JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 Until WORLD WAR II --- Episode 3

     GERMAN JEWS REACT TO ARRIVAL OF JEWS IN NEW 
    YORK CITY FROM RUSSIA AND POLAND 

    The arrival of the Russian and Polish Jews was such an embarrassment to the established  German Jewish community that their first reaction to it was to argue, through editorials in their newspaper, American Hebrew, and direct lobbying from their organization, the United Hebrew Charities of New York, for the introduction of tougher immigration laws. When this came to nothing and the number of Eastern European Jewish immigrants kept rising,the German Jews set up the Education Alliance, which organized Americanization programs in which the new immigrants were instructed in "the privileges and duties of American citizenship." What drove these measures were not only the German Jews' love of America, but also a dread of the anti-Semitism which they feared the Eastern Jews would arouse. The Jewish historian Gerald Sorin points out :"These uptowners were very taken with Israel Zangwill's play 'The Melting Pot'. They saw in it a reinforcement of their own proposed solution for the problems of downtown : the sooner immigrants from eastern Europe gave up their cultural distinctiveness and melted into the homogenized mass, the sooner anti-Semitism would also melt."

   It was a strategy that German Jews had tried unsuccessfully in Germany, but which seemed to be working in the United States. It required, however, constant vigilance with respect to "cultural distinctiveness," a vigilance that could easily slip into the kind of self-denial of which Rabi accused Oppenheimer. One form this vigilance took was an acute sensitivity among German Jews about their names. Sometimes this led to the abandonment of German-sounding surnames, a notable example being Arthur Schonberg, the son of an impoverished Jewish family from the Rhineland, who would become famous as the millionaire New York banker August Belmont. More often, though, it tool the form of changing one's first name and giving toone's children names that sounded reassuringly "American." Joseph Seligman, another millionaire New York banker, brought his brothers, Wolfgang, Jacob, and Isias over from Germany, but on arrival they became William, James, and Jesse. The names of Joseph Seligman's children look like a roll call of American heroes : George Washington Seligman, Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, and Alfred Lincoln Seligman (evidently "Abraham" was considered too Judaic). 
   Of the American heroes commemorated in these names, the least well known today is undoubtedly Robert Anderson.  He was a major in the U.S army at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 and was involved in the opening hostilities, when Ft. Sumter in South Carolina, which was then  under his command, came under fire from the Confederates. For holding his ground and defending the fort for thirty-four hoursMajor Anderson was promoted by Abraham Lincoln to Brigadier General and became a national hero, not just for the duration of the war, but also for many decades afterward. Because of him, the name "Robert" became immensely popular. For anyone wanting to affirm the identity of their offspring, it was the natural choice. Indeed J. Robert Oppenheimer was to like it so much that he ignored the "J" in his name and was known, by the family and friends, simply as "Robert" or "Bob." When he was asked what the "J" stood for, he would reply that it stood for nothing. In fact, as his birth certificate shows, it stands for "Julius," his father's name. For anyone striving to avoid "cultural distinctiveness," the name "Robert Oppenheimer," or even "J. Robert Oppenheimer," had obvious advantages over "Julius Oppenheimer." 

   Even so, the surname remained, and it was as "culturally distinctive" as a name can be, identifying its bearers' ancestors both geographically and ethnically. "As appears from his name," one of Oppenheimer's professors once wrote in an academic reference, "Oppenheimer is a Jew." If, ignoring Haskalah, one clung to the notion of Judaism as a defining race, a nation or a tribe, rather than simply a religion, then the professor was correct. After the Napoleonic decree of 1808, which required Jews to take a surname, "Oppenheimer" was the name adopted by those Jews who lived in the area around the small and fairly obscure town of Oppenheim, which lies in the Hesse area of Germany, between Mainz and Worms, not far from Frankfurt. With regard to J. Robert Oppenheimer, what "appears from the name" is that his ancestors were among those Hessian Jews. Could he look upon them and say, "These are my people?" Well, after his political awakening in the 1930s, when his relatives --- like all Jews in Germany --- were facing the horrors of the Nazis, his determination to play a part in defeating Hitler's regime did suggest some feeling of kinship with the victims of the Third Reich. But, until then, his reaction to his German Jewish relatives was to look upon them as if they came from a very distant time and place. When, as a child, he went to Germany on a family visit and met his grandfather, Benjamin Oppenheimer, who still lived just a few miles from Oppenheim, his impression [or so he later recalled] was of "an unsuccessful small businessman, born himself in a hovel, really, in an almost medieval German village." This, one feels, is the impression of a child used to the wealth of the Upper West Side and the modernity of twentieth-century Manhattan ; whether Benjamin would be regarded as "unsuccessful," his birthplace a "hovel" and his home town "medieval" by people with less exalted standards is, I think, doubtful. 

   The "almost medieval village" was presumably Hanau, a town northeast of Oppenheim, where Benjamin Oppenheimer lived and where his son, Julius, was born in 1871. Julius spent just seventeen years in Hanau before, in 188, leaving for America. Whatever the truth about Benjamin Oppenheimer's circumstances, the family clearly had aspirations for a better life than was possible in Hanau and, like many other German Jews, thought they could fulfill those aspirations in America. Julius' younger brother and sister, Emil and Hedwig, joined him a few years after he had set sail, and Julius himself was following the example of his two uncles, Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld [ "Sol and Sig" as they were known in the family], who had migrated to the United States a generation earlier. 

   The ambition may have come from Benjamin's wife, Babette Rothfeld, since the two uncles in question were her brothers. "Sol and Sig" left for America in 1869, nearly twenty years before Julius Oppenheimer came to join them, but more than thirty years after the "SECOND MIGRATION" had begun. In those thirty years or so, a great deal had happened to the German Jewish community in America. Or, rather, one should say that in those years the American German Jewish community had been created, its development demonstrating both that the United States could indeed realize many of the hopes expressed in Max Lilienthal's letter, and that it could not entirely live up to the promise of being a land in which "old strife" between Jew and Christian had been forgotten. 

   By 1869, the German Jewish migrants who had landed in America thirty or so years earlier had formed a successful social group, among whom were a surprisingly large number of families that had become extremely wealthy. Within a single generation, the Seligmans, the Lehmans, the Guggenheims, the Schiffs, the Goldmans and the Saches had all amassed vast fortunes and beccome founders of some of the best-known, most successful and most powerful financial and commercial institutions in America. They had also created a fairly tight-knit community, known to its members as "OUR CROWD," a Jewish version of the more conspicuously wealthy group of families---the Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans, Roosevelts, and so on --- that constituted New York's gentile high society during this period. "OUR CROWD" was a self-consciously cohesive community, whose members worshipped together at the Temple Emanu-El [ the Reform Jewish synagogue, whose imposing building on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1868, was a symbol of the success and aspirations of the German Jewish community] , socialized together, took holidays together and chose their wives and husbands from each other's families.