Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America by Shari Rabin

Author:Shari Rabin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jewish, Religion, History, Judaism, REL040000 Religion / Judaism / General
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2017-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

“Strangers among Brothers”

In 1844 Isaac Leeser offered his own theory of Jewish community:

[Our] souls are linked together by the ties of consanguinity in faith, by the union of the same religion, which regards the Creator as the common head of the Israelitish race, under whatever government they live.

He acknowledged the many divisions among American Jews, and yet insisted that “all Israelites should be living in harmony and friendship.”7 Although he argued for the irrelevance of government, Leeser’s terminology of friendship was an American one, used to describe diverse political and economic alliances in his day. Friendship argued for social cohesion apart from agreement or proximity, while, for Jews, drawing on the Talmudic idea that “all of Israel are friends.”8 This was a common strategy among American Jewish leaders, to insist that Jews were “friends” and “brethren” united by “the religion of our fathers.”9 It was intended to correct for the fact that in the United States, it was difficult to find or to verify coreligionists. American Jews were in fact “strangers,” a broad categorization that encompassed a range of fraught social, institutional, and economic relationships, and that a new mobile infrastructure would seek to overcome.

Leaders were especially worried about young Jewish men who were estranged from religious life, whether on purpose or by happenstance. These included men married to non-Jewish women, those living far from other Jews, and, most disturbingly, those who denied or ignored their religious identity altogether. Such men, Leeser argued,

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