JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 1

             JEWS IN SCIENCE  IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE 
            NINETEENTH & EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES 


Isidor Rabi And Robert Oppenheimer : Both Were Physicists ; 
     Both Were From New York ; and Both Were Jewish 

   Isidor Rabi [ Rabi rhymes with "Bobby" ] once remarked that his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer was "a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters," who "never got to be an integrated personality."  What prevented Oppenheimer from being fully integrated, Rabi thought, was his denial of a central part of himself : his Jewishness. As the physicist Felix Bloch, echoing Rabi, once put it , Oppenheimer "tried to act as if he were not a Jew and succeeded well because he was a good actor." And, because he was acting, he lost sight of who he really was. Oppenheimer had an impressive and wide-ranging collection of talents, abilities and personal characteristics, but where the central, united core of his personality ought to have been, Rabi thought, there was a gap and so there was nothing to hold those "bright shining splinters" together. "I understood his problem, " Rabi said, and when asked what that problem was, replied simply : "Identity." 

    
Rabi spoke as someone who, by virtue of his background, intelligence, and education  was well placed to understand Oppenheimer's "problem." He and Oppenheimer had a great deal in common : they were roughly the same age [ Rabi was six years older] , they were both theoretical physicists, were both brought up in New York City and were both descended from European Jewish families. Behind this last similarity, however, lay a fundamental difference. Rabi was proud of his Jewish inheritance and happy to define himself in terms of it. Though he had no religious beliefs, and never prayed, he once said that when he saw Orthodox Jews at prayer, the thought that came into his mind was : "These are my people." 
   No such thought could have entered Oppenheimer's mind, no matter who he was looking at. There was no group to whom he could point and say : "These are my people," and not just because of his ambivalence about his Jewish background. It was also because that background itself, regardless of Oppenheimer's feelings about it, could not have provided him with a sense of belonging and, therefore, the sense of identity that Rabi thought was missing in him. Rabi, despite his lack of religious beliefs, was Jewish in a fairly straightforward and unambiguous way ; the Jews simply were "his people." Theirs was the community to which he belonged. One cannot say the same thing about Oppenheimer. The sense in which he was Jewish, the sense in which he did --- and did not --- come from, and belong to, a Jewish community, is far more complicated and, as Rabi has perceptively noted, crucial in understanding the fragility of his sense of identity. 

   For an understanding of the elusive nature of Oppenheimer's Jewishness, the contrast between his family background and Rabi's is instructive. Despite their many and important similarities, and despite the fact that they grew up within a few miles of each other, Rabi and Oppenheimer were born into and brought up in families that were culturally worlds apart. Rabi was a "Polish Jew." Born in Galicia to a poor, Yiddish-speaking family of Orthodox Jews, he came to New York as an infant and was raised, first in the crowded slums of the Lower East Side and then in a tiny apartment in the Brownsville Section of Brooklyn.   Oppenheimer was born not in Europe, but in New York City, to a WEALTHY FAMILY that had abandoned its Jewish faith and traditions a generation earlier. The bustling and crowded "Jewish Ghetto" of the Lower East Side would have seemed utterly alien to the young Oppenheimer, who was brought up in an enormous luxury apartment in the genteel Upper West Side. The family had never spoken Yiddish, and, though German was his father's first language, it ws never spoken at home. 

   And yet, despite regarding himself neither as German nor Jewish, Oppenheimer was seen, by Jews and non-Jews alike, as a "German Jew." In New York in the early twentieth century the central division among the Jewish community was between, on the one hand, the German Jews and, on the other, the Polish and Russian Jews --- the differences between the two groups accurately mirrored by the differences between Oppenheimer and Rabi. The German Jews, sometimes called "Uptown Jews," were on the whole wealthier, more assimilated and less religious than their Polish and Russian counterparts, to whom they were notoriously condescending. At the time of Oppenheimer's birth in 1904 there were more Polish and Russian Jews in New York than German Jews, but the Germans assumed leadership of the Jewish community and took it upon themselves to help "Americanize"the Russians and Poles, who reacted with resentment at what they saw as a dismissal of their religion and their customs. 
   What Rabi called Oppenheimer's problem---the problem of identity--- was, in fact, a problem for the entire American Jewish community, perhaps its central problem. Certainly it was the issue at the heart of the tension between the two groups of Jews in New York City. For the Russian and Polish Jews, their sense of identity was bound up with their Jewishness : their Orthodox religious beliefs, their Yiddish language and their Jewish culture and traditions. That sense of identity, that culture, however, had been abandoned by the German Jews before they even came to America.