Artefacts tell the story of Jewish immigrants to the USA

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Jews in America gives a flavour of an important strand in the history of the United States, says Sarah Lawson

Jews in America: From New Amsterdam to the Yiddish Stage by Stephen D. Corrsin, Amanda Seigel, Kenneth Benson

The New York Public Library is in a class by itself. It has not only the usual accoutrements you would expect in a city library, and it is also a serious research institution with many rare holdings. The Dorot Jewish Division preserves 300,000 items of printed material, including early maps and drawings, books in Hebrew, Yiddish and several other languages, music scores, portraits, and ephemera. Jews in America illustrates rare documents about European Jews in the Americas, particularly North America. Some early navigators and mapmakers were Italian or Iberian Jews, and there are title pages from early printed works from London, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Leiden, Cologne, Venice, and colonial America. The earliest Hebrew grammar in English is here, and the earliest Hebrew Bible in English, and the first Haggadah published in the United States.

Sephardic Jews arrived to settle in the New World in the early and mid-17th century, coming to Brazil from Portugal, to the Dutch colonies from the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, and to the English colonies from the recently arrived Sephardic community in London. Among the first arrivals were Spanish conversos or ‘new Christians’ who had been forced to convert to Christianity. Freed of the threat of the Spanish Inquisition after a few generations, they sometimes reconverted to Judaism and sometimes remained Catholic. The situation could get very complicated when Portuguese Catholics, Dutch Protestants, and Jews from Portugal and Holland met in disputed parts of Brazil.

Lest we think that the New World corrected all the excesses of the Old, there was a horrifying auto-da-fe in Mexico City, the largest one ever held in the Americas, in 1649. ‘It concerned 109 individuals – 108 secret or open Jews, plus a French Protestant who had failed to denounce a friend for practicing Judaism...The New World wasn’t completely safe for Jews, though it was still safer than Spain or Portugal.’  

 An idea that excited both the English Puritans and the Jews was that American Indians were the lost ten tribes of Israel. All the evidence was there: Indian languages allegedly had similarities with Hebrew, and the Indians (if you were desperate for evidence to back up your theories) ‘looked Jewish’! The thinking was that those lost tribes had to be somewhere, and given all the known continents of the world, these inhabitants seemed like the best bet. This notion ran until well into the 19th century when the study of linguistics, history, and geography gradually put it to rest.

As everyone in the colonies was a newcomer, Jews were no more outsiders than anyone else. In much of Europe Jews lived on sufferance, depending on the benevolence – or lack of it – of the government and their fellow citizens. Industrious Jews became important in the early sugar refining industry in Brazil and the Caribbean; they built synagogues and brought rabbis wherever they went. Judaism took some new turns in the New World. Decisions had to be made and directions issued about questions of, for example, the suitability of prayers for rain at a time when the new country had a rainy season anyway.

From the mid-19th century the Jewish immigration to the United States came from central and eastern Europe, and soon the characteristic culture was Ashkenazi rather than Sephardic. The new movements of Conservative and Reform Judaism grew up in the United States as a response to new situations. Big cities such as New York and Philadelphia soon had sizable Jewish populations. Yiddish theatre was banned in Russia but thrived in New York, where Second Avenue became known as the Yiddish Broadway.

After the terrifying pogroms in Russia in 1881-82 and again in 1903–07 the flight of Jews became a deluge, and much Jewish culture was transplanted wholesale to the United States. Russian intellectuals and Jewish intellectuals were often the same people, and so poets and novelists writing in Russian and Yiddish ended up in New York writing for the several Yiddish daily papers and literary magazines that burgeoned in the early 20th century. One of them, Di Tsukunft (‘The Future’), founded in 1892, is still running. Other American cities had similar Jewish communities and publications on a smaller scale.

Whether it was because of the transplanting of so much Jewish culture or for some other reason, the authors don’t say, but the first few decades of the 20th century saw an exciting growth in Yiddish theatre and literature. We learn along the way the intriguing fact that some of the most popular Yiddish literature of the day, like the novels of Miriam Karpilove (1888–1956), have never been translated into English. A few other Yiddish writers who were translated or wrote in both Yiddish and English, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem, were and still are well known outside a Yiddish-speaking readership.

 Reflecting all this and the lives of leading Jewish men and women of the last 400 years, Jews in America gives a flavour of an important strand in the history of the United States.

Jews in America: From New Amsterdam to the Yiddish Stage by Stephen D. Corrsin, Amanda Seigel, Kenneth Benson is published by New York Public Library, New York 2013. 160 pp. 79 colour and 28 mono illus, £29.95  $45.00 SBN 978 1 904832 22 5