JEWS IN AERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---Episode 6

GERMAN JEWS IN NEW YORK CITY AS WE ENTERED 1900

   The economic recession of 1893-1895 hit the clothing industry harder than any other and resulted in mass unemployment, although Rothfeld, Stern & Co. seemed to ride out the recession better than most clothing firms in New York. It moved its office to cheaper accommodations on Bleecker Street, but other than that there was no sign that it suffered very much. In 1895, Julius's younger brother Emil came to New York, by which time Julius, now twenty-four years old, was beginning to make his mark in the firm. In 1900, the company took the decision to specialize in in the importation of cloak linings, something on which Julius Oppenheimer quickly became an expert, and from that point he seems to have become the company's leading figure. In 1903, this was recognized when he was made a partner, a move that seems to have persuaded him that the time was right to marry and settle down. 
   His chosen bride was Ella Friedman, who, though a member of the same German ajewish, Upper West Side community as the Rothfelds and Oppenheimers, was seen as significantly less German, less Jewish and more "American" than Julius. For one thing, Ella was not a migrant; she had been born in America and English was her first language. According to her son, she did not speak German very well --- something that seemed, if anything, to be a source of pride rather than of embarrassment. Her father, Louis Friedman, was indisputably a German Jew, but, having migrated to Baltimore rather than to New York, in the 1840s, he had been in the U.S. a good deal longer than the Rothfelds or the Oppenheimers. Ella's mother, Cecilia Eger, had herself been born in America and, though from a Germanic background [her father was German, her mother Austrian], was, so it was said in the family anyway, not a German Jew, since she was non-Jewish. The claim is precarious to say the least. Cecilia's mother, Clara Binswanger, was --- about as Jewish as it is possible to be : both her maternal and paternal grandfathers were rabbis. Cecilia's father, David Eger, was a prominent member of the Philadelphia Jewish community, mentioned several times in the 1894 publication The Jews of Philadelphia. If J. Robert Oppenheimer inherited his striking blue eyes from his grandmother Cecilia, as was widely believed in the family, it was not because she was, from a genetic point of view, any less Jewish than his paternal grandparents. 

            EMPHASIS IS SWITCHING TO J. ROBERT
            OPPENHIEMER , BUT THEN WE' LL COMPARE
           THE WEALTHY OPPENHEIMERS TO THE DIRT 
           POOR FAMILY OF ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC GENIUS,
           I. I. RABI WHO WAS ALSO RAISED IN NEW YORK 
           CITY DURING THE EARLY 1900s 

Not only was Ella seen as more "American" than the family she was marrying into, but she was also was seen as more "refined." During the years that Julius spent working his way up the family textile business, Ella was studying art, first in her native Baltimore and then in Paris, where she made a particular study of the Impressionists. [ She may have met Mary Cassett.] On her return to America she taught at Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women in New York, which had opened in 1889 as an "annex" of Columbia University and from 1897 was housed in a building next to Columbia in Morningside Heights on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. By the time she met Julius, Ella was an established and accomplished painter, with private students and her own rooftop studio. Her father had died in the early 1890s and she lived with her mother, Cecilia, in an apartment at 148 West 94th Street. Two years older than Julius, she would have been in her mid-thirties when they met, described by a family friend as "a gentle, exquisite, slim, tallish, blue-eyed woman, terribly sensitive, and extremely polite." She was born with an unformed right hand. To hide this --- and the artificial thumb and finger that she used to compensate for it ---- she always wore gloves, and her deformity was never once mentioned or even alluded to by the family. When a girlfriend of Robert's once asked him about it, she was met with stony silence. 
   It is not entirely clear how Julius and Ella met. It may have been that Ella's father was in the textile trade and knew the Rothfeld brothers, or it may have been that they had mutual friends in the Ethical Culture Society. Both suggestions have been made, although neither seems very likely. Her father had been dead for many years before she and Julius met, and it is not likely that her mother moved in the same circles as the Rothfelds. Nor is there any indication that Ella or anybody else in her family was a member of, or in any way interested in, Adler's Ethical Culture Society. 
   It seems more likely that it was their common interest in art that brought them together.  By 1903, Julius, as a partner in a thriving company, was a wealthy man and could afford to indulge his growing passion for the visual arts. It is reported that he "spent his free hours on weekends roaming New York's numerous art galleries." If so, given the way that wealth and enthusiasm attract invitations and introductions, it is not difficult to imagine that someone in the New York art world --- an artist, an agent, a gallery owner--- brought Julius and Ella together. 
   The cultural refinement that Ella represented was by this time something Julius craved. Though he had left school as a teenager, and had arrived in America speaking little English, he was determined to develop into a "proper gentleman" that his employees later described him as being. He dressed impeccably, acquired the social graces of the upper middle class and read widely, particularly in American and European history. Discovering that a German accent was a barrier to acceptance as a gentleman in the New York of the early twentieth century, Julius took drastic steps to remove all traces of his mother tongue, taking English lessons from an Oxford tutor, from whom he acquired the gentlemanly tones of the British educated elite. 
   Ella and Julius were married on March 23, 1903, their wedding being the occasion of a very public statement that they did not consider themselves Jewish. The service was performed not by a rabbi, but by Felix Adler himself, and not in accordance with any Jewish tradition, but rather as an illustration of the New Ideal" preached by the Ethical Culture Society. In his series of discourses,  Creed and Deed, published in 1886, Adler had written, in connection with his notion of what the "Priests of the New Ideal" might be be like : "there are special occasions in these passing years of ours, when the ideal bearings of life come home to us with particular force and when we require the priest to be their proper interpreter. Marriage is one of them." And so Ella and Julius were, in a way, married by a priest, but not in a way that implied commitment to any religious creed.