most new immigrants resided. After 1900, as the children of those new immigrants sought formal Jewish education, JTSA ultimately became the centerpiece of the Conservative Movement in American Judaism. A decade later, east European immigrants themselves organized America’s first European-style rabbinical school, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological School, in New York. Their Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America formed shortly after century’s close. Thus the century that began with the first Ashkenazic prayer group forming in Philadelphia closed with American Judaism divided into two distinct religious styles, Reform and traditionalist. At the dawn of the twentieth century American Judaism boasted three seminaries that each perpetuated its own religious style.

Mid-nineteenth-century Jewish associational life often grew out of familial bonds. Frequently, the young immigrants made new marriages between others like themselves making the same journey. It was not uncommon for a family of brothers to marry a family of sisters, settle in the same region, form business partnerships, and found local Jewish associations together. Creating a familiar base of strength and mutual support, they helped one another to succeed in the new land. Many of these families felt an emotional attachment to German culture and language and to the ideal of bildung—or self-cultivation expressed through reading clubs, lectures, and social activities that brought families together. The organizational records kept by many of these groups evidence their commitment to the twin goals of practical usefulness and cultural development. Larger Jewish associations staged banquets and balls for festive Jewish holidays like Hanukkah and Purim and other occasions. Thus Jewish fraternities created social bonds that could unite communities otherwise divided by worship style.

American fraternal associations like the Freemasons had enjoyed widespread popularity from the colonial era through the nineteenth century, and Jewish men also formed fraternities. The most successful Jewish fraternity was the B’nai B’rith, begun in New York in 1843 by young men from Germany. Like other fraternities, secret rituals marked initiation and progress through its ranks, but B’nai B’rith’s rituals and symbols derived from synagogue structure and Jewish religious sancta. Historian Deborah Dash Moore has suggested that, through them, B’nai B’rith translated a “religious past into a secular future” and circumvented religious disputes then raging across the American Jewish landscape.⁶⁴ By 1851 it counted seven hundred members in six lodges in New York City alone, one of which was already conducting its affairs in English. By 1860 more than fifty local lodges operated around the country.⁶⁵ In smaller towns the B’nai B’rith lodge was sometimes the first Jewish organization to be established, with congregations later growing from its base. Local lodges also provided the organizing momentum for Jewish hospitals, old age homes, libraries, and Jewish schools. Following the Civil War, B’nai B’rith rededicated itself to serving the “highest interest of humanity.”⁶⁶ It commissioned sculptor Moses Ezekiel to create his famous statue Religious Liberty and donated it to Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition commemorating one hundred years since the Declaration of Independence. Today the sculpture can be seen on that city’s Independence Mall. Despite its universalist perspective, B’nai B’rith remained a Jewish organization, and by the 1890s the Menorah Monthly provided a national forum to discuss issues concerning Jewish life. Because B’nai B’rith members reshaped their organization to answer their changing needs, it remains a vibrant organization today.⁶⁷

Three years after B’nai B’rith began, members’ wives organized a comparable women’s organization, the United Order of True Sisters. According to historian Cornelia Wilhelm, the True Sisters, originally called Unabhangiger Orden Treuer Schwestern, was an entirely independent organization. By 1870 it boasted seven lodges from Philadelphia to New Haven, Connecticut. Through the order women hoped for both mutual aid and “refinement of the heart and mind and moral improvement.”⁶⁸ Yet these women sought more than bildung; they hoped to “fulfill their part of the Jewish mission” of morally advancing the larger society.⁶⁹ True Sisters passed through four degrees, each named for a biblical heroine—Miriam, Ruth, Esther, and Hannah. Passage was understood to entail expanding piety, leading from service (Miriam), through friendship and loyalty to sisterhood (Ruth), fidelity and self-sacrifice (Esther), and ultimately fortitude and true faith (Hannah). At the end of the century the True Sisters published their own newspaper, which promoted political discussions among Jewish women, first in German and later in English, who were not affiliated with their group. By then they supported Jewish hospitals, manual training schools, residences for women, and settlement houses around the country. As the order inevitably switched from German to English, many of its members, now American-born, interested themselves in what was to become a far larger women’s group, the National Council of Jewish Women, formed at century’s close.

The National Council of Jewish Women, the first truly national Jewish women’s organization, took shape after Chicago’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893. Its World Parliament of Religion provided the setting for a Jewish Women’s Congress where leading American Jewish women discussed their view of Judaism and its meaning for women. Female lay preacher Ray Frank delivered the opening prayer and spoke about women in the synagogue, journalist Mary M. Cohen explained her view of Judaism’s importance to domestic life, while seven more women explored the importance of charitable work in Judaism and the particular needs, as they saw them, of eastern European immigrant Jews. Congress convener Hannah Greenebaum Solomon along with Sadie American presented their idea for a national Jewish women’s organization, and within a year lodges had formed in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and elsewhere. The NCJW aimed to provide a forum for the education and cultural development of its members and to offer charitable assistance to needy Jews. Three years later the NCJW counted fifty lodges propelled by women’s desire for educational uplift and a shared sense of urgency to assist new immigrants.⁷⁰ To Solomon the organization’s success proved that “women’s sphere is the whole wide world without limits.”⁷¹ Like B’nai B’rith, NCJW continued to thrive throughout the twentieth century.

B’nai B’rith reflected the broad center of American Jewish men, but, for all its interest in bildung, it did little to advance intellectual life. Morais and Mendes, like Leeser before them, believed that without an educated laity Judaism would disappear. In their view nineteenth-century American Judaism needed well-trained educators, communal workers, and parents. By 1880 Morais had reorganized a Philadelphia Hebrew Literary Society into a chapter of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, with chapters in New York and, soon, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and other towns. The YMHA chapters provided a meeting place for literary, political, and religious discussions, meetings, concerts, and a library. Members often viewed the YMHA as a vehicle for revitalizing American Jewish life.

A small cadre of young YMHA men in New York and Philadelphia felt personally inspired to revitalize Judaism in America and provided much of the energy for two important projects launched in 1879. In December New York YMHA members staged a pageant—“The Grand Revival of the National Holiday of Chanucka”—hoping to trigger renewed interest in that holiday, which they believed was neglected in America. The gala YMHA event featured a series of tableaux vivants, comprising several hundred costumed men and women, followed by social dancing. Many American Jews anticipated annual social gatherings at Hanukkah, but these tableaux depicted episodes from Hanukkah’s history in a manner designed to inspire the participants and audience to take up this celebration—along with other facets of Jewish life—with new spirit. Depicting the Maccabees dressed in battle armor triumphantly reclaiming the Temple in Jerusalem, cleansing it of Greek gods and sacrificial objects, and rededicating it to the God of the Jews by lighting the sacred candles, it was a dramatic assertion that Jewish religious life was a manly and exciting endeavor. It refuted the Victorian trend toward female domestic religion and religious apathy. The following year Jews in Baltimore and Philadelphia staged similar events, and New Yorkers repeated their pageant.

Some American Jews read about that pageant in a new periodical, the American Hebrew, which began weekly publication under the editorship of Philip Cowen (1853–1943), perhaps the most diplomatic of that small group who first organized the pageant. Published in New York, the American Hebrew refused to take sides on the politics of religious organizations, but guided its readers to appreciate Jewish traditions, literature, customs, and to commit themselves to answering the needs of Jews in crisis in the United States and abroad. Many of its original editorial board adamantly opposed reform, yet Kaufmann Kohler often published his ideas in its pages. Like Leeser’s Occident decades earlier, the American Hebrew published reports from Jewish charitable and educational organizations along with occasional poems, essays, and stories by both women and men. Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), the most talented of American Jewish writers, often published there. A New Yorker who died from Hodgkins disease at only thirty-six, Lazarus had achieved national fame before the plight of Jews in eastern Europe stirred her to pen dramatic poems urging Jewish defense and uplift. Her most famous poem, “The New Colossus,” can be found today on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.

The American Hebrew, Occident, and Israelite were only three of more than sixty nineteenth-century American Jewish periodicals published in German, English, Yiddish, or Hebrew. The last two conveyed the views of their editors, Leeser and Wise, while the American Hebrew editors provided a forum for wide debate. Other periodicals, like the Menorah Monthly, served members of a particular organization. The American Jewess, published in the 1890s by Rosa Sonneschein (1847–1932), first in Chicago and then in New York, sought readers among Jewish women, especially club women like members of the NCJW. Many more periodicals, like New York’s Asmonean, San Francisco’s the Hebrew, Chicago’s Jewish Advance, and Baltimore’s Jewish Chronicle, were edited by local rabbis and served local readers. Together they created a lively forum for Jewish news, politics, and creative works that encouraged many individuals to take up their pens. Yet by and large their content remained practical news, serialized fiction, or sermonlike essays on religion. For more intellectual works American Jews looked to Europe.

In the 1870s a handful of talented young Philadelphians—some linked to the American Hebrew—determined to resurrect the Jewish Publication Society formed many years earlier by Leeser but destroyed by a fire in 1851. Judge Mayer Sulzberger (1843–1923), Leeser’s protégé, Semitics scholar Cyrus Adler (1863–1940), physician and poet Solomon Solis-Cohen (1857–1948), journalist Mary M. Cohen (1854–1911), businessman Morris Newburger (1834–1917), and Reform rabbi Joseph Krauskopf (1858–1923) led the effort. Ultimately organizing with lay control, JPS opened in 1888 determined to revitalize American Jewish life by publishing high-quality works on Jewish history and literature that would be truthful, free of prejudices, and geared to the general reader.⁷² It began by adapting admired histories published abroad, but by the end of the century it had published twenty important volumes including Heinrich Graetz’s seven-volume History of the Jews, newly indexed and translated, a translation of the Talmud, Israel Zangwill’s dramatic novel, Children of the Ghetto, and high-quality children’s books. The American Hebrew, the Hanukkah pageants, and JPS were part of a movement to revitalize American Jewish life by inspiring ordinary Jews to greater Jewish practice, Jewish learning, and Jewish culture.

The success of JPS signaled American Jewry’s maturity, and in 1895 Moravian-born Isidore Singer, an editor and prolific author in French, German, and English, came to America with a new publication in mind. Deeply moved by the groundless conviction of Alfred Dreyfus in France and the antisemitic sentiment it unleashed there, Singer hoped that a comprehensive collection of Jewish history, literature, philosophy, rituals, sociology, and biology would combat popular misunderstandings about Jews that seemed to feed hatred. The work’s historian, Shuly Rubin Schwartz, explained that Isaac Funk, a Lutheran minister and chairman of Funk & Wagnalls, agreed to publish the work, and several leading Jewish scholars, including many on JPS’s board, comprised its editorial board. Hundreds of leading scholars wrote essays. Called the Jewish Encyclopedia, and published in twelve volumes between 1901 and 1906, this effort played a major role in transferring Jewish scholarship from Europe to America, promoting Jewish scholarship in English, and endowing American Jewry with new respectability.⁷³

Those fin de siècle efforts, which also included an American Jewish historical society, an independent college of Jewish studies (Gratz College), and annual published analyses of the state of American Jewry, advanced Jewish culture immeasurably. American Jewish associations became more creative and ambitious at the same time that new immigrants from eastern Europe pushed American Jews to greater heights of charitable innovation and giving. New national organizations knit together American Jews of every region and educational materials instructed children and adults. Magazines and literature informed and provoked American Jews to redouble their Jewish commitments and consider new ideas. Jews depended upon these resources as they tackled new challenges in the twentieth century.

1. Hasia R Diner and Beryl Leif Benderly, Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America (New York, 2002), 43.

2. Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States (Berkeley, 2004), 79.

3. Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering (Baltimore, 1992), 37–40.

4. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, 2004), 375.

5. Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The Publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia (Cincinnati, 1991).

6. Ava F. Kahn, Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush: A Documentary History, 1849–1880 (Detroit, 2002), 111.

7. Diner, A Time for Gathering, 9.

8. John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, 1985).

9. Ibid, 11.

10. Hasia R. Diner, “Entering the Mainstream of Modern Jewish History: Peddlers and the American Jewish South” Southern Jewish History 8 (2005): 1–30.

11. Diner and Benderly, Her Works Praise Her, 93.

12. Kahn, Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush, 245.

13. Deborah Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (Albany, 1981), 25.

14. Gary Philip Zola, Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788–1828, Jewish Reformer and Intellectual (Tuscaloosa, 1994), 1–10.

15. Moses Rischin, “The Jewish Experience in America: The View from the West,” in Moses Rischin and John Livingston, eds., Jews of the American West (Detroit, 1991), 32.

16. William Toll, “From Domestic Judaism to Public Ritual: Women and Religious Identity in the American West,” in Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna, eds., Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives (Hanover, 2001), 128–34.

17. Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership, 37.

18. Zola, Isaac Harby of Charleston, 3.

19. Sarna, American Judaism, 45.

20. Diner, A Time for Gathering, 161–162.

21. Anonymous, “Freemasonry and Religion: A Concise View of the Origin, Progress, and Ultimate Aim of the Masonic Institution,” San Francisco, September 8, 1865 (Hebrew), quoted in Kahn, Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush, p. 426–27.

22. Sarna, American Judaism, 113.

23. Jean Powers Soman and Frank L. Byrne, eds., A Jewish Colonel in the Civil War: Marcus M. Spiegel of the Ohio Volunteers (Omaha, 1985), 1–13.

24. Sarna, American Judaism, 114, Dianne Ashton, Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America (Detroit, 1997), 227.

25. Anita Libman Lebeson, Pilgrim People (New York, 1975), 248.

26. Marc Lee Raphael, “Beyond New York: The Challenge to Local History,” in Rischin and Livingston, Jews of the American West, 58.

27. Leonard Dinnerstein. “From Desert Oasis to Desert Caucus: The Jews of Tucson,” 140, in Rischin and Livingston, Jews of the American West; and Earl Pomeroy, “On Becoming a Westerner,” in Rischin and Livingston, Jews of the American West, 196.

28. Jonathan Sarna, The American Jewish Experience, 2d ed. (New York, 1997), xiv.

29. Stanley Feldstein, The Land That I Show You (New York, 1975), 35.

30. Egal Feldman, Dual Destinies (Urbana, 1990), 66–67.

31. Jonathan Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Manuel Noah (New York, 1981); Sarna, American Judaism, 63; Feldstein, The Land That I Show You, 57–60; Diner, A Time for Gathering, 153.

32. Diner, A Time for Gathering, 154.

33. Feldstein, The Land That I Show You, 94.

34. Steven A. Fox, “On the Road to Unity: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations in America, 1873–1903,” American Jewish Archives 32.2 (November 1980): 166.

35. Hyman Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York (Philadelphia, 1947), 152.

36. See for example, Gratz’s Annual Report to the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, 1835, American Philosophical Society, Gratz Family Papers, box 17; Ashton, Rebecca Gratz.

37. Dinnerstein, “Desert Oasis to Desert Caucus,” 140.

38. Bertram Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (New York, 1970), 3.

39. Ibid., 105.

40. Dianne Ashton. Jewish Life in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1998), 42–43.

41. Felicia Herman. “From Priestess to Hostess: Sisterhoods of Personal Service in New York City, 1887–1936,” in Nadell and Sarna, Women and American Judaism, 148.

42. Sarna, American Judaism, 60.

43. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776—1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ, 2000), 54–199.

44. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 49–50.

45. Sarna, American Judaism, 59.

46. Ibid., 44–45.

47. Zola, Isaac Harby of Charleston, 125.

48. Marc Lee Raphael, Judaism in America (New York, 2003), 48.

49. Jay M. Eidelman, “Penina Moise,” in Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America, 2 vols. (New York, 1997), 2:932–33.

50. Feldman, Dual Destinies, 84–87.

51. Lance Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (Detroit, 1995).

52. Ashton, Rebecca Gratz, 162–66 and 186–194; Ashton, “Grace Aguilar and the Matriarchal Theme in Jewish Women’s Spirituality,” in Maurie Sacks, Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture (Urbana, 1995), 79–92.

53. Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in America (Cambridge, 2000), 36–39.

54. Gratz’s Annual Report to the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, 1835, American Philosophical Society, Gratz Family Papers, box 17.

55. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 152.

56. William Toll. “From Domestic Judaism to Public Ritual,” in Nadell and Sarna, Women and American Judaism, 138.

57. Rudolph Glanz, “Where the Jewish Press Was Distributed in Pre–Civil War America,” Western States Jewish History Quarterly 5 (1972–1973): 1–14.

58. Fox, “On the Road to Unity.”

59. Chasanlein [little eagle], letter to the editor, Die Deborah 2.24 (January 30, 1857): 187, translated by Heidi Thumlert. One wonders if this letter might have been written by Wise.

60. Raphael, Judaism in America, 49–50.

61. Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery, 161.

62. Leo N. Levi, “Judaism in America from the Standpoint of a Layman,” lecture to the Regular Council of UAHC, New Orleans, Louisiana, December 4, 1894, American Jewish Archives, MS collection no. 72, box 72, folder 5.

63. Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership, 48.

64. Ibid., 7.

65. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 4

66. Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership, 28–29.

67. Ibid., 10.

68. Cornelia Wilhelm,“The Independent Order of True Sisters: Friendship, Fraternity, and a Model of Modernity for Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Womanhood,” American Jewish Archives Journal 54.1 (2002): 43.

69. Ibid., 45.

70. Faith Rogow. Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893–1993 (Tuscaloosa, 1993), 26.

71. Mary McCune, “The Whole Wide World Without Limits”: International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893–1930 (Detroit, 2005), 1.

72. Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888–1998 (Philadelphia, 1998), 25.

73. Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America.