American Jewry was largely an age mate of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Some of the salient characteristics of the larger society in the decades after 1870 enabled a growth and development that allowed America to emerge in the early twentieth century as a major center of global Jewry. In those years a set of circumstances came together that made possible the formation, growth, and maturation of the largest, freest, and institutionally richest Jewish community in the world and indeed in history.Footnote ¹ Although Jews had been living in the United States (and before that the British colonies of North America) well before the 1870s, they numbered that year no more than approximately 200,000 individuals, and they constituted too small a percentage of the American population and lived with too great a degree of anonymity to make much of an impact or impression on their American neighbors. Nor did they do much to fashion institutions and practices that distinguished them from their co-religionists in Europe. At the beginning of the Gilded Age, American Jews did little to mold the events and trends that made Jewish history.

The 1870s coincided with the beginnings of the mass migration, primarily although not exclusively from shifting regions within eastern Europe, and from this date, the state of affairs began to change. By the 1920s, the three million Jews in the United States—concentrated heavily in America's largest cities, New York in particular—could not be said to be unnoticeable on the American scene, nor did they avoid behaviors that drew attention to themselves as a distinctive element in the population. Likewise, in this half-century they no longer felt compelled to adhere to a set of religious and communal practices that mirrored those of their sisters and brothers who had remained on the other side of the Atlantic or who lived in a range of other new places. Their economic, political, religious, and social patterns became the stuff of discussion by Americans, and they emerged, particularly after World War I, to become central power brokers in world Jewish politics.

I do not want to use this article as a platform from which to focus on the ways in which the Gilded Age and Progressive Era coincided with the birth and flourishing of anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic action. While rhetoric defaming the Jews extended backward to earlier periods in American history, between the 1870s through the 1920s anti-Semitism became obvious and prevalent. Students of American anti-Semitism often cite the 1877 episode when millionaire Joseph Seligman found himself unwelcome at the swank Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York as the take-off moment in that history, and they consider the 1920s as the moment when anti-Semitism graduated to being a mass phenomenon in American society. The 1924 passage of the National Origins Act may have been one of the most profound moments in modern Jewish history, one which removed the safety valve of America for the European Jewish masses, the consequences of which would become obvious in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism in Germany and then the outbreak of World War II, which brought with it the cataclysm of the Holocaust.

Simply put, between 1877 and 1924 many private colleges and universities, clubs, resorts and hotels, hospitals, law firms, and other employers instituted quotas against Jews or simply excluded them. Anti-Jewish rhetoric, stereotyping, and caricatures became a familiar part of the age and functioned as a respectable form of discourse. Episodes such as the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1916 or the rejection of Woodrow Wilson's first nomination of attorney Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, amidst a swirl of anti-Semitic commentary, cropped up with some regularity, drawing attention of both Jews and non-Jews to America's “Jewish problem.” The Gilded Age, spanning populist understanding of America's economic ills, or, on the other side of the class spectrum, the writings of such elite intellectuals as Henry James and Henry Adams, made anti-Semitism a centerpiece of the national conversation. Some elements of the progressive agenda also contained more or less blatant statements of the Jews’ inherent unworthiness.Footnote ² That phenomenon will not be the subject of this article, important as it might be.

Similarly I will not offer here an analysis of how Jews participated in progressive movements or in radicalism, nor will I explore the ways in which the progressive ethos made its way into the various Jewish communities around the country. The involvement of local Jews, both the elites as well as members of the working class, in progressivism constitutes a subject that has not yet been studied other than in an episodic fashion and pretty much on the local level.

Rather I want to look broadly at the fifty years from the 1870s until the 1920s and see how a quintet of fundamental characteristics of American society in those years contributed to the forging of a synergistic relationship between America and the Jews and made the history of the Jews of the United States as sui generis, in the context of modern Jewish history. Although we can talk of a complete and robust integration of the Jews into American life and the assumption of American Jewry as the key player in world Jewish affairs only after World War II, the late nineteenth century laid the groundwork for those subsequent developments.

Those five factors included the emergence of America as an engine of dynamic economic development, the mass migration of tens of millions of Europeans, the new reification of privilege along the color line, the triumph of non-ideological politics, and the defanging of religion, Protestantism in particular. All these factors worked together to make the Jewish American synthesis possible, leaving an indelible mark on the Jewish people, before and after their migration to the United States.

Before exploring those five factors, a few demographic details of the migration need to be put in the foreground. The Jews who immigrated to the United States in the period from the 1870s through the 1920s, in concert with both those who had been there before, and then their American-born progeny, who became the majority by 1930, experienced history in radically different ways from either their fellow Jews who remained at home and those who migrated to other countries, primarily the British Isles, South America, South Africa, Canada, and Palestine.

Over the course of the last half of the nineteenth century and into the 1920s about one-third of European Jewry crossed international borders. They emigrated mainly from the Hapsburg Empire and Czarist Russia, although a substantial percentage also abandoned their homes in the Ottoman Empire. Of these migrants, 85 to 90 percent went to the United States. Likely that number would have been higher, as many who ended up in Canada, Argentina, Cuba, France, Germany, and England had left their homes with America on their minds. Such migrants considered the places where they landed as way stations to the United States, but personal circumstances intervened and for some, bureaucratic obstacles meant that they did not fulfill their migratory ambitions and make their way to America.

Meanwhile, the situation of Jews already in the United States was changing as well, as was American Jewish culture, religion, and politics. For all of their history in the United States and in the colonies before national independence, the country's Jews had affirmatively sought public anonymity, occupying in their early history literally unmarked Jewish spaces. Not until the 1850s did synagogues begin to call attention to themselves with religiously distinctive Jewish signs, markers, or Hebrew letters on their facades. Early American synagogues were neutral buildings; they followed dominant architectural styles so as to not announce to passers-by the identity of those who occupied them. However, from the late 1860s onward, Jewish congregations chose to build visible synagogues, often outsized edifices, in the Moorish style. Grand buildings in the centers of their cities, synagogues joined churches in dominating skylines, but they followed an architectural mode that resembled not at all the churches around them. Festooned with six-pointed stars, Ten Commandments, and Hebrew phrases, these Jewish buildings and the Jews who commissioned them for their congregational use did not hesitate to declare their presence and distinctiveness.

Similarly the 1870s witnessed a quickening of Jewish defense politics and a willingness to challenge the American status quo. Jewish communal leaders, the organizations that they represented, and their organs of public opinion launched vigorous campaigns against those aspects of American society that they found abhorrent and that they considered threats. I will briefly cite three examples.

By the late nineteenth century, numerous American Jews, espousing the mindset and message of progressivism, began to chide Americans for their deep commitment to laissez-faire as the ideal in class relations. Many American Jews—and not just the socialists and labor activists among them—advocated that the state enter into the economic life of the nation on behalf of workers and the poor. Despite the fact that by the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of American Jews who associated with the Reform movement came from the ranks of the affluent, employing classes, that movement in particular emerged as an advocate for unions and for the obligation of the state to help those in need. Rabbis of the Reform camp preached to their congregants on the imperative for economic justice, even when those same congregants profited from an inequitable system.

By the early twentieth century, American Jewish periodicals, rabbis, and others also joined an emerging assault on American race relations. They lambasted the United States for the pervasiveness of racism and implored the country to live up to its creed of equality. That Jews made up half of the white people who answered the “call” to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909; that they helped form and fund the National Urban League, founded in 1911; and that the Jewish press, both English-language and Yiddish, articulated a deep connection to and a perceived parallel fate between themselves and African Americans, also reflected a willingness to stand apart, at times, from American norms.

Finally, by the latter part of the nineteenth century and even more so into the early twentieth century, Jews in various ways began to insist to the overwhelmingly Christian majority that it did not have the right to claim America as a Christian nation. A new kind of political élan surfaced among American Jewry in the decades after the Civil War. Jewish congregations and other organizations publicly opposed repeated efforts by the National Reform Association between 1864 and 1910 to push through a constitutional amendment that would have declared that “we, the people of the United States,” acknowledge “the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among nations.” In public school districts, Jews campaigned against mandatory reading of the Bible—which would nearly always have been the King James version—and against classroom prayers, Sunday closing laws, and temperance initiatives, including the Prohibition amendment, whose passage, for better or worse, counts among the triumphs of the moral reform tendency within progressivism.

Finally, this new assertiveness percolated through Jewish communities themselves in the years spanning the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as American Jews set out to redefine Judaism and the nature of Jewish life. Increasingly Jews viewed Judaism as a malleable entity, which they believed they could mold to fit their beliefs, sensibilities, and tastes. With regard to deeply significant issues of language, ritual, communal governance, and institutional structure, American Jews created religious practices and institutions that worked for them as Americans.Footnote ³

Nothing demonstrates this better than matters of women's rights within Jewish ritual and practice. Starting in the 1890s American Jewish women began to move from behind the curtains of public invisibility to greater communal assertiveness. The 1893 creation of the National Council of Jewish Women exemplified this. So did the actions of the women of the Orthodox congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, who in 1894 successfully asked for full congregational membership, with voting rights, in their own names and not as the daughters and wives of male members. For the first time in American Jewish history, and no doubt in the histories of all other Jewries, women now voted on such matters as the election of rabbis and congregational procedures. At the end of this era, in 1922, the first woman in the long history of Judaism, Judith Kaplan, became a bat mitzvah. Called to the Torah and importantly encouraged by her father, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, she recited the blessings over the sacred scrolls, something that no woman—as far as has been recorded—ever had done.Footnote ⁴

Finally, the elaborate organizational infrastructure of American Jewish life owed its existence to these years. The three major denominations—Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox—came into being. Even the youngest of the movements, Reconstructionism, owed its origins to a series of articles written by Mordecai Kaplan for the Menorah Journal in the 1910s. The Anti-Defamation League, Hadassah, the American Jewish Committee, the National Council of Jewish Women, the American Jewish Congress, the Workmen's Circle, the Jewish trade unions, the Zionist movement in its various ideological iterations, the Jewish community center movement, and the city-wide charitable federations—all were products of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. One of the essential characteristics of American Jewry—a quality that distinguished it from all others—emerged in these years, namely a “community” made up a range of organizations and voluntary associations that competed with one another for members, funds, and clout but which gave the balance of power to the ordinary women and men who participated in institutions of their choice. Many traditionalists, both in Europe and America, found this particular aspect of American Jewish life disturbing, a challenge to what they saw as the need for a centralized and organized community that could enforce discipline.

Although the above might smack of the much criticized idea of American exceptionalism, the history of American Jewry in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, particularly when posited in geographically or nationally comparative terms, does show that something “right” existed in the United States, something that “worked” for the Jews. That relationship or fit between the two can explain the America-driven migration of Jews, from which so many further developments flowed.

Scholars of modern Jewish history have assumed American distinctiveness; they view America, and the history of its Jews, as in a class apart. After all, it lacked a process of emancipation. American Jewry never endured this excruciating and long ordeal, as did the Jews of England, France, Germany, and elsewhere. Other than in Maryland, which removed its last restrictions on Jewish political participation in 1825, few Jews lived in the few states among the original thirteen which imposed religiously based political liabilities on them. In no new state did Jews have to win rights. Indeed one of the main acts of Congress under the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance, provided that all admitted territories and states had to guarantee religious freedom and decouple religion from rights of citizenship. As such, in most relevant places from the beginning and all but a pair of states after the 1820s, Jews had the rights that automatically came to all white men. Likewise, however much anti-Semitism manifested itself in America in rhetoric and deed, the giant shadows cast by European ghettoes, pogroms, expulsions, blood libels, and ultimately the Holocaust on modern Jewish history made the American experience basically an upbeat one and created the reality that American Jewish history, as a field, exists outside of the rubric of modern Jewish history as this is understood internationally.

How did this state of affairs come about? What developments of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era enabled the Jewish American encounter to take a direction that justifies thinking about this history as being in a league of its own? How did the five forces at work in American society of those years come together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to provide the soil for the planting of a very particular Jewish community?

Immigration

The United States owed its basic character to the constant flow of voluntary immigrants, particularly during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the high point of a century of European migration to the Americas and elsewhere. Although the size of those population movements waxed and waned, American social and cultural life took much of its tone and shape from the fact that most Americans—native peoples, the descendants of African slaves, and residents of certain parts of the southwest excluded—stemmed from the women and men who had with some degree of volition chosen to leave one place and transplant themselves to America. At the apex of European immigration, Jews in America differed little from most of their neighbors as a result of their overwhelmingly foreign birth, their accented and limited English, and the newness of their American experience.

Immigration to the United States differed from the flows to other places by the diversity of its immigrants. To Brazil and Argentina, for example, two places which immigration also shaped, the majority came from the Italian peninsula, with Spain sending a sizable but smaller percentage. Of those who chose Canada and Australia, the British Isles sent an overwhelmingly large proportion.Footnote ⁵ However, in the United States, a variety of Europeans, with none dominating the flow, contributed to the national character. Over time no one group could be held up as the core population or as embodying the quintessential immigrant experience.

The Jews of America, who did not become majority American-born until 1930, resembled their non-Jewish neighbors for their immigrant status and the immigrant nativity of their parents. Because no one group dominated the population of the large cities in particular, like all the other immigrants and their children, Jews learned to negotiate America from the reality of this on-the-ground diversity.

Furthermore in nativist discourse from the 1850s onward concerning the defects of immigrants and in nativist crusades to limit immigrant numbers and rights, Jews did not figure centrally. Unlike the Irish of the pre-Civil War period and Italians of the late nineteenth century, both of whom functioned as the chief European targets of xenophobic fantasies, Jews attracted relatively little negative attention. Unlike the Chinese, who in 1882 became the first group excluded outright and named as the unwanted group, Jews never faced systematic and prolonged brutality or a threat of exclusion. Without understating the sting of anti-Jewish rhetoric, the bulk of discussion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about Jews as immigrants tended to see them as hard-working, if perhaps hyper-driven to make a profit, studious, if perhaps too eager to excel and overtake real Americans, adept, or maybe overly so, when it came to entrepreneurship, and set on a course, albeit one too rapid, toward economic mobility. In the United States, the words “foreigner” or “alien” did not connote Jew, and although Jews were included, they did not embody it.

Not so in many of the other destination points for central and eastern European Jews. In Australia and South Africa, Lithuanian and Polish Jewish immigrants stood out as distinctive for their language, citizenship, and lack of British ties.Footnote ⁶ For those Jews who opted for Argentina, the overwhelming predominance of Italians as the main immigrant group, religion, and language made Jews obtrusive others.Footnote ⁷ Finally, the Polish and other eastern European Jews who moved to Germany, France, and Great Britain in the last half of the nineteenth century found themselves relatively lonely in their status as immigrants. In England, Jews made up the largest group of non-English speaking newcomers. In the halls of Parliament and the pages of the press, debate over the Aliens Act at the start of the twentieth century served primarily a referendum on the Jews. In Britain and other non-American receiving societies, Jews stood out as quintessential immigrants, foreigners, and problems in the construction of a national type.Footnote ⁸

Race and Color

When contemplating the broad contours of American history during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and when trying to understand the points of intersection between that bloc of time and the history of American Jews, the issue of race as color looms large. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era saw the birth of the Jim Crow system, the reduction of millions of freedmen to a situation of virtual peonage, the heyday of lynchings, and the firestorm of race riots. This was the era that Rayford Logan famously labeled “the Nadir” in one book title and “the Betrayal of the Negro” in another.Footnote ⁹

In the United States, color mattered. Assumed and constructed but yet codified into the law, color meant the difference between rights and no rights, control over one's body or no control, entitlement to the protection of the state or not. The first and indeed only potential immigrants to be excluded happened to fall into the category defined as “non-white.” That definition of where one fell along the color line determined the nature of access to services and the privileges of citizenship.

Despite some recent assertions to the contrary, in every meaningful way, Jews in America always received the label of white and enjoyed the benefits of whiteness.Footnote ¹⁰ At no time did the state and its agents declare them to be unable to acquire naturalization and citizenship. At no time did Jewish men not expect the protection of courts, equal access to ballot boxes, and freedom of movement. As white men they could enter contracts, hold office, serve on juries, and enjoy all the other basic rights that came with being an American.

Certainly some rhetoric, particularly by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, questioned the whiteness of the Jews. Scientific racism and the respectable proliferation of biologized views of difference gave an impetus to a discourse that categorized Jews as something other than white, but these voices remained just that, never making the transition into public policy.

Even in the places where Jews in America suffered limitations and discrimination, in housing, employment, access to private higher education, and entry to places of leisure, the anti-Jewish practices that took shape during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era came from private individuals or institutions. The state stood aloof from these actions. Jews, unlike African Americans, Americans of Chinese and Japanese ancestry, and Native Americans, never needed to view government, the formal apparatus of the society, its courts, legislatures, elected leaders, and its key text, the Constitution, as the source of their sorrows.

Having this privilege represented a unique moment in Jewish history. In eastern Europe in particular, Jews functioned as the scapegoats of societies divided into ethnic and national factions. Throughout this huge region, from which the majority of Jews came, the state to one degree or another allowed Jews to serve as the objects of animus of all other groups. They had little or no recourse to the instruments of the state for protection. In the United States, for the first time, they did not have to contend with having the fewest rights and privileges in their society. Others stood many rungs below them in the entitlement scale. Unlike in so many other places, they were not the objects of demonization by the government and its elected or appointed officials. In the United States they could distinguish between their enemies—particular colleges, hotels, companies—and the state, the standard of the nation. The former, they condemned, while the latter, they lauded for the privileges it gave them.

Making a Living: Jews and the American Economy

Matters economic lie at the heart of this discussion. The massive transfer of Jewish population to America brought millions of Jews from places of low productivity and stagnant development to the most dynamic economy in the world. This reality undergirded the entire European immigrant flood to America and that of the Jews as well. Despite the Jewish communal narrative, which went back to the opening of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the pogroms in the Ukraine in 1903 and which cited these bloody riots as the cause of the emigration, like all other Europeans, Jews left settled places of dwindling economic opportunities and opted for America, where opportunities abounded.

The advantageous and basically whiggish fit between American needs and Jewish skills reflected the long history of Jews and commerce and the American proclivity toward materialism. In nearly every period of American Jewish history, a confluence between what Americans wanted and what Jews could supply them with manifested itself. Two such “fits” took place during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and linked the migration histories of Jews from central and eastern Europe.

From the middle of the nineteenth century into the earliest years of the twentieth, as Americans moved to remote and less settled areas, families and communities articulated a desire for material goods. The spread of Americans across the continent made it possible for commercial interests to gain access to vast stretches of western land to be farmed, mined, and logged. The people who tilled the soil, logged the lumber, and extracted the minerals desired stuff, and someone had to bring it to them.

A substantial (and uncountable) number of central and eastern European Jewish men traveled the shifting frontier of the peddlar. Well acquainted with itinerant merchandising after centuries of life in Europe, they turned their long-time economic niche into an American opportunity. The Jewish peddlers, many of whom became owners of Jewish dry goods stores in small hinterland towns, junk dealers, big-city Jewish retailers, as well as jewelers, pawnbrokers, and tailors, created a highly integrated American Jewish economy to serve the material aspirations of the expanding United States. Although behind this historic drama lay many complicated economic and political relationships, on the surface what transpired involved a marriage between Americans’ yearning for consumer goods—buttons, thread, needles, curtains, watches, eye glasses, pictures and picture frames, jewelry, ribbons, pots and pans, fabric and ready-made clothing—and the willingness of Jews to pick up the familiar peddler's pack and venture out anywhere they could find paying customers.

Crossing the thresholds of their customers’ homes, whether those occupied by native-born Protestant American farmers, immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia, and the Slavic lands, or miners, loggers, African American sharecroppers, or Native people on their reservations, Jewish peddlers lifted levels of material consumption. They by and large figured out how to accommodate the cultural mores of those to whom they would sell. The Jewish immigrant peddler achieved a degree of integration by virtue of learning the various languages present in the American backcountry, by coming into people's homes, often sleeping overnight, and eating at their hosts’ tables. The Jew became a real person and indeed someone whose presence seems to have been welcomed. As the Jewish peddler conveyed goods at low prices on installment plans, customers helped forge the peddlers’ adaptation to America. A few who started as peddlers ended up wealthy and influential; American Jewish business families that began with a peddler include such names as Seligman, Guggenheim, Straus, Gimbel, Rosenwald, and Spiegel. Most peddlers, however, over a decade or so became modestly comfortable merchants, and their sons never picked up their fathers’ packs or sat themselves down behind their fathers’ horses on their peddlers’ carts. The businesses founded by itinerant merchants played a crucial role in supplying the relatively poor women and men who stoked the economic revolution of the late nineteenth century.

By the 1860s yet another match took place between American and Jewish economic history. The expansion of the garment industry coincided with a series of linked, but independent, developments that transformed not just America but European Jewry. The invention of the sewing machine just before the Civil War, combined with the need for uniforms based on standard sizes, launched the garment industry. Late nineteenth-century urbanization, the movement of young women into the workplace, the rise of the advertising business, the emergence of style as something within the reach of working-class women, and new sanitary standards all helped the garment industry become one of the most dynamic sectors of the American economy. One recent study has postulated that by the 1930s New York's garment industry constituted the “nation's largest manufacturing cluster. It employed 50 percent more workers than the auto industry did in Detroit.”Footnote ¹¹

Factories, heavily although not exclusively housed in New York, sewed the garments that clothed women and men around the world. The ready-to-wear clothing industry spread its dresses and blouses, shirtwaists, hats, children's clothing, and undergarments around the nation and the world. In this sector Jews as employers and workers founded and sustained an economic niche that spurred the mass Jewish migration from Europe to America. The fact that New York functioned as the epicenter of this trade helped ensure that Jews, more than other immigrants, clung to their port of arrival rather than heading for other, interior homes. The fact that New York served as the heart of the industry meant that the entire operation took place primarily in Manhattan and provided Jews with a geographic and economic berth that they could in turn define as their place.

Jews in Europe had since the early modern period made a living by means of the needle, but in America they could use that lowly skill to create a vast enterprise that clothed Americans and others; employed in massive numbers the successive streams of incoming new Jewish immigrants, both women and men; and propelled a significant number into independent entrepreneurship. Garment-making by its very nature was carried out in many relatively small shops and required relatively little start-up capital. It provided Jewish immigrant workers with one of the few places in the American economy where a laborer could move into the ranks of the employing class, making it possible for relatively recent immigrant workers to reasonably expect to become bosses able to work for themselves. All they had to do, particularly in the women's clothing industry, was look at their employers, who like themselves had emigrated from some place in eastern Europe and began as workers too, perhaps in sweatshops in the late decades of the nineteenth century or in modern factories by the 1910s. In 2011, New Yorkers observed the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire; notably, the two owners of the factory, Max Blank and Isaac Harris, had themselves arrived in the 1890s as immigrants who made their start as sweatshop workers. These two achieved some degree of infamy because of their role in this notorious industrial accident, but they hardly stood out in the Jewish scene as well-off manufacturers who came from the ranks of the immigrant workers.

The connection between the Jewish economic repertoire and the particular nature of the American economy went beyond these stories of peddling and garment making. However, these two provide clear examples of how an old skill transformed into a vehicle for economic mobility in America.

American Religion and the Jews

The relatively harmonious Jewish encounter with America reflected different aspects of religion's significant role in American history and society. First, to the primarily Protestant population, which dominated America from the colonial period into the twentieth century, Jews were not Catholics. Jews could, in America, breathe more easily because for centuries anti-Catholicism functioned as a powerful force in political and public life. Aggressive anti-Papism dominated the public discourse of the Protestant nation. To numerous Protestants, Catholicism seemed unsuitable for a democratic, egalitarian nation, which venerated personal freedom and choice. Historians have chronicled the ways in which Catholic churches were attacked, priests assaulted on the streets, and the like. Although the level of violent anti-Catholicism diminished in the late nineteenth century, it remained a potent political issue. From the heated debates over the Blaine Amendment in the 1870s and the “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” incident of the 1884 presidential election to the anti-Catholic rhetoric that swirled around Al Smith's run for the White House in 1928, the history of American politics in this era cannot be disassociated from hatred, or fear, of Catholics and Catholicism.

Judaism, by contrast, although seen by some as overly legalistic, medieval, and retrograde, enjoyed a place of respectability in the American setting. Antipathy to it spawned no political movements, nor did its arrival and transplantation into America cause American Christians to redefine public policy in order to lessen Judaism's possible pernicious impact. From the middle of the nineteenth century, and particularly after the Civil War, the appearance of Christian, that is, Protestant, clergy at the dedication of synagogues and pulpit exchanges between rabbis and ministers indicated that Judaism found for itself a legitimate space on the American religious landscape. Although a hint of exoticism crept in to the Protestant vision of Judaism and while some evangelicals retained the customary hope of converting the Jews, by and large, Protestantism in America did not demonize the coming of Judaism to America. Judaism still did not become a feature of most Protestant political discourse, perhaps in part because Jews arrived in such smaller numbers than Catholics and because they tended to maintain a low profile in politics, unlike the politically active and successful Catholic Irish.

Such tolerance also no doubt reflected the general valorization of religion in America, a second religious aspect of American public culture that paved the way for Jewish integration. In part because religion had been decoupled from state power, Americans saw it as a benign force for promoting personal and civic virtue. Even in the age of the outspoken, self-proclaimed apostle of agnosticism, Robert Ingersoll, Americans did not develop a kind of aggressive secularism, the sort of anti-religious strand that made Jews uncomfortable in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France. In America, religion enjoyed a high degree of respect. American Jews of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era went out of their way to repackage themselves as a faith community as opposed to stressing peoplehood, a successful adaptation to a country whose majority understood and liked religion but treated ethnic difference with suspicion.

This kind of redefinition of the essence of Jewishness characterized in particular the actions of the leaders of the Reform movement, which emerged triumphant in the 1860s through the 1880s. Although the Reform movement took a visible role in providing assistance to Jews in distress around the world, as a religious body, it stressed the point that Jews ought to be considered the adherents of a faith community. The three main pillars of Reform Judaism's institutional infrastructure, Hebrew Union College (1875), Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1889), all advocated and represented this point of view. Although the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) (1886) reflected the sentiments of the traditionalists, albeit highly Americanized or westernized ones, it too emphasized the ritual aspects of Judaism. However, JTS was less inclined than the Reform institutions to eschew the idea of the group, a concept expressed as “catholic Israel” by JTS's most noteworthy president, Solomon Schecter.

Articulating the idea that Jews belonged to a religious community, with wide geographic reach and deep historic roots, worked well for Jews as they sought to fit themselves to American notions of respectability. As they came to be regarded as not at all different from any other denomination, Jews could therefore argue for extending to their religion the benefits that all Christian denominations enjoyed.

By and large they won, despite lingering problems, such as Sunday closing laws. As a benefit of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Jews came to enjoy full and unmolested entitlement to voting, office holding, and the like, similar to those of their Christian white male neighbors in the limited number of places where they had not gained full rights decades before. In 1868, North Carolina, the last state to limit Jewish office holding, removed its last religious restrictions.

During the Civil War, meanwhile, Congress passed legislation for the commissioning of chaplains that by statute limited such officers to Christian clergy. So much changed over the next half century that during World War I, the Jewish Welfare Board stood in partnership and at least rhetorically on an equal plane with the Knights of Columbus and the Y.M.C.A. in providing for the religious needs of the troops. In World War I military camps, Jewish chaplains not only provided for the needs of Jewish service men, but when their turn came, they preached to Christian men, comforted them when injured, and performed the multifarious tasks of the chaplains, regardless of the minority status of Judaism. It was a religion, and that seems to have been enough.

Finally, no discussion of the harmonious relationship that evolved between the Jews and the United States would be complete without considering the impact of religious diversity and the concomitant political commitment of the society to the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state. Too many denominations had established themselves to allow any one church to impose a grip on civic life. Although many gray areas, such as Sunday closings, continued to vex groups of religious outsiders, most aspects of public life fell outside the gray zone. Even so simple a fact that the state did not collect statistics by religion meant that private beliefs, matters of the spirit, required no public declarations.

For Jews the divorce of the state and church not only afforded them the possibility of participating, over time, in the polity as equals to Christians, but it gave them the freedom to mold Judaism to fit their wishes, tastes, and sensibilities. Jewish clergy enjoyed the same level of state-granted power as did the ministers of Protestant denominations or Catholic priests. Like all religions in America, Judaism depended on the consent of the governed, as men and women joined synagogues they liked, quit when they wanted, and founded new ones as they saw fit. Indeed, in America individual Jews could band together with others who shared their views of Jewishness. They could create institutions outside the pre-existing religious rubric and enroll others if they wanted. Even if they were not dues-paying members of a synagogue, they still could turn to the Jewish community for marriage, burial, circumcision, and the education of their children.

Jews like all others enjoyed the freedom to structure their institutions as they wanted and the state could do little, indeed nothing, to stymie creativity. As a result, American Jews became the innovators and reformers par excellence in the Jewish world.

Politics

The United States made it easy for white, male immigrants to naturalize, and the political realm did not exclude anyone because of religion or non-native birth. For nearly all of American history, including those late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decades that brought millions upon millions of Europeans to the United States, religion and nativity was not a concern in matters of naturalization, acquisition of citizenship, voting, and office holding. With the exception of the constitutional requirement that the president of the United States needed to be native-born, no barriers to political participation needed to be overcome for white men (and later women), regardless of how (or if) they prayed and where they had been born.

Politics also opened doors to Jews in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It provided a meeting place for Jews and America. In local Democratic and Republican clubs, reform-oriented or boss-dominated, Jewish men showed up, promised to help turn out the vote, and quite often managed to have themselves placed on the ticket. All across the country, in small communities and on the statewide level, Jewish men plunged into politics and won election to local and state office, more often than not in places where few other Jews lived. For example, by 1880 Portland, Oregon had already elected two Jewish mayors, and in 1900 in that same city, both major parties fielded Jewish candidates. By 1910, voters in Stamford, Connecticut came out to elect a Jewish candidate to the state legislature and two to the position of justice of the peace. Two years later a Stamford Jew ran statewide for secretary of state and won. Examples could be drawn from across the country and from the beginning to the end of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.Footnote ¹²

The Gilded Age and Progressive Era also saw committed and identifiable Jews assuming visible national offices, with the first Jewish cabinet member, Oscar Straus, becoming secretary of commerce in 1906 and Louis Brandeis ascending to the Supreme Court in 1916.

Notably different patterns were at work in the many other places to which Jews migrated in these years. A recent study notes that in Argentina, the largest Latin American Jewish community, “the notion of Jews in public office is still viewed . . . as a betrayal of traditional values, a reversal of natural law.” In 1958, the first Jew served as a cabinet minister and the first Jews were elected to the Argentine House of Representatives. These developments prompted a heated public protest, which reified the fact of Argentina's Catholic essence.Footnote ¹³

The long reality of the two-party system helped facilitate the American Jewish symbiosis, enabling the steady movement of Jewish men into political office across the nation, particularly on the local level. It also testified to the transformative effects of this era. The ease with which Jews entered the political mainstream reflects in large measure the fundamental stability of the political system after the trauma of the Civil War. With the key dividing point in society, the question of slavery, settled by force, and with both parties then essentially agreeing to let local mores and conditions prevail on the matter of race—to be sure at the expense of southern blacks—the nation settled into a period of relative political equilibrium. The United States long had maintained a tradition of living with two parties relatively evenly matched. Since the 1850s the political scene has been dominated by the Republicans and the Democrats, albeit with some challenges. Without formal membership and at times with vague platforms, party politics valorized pragmatic majoritarianism. In this kind of political system, various interest groups—labor, farmers, manufacturers, ethnic groups—negotiated with the parties for their votes. The parties brokered among these constituencies whose votes they needed. The parties wanted votes, and each constituency had an agenda that it hoped to float to those in office. Each party sought to claim as many constituency groups as possible and had little incentive to offend any identifiable bloc that it might hope to win over.

Jews benefited from this situation. In sharp contrast to many other countries, no major party or political movement defined “the Jews” as a problem. The American parties both wanted their votes. Neither party dismissed them, nor did either refuse to provide them with some tangible rewards for voting correctly. In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Jews in fact divided and flip-flopped between the Republicans and the Democrats. Only by the late 1920s did they become firmly ensconced in the Democratic Party. Even after that, the Republicans did not incorporate antipathy toward the Jews into their political rhetoric. The G.O.P. retained the hope of wooing the Jews over to its camp and employed various courting strategies.

This political setting allowed Jews to shop around and make their case to both parties on the local, state, and national levels. They—along with members of other ethnic and religious groups not tied by history or ideology to one party or the other—could see who would make them the best deal in exchange for their showing up on election day. In this kind of political atmosphere, Jewish men since the middle of the nineteenth century, and then women as well by the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century, found ample space to join in the competition for the attention and rewards that accompanied political participation.

This political process may not have helped the Jews secure everything they wanted. They lost on immigration restriction, a post-World War I development that deeply affected them. However, in this they resembled other interest groups, particularly those that represented ethnic and immigrant communities. The hurly-burly of the political marketplace made it possible for them to get some of what they wanted, but clearly not everything. They attained enough to allow them to feel part of the civic whole and to believe in the basic goodness of the system.

The pluralistic political environment of the United States made possible for American Jews to experience the late nineteenth century and early twentieth differently either from Jews who remained in Europe or those who opted for other new destination homes. Although certainly similarities can be cited and explored, differences predominated that created an American Jewish synthesis and helped make the United States not only a desirable place for Jewish migration, but rendered it the choice for the vast majority.

As a result of this kind of political system as well as the other overarching attributes of America, in the years from the 1870s through the 1920s—which coincided with the arrival of most Jews in America and their creation of an elaborate network of communal institutions—Jews functioned in an environment that worked well for them. They arrived in a large enough number—but not too large. They reached a population sufficient to be able to build the communities that they wanted; to take advantage of fundamental political realities, which often worked to the disadvantage of others; and to apply their economic knowledge inherited from the past and from very different circumstances to American material realities.

It is impossible to conceptualize American Jewish history without the central place occupied by the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The vast expansion of the American economy, the flood of millions of European immigrants, the demonization of those defined as non-white, the emergence of liberal religion, and the emergence of pluralistic, broker-state politics fused together to make it possible for one-third of European Jewry to find a new place to live and make their mark on history. One hopes that scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era will in turn see how the history of their period would be enriched and further complicated by taking more account of Jews and their arrival and place in America in those years.