Sometime between 1850 and 1914, an immigrant Jewish peddler with his horse-drawn cartload of goods found himself in A-Remote-Town, U.S.A., when his horse suddenly died.
Undaunted, the stranded Jew set up a store and that was how that town’s department store and Jewish community were born.
This is an archetypal, “time-honored” legend that University of Louisville historian Lee Shai Weissbach heard in many places during his some 15 years of studying small town Jewish communities throughout the United States. Of such stories, he said, “I don’t think they’re true.”
But the real stories of small town Jewry are just as colorful and fascinating, as an audience of about 25 found when they heard Weissbach speak at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library Monday, Oct. 11.
Moreover, Weissbach contended that the real stories are important for understanding both the U.S. Jewish experience and U.S. small town life generally.
“They must be examined if the American Jewish experience is to be understood,” Weissbach said. Moreover, these stories “alert us to the diversity of small town society in times past.” The image one finds in popular culture of small towns having homogeneous populations with no minorities is not true, he said; that they had Jews shows that their populations and local cultures were “complex and varied.”
During what Weissbach called the “heyday” of Jewish small town life — between the end of the Civil War (1865) and the end of World War II (1945) — hundreds of towns in the U.S., including more than a dozen in Wisconsin, had Jewish populations of between 100 and 1,000.
Common traits
These communities began in many different ways. Some were started by itinerant peddlers who decided to settle. Some Jews sought more remote settings to escape the crowded city conditions.
Some were attracted to towns with growing non-Jewish populations or growing industries, such as mining and timber, whose workers could become consumers for retail goods.
Some were encouraged to move to these places by the Industrial Removal Office, a joint project of several New York Jewish organizations, which began in 1901 and lasted about 20 years. Its goal was to get immigrant Jews out of New York City and into other communities in the U.S. and Canada.
And some were founded by happenstance. For example, a group of Jews on their way to St. Paul, Minn., came to La Crosse, Wis., and decided to stay there instead, Weissbach said.
Once settled, these communities had many things in common. In fact, Weissbach said that these similarities transcended regions, such that the differences between the Jewish communities of Appleton and Milwaukee were more significant than the differences between the Jewish communities of Appleton and, say, Vicksburg, Miss.
For one, small town Jewish communities tended to be comprised of small family groups. Weissbach cited novelist Edna Ferber’s description of Appleton Jewry in the 1890s as “a snarl of brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins.”
For another, most of the Jews made their livings as small business proprietors. Few were members of the wage-earning working class. That meant that such concerns as union organizing or Socialist movement agitation, found in big or middle-size city Jewish communities like Milwaukee, were irrelevant to small town Jews.
Moreover, most of the time the small Jewish populations and resource bases encouraged religious cooperation. Weissbach said that some 69 percent of the small town communities he studied had only one synagogue, and another 20 percent had two.
And Weissbach told some remarkable stories of attempts to show sensitivity to or compromise with other Jewish groups’ religious practices. So in the synagogue in Port Huron, Mich., the more observant agreed to give up having a mechitza (separation between men and women) in exchange for the Reform Jews agreeing not to have an organ.
A study of synagogue architecture in these towns also shows much about the quality of Jewish life, Weissbach said.
In some places, the synagogues were large, Middle Eastern in style, and located on the main streets, showing a Jewish community willing to assert its distinctiveness. In other towns, the synagogue might be smaller or look more like a church or be located on a side street, indicating a community more concerned about blending in.
Weissbach was born in pre-Israel Palestine in 1947, grew up in Cincinnati and got his doctorate at Harvard University. He originally specialized in the social history of France, but “the beauty of history and journalism is that you can follow where your interests lead.”
His third book, “Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History” will soon be published by Yale University Press.
Weissbach also spoke to an audience of about 60 in Appleton Sunday and in Madison on Tuesday. His appearances were arranged to help celebrate the 350 years of Jewish life in the U.S. by the Wisconsin Small Jewish Communities History Project, a research and educational program of the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning.
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