United States Jewry, 1776-1985 by Marcus Jacob Rader;

Author:Marcus, Jacob Rader;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2017-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

ASPECTS OF JEWISH EDUCATION AND CULTURE, 1860-1920: PART I

INTRODUCTION

In Jewish life it is impossible to divorce the charitative from the cultural; Jewish welfare institutions, philanthropic in origin, were also social, religious, and cultural in intent. Sabbath Sunday schools which owe their origins to “Uptown” social workers, were more educational in nature than religious. Jewish culture is woven into the fabric of every aspect of Jewish life and faith. Thus any analysis of Jewish education and culture as separate entities is unhistoric, un-Jewish in its approach. Unlike Christianity, Judaism is not merely a religion, a relationship to the Deity, it is much more; it is a many-faceted distinct way of life, a total all-embracing culture. And if culture must be defined, then let it be said that it is any activity of Jewish content that furthers the intellectual and emotional faculties and responses of the Jew.

The Central European Jews who made their way here in numbers throughout the nineteenth century found an indigenous American Jewish culture awaiting them, a cultural communal structure that was already almost two centuries old. The Sephardim had established synagogs, schools, and charities; the Germans accepted these institutions, adapted them for their own use, and built new ones as the need arose. Not one of these was devoid of cultural quality or implications. Thus the Germans became a link in a cultural-education chain that stretched back to 1654 and was destined to be strengthened and shaped anew by the traditions of constantly arriving newcomers. Among them were Slavic Jews who were sufficiently numerous to build a socioreligio-cultural community of their own as early as the 1850’s. All three American Jewish groups—Sephardim, Germans, and East Europeans—were synchronous; any treatment of them is complicated by their interplay. This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that the newcomers, the Germans and then the Slavs, had to come to terms with the prevalent American complex of thoughts and manners. Many of the basic institutions of the later nineteenth century were established by the Germans in order to integrate the newcomers into the German American community, but by 1900 at the latest, émigrés from the Slavic lands constituted the majority of the Jews in the United States. The history of the Germans, fathers and sons, from 1900 to 1920, is the record of a Jewish minority.

GOALS OF THE GERMAN IMMIGRANTS

Very few of the Central European Jews were illiterate; they brought with them a modicum of learning in the secular and religious areas. They could read the Hebrew prayers and were familiar with the traditional rites and observances; a few had subscribed to the German Jewish press back home. After their arrival their cultural goals remained Germanic; they loved the German language and its literature, yet they were equally set on being good Jews, German style. Jewish book learning in the German and English vernaculars was not discouraged. It was taken for granted that their boys would be bar mitzvah and join as “men” in the worship service. The new generation was

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