Abstract
City of Promises, a three-volume series edited by Deborah Dash Moore, is a landmark achievement in American urban and Jewish history. Previously, the history of Jews in New York City was told episodically. For a complete picture, scholars had to cobble together independently conceived books written decades apart. Hyman B. Grinstein’s The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York 1654–1860 (1945) was a recognized starting point for that literature. Moses Rischin’s The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (1962) was perhaps its most important linchpin. A pioneering study of Jewish mass migration to Manhattan’s Lower East Side and New York City’s rise as a modern metropolis, it intersected urban, Jewish, and immigration history. From the 1960s onward, historical coverage of New York Jews unfolded at a steady pace. There was no shortage of intellectual innovation as scholars including Arthur Goren, Moore, Beth Wenger, and Eli Lederhendler brought the story ever closer to the present. Still, the full narrative of New York Jewish history remained tacit until the release of City of Promises. 1
The City of Promises volumes are elegantly designed and well-stocked with images. Each opens with a foreword by Moore and closes with a separate essay on the material and visual culture of New York Jews written by art historian Diana L. Linden. In between, Howard B. Rock, Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, and Jeffrey S. Gurock provide the volumes’ core texts. They are vibrantly written, while juggling an array of content and themes. The trilogy, ambitiously designed and masterfully executed, has garnered deserved praise and a National Jewish Book Award since its publication in 2012. A single-volume distillation, Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People, issued in 2017, will further amplify its reach and impact. 2
The series is organized around the principle that New York was a “city of promises” for the Jews who lived there and for Jews further afield. That notion is usefully flexible and invokes New York City’s dual importance as an urban and political reality on the one hand, and as an imagined entity on the other. As immigrants, residents, workers, voters, investors, developers, organizers, and office-holders, Jews helped to build the metropolis. As media creators, producers, and consumers in America’s cultural capital, they shaped popular conceptions of New York City, with Leonard Bernstein and Woody Allen providing two of the more obvious twentieth-century examples.
Did Jews make New York City, or did the city make New York Jews? City of Promises answers this question both ways. At times, New York appears as a historical agent. Moore, for instance, writes that “The city welcomed Jews in all their variety” (p. xi), and “New York gave Jews visibility as individuals and as a group. It provided employment and education, inspiration and freedom, fellowship and community” (p. xii). More often, New York is identified as a cultural, social, and physical construct wrought by Jews and other immigrant groups. Jews, in this sense, are involved in making the city, rather than just swept up or along by it.
The three volumes adhere to a loose periodization. Key moments (the founding of a second New York synagogue in 1825 and the immigration restrictions of the early 1920s, for instance) are properly highlighted. In addition, the mid-twentieth century serves as something of a reference point for what constitutes a blossoming “city of promises.” Judged against that demographic peak and moment of triumphant democratic cosmopolitanism, earlier periods in Jewish New York history seem preliminary, and later decades look strained, complex, and uncertain. Moore’s foreword, for example, begins in 1945 and states that postwar New York, which stood in marked contrast to the “vast slaughterhouse” of wartime Europe, “glistened as a city Jews could and did call their home in America” (p. xi). In the first of the City of Promises volumes, Rock notes that the twenty-three Jewish refugees who famously arrived in New Amsterdam from Dutch Brazil in 1654 “had no idea . . . that they were among the first Jews in a settlement that was to become America’s largest city and to house the world’s largest Jewish population” (p. 1). The second volume, Emerging Metropolis, keeps its focus on the mass migration of Jews to New York during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “By 1920,” Polland and Soyer observe, “New York’s Jews numbered over 1.6 million, making the city the greatest Jewish metropolis of all time” (p. 245). Finally, Gurock’s Jews in Gotham details the rise and fall of New York’s most distinctive Jewish neighborhoods either side of World War II. It ends positively with the revitalization of the Lower East Side and concludes that “Gotham appeared poised to fulfill its promises once again” at the start of the twenty-first century (p. 211).
Of the three City of Promises volumes, Haven of Liberty is the one least grounded in the urban fabric and quotidian routines of New York City. In covering a period in which New York City sat on the periphery of European empires, and New York’s Jewish community was so small that it sometimes struggled to maintain the minyan (or quorum) required to hold religious services, Rock prioritizes Jewish exposure to external and ideological pressures. “Prior to 1870,” he explains, “it . . . makes sense to view the Jews of any period through the currents of contemporary American institutions and conflicts” (p. 3).
Rock starts with a familiar narrative. He briefly describes the expulsion of Jews from southern Spain in 1492 and the migration of Sephardic Jews to the Dutch Republic and the Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, before moving on to document more fully how New Amsterdam Jews battled entrenched anti-Semitism to secure political, religious, commercial, and property rights. Those rights expanded after the English conquered (and renamed) the city in 1664. Colonial New York’s only synagogue, Shearith Israel, became a focal point of a tight-knit Jewish community, led by elite Jewish merchants, in the eighteenth century.
The core contention of Haven of Liberty is that Republican ideology “formed the seeds of the city of promises” (p. 4). In 1776, Rock reports, most New York Jews aligned with the revolutionaries even though that allegiance meant abandoning British-controlled Manhattan for Philadelphia or other places of refuge. Postwar, many of these Jewish exiles returned to New York. They revived Shearith Israel and created a new constitution and corporate governance structure for the synagogue. Rock describes these developments as republican in nature, indications that New York Jews wanted to be “part and parcel of the commonwealth” (p. 91). During the 1790s, American republicans split violently into egalitarian (or Jeffersonian) and deferential (or Hamiltonian) camps, forcing New York Jews, like their neighbors, to pick sides. They mostly threw in with the Jeffersonian Democrats. Partisanship and challenges to elite authority became the order of the day. When disaffected members of Shearith Israel founded New York’s second Jewish congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, in 1825, they did so in the spirit of Jeffersonian republicanism.
Although Rock strains at times to impose a neat ideological pattern on the messy realities of Jewish life in early New York City, his text remains readable and informative throughout. The later chapters of Haven of Liberty continue to reference republicanism as they describe how European Jews arrived in large numbers for the first time in the 1820s and 1830s. These immigrants settled in the Five Points and Kleindeutschland neighborhoods. They drew support from benevolent, fraternal, and other voluntary organizations, as well as from the city’s Jewish congregations that quickly grew in number from the 1830s. Divisions appeared, especially as Orthodox and Reform Judaism battled for preeminence from the late-1840s. Antebellum New York Jews mostly voted for Democrats, though some sided with the Whigs and a few favored the Republican Party. With a few notable exceptions, New York Jews remained silent on the issue of abolition before the Civil War. However, once fighting commenced in 1861, almost two thousand Jewish New York men enlisted in the Union army, while many Jewish women contributed to the war effort in other ways. The Jews’ Hospital (later Mount Sinai) opened its doors to non-Jews in an important and lasting gesture of national unity. Even so, the Civil War sparked outbreaks of anti-Semitism, including General Ulysses S. Grant’s notorious 1862 General Orders No. 11, which expelled Jews from a region of the South under Grant’s military control. Jews joined other New Yorkers in grieving the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. By that time, they were embedded in and strongly attached to American democracy.
Parts of this antebellum and Civil War story are retold with different emphasis in Emerging Metropolis, which examines “a century-long wave of Jewish immigration from Europe” (p. 1), paying particular attention to the immigrants’ “economic, social, religious, political, and cultural adaptation between 1840 and 1920” (p. 8). The millions of Jewish arrivals processed through Castle Garden and, from 1892, Ellis Island transformed New York City and the United States. Polland and Soyer describe how these Jewish immigrants relied on friends, family, and local organizations to adapt and survive. By 1920, they turned New York City into the “unofficial capital of the Jewish world” (p. 138).
Urban and ethnic history intersect throughout Emerging Metropolis as Polland and Soyer trace the spread of Jewish communities around a city that itself expanded in 1898 to include Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. They show that Jewish mobility was social as much as geographic, although the constant arrival of new immigrants ensured that the bulk of New York Jews remained working class. Jewish immigration and adaptation to America spawned cultural innovation in art, theater, music, and literature.
One of the strengths of Emerging Metropolis is its precise exploration of New York City’s streets and urban spaces. Polland and Soyer locate “the story of Jewish New York in the markets, tailor shops, saloons, and butcher stores where Jews formed an ethnic economy and forged neighborhood networks” (p. 16). They demonstrate that Jewish men and women created strong communities and American-Jewish identities through their shared residences, work, and neighborhood interactions. They begin in Chatham Street, a main site of Jewish settlement in New York City between the 1820s and 1880s. As traders and peddlers in the used-clothing and ready-made garment businesses, Jews inserted themselves into the city’s economy. They benefited from increased demand for clothing manufacture created by the Civil War. The more successful families moved to new neighborhoods to the north and west. The development of new congregations contributed to this dispersal as did differences of class, occupation, language, and origin among the growing Jewish population. Charity helped to bridge a growing divide between the brownstone and tenement Jews, and social welfare increasingly came under the purview of formal organizations rather than informal neighborhood networks.
Nineteenth-century Jews impacted the architecture of New York. Starting in the 1830s, but more especially after the Civil War, Jewish congregations invested in magnificent synagogues. Drawing inspiration from central Europe, they built impressive Moorish structures to proclaim their Jewish identity and to assert the diversity of the city of which they were part. Jews also left their mark on the urban landscape of the Lower East Side. Sender Jarmulowsky’s bank building, completed in 1912, not only added a skyscraper to the neighborhood but also confirmed the social and economic importance of local bankers who connected immigrant families and friends, not least by selling ship tickets. The tenements, “the most infamous housing stock in the nation’s history” (p. 114), were another feature of the Lower East Side. They caused many Jewish immigrants to seek better housing conditions in other neighborhoods. New transportation aided this mobility. In 1892, three-quarters of the city’s Jews lived in the Lower East Side. By 1916, only one quarter did so.
Facing local anti-Semitism and nativism, the persecution of Russian Jewry, and mass immigration of eastern European Jews in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, New York Jews organized institutions, such as the American Jewish Committee, to defend Jewish rights and distribute charity to Jews around the world. During World War I, they provided war relief, furthering New York City’s position as the capital of world Jewry. Simultaneously, Jews emerged as an important voice for domestic reform. Tammany Democrats and Socialists, along with the Republicans and anti-Tammany Democrats, vied for their votes at the turn of the twentieth century. After a tragic fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in 1911, Jews threw their support behind social reform and Jewish voters helped to give women the vote in New York State in 1917. In so doing, they reinforced New York City’s progressive inclination. From the 1920s, Polland and Soyer write, “Jews provided the most reliable constituency for a politics of social reform that helped make New York City one of the most advanced social democratic polities in the country” (p. 204). Meanwhile, immigration restrictions passed in the early 1920s showed that nativism temporarily held the upper hand in America over tolerance and cosmopolitanism.
The final volume, Jews in Gotham, affirms the importance of neighborhoods to the Jewish experience. Gurock demonstrates that intimate street interactions bred new forms of Jewish and American identity, provided critical emotional support, and spawned cultural and commercial creativity. However, the stability and survival of distinctive Jewish neighborhoods were threatened by social mobility and urban transformation. A flood of construction occurred in the city after 1921 as local developers and builders, including some Jews, profited from a tax-exemption ordinance. New housing developments enabled Jewish migration from the Lower East Side and Central Harlem to the Bronx, Brooklyn, and parts of northern New Jersey. At the same time, Jews were excluded from some newly developed areas, including the Jackson Heights garden suburb in Queens.
As prosperous Jews moved away from established Jewish neighborhoods, thousands of new immigrants arrived to replace them. In the 1920s, the garment industry shifted its center from the Lower East Side to western Manhattan, and Jewish garment bosses duly took up residence on the Upper West Side. Immigration quotas slowed but did not end the inflow of Jewish immigrants. Indeed, a sizeable number of Polish, Romanian, German, and Austrian Jews came to New York City between the mid-1920s and the outbreak of World War II. They had the misfortune of landing in a country suffering through the Great Depression, and at a time when New York Jews clashed with their Irish and Italian neighbors. In contrast, Jewish and black New Yorkers resided in proximity in Harlem with few intergroup problems until upwardly mobile Jews began to move away from Harlem in the 1920s, and resentment built among African Americans whose housing options were limited by racist policies.
New York City’s role and responsibility as a Jewish global center escalated during World War II. The city hosted Jewish organizations, trained Jewish leaders, provided Jewish volunteers, and distributed Jewish media. After World War II, Jews moved away from the distinctive Jewish neighborhoods of New York City. Some went to Los Angeles. Others went to the suburbs and fretted over their loss of “Jewish street ties and connections” (p. 103). Still others sought out greener parts of the city; Queens’ Jewish population almost doubled between 1940 and 1950. Even there, however, they found “Jewish identification did not radiate as naturally from these streets” (p. 107). Concurrently, enclaves in the Bronx and elsewhere that had retained their Jewish identity were torn apart by urban development in the 1950s and 1960s. To make matters worse, manufacturing jobs disappeared, the city’s revenue stream dwindled, public housing deteriorated, and crime escalated. By the 1970s, New York City was “a city of broken promises” (p. 151), especially for the elderly and poor. But all was not lost. New York’s “unique geography” (p. 209) ignited Jewish feminism and political activism in the 1970s and 1980s. Gradually, the city recovered its sense of promise as the Lower East Side and other neighborhoods regenerated.
It is impossible to communicate the full scope of the City of Promises volumes in a brief review. These books should be of considerable interest to urban historians. They individually and collectively integrate New York and Jewish history, identifying broad trends while simultaneously examining specific neighborhoods, streets, and even buildings. The personal experiences of individuals, including many Jewish women, are highlighted throughout. Wide-ranging, yet acutely sensitive to the dynamism and specificity of Jewish neighborhoods and experiences in New York City, these three books recount a complex story with clarity, precision, and analytical depth.