The American Jew at Mid-Century
American Jewish Year Book, 1955.
Published by American Jewish Committee and Jewish Publication Society of America. 682 pp. $5.00.

For fifty-six years the American Jewish Year Book has been a faithful record of Jewish history in the making. To mark the American Jewish Tercentenary its editor, Morris Fine, has this year chosen to present three special historical studies that tell us much about Jews and about America. These articles are more vital than the statistics in the book, for they provide us with the beginnings of a profile of the American Jew at mid-century.

The “ground-tone,” to use Nathan Glazer’s phrase in his summary of the various surveys of social characteristics of American Jews, is essentially middle-class—respectable, prosperous, sober, ambitious. This ground-tone is very much the same today as it was seventy-five years ago, although between times it has been something quite different.

On the eve of the mass immigration which began in the 1880’s, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations made a census of 10,000 Jewish families. It turned out that nearly two-thirds had at least one servant. The largest number of men were merchants of one kind or another. One in twenty was in the professions, and one in eight was a skilled worker of some kind; only one in a hundred admitted to being a peddler.

In the 1950’s, having settled down after a couple of generations of change, we are now apparently re-emerging as a 20th-century version of that mid-Victorian middle-class daguerreotype. The change of course, came during the period when Jewish immigrants, pouring in from Eastern Europe, raised the proportion of Jews to the total population from about one in two hundred (1880) to about one in thirty (1917), where it has stayed ever since.

These new settlers herded in the cities, sweltered on hot pavements, froze in cold-water flats, worked in sweatshops, haggled over pushcarts, sparkled with ideas, and drove their children to better themselves. For once, history had dealt kindly with Jews, at least with those who came here. Having molded them, through the centuries of ghetto life in Europe, into thrifty, canny, studious people willing to sacrifice the present for the future, it sent them by the millions into a new world where such qualities were in great demand.

So they worked, and they planned for their children. They did not drink. They stayed out of jail. They committed fewer murders and had fewer accidents. More of their babies survived infancy. Their children attended school more regularly and had a higher IQ. It was bound to affect the ground-tone.

At the halfway point, in the 1930’s, most of the first-generation immigrants were still manual workers, and most of their children clerks, salesmen, white-collar people. Among women, this was the era of the Jewish secretary, who is now disappearing almost as rapidly as the Jewish laborer. And the penetration into pharmacy, the law, dentistry, and medicine was heavy. At that time, proportionately, more than three times as many Jews as Christians were lawyers or judges in San Francisco, and in Trenton ten times as many were doctors.

What these figures reveal, says Mr. Glazer, is that American Jews seem always to exaggerate the impulses of the nation as a whole. “Thus, if there is a general movement away from manual work, among the Jews it becomes a flight; and when the general birth rate dropped during the Depression, the Jewish birth rate plunged downward.”

So today, as before the 1880’s, the ground-tone is super-American. In a middle-class country, American Jews are supremely middle class. In an atmosphere where business and the professions are highly respected, most of the younger American Jews are business or professional men. As a group, they are “probably as well-educated and as wealthy as some of the oldest and longest-established elements in the United States.” They still show a marked preference for owning their own businesses—whether junk yard, grocery store, factory, or law firm—rather than managing enterprises owned by others. Clearly there is still the fear, however disguised, that in a large corporate bureaucracy one may be victimized by persons who may happen not to like Jews.

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This concern is based not on fear of political anti-Semitism but rather on fear of social exclusion—or, more accurately, fear of embarrassment. As Oscar and Mary F. Handlin show in their careful study of the acquisition of political and social rights by the Jews, it is the problem of social barriers during the past seventy-five years that is most relevant today.

The problem really began in the late 19th century. The country was prospering, and the need arose among the newly-rich Protestant families to acquire the trappings of aristocracy. Out of this need came the lavish age of “high society,” with its own protocol, customs, residential areas, clubs, resorts, entertainment, all designed to mark off and preserve the status and wealth of those who had “arrived.” Ancestry became terribly important, with a blue ribbon for the New Englander of old English stock. Since many in the new aristocracy could not meet the pedigree test, it became easier to try for cohesion through exclusion of the outsider. The most available outsider, after the Catholic, was the stereotyped Jew, whose religion set him apart, whose legendary association with money made him peculiarly repugnant to the very rich, and whose arrival by the millions marked him for easy identification in appearance, speech, manners and habits.

And so, the Handlins point out, the very rapidity with which Jews became members of the middle class made them logical victims of the upper class. “High society, in the 1890’s, was no more willing to take a Negro or an Irish Catholic to its bosom; but it was spared the necessity or opportunity for exclusion because few members of these groups attained the means of demanding admission.

These snobberies spread quickly into the everyday lives of too many people, who sought respectability in the places where they lived through such real estate devices as “informal understandings,” “gentlemen’s agreements,” and restrictive covenants. They spread into the joke-lore of the people, for a time, and in a more serious and certainly more stubborn way into employment practices. Discrimination against Jews in many kinds of jobs, in higher education, in some of the professions, in the prestige positions of industry, increased rapidly.

By now a good many of the most virulent symptoms of this disease have disappeared. They were, after all, never compatible with accepted American tradition. They became less necessary as Jews lost their qualities of strangeness and exoticism in the eyes of their neighbors. And the reaction to the ugly extremes of Nazism, the uncomfortable awareness that postwar American behavior was being judged by the rest of the world, and the judicial insistence on the plain meaning of Constitutional guarantees, combined to remove or at least weaken any legalized restrictions.

Beyond all this, there was also the reaction of the Jews themselves. After their initial disappointment and disillusion, they began to develop a peculiarly effective sense of universal responsibility. The lesson they had learned was, as the Handlins put it, “that their own security would be best preserved not by seeking to adjust to laws which were generally iniquitous, but rather by struggling for the general liberties of all Americans. . . . They had learned that there was a unity of interests and ideals among all minorities, and no longer sought security on their own behalf alone, but rather the affirmation of general rights . . . .”

The social barriers began to crumble, not only for Jews but for Negroes and Catholics and other identifiable minorities. A new stereotype of the Jew is arising in America, and we can begin to see its outlines. It reflects the middle-class, respectable, ambitious, moralistic ground-tone that now appears to characterize him.

The other side of the coin is that this ground-tone, and the social and economic pressures which have created it, have inspired American Jews to create a new image of themselves for themselves. Today the Jew in America is likely to ask a question which would never occur to most Jews in other lands or other ages: “What do I mean when I say that I am a Jew?” The question would have seemed silly to the denizen of a Polish ghetto a hundred years ago; cynical to the desperate Jew behind the barbed wire of a Nazi concentration camp; and unrealistic to the Jew in Israel today. But here it is real because the condition of the Jew in America bears such small semblance to the experience of Jews anywhere else.

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Of the three major essays in the Tercentenary volume of the Year Book, Joseph L. Blau’s study of “The Spiritual Life of American Jewry” is the most important, and precisely for this reason: “In America alone of all the nations in which Jews have resided Galuth has not meant strangerhood but a broadened conception of brotherhood. In America alone the emancipation of the Jews has not been necessary, since in America alone the Jews have been from the outset of national life free and equal citizens of the land in which they live.”

During the recent celebrations of the Tercentenary, an occasional protest Was raised that the observance lacked “Jewishness,” that it did not have enough of a specifically and traditionally Jewish flavor. The complaint may have been justified, but only in the sense that the observance itself was a mirror of American Jews. They are Jews, but they lack “Jewishness.”

As Dr. Blau points out, Jewish thinkers in America are for the most part American thinkers speaking to an American audience, and the Jewish background of their thought is thus absorbed into the mainstream of American culture. “In America the lines of communication to the larger American world have been open, and in speaking to this larger world these American Jews have, for the most part, been drawn away from the creation of the American variety of Jewish tradition.”

Few indeed have been the voices capable of giving to the mass of American Jews a definition, in their own hearts and minds, of the precise relationship between their “Americanism” and their “Jewishness.” The spiritual life which Dr. Blau reviews has not been very creative because the rest of life has been so exciting.

As to the synagogue, the basic symbol of “Jewishness,” it has developed into a community center where “the greatest problem of the run-of-the-mill rabbi is to establish some modus vivendi with his congregation.” It has, in sum, become converted into a servant of a middle-class community. “The typical Jewish congregation houses a wide variety of non-religious and semi-religious activities, as well as serving religious functions.” Inevitably there are rabbis who protest. “A community that accepts the philosophy that a gymnasium is as essential to Jewish life as a synagogue, and a Jewish basketball team as conducive to Jewish survival as a Talmud Torah, is on its way to Jewish extinction,” said one of them not long ago. But Dr. Blau points out:

The synagogue-center movement has met a need in the life of the Jewish people of America and has therefore kept on growing. More and more congregations have invested in new buildings and transformed themselves into Jewish centers. Whether the rabbis supported the move or not, they have been compelled to go along, even while they may have been wondering whether, in attempting to do and be all things, the American synagogue has not allowed its major functions to lapse into relative insignificance. Whatever the rabbis may like, the dominant laity likes the synagogue-center. Since the American synagogue is lay-controlled, it becomes what the laity makes of it.

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Meantime, many American Jews seek their definition of “Jewishness” outside the synagogue altogether. Many today are “good Jews” by virtue of the time and energy they spend on good works. They give or raise money for Jewish causes. They are active members of secular Jewish organizations. Or, seeking larger expressions of their drive to serve, they concern themselves not with Jewish but with general problems: muscular dystrophy, mental health, the Red Cross, civil liberties.

They have discovered a moral equivalent for the traditional ritual of Judaism. Their parents, many of them, had broken away from the ancient faith by the time they reached America, replacing it with a faith in socialism, or labor unionism, or Yiddishism, or any one of a dozen other causes. But when the ground-tone became middle-class, their children found in good works a new way of demonstrating that they were Jewish.

For a time, especially in the late 1940’s, Zionism provided an exciting sense of mission, of satisfaction, of unity. But because of the prevailing ground-tone the American Jew tended always to think of Israel as a place for other Jews, not for himself. He gives time, work, money, but he will not give himself. He will go to Israel as a tourist, not as a settler. Inevitably, after the élan of the fighting and the excitement of Israeli independence wore off, the unifying appeal of Zionism rapidly began to dwindle. Even in the space of half a dozen years it is possible to note the tremendous change.

And, as a result, there appears to be an intensification of the moralistic concept of good works, liberalism, concern for the rights and welfare of others, combined with an increased interest in the synagogue as a communal rather than a spiritual institution. Perhaps, in view of the basic ground-tone, this is what it means to be a Jew in America.

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