Jews in America from 1800 until World War II --- Episode 2

        The Mass Migration of Jews To America in the Mid-1800s 

   The mass migration of German Jews to America that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century was intimately bound up with their earlier abandonment of the traditional trappings of Jewish identity. Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, was an essentially German movement, its prophet being the great Prussian Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, which led in turn to that other essentially German movement, Reform Judaism, encouraged Jews to, literally and metaphorically, leave the ghetto in which they had been confined and embrace the modernizing ideas of the wider Western European Enlightenment. This meant using German rather than Hebrew as the language of worship, abandoning traditions and customs that served to isolate Jews from the rest of society, and reforming Jewish education so that it prepared people for the world at large rather than schooling them in a separate culture. The hope that inspired these changes was that, in return for abandoning those aspects of their culture that identified them as radically different from others, the Jews would receive from the gentile world  a lifting of the discriminatory laws that affected almost every aspect of their lives, and a full acceptance as members of society with the same legal, financial, and political rights as other citizens.  Thus fully assimilated, Jews would no longer think of themselves as a separate race or nation, but rather as adherents of a religion. Their nationality would be GERMAN , and they would be not a bit less German for worshipping in a synagogue rather than a church.
   It was the dashing of this hope that persuaded hundreds of thousands of German Jews in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to turn their backs on their home country and look to America to find the freedom and equality they had failed to achieve in Germany. Thus, in the eyes of German Jews, America became not only a refuge from discrimination and prejudice, but also the national embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, the ideals of Haskalah. Many of them therefore ceased trying to become accepted as Germans  and sought to become accepted as Americans.  
 "Amerika, du hast es besser." These famous words of Goethe are contained in the poem "Den Vereingten Staaten" [ "To the United States" ] , written in 1827, when, as an old man, he reflected upon the advantages that youthful America had over the "Old Continent" in having no tradition, no "decaying castles," and being therefore free from the continuous strife that comes from long memories. The image of America that Goethe's poem conjures up is one of a tabula rasa, waiting, so to speak, to have its history written upon it. This was an image perfectly suited to arouse the interest and expectations of the German Jews, a group who longed to start afresh, free from the tensions and prejudices of the past. 
   And so, beginning in the 1820s, the rallying cry "On to America" echoed throughout the Jewish community in Germany. A whole movement grew up dedicated to the encouragement of migration to the United States, publicizing the financial, social and political advantages of the New World, and providing hope and support to those prepared to make what must have been an alarming as well as  an exciting fresh start. In books by Europeans who had been to America, in letters to relatives from those who had migrated, and in village meetings where people gathered to her firsthand accounts of American life from migrants who had returned to visit families, the image of America as "the common man's utopia" was spread, inspiring more and more Jews to set sail for the United States. 
   A typical example of such inspirational firsthand accounts is a letter written in November 1846 by the journalist and academic Max Lilienthal, which was published in the German Jewish weekly newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenbums. Extolling "the beautiful ground of civil equality" that he had discovered in America, Lilienthal announced : "The old Europe with its restrictions lies behind me like a bad dream. . . At last I breathe in liberty . . . Jew or Christian, Christian or Jew --- this old strife is forgotten, and only the man as such is respected and loved." Encouraging others to follow his example, he urged : "Shake off the centuries-old dust of Jew-pressure . . . become a human being like everybody else." And, he promised, in America : "Jewish hearts are open in welcome. Jewish organizations ready to help anyone. Why should you go on carrying the burden of legal exclusion ?" 
   The number of German Jews willing and eager to "shake off the centuries-old dust of Jew-pressure" was so large that it completely transformed the American Jewish community. In 1840, there were just 15,000 Jews in the United States ; by 1880, there were 280,000 , most of whom were of German origin. This influx of German Jews is known to Jewish historians as the "Second Migration" --- the "First Migration" being the arrival in the seventeenth century of a small community of Sephardic Jews. These were descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, who, by the nineteenth century, were a well-established part of American life. 
   These self-styled "old American Sephardic families" took pride in the fact that they had been in America for as many generations as the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and tended to treat the new German arrivals with the kind of lofty disdain with which the German Jews would later treat the Russians and Poles. The first German Jews to arrive in America accepted the leadership of the old Sephardic community and even adopted the Sephardic form of worship. When the number of German Jewish migrants began to increase dramatically, however, the balance of power shifted and the German Ashkenazi Jews replaced the Sephardim as the leaders of the Jewish community. 
   The mass influx into America of Russian and Polish Jews, which took place from 1880 to 1920, formed the "Third Migration," and was on an entirely different scale from the previous two, being measured not in the tens of thousands, or in the hundreds of thousands, but in millions. Roughly two and a half million Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in the United States during the Third Migration, bringing with them a very different kind of Jewish culture from that of either the Sephardim or the Germans.