Politics, faith, and the making of American Judaism

Abstract

Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism. By Peter Adams. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Pp. x, 207, notes, index. Paper, $70.00.)Varying degrees of crisis and response move Peter Adams's study of American Jewish political and religious development over the second half of the nineteenth century. While international emergencies bookend the work-ranging from the 1840 Damascus blood libel to turn-of-the-century persecution of eastern European Jews-episodic discrimination in America also receives much attention. Here Adams focuses on anti-Jewish expressions during the Civil War and in subsequent decades characterized as state-sanctioned limitations on their freedom imposed by military commanders or discreet-and not so discreet-discrimination in employment and public accommodations (p. 5). Some instances are familiar, such as depictions of Jewish merchants as wartime profiteers or Ulysses S. Grant's order expelling Jews from his military district. Others are less known like an early congressional law barring Jewish chaplains from army camps or hospitals. Postwar incidents include Jewish discrimination in employment and commercial insurance, exclusion from certain schools or social clubs, or refusal of Jewish patrons at the Grand Union and Manhattan Beach hotels. Ultimately, Adams argues, events at home and abroad taught American Jews an important and difficult lesson. The United States could be a welcoming haven for Jewish immigrants, but it could also pose social and political challenges all its own.Against this backdrop, Adams surveys a generation of American Jewish elites promoting security and acceptance in the United States. Isaac Leeser, Isaac Mayer Wise, Simon Wolf, Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, Jacob Schiff, Oscar Strauss, and Louis Marshall are just a few of the familiar-and noticeably male-intellectuals, religious leaders, philanthropists, and diplomats on whom the study centers. Despite these figures' varied affiliations, Adams argues that they shared a common goal to better integrate Jews into the nation's social and religious landscape. In this light he seeks to tie key nineteenth-century matters of Jewish faith and politics to broader efforts at Americanization. In the book's long view, the seminaries, congregational alliances, political skills, and networks that American Jews developed throughout the late nineteenth century represented both an outgrowth of contemporary posturing as much as an important foundation for robust-albeit factional-Jewish defense groups and denominationalism that would characterize the twentieth century. …