Self-Image and Its Discontents

Despite the Jewish sense of themselves as wholesome, Jewish criminality in eastern Europe was not unheard-of. Bands of Jewish tramps wandered across the region, sought assistance from the communities on their way, and frequently turned to thievery to maintain themselves. The social and economic dislocation brought about by overpopulation and poverty in late nineteenth-century eastern Europe aggravated the problem of crime and vice among Jews.Footnote ⁸ One of the leading writers in New York's Yiddish socialist camp and a bitter opponent of Jewish nationalism was Benyomin Faygnboym, who grew up in Warsaw in the 1870s. Originally a hasidic yeshiva student, Faygnboym remembered the “gangs of Jewish robbers and murderers” and how fellow yeshiva students raped Jewish women “and bragged about it.”Footnote ⁹ Numerous reports in tsarist Russia and Habsburg Galicia pointed to the role Jews played as brothel keepers and traffickers in what was known as “white slavery,” an international trade that procured women and girls, either with or without their consent, for sexual purposes. Some Jewish women in Russia were drawn to prostitution by the privilege of the infamous “yellow ticket” that gave them the coveted right of residence beyond the Pale.Footnote ¹⁰ Jacob Adler, future star of the Yiddish stage in New York, who grew up in the 1870s in the southern port city of Odessa, was in his youth one of the city's young Jewish toughs, who were looking for a brawl and “dabbling in prostitution and blackmail.” Odessa's Moldavanka neighborhood, the most populous Jewish section in the city, was known for its thieves and hoodlums. Overall, eastern Europe's Jewish malefactors were usually involved in property-related crimes and vice, and stayed away from violent offenses.Footnote ¹¹

Yet that reality did little to alter Jewish self-image seriously. When faced with reports about Jewish crime in America, Jewish observers tended to idealize the eastern European past, arguing that Jews had nothing to do with crime in general, and not just with violent crime, while bemoaning the alleged negative influence of America. Lithuanian-born veteran New York social worker David Blaustein argued in 1907 that in America, “the Jew has become, so to say, ‘dejudaized.’ There is gambling among the Jews; there are family scandals.”Footnote ¹² In 1912, after a couple of murder cases involving Jews (discussed below), the leading Yiddish daily, the Forverts (The forward), complained against a recent trend where many people, “and not only common ones,” blamed America for corrupting Jewish youths.Footnote ¹³ Years later, the communist writer Michael Gold, who grew up on the East Side, falsely determined, “There never were any Jewish gangsters in Europe. The Jews there were a timid bookish lot.” The growing discontent among Jewish immigrants about the perceived adverse effect of Americanization, or some of its aspects, on their children led to a romantic view of eastern Europe.Footnote ¹⁴

As early as the 1890s Jewish communal leaders and social workers, in addition to urban reformers and muckrakers, expressed their concerns about the high rate of crime among immigrant Jews. In 1891, Rabbi Adolph Radin, who was born in Prussian Poland (and thus called by Yiddish-speaking Jews “half-German”), formed the Jewish Prisoners Association, a small organization established chiefly to combat Christian missionaries who worked at the state's prisons.Footnote ¹⁵ Official reports in the 1890s showed that a substantial Jewish criminal element existed on the East Side, and detailed especially the deeds of the “Essex Market Courthouse gang.” Seedy characters like Martin Engel, later boss of the Eighth Ward, lawyer and fixer Max Hochstim, and Monk Eastman (the Brooklyn-born Edward Osterman), the simian-looking leader of the strongest gang east of the Bowery, all converged in the saloon of flashy Alderman “Silver Dollar” Smith, a Polish-born Jew also known as Charles Solomon, whose saloon was located across the street from the courthouse. In exchange for securing Tammany's votes with an armada of “repeaters” and “floaters” (or brass knuckles) at the polls, gang members cheated and extorted the immigrant population as if the East Side were their fiefdom.Footnote ¹⁶

Observers such as police officers, social workers, and investigative committees attested to a correlation between the kind of crimes committed and ethnicity. Intoxication, assault, and armed robbery were typically Irish offenses. Violent crimes like stabbing, kidnapping, dynamiting, and blackmailing were considered Italian crimes. Jews tended to commit crimes against property, like forgery, receiving stolen goods, pickpocketing, and arson, or crimes of “immorality” (prostitution and gambling). Although the branches of ethnic crime were more flexible and Jews did commit assault and murder, most turn-of the-century Jewish malefactors shied away from violent crimes and concentrated in the above fields.Footnote ¹⁷ Between 1900 and 1915 nearly 80 percent of all felony charges brought against Jews in the Empire City had to do with property crimes (arson, burglary, theft, horse poisoning, and dealing with stolen goods). Arson for insurance purposes, called at the time the “Jewish lightning,” and horse poisoning as a means to extort businessmen who relied on them were particularly considered “Jewish” crimes in New York. In the 1890s popular magazines such as Puck described arsonists with names like Flameski, Burnopski, or simply Cohen. Appearing a decade later in 1906 or 1907, horse poisoning was also associated almost solely with Jews, though the Jewish gang specializing in that form of extortion, headed by “Yoske Nigger” (the nom de guerre of Joseph Toblinsky), fashioned itself after the Italian Black Hand. By 1912 it had become such a menace on the East Side that Jewish merchants had to form the East Side Horse Owners Protective Association and worked closely with the police to rout that gang.Footnote ¹⁸

The Reluctance to Wash (Jewish) Dirty Linen in (Non-Jewish) Public

New York Jews hardly needed urban reformers or social workers’ reports to know about Jewish pickpockets, arsonists, horse thieves, prostitutes, and cadets. Children and adults alike knew where the brothels, saloons, poolrooms, and gang haunts were located. Street gangs were the lot of many a youth, when virtually every street had its own gang. Yet most of those gang members did not mature into adult underworld careers. As Irving Howe has rightly noted, the largest part of those gangs served as “half-illicit, half-fraternal agencies for a passage into adult life.”Footnote ¹⁹ More often than not those street gangs had a distinct ethnic character. The youths of Henry Street despised those of Division Street, but Jewish gangs banded together against gangs from Little Italy, or the Irish youths from the tenements along the East River. The pianist and radio producer Samuel Chotzinoff, who was born in Vitebsk around 1889, and spent his childhood on the East Side, remarked that ethnic enmity strengthened his gang's hostility to the Irish of Cherry Street. Some notorious Jewish gangsters began their illustrious careers fighting against the encroachment of non-Jewish gangs on the East Side.Footnote ²⁰

In the first decade of the twentieth century anti-delinquency activity, focusing on Jewish youths, remained primarily in the hands of uptown Jews. In 1902 they launched the Jewish Protectory and Aid Society, and five years later established America's first all-Jewish reformatory, the Hawthorn School in Westchester. Meanwhile, downtown Jews did little by way of concrete steps to stamp out Jewish criminality, despite sharp rebukes by the Yiddish press and a few rallies. Measures were generally taken only after the surrounding gentile society hurled accusations at Jewish immigrants.Footnote ²¹

There were a few reasons for the immigrants' relative silence concerning Jewish criminals. One of them had to do with the issue of informing on other Jews to the gentiles. Without a doubt, in nineteenth-century eastern European Jewish society there were numerous cases when conflicts between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, or between Orthodox and maskilim had led them to inform on their opponents to the Russian or Austrian authorities.Footnote ²² Still, many Jews detested Jewish moysrim (informers), who made a living by reporting on other Jews to a gentile government. There were numerous Yiddish sayings (such as “an informer is hanged by his tongue”) that conveyed the nearly visceral disgust toward the moysrim. And in severe cases, when informers threatened to prejudice the authorities against a whole community, their bodies were found in the forest or drowned at a nearby river.Footnote ²³ The unwillingness to become a moyser explained why as late as 1912 a popular columnist in the Yiddish press, Dovid M. Hermalin, had to implore his readers to report Jewish criminals to the police. The claim that “one must not turn in a Jew to gentile hands” was foolish, wrote Hermalin, since in America, “Jews are equal to all other residents.”Footnote ²⁴

Jewish criminals were also of service to the downtown population as defenders against non-Jewish aggression. Although immigrant Jews were frequently the victims of their criminal co-ethnics, in many cases Jewish gangsters handled non-Jewish hoodlums who harassed Jews. Kid Twist (alias Max Zweibach), who succeeded as leader of the East Side gang Monk Eastman after Eastman's arrest in 1904, was known for his hatred of gentile gangsters. He was angered by what he saw as the invasion of Irish or Italian gangs into a Jewish neighborhood in search of businesses to rob and women to seduce. Kid Twist resolved that “no ‘wop’ and no ‘mick’” would “rule on the Lower East Side of New York.” The young criminal remained faithful to his ideal until 1908, when an Italian member of the Five Points gang shot him to death at Coney Island.Footnote ²⁵ His successor, Big Jack Zelig (born William Alberts) was equally determined to rid the Jewish quarter of Italian thugs. Veteran Tammanyite judge, Jonah J. Goldstein, recounted how ruffians used to tug the beards and sidelocks of Jews who traveled on the trolley cars from Coney Island to the Brooklyn Bridge, but the harassment ceased when Jewish underworld types (Zelig and Nathan Kaplan, the “Kid Dropper”) rode those cars and beat up the hooligans.Footnote ²⁶ Abe Shoenfeld, who was active in the Rockefeller-funded Bureau of Social Hygiene, had conducted comprehensive investigations into Gotham's crime scene for the New York Kehillah, a body that sought to organize the city's Jews as a community. In 1912 Schoenfeld concluded that Zelig cleared the East Side of Italian robbers and pimps: “I defy any man to show me an ITALIAN parade through the EAST SIDE with a JEWISH girl under his arm … as they were wont to do years before.”Footnote ²⁷ Dovid Hermalin went even further when describing in 1912 Jewish gangsters as “nationalists” who defended “Jerusalem” (Hester Street) against “Rome” (the Italians of Mulberry Street).Footnote ²⁸

The role of some Jewish gangsters as defenders of their people brought them a measure of grudging respect from law-abiding Jews and the eager admiration of many Jewish youths. At a time when crime offered a visible path to success, it also offered a certain degree of ethnic pride. Kid Twist, Big Jack Zelig, and their ilk embodied a new type of New York Jews, who were not afraid to protect their people against Irish or Italian hoodlums. The Irish and Italian gangs who tried to encroach on the East Side surely did not improve the image of their respective groups in the eyes of downtown Jews. And yet, numerous underworld Jews (or Italians for that matter) picked Irish names for themselves: Richie Fitzpatrick, Harry McGurck, and Jack Sullivan were the names of Jewish criminals in early-1900s New York. As in the world of prizefighting, an Irish name was thought to add toughness that eluded names like Cohen or Reich. Longtime New York journalist Andy Logan has remarked that anyone who relies only on names to write about crime on the East Side could be seriously misled about the numbers of Irishmen who still resided there after 1900.Footnote ²⁹

Perhaps more important than the above reasons, the immigrants' reluctance to deal with crime in their midst resulted from the political and cultural attitudes Jews developed over centuries of living among a potentially or actively hostile gentile majority. Caution and self-censorship were deemed not only proper but indispensable for survival. Apologetics were one's daily bread, and life was difficult enough without indulging in the dangerous luxury of washing Jewish dirty linen in public. When the famed Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill (Children of the Ghetto, 1892) and the towering figure of Jewish socialism and the Yiddish press, Abraham Cahan (Yekl, 1896), chose to describe the lives of Jewish ghetto dwellers in a realistic manner, with their poverty, squalor, and some inevitable depravity, much of the harshest criticism came from Jewish circles, both uptown and downtown. It was one thing to write about the blemishes and shortcomings in Yiddish or Hebrew, but another when non-Jews could read about it. Shortly after the turn of the century, the popular Zionist and Orthodox orator, Hirsh Masliansky, asserted that every Jew must constantly worry about “What shall the gentiles say?” and see it as a religious obligation—to act otherwise would endanger other Jews and constitute “blasphemy.”Footnote ³⁰ In 1902 Russian-born journalist, and later Zionist and communal activist, Bernard G. Richards insightfully explained to American readers why many Jews responded negatively to writers like Zangwill and Cahan, who portrayed Jewish life unadorned: most Jews still shrank from the eye of the stranger, and did not believe that non-Jews would judge them fairly. Richards explained that the Jew “is ever on the defensive … so utterly misunderstood, so misrepresented, so slandered.” Jews suspected, wrote Richards, that gentiles “would only jeer at wounds they themselves inflicted, would only laugh at deformities caused by conditions they have created.”Footnote ³¹

Jewish apologetic should not be seen as merely instrumental, aimed at defending the group's image. Some Jews sincerely did not believe that fellow Jews could be criminals, even when presented with the sordid details. A denial of Jewish criminality penetrated into some recollections of that period. An East Side Jew by the name of Herman Robinson, who grew up on Allen Street in the 1890s, remembered that there were many prostitutes, and vice was everywhere to be seen, but “the Jewish [sic] separated themselves from these Christian vices.”Footnote ³² Julius Gershin, a garment worker and member of the Workmen's Circle who came to America in 1904, recalled that although there were a few Jewish prostitutes on the East Side, “most of the prostitutes were Irish.”Footnote ³³ That impression was invoked not only in retrospect. After a few Jewish names were mentioned in connection to crime in New York in 1902, the editor of the conservative Yidishes tageblat (Jewish daily news), John (Yoyne) Paley, wrote that Jewish thieves were not really Jews. According to him, these so-called Jewish swindlers were often actually “Catholic Poles, whose last names also end with a ‘ski’ or ‘vich’, or Negroes, who carry biblical first names.”Footnote ³⁴ The self-image of many Jews as being free from “Christian vices” pushed aside any information to the contrary, despite their firsthand knowledge about Jewish criminals; and in spite of numerous reports in the early 1900s by different committees that showed a considerable presence of Jews in New York's vice scene.Footnote ³⁵

The sweeping attacks against “Jewish criminals” in New York seemed to reinforce the deep-seated Jewish fear that gentiles would judge them unfairly. Attending in 1901 a mass meeting at the Educational Alliance, established by uptown Jews to Americanize the immigrants, a Jewish audience booed and hissed the ex-police commissioner Frank Moss, a Yankee civic reformer, who in 1897 published a three-volume opus, The American Metropolis, which depicted eastern European Jews as ignorant, dirty, and imbued with “hatred and distrust of the Christians.” Moss argued that “criminal instincts… are so often found naturally in the Russian and Polish Jews.”Footnote ³⁶ His apology for those statements four years later was met with vocal protests. Afterward the Tageblat cried, “What a lame, cheap, insulting apology!” and declared, “The East Side wants none of Frank Moss and his like. The evils that exist here we will remedy—ourselves.”Footnote ³⁷ Felix Adler, founder of the nonsectarian Society for Ethical Culture, described in 1900 how Police Chief William S. Devery whispered in his ear, “It's just you Jews” who were responsible for the “bad moral conditions in the city.” Speaking before eight hundred people at an anti-vice mass meeting at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, Adler's words immediately drowned in an outburst of angry shouts. Devery and others' claims had a direct effect on the way Jews increasingly identified their defamers as “Anglo-Saxons” or “Yankees.”Footnote ³⁸

Allegations about Jewish Criminality and the Jewish Responses

During the decade prior to World War I, urban America was engaged in a comprehensive anti-vice crusade. Journalists, social workers, scientists, and public officials, armed with fashionable theories of immutable biological differences and government reports, strengthened the link between prostitution and the alien in the public mind. The more recent immigrants, especially those from southern Italy and Russia, were easy to cast as scapegoats for the malaise of urbanization and industrialization. Enjoying the halo of disinterested scientific observation, urban reformers facilitated the identification of immigrants with crime and immorality.Footnote ³⁹ Reformers gave special attention to dance halls and dance academies, which they saw as a breeding ground for prostitution, where immigrant working-class girls fell prey to pimps. In the East Side alone dozens of dance halls opened their doors each evening, and as Michael Gold reminisced, the pimps “infested” them and “picked up the romantic factory girls” who came there.Footnote ⁴⁰ The conspicuousness of certain Jewish procurers and prostitutes, especially when East Side Jews were one of the populations most scrutinized by urban reformers and social workers, made it easier to cast Jews as the main culprits for America's social evil. Ernest Bell, one of the leading anti-white slave reformers, claimed in 1910, “It is an absolute fact that Jews are the backbone of this loathsome traffic in women.”Footnote ⁴¹

Two of the most conspicuous accusations that linked immigrant Jews to crime were made in 1908 and 1909. In September 1908, New York Police Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham argued that “perhaps half” of the criminals in New York were Jewish, especially “Russian Hebrews”, and that situation was hardly surprising, “when we consider that ignorance of the language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor.” Subsequently Bingham withdrew his statement “without reservation” and was eventually dismissed in July 1909 for inefficiency and mismanagement.Footnote ⁴² A year later, in a last-minute attempt to damage Tammany during a mayoral race, another indictment of Jews came right from the Yankee heart of the reform camp. McClure's Magazine, the flagship of muckraker journalism, which represented the tastes of its mostly urban, middle-class Protestant readership, published in November 1909 George Kibbe Turner's “The Daughters of the Poor.” Using imagery and conjectures that were widely translated in the Yiddish press, Turner associated Jewish immigrants with white slavery, and maintained that “[there] were a large number of criminals” among them in New York.Footnote ⁴³ Some of the angry responses to Turner's charges compared the muckraker to Bingham, but barely noticed that Bingham actually identified most procurers as French and Belgians in his article. Whereas some of Turner's remarks about Jewish individuals were actually true, his generalizations and assumptions about the Jewish character revealed his nativist bias.Footnote ⁴⁴

Following Bingham's statements several protest rallies were held on the East Side, while all the major Yiddish dailies—Forverts, Morgen zhurnal (the Orthodox Morning journal), Yidishes tageblat, and Varhayt—in a rare display of agreement, classified Bingham as an anti-Semite. For weeks they offered claims and “statistics” to refute his article.Footnote ⁴⁵ Furthermore, the police commissioner's article prompted the establishment of a new organization. Headed by a young, American-born rabbi, Judah L. Magnes, who served at the prestigious Reform Temple Emanuel on the Fifth Avenue, the movement sought to organize all New York Jews as a kehillah, an encompassing Jewish community, with authority over religious, social, philanthropic, educational, and labor matters, and later also a crime-fighting function. In an attempt to allay gentile suspicions, the new Kehillah's founding convention in February 1909 decided that only American citizens could serve as delegates. Louis Marshall of the patrician American Jewish Committee, established less than two years beforehand, privately explained that without the citizenship clause, non-Jews might interpret the Kehillah as “disloyalty to this country” and a Jewish intent to build a state within a state.Footnote ⁴⁶

Turner challenged a central pillar of Jewish self-image, a challenge that was in a sense more damning than Bingham's essay—the purity of Jewish family, and especially of Jewish women. The ideal of sexual purity was not only derived from Jewish traditions. By the turn of the century the influence of the Victorian concept of “true womanhood,” with its models for good wives, sisters, and daughters, had penetrated the more acculturated segments of the immigrant population, and exacerbated the affront in Turner's essay.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rabbi Magnes delivered a fiery sermon in Temple Emanuel, asserting that “the women of Israel are pure, clean, womanly women.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The rabbi also criticized the settlement houses and reformers who treated Jews like “microbes under a microscope.” The East Side Property Owners and Businessmen Association reiterated Magnes's message, condemning Turner for smearing the Jewish quarter.Footnote ⁴⁹ The journalist's arguments forced many Jews to acknowledge the existence of a sordid reality in their midst. Having to accept these facts, however, did not endear the accusers to New York's Jews.

While conceding that there were Jewish pimps and prostitutes, Jewish commentators predictably set out to refute Turner's claims and protect the violated honor of downtown Jews. Political interests shaped the form of the protest and selected different villains accordingly. One pointed the finger at muckrakers, the “do-gooders” (reformers) in general, or at Tammany Hall, or all of them. Tammany's involvement in vice made the Irish an easy target. The socialist Yiddish poet Avrom Lesin used many Jews' suspicion toward the Irish to convince his readers that the problem was not with Turner or McClure's (though he called urban reformers “hypocrites”), but with “the Irish and Catholic party of New York.” Lesin argued that when “the Irish of Tammany Hall” wanted to get the votes of Germans or Italians, they nominated communal leaders. But when “Tammany's Irishmen” wanted to get the Jewish vote, they “nominated Jewish pimps.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Expressing a similar view from the other end of the political spectrum was the Orthodox, and usually pro-Republican, Morgen zhurnal, whose dislike of Tammany converged with that of a socialist like Lesin. A writer who signed “anonymous” (conceivably the editor Peter Wiernik or critic B. Gorin) attacked “our Irish fellow citizens” as “not the students but the teachers” when it came to corruption and prostitution.Footnote ⁵¹ Zionist (and former anarchist) Yiddish writer Avner Tanenboym, who made his name by translating popular novels and scientific texts to Yiddish, observed that “as a side dish” Turner and other reformers added “a little anti-Semitism, a little Jew-hatred, a few drops of poison.” Unlike those who referred to the Irish, Tanenboym pointed to the Yankee origin of many anti-vice crusaders, writing that “the old, wild spirit of Puritanism” and its “sad hypocrisy” still dominated New York.Footnote ⁵²

The Tageblat was even more straightforward in its assault on Yankee reformers, and especially lambasted those who operated downtown. After Paley's tragic death in 1907, the daily gradually assumed a more devout and Orthodox character under the influence of young writers like Gedaliah Bublik and Ephraim Caplan, while maintaining a large readership. In response to Turner's article, an editorial echoed Rabbi Magnes's words, crying, “Leave the East Side alone!”Footnote ⁵³ The discrepancy between Jewish self-image and the immorality attributed to Jews compelled the paper to set Jewish traits against those of the American critics: “On the East Side there are pushcart peddlers who culturally stand higher than some of the foolish sanctimonious women who come here to educate us… the average Jew is more moral and wiser than the average social worker.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The paper condemned the “aristocratic idlers and self-righteous maids” who considered it “a sport” to elevate the immigrants and determined that “no quarter in New York is plagued with settlements as the East Side.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In a similar vein, Hirsh Masliansky, a popular Orthodox and Zionist Yiddish preacher, juxtaposed what he saw as Jewish and gentile features. In an article titled “What has become of us?” he mentioned that Jewish youths did well in school and “fill up the libraries,” while non-Jewish youngsters “spent their youth in saloons and other places of entertainment.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The Nativist Menace

The heated reactions to Bingham and Turner reflected growing anxiety that immigrant Jews would be irreversibly associated with crime. “An American who knows nothing about the East Side and Jews… and reads those articles,” warned the Morgen zhurnal, would likely think that “the Jew is a highly unwanted immigrant, a hateful creature.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Those fears were hardly baseless; the voices that viewed immigrants as a threat and demanded to curb their entry intensified in the first decade of the twentieth century. Armed with fashionable pseudoscientific theories about the superiority of Anglo-Saxons or Nordics, American xenophobes blamed the ills of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and corrupt politics on the stream of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who crowded in the country's largest cities. While unions were concerned that cheap immigrant labor would lower American wages, nativist journalists and reformers were horrified by the living conditions of the new Americans—the overcrowding, squalor, alien languages, and religion.Footnote ⁵⁸

Those who wished to limit or stop the influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe altogether often pointed to the supposed high crime rate among them to argue for their inherently pernicious effect on their environment. By 1906 Vermont Senator William P. Dillingham introduced legislation that eventually led to the establishment of the United States Immigration Commission (the Dillingham Commission) to investigate the impact of immigration on American society. The committee's reports defined the new immigrants as physically, intellectually, and culturally less suitable for Americanization than earlier immigrants from western and northern Europe, and recommended the passage of literacy test. A month after McClure's published the issue with Turner's article in December 1909, the Commission presented the report about vice and white slavery to Congress, a large part of which depicted the situation in New York City. Although the report stressed that there was no proof that alien women were “more quickly degraded than native women,” it showed the substantial role Jews and other immigrants played in the commercial vice of the city; the report also stated that Italian pimps were “more vicious and criminal” than others.Footnote ⁵⁹

New York Jews were quite aware of the changing mood in America that dimmed the prospects for future immigration. For them this issue had become acute—the waves of pogroms in Russia between 1903 and 1906, and the worsening of living conditions for Jews in the tsarist empire made it all the more important to keep America's gates open. For most Jewish immigrants in New York the well-being and very lives of family members were at stake, and hence there was a virtual consensus within the Jewish immigrant population (and by the 1900s also largely among established Jewry) about the need to foil attempts to restrict European immigration. That many of the restrictionists were Anglo-Saxon patricians, the embodiment of true “Yankeeism,” certainly marred the image of the Yankee. By the same token, fellow immigrant groups, like the Italians, that also fought against restriction became fellow sufferers, whose help was essential to fend off the curtailment of immigration.Footnote ⁶⁰

The growing anxiety over immigration restriction fortified suspicions toward the surrounding American society. In 1910 the socialist Zionist leader, Dr. Nachman Syrkin, had reportedly warned that Americans might initiate anti-Jewish pogroms.Footnote ⁶¹ That year, the Forverts, sounding less dramatic, frowned upon the deeds of “fanatic Yankees.” A committee of experts, nominated by the Dillingham Commission, had set out to study how the physique of immigrants changed after their arrival. The Yankees were afraid that the masses of immigrants were “inferior to the real Americans.” The editorial declared, “We do not think highly of the ‘superior’ American character. Surely it stands—the American character—higher in certain aspects. But not in all.”Footnote ⁶²

The talk about “undesirable” immigrants led to musing about those who did happen to be desirable—white, native-born Americans. Such reflections were precursors of a larger disposition to identify with other minorities and defend them against the tide of intolerance. After a laid-off dockworker, James J. Gallagher, shot and seriously injured New York City mayor William Jay Gaynor in 1910, the Forverts wrote acerbically, “As if to spite all jingoists and race-baiters, it is not an Italian, not a Syrian, not a Slav, not a ‘nigger’” who shot the mayor, but rather “a good Tammany-man, a sport, a gambler, a drinker … a person with all the ‘virtues’ that an American jingoist” would find “desirable.” In a pattern that would strengthen as the demand to restrict immigration grew, the Forverts defended other groups as it attacked the bigotry of “the Americans,” who had “sympathy” for the Irish, but “shout about the Italians, the Negroes … that they are murderers, bloodthirsty animals.”Footnote ⁶³ A year later, in 1911, Dovid Hermalin grimly listed the minorities that were most hated in different regions of the country, noting that the only reason Americans did not treat Jews “as the Russians” was because “they hate the Negroes and Mongolians [Asians] even more.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The need to join efforts with other groups and pro-immigration Americans to secure open immigration had become urgent. After the Dillingham Bill was introduced in 1906, the Federation of Jewish Societies organized a mass protest at Cooper Union, attended by more than three thousand people, where socialist, Zionist, and Orthodox leaders, as well as non-Jews, like future mayor William Jay Gaynor and congressman William Bennet, spoke against the bill, and many more signed a petition that was published in the Yiddish papers. That year Nissim Behar, a Jewish welfare worker, organized the New York-based National Liberal Immigration League for the single purpose of defeating restriction bills. Edward Lauterbach, a philanthropist prominent both in Jewish communal affairs and the Republican Party, became its president, and the league enlisted the support of old-stock Protestants, like Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson, and the Episcopal bishop of New York Henry C. Potter. In 1907 Behar warned that, “When this door is closed, as the door of England has been closed to Jewish immigration,” the whole Jewish people “could not open it.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Reaching the Nadir in the Summer of 1912

Despite the fear that immigrant Jews would be linked with crime, which would strengthen the calls for immigration restriction, the discussion about Jewish criminality in 1908–1909 did not generate major changes in communal policy. But Jewish criminals became a burning issue in July 1912, when two gruesome and widely publicized murder cases in New York involved Jewish offenders. Historians have paid considerable attention to one of those crimes. In the early hours of July 16, 1912, Herman “Beansey” Rosenthal, a Jewish gambler and former protégé of Tammany's “Big Tim” Sullivan, was gunned down steps away from Times Square. Rosenthal was shot only hours before he was scheduled to testify before a grand jury about police-underworld ties, after already revealing that Police Lieutenant Charles Becker, head of the antigambling squad, was his silent partner. The gambler believed Becker double-crossed him. The police soon traced the getaway car to an East Side automobile rental service and in less than a month Lieutenant Becker and all of the hired assassins were arrested. The captivating mixture of murder, conspiracy, corruption, and punishment received extensive coverage in the city's newspapers.Footnote ⁶⁶

Perhaps most striking for Jews and non-Jews alike was that all the major figures involved in the murder (excluding Becker and one of the hired hit men), whether murderers, accomplices, or witnesses, were Jews. In the quartet of gunmen who murdered Rosenthal, three were Jews: Harry Horowitz (alias “Gyp the Blood”), Louis Rosenberg (alias “Leftie Louie”), and Jacob Seidenshner (alias “Whitey Louis”), while the fourth was Frank Cirofici (alias “Dago Frank”). Beyond the murderers themselves unfolded a whole cast of East Side gamblers, conmen, opium-den keepers and ne'er-do-wells like “Bald Jack Rose” (born Jacob Rosenzweig), Harry Vallon (born Valinsky), and Louis “Bridgey” Webber. As the trials took place—the four gunmen were executed in April 1914, and Becker was retried to meet the same fate in July 1915—most New York newspapers did not openly comment on the ethnicity of those involved.Footnote ⁶⁷ Still, some newspapers, like the New York Herald and its sister paper the Evening Telegram, went further than others in pinning the blame on Jews. Those papers called Rosenthal “an undersized Jew,” and termed the alleged murderers and accomplices “East Side thugs,” and “Jew Gamblers.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Very little scholarly attention has been paid to an even grislier crime, also widely covered in the metropolitan press, that happened shortly before Rosenthal's murder. On July 7, 1912, a fatally wounded twelve-year-old girl, Julia Connors, was found cut and stabbed at a vacant lot in the Bronx. After a few days the police announced that the prime suspect was a young Jewish man by the name of Nathan Swartz, who served in the past eighteen months in prison for assaulting another young girl, and whose family resided next to the lot where Julia Connors was found. Ten days after the girl was murdered, and three days after Rosenthal was gunned down, Swartz committed suicide in an East Side tenement apartment, leaving a note in which he confessed to murdering the girl. Though committed by an individual lacking links to organized crime and local politics, and though it received less coverage than the gambler's murder, the Swartz case added more headlines connecting a Jewish name to a hideous crime.Footnote ⁶⁹

For the Jewish public in New York, these simultaneous, unrelated, high-profile murders were very disturbing. While pickpocketing, forgery, gambling, and prostitution were bad enough and widely condemned, Jewish apologists could still blame them on the surrounding conditions. But execution-style murder like Rosenthal's, or the heinous crime of a sexual pervert like Swartz, came as a genuine shock to most Jews and challenged their self-image, according to which bloodshed was alien to the Jewish character and historical experience was a central part of that conception. Uptown communal leader Cyrus Sulzberger declared that a case like Rosenthal's murder had “no parallel” in Jewish history and that such crimes were heretofore “alien to the Jewish nature.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In a Varhayt editorial Dovid Hermalin articulated the self-perception of many Jews when he bemoaned, “We should stand higher than others … and be a nation of priests, a holy people.”Footnote ⁷¹ A staunch upholder of Orthodoxy and a rabbi's son from Lithuania, journalist Ephraim Caplan claimed that “in our Jewish blood … there is no inclination toward violence and no bestial passion.”Footnote ⁷² No less painful was the fact that almost all of those criminals were either born in New York or immigrated at a very young age, enjoyed at least a few years of public school education and came from families with no criminal history. Putting the onus on the American setting, Judah Magnes asked, “When does the foreigner cease and the native begin?” and remarked “Heaven keep us all from that kind of Americanization!” Jews who held diverse outlooks were deeply troubled that the true Americans yielded by the immigrant Jewish population were vicious criminals.Footnote ⁷³

Heirs to a tradition that sought to reduce group vulnerability through the maintenance of a well-ordered house, both downtown and uptown Jews were determined to launch an anti-crime campaign. In August 1912 the Kehillah established the Bureau of Social Morals, which fought crime in New York's Jewish sections until 1917. Judah Magnes hired private investigator Abe Shoenfeld, who had previously worked for Rockefeller's Bureau of Social Hygiene, and later, eight additional investigators, who collected information on Gotham's Jewish underworld and submitted it to the police. In 1913 both Shoenfeld and the Bureau's legal counsel, uptown lawyer Harry Newburger, who had worked for the police department and was appointed in 1913 by Mayor Gaynor deputy police commissioner, ordered and led raids in the East Side. After eighteen months of vigorous crime fighting, the Bureau reported that it managed to shut down over one hundred brothels, sixty crap houses, sixty-five pool parlors, and sixteen opium dens.Footnote ⁷⁴

Even though many Jewish immigrants probably supported the anticrime effort in their neighborhoods, some unease still remained about Jewish communal authorities that apprehended Jews and turned them in to gentile hands. In August 1912 the Morgen zhurnal warned that any anti-crime fight should be general and not a specific Jewish endeavor; if Jews would act separately against Jewish criminals, “it would only help to develop a new group of moysrim [informers].”Footnote ⁷⁵ The Orthodox were not the only ones who invoked the old-world picture of betraying Jews to gentile officials. Writing in March 1914 for the organ of the Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF), Der yidisher sotsyalist (The Jewish socialist), a journalist who identified himself as Bernard Mahler (most likely editor Yankev Salutsky or Shakhne Epshteyn, both of whom were Bundists who arrived in New York a few years earlier) sharply rebuked the Kehillah for capturing a Jewish escaped convict and handing him over to the police. Mahler called the Kehillah khapers (kidnappers), thus reminding his readers of the painful collaboration of Jewish communities with the tsarist regime (1827–1855) in apprehending juvenile conscripts. Moreover, Mahler mocked the communal leaders who wanted to show the gentiles that Jews were a pure people by turning in Jewish criminals: “but that is simply spying,” with a “nasty” crawling before the gentiles “on top of that!”Footnote ⁷⁶ The discomfort about the Kehillah's activity was merely another signal that immigrant Jews were still interpreting their relations to the larger society as paralleling old-world patterns of Jewish-gentile relations rather than breaking from them.

That many immigrant Jews saw America as a guilty party for Jewish crime was clear. Shortly after the Rosenthal affair made the headlines, the Forverts complained that too many people, “and not only common ones but even many intelligent people,” were walking around and bewailing “Ah, America! American children! Damn Columbus!” Their belief that Jewish children became bad because of America led to the superficial judgment: “America is to blame!” “But that is totally wrong!” thundered the socialist daily.Footnote ⁷⁷ One of the paper's leading columnists, M. Baranov (penname of Moyshe Gormidor), explained how the ramifications of urbanization in a capitalistic order were the root cause of the growth of crime.Footnote ⁷⁸

Since the economic system was culpable, the Forverts rejected the notion that the Jewish population bore any collective responsibility for crimes committed by individuals. The paper acknowledged that many “dumb Christians” undoubtedly told Jews in private “enough biting words” that all criminals were Jewish. “But we must remember,” cautioned the paper, that if we “scorn them [the accusers] for that … [it] is not because they are gentiles, but because they are dumb people, unenlightened.” Yet Jews were not free from “that stupidity,” either, argued the editorial: “Also among us the unenlightened public is inclined to say that all gentiles are drunk, all Italians are murderers, all Irishmen are thieves, all Germans are anti-Semites, all Russians are pogromchiks, etc.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Although the Forverts dismissed ethnic stereotypes and emphasized the global dimension of capitalism's inequities, it echoed how many Jews sought to minimize the significance of recent crimes by blaming American ways and clinging to negative images of different groups.

The Morgen zhurnal agreed with its socialist rival that New York's Jewish population should not be held accountable for the deeds of Jewish criminals. Unlike the Forverts, however, the Orthodox daily believed the moral deterioration of the young generation derived from the abandonment of tradition and could not have happened where there was “a moral atmosphere and religious discipline.”Footnote ⁸⁰ That was true for both Jews and non-Jews, and the Morgen zhurnal thought it was “stupidity” to consider crime a Jewish problem. If it was necessary to establish a vigilance committee for New York, the paper wrote, it must be general, “for Americans as well as immigrants, for Italians as well as Jews.”Footnote ⁸¹ Columnist Avner Tanenboym reasoned, “there are bad people among all nations, but among Jews there were “proportionally much fewer bad people than other nations. A Jewish murderer, and especially a sexually perverted murderer … was a rarity.” Tanenboym added, “It is true that even today, the number of Jewish murderers and criminals in America's largest cities is still [proportionally] much smaller than the number of non-Jewish murderers and criminals.”Footnote ⁸²

Writer Ephraim Caplan believed that bigots would seek to incriminate Jews as a whole “even if we were angels” and he also put the blame on American influence: people said the Swartz was a madman, but “in Ayshishok, in Shnipishok, in Radon and in Volozhin we never heard of such madmen.”Footnote ⁸³ Caplan believed that Swartz's personal background, his father active in the socialist Workmen's Circle, might have had a detrimental effect on the young man. But even worse was young Swartz's obsession with sport. The Orthodox columnist condemned the Americanization that depended on “physical training” and those Jews who revere this craze that might have led to the creation of “bestial passions.” “Athletes are half-wild animals,” Caplan averred, pointing a finger at the Educational Alliance with its physical training programs. He speculated that perhaps the kernel of Swartz's bestial madness “was created in his brain at the gymnasium of that institution.” By referring to the murderer's muscles, “those of a wild, huge Orangutan,” and preoccupation with physical attributes, Caplan expressed the dissatisfaction with physical activity that was prevalent among many traditional Jews. Portraying Swartz as the embodiment of goyish characteristics enabled Caplan to disassociate the young man from what were perceived as Jewish qualities.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Morgen zhurnal took a similar approach in regard to Rosenthal. The gambler was an “ekhter amerikaner” (real American) and a “perfect American gentleman” who was twice married to Christian women. Thus one should not add him to the tally of Jewish immigrants.Footnote ⁸⁵

The Tageblat and Varhayt, in contrast, ascribed responsibility to New York Jews as a whole and supported the Kehillah's effort to root out Jewish criminals. Yet they, too, hardly refrained from blaming the American setting and idealizing Jewish qualities. Amid the names and faces of Jewish criminals splashed across many papers, the Tageblat reminded its readers that though there were Jewish criminals, “the Jewish heart is softer.” Jews were overall farther from violence than even “the present-day highly civilized nations.”Footnote ⁸⁶ But it was not a time to relish such achievements, since “Our American neighbor is silent,” as the conservative daily warned. “He is too polite to say something. But we do not believe his silence … he entertains bad thoughts about the Jewish people” as a result of what the Americans were reading in the papers.Footnote ⁸⁷ Two years later, in April 1914, after Rosenthal's murderers were executed, the Tageblat lamented that in the past, “the Jew usually left those crimes [murders] to Esau [gentiles].”Footnote ⁸⁸ The Tageblat laid the responsibility on Jewish parents who abandoned the traditions of their people and “instantly became more American than the Americans.” The outcome was gangs and gamblers who besmirched the Jewish reputation.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Varhayt also believed that New York Jews could not exonerate themselves from the sordid dealings in their backyards. The editor, a pioneer of Jewish socialism and the Yiddish press in America, Louis E. Miller (formerly Bandes) wrote that the Rosenthal tragedy “could not have happened among the Irish, not the Germans, not the French, certainly not the Americans, and even among the Italians it would have had a different form.” Miller argued that, “no one is responsible for the East Side gangs as the East Side Jews themselves.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Here Jews were at a very different situation from that in Russia, Miller wrote: “The Russian law and courts are not the law and courts in America … here the government and the police are the servants of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens alike.”Footnote ⁹¹ Miller contended that Jews “have the right to have thieves like other nations, and we have the right to have a Rosenthal like other nations,” but while a gentile lawbreaker gambles away only his own honor, “[B]y Jews a gambler like Rosenthal risks the moral fiber and dignity of the whole Jewish people.”Footnote ⁹² Therefore New York Jews had a moral obligation “to raise our voice as loudly as possible and denounce the gangs, reject the gamblers, shake them off with all might.”Footnote ⁹³

The Varhayt's position, nonetheless, was more complicated than simply to “cast the blame squarely upon the Jewish quarter,” as Arthur Goren has suggested.Footnote ⁹⁴ When it was reported that the police suspected Nathan Swartz, coeditor Dovid Hermalin termed it “a blood libel.”Footnote ⁹⁵ It is quite plausible that Hermalin was thinking about the ongoing Beilis trial in Russia, where a Jewish manager of a brick factory, Mendel Beilis, was falsely accused in 1911 of murdering a young boy in Kiev for “ritual purposes.” Though the trial was a complete farce, the Russian government used it to divert revolutionary unrest, and Beilis was released only after more than two years of imprisonment and torture.Footnote ⁹⁶ The trial made headlines across Europe and was also widely covered by the Jewish press in America, serving as yet another proof of the cruelty and antisemitism of the tsarist regime. Numerous dramatic renderings of the trial appeared on the Yiddish stage in New York and other large cities in the United States and Europe during that period. Hermalin was clearly catering to the sensibilities of his readers.Footnote ⁹⁷

Though admitting there was a crisis in American Jewish life, Hermalin set out to exonerate the Empire City's Jews. Rosenthal, “Whitey Louie,” and “Leftie Louie,” and their ilk “were not Jews in their actions, life and existence.” The main culprit was the corrupt police, which was made of “good Christian Americans, Irish, Germans, and Dutch.” Hermalin attempted to prove that since the mass immigration of Jews to New York crime had been actually declining. The American press wrote as if in the past New York had been a model of holiness, but “twenty-five years ago there were brothels almost on every block…. The prostitutes were Yankee, German, French, and their pimps were of the same origin.”Footnote ⁹⁸ When “Yankee Jews and rich gentiles,” as uptown reformers were called, came to examine the East Side, Hermalin maintained, they saw the importance of education in Jewish life. When they went to Mulberry Street, “they saw how one Italian stabbed the other,” and on Cherry Street they saw “the violent drunkards outside a saloon, who are all Yankees or Irish immigrants.”Footnote ⁹⁹

The Varhayt could not have cast the blame “squarely” on the Jewish quarter because of a practical concern as well: implying that New York Jews were somehow collectively responsible for those hideous crimes could have taken its toll on the paper's circulation. Even chief editor Louis Miller, the same one who wrote, “no one is responsible for the East Side gangs as the East Side Jews themselves,”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ did not hesitate to hold the “general atmosphere in America” accountable.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In a different editorial called “Our ‘Young America,’” Miller bemoaned the general conduct of the “Jewish Yankees,” the American-born or raised children, and mentioned what many immigrants believed, that a Jewish child, born to the same parents, behaved differently on Hester Street than in a Polish shtetl.Footnote ¹⁰²

But even Miller's moderate self-examination did not appeal to everyone. A distressed Bronx reader by the name of Morris Williams protested Miller's words about Jewish accountability. Williams could not believe that the Varhayt would take such a stance. “If so, then the Russian government acted logically during the [1905] revolution, when it called the rabbi and prominent members of the community, and demanded that they give in the [Jewish] revolutionaries, or face a pogrom.” Williams warned that “if your editorial would be translated to English, our American neighbors would draw from it a very poor opinion about the local Jewish population.”Footnote ¹⁰³

An unfortunate statement by Mayor Gaynor further aggravated the apprehension about the reaction of the surrounding society. After the identity of Rosenthal's murderers became known, the sharp-tongued Gaynor pointed out that New York had the largest foreign-born population of any city “and a large number of these are degenerates and criminals.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Later Gaynor explained, “I have not said so much as one word about Jews in connection with the Rosenthal murder … A degenerate outlaw is the same to me, Jew or Gentile.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Democratic mayor, who kept his distance from Tammany, had been quite popular among Jewish immigrants. In the past he refused to grant a license to a Brooklyn missionary, as a judge he strongly deplored police harassment of peddlers, and he attacked Bingham and McClure's for their articles about Jews and crime. But his statement about foreign criminals availed itself to Gaynor's rivals on the reform camp. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise declared that Gaynor was trying to divert attention from his incompetence by “inflaming the public mind against the Jews.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The pro-Republican Morgen zhurnal mocked Gaynor's Jewish supporters, “who thought he was different, an intellectual giant.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Tageblat compared Gaynor to the man he helped to dethrone—Police Commissioner Bingham—and rhetorically asked, “does the educated mayor not know that gambling is an American habit, and does he not know that among Americans there are drunkards, murderers, and all kind of wretches?”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

It is hard to tell to what extent the incident tarnished Gaynor's image among immigrant Jews. The mayor continued to work closely with the Kehillah in fighting crime on the East Side and had amicable relations with its leaders. Toward the 1913 election a pro-Gaynor body, the Gaynor League for Foreign-Born Citizens, was formed on the East Side. It was led by former labor tribune and untiring communal leader Joseph Barondess, and enjoyed the tacit support of Magnes. Although Gaynor's early death in September 1913 terminated that organization, Gaynor's words had probably added to the growing feeling of immigrant Jews that perhaps Americans were not so different after all from other gentiles, since they, too, harbored ill feelings toward Jews. A Harlem reader by the name of S. Feldstein wrote to the Varhayt that “In the best Christian there is a little gall toward Jews that he must let out at the first chance.” Feldstein criticized the daily for its hypocrisy of keeping silent when a Democrat assailed Jews. The Varhayt answered its critical reader by writing that though Gaynor's words had some truth to them, the mayor had no right to say them: “When a Jew opens a Jewish wound, everyone knows he does it not out of hatred nor envy, but out of pain …. When a non-Jew does that, we cannot bear it, because we do not know his feelings, because we do not know his motives.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

*****

While scholars have dwelled on the public self-criticism and shock that galvanized New York Jews into action after the events of July 1912, those responses did not characterize the whole gamut of Jewish reactions. The Jewish self-image as a nonviolent people proved to be quite resilient, and one of the ways to reconcile murderers like “Gyp the Blood” or vicious sexual perverts like Nathan Swartz with that self-perception was to put the blame on the surrounding American influence, or to evoke generalized negative images of gentiles that harked back to Jewish traditional society as a foil for positive Jewish qualities. Jewish immigrants construed the relations between Jews and the larger non-Jewish society as a continuation of old-world patterns of Jewish-gentile relations rather than a change or reversal of them. The above criminal episodes demonstrated how a cultural net of transnational meanings shaped the Jewish responses to allegations against them.

In the period between 1908 and 1913 the images of the American among Jews gradually became clouded with mistrust and fears. To be sure, Jewish immigrants continued to hold fast to the belief that America and Americans were better than other gentiles because of their positive relations to Jews. Yet the claims about Jewish criminality and the emergence of a more robust immigration restriction movement in America (that often linked restriction to the newcomers' purported wrongdoings), at a time of dire conditions in tsarist Russia, worsened the image of “real” Americans. More concretely, the accusations came from the heart of the reform camp. Yankees like Bingham and Turner among others had raised claims that did not just acutely challenge Jewish self-perception, but also exposed the barely hidden nativism of many reformers. Jewish immigrants increasingly saw the concentration of many non-Jewish social workers, settlement houses, urban reformers, and journalists on the East Side as intended to malign Jews rather than genuinely help them. Several historians have thought of Hutchins Hapgood or Lincoln Steffens when asserting, “the muckrakers were deeply infatuated with the Jews.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Nonetheless, Jewish immigrants had become growingly disillusioned with Yankee progressives, including muckrakers. The fact that there was a real problem with the Jewish underworld did not dispel Jewish immigrants' distrust of the gentile accusers and their motives, nor the suspicion that perhaps those Yankees, including even a trustworthy man like Mayor Gaynor, were not much better than other gentiles in spreading indiscriminate libel against Jews.

Finally, the Anglo-Saxon identity of the most avid advocates of immigration restriction did not just contribute to the disenchantment with “true” Americans. In their efforts to keep America's doors open, Jewish immigrants found themselves in the same boat with other immigrant groups. That did not mean that they instantly came to value those other groups. The early and, sometimes, cumbersome attempts to defend immigrants in general were mostly self-serving. As the 1910s advanced, nevertheless, the connection to several groups, like the Italians, would begin to strengthen, when Jews sought cooperation with other minorities as the only viable self-defense in a society that seemed increasingly intolerant.