The Development of American Judaism
Colonial American Jews were largely Sephardic, prosperous, and urban, living in the Atlantic seaports. But 19th-century immigration produced wider geographic dispersion, increasing ethnic diversity, and tensions over Americanization.
Between 1830 and 1860, German and Austro-Hungarian Ashkenazic immigration raised America’s Jewish population from 6,000 to 150,000. Most of the immigrants were less prosperous and became itinerant peddlers on the expanding frontier; others succeeded as dry goods merchants in the small towns and larger cities, particularly in the Northeast and the Midwestern “German Triangle.” Migrants from the same region in Europe tended to settle together in America: Bavarians in Cincinnati and Cleveland, southern Germans in Atlanta, Austro-Hungarians in Milwaukee. Jewish communities existed nationwide by 1860, with particularly substantial ones in New York and Cincinnati.
With the German influx came Reform Judaism, which emphasized assimilation, ethics, and vernacular worship over traditional Hebrew-language ritual and ethnic distinctiveness. Many existing congregations embraced Reform, and new Reform synagogues proliferated: Har Sinai in Baltimore (1842), Emanu-El in New York (1845), and Sinai in Chicago (1858). Leading the Reform thrust was Bohemian immigrant rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900), who arrived in 1846, established a base at Cincinnati’s Bene Yeshurun, gathered Reform congregations into the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), and founded Hebrew Union College (1875), the nation’s first permanent rabbinical school. In 1889, Reform rabbis meeting in Detroit completed the organization of American Reform Judaism by forming the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR). By 1880, most of America’s 250,000 Jews and 270 synagogues were Reform and of Germanic background.
Plum Street Synagogue, Cincinnati.
Jewish immigration to Northeastern and Midwestern cities after the mid-19th century made Judaism a major American faith.Those opposing the extent of Americanization often formed separate institutions. Ethnic difference sometimes bolstered conservative impulses, as when traditionalist Polish and Russian Jews in New York, resistant to German leadership, founded Shaarey Zedek (1839) and Beth Hamedrash (1852), respectively. As Reform became institutionalized, so too did a Conservative “middle way” between Americanization and tradition, first in the founding of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in 1886 and later in the establishment of the United Synagogue of America (1913; now the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism) and the Rabbinical Assembly of America (1919).
Jewish traditionalism was strengthened and ethnically expanded when the “new” immigration brought more than 2 million Eastern European Jews from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Romania to the nation’s Northern industrial cities between 1880 and 1920. By 1927, they accounted for about 80 percent of American Jewry. They settled especially in New York’s Lower East Side, home by 1892 to more than one-third of America’s Jews. But while concerned to preserve tradition, the new arrivals were alienated from established Reform and Conservative Jewish communities by class, cultural, and linguistic differences. The immigrants formed ethnic enclaves and congregations, protected their vernacular Yiddish (a Germanic language written in Hebrew and with Hebrew, Russian, and Polish infusions), and formed an “Orthodox” denomination distinct from Reform and Conservatism, institutionalizing it in the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary on the Lower East Side (1897), the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations in America (1898), and the Union of Orthodox Rabbis (1902).
American Judaism became even more ethnically and religiously diverse during the 20th century as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s sparked an immigration of eastern European Hasidim, practitioners of a pietistic, mystically inclined, and ultratraditional variety of Judaism.
They formed insulated communities, mostly in Brooklyn, where they adhered strictly to traditional ritual, Yiddish, and eastern European lifestyles. Some communities sought even greater isolation in upstate New York, while other groups, such as the Brooklyn-based Lubavitcher, have engaged in missionary outreach to young Jews. Today, about 80 percent of the world’s approximately 250,000 Hasidim live in the United States, half of these in Brooklyn. The Hasidic presence is small but has invigorated American Orthodoxy and the Old World ties of American Judaism generally. Still more recently, in the 1960s and 1970s, Jewish immigrants have arrived from the Soviet Union, South Africa, South America, and Israel. In the 1980s, 5 to 10 percent of American Jews were recent immigrants. Ethnicity and immigration thus remain central themes of American Jewish experience.
Still, most American Jews became thoroughly integrated into American life. The children of Orthodox immigrants joined the suburban exodus of the 1950s, abandoned Orthodoxy, Yiddish, and the old neighborhoods in the pursuit of affluence, swelled Reform and Conservative ranks, and built new suburban synagogues. They also followed the broader post—World War II migration to the Sunbelt, producing major new communities in Los Angeles and Miami and modifying their traditional Northeastern and Midwestern concentration. Still, New York City’s approximately 1.5 million Jews—and more if one includes the surrounding metropolitan area—remain America’s largest concentration, and nearly half of the nation’s Jews still live in the Northeast.
