Jewish Community

Jewish Community

A Leading figure in Jewish community affairs relates that a Jew always eagerly asks, in any situation, "How many are Jews?" And when he gets an answer, he asks suspiciously, "How do you know?"

                Self-consciousness, curiosity, pride?  all these are Jewish traits; caution, timidity, fear?  these are Jewish traits, too. But our interest for the moment is in the more mundane subject of figures.

                The U.S. Census does not ask about religion. But sociologists, planners, journalists, and people in general are so interested in this question that it might have done so a long time ago except for, among other reasons, the strong opposition of certain Jewish organizations. At the same time, the Jewish community demands that such figures exist; so Jewish organizations have developed techniques for estimating the Jewish population. In 1957 the census did ask a question about religion, as a pretest for a possible question about religion in the i960 census. Some information from this sample was released before the Jewish organizations that oppose official statistics on Jews had developed pressure enough to seal the returns. This abortive census study had at least the result of loosely corroborating the figures derived in less direct ways.

                We know that somewhat more than a quarter of the population of New York City is Jewish; that about a third of the white and non-Puerto Rican part of the population of the city is Jewish; and that this huge concentration of Jews, the greatest that has existed in thousands of years of Jewish history, forms about two-fifths of all the Jews in the United States. The city and surrounding suburban counties together include about half of the nation's Jews,  and almost all the rest have once lived in the city, will at some time live there, or have parents or children who live there. New York is the headquarters of the Jewish group. The euphemistic use of the term "New Yorker" to refer to "Jew”, which is not uncommon in the United States, is thus based on some reality.

                There have been Jews in New York City since almost its beginning. The first group, which landed in 1654, were "Sephardic" Jews, as those originally from Spain and Portugal are called, and spoke Portuguese. But they were also "Dutch" Jews, for they had been driven from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century and settled in Holland. They were also "Brazilian" Jews, having for some decades formed a large and important Jewish community in Brazil until the Portuguese, driving out the Dutch, had sent them on their way again. The synagogue these first Jews established is appropriately named Shearith Israel, "the Remnant of Israel," and in its latest physical form stands at Central Park West and 70th Street. There an ancient form of the Jewish service is carefully preserved and elegantly performed.

                The special prominence of Jews in New York is, however, of much later origin. During the middle of the nineteenth century there was a sizable immigration of Jews from Germany. In 1880 there were perhaps 80,000 Jews in the city. Still, they were only 4 per cent of the population, which was then mainly Irish, German, and old Stock American, and they were mostly German-speaking (from Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, as well as Germany itself). This largely German immigration became concentrated in business, particularly retail trade, and was economically quite successful. The German names of leading department stores in a dozen cities remind us of this wave of immigration. In the i88o's began the enormous migration from Eastern Europe, particularly from the Russian Empire, but also including sizable streams from pre-World-War Austria-Hungary and from Rumania. By 1910 there were a million and a quarter Jews in New York City. They then formed more than a quarter of the population, a proportion they have maintained ever since.

                This great migration, which continued, except for the interruption of the First World War, until it was reduced by law in 1924, has stamped the character of New York. The city's Jews are descendants of the Yiddish speaking, Orthodox and Socialist Jews of Eastern Europe. Despite a half-century of American life, which has made the grandchildren now coming to maturity very different from what their grandparents were, they retain much that recalls their origins.

                By 1924 there were almost two million Jews in the city. The old German Jewish community, marked off in language, religion, culture, and occupation from the new immigrants, was a tenth part or less of New York Jewry. When we see the contrast between these two groups (the variations within each were of course also great), we must ask what made them in any sense a single group. The German Jews could have stood off from the East European, Yiddish-speaking Jews and insisted they had nothing in common. Indeed, in practice, tone, and theology, the Reform Judaism of the German Jews diverged from the Orthodoxy of the immigrants as much as the beliefs and practices of Southern Baptists differ from those of New England Unitarians.

                Two wills make a group? the self-will that creates unity, and the will of others that imposes a unity where hardly any is felt. Conceivably this will of others had an effect on Jews, for since the 1870's anti-Semitism had been rising in the upper social circles to which the German Jews felt closest. Perhaps German Jews feared that, regardless of what they thought and felt, non-Jews would identify them with the new immigrants. Whatever the reasons, they themselves sensed this identity. Out of a multitude of institutions and organizations, a consciously single Jewish community was formed by the time of the First World War.

                The identification of the older group with the newer one took many forms. It was evident in the organization of charitable institutions to give immigrants money, guidance, training, and education so as to "Americanize" them. In 1917 a single Federation of Jewish Charities was formed to serve all Jews without discrimination. In 1906 wealthy German Jews founded the American Jewish Committee to defend Jewish interests, which meant, at that time, primarily the interests of East European Jews. Prominent Jews of the German group? Louis Marshall, Louis Brandeis, Jacob Schiff, Oscar Straus? were involved in the great strikes that created the powerful garment trades unions before the First World War. Both the bosses and the strikers were generally East European Jews, and German Jewish dignitaries served as mediators. Both communities cooperated in Jewish relief during the First World War, and elements of both helped create a Jewish state in Palestine. (Elements of both also opposed it.) Since 1920 the new groups that have arrived? Sephardic Jews from Greece and Turkey in the twenties, German refugees of the thirties, or displaced persons of the forties and fifties? have been met not by "German Jewish" or "East European Jewish" institutions, but by institutions that are simply "American Jewish."

                What is this Jewish community? There is no organization that includes all Jews, though the United Jewish Appeal may come close in that it collects from very many. The neat division of "Protestant, Catholic, Jewish" makes it easy to think of Jews as a religious group, but whereas a single organization baptizes and keeps track of all Catholics (at least for statistical purposes), there is no central Jewish religious organization, except for a small coordinating group that links the rabbinical and congregational associations of the three Jewish denominations. In any case, most Jews in New York City belong to no synagogue or temple, and many of them are nonreligious, or even antireligious. And yet we know from experience that when asked, "What is your rehgion?" even these answer, "Jewish."

                If the category of religion does not define Jews well, neither does the category of national origin or culture, for Jews have come from a score of countries and speak many different languages. The Sephardic Jew has to learn Yiddish expressions just as the non-Jew does; his "Yiddish" is not a German dialect, but Spanish. Nor does a common sentimental commitment to a national homeland define Jews, for, despite the feeling of many Jews for Israel, many are violently opposed to the whole idea. And yet, despite the difficulty of finding the common denominator, there is really no ambiguity about being Jewish, even though people are Jewish in different ways.

                There is first of all the fact that the overwhelming majority of American Jews do stem from a single culture? the Yiddish-speaking culture of Eastern Europe, which had a single, strongly defined religion, which we now call Orthodoxy but which was once only traditional Judaism, intensified by the isolation of the East European Jews from world culture. This East European group had been stamped with a common character by common experiences: a strong governmental and popular anti-Semitism, and the development in response to it of a variety of ideological movements, such as Socialism and Zionism, as well as the huge migratory movement that dispersed this group to the United States, Canada, Argentina, England, France, Israel, and South Africa. The worldwide migration of this vigorous people makes American Jews at home almost everywhere they go, for other descendants of East European Jews, speaking or understanding Yiddish, will be found almost everywhere.

                This dominant group created a Jewish culture in which almost everyone ate gefilte fish and knew a few Yiddish tags, and which has served as the first stage in the assimilation to America of very different kinds of Jewish immigrants. But there is more to the creation of a Jewish community than the link with Eastern Europe and the creation of a single American subculture. There is also, linking all Jews, the sense of a common fate. In part, the common fate is defined ultimately by connection to a single religion, to which everyone is still attached by birth and tradition if not by action and belief. In part, it reflects the imposition of a common fate by the outer world, whether in the form of Hitler's extermination or the mild differential behavior  that is met in America today.

                This "community," then, is a group that may never act together and that may never feel together, but that does know it is a single group, from which one can be disengaged only by a series of deliberate acts. Only a minority are "Jews*' if we use some concrete defining index. Only a minority belongs to synagogues, is sent to Jewish schools, deals with Jewish welfare agencies, is interested in Jewish culture, speaks a traditional Jewish language, and can be distinguished by dress and custom as Jews. But, added together, the overlapping minorities create a community with a strong selfconsciousness and a definite character.

                The easiest way of identifying a Jew is to ask his religion. Regardless of the low rate of religious identification among the Jews in New York City, only rarely, as we have pointed out, will a person born of Jewish parents not answer "Jewish." The simplest answer to the question "Who is a Jew?" (which became a problem only because Jews broke with their traditional religion in the nineteenth century) is the return question, "Who is not a Jew?" For the purposes of those efficient fund-raising organizations which make it their business to keep tabs on Jews, only those who have converted are not Jews. There are remarkably few of them. So, linked by the strong arm of the Jewish communal organizations, even if resentfully, there is quite a range of individuals? Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and secular Jews, self-conscious and proud Jews and hardly conscious and embarrassed Jews, Jews who know about their history and religion, and Jews who know less about it than any Christian minister.

                There is then a reality to this notion of an American Jewish community, though it is not a reality that can be summed up in a simple definition. Aware of all the complexities of being Jewish, of all the groupings and subgroups within that category, and of all the ways in which Jews do not act as a group, we can still speak of it as a group.