A Synthesis for the New American Jewish Historiography

Abstract

A Synthesis for the New American Jewish Historiography Jeffrey S. Gurock (bio) Gerald Sorin. Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xv + 294 pp. Figures, tables, bibliographical essay, and index. $40.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). As this century draws to a close, American Jewish historians find themselves reconsidering the basic themes, and reconfiguring the fundamental structure, of their discipline. For example, the periodization of that group’s experience in this country that was once so neatly sub-divided among Sephardic, German, and East European eras is now dated and obsolete. A new historiography speaks of a century of international migration (from roughly 1820–1920) that brought Jews to these shores from Western, Central and Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire even as they were part of an even larger Jewish mass relocation from towns and villages to cities within the Old World. Thus, scholars for the most part have begun to avoid designating the mid-nineteenth century as an uniquely German period. Our sense is now that Jews from a variety of Central and East European lands arrived between 1820–1880. Maybe a better way of identifying those newcomers would be to call them Jews from German-speaking lands. But even that classification might not be sufficiently broad. During these same decades, Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews, Hungarians, and even Jews from the Russian Empire were finding their way to the United States. Moreover, we now recognize that Jews from German-speaking lands continued to settle here after the 1880s, long after their emancipation in the Fatherlands. Their particular saga used to be overlooked by historians who focused so much on those who fled the Russian pogroms of the same era. Implicit in this new understanding is that political considerations—specifically the Central European Jews’ frustrations over the slowness of emancipation—was but one relatively minor factor in their opting for America. Contemporary scholarship has also begun to assess the migration, settlement, and acculturation patterns of American Jewry during the most recent fifty years. We now speak of a new epoch opening after 1945 as Jewish residential stagnation in East Coast and rust-belt inner cities ended while [End Page 385] third and fourth generation communities found their destinies manifested both in local suburbias and in sun-belt communities across the nation. It is presently being shown how this massive internal American migration is, in so many ways, as significant as the earlier foreign waves once were in shaping the character and determining the destiny of this particular ethnic community. Concomitantly, scholars who are still deepening our appreciation of the most intensive period of East European migration to America (1880–1920 still remains the most studied four decades in American Jewish history) continue to address new themes and are looking at different types of settlements. Today, when we speak of the history of the Jews’ economic progress, the focus is not so much on how these new Americans struggled to make their livings and how they organized to promote themselves as a laboring mass. Rather, attention increasingly is paid to how first generation Jews and their youngsters spent their hard earned incomes and what the conspicuousness of their consumption says about their social and cultural transformation. Meanwhile, other scholars are balancing the regnant New York-centric focus of this period’s history with perspectives from other larger cities and America’s small town Jewry. Of course, balance is also being sought in integrating the role and contribution of Jewish women both within and without the metropolis and as breadwinners, homemakers, and consumers. If these new appreciations of how American Jewish history can be understood and taught were not enough, other researchers have been refashioning the religious history of that community. Jewish denominational history used to be told from the point of view of an elite of reconcilers—rabbis primarily—who worked to adjust Judaism to the influences of the American environment. More often than not, that interest informed biographies of Conservative and Reform rabbis. Today’s revised historiography takes into account not only those who readily and visibly objected to changing the practices and teachings of that faith in America. It also...