Jewish Life in the United States

The beginnings of Jewish life and thought in the USA take us back to the colonial period and to the seeds planted at that time by the Sephardi Jews who played a small but significant role in the founding of the new republic.

In the Old World, Jews desirous of change con­fronted patterns of observance and belief that had changed little over the centuries. In the New World, in an atmosphere of change, the Jews moved to the south-west, mid-west and California. The small communities often had no kosher butchers or ritual baths. They had few scholars; and they fervently affirmed the values of a new land which had welcomed them into a freedom they had seldom known. The outward religious pattern was con- gregationalist and made for independent communities. This became part of American Jewish life, where no Chief Rabbinate ever developed. The rabbis who gave ideology and substance to this new development were the German Reform rabbis who arrived after 1848. Isaac M. Wise (1819-1900) had radical vision but a moderate temper. His great achievement was in the field of organisation. He established the Hebrew Union College (1875), now the oldest and most influential Jewish seminary in the world; the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), which united American Jewry for the first time; a Jewish newspaper, a prayer book (Minhag America— expressing the hope that there would be one united American Jewish com­munity); and the first rabbinical Conference (1889). However, his willing­ness to go along with traditional thought (i.e.

In the 1880s, pogroms swept the Eastern Jewish world; and a great wave of Jewish immigrants came to the United States. Previously, Jews had arrived as individuals, had been caught up in the movements of a developing America (‘Go West, young man’), and had been absorbed within the American scene. The new group arrived as landsmannschaften—unified groups from individual communities who were transplanted as they had been before the move: even the synagogues, brick by brick, accompanied them. At the same time, the changing economic scene meant that the flow across the continent was stopped. The small factories of the eastern seaboard wanted and needed them. Often, they kept their own language: aspects of Europe were rebuilt in New York and Boston. The Jews they met were strange to them. Sephardi traditionalism had remained a small aristocratic enclave. The German Jews had created an accommodating pat­tern of Jewish life in America which combined pragmatism, independence and strong nationalism within an American Judaism which viewed the older European customs with mixed emotions. Zionism seemed a threat to the established community: ‘America is our Palestine, Washington our Jerusalem’, they proclaimed: the new arrivals must be ‘Americanised’.