Among that select group who gained membership right from its inception were Solomon and Sigfeld. With regard to the Rothfeld brothers' time in New York is a little sketchy. Little is known of their first five years in America, except that they set up some kind of business in the tailoring trade, which must have done fairly well. In 1874-75 they are listed in the New York City Directory as "importers of dry goods," with offices in Worth Street, Lower Manhattan. More significant as a measure of their social and financial success, however, is the fact that in the following year they appear as founding members of the Ethical Culture Society, along with Joseph Seligman, Jacob Schiff and Henry Morgenthau. Within seven years of being in America, then, the Rothfeld brothers had joined :Our Crowd," the elite of Manhattan German Jewish society.
In 1880, that society (including, no doubt, the Rothfeld brothers) was united in mourning the death of Joseph Seligman, known since the Saratoga incident as "America's leading Jew." Shortly before his death, Seligman hd asked that his funeral service should be directed by the Ethical Cultural Society. DEspite this request, the Seligman family and Gustav Gottheil, the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, conspired to give him a "proper Jewish funeral" at the synagogue. In addition, a funeral srvice conducted by felix Adler ws held in Seligman's house, an event that served to cement and increase the acceptance of Adler's society among New York's German Jewish elite.
It was, however, increasingly becoming a separate elite. In 1887, the nature of New York's high society was spelled out when the first volume of the Social Register for New york appeared, listing 2,000 or so families that were considered the creme de lacreme of Manhattan. NOT ONE OF THEM WAS JEWISH, It author, Ward McAllister, suggested : "our good Jews might wish to put out a little book of their own." In the face of such painful reminders that they were not accepted by New York high society, many prominent members of the German Jewish community migrated from the Upper East Side of Manhattan [ where, along Fifth Avenue, the likes of the Astors had their grand "brownstones" ] to form what has been described as "the first recognizably German Jewish upper-class neighborhood " on the Upper West Side. It was to this neighborhood that Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld moved in 1887, after they had joined with their cousin, J.H. Stern, to form Rothfeld, Stern & Co., a company that specialized in importing tailoring materials. Their names would never appear in the Social Register, but among their immediate neighbors now were Goldmans, Sachses and Guggenheims.
Meanwhile the "THIRD MIGRATION" of Jews to America was gaining momentum and, as the German Jewish community had feared, arousing a new and intensified form of anti-Semitism. In the same year that the Social Register was published and the Rothfeld brothers moved to the Upper West Side, an article appeared in Forum magazine entitled "Race Prejudice at Summer Resorts," which identified anti-Semitism as "a new feature in the New World." "Only within the present decade," the article stated, "has there been an anti-Jewish sentiment openly displayed in the United States." The blame for this ws laid by Alice Rhine, the author of the article, firmly on Judge Hilton, whose exclusion of Jews from his hotel in Saratoga had set an example that other hotel and boardinghouse proprietors had followed. "In seeking reasons for this sweeping ostracism, " she wrote, "it is found that the Gentiles charge the Hebrews with 'being too numerous' ; 'they swarm everywhere.' " It was also said, she recorded, that Jews lacked refinement ; they dressed badly, had bad manners and showed disrespect for the Christian Sabbath.
The kind of anti-Semitism discussed by Rhine was extremely mild, however, compared to the sort that was unleashed at around the same time in The American Jew, described as "the book that inaugurated racial anti-Semitism in America." Its author was Telemachus Timayenis, a Greek immigrant. Whereas Rhine described a prejudice against Jews as identified by their culture, their language and their perceived lack of social graces, Timayenis's target was the Jew as a RACIAL type. identified by "their hooked noses, restless eyes, elongated ears, square nails, flat feet, round knees, and soft hands." The Jews that he describes with venomous hatred wear "long coats dripping with filth, while their faces and beards look suety with sluttishness" ; they arrive in the United States penniless, and soon ---- suspiciously soon, according to Timayentis --- become prominent bankers, and leaders of American industry. But despite his unease at the wealth of the German Jews, it is the wretched poverty of the eastern Jewson the Lower East Side that most exercises Timayenis, who is also inclined to despise Jews because they are refugees from prejudice. "Let the Jews of this country understand," he writes, "that the American people do not want, and will not receive, the dregs of a race which has won only scorn and contempt from the people of Europe." The message of The American Jew, repeated several times throughout the book, is : "The Jew must go! "
Timaayenis, of course, did not speak for the whole American population, the majority of whom would have identified far more readily with the famous sentiments expressed by Emma Lazarus in the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which was dedicated by President Cleveland in 1886, sentiments that indeed were inspired by the piteous sight of the arrival to New York of the very Jews that had aroused the venom of The American Jew :
Give me your tired, your poor ;
Your buddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
The Statue of Liberty would have been the first thing that Julius Oppenheimer saw when he came to the United States in 1888 to join his prosperous and well-connected uncles and take his place among "Our Crowd." He was at that time a slim, good-looking, but shy seventeen-year-old who spoke little English. However, he clearly lost no time in joining the cultural, spiritual and [perhaps most importantly] social world of his uncles. In the yer of his arrival in New York, he is listed as a member of Adler's Ethical Culture Society. Though he was, of course, immediately given a position in Rothfeld, Sterm & Co., he could not yet afford to live on the Upper West Side and, for the first few years before his inexorable rise through the company's hierarchy, lived in rented accommodation in Lower Manhattan, the same part of town in which the company had its office.
In many ways Julius Oppenheimer was arriving in Americaat a bad time. The so-called "Gilded Age," when unimaginably large fortunes were amassed by the Robber Barons [Carnegie in steel, Rockefeller in oil, Vanderbilt in railroads and Astor in real estate], and smaller but still significant fortunes were made by Jewish bankers and traders, was coming to an end, as the country headed toward recession. No doubt related to the darkening economic scene was the growth of racial anti-Semitism, which , while rarely as virulent as that expressed in The American Jew, could still shock many of those German Jewish migrants who had believed in America as a land free from the "old strife."
In 1880, that society (including, no doubt, the Rothfeld brothers) was united in mourning the death of Joseph Seligman, known since the Saratoga incident as "America's leading Jew." Shortly before his death, Seligman hd asked that his funeral service should be directed by the Ethical Cultural Society. DEspite this request, the Seligman family and Gustav Gottheil, the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, conspired to give him a "proper Jewish funeral" at the synagogue. In addition, a funeral srvice conducted by felix Adler ws held in Seligman's house, an event that served to cement and increase the acceptance of Adler's society among New York's German Jewish elite.
It was, however, increasingly becoming a separate elite. In 1887, the nature of New York's high society was spelled out when the first volume of the Social Register for New york appeared, listing 2,000 or so families that were considered the creme de lacreme of Manhattan. NOT ONE OF THEM WAS JEWISH, It author, Ward McAllister, suggested : "our good Jews might wish to put out a little book of their own." In the face of such painful reminders that they were not accepted by New York high society, many prominent members of the German Jewish community migrated from the Upper East Side of Manhattan [ where, along Fifth Avenue, the likes of the Astors had their grand "brownstones" ] to form what has been described as "the first recognizably German Jewish upper-class neighborhood " on the Upper West Side. It was to this neighborhood that Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld moved in 1887, after they had joined with their cousin, J.H. Stern, to form Rothfeld, Stern & Co., a company that specialized in importing tailoring materials. Their names would never appear in the Social Register, but among their immediate neighbors now were Goldmans, Sachses and Guggenheims.
Meanwhile the "THIRD MIGRATION" of Jews to America was gaining momentum and, as the German Jewish community had feared, arousing a new and intensified form of anti-Semitism. In the same year that the Social Register was published and the Rothfeld brothers moved to the Upper West Side, an article appeared in Forum magazine entitled "Race Prejudice at Summer Resorts," which identified anti-Semitism as "a new feature in the New World." "Only within the present decade," the article stated, "has there been an anti-Jewish sentiment openly displayed in the United States." The blame for this ws laid by Alice Rhine, the author of the article, firmly on Judge Hilton, whose exclusion of Jews from his hotel in Saratoga had set an example that other hotel and boardinghouse proprietors had followed. "In seeking reasons for this sweeping ostracism, " she wrote, "it is found that the Gentiles charge the Hebrews with 'being too numerous' ; 'they swarm everywhere.' " It was also said, she recorded, that Jews lacked refinement ; they dressed badly, had bad manners and showed disrespect for the Christian Sabbath.
The kind of anti-Semitism discussed by Rhine was extremely mild, however, compared to the sort that was unleashed at around the same time in The American Jew, described as "the book that inaugurated racial anti-Semitism in America." Its author was Telemachus Timayenis, a Greek immigrant. Whereas Rhine described a prejudice against Jews as identified by their culture, their language and their perceived lack of social graces, Timayenis's target was the Jew as a RACIAL type. identified by "their hooked noses, restless eyes, elongated ears, square nails, flat feet, round knees, and soft hands." The Jews that he describes with venomous hatred wear "long coats dripping with filth, while their faces and beards look suety with sluttishness" ; they arrive in the United States penniless, and soon ---- suspiciously soon, according to Timayentis --- become prominent bankers, and leaders of American industry. But despite his unease at the wealth of the German Jews, it is the wretched poverty of the eastern Jewson the Lower East Side that most exercises Timayenis, who is also inclined to despise Jews because they are refugees from prejudice. "Let the Jews of this country understand," he writes, "that the American people do not want, and will not receive, the dregs of a race which has won only scorn and contempt from the people of Europe." The message of The American Jew, repeated several times throughout the book, is : "The Jew must go! "
Timaayenis, of course, did not speak for the whole American population, the majority of whom would have identified far more readily with the famous sentiments expressed by Emma Lazarus in the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which was dedicated by President Cleveland in 1886, sentiments that indeed were inspired by the piteous sight of the arrival to New York of the very Jews that had aroused the venom of The American Jew :
Give me your tired, your poor ;
Your buddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
The Statue of Liberty would have been the first thing that Julius Oppenheimer saw when he came to the United States in 1888 to join his prosperous and well-connected uncles and take his place among "Our Crowd." He was at that time a slim, good-looking, but shy seventeen-year-old who spoke little English. However, he clearly lost no time in joining the cultural, spiritual and [perhaps most importantly] social world of his uncles. In the yer of his arrival in New York, he is listed as a member of Adler's Ethical Culture Society. Though he was, of course, immediately given a position in Rothfeld, Sterm & Co., he could not yet afford to live on the Upper West Side and, for the first few years before his inexorable rise through the company's hierarchy, lived in rented accommodation in Lower Manhattan, the same part of town in which the company had its office.
In many ways Julius Oppenheimer was arriving in Americaat a bad time. The so-called "Gilded Age," when unimaginably large fortunes were amassed by the Robber Barons [Carnegie in steel, Rockefeller in oil, Vanderbilt in railroads and Astor in real estate], and smaller but still significant fortunes were made by Jewish bankers and traders, was coming to an end, as the country headed toward recession. No doubt related to the darkening economic scene was the growth of racial anti-Semitism, which , while rarely as virulent as that expressed in The American Jew, could still shock many of those German Jewish migrants who had believed in America as a land free from the "old strife."
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