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Review Essau

American Eyes Toward Zion

Yaakov Ariel

Vogel, Lester I. To See a Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in

the Nineteenth Centu y. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. xvii, 338 pp.

Davis, Moshe. America and the Holy-Land: With Eyes Toward Zion -1V.

Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995.193 pp.

The subject of America and the Holy Land has become, in the past two decades, a vital field of academic research. It might well be the special relationship that has developed between the United States of America and the State of Israel, particularly since the late 1960s~ that has aroused this strong interest. American and Israeli scholars have

, been searching for the origins of America's interest in Israel and the nature and character of America's interest in the Holy Land. Both Moshe Davis's America and the Holy Land and Lester Vogel's To See a Promised Land deal with the involvement of America with Zion in the generations that preceded the birth of the Jewish state.

The late Moshe Davis's book is a collection of essays, the fruit of a lifetime of interest in and exploration of the subject. The author, founder of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew Univer- sity of Jerusalem, established, as part of the Institute, the America- Holy Land Project, a center for the study of the history of the interaction between America and the Land of Israel. Among other things the project initiated the publication of a four-volume biblio- graphic directory of collections and sources for the use of scholars in the field. It also organized a series of scholarly colloquia dedicated to the study of the topic. The papers presented at these gatherings were published in a series of books called "With Eyes Toward

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Zion'' Davis edited the series and chose to publish the collection of his own works on the subject as a book in the series.

Davis's essays deal mostly with the religious and spiritual dimensions of America's involvement with the Land of Israel. The first essay, which serves as something of an introduction, examines the Holy Land in American spiritual history, which Davis understands as encompassing religious, cultural, moral, ethical, and creative deci- sionsmade by individuals and groups (p. 11). He believes that Zion has been a dominant theme in American thought since the beginning of the English settlement in the seventeenth century. In Davis's opinion, it was this special attitude toward the Land of Is- rael which helped shape much of the actual American policy toward that part of the world. Davis recalls ex-President Truman's words during a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 1953. "I am Cyrus!" exclaimed Truman, who actively supported the establishment of the State of Israelin 1947-48 (p.31). In line with this thesis, Davis examines biblical place-names in America. Such place-names, the patriarch of America-Holy Land studies claims, are manifestations of America's spirit, which was strongly impressed by the Bible (pp. 135-142). Davis brings forth all the names he could find in America which stem from the Bible and classifies them according to states and counties. However, his list of 384 biblical place-names is far from being complete. It includes eleven place- names in North Carolina, for example, but the state can boast amuch larger number. Orange County alone (which is not mentioned in the list) carries a number of biblical place-names, including Jordan River, Mount Moriah, and Mount Hermon.

Another chapter, "America in Zion: deals with American placeor institutional names in Israel. These, in their turn, reflect America's involvement in the building of the State of Israel. The list of settlements founded by Americans or named in honor of American individuals or communities includes Netanyah, founded in 1928 and named after American department store owner and Jewish philan- thropist Nathan Strauss. Another example is Tal-Shahar, a moshav (village) founded in 1948 and named after Henry Morgenthau, Secre- tary of the Treasury in F. D. Roosevelt's administration; Tal-Shahar being the Hebrew translation of the originally German Morgenthau.

Davis devotes one of his more interesting essays to American

282 American Jewish Archives

Christian devotees in the Holy Land. In this article he examines the impact of visits to the land on the views and careers of American Christian leaders and scholars. He concludes that in a number of cases the encounter with the land and its people shaped the visitors' opinions and agendas. In 1889, for example, William Blackstone, a Chicago businessman, evangelist, Methodist lay preacher, and propagator of the belief in the Second Coming of Jesus, visited Palestine. He was struck by the emptiness of the land and de- scribed it in relation to the Jewish people as "a land without a people and a people without a landlf Convinced that the Jewish people were destined to return to the Land of Israel before the arrival of Je- sus could take place, .he set himself to actively promoting the idea of the return of the Jews to Palestine (pp.65-66).

Davis devotes a number of articles to the American Jewish interest in and involvement with Eretz Israel. He views the Jewish attitude t e ward the Land of Israel as a key indicator of the quality and character of Jewish life in America (p. 45). For example, the change in the Re- form attitude toward Zionism, manifested dramatically in the new Columbus Platform of 1937, indicated a larger, deeper transformation in the Reform understanding of the relationship between religion and peoplehood in Judaism. Davis proceeds to examine the involvement of a number of leading figures in the American Jewish community with Eretz Israel. These include Isaac Leeser, one of American Jewry's more outspoken activists in the mid-nineteenth century, who edited the Occident, the only Jewish American journal at that time, and labored tirelessly for the establishment of national Jewish institutions. Leeser, the chapter tells us, became the liaison of emis- saries, correspondence, and interest in Eretz Israel in America.

One of the book's more interesting and original chapters deals with American Jewry and Moses Montefiore. Montefiore was an English Jew who had never set foot in America. His majestic standing in world Jewry and his philanthropic ventures among the Jewish settlements in Palestine nevertheless turned him into an almost legendary figure for American Jews. Davis lists, among other things, the names of institutions - educational, medical, and philanthropic -that were named after the eminent British Jew.

At the end of the book, under the title "Rediscovery of the Holy Land: Davis lists books and tracts written by American visitors,

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missionaries, and explorers of the land in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The entire collectionwas retrieved and reprinted by the America-Holy Land project at the Hebrew University. America and the Holy Land does not pretend to be the final word on the topic. The author sees himself as a pioneer in this field of academic research, and the book is more a sharing of the findings and thinking of a lifetime of research in the field than a narration or a summary of the issues involved. It explores selected themes, and does not attempt to summarize the field or even one issue in its entirety.

By contrast, Lester Vogel's To See a Promised Land concentrates on one theme, the American Protestant relationship to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century, which it attempts to record and narrate from beginning to end. Vogel explains his motivation for this study as a reaction to the America-Holy Land Project's choices and agenda. The four-volume Guide to America-Holy Land Studies, 1620-1948, claim Vogel, overlooked the sources at the Library of Congress, where he is a senior librarian. He wishes to set the record straight and make potential researchers aware of the richness and immensity of the collections available on this subject in the nation's largest library. Vogel decided to concentrate on the American involvement with the Land of Israel until the end of World War I, before current political issues, including the Arab-Israeli conflict, came to dominate the American standpoint in this part of the world.

Vogel begins his study with a chapter entitled "Reality and Image:' which examines the place of the Holy Land in American thought. He shares Davis's view on the persistence of the Holy Land as a major theme in American spiritual life. Interest in the Holy Land, Vogel argues, was a feature of American Protestantism that disregarded sectarian divisions and was common to virtually all denominations (p. 35). One might argue with this generalization. Different Protestant traditions and churches demonstrated varying amounts of interest in the Holy Land. For example,Unitarians related to the Land of Israel in a different way from adherents of churches that were influenced by the Reform tradition and American revivalism, such as Methodists or Baptists. Thebook then proceeds to discuss actual modes of encounter by American Protestants with the realities of the Land of Israel. Vogel begins by discussing travelers to the Holy Land. American visitors to Palestine included such diverse and distinguished individuals


as Presidents Ulysses Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, and writers Herman Melville and Mark Twain, to mention just a few among the many. These modem pilgrimages reflected the influence of the imaginary Holy Land on the American mind. Abraham Lincoln, just hours before he was assassinated, planned a trip to Palestine, Vogel notes. For many visitors, the desolate Land of Israel was a disappointment in comparison to the biblical descriptions. Mark Twain, in particular, took a rather unsympathetic look at the land and mocked his fellow travelers who refused to see the gap between image and reality.

American Protestants came to the Holy Land not only as travelers and sightseers. The country witnessed the arrival of Americans as missionaries, explorers of the land, diplomats, and settlers. Vogel deals extensively with each of these groups. American missionaries repre- senting the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions arrived in Palestine as early as 1821. By the middle of the nineteenth century, British and American missionaries in the region reached a tacit agreement. TheBritish concentrated their evangelization efforts in Palestine, whereas the Americans labored in Lebanon. Yet some groups, such as the Disciples of Christ, the Quakers, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance, sent missionaries to the Holy Land, who distributed Bibles, opened schools, and engaged in educational enterprises which left their mark on the country. Their missionary en- deavors,Vogel asserts, had a profound effect on America's relations to the Holy Land. Missionaries had the dual role of introducing American culture and systems to the country and enlightening Americans back home about conditions in the Holy Land (p. 120). Missionaryenterprise~~the author further claims, were closely con- nected to scholarly and diplomatic ones. Muchof the day-to-day activity of the diplomatic corps had to do with protecting missionary and scholarly communities. Following historian Joseph Grabill, Vogel also claims that missionaries strongly influenced American policy toward the Middle East.

To See a Promised Land makes for pleasant reading. Vogel loves anecdotes, and the bookis full of amazing yet delightful stories which serve, together with the many illustrations, to make a lively account. The book's detailed bibliography is undoubtedly the most extensive and covers most of the publications in the field.

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With all their merits, Davis's and Vogel's books do not exhaust the complexity and richness of the larger topic. Their books are comple- mented in part by other studies on America and the Holy Land, often written in conjunction with the project Moshe Davis established at the Hebrew University. Works by scholars such as Ruth Kark, Shalom Goldman, Gershon Greenberg, David Klatzker, Menachem Kaufman, and Joseph Glass shed light on other dimensions of the topic, such as American consular activity, travelers and visitors to the land, and Jewish settlers. The impact of these works is noted by both Davis and Vogel. Their two works, each in a different way, try to make use of and at times summarize the knowledge accumulated in the field. Yet there is room for more investigation on the subject. There are a number of areas that scholars have not researched so far. Orthodox Judaism and its actual involvement with Eretz Israel, to mention one topic, has not really been studied. In a generation in which there is a growing interest in women's history, the special role of women, whether as Jewish settlers or Christian pilgrims, to give another example, has also been overlooked. The history and deeds of a number of religious groups have never been studied; for example, no scholarly study has been done of the American Colony in Jerusalem.

Davis's and Vogel's very good and instructive books should stim- ulate further interest and inquiry and consequently additional publications in the field.

Yaakov Ariel teaches in the Dqartment of Religious Studies, the University of North Carolina. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is the author of On Behalf of Israel: American Fundamentalist Attitudes Towards Jews, Judaism and Zionism, 1865-1945 (1991)

Book Reviews

Armbrester, Margaret England. Samuel Ullman and "Youth": The Life, the Legacy.

Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.124 pp.

Samuel Ullman shaped religious life in two Southern Jewish communities during the late nineteenth century, wrote poetry in the early twentieth century, and since 1945 has been revered in Japan as the author of a poem cherished by business leaders. Margaret Arm- brester's new book offers a compelling account of Ullman's life, an introduction to his poetry, and insight into the popularity of Ulman's best-known work, "Youth."

Ullman, born in Germany in 1840, and named after his grandfather, Rabbi Samuel ben Isaac Ullman, arrived in America in 1851, set- tling in Port Gibson, Mississippi. After turning sixteen, Samuel studied at Rabbi Bernard H. Gotthelf's Louisville, Kentucky, school for eighteen months, returning to Port Gibson to resume work in the family grocery business. Samuel supported the Southern Democra- tic ticket in 1860, joined the Mississippi Militia in 1861, and served in the Confederate Army until he was wounded, late in 1862. Ullman moved to Natchez, Mississippi in 1865, where he helped establish a Reform congregation.

It was Reform Judaism, Ullman passionately believed, that enabled him to become a democrat and a "full-sized American." LT11- man led services for the new congregation, established the religious school, ran a small business, started his family of eight children, became president of B'nai B'rith's Seventh District (incorporating eight states), served on numerous Natchez boards, and was elected alderman. After moving to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1884, he first ran a hardware store and later sold insurance, but mainly chan- neled his energy into community work, serving as president and acting rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, and as an active member of city, civic, and business boards.

Ullman wrote beautiful sermons during the late nineteenth century, and after retiring, in 1908, wrote poetry until his death in 1924. "Youth" appeared both in a privately published volume of Ullman's

Book Reviews 287

work in 1922 and in a 1934 anthology of American poetry. In 1942, an admirer of Douglas MacArthur sent the general a copy of "Youth:' and MacArthur hung the poem behind his desk. During a visit to MacArthur in 1945, influential industrialist Yasuzaemon Matsunaga (best known as Den-Ryo-Ku-0, "King of Electric Power"), translated the poem, later distributing it to friends and business associates. During 1945 and 1946, Reader's Digest printed "Youth" in American and Japanese editions of the magazine. Japanese readers, particularly business leaders, have continued to treasure the poem. In the 1960s~ Kounosuke Matsushita, fearing that at age seventy he was too old to expand his business, read "Youth" and, invigorated, established Panasonic. Matsushita later distributed 20,000 copies of the poem. In 1990, when Kokichi Hagiwara took charge of Pittsburgh's National Steel Corporation, he announced that the poem would form the core of his plan to make the company profitable. In 1994, the Japanese ambassador to the United States traveled to Birmingham to visit Ulman's home, now a museum, following a $250,000 reno- vation, jointly funded by contributors from Alabama and Japan.

Armbrester writes well, and accomplishes what she set out to do: offering a brief biography of Ullman and an introduction to his poetry. But Ullman's extraordinary life - as a controversial advocate of African-American education and of rights for coal miners, and as a merchant without a college education who shaped Jewish religious life in two cities - deserves a more probing examination. While Armbrester's assertions are, on occasion, too sweeping (as, for instance, her observation that "most Jews in the late nineteenth-century South assimilated comfortably into the economic and civic life of their adopted communities"), the book will be of great interest to students of Japanese-American relations and admirers of Ullman's poetry. The University of Alabama Press deserves special recognition for one of the best book jackets in memory.

-Leah Hagedorn

Leah Hagedorn is completing her dissertation on Southern Jewish women at the Unviersity of North Carolina.


Goldman, Shalom, ed. Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries.

Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993. xxx, 259 pp.

The Hebrew Bible has had a particularly profound influence on American religious and cultural development. It served as the blue- print for Puritan settlement in America, and colonial Americans gave the study of Hebrew and the Bible a place of importance in their early academies. They were God's new "chosen people:' here to build His "New Jerusalem." The Revolution extended this sense of chosenness to the entire nation, thereby forming one of the building blocks of American self-definition, and the Bible and Hebraic culture have continued to mold the way Americans think, act, and perceive themselves. Hebrew and the Bible in America chronicles this early American fascinationwith Hebraic knowledge, offeringawide variety of essays about Christian and Jewish Hebraism in the colonial period.

The work is divided into five sections of three essays each. Topics include the European roots of Christian Hebraism, the myth of the Ten Lost Tribes, Puritan Hebraism, the colonial Jewish community, and finally, Hebraism in the colonial American academy. If an overarching theme can be found, it is the decline of religious cosmogony in the face of ever expanding scientific knowledge. As science became a better way in which to describe the origin and workings of the world, biblical and Hebraic knowledge became less vital. Yet, despite the loss of its once-central position in the American academy, Hebrew continues to have an impact, as editor Shalom Goldman points out in his introduction.

The first section leads off with a survey of Christian Hebraism from the medieval period through to seventeenth-century Britain by Ktziah Spanier. The essay provides a good review of Christian He- braism's movement away from Hebrew study for solely disputa- tional and conversionist goals toward other ends. By the Protestant Reformation, the idea of Jewish conversion had become far less important than the need to reestablish the authority of the biblical text over that of the Catholic Church. Reform scholars such as Johannes Reuchlin now argued in favor of the study of Hebrew and Jewish

Book Reviews

texts because of the information they provided about the roots of Christianity. According to Charles Stinson, this effort to ally with the scriptural veritas as containedin the "Old Testament" took on special significance in the Anglo-Saxon world. In his essay "Northern- most Israel: he examines the Hebraism of the late-seventh-century Anglo-Saxon missionary, the Venerable Bede, as well as that of thir- teenth-century BritishChristianity itself, in which the British Church becomes not only the spiritual heir of ancient Israel, but its embodi- ment as well. Though they were separated by a thousand years, Stinson notes the striking similaritybetweenBede and theNew Eng- land Puritan divines in their use and veneration of the Hebrew Bible, their conception of theUEnglish nation:' and their attitudes about the nature of the Church. The section's final essay, Barbara Krieger's "Seventeenth-Century English Travellers to Palestine:' describes the growth of interest in the Holy Land among English Christians. Though the essay is interesting, it is hard to discern a direct connection betweenPalestineandBritishHebraism, asKrieger herself admits.

The second section of the collection explores one aspect of Anglo- Hebraism in detail: the theory that Native Americans were somehow the descendants of the ten northern tribes of Israel, who were con- quered and exiled by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E. The "lost tribes: hidden behind the stone-throwing river Sarnbatyon, figure prominently in Jewish messianic speculations. The indigenous populations of the Americas were probably the last in a long line to purportedly be de- scended from the Ten Lost Tribes. The theory that the Indians were in fact of Jewish extraction became important to Christians in the seventeenth century as millenarian speculation predicted messianic happenings by mid-century. If North America's native peoples were Jews, then they needed to be converted to help usher in the millen- nial age. While the theory may seem fantastic to present-day readers, Cyrus Gordon's essay "TheTen Lost Tribes" presents some interesting primary and secondary evidence for a connection between the ancient Mediterranean world and pre-Columbian America. In "The Rise and Fall of the JewishIndian Theor).;" Richard Popkin places the theory withinits historical contexts. Whensciencereplacedreligionas thebest medium through which to explore the origins of the world, the connection between Jews and American native peoples became irnmater- ial, and the theory fell by the wayside.Grant Underwood's "The Hope of l m l in Early Modern Ethnography and Eschatology" describes


the impact of Manasseh Ben Israel's 1650 treatise on the relationship between Native Americans and Jews. Though Manasseh tried to mini- mize speculation as to a connection, he did admit its possibility. For the next century and a half, his Hope of Israel was offeredasproof of the tiebetweenIndians and the Ten Lost Tribes in order to justify millenarian speculations both here and abroad.

The essays covering PuritanHebraism begin with Arthur Hertzberg's "New England Puritans and the Jews." Hertzberg describes the Puritan attitude to Jews as ambivalent; though Israel and her descendants may have been important to the Puritan millennia1 scenario, actual living Jews were to be kept at arm's length. Bringing the essay into the modern day, Hertzberg suggests that this combination of admira- tion and contempt may have helped to keep anti-Semitism less malevolent in America than elsewhere. Louis Feldman's essay explores Cotton Matherfs use of Josephus in his Biblia Americana, an exegesis of the Bible begun in 1693 but never published. Feldman demonstrates the extensive influence of Hebraica on Mather, one of seventeenth-century America's most important scholars. Rounding out this section is Arthur Chiel's essay on Ezra Stiles's attitude toward and interaction with Jews. Despite the increasing tolerance of his era, which enabled him to accept and befriend Jewish individuals, Stiles, like many Christians, still maintained the hope that they would ultimately find the truth of Christianity.

The fourth section of the collection focuses on the colonial Jewish community. Ln "New Amsterdam's Twenty-three Jews - Myth or Reality?': Leo Hershkowitz provides an important reexamination of the origins of the American Jewish communityf convincingly challenging the acceptedversion of events. With new documentation from the Gemeente Archief in Amsterdam, Hershkowitz reconstructs some of the comings and goings of the first Jews in North America. With the exception of Asser Levy, most of New Amsterdam's Jewish residents were transient, here for economic motives, not colonization. The year 1654, he concludes, is too optimistic a date for the founding of the first Jewish congregation in America. A permanent Jewish community able to sustain a minyan (prayer quorum) did not arise until the eighteenth century. The essays by Nathan Kaganoff and Jacob Kabakoff examine the knowledge of Hebrew among American Jews in the colonial era. These two contributions reconfirm the notion that the

Book Reviews 291

level of Hebraic knowledge was low in the first North American Jewish communities.

The collection ends with three essays about Hebrew's place in the academy. Shalom Goldman's essay compares the instruction in Hebrew at Dartmouthcollege with that at the other colleges founded before the Revolution. Althoughmandatory Hebrew instruction was initially instituted, Hebrew lost its importance after the Revolution, the natural sciences now demanding more attention over classical languages. Matthew Wiencke discussestheimportance of Hebrew and the classics in Eleazar Wheelock's (1711-79) plans for Dartmouth College. Wheelock, the founder and first president of Dartmouth, wanted to trainIndians and Englishmen alike for service as ministers to their respective communities, and he relied heavily on the ancient languages to help develop the students' oratorical skills. Finally, Thomas Siege1 describes the transformationof Hebrew instruction at Harvard from the traditional recitation method to the lecture method, instituted in 1761 by Stephen Sewall, the first endowed professor of Hebrew in the United States. The change reflected the late-eighteenth-century shift in the mode of instruction at Harvard away from the tutorial and toward greater specialization. In both style and content, Sewall's lectures modernized the study of Hebrew at Harvard and placed it on a par with the most important subjects: divinity, natural philosophy, and medical sciences. Yet, as at Dart- mouth, Hebrew eventually lost out inimportance to the sciences.

All in all, Hebrew and the Bible in America provides a comprehensive review of the place and importance of Hebrew in colonial America. If Goldman's collection fails in any way, it is in having too broad a scope. Readers may occasionally wonder how particular essays fit together. The collection is also occasionally repetitious and sometimes slow-going. Nonetheless, this is a valuable addition to the study of early American religious and intellectual activity. Goldman's com- parative approach in choice of essays reflecting both Christian and Jewish issues allows for a much broader understanding of the topic. The collection will certainly be of interest to readers of early American religious history and Jewish history alike.

-Jay M. Eidelman

JayM. Eidelman is completinghis Ph. D. dissertation at Yale LInviersity. His subject is North American Jewry, 1790-1830.

292 American Iewish Archives

Ross, James R. Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China.

New York: Free Press, 1994.298 pp.

The Imperial Japanese armed forces occupied Shanghai (except for its International Settlement and French Concession) in 1937, and all the rest of the city on Pearl Harbor Day in December 1941. Under Japan- ese rule, humidly sweltering Shanghai proved to be the final refuge of some 20,000 Jews, principally from the GermanReich. The Japanese military authorities required no irnmigrationvisas, and while politics determined the issuance of landing permits, these were compara- tively easier to obtain than visas for other lands of refuge.

James R. Ross, a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston, has written a superblyreadable volume about this essentially transient Jewish community whose existence effectively came to an end by 1950. While a number of books have been written on the same subject, Ross does particularly well in admixing fluently composed journalistic reporting with extensive scholarly research into a whole array of library and archival source materials. He describes the historical antecedents and life experiences of the city's exiled German- Austrian Jewish refugees and provides challenging information on the thousand-odd yeshiva scholars from Lithuania and Poland. Ross's book stands as a skillfully written saga of Jewishrefugee life and death in Shanghai. It offers a surprisingly detailed account of the economic, health,night-life, cultural,religious, and interpersonal facets compris- ing that saga. The book therefore belongs to the genre of popularly written scholarship within the parameters of Jewish history and experience during the Holocaust.

As a literary technique, Ross has his primary set of living sources report on and bear witness to the separate phases of the Shanghai story, which he adjusts to a fixed time frame. Arrivals in Shanghai are placed into the 1938-39 years; the community, its structures and per- sonalities, programs and goals, controversies and developments proceed for the next following two. The outbreak of war in Asia and its consequences for the Jews in Shanghai continues for another two, followed by the establishment of the infamous "Designated Area" for

Book Reviews 293

"stateless refugees,'' as the Japanese authorities had us categorized. The areais referred to as a ghetto, a term that may be deemed inappro- priate in light of the fact that there were considerably more Chinese residents in this "ghetto" than Jews. The final l'exodus'lphase of the story deals illustratively with evacuation of those refugees who had succeeded in surviving starvation diets and tropical diseases. Most of the survivors were eminently fortunate in securing entry to the United States; lesser numbers returned to Germany and Austria or emigrated to British-mandated Palestine and a variety of other lands, such as Australia. In assessing the Shanghai community of transient emigrants, it is

incumbent to always bear in mind that the terrors of hunger and sickness, miserable residential conditions, and lack of professional or trade opportunities were as nothing if compared to Auschwitz and similar infernos. There are all too many Shanghai refugees who failed and sometimes still fail to adequately understand this. And while thousands of Jews who had survived the war in hiding in Berlin and other cities voluntarily remained in Germany after the war and rebuilt its Jewish life, some of Ross's sources bitterly complained about being evacuated back to Germany,

The author makes note of some 1,100 Shanghai Jews who went to Palestine once they were able to do so, but as it turns out, the great majority of them were members of Shanghai's older establishedRussian- Jewish community and not of the refugee community. Ross reports that while there were "a number of Zionists" among the German and Austrian Jews, only a very few actually joined the struggle, the armed fight for national Jewish statehood in British-mandated Palestine. This observation highlights a somewhat poorly informed description of the B'rith Trumpeldor-Betar section of the Zionist Revisionist movement.

Since one of Ross's principal witnesses served as an enthusiastic member of Betar, greater stress might well have been placed on this rightist-political component of Zionism, as led and interpreted by its manheg (leader), Dr. Vladimir Jabotinsky. Betar members wore a brownuniform, andleftist Zionists, as well as many non-Zionists, took offense, because these uniforms resembled those of the Hitler Youth. An unwarranted analogy: Betar members were wearing these uniforms long before the emergence of Adolf Hitlerls youth movement.


Ross unfortunately fails to discuss a very significant movement within the Jewish community, namely, that encompassing non- Zionist and indeed even anti-Zionist German and Austrian Jews. Immediately after Japan's surrender, Gerhard Gerechter, a Social Democrat, led the formation of the Association of Democratic Ger- mans among Shanghai's Jewish refugees. While the Zionist organizations urged the city's Jews to hoist the flag that is now the national insignia of Israel, a great many of them somehow got hold of black- red-gold Weimar Republic flags. This caused an uproar among stalwart Zionists and especiallyamongtheZionistRevisionist/Betar stalwarts. Indeed, there were ugly occurrences of Betar members invading public meetings of the Democratic Germans and resorting to physical aggression against them. Hans-Werner Friedlaender, one of the foremost intellectuals among the Democratic Germans, was viciously assaulted, and there were other unhappy instances of this sort.

There is extensively welcome material that the author submits on , the practice of Judaism inshanghai. The former district rabbi of Star- gard in Pomerania, Dr. Phil. Emil Silberstein (1865-1946), consis- tently referred to as Walter, who however was his son, played a major role as champion of German Liberal Judaism. Dr. Silberstein's important ideological role as a 'German citizen of the Jewish faith: and his consistent opposition to Zionism and to East European religious Orthodoxy, would have merited illustrative treatment.

Ross's book is a first-rate social history on a largely neglected chapter of Jewish experience, and it is considerably more inclusive and objectively written than was a previously composed one. Unlike that more classic text on the Shanghai refugee community, James R. Ross takes due cognizance of the reformist, liberal-religious developments among Shanghai's Jews.

Escape to Shanghai fulfills a perceived need in providing a fortunate melding of scholarship and fluidly written prose. In the words of a most distinguished member of the Shanghai refugee community, W. Michael Blumenthal, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, "James R. Ross has written the exciting story of stateless Jewish refugees who struggled to remain alive under horrible circumstances in one of the world's truly most unlikely locations.''

-Klaus J. Herrmann

Klaus J. Hermann teaches political science at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He received his Ph.D.from the University ofMinnesota. Dr. Hennann has written extensivly on German-Jewish histo y, especially on the plight of German- Jewish organizations during the Third Reich. He left Germany i n 1940, emigrating to Shanghai, where he remained until 1947.


Penkower, Monty Noam. The Holocaust and Israel Reborn: From Catastrophe to Sovereignty.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.376 pp.

Linked by an inextricable bond of destruction and resurrection, the Holocaust and the creation of Israel represent a critical break in Jewish history. The Holocaust brought the modem period of Euro- pean Jewish history, with its optimistic faith in emancipation, tolerance, and pluralism, to a crashing halt. At the same time, the horror of the Holocaust gave rise to a new chapter in the national experience of the Jewish people, as the State of Israel rose Phoenix-like from the ashes of the crematoria.

While the organic connection between theHolocaust and Israel has become a common theme in scholarly literature and popular culture, the relationship between the two has been asserted more often than it has been demonstrated. In The Holocaust and Israel Reborn: From Catastrophe to Sovereignty, Monty Noam Penkower, professor of history and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Touro Col- lege, brings together an impressive collection of essays on this difficult and important subject. Penkower's beautifully written essays draw upon a wide range of archival sources (mainly in Israel and the United States), interviews, and the author's close familiarity with the relevant historical literature in order to explain how Jews and Christians became convinced that Jewish statehood was a necessary response to the Holocaust.

Twelve of the fourteen essays in this volume have appeared elsewhere in somewhat different form. Some of them, such as the compelling analysis of the "Bergson Boys" -an enterprising group of Irgunists who waged an American propaganda campaign in favor of rescue and a Jewish army during World War I1 -may be well known to specialists. Other essays will be less familiar, and deserve to be brought to the attention of readers who may have missed them the first time around. Two previously unpublished essays - on Christian support for Zionist objectives during World War 11 and on the personal attitudes of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Book Reviews 297

toward the "Palestine problemJ'-provide fresh perspectives on these issues.

The volume is divided into five clearly delineated parts. The first section consists of a single essay on the efforts of "Jewish statesmen: particularly Nahum Goldmann, Stephen S. Wise, Leo Motzkin, and other leaders of the World Jewish Congress, to protect the rights of European Jews between the two world wars through a creative combination of diplomacy and protest. Penkower contends that Jews were vulnerable to the rising tide of anti-Semitic practices and poli- cies during the 1920s and 1930s because they lacked a state of their own. According to this analysis, long-time Zionists like Goldmann and his colleagues were statesmen without a state, powerless without the power that comes with sovereignty.

The second and third sections of the book contain essays dealing with the ways in which Zionist activists, American Jews, pro-Zionist Christians, and the American and British govements each re- sponded to the Holocaust. All of these essays lend support to Penkower's main thesis: that Nazi genocide and Allied inaction provided the catalyst for the realization of the Zionist dream. Some of the subjects which these essays cover, such as the British and American governments' unwillingness to make rescue and resettlement a priority, have been examined by David Wyman, Henry Fein- gold, and Saul S. Friedman, as well as in Penkower's own monographic study, The Jews Were Expendable (1983). The strength of this new volume, however, is that it relates Anglo-American in- transigence to the growth of pro-Zionist sentiment in a variety of quarters during and immediately after the war.

These essays provide a nuanced portrait of the Zionist movement during its most challenging years. They describe how leaders such as David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Abba Hillel Silver, and Stephen S. Wise tailored their strategies to fit the shifting demands of international diplomacy and military necessity. Penkower gives careful attention to the historical agency of these Zionist activists, whose decisions and disagreements directly shaped the future of their cause. At the same time, he never loses sight of the broader context; he makes it clear, for example, that it took the Holocaust to transform American Zionism from a small philanthropic enterprise


into an effective political movement dedicated to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

This volume also addresses the difficult question of whether American Jews or the Zionist leadership could have done more to help European Jewry during the Holocaust. Like Henry Feingold, Penkower argues that the organized American Jewish community wielded only a modest amount of economic and political power during the Holocaust years. The notion that American Jews had a controlling influence over the Roosevelt administration was an anti- Semitic fantasy, not a political reality. Thus, even as he illustrates the persistence of divisiveness within the American Jewish community Penkower maintains that a unified American Jewry would have been powerless to force the United States government to rescue European Jews. Zionist activists won small but significant victories - they pressured the Roosevelt administration to create the War Refugee Board, and they were able to help some Jews escape from Nazi- occupied Europe -but Penkower establishes that they, too, lacked the political power necessary to transform the Allies' war against fascism into a war to save Jews.

The two essays which make up the fourth section of the volume use biographical analysis to shed additional light on the connections between the Holocaust and the triumph of Zionism. An essay on Eleanor Roosevelt clearly demonstrates that her compassion for the victims of Nazism converted the "First Lady of the World from anti- Zionism to an active commitment to Hadassah's Youth Aliyah and other progressive resettlement efforts in the State of Israel. An essay on Rabbi Leo Jung, which includes the transcript of an interview with the long-time religious Zionist, shows that Jung saw the crea tion of the State of Israel as an opportunity for Jewish redemption in the wake of the Holocaust. For Jung and for Eleanor Roosevelt, as for countless other American Jews and Christians, the catastrophe of the Holocaust provided convincing evidence that Jewish statehood was the only reliable protection against Jewish persecution.

The final section of the book contains three especially powerful and insightful essays exploring the legacies of the Holocaust. In an essay on genocide, Penkower asserts that the Holocaust can only be properly understood as a specifically Jewish event without historical precedent. At the same time, he argues that the Nazis' depersonal-

Book Reviews 299

ization of European Jewry undermined the sanctity of individual life and paved the way for a postwar world of "acceptable losses:' "surgical strikes:' and "ethnic cleansing." The controversy which erupted in the late 1980s over a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz provides Penkower with the opportunity to investigate the Vatican's failure to aid European Jewry during the Holocaust and the more recent tendency of many Polish Catholics to claim that they, too, were victims of the Nazis. An essay on the relationship between American Jewry and Israel, which was prescient in its warnings about the danger of right-wing extremism in Israel, considers the ways in which American Jewish identity and Israeli politics have both been founded on the memory of the Holocaust. All three essays seek answers to a critical question: how can Jews and Christians grapple with the historical meaning of the Holocaust? To understand the Holocaust simply as a universal human tragedy is to trivialize or deny its special significance for the Jewish people. At the same time, Penkower suggests, the Holocaust provides an inadequate basis for Jewish identity and Jewish politics. The best hope for Jews, for Israel, and for humanity, he intimates, is to learn from the Holo- caust without becoming trapped by it.

Taken together, these carefully crafted essays provide an incisive analysis of the complex and sometimes troubling relationship between the Holocaust and Israel. While they will unquestionably add to the understanding of specialists in American Jewish history, the Holocaust, and Zionism, they should also appeal to readers interested more generally in Jewish history and diplomacy during the twentieth century.

-Stuart Svonkin

Stuart Svonkin received his Ph.D.from Columbia University. His book on the in- tergroup relations movement in America will be published in 1997 by Columbia University Press.


Kaplan, Albert0 D. Memoria de un Midico [Recollections of a Doctor] Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano,

Coleccion Temas, 1993.190 pp.

Among the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States, a considerable number wrote their autobiographies. Few of these writings have been published, and their quality varies, but they offer valuable insightsinto human relationships ina particular society and assimilation into the culture of the majority. Many can be found at the YNO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City and the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. Autobiographies by the grandchildren of immigrants to Latin America, particularly by a physician, are not so common. One such book, Alberto Kaplan's Recollections of a Doctor, will be analyzed here in order to see if it helps explain the history and culture of Jews in Argentina. Although Kaplan's autobiography tells us much about his professional life, we are more interested in his account of the life of the Jews in Argentina.

Alberto Kaplan, born in Buenos Aires in 1923, feels that he has deep roots in Judaism. Migration within his own family occurred over several generations. His grandparents immigrated to Argentina at the end of the last century and settled in the Baron de Hirsch colonies. But his parents did not remain there and went to Buenos Aires; his own children later emigrated to the United States.

Kaplan feels that his children left Argentina because of the country's political instability, as shown by the civil war, the war with England, and the severe economic decline in the 1970s. His own personal experience in the 1950s in the United States could also have contributed to their decision to leave. The Kaplan family's story is not unique. There is a tendency among Latin American Jews to emigrate to the United States.

In the United States, Kaplan's children chose a more traditional Judaism. Since the United States is a democracy, the different ethnic groups can keep their own traditions. In Argentina, however, this is not possible, because it could be considered a threat to social stability.

Kaplan's grandparents and parents lived in small towns in the

Book Reviews 301

Argentine countryside. His great-grandparents emigrated from Lithuania to Argentina in the 1890s and settled in Moises Ville, in Santa F6 Province. Like many immigrants, they had to struggle against locust plagues and floods. When conditions improved they began to raise cattle and later were able to send their children to college. Kaplan's father became a doctor.

Kaplan's maternal grandparents emigrated to the same colony, where they opened a butcher shop. His grandfather bought the first automobile in town; his mother became a pharmacist. Thus both sets of grandparents overcame many difficulties and improved their economic conditions. Many immigrants were not as successful and left the agricultural colonies. They emigrated to urban areas. Some even left for the United States.

In 1922 Kaplan's parents moved to the Piedmontian colony of Tacural, near Moises Ville. His father, the only doctor in town, was greatly admired. Kaplan has fond recollections of his cousins and of Shabbat at his paternal grandparents' home. On Sundays, most of the people of Tacural went to Sunchales, the nearest town, to at- tend mass, shop, and seek professional services. Kaplan's father and the local pharmacist, also a Jew, helped build a Catholic church to keep the local population from leaving Tacural.

In 1930, Alberto Kaplan's family moved to Buenos Aires. He recalls the fund-raisers from many Jewish institutions who came to his parents' home. The family read the Buenos Aires newspaper El Diario Israelita and took the children to Yiddish plays. He and his sister attended afternoon classes at the Folks Farband school, where they learned Hebrew, and the history and geography of Israel, and cele- brated Jewish holidays mainly for the sake of tradition. Kaplan also attended Hebrew classes to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah, which helped him keep his Jewish identity.

As a youth he joined a Zionist group that had about loo members. The Second World War led to the polarization of public opinion in Argentina. Although most of the population supported the Allies, some were influenced by Nazis and anti-Semites in the government and in the army. In the early 1940s~ the police began to classify leftist political activity as anti-Argentina. Anti-Semitic groups held public meetings, published pamphlets, and exhibited anti-Semitic carica- tures in Florida Street, the most important street in Buenos Aires.


The police considered Kaplan's Zionist group, Avuka, subversive.^' Members had to ask for special permission to hold their meetings, which were spied on by the police. Later Kaplan paid an official to "lose" the page that classified him as a "Zionist." Because of a Zionist stigma in his police file, he always had to wait a long time whenever he needed an official record. Certainly Kaplan's attitude must be seen as a struggle for survival in an underdeveloped and authoritar- ian country.

Although he belonged to a Zionist organization, Kaplan had no idea of emigrating to Israel because he felt strongly attached to Argentina. This attitude was not uncommon among the Jews in Argentina, who as a group identified themselves closely with the nation.

In the course of his recollections, Kaplan refers very often to military putsches and anti-Semitic demonstrations. In 1942, he began to study medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. The following year, he enlisted and had a frightening experience in the army, where admi- ration of Germany and Nazism played a great role. One of his Jewish friends discovered that the officer who had harassed them was a Sephardic Jew, who was hiding his identity.

Although Jewish students were not allowed to serve as interns in the public hospitals, Kaplan was accepted in one in 1947. He and another Jewish intern were harassed by anti-Semitic colleagues. The discrimination against Jewish doctors and interns in the public hospitals lasted for more than thirty years.

In 1951, Kaplan got a grant at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. At first a resident in neurosurgery, he later became an instructor there. In 1954, he returned to Argentina and later married. He worked in several institutions, including some Jewish ones, and at theuniversity of Buenos Aires. He wrote many scientific articles and took part in several conferences in his field, in Argentina and other countries.

Kaplan became a physician like his father, who probably had been oneof the first Jewishdoctors in Argentina. Hismother got her degree in pharmacy in 19x9. She was one of the first Jewish women to earn a college degree. Kaplan's oldest son followed the family tradition; he is now a physician in the United States.

Kaplan tells us about his family, his professional life, and his ties to Argentina. He does not attempt to describe the general Jewish

Book Reviews 303

role in his country. We cannot expect him to analyze it, because he is not a historian. He refers to his ownlimitations clearly. He says in his preface that there are few first-hand accounts of the Jewish presence in Argentina since the turn of the century. With his autobiography he hopes to bridge part of this gap. Therefore one must accept his intentions and consider his book as the personal account of a second- generation Argentine Jew.

-Ethel Volfzon Kosminsky

Ethel Volfion Kosminsky is a professor of sociology at the University of SiTo Paulo State-Marilia Campus in Brazil. As a Fulbright scholar, she did her research at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York Cityfvom 1994 to 1995.


Coleman, Julie L. Golden Opportunities: A Biographical History of

Montana's Jewish Communities. Billings, Mont.: Sky House Publishers, 1994.120 pp.

In Golden Opportunifies, Julie Coleman challenges the commonly held view that immigrant Jews from the Old World, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, settled and remained in the large eastern cities. While many of them did, there were significant numbers, mostly young men, who sought fortune in the West, including the Montana frontier. They were among the early arrivals in places like Virginia City, Last Chance Gulch (Helena), and Butte. Some worked at mining, others as peddlers, still others became merchants in a variety of enterprises. They also were active in the cultural and political Life of their towns.

The other main focus of this volume is biographical, as indicated in the full title. The major portion of the text is devoted to sketches of prominent Jewish citizens in Helena, Butte, and Billings. While Jews were to be found elsewhere in Montana, these were the cities where Jewish communities as such developed. The use of the bi- ographies proves helpful in conveying a sense of the Jewish presence over the years.

Early on the three communities shared a common concern in the need to bury their dead in the traditional manner. This led to the organization of societies to establish cemeteries, as well as to dspense char- ity, care for the sick,and arrange for holiday services.The formation of congregations for worship benefitted from continuing Old World immigration - relatives, wives for single men, the fostering of family life andcommunity vitality.

Other commonalities in the communities were found in the organization of B'nai B'rith, the involvement of Jews in the Masonic Order, and the emphasis upon education, which, unhappily, resulted in the outmigration of many of the young in pursuit of higher learning and then employment opportunities elsewhere.

Notable differences in the three Jewish communities reflected places of origin. Helena, the first to gather, was peopled mainly by

Book Reviews 305

German immigrants with strong Reform traditions. While a few elderly observed Orthodox practices, the congregation employed a Reform rabbi, allowed men to leave their heads uncovered during worship, and permitted men and women to sit together.

Butte was another story, with the "richest hill on earth" drawing a mix of Jews from different Old World origins. The result was the emergence of three separate congregations :Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. Eventually, however, dwindling numbels would require a compromise of practices to keep at least one congregation alive. Meanwhile, there was notable divisiveness within the ranks. As in Helena, Butte Jews found acceptance in the community both as business people and as private citizens.

In easternMontana, ina different setting, Billings Jews were the last to develop elements of community. The contrasts with Helena and Butte were notable. The Jews who arrived on the first trainsfthe author tells us, were mostly peddlers and fur dealers. They struggled to make a living, having fewer kinship ties than in the other cities, and also experienced less acceptance in the community at large. Yet the Jewish community in Billings eventually grew, with members becoming prominent in business and as leaders in the city.

Montana Jews, like their coreligionists elsewhere, faced the pres- sures of assimilation, on the one hand, and of the retention of Jewish identity, on the other. Cultural adjustments were necessary to achieve economic objectives; yet in this new land, Jews did not lose their at- tachment to religious tradition. This important aspect of the Montana experience might have merited further consideration.

Billings became Julie Colman's home in May of 1952, just as oil explorations in the Williston Basin were stirring a boom in the region. The Jewish congregation by then had some professional people, though the majority were still in the retail business. Soon the author, a college-trained homemaker restless for community service, was involved in the Billings chapter of the League of Women Voters. Later, serving on the state board, she traveled frequently to Helena and became acquainted with people whose roots went back to the early days. This led to the research and personal interviews that form the backgrounded for this volume.

Golden Opportunities tells an overlooked part of the Montana story. The only previous scholarly endeavor in this area was a master's the-


sis by a rabbi submitted to the University of Montana in 1950, an effort, Coleman notes, that failed to consider developments in Billingst The Jews in Montana have been few, hardly major players in the Montana drama, and their numbers have declined over the years. In 1917 there were about 2,500 in the state; by 1940 there were only 1,800. Today, by one estimate, there are around ~,ooo,half of whom choose not to be identified as Jews (p. 110).

Yet the author finds a growing interest in Judaism, evident, for example, in college courses, and in increased attendance at Friday night services, including non-Jewish visitors. Majco, a statewide organization, provides better communication between the various congregations. In addition to the cities studied, the author lists Jewish groups in Bozeman, Great Falls, Missoula, and the Flathead Valley.

Golden Opportunities will be of interest not only to Jewish readers but to students of history with an appreciation for the various themes which add meaning to the Montana story. The book includes numerous black-and-white photos and illustrations, together with a section of references and an index.

-Lawrence F. Small

Lawrence F. Small is president emeritus and professor emeritus of Rocky Moun- tain College, Billings, Montana. He received his Ph. D. in histo y from Harvard University. He is theauthor ofseveral volumes on Montana histo y.

Notes

I. Another recent study of Jews in Montana, authored by Dolores Morrow, is included in Lawrence F. Small, ed., Religion in Monfana: Pafhways to the Present (Billings, Mont.: Falcon Press, 1992-1995).

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Swierenga, Robert P. The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora.

Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.465 pp.

As a nation of immigrants, we are forever rearranged by the arrival of newcomers to our shores. It is a process of addition that continues to this day, and no matter how small, has contributed to our national mosaic. The challenges awaiting the immigrant are enormous; aside from the daunting task of learning a new language and trying to sur- vive economically, the newcomer of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries faced geographic isolation, the uncertainties of the frontier, and the hazards of agricultural or mercantile pursuits. And for the Jewish immigrant there was the additional obligation of religious survival, which would become impossible if he existed as a minority of one individual or family.

Despite the obstacles of an unexplored, undeveloped continent, the immigrants came. Often they had no choice, for war, persecution, and chaos dictated the need for physical survival above all else. Such conditions, however, were not the imperatives that compelled emigration from the Netherlands. According to Robert Swierenga, the interruption of Anglo-Dutch commerce, brought about by the French occupation of the Dutch republic and the Napoleonic wars, caused havoc to the economy and reduced many members of the Jewish community to paupers. It was thus economic necessity that forced Dutch Jews to leave Amsterdam, the ''new Jerusalem:' for the untried shores of the New World.

This is essentially the starting point for The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora. The author, a professor of history at Kent State University, has written extensively on Dutch irnmi- gration to North America, and has compiled two source books on Dutch households based on the U.S. population censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1870, and ship passenger manifests. He asserts that the history of Dutch Jewish immigration "has been largely unexplored [and] is important within the history of American Jewry because the Dutch were the forerunners, the early leaders of the synagogues and benevolent societies" (bookjacket backflap). While this state-


ment has to be documented (the heart of the book), it should be realized that it covers no more than 6,500 people (a careful estimate), who entered the United States between 1800 and 1880. Most came directly from Holland, a substantial minority stopped off in England for several months or years before moving on, and a few arrived by way of the Dutch Caribbean islands.

The Dutch Jewish community was by no means homogeneous in the late eighteenth century, and Swierenga details the differences between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Dutch and German/Polish Jews, rich and poor. Intermarriage between Dutch and German, Pol- ish, or English Jews was quite common, but not so among the Sephar- dic Jews from the Iberian peninsula who had fled to Amsterdam after 1492. The distinction between the two groups was noticeable from theirlastnames,thei~eligiousrites,andtheirseparatesynagogues. The Dutch Ashkenazim imported their religious leaders from the Jewish academies of Central and Eastern Europe, the Dutch Sephardim drew theirs from their own religious centers in Holland. Generally, the Sephardim were regarded as superior (even "aristocratic"), while the Dutch Ashkenazim were more closely identified with East European Yiddishkeit.

The earliest emigration of Dutch Jews to the New World involved Sephardim from Amsterdam who settled in Brazil and the West Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Dutch West India Company was the promoter of this enterprise; some of the settlers in the Dutch Caribbean did very well in sugar, owned and traded in slaves, and became prominent in Surinam and Curaqao, with the largest Jewish community in Willemstad. Congregation Mikve Israel, founded there in 1659, prospered for 200 years.

The first Jews to land in New Amsterdam in 1654 were also Dutch, but they were hardly welcome. However, seven of the West India Company's "principal shareholders" were important members of the Amsterdam Sephardic community, and due to their influence the new immigrants were permitted to stay. It was the opening wedge for all who followed.

The overwhelming majority of the Dutch Jews who immigrated to North America would be peddlers, retailers, and merchants. Most came with mercantile skills and little capital. They settled first in the cities along the eastern seaboard from Boston to New Orleans, with

Book Reviews 309

the largest concentrations in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Swierenga has collected a wealth of data, and his study provides lists of names, occupations, and specificlocations by ward in eachcity where the newcomers settled. We learn about the increase of Dutch Jews by ten-year intervals, the establishment of synagogues, and the growing divisions between Orthodox and Reform congregations.

The pattern that emerges hardly differs from place to place. As soon as the Dutch Jews were sufficient in numbers, they organized three different institutions: synagogues, benevolent societies, and burial societies. The overwhelming majority of the Dutch Jews were Orthodox, at least at first, and as long as they resided on the eastern seaboard. The scarcity of religious leadership was offset initially by the basic religious training of the adult males, most of whom could conduct Shabbat services.

Before 1830 two hazans provided role models for the early settlers: Joseph Pinto and Isaac Touro. The first served as leader of Shearith Israel in New York from 1758 till 1765, the latter headed Newport's synagogue in Rhode Island for two decades (1760-1780). Both men were far more than cantors in the traditional sense. Pinto taught Spanish and Portuguese as well as Hebrew, and was quite knowledgeable in rabbinic literature. Touro directed religious education and established a Talmud Torah school. Cantors like Pinto and Touro - both of them born and educated in Amsterdam- were the spiritual lodestars for a nascent community they conducted the services but did not preach. The occasional visiting rabbi delivered a sermon in Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch. Not until the rnid-nineteenth century did the use of English become habitual for speaking from the bimah.

Among the Dutch Jews of New York City, the leadership of Samuel Isaacs cannot be overestimated. His long tenure at Shaaray Tefila and his defense of Orthodox Judaism against the reforming tendencies of German Jewry were only part of his many contributions. He founded the Jewish Messenger, promoted Jewish education, worked for Palestinian relief, fought anti-Semitism, helped in the establishment of a Jewish hospital and a benevolent society, and spoke to save the Union during the Civil War. The list is incomplete, and all the more remarkable since Isaacs, born and educated in Amsterdam, was never formally ordained. But his religious influence went well

310 American Jmish Archives

beyond the city, and he maintained close contact with his friend and collaborator, Rabbi Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia.

Besides New York, Philadelphia and Boston were the only cities to see the establishment of a "Netherlandisch" synagogue. The Dutch Jews who settled in Philadelphia came directly from Amsterdam (those in New York had often lived for a while in London first) and seemed to be better off economically. Before 1870 virtually all Dutch Jews were Orthodox. Bnai Israel of Philadelphia, founded by Dutch Jews in 1852, lasted till 1879, but after the Civil War Jewish immigration from the Netherlands slowed. In Philadelphia, as elsewhere, Dutch Jewish acculturation led increasingly to intermarriage with German Jews and the loss of Dutch identity. A similar pattern occurred in Boston, where again in the post-Civil War period the relatively small Dutch Jewish contingent was absorbed into the much more numerous German Jewish community.

Economically there was a subtle transformation as well. Dutch Jews who had begun as peddlers and small retailers were buffeted by the vagaries of the American market. The depression of the late 1850s saw a number of business failures, the Civil War made some rich, and the great Chicago fire wiped out a number of prosperous merchants. In Philadelphia the Lit brothers' department store was a Dutch Jewish success story, and so was Moses Aaron Dropsie, a prominent Philadelphia attorney who promoted Jewish higher education by founding a college. Two areas of business-diamonds and tobacco-became a Dutch Jewish activity, but more often as workers than as entrepreneurs. Workers in late-nineteenth-century America turned to unions for protection, and were led by Samuel Gompers, who, born in London of Dutch Jewish parents, had moved to the United States in 1863 and helped to organize the American Federation of Labor.

By the 1880s Dutch Jewish immigration slowed to a trickle, while German and East European Jews began to arrive in ever larger numbers. Swierenga has taken a very close look at these Dutch forerunners, and his account at times may seem more genealogical and statistical than is necessary. Since this is the first book on the subject, however, the approach he adopted may be called for. The many typographical errors, especially of dates, are not.

As the Dutch immigrants left the east coast for the midwest, their

Book Reviews 311

Orthodoxy waned and their influence lessened. Reform Judaism, anathema to most Dutch Jews, triumphed in the person of Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger of San Francisco, who was an outspoken assimila- tionist. "In sum: Swierenga writes, "the early national period was the Dutch era in American Jewry when Dutch Jewish immigrants from Amsterdam provided leadership in synagogues, schools, and society. But over, the middle decades Dutch Jewish homogeneity and orthodoxy gave way to the heterogeneity and heterodoxy that characterizes modem Jewry(' This role is all the more remarkable if we remember the small number (6,500) that was involved.

- Ernst L. Presseisen

Ernst L. Presseisen is professor emeritus of modern European and German history at Temple University. He was born in Rotterdam, Holland, where in 1942 he and his family were sent to Westerbork, an SS transit camp, and in 1944 to Bergen- Belsen. He was liberated by the Russian Army on April 23,1945. Professor Pres- seisen is the author of, among other works, Germany and Japan: A Study in Totalitarian Diplomacy, 1933-1941 (New York, 1949)


Pollock, Zailig. A. M. Klein: The Story of the Poet.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.324 pp.

At first glance, the title of Zailig Pollock's book, A. M Klein: The Story of the Poet, would lead the reader to believe that this is another biography of the father of Canadian-Jewish literature, supplementing Usher Caplan's Like One That Dreamed:APortrait ofA. M. Klein. Instead of filling in some of the lacunae in Caplan's biography, however, Professor Pollock offers us a detailed analysis of much of Klein's poetry and prose in support of a tightly argued, intricate thesis.

Chairman of the English department at Trent University and chairman of the A. M. Klein Research and Publication Committee, Pollock has devoted a decade to the study of Klein's work, and the results of his labor are indeed impressive. He peppers his text with epigraphs from Gershom Scholem, Rainer Maria Rilke, Martin Gardner, and Walter Benjamin to give a broader context for his argument about the interchangeability of insides and outsides, an inner and outer thematics prevalent in the key works of Klein.

He fires his opening salvo from Scholem's "Towards an Under- standing of the Messianic Idea in Judaism": 'According to the dialectics of Jewish mysticism, the drive to the essence was at the same time the drive outward. The re-establishment of all things in their proper place, which constitutes redemption, produces a totality that knows nothing of ... a division between inwardness and outwardness." Scholem's passage sets the tone for Pollock's examination of various dialectical forms in Kleids own thinking. At every turn, however, this dialectic undermined the poet's stability: he was driven to tragic silence instead of redemption; and instead of a totality elimi- nating divisions, he faced fragmentation in "schizoid solitude: The drive to outer acceptance ended in inner-directed solipsism.

The quotation from Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" is fortuitous: "The Klein bottle has no inside or outside. What seems to be its inside is continuous with its outside.. . . Unfortunately it is not possible to construct a Klein bottle in three-dimensional space:' Like the Moebius strip, another emblem of postmodernism, the Klein

Book Reviews 313

bottle breaks down boundaries of definition. The breakdown of the Klein life, however, is a more serious matter, and it is not possible to construct or deconstruct a three-dimensional Klein life, though Pollock's effort certainly moves in the right direction.

Like the other epigraphs, the sentence from Walter Benjamin's "One-Way Street" is appropriate: "Any human movement, whether it springs from an intellectual or even a natural impulse, is impeded in its unfolding by the boundless resistance of the outside world." For Klein, Montreal's one-way street eventually became a dead-end, unfolding was his undoing, and he dissolved into boundlessness.

According to Pollock, Klein retells the story of the poet throughout his career as an unfolding of the one in the many-unity in the midst of diversity, where diversity shades into adversity. In poem after poem Pollock relentlessly pursues this theme, which Klein himself had earlier pursued. Invoking metaphors of "unfolding,!' "remembering,!' and "unrolling the scroll,!' the critic convincingly echoes the creative writer who struggled between countervailing centrifugal and centripetal forces of flight and return in relationship to the Jewish community.

If Klein wanted to serve as a spokesman for his community in his writing, teaching, translating, editorial work, speeches, and political career, he became increasingly disillusioned with a Canadian-Jewish public that failed to appreciate him. Ultimately the spokesman became silent, and Pollock traces the sounds of silence from the early poetry of the twenties until the late prose works of the fifties.

In addition to the scroll and Klein bottle as emblems of Klein's aesthetic, Pollock identifies the pattern of the Rorschach blot which Klein found in Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry: "the model of internal symmetry frayed with peripheral ambiguity;" This piling up of figures calls to mind yet another figure of the Chinese box within a box as Pollock's commentary coincides with Klein's: "TheRorschach blot describes both the principle of the One in the Many and the process of unfolding through which the principle manifests itself." Thus Pollock's allegory of reading a story within a story heads in a postmodernist direction.

Further complicating matters is Klein's position vis-A-vis modernism. Although Klein's diction was heavily archaic, he welcomed modernist writers such as Kafka and Joyce, but rejected the mod-


ernists' sense of alienation as he sought to ground his work in commitment to community, to the political and historical events before, during, and after World War 11. Pollock concludes by demonstrating Klein's affinities with postmodernism rather than with modernism. That is, Klein's skepticism about absolutes places him closer to contemporary aesthetics than to earlier brands of modernism.

Pollock is especially strong in his analysis and evaluation of Klein's poetry, pointing out limitations and weaknesses in Klein$ verse. The first serious discussion focuses on "Out of the Pulver and Polished Lens" (1931)~ a poem about Spinoza. Pollock singles out Klein's images of "prism" and "flying motes" as examples of the One in the Many. As sure-footed as Pollock seems to be in his arguments, he occasionally hesitates with humbling gestures: "I am, of course, aware of the danger of circularity in basing an interpretation of a poet's development on an account of the chronology of his poems which may have been influenced by this interpretation in the first place.. . . In short, I am confident that my account is a reasonable one, but I am aware that some of its details are, to a certain extent, based on educated guesses" (p. 36). After a decade of painstaking research, a con- fession of this kind must be somewhat frustrating.

Pollock explores the motif of a young child being escorted by a loving and protective male adult, generally an uncle or father or teacher. If the escort represents continuity and tradition, there is a countercurrent of failed meetings which indicate the problematic nature of an easy alliance. Klein is rarely able to create characters who interact with one another in a convincingly realized social world. Thus, the narrator in Klein's novel, The Second Scroll, searches for his Uncle Melech but never actually meets him. Both characters seem to be symbolic mouthpieces for certain points of view rather than fully-fleshed, three-dimensional characters. Henry Kreisells later short story, "The Almost Meeting: captures this aspect of Klein's life and work.

After comparing Klein and Bialik, Pollock traces recurrent metaphors of the body and the city, the inverted tree of the lungs, Klein's symbol of the interaction between the individual and the community. Equally important is his linkage of the detective story and biblical commentary. Just as Klein was caught up in the act of commentary and skeptical of that very activity to provide definitive an-

Book Reviews 315

swers, so Pollock is aware of the limitations of his own arguments. An interesting discussion of "Stranger and Afraid:' a detective story of the soul, allows the reader to speculate on Klein's approach to voyeurism, paranoia, and panoptic modes of perception from Montreal's mountain to the hills of Safed.

The analyses of "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" and the Quebec poems in The Rocking Chair are provocative and intriguing, as is the comment on the detective story: "Specifically, in its central motif, the careful interpretation of scattered and apparently unrelated clues which eventually add up to a single coherent solution, he saw a model for his own search for a meaning underlying the apparent chaos and fragmentation of existence." While the author adduces Paul Auster's comments on the detective story, one could also include the hermeneutics of Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard, and Mario Praz on Poe and this genre.

Pollock also brings to bear a fascinating passage from Borges which applies uncannily to Klein's The Second Scroll. Connections to Harold Bloom's kabbalistic criticism would not be amiss here, nor would connections to S.Y. Agnon, whose dominant agunah metaphor affords yet another paradoxical perspective on the One in the Many. One stage beyond the detective story is Klein's later obsession with murder. Does one detect images of crucifixion, with Klein as some kind of martyred Jesus and The Second Scroll as his version of the New Testament?

Having plumbed the depths of Klein's dialectics, Pollock avoids the pitfalls of "reducing everything to a single coherent and reas- suring pattern" (p. 240). Yet for all his attempts to move away from the master narrative of modernism to the lesser truths of postmodernism, from the One to the uncertain Many, his subtitle The Story of the Poet smacks of certainties not present in the relativistic "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape." The mystery of the figure rolled up in a scroll of the silence remains: for one who wanted to be a spokesman for a community, he fashioned a language that seemed foreign to the hard of hearing.

-Michael Greenstein

Michael Greenstein has taught at, among others, the University of Toronto and the Universite' of Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solidtudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish Canadian Literature.


Seager, Richard Hughes. The World's Parliament ofReligions:

The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. xxxi, 208 pp.

In May 1893 the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago opened its doors to the public. This occurred at a time when the United States had reached a decisive turning point in its history. The impact of the Industrial Revolution had brought far-reaching social and economic changes. What had been a predominantly rural-agrarian society was rapidly turning into an urban-industrial society.

No other city symbolized this rapid change more vigorously than Chicago, the metropolis of the American West. The city served as the hub for the nation's railroads. Raw materials like wood, iron ore, and coal, as well as agricultural produce and cattle, were brought to Chicago, processed by its industries, and distributed throughout the United States and beyond. Between 1880 and 1890 the population of Chicago more than doubled from 500,000 to over I million.

The Columbian Exposition, with its famous White City, presented an optimistic perspective of this dawning new era. The exhibition was a rich source for countless cultural metaphors and symbols of Gilded Age America, of America's own understanding of its past and destiny, and of its role among other nations. But the set of ideas which shaped the Columbian Exposition reflected the rather specific viewpoint of its makers. While some scholars emphasize the aesthetic aspects of the Columbian Exposition in a rather nostalgic manner, recent historiography has analyzed it and other American fairs rather critically. Within the self-perception of the American rnid- dle classes, withtheir seemingly unswerving optimism, there was little room for the lower classes. Blacks and other minority groups were excluded or presented in a stereotypical or even racist fashion. The social reality of the working class was all but absent from the dream world of the exhibition.

Richard Hughes Seagerls book belongs to this more recent current of historiography on the fairs. Seager's study, the first in a new series

Book Reviews 317

called "Religion in North America; proves how fertile an intellectual- history approach to this subject can be. His focus is the cultural and ideological landscape of the Columbian Exposition.

The World's Parliament of Religions, Seager's main subject, was one of several conferences, like the Women's Congress or the Jewish Denominational Congress, which were organized under the roof of the Columbian Exposition. The failure of the World's Parliament of Religions to overcome the dividing lines between the religions serves as paradigm for Seager's main thesis that the Columbian Exposition's claim to universality was particularist in its very roots. Since there has been little research on the Parliament in the past, this work is somewhat of a pioneering study on the subject. Seager relies primarily on several collections of the speeches given at the Parliament, ana- lyzing the discussions in a narrative account of the Parliament's proceedings against the background of the Columbian Exposition.

At the closing session of the World's Parliament of Religions, the leading Jewish reformer and co-sponsor of the event, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, remarked that the Parliament would be "a new portal to a new life; for all of us a life of greater love and greater trust in one another.'" The optimistic undertone of Hirsch's address reflected not just the high expectations of a Reform rabbi but those of most participating Catholics and the representatives of America's many different Protestant denominations. They shared the vision of a global religious unity for the emerging twentieth century. Seager characterizes this common religious platform as liberal, Western, and Judeo- Christian in its ideological content. Yet the Parliament failed to achieve that goal precisely because, as the author shows in his elaborate study,its"universalistic agenda turned out to be particularistic."

In order to examine this point, Seager focuses primarily on the encounter of the American Judeo-Christian mainstream with leading Eastern religions from Asia. On the floor of the Parliament the delegates from India and other Asian countries presented their religious beliefs competently and thus challenged the conception of a forthcoming universalistic religion. By affirming their own cultural and religious agenda, they implicitly argued for a pluralistic model and exposed the cultural shortsightedness of the American mainstream theologians.

The American delegates themselves were only superficially united:


American Catholics and Jews shared a vaguely universal vision; their primary objective, however, was to underline that they were not out- siders but an essential part of the American mainstream. Most of the Western delegates did not really confront the Eastern religions. For some, like William Martin, an American who had worked as a missionary in Peking, it was just a matter of underdevelopment and backwardness. His favored solution was to Christianize the peoples of China. Others, like Emil Hirsch and several Unitarian delegates, offered quite elaborate visions of a forthcoming universal religion. Yet they remained within their religious discourses. Hirsch's speech, "Elements of Universal Religion: for instance, echoed his contributions to the dialogue between radical Jewish reformers and Unitar- ian ministers. Hirsch developed the key terms of his theology, such as duty, and repeatedly emphasized the important role of Jesus, the "great teacher of Nazareth.'" It is quite obvious from Hirsch's paper that he thought it far more important to find a common platform with certain Christian representatives than to involve himself seri- ously with the theology of Hinduism or Buddhism.

Important questions and problems of the Parliament, like an agreement over central definitions of the religious discourse, remained unsettled. To embrace other religions as equal partners was impossible for many Christian delegates because the specter of com- parability violated the all-embracing aspirations of Christianity. Many Asian speakers, on the other hand, had already encountered the West, and in that respect they were well ahead of most of the Western delegates. The Indian delegate Vivekananda, for instance, questioned convincingly the necessity of a unified, global religion. For him it was a matter of content rather than form: God was "in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls? The Parlia- ment of Religions was, nevertheless, "most definitely a liberal event: writes Seager, but the willingness to convene with representatives of various faiths did not necessarily mean that all partici- pants were able to settle on an identical conception of a universal religion.

Seager looks beyond the World's Parliament of Religions as such when he carefully explores aspects of the cultural and ideological "landscape" of the Columbian Exposition and the Parliament that reflected the ideology of the American mainstream. What he calls

Book Rwiews 319

the "Columbian Myth of America" was the underlying ideology of the Exposition. This optimistic myth expressed itself in the classical architecture of the White City, in gigantic displays of the Stars and Stripes, and in the huge statue of the Goddess of Liberty. Classical symbols "served as a rich source for the religious and mythic imagination of nineteenth-century America's Protestant mainstream."

According to the Columbian Myth, America's "mythical claim to universality" was rooted firmly in the Greco-Roman tradition of Western civilization. A central element of this optimistic spirit was Protestant Christianity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, religious concepts about the forthcoming millennium merged with the secular ideal of human progress to form a "religion of civilization" (Robert Handy). While this (Christian) Anglo-American mainstream ideal appeared to be inclusive to a certain extent even for (Reform) Judaism, a closer look reveals contradictions on several levels.

For contemporary observers, the White City with its Renais- sance and neoclassical architecture presented the United States as the culmination in the development of human civilization. The self- perception of the white Anglo-American mainstream, its unique tradition, and its imagined destiny were combined in the construc- tion of the White City. The exterior architecture of the White City evoked a sense of tranquility, order and harmony, "but inside, the exposition palaces were all energy, profusion, and variety. The exteri- ors emphasized tradition, order, and control; the inside, physical progress, activity and newness113

In the Midway Plaisance, however, the exhibit presented Amer- ica's outward perspective on "other" people. Closest to the White City were the Europeans; far away and at the bottom of this pseudo- scientific hierarchy were the "primitives" and "savagesl' ranging from American Indians to African indigenous tribes. Thus the Expo- sition shifted the public's attention away from actual social problems to the theme of races.

Chicago's rapid growth hinged on thousands of working-class migrants who came from all parts of Europe, Asia and, in the case of blacks, the South to workinits factories, stockyards, and sweatshops. Yet in the (often depressing) reality of their lives, their expectations and utopias were not addressed. Instead, stereotypical images of their home countries prevailed in the Midway Plaisance: the Eiffel


Tower, the medieval city of Nuremberg, St. Peter's Cathedral were destinations for wealthy American tourists. While ethnic pluralism was already becoming a fact in urban America- literally right outside the exhibition grounds, the American mainstream was not yet ready to acknowledge it.

-Tobias Brinkmann

Tobias Brinkmann is completing his doctoral dissertation, a study of German Jews in Chicago 18go-1900, at the Free University of Berlin, Germany.

Notes

I. Emil Hirsch, "Farewell to the Parliament:' in The World's Parliament of Religions, ed. John H. Barrows (Chicago, 1gg3), vol. 1, p. 174.

2. Emil Hirsch, "Elements of Universal Religion:' ibid., vol. 2, pp. 1305 f.

3. Neil Harris, "Great American Fairs and American Cities: The Role of Chicago's Columbian Exposition," in idem, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cul- tural Tastes in Modem America (Chicago, iggo), pp. 119 f.

Book Reviews 321

Barkai, Avraham. Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration

to the United States, 1820--1914. New York: Holmes & Meier, xiii, 1994,269 pp.

In Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820-1914, Avraham Barkai offers an impressive survey of German- Jewish immigration during the years 1820-1914. Using published and unpublished sources from central and local Jewish archives, German- Jewish and American-Jewish periodicals, personal reminiscences, letters, family histories, and records of congregations and other Jew- ish associations, Barkai traces the distinctive process of Jewish family-oriented chain migration, resettlement, and Americanization. The relationship of the immigrants to their "home" and to non- Jewish Germans in the United States is also explored.

From the opening chapter, entitled "The First Wave: A Substitute for Emancipation, 1820-1860; Barkai illuminates how a continuous mutual interaction existed between German Jewry and its American counterpart. In contrast to recent scholarship, which challenges the description of this era as the "German period,? Barkai treats the Jewish immigrants from Bavaria, Baden, Hessen, Wiirttemberg, the Prussian provinces, the Rhineland and Westphalia, Alsace-Lorraine, Posen, West Prussia, and Silesia until 1880 as branches of German Jewry. While Barkai does acknowledge the cultural, religious, and socioeconomic differences between the "Bayers" and the "Polacks" (p. 3) -who, by the middle of the nineteenth century, gained substantial ground at the expense of the southern German immigrants (pp. 79-80~96) -he argues that they were bearers of German culture (p. 96). In the United States, these immigrants sought the political and civil rights denied them at home (pp.xi-xii). Accordingly, Barkai views the act of immigration as an alternative solution to the impeded quest for emancipation at home (p. 11 and chap. I). Once in the United States, these immigrants experienced impressive economic improvement in comparison to both their former situation in Eu- rope as well as to the general population among whom they lived (pp. 80-88).


In a chapter about the later period entitled "The Second Wave, 1865-1914; we learn from Barkai's meticulous description that Ger- man Jews came in two distinct waves during the years 1820--1860 and 1865-1914. While the first period of immigration has been widely noted in the historical literature, the second period has been ignored or, at best, viewed as a "mere trickle" (pp. 124-127). Yet, based on new demographic research, Barkai calculates that the immigration wave between the end of the Civil War (1865) and the beginning of World War I (1914) comprised approximately 70,000 Jewishimmigrants from Germany (p. 126). Furthermore, this second wave differed from the first both in its demographic and its social composition. The gender ratio gradually leveled out as more young women came, or were brought over to marry earlier immigrants. Chain-migrationof younger siblings was also more widespread than in the first wave. Despite the fact that most of the immigrants in the second wave were younger thanthoseof the firstwave, they traveled to America by first or second class. Their motives for immigrating were different as well. While the earlier immigrants were largely motivated by legal and socioeconomic discrimination in Germany, second wave immigrants were pulled along by family connections and economic enterprise, and followed in the well-prepared paths of their predecessors (pp. 128-129).

Due to the rapid growth of American Jewry and the cultural diversity of the immigrant population, the number of Jewish communities rose significantly. While in 1840 there were only eighteen recognized Jewish communities in the United States, the number rose to seventy-six a decade later and to 277 in 1877 (p. loo). More- over, secular, nationwide Jewish associations like the B'nai B'rith were created which in turn established libraries, organized lectures, and provided musical entertainment. Other organizations, such as Harmonia and Progress, were founded and provided recreational opportunities.GermanJews also joined nonsectarian German clubs, including literary circles, theater groups, Sanger, and Turnvereine. Similarly by 1860 seven English- and four German-language Jewish monthlies or weeklies appeared from New York to San Francisco more or less regularly. Together with the Reform temples, these institutions formed the framework of immigrant society. Since this institutional structure lacked the legal status accorded to Jewish

Book Reviews 323

communities in Europe, it is difficult to conjecture about the number and background of the immigrants who actually took part in the e m e r p g subculture. As Barkai concedes (p. i3), the question remains: What segment of mass immigration is really reflected in the sources he consulted? In light of the problem of representative- ness, it must be pointed out that characterizing this period as dis- tinctively German seems as difficult an assumption to prove as that of its critics, who argue that a "German period" oversimplifies historical reality.

In the chapter "Jews and Other Germans" Barkai elaborates on the relationship between German Jews and Germans in the United States, maintaining that the harmony of this relationship has been overestimated by scholars such as Stanley Nadel. Nadel most re- cently argued that a sixty-year-long German-Jewish nexus existed and that the two communities formed an organic unity.' While this description may accurately reflect the experience of midwestern Jewish communities for a brief period of time, it does not hold true for the East Coast, where, according to Barkai, most immigrants eventually settled. Furthermore, Barkai argues, the disillusionment over the revival of anti-Semitism in Germany as well as the process of advanced Americanization pulled German Jews apart from their Gentile counterparts (p. 189).

Barkai, who is also the author of Jiidische Minderheif und Indusfri- alisierung (1988), a standard work on the process of industrialization and its impact on German Jewry, further elucidates the impact of emigration on the German-Jewish communities the immigrants left behind. He makes a compelling argument that the emigration had considerable importance demographically. While the decline in the birthrate of German Jews has been understood as having been caused by the socioeconomic ascent of a large part of German Jewry into the urban middle class, Barkai maintains that this decline was a direct result of the emigration. The birthrate of the Jews in Germany declined dramatically, not because of the process of em- bourgeoisement, but because most of the emigrants were of a young, marriageable age. Accordingly, for Barkai, the emigration between 1820 and 1914 caused "an unprecedented demographic drain" in Germany (p. 224). Indeed, due to the impressive increase in the natural growth rate of German Jews up to 1860, the total Jewish


population of Germany did not decline in absolute terms as a result of the mass emigration. Likewise, Barkai emphasizes that the urbanization resultingfrom the internal migration of German Jewry was a much slower process than previously thought. This urbanization can likewise be attributed to the demographic drain, which in particular affected the rural Jewish communities (pp. 223-224).

Barkai considers the immigrants who arrived before 1880 to have been a branch of the German-Jewish communities in Germany, since the continuous influx of immigrants overturned the "undisturbed, organic growth of a homogeneously 'Americanized' Jewish commu- nitf' (p. 152). Personal contacts with parents and siblings who stayed in Germany further contributed to the feeling among German Jews that they were part of German Jewry. Moreover, particularly during the first years of mass emigration, Jewish congregations in America accepted their dependence on the Jewish establishment in Germany by turning to Germany for spiritual guidance. Barkai explains that preachers, rabbis, and religious teachers were almost exclusively educated in Germany. As late as 1867, there were sixty people in the United States who subscribed to the publication of the Institut zur Forderung der israelitischenLiteratur (Institute for the Promotion of Jewish Literature) established by Ludwig Philippson, a GermanReform rabbi, in 1855. While the dependence on German Jewry continued for several more decades, disagreements between German Jews in America and Germany increased. In 1857 Philipp- son's institute published an anonymous brochure entitled Deutsch- Amerikanische Skizzenfur jiidische Auswanderer und Nichtauswanderer ("German-American Sketches for Jewish Emigrants and Non-Erni- grants"), in which the religious and social life of the Jewish community in New York was severely criticized. Isaac Mayer Wise and others defended American Jewry and began attacking Philippson's publication of this pamphlet (pp. 159-161).

Yet despite the conflicts, Jews in America still primarily conceived of themselves as German Jews. Only with the mass immigration of East European Jews did the process of Americanization take hold in the German-Jewish community (p. 154). According to Barkai, the confrontation between Eastern and Western Jews played a decisive role in furthering the 'process in which, after several more decades, the Americanization of the Jewish community in all its social,

Book Reviews 325

cultural, and religious aspects was finally accomplished" (p. 154). However, as Barkai asserts, German-American Jews continued to display some characteristic group cohesion as "a subculture in the mainstream of an emerging new American-Jewish identity" (pp. 222

and 228). While in the public and political spheres cooperation and joint leadership between Eastern European and German Jews in the United States was eventually established, in the social and cultural institutions and in personal relationships, the division between the two groups proved to be long-lasting. Most German Jews retreated into their own social shell, "isolated by a tradition of condescension toward, and reciprocated contempt from, the majority of American Jewry" (pp. 214-215).

Despite the fact that Barkai deals, however briefly, with the immigrants' cultural and spiritual dependence on the German motherland, his analysis deliberately omits their spiritual and religious development, as he asserts in his preface (p. xii). Accordingly, Branching Out does not offer a history of American Judaism but rather shows the impact of mass migration on the country of origin as well as the continuous contact and interaction between the Ger- man Jews in America and Germany. The question thus arises: given this limitation, can the process of Americanization be adequately addressed without elaborating upon the impact of self-conscious efforts at American Jewish self-definitions? For example, shouldn't the effect of such institutions as the Hebrew Union College, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Jewish Publication Soci- ety of America on immigrant society be considered? As an inherent result of this limitation, Barkai does not address the growing self- awareness of American Jewry as it crystallized during the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America or the 250th anniversary of the settlement of Jews in the United States. Moreover, while Barkai emphasizes the mutual contact between German Jewry and its American offspring, he largely neglects the question of the changing perception of the German motherland in the eyes of the immigrants. New educational institutions as well as cultural celebrations, the growing number of children born in the United States, and the revival of anti-Semitism in Germany altered the immigrants' relationship to Germany. In Barkai's analysis, the revival of anti-Semitism, for example, seems relevant only in respect to the


changing relationship of German Jews and Germans in the United States (pp. 185-190).

Avraham Barkai provides a meticulously researched social history of demographic, social, and political developments. His dense narrative is interspersed with illustrative examples from individual biogra- phies which make this book highly readable for the general reader as well as for the professional historian. Branching Out contributes to the understanding of both German-Jewish and American-Jewish history. Indeed, it should be emphasized that, despite the limitations inherent in Barkai's socioeconomic approach, he offers an impres- sivesynthesis of recent literature filled with original insights.

-Nils H. Roemer

Nils Roemer is completing his doctoral dissertation, a study on the reception of works by German-Jewish scholars in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, at Columbia University.

Notes

I. See, for instance, ~ a s i a R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

2. Stanley Nadel, "Jewish Race and German Soul in Nineteenth-Century Arner- ica,!' American Jewish History 57 (1987): 6-26.

Brief Notices

Frommer, Myrna Katz and Harvey Frommer. Growing Up Jewish in America: An Oral History. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995.264 pp.

American Jewry is more than the musings of social and religious pundits. It is the day-to-day experiences of American Jews as they seek to sort out the his- toric tensions of life as an American and as a Jew. Myrna and Harvey Frornmer, already well-known for examining those areas of intense American Jewish "au- thenticit$' Brooklyn and the Catskills, shift their considerable oral interviewing skills to a much wider area of interest. In Growing Up Jewish in America, over a hundred American Jewishmenand women, between the ages of 22 and 99, reflect on their American Jewish childhoods. With such a wide geographic and gener- ational sweep, the Frommers allow us to see the evolution of the American Jewish community from the late nineteenth century until the present day. What was it like to grow up Jewish in Birmingham, Alabama, or Pueblo, Colorado? Differ- ent from growing up in New York or Chicago, certainly. If the volume can make this point clear, then it has achieved an important purpose: New York is not America, and neither is the New York Jewish experience the essence of Jewish life in the United States. American Jews have enough in common to be a community but enough differences to celebrate them.

Rikoon, J. Sanford, Edited by. Rachel Calof s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.158 pp.

Thank goodness for historians with imagination. Sandy Rikoon, the editor of this volume, and one of the few genuine agricultural historians specializing in American Jewish agricultural history, is a relentless researcher. Thus it was, that on a warm spring day at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati he came across the unpublished manuscript which forms the basis of this book. Rachel Calof was one of many extraordinary Jewish women, immigrants to America from eastern Europe, who lived much of their lives in the harsh conditions of North Dakota and the Northern Plains. Her story is a simple but heroic one. What she and other Jewish pioneers endured is almost unimaginable today. But endure she did, raising a family and being a full partner in the business of homesteading. While her story is simple, it is one of the few representative re- counting~ of this extraordinary experience. That in itself makes this book worthwhile as an historical memoir. To also have her son's beautiful words about his mother's life, Sandy Rikoon's scholarly analysis of the Jewish farming experience in the American Heartland, and Elizabeth Jameson's effort to place Rachel Calof in the historical context of her time and place is icing on an already tasty and important historical cake.


Jeansonne, Glen. Women of the Far Right: The Mother's Movement and World War 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.264 pp.

We have come to expect from Professor Glen Jeansonne first-rate studies of some of the darker forces in American social and political life. Gerald L.K. Smith, Leander Perez, and Huey I? Long are no longer mysterious shadows, but clearly understood demagogues of America's forces of reaction. Such men are not atypical of the fascist forces who made up the "politics of paranoia" which frightened so many Americans in the first five decades of the twentieth century. But how do we react to the National Legion of Mothers of America, the Mothers of Sons Forum, or the National Blue Star Mothers, organizations of American women who admired Adolf Hitler, hated Jews, Communists andNew Deal liber- als and believed in a Christian America? Much the same way that we react to newsreel films of female Nazi concentration camp guards throwing lifeless bodies into common burial pits. Does the "gentler sex" really possess the capacity to hate in such brutal terms?

Glen Jeansonne's superb analysis of the " mothers' movement,!' is a solid and original contribution to the history of American right-wing politics.

Viera, Nelson H. Jezuish Voices in Brazilian Literature: A Prophetic Discourse of Alterity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995.256 pp.

In the days and months after the end of World War I1 and the discovery of the extent to which European Jewish life had been destroyed, the victorious Allies made it clear to the defeated German nation: the manner in which it treated the few remaining Jews in its midst would be an important criterion for Germany's opportunity to rejoin the civilized world.

In much the same manner, the Brazilianist Nelson H. Viera has chosen to study in a postmodern and cultural manner the place and voice of Jews within Brazil. Viera believes that by focusing on a "subaltern" ethnic and religious group such as the Jews, one may understand how "Brazilians deal or do not deal with multicultural others" and how a society with a long history of au- thoritarian paternalism functions vis=h=vis its marginalized components. Viera focuses on the writings of three Brazilian Jewish authors, Samuel Rawel, Clarice Lispector and Moacyr Scliar.

Gergel, Belinda and Richard. In Pursuit of the Tree of Life: A History of the Early Jews of Columbia, South Carolina, and the Tree of Life Congregation. Columbia, S. C., 1996.202

PP. Another congregational history has been written. One usually expects the

worst from a "house h i s t o e written, one suspects, to put the best face forward on the congregation while seeking to hide "the warts."

In Pursuit of the Tree of Life is a pleasant, perhaps even extraordinary, surprise. The Gergels could have written another rather vapid history of a congregation, its rabbis, its weddings and deaths, and been done with it.. Instead, they have produced not only one of the best synagogue histories in print, but one of the

Brief Notices 37-9

best interpretations of the Southern Jewish experience. Yes, Columbia and its synagogue were burned during Sherman's march and, yes, priceless relics of Charleston's KK Beth Elohim, hidden by Charleston's rabbi in the Columbia synagogue, were destroyed, but the story does not focus on these important historical events. Indeed, it is as if the Gergels, not professional historians, researched and wrote this book with an outline of all the unanswered questions about Jews in the South that have plagued the writing of their history. The Gergels have left nothing untouched in that history and have confronted fully the questions of Southern Jews and race and the place of Jews in the Christian South. One can only congratulate the Gergels and hope that they will turn their attention to other aspects of Southern Jewish life and history.

Goldstein, Howard. The Home on Gorham Street and the Voices of Its Children. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.231 pp.

The author of this outstanding history of the Rochester Jewish Children's Home, Professor Howard Goldstein, is a distinguished teacher of social work and a much-published author. He was also "Howie" Goldstein, the boy who lived at 36 Gorham Street,across from the orphanage. A conflict of intellectual objectivity, one might ask? Not in this case. Howard Goldstein has all the academic tools necessary to write this book as a scholarly tome, but also the nostal- gia and caring to produce a labor of love. Those who are fortunate enough to read this book will leam that scholarship and love can mix in the most wonder- ful of ways.

Ezekiel, Raphael S. The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen. New York: Viking, 1995.330 pp.

In seeking to understand, as he puts it, "the meaning that a person's activity has in that person's life:' Rafe Ezekiel has, in this fascinating study of America's radical right, gone into the belly of the beast. He has stood eye to eye with those who would murder him if they had the chance to carry out their vision of an Aryan America. Ezekiel wants to know why these haters hate, and he gives us riveting portraits of some of America's most prestigious haters, ideologues such as Tom Metzger, Dave Holland, and Richard Butler. What we leam from this book is to be on guard: while most of the figures in the book appear harmless, Professor Ezekiel is quick to point out that their movement is not. The radical right lives and dies on the notion of violence. As far too many innocent deaths attest, that notion is alive and all too well.

Ivers, Gregg. To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.281 pp.

American Jews have always believed in, and America has shown its willingness to keep separate, the relationship between religion and the central government. To a people such as the Jews who historically had been denied the fruits of full equality in the lands of their birth, who had suffered economic and profes-


sional as well as geographic restrictions and had always been on the margin of national activity because of their religious beliefs and the negative influences of the Christian churches, such a separation was crucial.

In her outstanding work J m s in Christian America (1992), Professor Naomi Cohen demonstrated that popular notions of rationalism, individual rights, and natural law, the exact ideas that helped to shape the ideological understanding of America's desire to separate from Britain, also meant that a national church along European lines could not predominate in the new republic. American Jews strove to fulfill their American dream and to overcome Protestant reality. American rabbis, particularly, sought to achieve those aims by "enlightening" Christian America on the need for church-state separation and religious freedom (equality). In the post-1945 period, a new kind of Jewish defender stepped forth, often secular and perhaps even a bit anti-religious.

Gregg Ivers's book is the first extensive study of the struggle for church-state separation in the courts at the local and national levels. He is fortunate in having had access to the personal files and papers of Leo Pfeffer, who, as Ivers relates, was the lead counsel or amicus curiae in almost all the establishment clause cases for nearly four decades. Litigation in American life has produced not only wealthy lawyers but the survival of one of American Jewry's most important social and religious safeguards.

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