In celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the American Jewish Archives and its current director Gary P. Zola, this festschrift combines articles on Jewish life in America from the arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam to the nostalgia of the film Yentl. Nadell (history, American University), Sarna (history, Brandeis University) and Rabbi Sussman have selected essays that reflect the burgeoning field of American Jewish history. There are studies covering Yiddish in America, the Jews of the South, the growth of Hanukkah as a form of assimilation, and other examples of Jewish adjustment to America. There are also interesting micro-studies of individuals such as Henrietta Szold and Robert King Merton. A look at the integration of Jews into the largely Protestant campus of the University of Oregon in the twenties is a good example of a fascinating investigation into an area that is generally not part of American Jewish studies. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
New Essays in American Jewish History
Commemorating the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Jewish ArchivesKTAV Publishing House. Inc.
Copyright © 2010 The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-60280-148-6Contents
Preface Lance J. Sussman.....................................................................................................................................xiAfter Sixty Years: An Appreciation David Ellenson............................................................................................................1Jacob Rader Marcus and the Archive He Built Kevin Proffitt...................................................................................................5"A Land That Needs People for Its Increase:" How the Jews Won the Right to Remain in New Netherland Paul Finkelman...........................................19Architecture of Autonomy: The Blessing and Peace Synagogue of Suriname Aviva Ben-Ur and Rachel Frankel.......................................................51David Nassy's "Furlough" and the Slave Mattheus Natalie Zemon Davis..........................................................................................79The Democratization of American Judaism Jonathan D. Sarna....................................................................................................95Jonas Phillips Levy: A Jewish Naval Captain in the Early Republic William Pencak.............................................................................109Beyond the Parochial Image of Southern Jewry: Studies in National and International Leadership and Interactive Mechanisms Mark K. Bauman.....................137An Ambivalent Relationship: Isaac M. Wise and the Independent Order of B'nai B'rith Cornelia Wilhelm.........................................................155The Odyssey of a Liturgist: Isaac S. Moses as Architect of the Union Prayer Book Eric K. Friedland...........................................................175Modern Maccabees: Remaking Hanukkah in Nineteenth Century America Dianne Ashton..............................................................................197"The Spirit of Jewish History:" From Nachman Krochmal to Ahad Ha'am Alfred Gottschalk z"l....................................................................229Creating Cultural Space: Jews and Judaism at a Public University in the 1920s William Toll...................................................................247Robert King Merton, his Science, and the Promise of the Enlightenment Samuel Haber...........................................................................271When Harry Met Max Leonard Greenspoon........................................................................................................................289Rethinking the History of Nonobservance as an American Orthodox Jewish Lifestyle Jeffrey S. Gurock...........................................................305The United States in Abba Hillel Silver's World View Allon Gal...............................................................................................325Heschel and the Roots of Kavanah David Ellenson and Michael Marmur...........................................................................................345The Postwar Pursuit of American Jewish History and the Memory of the Holocaust Hasia Diner...................................................................367The Historical Consciousness of Mid-Century American Reform Judaism and the Historiography of Ellis Rivkin Robert M. Seltzer................................387Telling the American Story: Yiddish and the Narratives of Children of Immigrants Rakhmiel Peltz..............................................................417Henrietta Szold: The Making of an Icon Shuly Rubin Schwartz..................................................................................................455Yentl: From Yeshiva Boy to Syndrome Pamela S. Nadell.........................................................................................................467Notes.........................................................................................................................................................485Contributors..................................................................................................................................................591Index.........................................................................................................................................................599
Chapter One
After Sixty Years: An Appreciation
The rich collection of scholarly essays contained in this sixtieth anniversary commemorative volume displays the enduring vitality and foresight of Jacob Rader Marcus, and celebrates the tenth anniversary of Gary P. Zola as Executive Director of the AJA and Editor of The American Jewish Archives Journal. Talmid muvhak of Jacob Rader Marcus, Gary Zola has followed in the footsteps of his teacher, building upon and extending the structures Professor Marcus created. The American Jewish Archives has moved into renovated and expanded new quarters under his leadership, and Dr. Zola has made the AJA and its unparalleled resources available to the world of scholars and interested laypeople alike. The American Jewish Archives Journal itself has maintained its tradition of scholarly excellence under his editorship, and has addressed an ever-expanding range of topics and subjects related to the American Jewish experience. This volume is ample testimony to that assessment, and reflects the high esteem in which Gary Zola is held by his academic peers. Following in the tradition of the 1958 publication, Essays in American Jewish History-which marked the tenth anniversary of the founding of the AJA it is a pleasure and an honor to salute the achievements of the executive director on this occasion, and to wish the AJA and its journal many more years of continued success under his leadership.
As President of HUC-JIR, I cannot avoid noting that this sixtieth anniversary of The American Jewish Archives Journal parallels the sixtieth anniversary year of the State of Israel. Both were born in the crucible that was Jewish life alter the Shoah, and this moment of joy-as we celebrate sixty years of the publication of The American Jewish Archives Journal, and of the AJA itself, as well as the decade of leadership Dr. Zola has contributed-invites reflection upon the philosophy that guides and animates HUC-JIR as well as the role that the AJA plays at the College-Institute as this institution seeks to fulfill its mission of service to the Jewish and academic worlds.
Simply put, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion affirms the spiritual-religious assertion that the late Brandeis University Professor Simon Rawidowicz put forth in his famed work, Babylon and Jerusalem. In that book, Professor Rawidowicz employed the two ancient sites contained in the title of his book as emblematic of the reality and indivisibility that marks Jewish existence-whether in the Diaspora or the Land of Israel. He unquestionably considered Israel as a center of Jewish life, but, at the same time, affirmed the Diaspora as a center of Jewish life as well. By affirming as a core Jewish belief the integral connectedness that binds Jews and Jewish settlements everywhere, Professor Rawidowicz affirmed the moral obligations that bind Jews worldwide to one another and proclaimed a broad notion of Jewish peoplehood that included both the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. He refused to accept the notion of Zion as the spiritual center of Jewish life and instead employed the notion of an ellipsis-a figure with neither center nor beginning or end-to conceptualize the unending ties that bind Jews in Israel and the Diaspora together as one.
It is within this larger context that the story of the American Jewish Archives must be placed and its importance emphasized, for the philosophy that informed Jacob Rader Marcus in conceptualizing the American Jewish Archives surely parallels and echoes the stance that Rawidowicz articulated in his Babylon and Jerusalem. After the slaughter of more than 6,000,000 Jews during World War II and the wholesale destruction of Jewish settlements and cultural institutions by the Nazis during the 1940s, Dr. Marcus-despite his training as a European Jewish historian-came to the conclusion that the United States was now going to occupy a central role in the unfolding narrative of Jewish history. As his 1933 essay, "Zionism and the American Jew," indicates, Marcus had a keen appreciation of the Zionist Movement and the role that Israel could play as a land of refuge and as a spiritual center for Jews worldwide. However, Professor Marcus would not cede primacy to Israel and insisted that the United States was no less a center of Jewish life than Zion. Hence, his dream of building the American Jewish Archives testified to his belief that the American experience was now as central to Jewish life and history as Israel.
Informed by this philosophy and aware that no first-rate archives containing the records of the American Jewish community then existed, Dr. Marcus was led by this ideological stance to conclude immediately after World War II that the American Jewish story could not be properly told without such a repository-that the leadership of the American Jewish community would fail in fulfilling the role that it was now being called upon to play in the stream of Jewish history and life without the intellectual foundation such a scholarly resource would provide. Determined to address this need and rectify this lack, and with the active assistance of his HUC classmate and friend President Nelson Glueck, Marcus established the American Jewish Archives on the campus of HUC in Cincinnati in 1947. He believed that the AJA would allow for the gathering and housing of documents that would enable American Jewish history to be written, and, as the past six decades have demonstrated, the growth of the AJA has confirmed the wisdom of his belier: The American Jewish Archives has now unquestionably become the premiere research center in the world for materials related to the American Jewish experience.
At the same time that he established the AJA, Dr. Marcus also had the breadth of vision to realize that the narratives and descriptions that the scholars and students of American Jewish history would compose would require an appropriate journal for their dissemination. He therefore published the first volume of American Jewish Archives in 1948 as a vehicle for the display of that scholarship, and for sixty years this journal has embodied the highest standards of academic integrity and excellence in the field. In so doing, The American Jewish Archives Journal has garnered worldwide fame in academic and lay circles alike and has fulfilled the highest vision of its founder.
During these anniversary years of the State of Israel, the AJA, and its distinguished journal, we have great reason to rejoice in these two arenas of Jewish life and culture and to be proud that HUC-JIR has vibrant campuses and programs in both Jerusalem and North America where our students imbibe the philosophy of Jewish peoplehood which Professor Marcus advanced and which our College-Institute still champions. May the American Jewish Archives and its journal, under the guidance of Gary Zola, continue to devote itself to this vision and may it continue to contribute-as I am certain it will-to the ongoing strength and quality of Jewish life in the United States, Israel, and the world.
David Ellenson November 21, 2008-23 Cheshvan 5768
Chapter Two
Jacob Rader Marcus and the Archive He Built Kevin Proffitt
Introduction
Concurrent with the founding of the American Jewish Archives (AJA), Jacob Rader Marcus also founded The American Jewish Archives Journal (known until 1998 as American Jewish Archives). From its genesis, Marcus envisioned archives and scholarship as a joint project at the AJA, each supporting and enhancing the other. Marcus's inspiration in founding the AJA was his awareness of lacunae in the gathering and preservation of primary source materials on American Jewish life. His motivation was to create an institution, located in the Midwest, that was "devoted to the preservation of American Jewish historical records and their study," particularly for "those students and researchers living between the Rockies and the Cumberland plateau."
This essay will discuss Marcus's creation of the AJA and its joint ventures of scholarship and publication as intertwined, and will consider these subjects within a larger context of archival thought and practice. The creation of the AJA is a fascinating case study. It encompasses two emerging disciplines in the historical community in the mid-twentieth century: the creation of a scholarly discipline for the study of American Jewish history and the emergence of an American archival profession. Jacob Rader Marcus was a leader in laying a foundation for both scholarship and archives in American Jewish history. Through the combination of his scholarly training, his rabbinic background, his leadership vision, and his personal devotion to Judaism, Marcus led the way in making important contributions which established organized efforts in both movements.
Marcus was a historian, not an archivist. His focus in creating the AJA was from a historian's perspective of scholarship rather than from the archivist's view of professional theory and practice. Ordained as a rabbi at Hebrew Union College, trained in Europe for his Ph.D., and a professor of rabbinic students at Hebrew Union College, Marcus was immersed in Jewish culture and learning, and had no connection to the U.S. archival profession and its theories, which were beginning to emerge concurrent with the establishment of the National Archives in 1935. Yet, as we shall see, in founding the AJA, Marcus followed-and often anticipated-he accepted archival forms and conventions of his time.
Marcus's motivation in founding the American Jewish Archives was to enhance and advance what he called the "scientific" inquiry of American Jewry. Originally a historian of European and German Jewry, Marcus began in the late 1930s to work in American Jewish history. Marcus was one of a small number of historians (among them Columbia University historian Salo Baron and Harvard scholar Oscar Handlin) who worked to establish the study of American Jewish history as an academic discipline. In the early 1940s, he hosted the first known graduate level seminar in American Jewish history at Hebrew Union College. His teaching load in the subject increased steadily as American Jewish history became a required course of study for rabbinic students at HUC.
In this context, we are able to see, not coincidentally, that Marcus's interest in fostering the growth of American Jewish history as an academic discipline paralleled the expansion of his own teaching and writing in American Jewish history. He quickly learned, however, that few of what he called the "basic tools" necessary for research in American Jewry-archives, manuscripts, and primary sources, together with reference volumes and other secondary sources-were available to support his, or others' work. Commenting in 1951 on the lack of sources available to students of American Jewry, Marcus wrote, "it is no more difficult to write American Jewish history than it is to make bricks without clay.... The basic tools are still missing." With the founding of the AJA, it became Marcus's mission to provide these tools.
The Historian-Interpreter
In founding the AJA, Marcus patterned his new project broadly along the lines of what is now known as the historical manuscripts tradition. The historical manuscripts tradition dates to the late eighteenth century and the founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which itself was modeled after the Societies of Antiquaries in London. The historical manuscripts tradition sprang from mostly private (as opposed to public, or government) repositories and historical societies that focused "on the collection, preservation and dissemination (generally through editing and publication) of artificial collections of historical materials by historical societies and libraries."
The archival profession as it is known and practiced today was in its infancy in the 1940s. Modern archival thought and practice-which was based on the European principle of provenance, respect des fonds-would not gain a clear foothold in the U.S. until nearly 1960. Until that time, the historical manuscripts tradition was a predominant model. Rooted in the mindset and philosophy of the historian, its methodologies were based in principles of librarianship. It was overseen by historian-interpreters who had a desire to preserve documents and study history, but were not trained as archivists or librarians. The historical manuscripts tradition emphasized the collection of documents of "remote vintage" over those of recent origin. It cataloged and described documents more as discrete items (i.e., through the use of calendars or catalogs) rather than in bulk as was emphasized in public archival theory. The historical manuscript tradition also boasted a strong legacy of publishing-which was a key component of Marcus's vision and must have been an obvious point of attraction as he examined the existing landscape for models to emulate. Many if not most of this first generation of historical societies had programs in place to publish speeches, articles and documents, usually based upon holdings in their possession.
In following the historical manuscripts tradition, Marcus not only copied the prevailing archival model of the time; he also, no doubt, reflected his own training, interests, and background. In many ways, Marcus was the prototypical "historian-interpreter." Though he knew little about the details of librarianship or archival practice, Marcus had a vision of preserving American Jewish history and providing information to his patrons with a maximum amount of service and a minimum of bureaucracy or cost. In establishing the AJA, Marcus was attempting to create a venue where research and scholarship could be pursued on demand by a broad community of users (including himself).
Coming from the historical manuscripts tradition, Marcus was concerned with implementing his broad mission of scholarship and research as a means to further Jewish culture, not with the development of archival theory and practice. The leaders of the public archives movement were attempting to form a profession of records keepers. In terms of publications, Marcus was interested in pursuing and promoting humanities-based scholarship on the American Jewish experience. The public archives advocates pursued social sciences-based research that focused on the processes of their work in order to create an intellectual framework for what they did and who they were. What Marcus and the emerging archival profession shared, however, was the common goal of wanting to better document American life and culture while-perhaps most importantly-gaining legitimacy for their work through their publications and research.
Marcus often showed his iconoclastic side, however, and aligned with the public archival theorists against the traditionalists. For example, he eschewed the "antiquarianism" of most historical societies in their policy of collecting only original documents, and believed that the informational value of a reproduction was equal to the intrinsic value of an original document-not to mention more accessible. In his introductory essay about the AJA, Marcus foreshadowed in broad form the 1980s archival concept of documentation strategies in his vision to collect collaboratively records of American Jewry from coast to coast. He created networks of individuals and organizations to assist in collecting and in documenting specific regions and topics of interest. He became not just a collector of documents, but in many ways a creator of records as well. He documented social and cultural movements (such as the 1960s civil rights movement) not just after the fact, but as they occurred. He often invited individuals to write about their thoughts and their involvement in contemporary events to keep as a record for future researchers. He regularly polled different parts of the American Jewish community for their views and reactions to various happenings that he then stored at the AJA. In sum, he used oral history to great effect.
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