Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 166–168 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.18 Book Review Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2017) Lincoln Mullen George Mason University, Fairfax, USA In 1948, William Warren Sweet published The American Churches: An Interpretation, summing up his scholarship dating back to 1912. The overriding thesis of the book, penned by one of the leading church historians of his day, was that the frontier and the movement of Americans westward was the primary explanation of almost all noteworthy developments in American religious history. The claim was indebted to Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), which argued that the frontier (“the meeting point between savagery and civilization”) was not simply a place: it was also a process that gave rise to American democracy. Sweet took Turner’s thesis and applied it to religion, most fully substantiating his claims in a collection of sources, Religion on the American Frontier: one volume each for the Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists. For Sweet, the archetype of American religion was the Methodist circuit rider, perpetually in motion along the frontier. Shari Rabin’s 2017 volume, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America could not disagree more on that point. Rabin’s work is in conversation with recent scholarship on religion, not with early twentieth -century church history, and yet the structure of Rabin’s argument bears some Lincoln Mullen 167 resemblance to its much earlier predecessor. The frontier—meaning the furthest extent of mostly white settlement in what became the United States—is sometimes discussed as a place in this book, since the Jews whom she chronicles lived in western cities like Cincinnati and participated in westward expansion. But the subject of the book is not a westward moving line. Like Turner and Sweet, Rabin sees a spatial process at play: “mobility,” more than “frontier,” most accurately captures the claim of the book. A New England Jewish peddler like Jacob Kohn and even a prominent figure like Isaac Leeser, who resided in the major eastern city of Philadelphia, were subject to the same spatial processes, though living far from the frontier. Mobility, more than modernity or assimilation, was in Rabin’s view the central driver of Jewish religious adaptations in the United States. Unlike European Jews, American Jews could and did move wherever they liked. American Judaism thus faced challenges to religious practices such as forming a minyan, observing the Sabbath, finding kosher food, forming family, and creating unity with one another and continuity with the Jewish past. In several chapters, Rabin details how American Jews crafted strategies for adapting American Judaism to this pervasive mobility. (One of these strategies, though not a particularly successful one, was a proposal to have itinerant Jewish ministers modeled on Methodist circuit riders.) The result was a “mobile Judaism … that was portable, individual, and extended throughout the American continent” (143). Even though traditional Judaism seemed to be on the wane, under the standards of mobile Judaism “the measure of authentic Judaism was individual identity and institutional power that could flourish in the United States as much as—if not more than—right belief or practice” (139). Based on this concept of mobile Judaism, Rabin argues for a different archetype of American religion. Not the Methodist circuit rider, nor the Baptist farmer/ preacher, but the mobile Jew is the best representative of American religion, she claims. Rabin is not just arguing against scholars like Sweet and his descendants who offered “happy narratives of the United States as a land of religious pluralism, diversity, and choice.” She also disagrees with the critics who invert that story by arguing that “Protestantism is baked into the very structures of American culture, shaping all minority religions in its image” and thus threatening Judaism with either assimilation or prejudice. Rabin argues instead that mobile Jews formed their religious practices and affiliations in response to the conditions that shaped all American religious groups. She concludes, therefore, “that the United States is not primarily Protestant or...