The present increased interest among social scientists in the relations of immigrant groups to a changing American society, and the current desire of Jews to have a record of their experience on the American scene, would seem to create a favorable climate for writing history about American Jews. Nevertheless, there has been little activity of any real quality in the field in recent years. To inquire into the reasons for this situation, and to encourage thinking and creativity, COMMENTARY last May held an informal conference of interested scholars and writers. Oscar Handlin, assistant professor of social sciences and a member of the departments of History and Social Relations at Harvard, here discusses the problems of writing American Jewish history as they emerged in the conference, and offers some comments of his own. 

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The low status of writing in American Jewish history has been an open secret for two decades or more, but only recently has dissatisfaction become general and vocal. The works that held the field, with few exceptions, were, it was already recognized, steeped in apologetics and in a false provincial pride; these were not such as to give the Jews an adequate sense of their own past or to give Americans generally an adequate sense of the role of an important ethnic group in the development of the United States.

This writer has been only one of many who have deplored the present situation; that my article,“Our Unknown American Jewish Ancestors” (COMMENTARY, February 1948), severely criticizing prevailing history writing, occasioned considerable interest and lively discussion, was due more to the increasing sense of the urgency of its theme than to any particular merit in its presentation.

Partly in response to such self-searchings and complaints, partly out of their own interest in encouraging a larger flow of sound and relevant history writing for its own pages, the editors of COMMENTARY called a conference to consider the problems of interpreting and recording the Jewish experience in America. In May 1948, twenty-eight scholars from all parts of the country assembled in New York and spent three lengthy sessions in an informal review of the whole subject. The survey was fruitful. Many participants met each other for the first time and found the opportunity, in free and candid discussion, to become acquainted with a diversity of attitudes and of current lines of research.

It was my good fortune to play the part of chairman at the conference, a part that enabled me to take in the various points of view, if not impartially, at least comprehensively. Having had several months to think over what was said, and having recently reviewed the entire record of the proceedings, it may be worthwhile to set down some impressions of one practising historian of the conference and of the current status of the questions considered.

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The participants in the conference fell into four groups: historians who had devoted themselves specifically to the study of the Jews in America; historians concerned with the general history of the United States; sociologists interested in the problems of race and ethnic groupings; and a number of thinkers troubled by the present situation of American Jewry and anxious to emphasize the contemporary relevance of the historical data.¹ The interplay of observations and ideas from these dissimilar sources made for stimulating and provocative discussion.

Despite the differences in approach, there was essential agreement upon the central point, that we live in abysmal ignorance of the real past of American Jewry. What passes now for history is an accumulation of details of little consequence, only slightly related either to the real problems of the present or to the real people of the past.

There was also substantial agreement as to the causes of this deplorable condition. American Jews, like other American immigrants, were until recently deficient in history-mindedness. All newcomers, eager to establish a sense of belonging, have been more anxious to forget than to remember the past out of which they have risen and which they imagine has separated them from the whole community.

Intertwined with this reticence about not quite-proper antecedents, there was, in the case of the Jews, a suspicion that, even if there were no skeletons there, it was safer not to expose the contents of the family closet to the gaze of strangers. After all, it was better not to supply potential anti-Semites with too much information (happy days when it seemed anti-Semites needed substance to their charges!). Consequently, American Jewish history was left in the inadequate hands of the polite amateur who justified and pointed with pride for the benefit of a handful of interested devotees.

Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that this field of study failed to profit by the development of scientific history in the last half-century. Academic historians, lacking the language equipment to engage directly in such research, depended for their impressions upon the writings of the few amateur specialists; and those writings were not such as to win much space in general works or to make the subject seem attractive as a field of future investigation. The number of Jews among professional historians has not been large. And young men who have entered the field in recent years have often been unwilling to strengthen an identification that might retard professional advancement. In that respect, the fate of the historiography of the Jews has been like that of all other American ethnic groups—disorderly, unrelated to any larger developments, not even certain what are the proper questions to ask, much less able to answer them.

These old attitudes need no longer hold us back. Historians, in general, even the most academic, are now fully aware of the importance of the role played by immigrant groups in the American past. If the writers of history are backward in understanding and describing that role, it is less through ill-will than lack of knowledge. Anxious to know, they need help from those who can supply the knowledge.

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The conference early turned its attention to some of the matters about which American historians have pleaded ignorance. Two themes in particular ran through the deliberations—the nature of the Jewish group and of the internal developments within it, and the relations of the Jewish group to the general currents of American life about it. Around these themes were elaborated a wide range of meaningful questions.

To begin with, the problem of defining the American Jews, at first sight simple, turned out to involve the most profound complexities. It was not at all clear to what extent it was proper to deal with American Jews as a group. The solidarity of Jews, it appeared, was often so tenuous, the divisions among them so marked, that in many important respects it seemed more significant to deal with sub-groups within the group than with the group as a whole.

The preponderance of opinion at the conference was disposed to accept the traditional tripartite division into Sephardim, Germans, and East Europeans. But even those who spoke most vigorously for this view did not claim that such designations were based upon nationality or nativity; a plethora of examples was available to prove how numerous were the Germans and Poles among the Sephardim, the Russians and Hungarians among the Germans. Yet once we penetrated beyond the conventional terms, we found it difficult to describe the Sephardim, Germans, and Russians with any degree of precision, either as to national origin or religious and cultural pattern, much less to explain the emergence of those differentiations.

We could grant that in the 1880’s there were different kinds of Jews to whom those names were applied. But if nativity did not explain group membership—if some “Spanish” Jews were born in Germany and some “Germans” in Poland—what did account for these neat categories? Surely these groupings were not of the same nature as earlier ones in Europe. The kind of legal distinctions that kept apart Portuguese and Alsatian Jews in 8th-century France, or Sephardim and Germans in Hamburg, could not exist in the United States.

It is far more likely that the lines that divided American Jewry were not brought from across the Atlantic but rather reflected the circumstances of settlement in the New World. Probably these differences grew out of some form of social stratification. The conference indulged in interesting speculations on the relevance, in fixing the strata among Jews, of economic achievement, of social mobility, of cultural differences, of period of arrival. But these remained at best inspired guesses; no ordered body of data was available to test them.

In this unavailable information lies a clue to the effects of stratification within the Jewish group and perhaps within other similar ethnic groups. Enough instances were cited from the history of Jewish social clubs, of charitable associations, and of other communal organizations, to show that the development of such activities was markedly influenced by the existence of divisions within the community. Why congregations moved from one part of the city to another, why philanthropy was so long in being centralized, why lodges proliferated as they did, these are all questions, the answers to which are related to the basic reality that the Jews have not formed a single group, but were always significantly segmented.

Insight into the nature of intra-group stratification would also throw light on such other significant questions as the rate and means of assimilation or adjustment to the society outside the group, the transmission and transformation of traditional values, and the incidence of culture changes. Did the Russian Jew of 1900, seeking an American pattern to which to conform, find his model in the Yankee, or in the German Jew? Did the needle worker seek to emulate Rockefeller or Jacob Schiff or Joseph Schaffner? Unfortunately we know practically nothing as to the source of innovations in American Jewish life, nothing as to where standards of behavior and thought originate.

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To complicate the problem still further, a number of speakers pointed to the obvious but often neglected fact that Jewish affiliations were rarely direct and simple. Thus, in 870, at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, many Jews participated actively in the celebrations in America in honor of the Kaiser’s victory. These people acted then as Germans, just as on Yom Kippur they acted as Jews, and on the Fourth of July as Americans in a more general sense. (At the conference, the only examples cited were those of Germans. In retrospect, however, it seems to me, instances could as well have been drawn from other nationalities. Thus many radical Jews after 1905 retained a deep interest in Russian and Polish affairs. Others, during the First World War, were seriously concerned with the emergence of the new national states of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.) In the social activities that organized their lives, Jews could make a variety of choices; significant gradations in affiliation were possible.

Precisely because many Jews did not confine all their activities to within the Jewish group, we will not learn much about the implications of their affiliations from Jewish sources alone. To understand why some Jews developed a complete associational life of their own, it would not be enough to examine the Jewish associations they joined. We would also have to know the extent to which Jews also participated in other communal activities, in Turnereine, in Sokol Clubs, and in Masonic societies. And we would have to know the circumstances under which Jews refrained from affiliating with any kind of Jewish organization at all.

Consideration of each problem inevitably led us head on into the technical aspects of coping with it. Yet even purely technical questions immediately became complex.

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How many Jews were there at any given period in the United States? The conference spent a good deal of time on the simple problem of how to count. For we discovered we were in disagreement as to the number of Jews at different times. Estimates of the population in 880, for instance, ranged from 250, 000 to one million. Nor was it immediately apparent how one would go about ascertaining a more precise figure. How would one identify a Jew? No government statistics ever took account of this category. And enough cases were adduced of non-Jewish Goldbergs, Rosenbergs, and Israels to show that in the 19th century at least, name alone was no criterion. (An interesting tangential historical problem is what happened to those non-Jewish bearers of names now taken as distinctively Jewish.)

Some members of the conference were inclined to identify as Jews only those with demonstrable organizational affiliations. But this solution would be no solution at all, for it would leave unanswered the questions of why some Jews affiliated with Jewish organizations and others did not, of why some identified themselves with the group and others did not. Such a reckoning would also make it impossible to make any judgment as to the rate of conversion and the ability of the group to maintain itself.

Without minimizing the difficulty of the task, one ventures to suggest that it is possible, given time and thought, to identify the Jews who remained outside the organizational fold, and to discover the history of their adjustment not only to their co-religionists but to the larger community. I may add that a sizeable percentage of the conferees supported this view.

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The need for keeping in mind the unaffiliated Jews was stressed again when the conference focused on a second series of questions involving the relationship of Jews to the life of the whole society. Affiliated or not, members of organizations or not, Jews, by their very presence in the United States, influenced the development of American culture; an adequate Jewish history would certainly have to cope with the problem of describing the interaction of members of the group and American society.

We have had lists in plenty of notable Jewish contributors to American culture. But such data have never been examined with a view to discovering the extent to which the impact of an individual upon the culture is affected by his ethnic affiliations. Was the role of the great inventor, artist, merchant, greatly altered by the fact of his Jewishness? It would be interesting to know whether significant differences existed among the Jewish Gimbel, the Irish Stewart, the Yankee Wanamaker, or between Hearst and Pulitzer, or among Steinmetz and Edison and Pupin. And were those differences, if they existed, aspects of specifically Jewish qualities or of ethnic qualities in general?

Yet this is only the simplest level on which the question may be asked. For such individuals were exceptional and they exercised their influence in the open light of public attention. The great mass of American Jews occupied humbler stations; they were laborers, artisans, petty shopkeepers. Individually they were undistinguished; was there anything that distinguished them in the mass as they reacted to American life?

The conference devoted much time to evaluating the role of the Jews in the American labor movement. To what extent, it was asked, did such associations as the garment unions acquire their distinctive characteristics from the fact that their membership was once largely Jewish? Was the unique development of collective bargaining in the clothing industries the outcome of some unity of feeling on the part of Jewish employers and employes; or was it simply a product of the form of organization of the trade? Persuasive arguments were made on both sides of these questions. Proof of any position was more difficult; for information in this area is fragmentary. There are a number of biographies and a few official histories of individual unions, but little more. There have been few efforts to deal with the mass membership of these organizations; it is hard even now to speak with certainty of the motivation of those who joined. (It certainly would be desirable, toward that end, to complete the pioneer work in this subject, Yivo’s history of the Jewish labor movement, and to make it available in English translation or abridgment.)

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The problem of the influence of the Jewish Masses upon American life exists in every field in which Jews were active. In dealing with Jewish culture, the Jewish press, theater, or literature, there is always the temptation to define as Jewish only those works using Yiddish or Hebrew as vehicles of expression. But American Jews were also intimately involved in a culture not exclusively their own. They read and wrote for English language newspapers, they acted in and were audiences at English plays. Jews, in these activities, were not identified as Jews. Yet it would be surprising if their Jewishness did not make a difference, did not, for example, decisively influence such “neutral” media as the Broadway stage or significant sectors of New York journalism. As in the case of the unions, it is important to estimate the effects upon the development of American institutions and cultural forms of the participation of Jews in them.

If we knew the answers to such questions, we might better be able to describe the process of acculturation, the means through which all newcomers got accustomed to America and American ways. Some participants at the conference were willing to assert that the Jews advanced more rapidly in Americanization than did other immigrant groups; other speakers refused to make such judgments on the basis of the available evidence. But, in any case, the more important consideration is how the process operated, what happened to the human beings involved.

There was a time when this process was regarded in quite simple terms, like a change in clothes; immigrants took off Old World ways, put on those of the New World. Conventionally, Americanization was then described in terms of the disappearance of separate immigrant institutions and the integration of the immigrants into more and more general ones.

We know enough now about all immigrants to be aware that acculturation was far more complex. Separate newspapers, places of worship, clubs, and associations by no means always retarded Americanization; sometimes they seem actually to have facilitated it by easing the adjustment of individuals to the whole society. But it is impossible to speak precisely of the problem until there have been investigations of the interaction between the milieu and the institutions existing within it. It was asserted, for instance, that the trend in many congregations away from Orthodoxy to Conservatism was related to the social mobility and to the Americanization of their members. That hypothesis would certainly be worth testing and its implications certainly worth analyzing.

In this respect, it was necessary to keep in mind all the significant variables which rendered dangerous any generalizations from particular isolated cases. It was pointed out that differences in size altered the experience of various communities. New York was a problem unique unto itself. But it was also risky to speak of what happened in large cities like Philadelphia and Boston as if that were relevant to the small ones like New Haven or Lancaster. And it was also necessary to take account of the circumstances of isolated Jews in rural environments and in very small towns.

Nor, in these discussions, was it possible to avoid noticing that each period of settlement seemed to have characteristics of its own. Many at the conference spoke of 880 as the watershed, the decisive line of division, not only because of the change in place of origin of the immigrants, but also because the quantitative difference in numbers altered the nature of the Jewish situation. (One might also add because America after 1880 was different from America earlier.) It is only with a firm understanding of all these considerations that we will be able to arrive at sensible conclusions as to the role of acculturation in the settlement of Jews in America. Merely to enumerate them is to indict the kind of history we have had up to now.

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The conference was, in the first instance, Focused upon the past. But inevitably it uncovered the relationship of the past to the present. For the Jews of America today must take account of their history in estimating their own position. Implicit in the actions of every individual and of every institution is a judgment as to whether the American experience is only a passing phase in the long history of the persisting group, or whether the group itself changes under the impact of new circumstances. At the conference, arguments were heard on both sides of the question. But there was no disputing the fact that the judgment will be better made if it rests on an accurate, thoughtful view of the past.

A clear historical analysis would illuminate the general nature of the forces that hold the group together. In a view of the recent past, so dominated by the problems of anti-Semitism, it is easy to suppose that Jews continue to affiliate with the group because they are pushed into it; so, Sartre says, the Jew is a creature of the anti-Semite. Yet it would also be worth examining the alternative proposition, that there is a pull, some attractiveness, some basic values in the common inheritance that draw members into the group. Historical analysis of the development of culture and of institutions might throw light on the relative strength of the push and of the pull.

Such historical perspective has a critical function in our society where many Jews now call themselves Jews not for the purposes of traditional religious observance, but for some other reason. People whose ties to the group are ethnic, the recollection of a common ancestry, find it particularly important to know their own history, to seek in the past the sources of their present consciousness as Jews. They may be concerned only with the pressures of anti-Semitism. They may be troubled only by the answers they must give children who demand an explanation of the vague line that divides them from their neighbors. But unless they have a clear conception of the past of the group, they will fall victims to disastrous myths and remain torn by cultural and personal conflicts.

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The wide areas of agreement as to what were the fundamental problems were gratifying in view of the diversity of the participants in the conference. The sociologists, it is true, did not always see eye to eye with the historians. The former were inclined to weigh the importance of various subjects in terms of contemporary relevance and argued the necessity of using historical data to answer questions of present-day importance. The historians, on the other hand, were more disposed to start from the available material, organizing it in terms of the questions of the past, in the faith that an accurate whole picture of the past would throw light on the present. This disagreement involves important problems in the theory of method. But in practice it was generally reduced to a matter of emphasis; in actual discussion, we discovered historians and sociologists were in adequate agreement—even if for different reasons.

More significant and, in my opinion, quite dangerous, was the attitude that cropped up here and there that historical writing ought to be shaped by certain preconceived judgments as to its conclusions. The assumption was occasionally expressed that only those who agreed on conclusions could see eye to eye on the substance of history. In arguments as to the uniqueness of the Jews in world history and in American history, this view resulted in a kind of particularism exceedingly misleading in a society that comprehends the experiences of many ethnic groups. One speaker, for instance, pointed to the relations of the Jews with Israel as absolutely without parallel. Yet familiarity with other immigrant peoples similarly situated in the United States would have revealed striking resemblances. The Irish, the Bohemians, and the Germans had each a national home for which to fight, which fired imaginations, taxed purses, and kept alive a kind of nostalgic revolt against America.

The more profitable course will be to emphasize the bodies of information upon which we can agree, leaving in abeyance conclusions and questions of ultimate judgment. For whenever the conference dug down to the bedrock of concrete historical data, its discussions were fruitful and enlightening. And everyone was agreed on one basic point: the utility of a systematic survey of the needs and opportunities for research in American Jewish history.

Several speakers pointed to the substantial achievements that resulted from such surveys in other fields. A project that would map out the unexplored areas in our past, it was agreed, would be an invaluable guide in the work of scholars for the next decade. It would capitalize on the current interest in the universities in the history of ethnic groups and open up attractive lines of investigation to graduate students and young writers. It might thus lay the foundation for a series of books that would uncover the history of America’s Jews. Such an achievement would have value to the Jews themselves as a revelation of their own antecedents. It would also have a larger value; it could supply a case study of the development of group life to an American society which now increasingly becomes aware that men do not move as isolated individuals in the community, but act in relationship to the whole through a life in one or several groups.

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The value of such a guide would, of course, depend upon the availability of scholars to use it; and the attraction of talent into the field of American Jewish history is, to this day, much more difficult. The most likely course is one which would see the specialists in Jewish history working in close enough contact with other American historians to be aware of the main developments in the larger field. The logical agency for establishing such a rapport is the American Jewish Historical Society. But that organization will not fill the role unless it undergoes a radical reform. At present it is still bogged down in its own parochial little interests, cut off from the main streams of American intellectual life—for that matter, from the main streams of Jewish intellectual life.

There were hopeful signs of such a change last year when the society acquired the financial sponsorship of the National Jewish Welfare Board. There was also a change in the administration, and the Publications, which had been appearing at irregular intervals over the past half-century, turned into a quarterly journal.

But the changes have not gone far enough. Too much effort the first year went into pamphlets popularizing the old clichés; and the caliber of contributions to the quarterly was not high. Most disappointing was the revelation at the annual meeting in February, 1949, that the old archaic conceptions were still strong. A session then on “The Function of American Jewish History in Contemporary American Life” heard the traditional attack on American historians for not giving enough praise to the Jews. It heard a consideration of “communal and social aspects” which viewed the adjustment of Jews to the American scene entirely in terms of the “dismemberment” of the European kind of community, without any sense of what was constructive in the life of Jews in the United States. And it was told by a distinguished scholar, who still thinks of apologetics and local pride as worthy motivations for historical writing, that the most pressing problems of the Society were those of acquiring a building and collecting archives. Still, these are men of good will who command considerable talent. If they could shed the regressive traits that now narrow their view of the past, they would be in a position to make signal contributions to the understanding by the general American society of the Jews and by the Jews of themselves.

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¹ Hannah Arendt, New York City; Daniel Bell, University of Chicago; Carl Bridenbaugh, Institute of Early American History and Culture; Elliot E. Cohen, Commentary; Henry David, Queens College; Moshe Davis, Jewish Theological Seminary; Morris Fine, Jewish Library of Information, American Jewish Committee; Lee M. Friedman, American Jewish Historical Society; Nathan Glazer, Commentary; Nathan Goldberg, American Jewish Congress; Louis Gottschalk, University of Chicago; Solomon Grayzel, Jewish Publication Society; Hyman B. Grinstein, Yeshiva College; Oscar Handlin, Harvard University; Sidney Hook, New York University; Guido Kisch, Historia Judaica; Bertram Korn, Hebrew Union College; Harry L. Lurie, Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds; Rollin G. Osterweis, Yale University; Charles A. Reznikoff, New York City; Edward N. Saveth, American Jewish Committee; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Harvard University; Leo Srole, Columbia University; Joshua Trachtenberg, Temple Covenant of Peace; Max Weinreich, Yiddish Scientific Institute; Louis Wirth, University of Chicago; Harvey Wish, Western Reserve University; Donald Young, Social Science Research Council.