Jews

REASONS FOR AND LOCATIONS OF THE ORIGINAL DIASPORA

BASIC RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND PRACTICES

JEWISHNESS AND ITS OTHERS

ENGAGEMENT IN WORLD CIVILIZATION

THREATS AND SOLUTIONS TO EXISTENCE IN MODERNITY

PRESENT SITUATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

According to the Torah, the history of the Jewish people begins with a call to the patriarch Abraham to abandon his ancestors’ idol worship and to “Get thee out from thy country … unto the land that I will show thee” (Gen. 22:1). Jewish history and identity, as recounted within the people’s own tradition, thus begin with a command, a renunciation, and a departure. The Torah also recounts the earliest Jewish generations’ experience of exile in Egypt, followed by the miraculous deliverance, return, and reconquest of that divinely promised land. However, current archaeological consensus is unable to agree on confirmation of key moments in the biblical account.

The name Jew and its various cognates (e.g., French Juif, German Jude, Arabic yahud ) all stem from the name Judah, the ancient kingdom that shared the name of one of the twelve sons of the biblical patriarch Jacob. Other names for the group are Hebrew (generally referring to the ancient period, but also the name of the main ethnic language) and Israel (a name of Jacob in the Bible and also the name of the second ancient Jewish kingdom).

REASONS FOR AND LOCATIONS OF THE ORIGINAL DIASPORA

Jews are known simultaneously for their lasting devotion to their homeland (Israel, Zion, Palestine, or simply “the Land”) between the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, and for their long endurance in conditions of diaspora or exile. The main historical exiles of ancient Jewry followed the destruction in 586 BCE, by the Babylonians, of the ritual center in Jerusalem known today as the First Temple, and then the destruction in 70 CE, by the Romans, of the Second Temple. However, Jewish diaspora —the existence of stable and persistent Jewish communities outside the historical homeland—long predates the loss of the ritual center and of Jewish sovereignty. The ancient Jewish community of Alexandria, with its rich Hellenic culture and regular remission of tribute to Jerusalem, is only the most dramatic example of such a pre-exilic diaspora.

Babylonia quickly became a key and powerful center of ancient Jewish life, throughout the entire Second Temple period and beyond. In the wake of the Roman exile, groups of religious leaders collectively known to current scholarship as “the Rabbis” devoted generations to the elaboration and transmission of the Oral Torah, eventually redacted into the texts known as the Mishnah, and in the commentaries on the Mishnah known respectively as the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem or “Palestinian” Talmud. Rabbinic Judaism was a minority formation in its earliest centuries (outnumbered by what is broadly known as Hellenic Judaism and by other rival formations, eventually including its only surviving rival, known as Karaite Judaism). Despite continuing sentimental attachment to the ancient homeland, the Babylonian Talmud retained far more central authority than its Jerusalem rival. The Rabbinic models of scriptural interpretation, legal adaptation, and substitution of prayer for Temple ritual came to serve as the fundamental template for Jewish communal life throughout various diasporas until the modern period.

BASIC RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND PRACTICES

The notion of “chosenness” is understood in Jewish tradition in terms of obligation and reward. The Book of Deuteronomy recounts the Hebrew nation’s reaffirmation of God’s original covenant with Abraham; the people will keep God’s “statutes” and “commandments” and “ordinances,” and God will in turn keep them as “His own treasure” (am segula ) (Deut. 26:16–18). Various examples of the literary genre of commentary known as midrash recount God’s prior offer of the Torah to other nations, each of which is unable to accept one of its major premises and thus refuses to enter into the divine covenant.

Though this deity is sometimes referred to as “the God of our ancestors” or “the God of Israel,” the biblical narrative—and especially the Prophetic writings—reflect the conviction that, as the creator of all being and of all humanity, this divinity’s sphere of power and interest is not limited to one nation or territory. Moreover, in sharp contrast to some other national epics, the origin of the people in human history is separated from the original creation of the earth and its creatures. Accordingly, Jewish tradition and rhetoric view the non-Jewish “other” through a range of metaphorical frameworks: as “cousins,” descended through a mythic genealogy from the common human ancestors Adam and Eve; as instruments of a divine plan centrally dependent on the covenant and on the Jews’ always inadequate performance thereof; and occasionally as creatures equally precious in the sight of God: “Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto Me, saith the Lord?” (Amos 9:7).

At the ideological plane, diaspora Jewish life has been played out in this continuing and productive tension between ethnocentrism and universalism. The synagogue, wherever it is, becomes a form of mikdash me’at, a “miniature” substitute for the lost Temple in Jerusalem. The study of the forms of Temple worship and recitation of the order of sacrifices both recall ancient sovereignty and give form to dreams of messianic restoration. The study of sacred texts transcends mere recitation through a chain of commentaries that both preserve understandings and distort them to make the authorities fit new circumstances. The Rabbinic academies (yeshivot ) of ancient Babylonia come to serve as models for the new academies in eastern Europe devoted to the defense and reinvention of Talmud study in response to modern forms of knowledge and inquiry.

Practice—the meticulous and highly rationalized observance of positive commandments and prohibitions—is central to the conduct of a traditionally Jewish life. Laws of separation and purity (such as dietary limitations, bans on the mixing of certain species in agriculture, and menstrual taboos) both help to order the social world and sustain the larger lifeworld separation distinguishing Jews from non-Jews. During the period of Jewish sovereignty, many of these laws served to underscore the special sacredness of the land itself. In diaspora, their function in preventing the dissolution of the Jews as a kin and ideological group become more salient.

Jewish law and custom are all highly androcentric, though not univocally so. They are heteronormative, though they do not reflect the gender structures of the post-Enlightenment European bourgeoisie, from the perspective of which the Rabbinic ideal of the quiet, studious, “tent-dwelling” Jacob may even seem effeminate (see Boyarin 2004). Men under traditional Jewish law exclusively enjoy various rights and powers, such as serving as witnesses, as members of prayer quorums, and as the initiators of divorce. Apologetic accounts stress the key role of women in the family, but at various points women in Jewish communities have also held important economic roles, and the Talmud also makes clear the rights of women as property holders and contracting parties in ancient Babylonia.

Since the Prophetic response to the nation’s demoralization in the wake of the first and second exiles, the messianic promise of ultimate redemption and restoration—sometimes accompanied by visions of universal peace and well-being—has been a core tenet of Jewish belief, ritual, and culture. Messianism has also been a central motivating theme of the powerful and continuing tradition of Jewish mysticism, which has sometimes coexisted with and sometimes contended with Rabbinic textualism. Some leading scholars have argued that Jewish messianism is distinctly characterized by the expectation of the advent of the messiah as a historical and public event, over and against ideologies of individual redemption.

JEWISHNESS AND ITS OTHERS

Since earliest times, and including periods of state sovereignty, the Jewish collective has often found itself either a client of or in conflict with larger powers. Much Prophetic discourse turns on the geopolitical dilemma of choosing between loyalty to the rival empires of Assyria and Egypt. The biblical narrative of enslavement and deliverance turns on an image of the Egyptians as heartless and unworthy emperors. The destruction of the Second Temple resulted in large part from Jewish resistance to incorporation within the Roman provincial administrative system. Christianity was an outgrowth of certain messianic trends among Jews, and there has been growing scholarly acknowledgment in recent years not only of the significance of Jesus’ Jewishness, but the continued Jewishness of many of the first “Christians,” including Paul. Yet Christianity became radically distinguished from, and powerfully opposed to, Judaism and Jewishness once it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Similarly, Islam arose in Arabia in a social milieu where Jews were a prominent part of the mix, yet the rejection of Muhammad’s (c. 570–632) message by the local Jewish community gave rise to strains in Islam that are at best ambivalent toward Jews and at worst overtly hostile.

ENGAGEMENT IN WORLD CIVILIZATION

Jewish communities eventually spread (or were established by conversion) throughout the circum-Mediterranean region, Central Asia, and eastern and western Europe. With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa and much of East Asia (there were smaller Jewish communities for centuries in India and China), Jews were thus found throughout the Old World. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, Jews played prominent roles in the world system of trade and communication that stretched from the Atlantic coast of Europe through the Mediterranean and into Asia, and for centuries, Jewish communities were concentrated in Islamic lands, ranging from Iberia through North Africa and the Middle East. Yet that world system was unstable, and Crusader anti-Muslim zeal sometimes spilled over into murderous anti-Jewish violence.

During the High Middle Ages, in a complex process tied to the formation of nascent nation-states, long-established Jewish communities were forced out of various parts of western Europe; many of their number migrated to regions in eastern Europe that were then being colonized by Christian nobility, peasants, and clergy. More than a century of forced conversions and persecutions culminated in the expulsion of Jews from Iberia at the end of the fifteenth century. While this ended centuries of fruitful and conflicted multireligious contact that had produced Jewish luminaries such as Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092–1167), and Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c. 1021–1058), it also gave rise to new, flourishing, and influential communities across the Ottoman Empire, known as Sephardim and speaking the Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino. However, a dramatic rise in the Jewish population of eastern Europe during the nineteenth century radically shifted the “center of gravity” of Jewish communities in the modern period.

THREATS AND SOLUTIONS TO EXISTENCE IN MODERNITY

Modern European nationalism, the rise of democratic citizenship, and Enlightenment ideologies of individual autonomy and of freedom of conscience all presented both dangers and opportunities for Jews and Jewishness. Distinctive legal status—both limitations and protections—for Jews began to crumble. In western Europe, the National Assembly during the French Revolution of 1789 heralded the abolition of autonomous Jewish communities with the famous phrase, “To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to Jews as individuals, everything.” In modernizing Germany, Jews were prominent in literature, science, and the arts, though they continued to suffer social and institutional discrimination. In the Russian Empire, “the prisonhouse of nations,” Jewish communities faced a bewildering and inconsistent sequence and array of liberalizing gestures, increasing restrictions on settlement and occupations, and forced assimilation in the guise of modernization. Individual Jews and Jewish movements (notably the Jewish Workers’ Bund in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania) were prominent in socialist and revolutionary efforts to overthrow the czarist regime. Jews were full participants in colonial, democratic, and capitalist ventures in the New World, and the United States became a center of Jewish population and creativity.

Perhaps fueled by the dramatic encounter between traditional Jewish communities and the new bourgeois sphere, thinkers of Jewish origin such as Karl Marx (1818–1883), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) were pioneers in the reflexive articulation of modernity’s self-understanding, while Jewish writers, scientists, and musicians likewise made disproportionate contributions to modern culture. The haskalah or “Jewish enlightenment” stimulated a new, secular Hebrew literature, as well as a modern Yiddish literature, much of which has stood the test of generations as a commentary both on the limitations of tradition and on the frequently empty pretensions of the new.

Yet Jewishness and the Jews were frequently seen as a “problem” for Western modernity, whether because their potential loyalty and capacity for absorption as fellow citizens of secular nation-states was in question, or because the organizing logic of those nation-states rested in unacknowledged ways on assumptions of their constituents’ shared Christian heritage. One reaction was the crystallization of Zionism as the Jews’ own modern nationalist movement, which eventually took material form in the effort to convince Jews to migrate to Palestine and to create the infrastructure for Jewish state sovereignty there to be renewed after nearly two millennia. Zionism bears in turn a complex relation to traditional Jewishness, rejecting as neurotic substitutions much of the diasporic forms of Jewish life, while mobilizing the memory and longing for the lost homeland that have nourished Jewish sensibilities in exile.

Political engagement by Jews in liberal and socialist struggles throughout the West helped fuel the modern anti-Semitic movement. Anti-Semitism was itself a reactionary response to the rapid pace of social and economic change, paradoxically bolstered by modern theories of biologically determined and hence immutable racial characteristics. During the 1930s, a time when Western economy and society were simultaneously resisting workers’ revolution and reeling from catastrophic disruption to the capitalist economy, Jews were irrationally but opportunistically tarred as the bête noire of the imagined “Aryan” race. The consequent call to eliminate the Jews, originally a demand for expulsion, was transformed in the course of World War II (1939–1945) into an active program of genocide. There were an estimated 18,000,000 Jews at the beginning of that war; by its end, a third of them had been slaughtered.

PRESENT SITUATION

The map of the Jewish world has been dramatically reshaped in past centuries, as a result of genocide, assimilation, migration, nation-building, and renewal. The Jews of the world are far less widely dispersed than they once were, and much has been lost. The State of Israel explicitly defines itself as a Jewish state, yet along with a significant Arab minority, its population includes numbers of immigrants whose “Jewish” status according to religious law has been hotly debated. Moreover, Israel and its Jewish population continue to face vital issues of cultural and political integration into the Middle East.

Along with Israel, the United States holds by far the world’s largest Jewish population, and American Jews are generally considered well integrated. Markers of Jewish identity and culture are readily present and celebrated in media and popular culture. Those concerned with Jewish continuity worry about high rates of intermarriage among moderately affiliated Jews. There is an extraordinary range of options for expression of religious Judaism, for the explicit linkage of Jewishness to other nonmajoritarian identities, and for the preservation and reinvention of secular Jewish culture. Meanwhile, traditionalist religious communities have enjoyed a resurgence, experiencing high birthrates and close to universal retention of young people within their communities.

Outside of Israel and the United States, France retains the largest Jewish population, largely comprising North African immigrants and their descendants. French Jewry today stands as a test case for the continued viability of Jewish and indeed of minority communities more generally in contemporary western Europe, and some see its future as clouded by the appearance of a “new anti-Semitism” there. Significant Jewish populations also are found in the countries of the former Soviet Union, in Canada, in the United Kingdom, and in Argentina.

SEE ALSO Anti-Semitism; Assimilation; Christianity; Enlightenment; Ethnocentrism; Gender; Genocide; Heteronormativity; Holocaust, The; Islam, Shia and Sunni; Jewish Diaspora; Judaism; Migration; Modernism; Modernization; Nation of Islam; Nationalism and Nationality; Religion; Reparations; Supreme Being; Zionism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biale, David, ed. 2002. Cultures of the Jews: A New History. New York: Schocken.

Boyarin, Daniel. 2004. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gerber, Jane. 1992. The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience. New York: Free Press.

Gilman, Sander. 1986. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gruen, Erich. 2002. Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Jehuda Reinharz, eds. 1995. The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moore, Deborah Dash, and S. Ilan Troen, eds. 2001. Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Scholem, Gershom. 1971. The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken.

Urbach, Efraim. 1979. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs. 2nd ed. Trans. Israel Abrahams. Jerusalem: Magnes.

Weinreich, Max. 1980. History of the Yiddish Language. Trans. Shlomo Noble, with Joshua Fishman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jonathan Boyarin

JEWS

JEWS. In September 1654, twenty-three Sephardic Jews sailed into New Amsterdam's harbor aboard the St. Catherine. Fleeing the collapse of Dutch colonial rule in Brazil, the Jews sought refuge in New Amsterdam. They received a cold welcome from New Amsterdam's governor, Peter Stuyvesant, a Calvinist who viewed Jews as "blasphemers of the name of Christ" as well as a potential burden on his colonial coffers. Undeterred, the Jews appealed to brethren in Amsterdam to intervene on their behalf to the directors of the Dutch West India Company.

They succeeded. In 1655, the directors granted Jews permission to settle in New Amsterdam as long as they did not worship publicly, a right Jews had enjoyed in both Brazil and Amsterdam, and they assumed total responsibility for their indigent. In the colonies, economic potential often outweighed religious affiliation, and most white people enjoyed an equality of opportunity. The colonies consistently complained of labor shortages and the directors knew that Jews made good colonists: they quickly established roots in their new home, they remained loyal citizens, they developed international trade networks through contacts in Europe and the Caribbean, and wealth tended to flow along these networks. By forcing the poor Jews who arrived in 1654 to become a viable colonial population, perhaps the directors hoped that the new arrivals would stimulate needed economic growth. Beginning with New Amsterdam, Jews established communities in numerous colonial port cities, including New Port (1677), Savannah (1733), Philadelphia (1745), and Charleston (1750).

Establishing Communities

The Jews who settled in Dutch and, after 1664, British North America participated in a broad international migration that continued well into the twentieth century. They were Sephardim, part of the Iberian-Jewish diaspora created by the expulsion of all Jews from Spain and Portugal during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Soon, Ashkenazi Jews, who traced their roots to northern and central Europe, began to join the Sephardim. Generally poorer, and differing in religious ritual and Hebrew pronunciation, the Ashkenazim constituted the majority of American Jews by 1720.

Immediately upon arrival in North America, Jews established the necessities of full political and religious freedom. In 1655, the Jewish community received permission to construct a cemetery so they could bury the dead according to Jewish religious ritual. In 1656, one year after Lutherans lost their right to worship in their homes, Jews gained that exact privilege. After two years of legal wrestling, Asser Levy, one of New Amsterdam's, and later New York's, most prominent Jews, won Jews burgher rights—citizenship—in 1657. Although Jews did not receive the official right to worship publicly until the end of the seventeenth century, the nascent community worshiped in a building on Mill Street commonly known as the "Jew's Synagogue." The building, which included a mikveh, or ritual bath used primarily by women for rituals associated with family purity laws, served as colonial Jews' house of worship until 1728, when they established Shearith Israel, North America's first permanent synagogue.

Outwardly, the Jews who settled in America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not be distinguished from their neighbors. This, as well as the low number of marriageable Jews, led to the emergence of intermarriage as a common feature of American Jewish life. Jews differed from their peers, however, in their professional activities. Whereas non-Jewish immigrants tended to work in agriculture or artisanry, Jews concentrated in commerce. Relying primarily upon family and community ties, Jews established trade networks among the colonies, with the Caribbean, and with Europe. These business arrangements provided Jews with the bonds necessary to sustain religious, cultural, economic, and familial interests. By 1730, when about 300 Jews lived in New York, only two Jews listed occupations other than commerce.

While most Jewish merchants traded in rum, hardware, spices, candles, lumber, and fur, some found the most lucrative commodity to be African slaves. Lured by the promise of substantial profit, Jewish notables from the shipping center of Newport, Rhode Island, participated in the traffic of humans. Moreover, like many of their white neighbors, Jews in both the North and the South owned slaves. In fact, the 1703 census revealed that 75 percent of Jewish households owned slaves. Because slavery functioned as the central determinant of American political, economic, and social systems, owning—or seeking to liberate—slaves existed as a central feature of American life for both Jews and non-Jews alike until the Civil War (1861–1865).

The American Revolution and subsequent ratification of the Constitution legitimized the rights and ad hoc privileges that had organized American Jewish life during the past century. The Constitution instituted the legal separation of church and state—a condition of existence quite different from Europe, where religion could determine an individual's political and legal rights.

Nineteenth Century Arrivals

Beginning in the 1820s, a new migration of Jews from Europe began, one that would continue unabated until its climax during the first decades of the twentieth century. Jews migrated westward between 1820 and 1920 in response to upheavals in European society caused by political emancipation, industrialization, and urbanization. Unlike other immigrant groups, that often returned to Europe after earning enough money to sustain a family, Jews tended to immigrate permanently.

Between 1820 and 1880, the Jewish population in America rose from 4,000 to almost 250,000. Historians usually refer to members of this first wave as "German" immigrants, but the name is incorrect. Jewish immigrants who arrived in America between 1820 and 1880 generally left from areas eventually included in unified Germany (1871) or countries deeply influenced by German culture, such as Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia. Yet the pre-1880 contingent also included many Jews whose culture was decidedly Polish, from Silesia and Posen, provinces annexed by Prussia and later assumed into unified Germany, as well as Lithuania, western Russia, and Galicia. These Polish and Eastern European Jews, characterized by poverty, religious traditionalism, and the Yiddish language, more closely resembled the Jews who would begin their exodus to America in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

By the Civil War, Jews lived in over 160 communities in America. Many earned their keep by peddling, a profession that required no initial investment and functioned entirely on credit. Moreover, if successful, an itinerant peddler could earn enough to become a store owner. At a time when few retail stores existed outside the large cities, peddlers provided rural Americans and ethnic neighborhoods with their everyday necessities. Peddlers bought their supplies in large cities like New York, Chicago, or St. Louis and set out either for the hinterlands or the city streets. With their wares slung over their backs, on horse-carts, or on pushcarts, they roved from town to town or neighborhood to neighborhood selling small items like buttons, stoves, glass, needles, old clothes, and plates. Peddling resulted in the creation of extensive peddler-supplier-creditor networks in which Jews across the United States became linked in a collective endeavor to earn a living from the constant pulse of supply and demand. Indeed, this network of peddlers, general stores, and wholesalers served as the foundation for the evolution of the American department store.

Early Judaism in America

After the establishment of Shearith Israel in 1728, synagogues began to spring up wherever Jews settled, including the Touro Synagogue in Newport (1762) and Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia (1782). These first synagogues followed the traditional Sephardic rite. In 1801, resenting Sephardic control over synagogue administration and ritual, a group of Ashkenazim in Philadelphia formed the first "second" synagogue in an American Jewish community.

Because no ordained rabbi arrived in the United States until the 1840s, American Judaism developed almost entirely by improvisation. Moreover, due to their white skin color and their position outside the scope of nativist concerns with Irish Catholics, American Jewish modes of worship and religious institutions developed relatively free from outside interference. Laypeople generally led congregations and a synagogue's board determined religious ritual. Negotiating Jewish tradition, congregational demands, and desires for social acceptance, Jewish leaders oversaw a burgeoning American Judaism as chaotic and diverse as its new homeland. By the close of the 1800s, three major institutions—the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations—all claimed to speak for American Jewry.

Starting in 1870, the same processes that had led earlier arrivals to immigrate to America—market capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and growing anti-Jewish violence—set in motion a new migration from eastern Europe to America. Between 1870 and 1924, when Congress officially legislated the end of free and open immigration, the 2.5 million Jews who immigrated to the United States radically altered American Jewry's demography, social structure, cultural life, and communal order.

Adjusting to America

After crossing the Atlantic, Jewish immigrants landed at Ellis Island. There, they encountered employees of the U.S. government, who checked papers and performed rigorous medical exams, and representatives of settlement houses or the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, organizations founded in the late nineteenth century to guide immigrants through landing procedures and provide financial aid, shelter, professional training, and acculturation skills. Whether meeting a family member already established in America or arriving alone, most immigrants headed directly from Ellis Island to one of the major ethnic neighborhoods that saturated America's cities, such as Chicago's West Side, Boston's North End, downtown Philadelphia, or New York's Lower East Side.

The immigrant neighborhood bustled. A cacophony of life, work, and leisure, one square block could hold among its tenements workshops of the garment trades, synagogues, saloons, cafes, wives, children, intellectuals, political functionaries, religious students, gamblers, con artists, and prostitutes. By 1910, 540,000 Jews lived within the 1.5 square miles considered the Lower East Side, cramped into five-or six-story tenement houses. Entire families, as many as seven or eight people, lived in three-or four-room apartments. Often, they took in boarders to help pay the rent. Usually a single male, the boarder would occupy one full room in the tiny apartment, cramping the rest of the family into even smaller quarters.

In order to meet their monthly expenses, every family member earned wages. Generally poorer and more religious than their predecessors, the new arrivals made work a top priority. Unlike their predecessors, the Eastern European Jews who arrived in the decades surrounding the

turn of the century tended to be skilled laborers, primarily in the garment industry. In fact, in 1900, one out of every three Jewish immigrants labored in the garment trades, although cigar making, peddling, and butchering were also popular professions. Due to the pressure to earn money, women, working in the needle trades, and children, who labored on assembly lines or in the streets selling whatever possible, joined men in the factories, back-room sweatshops, and small street stalls.

To compensate for these tough conditions, Jews developed an array of cultural and political responses to their new environment. The Yiddish theater offered low-cost, high-quality performances of original plays, translations, comedies, and variety shows. Likewise, socialism and Zionism became the dominant secular ideologies of the immigrant neighborhood. The language of these political ideologies, Yiddish, served as a source of literary and theatrical productions. Between 1885 and 1914, over 150 Yiddish dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and yearbooks appeared in print.

Jewish immigrants also produced institutional responses to immigration. Modeled after American fraternal orders, Jews organized landsmanschaften, societies for individuals who originated from the same town. The landsmanschaften provided various forms of financial aid such as sick and bereavement benefits, and organized small synagogues, lectures, and social opportunities. Trade unionism also provided Jews with opportunities for mutual aid and political expression. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, the most famous of the Jewish trade unions, organized in 1900 to provide support to the thousands of women working in the needle trades. The union opened a health center, experimented in cooperative housing, provided unemployment and health insurance and retirement benefits, and offered recreational and vocational programs. In 1909, the union participated in one of the largest strikes to date, known as the "Uprising of the 20,000," where women shirtwaist workers protested their poor salaries, poor working conditions, and culture of sexual abuse.

The ethnic neighborhood served primarily as a way station for new immigrants. Although it served as the first place of residence for a tremendously high percentage of immigrant Jews, its piteous living conditions encouraged immigrants to move to better neighborhoods as quickly as possible. In these areas of second settlement, public schools, interethnic contacts, and American popular culture all served as a cauldron of integration, tutoring immigrants and their children how to look, sound, and act like Americans. Indeed, by the 1930s, American Jewry became, for the first time, a largely native-born population. Thus, when the depression hit, Jews, like all Americans, suffered financial hardship, bankruptcies, and barriers to financial and educational advancement, as well as the disappointment of the expectations that accompanied general upward mobility.

Following World War II (1939–1945), in which over half a million American Jews served in the armed forces, American Jewry experienced a profound period of social and economic mobility. The Holocaust caused many American Jews to approach life with a new sense of responsibility. Now the world's largest Jewish community, American Jewry aimed for success, both as Americans and as Jews. Most important, they aimed to eradicate the distinctions that had marked earlier generations. Because of the opportunities offered by the GI Bill, Jewish men and women entered higher education in record numbers. As a result, by the end of the twentieth century most of America's 6 million Jews claimed college degrees, worked in white-collar jobs, and enjoyed comfortable lifestyles. Moreover, Judaism experienced a second period of transformation.

As America's Jews became increasingly assimilated, they diversified from the orthodoxy that had characterized the eastern European immigrants to more Americanized forms of Jewish expression. The birth of the State of Israel catalyzed the American Zionist movement. Numerous Jews participated in a wellspring of Jewish cultural expression in literature, academia, dance, and film. Others chose new religious opportunities. Some found "modern" Orthodoxy, a movement to combine traditional Judaism's strict lifestyle constraints with the realities of modern American society. Others chose the Havurah movement, which sprang up in the 1960s. Influenced by 1960s counterculture, members of havurot rejected traditional Judaism's formalism and sought to invest Jewish ritual with greater spirituality and attention to social justice. Most American Jews, however, identified as Re-form or Conservative, American Jewry's mainline religious movements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashton, Dianne. Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Diner, Hasia R. A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.

Faber, Eli. A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Goldman, Karla. Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding Places for Women in American Judaism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Goren, Arthur A. New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.

Grinstein, Hyman. The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–1860. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945.

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Heinze, Andrew R. Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Jick, Leon A. The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England: Brandeis University Press, 1976 [1992].

Markowitz, Ruth Jacknow. My Daughter, The Teacher: Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

Moore, Deborah Dash. At Home in America: Second-Generation New York Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

Morawska, Ewa T. Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890–1940. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Rischin, Moses. The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870–1914. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Soyer, Daniel. Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Svonkin, Stuart. Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Wenger, Beth S. New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.

Wertheimer, Jack, ed. The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England: Brandeis University Press, 1987.

JoshPerelman

Jews [from Judah ], traditionally, descendants of Judah, the fourth son of Jacob, whose tribe, with that of his half brother Benjamin, made up the kingdom of Judah; historically, members of the worldwide community of adherents to Judaism . The degree to which national and religious elements of Jewish culture interact has varied throughout history and has been a matter of considerable debate. There were approximately 17.8 million Jews in the world in 1990, with 8 million in the Americas (of which about 5.7 million were in the United States), 3.5 million in Israel, and 3.5 million in Europe.

Biblical Period

According to the biblical account, much of which is impossible to verify in the archaeological record until late in the monarchial period, Jewish history begins with the patriarchs Abraham , Isaac , and Jacob , who considered Canaan (an area comprising present-day Israel and the West Bank) their home. Their history continues in Goshen, NE Egypt, where they settled as agriculturists many centuries before the Christian era. Under Ramses II the Jews were severely persecuted and, finally, Moses led them out of Egypt; at Mt. Sinai he delivered to them the Ten Commandments.

Many years of wandering in desert wildernesses followed before the Israelites conquered Canaan. Saul became the first king. Initially successful against the Philistines, he was finally defeated at Gilboa. David , of the tribe of Judah, ruled, conquered the enemies of the Jews, expanded his territory across the Jordan River, and brought prosperity and peace to his people. The reign of his son Solomon , who built the first Temple , was the last before a period of disruption. The tribes of the north formed the kingdom of Israel; those of the south formed the smaller but more strongly united kingdom of Judah.

In 722 BC, Sargon II captured Samaria, capital of Israel, and most of the Israelites (the lost tribes ) were exiled. Judah passed under Assyrian domination, then under Egyptian, and in 586 BC, under Babylonian, when the Temple was destroyed and the people were exiled until their return was permitted by Cyrus the Great (538 BC). The rebuilding of the Temple was completed in 516 BC The Jews remained a strong religious group during the period of Hellenism, but regained political independence only under the Maccabees . A rebellion, led by Bar Kokba against the Romans in the 2d cent. AD, ended in defeat. In 63 BC Rome conquered Palestine, and the second Temple was destroyed in AD 70.

Diaspora

As political aspirations subsided, the Jewish community was increasingly led by scholars and rabbis. Even during the period of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, large Jewish communities developed in Egypt and Babylonia. After the fall of the Temple, Babylon's Jewish community became the most important in world Jewry and its academies the most influential centers of Jewish learning. In 8th-century Iberia, a large Jewish community played an important part in intellectual and economic life. From the 9th to the 12th cent., Spanish Jewry enjoyed a golden age of literary efflorescence marked by a highly creative interaction between Jewish and Islamic culture.

From the Crusades to the Enlightenment

From the time of the Crusades date the persecutions that persisted until the 18th cent. During this period the ownership of land and most occupations other than petty trading and moneylending were forbidden to European Jews; the ghetto came into existence. The Jews, who had earlier been an agricultural people, became an urban population. The Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. In 1391, forced conversions began in Spain; in 1492 all remaining Jews were expelled. Many of the exiles perished; others found asylum in the Netherlands and in the Turkish possessions. The German Jews, who experienced periodic explusions throughout the 15th cent., fled to Poland, where, although subject to persecution, they build a thriving culture.

After 1492, Spanish Jews (see Sephardim ) spread throughout the Mediterranean world, often absorbing smaller Jewish communities they encountered. In some places they continued to speak a Judeo-Spanish language known as Judezmo or Ladino into the 20th cent. Some Sephardim also migrated to Western Europe. The other large branch of the Jewish people, known as Ashkenazim, formed in the 9th cent. with the settlement of Jews in the Rhine valley. Marked by their use of Yiddish, a German-Jewish language, the Ashkenazim also migrated east into Poland. The Polish-Lithuanian community became a major center of world Jewry in the 16th cent., distinguished by its high level of Talmudic scholarship. The political vulnerability and religious faith of the Jews led to the rise of several messianic movements; one of the most important was led by Sabbatai Zevi . In the 18th cent. Hasidism arose among the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Emancipation and Secularization

Modern political emancipation of the Jews began with the American and French revolutions. In Germany and Austria emancipation of the Jews was proclaimed after the Revolution of 1848. Simultaneously, the Haskalah encouraged the secularization of Jewish life, and the integration of the Jews into the societies in which they lived. Especially in Western Europe, this led to considerable acculturation, and even assimilation, of Jewish communities. The religious Reform movement advocated a form of Judaism shorn of its national elements and emphasizing ethical content rather than adherence to traditional Jewish law.

Zionism and Mass Migration

In Eastern Europe in the late 1800s, new secular movements arose, particularly after a wave of pogroms in 1881. These movements sought to ameliorate the Jewish condition and establish Jewish life on a new national basis. Zionism advocated the return of the Jews to Palestine. The Zionist movement was formally established in Basel in 1897. During the 19th and early 20th cent., there was a mass migration of Jews westward from Eastern and Central Europe and the Ottoman Empire. During the period 1880 to 1924 some 2.5 million Jews emigrated to the United States, which after 1939 was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. Smaller numbers, under the influence of Zionism, settled in Palestine.

Between 1933, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, and 1945, when Germany was defeated in World War II, the Jews faced persecution of unprecedented scope and violence; thousands were driven into exile and close to 6 million were systematically slaughtered (see anti-Semitism ; Holocaust ). After the war, great numbers of Jews sought refuge in Palestine. The Jewish state of Israel was established in 1948 from portions of Palestine, and in succeeding years absorbed many Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Arab-Jewish relations have been complicated by the hostilities that have resulted in and from the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982.

Bibliography

See H. Graetz, History of the Jews (6 vol., tr. 1926; repr. 1956); A. L. Sachar, A History of the Jews (5th ed. 1965); C. Roth, The Jewish Contribution to Civilization (3d ed. 1956) and A Short History of the Jewish People (rev. ed. 1969); H. Feingold, Zion in America (1974); R. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought (1981); S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (27 vol., 1952–83); N. de Lange, ed., The Illustrated History of the Jewish People (1997); S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (2 vol., 1997–2007); A. Hertzberg and A. Hirt-Manheimer, Jews (1998); D. Vital, A People Apart (1999); M. Konner, Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews (2003); J. R. Baskin and K. Seeskin, The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion, and Culture (2010).

Jews

Jews had been a persecuted minority throughout the Middle Ages, and the humanism and questioning of Christian doctrine during the Renaissance did little to improve their status. Many European cities forbade them to pass through their gates at all; most others severely restricted their movements, their professions, and the neighborhoods in which they lived. From time to time, Jews were completely expelled by decree of a prince or city council. Their property was confiscated and the debts owed to them were cancelled—in this way, expulsion was often a convenient way for a prince or monarch to relieve a debt from his treasury. Expulsions occurred in France in 1394, in Portugal in 1497, in the southern French duchy of Provence in 1502, and from southern Italy in 1541. Jews were completely forbidden to live in England throughout the Renaissance, a restriction that dated to the year 1290 and did not end until the middle of the seventeenth century. The most important expulsion of this period occurred in Spain in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Jews as well as Muslims from their united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. Jews who claimed to convert to Christianity in order to keep their homes and property were known as marranos or conversos. Such converts were under constant suspicion and often prohibited from leaving the confines of the cities where they lived. They were often brought to trial for heresy; the Spanish Inquisition was established in the late fifteenth century for the express purpose of testing the sincerity of conversos and rooting out the insincere.

Jews were often restricted in the clothing they could wear and in their general appearance; in fifteenth-century Spain Jewish men were forced to grow their beards long. In some cities they were forced to wear a circle of yellow felt to identify themselves as Jews; other places required wide-brimmed hats or a long dark cloak. The professions available to them were also limited. Jews were banned from traditional artisanal guilds, but permitted to work as moneylenders and as dealers in second-hand goods. Many Italian communes granted charters allowing Jews to settle for a limited time, for the purpose of serving as lenders to the poor of the city.

In the literature of the time, including works of Christopher Marlowe and Sir Francis Bacon, Jews were often depicted as greedy and villainous. Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice presents one of the most memorable Jewish villains, the moneylender Shylock. European Christians branded Jews with sinister libels, such as claiming that they made their ceremonial food with the blood of Christians. These libels could sometimes lead to violence and massacre, occasionally with the approval of the city authorities. In 1475 the city of Trent arrested every Jewish male on the suspicion of carrying out the ritual murder of Christian children, and put the captives to death.

At the same time, however, Hebrew, the language of the Jews, became a respected subject of interest to many scholars, including the Protestant scholar Johannes Buxtorf, who taught at the University of Basel in Switzerland and published Hebrew dictionaries and grammars. Jewish texts were translated into Latin, and several universities established departments of Hebraica, or Jewish studies. The study of the Jewish kabbalah, a medieval system of symbols and esoteric knowledge, was undertaken by humanist scholar Giordano Bruno, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and others interested in systems of thought that lay outside traditional Christian teachings.

In 1516, the first Jewish ghetto was established in Venice, in a quarter known as the Ghetto Nuovo. The Jewish ghetto became a neighborhood cordoned off from the Christian population, often with a system of walls and gates. In 1555 the Catholic Church began enforcing a twelfth-century law that prohibited Jews from living in the same neighborhoods as Christians. This law was strictly enforced within the Papal States, the cities and territories under the control of the papal administration in central Italy. The ghetto spread to Germany and then the rest of Europe. Jews were commonly confined to the ghettos permanently, and were only allowed to leave in order to transact necessary business in other parts of the city. The gates were locked and no traffic permitted at night; Jews caught out after curfew were subject to arrest and a term in prison. The ghetto walls prevented Jewish communities from expanding, and as a result they became the most crowded and least healthful neighborhoods, with families raising tenements ever higher in order to accommodate the growing population.

See Also: ghetto

Jews

Sources

Origin. The history of Judaism in America began with the arrival of Dutch Jews at New Amsterdam in 1654. They had been active in the Dutch West India Company settlement in Brazil and were expelled when the Portuguese retook the post. The Netherlands had provided a place of refuge for the Sephardic Jews (those of Iberian descent) after Spain had expelled them in 1492 and Portugal in 1496. In the Netherlands they flourished as merchants and tradesmen.

Early Clusters. There were no rabbis among these colonial Jews. This fact did not present much of an obstacle, however, because only ten adult males were needed to form a synagogue. As soon as they were granted the right to public worship in New York at the end of the seventeenth century, they established a congregation and by 1729 had built a house of worship. Others arrived in small groups, especially after 1740, when the British Parliament allowed them to be naturalized. In some colonies they were denied political rights because they were not Christians and could not take the required oaths on the Bible. They settled primarily in the coastal cities and practiced their faith unobtrusively. Cantors took on the

role of ministers, and the highly literate laity preserved their teachings and traditions.

Sources

Ruth Gay, Jews in America: A Short History (New York: Basic Books, 1965);

Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jews, 1492–1776, 3 volumes (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).

Jews Traditionally, the descendants of Judah, fourth son of Jacob, who settled in ancient Palestine towards the end of the 2nd millennium bc; historically, followers of the religion of Judaism. In c.1020 bc, Saul founded the Hebrew state of Israel. David united the kingdoms of Judaea and Israel. His son, Solomon, built the Temple in Jerusalem. In 587 bc, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple, and deported the from Jerusalem, thus beginning the period of the Babylonian Captivity. In 538 bc, Cyrus the Great delivered the Jews from Babylon. In the 2nd century bc, the Maccabee dynasty gained political independence from the Greeks. In ad 70, the Temple was destroyed for a second time by the Romans and the Diaspora began. In Christian Europe, Jews were victims of anti-Semitism. In 1290, Jews were driven out of England. In 1492, they were expelled from Spain. During World War II (1939–45), six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. In 1948, having struggled against British rule in modern Palestine, the modern state of Israel was proclaimed, despite opposition from Arab and other Islamic states. Today, there are c.17.5 million Jews worldwide, including c.7 million in the USA and c.5 million in Israel. See also Yiddish; Zionism

Jews The inhabitants of the state or province round Jerusalem after the return from the Exile in Babylon; the name also for the ethnic-religious group who remained there or lived elsewhere in the Diaspora, distinguishing them from neighbours who were Gentiles.

Jews, see Judaism; Zionism; anti-Semitism; pogroms

Jewish people. See JUDAISM.