Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States 1830-1914 / After years of being scorned or ignored by historians, America’s German Jews are finally being rehabilitated. The historical lens, focused for far too long on the experience of East European Jewish immigrants, is at last widening to include those who preceded them, and who forged the communal structure which they then inherited and built on. What is emerging is a new and far more accurate view of how American Jewry developed, a view that puts events of our own day into their proper context.
Although German Jews were among the first Jews to immigrate to America’s shores, and even in the colonial period achieved numerical superiority over the pioneering Sephardi Jews, it was not until the 1840’s that they began to arrive in truly substantial numbers. Their origins were humble, and many began life here trudging wearily over back roads, heavily laden with peddlers’ packs. But with the American economy growing at a rapid pace, German Jews were soon able to take advantage of opportunity. Over the next eighty years they prospered, establishing Jewish settlements throughout the country. In the process they created new social, religious, and cultural institutions, assumed positions of communal leadership, and effectively reshaped the American Jewish community along new lines.
So pronounced was German Jewry’s influence that an entire period of American Jewish history is commonly referred to as the “German period.” This is actually something of a misnomer, since Jews from German-speaking lands formed only a fraction of those immigrating. Other Jews came from Poland, from elsewhere in Europe, and from outside Europe too, and for the same reasons: economic distress, persecution, restrictive laws, and the failure of movements aimed at revolution and reform. It was, however, largely German Jews, writing in the German language, who gave this period its distinctive character. In not a few cases, Jews born elsewhere passed themselves off as Germans—that was one way of achieving status.
German Jews left their imprint on America in such widely diverse areas as religion, culture, politics, philanthropy, and business. Theirs was a community flushed with economic success, actively involved in the world around it, fiercely determined to gain acceptance into the American mainstream—but not at the cost of abandoning Judaism itself. Reform Judaism, B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Committee, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish Publication Society, the American Jewish Historical Society, Hebrew Union College, and a host of other still extant movements, institutions, and organizations testify to the rich inheritance that German Jews bequeathed to those who came later.
Those latecomers offered them no thanks. East European Jews who emigrated to America en masse from 1881 to 1924 tended to view the natives, including the German Jews, mainly in terms of their own treatment at their hands. They noticed in particular some of the worst features of their German-Jewish brethern—their social aloofness, anti-East European bias, and their evident assimilationism. In all this they were not entirely wrong. Many German Jews in America did fear the new immigration, and thought it would provoke anti-Semitism. They saw the newcomers as social inferiors, and at least in the early years doubted that East Europeans could ever succeed in the New World. As for the East Europeans, in their justifiable umbrage at these attitudes they tended to overlook the generous contributions of America’s German Jewish philanthropists to institutions designed to aid immigrants—institutions that played no small role in helping East European Jews and their children move rapidly up the ladder to success.
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