In New York, the leading German Jews did not react to the Grand Union Hotel incident by appealing to the humanitarian impulses of Gentiles, in the manner of Lazard Kahn’s letter to Nast. Instead, many of them came to see their new and unexpected troubles as the result of the mass emigration of Eastern European Jews which was just getting under way. Before 1880, there were fewer than three hundred thousand Jews in the United States, most of them German. By 1920, as many as three million Jews had arrived, overwhelmingly from Eastern Europe. They weren’t just far more numerous than the German Jews, they were more observant, more concentrated in urban slums, and much poorer. The way to combat anti-Jewish prejudice, many German Jews thought, would be to do something about them.
In 1891, three prominent German Jews—a Schiff, a Seligman, and a Straus—asked President Benjamin Harrison to pressure the tsar to adopt more lenient policies toward the Jews, and to stanch the rising incidence of pogroms, so that Russian Jews wouldn’t feel they had to immigrate to the United States. Another German Jewish project was the Galveston Plan (1907-14), which aimed to steer Jewish immigrants away from New York and other big cities, where there were highly visible Jewish slums. A third initiative was establishing a Yiddish-language newspaper called Die Yiddische Welt, or the Jewish World, as an alternative to the unmannerly homegrown press, much of which was scandalous and socialist, at least to the German Jews’ way of thinking. Still another was funding the early Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine for Eastern European Jewish refugees, which would provide a destination that wasn’t New York.
Surely there was compassion in these efforts—maybe even the enhanced compassion you would feel for people who were like you in some way. But it didn’t extend to actual mingling. As a son of the German Jewish financier Felix Warburg said about his father, who contributed or raised millions to the aid of Jews in distress, “He disliked almost everything about the Jews except their problems.”
In France in the late nineteenth century, a Jewish Army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was put on trial on false charges of treason. Dreyfus’s sensational case turned him into a public enemy, and made it clear that France, the site of one of the earliest programs of Jewish emancipation, was not friendly to Jews, either. Theodor Herzl, the journalist who founded the modern Zionist movement, said he was converted by the Dreyfus case from a typically assimilated, secular Western European Jew into someone who believed that the time had come to declare the Diaspora a failure and create a Jewish nation. This did not appeal, to say the least, to German Jews in America. No idea was more threatening to our sub-tribe at the turn of the twentieth century than Zionism. We wanted to blend in, to be unobtrusive, to be accepted. Zionism was loud, insistent, separatist, tribal. Zionism called attention to the unsettling reality that millions of Jews in Europe wanted to leave—many, no doubt, for America rather than for Palestine. Reform Judaism’s slogan was that we were a religion, not a race. Zionism was a secular movement rooted in Jewish identity: race, not religion.
Just as America’s carriage-trade institutions were systematically excluding Jews, the German Jews’ Reform institutions excluded or expelled Zionists. Kaufmann Kohler, a German-born Reform rabbi, became the president of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1903. He purged Zionists from its faculty; he also barred a prominent Zionist from speaking at H.U.C. In 1918, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the national Reform leadership organization, issued a statement criticizing the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s official statement of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. “The ideal of the Jew is not the establishment of a Jewish state—not the re-assertion of Jewish nationality which has long been outgrown,” the statement said. A few years after that, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which severely restricted emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (and barred immigrants from Asia). This meant that Jews would have a hard time coming to the U.S.; Jewish migration to Palestine swelled.
In 1936, Julian Feibelman arrived as the new rabbi at New Orleans’s Temple Sinai. He wound up holding the job for thirty-one years, and so being the main direct religious authority of both Father’s childhood and mine. In 1938, he married one of the Lemanns, which also made him, to me, Cousin Julian. Julian had grown up in Jackson, Mississippi, when it was a town of around seven thousand people, without paved streets. His father, who, like most of the other Jews in town, owned a store, had the family eat matzos during Passover and take the day off on Yom Kippur, but that was the extent of their observance. They also celebrated Christmas and Easter as secular holidays.