Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [597]
JEWS AND HUGHES
Through the 1830s New York had remained a Protestant town. The 1840s and 1850s immigration ended that dominance forever. Jews went from being an ecclesiastical sliver (five hundred in 1825) to a respectable religious minority of forty thousand by 1859. Catholics, a respectable minority in the 1830s, became the largest denomination in the city—with two hundred thousand congregants in 1855—and a temporal power in metropolitan affairs.
The mass migration of Jews to New York City was triggered when various German states, especially Bavaria, imposed severe economic and social restrictions, making business, travel, and even marriage increasingly difficult. With the arrival of thousands of German- or Yiddish-speaking Jews, the number of synagogues rose rapidly, reaching a total of twenty-seven by 1860. The immigration also created considerable internal strains in what had been a relatively harmonious population. German Jews, especially the more educated and wealthy among them, objected to holding services in Hebrew, which few understood. They also wanted preaching by a rabbi, the introduction of instrumental music, and the integration of sexes. Those inclined toward such practices organized their own “reform” congregation—Emanu-El (God Is with Us)—which soon acquired its own “temple” (first on Chrystie, then on 12th Street) and its own cemetery (at Cypress Hills on Long Island). By the 1850s Emanu-El was challenging “orthodox” Shearith Israel and B’nai Jeshurun for leadership of the Jewish community.
Many German Jews, as verein-minded as other Kleindeutschlanders, flocked to secular groups as well. By 1849 the combined membership of the fifty-odd Jewish organizations—charitable, social, and fraternal—exceeded by far the combined membership of the synagogues. Among the most important was the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant). It resembled the Odd Fellows and Masons in providing members with mutual aid and burial benefits, and by 1860 it had ten lodges and a thousand members. A Jewish press emerged as well. The Asmonean, the first successful Jewish weekly in the United States, was joined, in 1857, by the Jewish Messenger. In 1855 the “Jews’ Hospital in the City of New York” opened its doors (it would be known after 1866 as Mount Sinai). Initially a project of the older Portuguese and English, it soon added immigrant Germans to its board and became the most prominent Jewish organization in New York City. All factions attended its charity banquets and balls; the spectacular affair at Niblo’s in 1858, graced by the mayor’s presence, was the most extravagant event of its kind ever organized by New York Jews.
The emergence of a full-blown Jewish community raised relatively few hackles among other religious communities in a city where congregants of Shearith Israel had long been a respected presence. Anti-Semitic caricatures of Chatham Street’s clothing dealers and pawnbrokers were prevalent, to be sure. A character in Melville’s Redburn recalls “walking up Chatham-street” and seeing “a curly-headed little man with a dark oily face, and a hooked nose, like the pictures of Judas Iscariot.” But most found it hard to distinguish German Jews from other Germans, and when they did, it was apparent that the newcomers were intent on fashioning a brand of Judaism that would be “acceptable” to the gentile majority. By 1856 Temple Emanu-El had switched from German to English.
Where the arrival of the German Jews—modest