Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [883]
Pogroms broke out, organized massacres unhindered and at times instigated by the government. Jews were beaten, killed. Jewish shops, dwellings, warehouses, and synagogues were attacked and destroyed. The worst violence took place in bulging urban centers like Yelizabetgrad, Kiev, and Warsaw. Over the next decade, new czarist policies imposed forced relocations, banned access to certain professions, restricted admission to the educational system, and, in 1891, forcibly expelled Jews from Kiev, Moscow, and other Russian cities.
These pogroms and policies precipitated flight, with many Jews opting for America. In 1881-82, thousands bolted from southern Russia across the Austrian border to Brody. From there European Jewry’s charitable organizations passed many along to Bremen or Liverpool, where they boarded steamers heading to New York City. Over the next two decades, tens of thousands more made the trek on their own, escaping both sporadic repression and steady economic impoverishment.
In the 1870s roughly forty thousand Eastern European Jews had come to the United States. In the 1880s over two hundred thousand came; in the 1890s over three hundred thousand followed suit. Roughly 70 percent would settle in New York City, the major port of entry. In 1870 there had been about sixty thousand Jews in the metropolis, and by 1880 about eighty thousand. By the early 1890s that number had more than doubled, to nearly 170,000, and by the end of the decade it had reached 290,000—a phenomenal inrush that troubled New York’s long-established German-Jewish community.
OCCIDENTALS, ORIENTALS
In the context of the rising anti-Semitism that characterized the late 1870s and early 1880s city, New York’s German Jews, especially the more affluent among them, worried that the arriving masses would further undermine their decades-long drive for social acceptance. Such anxieties were not unreasonable. At first the wider metropolis rallied against Russian barbarism and anti-Semitism: a large protest meeting at Chickering Hall in 1882 denounced the pogroms, and the Commercial Advertiser suggested reprisals against the czarist regime. At the same time, however, faced with refugees who were far poorer and more exotic than had been imagined, less sympathetic opinions surfaced. A two-page cartoon in Judge that year depicted a “Ceremony of taking down the last sign of the Christians in New Jerusalem (Formerly New York)”.
The temptation was therefore strong to underscore the differences between German “Hebrews,” still widely respected, and “low-class Jews,” who were increasingly suspect. Thus the Rev. Dr. J. Silverman complained in an 1889 lecture at Temple Emanu-El that the newcomers were “a standing menace” because their “loud ways and awkward gesticulations are naturally repulsive and repugnant to the refined American sensibilities.” The “thoroughly acclimated American Jew,” the Hebrew Standard agreed, “is closer to the Christian sentiment around him than to the Judaism of these miserable darkened Hebrews.”
Real differences did exist. In Europe, those inspired by the Haskalah—an earlier German-Jewish enlightenment that had reconciled Jewish tradition to Western culture—had long rejected the power that shtetl rabbis, melamdim (teachers), and scholars retained in community affairs, considering it rigid and reactionary. In New York, many haut bourgeois Reform Jews, whose modes of observance had been moving steadily closer to those of their Protestant confreres, considered the Orthodox immigrants little better than fanatics. And even the Conservative Jews—those who balked at the Reform project and founded the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1886—were far more liberal in their theology than the arriving immigrants.
German Jews, moreover, had long contrasted their own progressive “Occidental civilization” with Russian