During the early 1800s in New York City, Jacob Abrahams was a shochet (ritual slaughterer) hired by Congregation Shearith Israel. In 1813, he decided that he couldn’t accept the synagogue’s terms of employment any longer and that he wanted to operate independently.
Was this a minor occurrence of no pertinence today? Actually, the incident showed that “a new world of American Judaism was a-borning” among the few thousand Jews living in this country at the time, according to Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna, author of the recently published “American Judaism: A History.”
Speaking to an audience of more than 100 people at Congregation Beth Israel last week, Sarna said that the New York congregation’s leaders felt so threatened by Abrahams’ challenge to its authority that they went to the New York Common Council and got it to pass an ordinance confirming the synagogue’s control of the sale of kosher meat in New York.
In Europe and in the English colonies before the revolution, Sarna said, such a successful appeal to secular authorities to recognize one Jewish institution as the community authority would have ended the whole matter.
But in the post-revolutionary United States, it didn’t. Eight members of the congregation protested that this ordinance was an “infringement on the rights of the people.”
As a result, the Common Council repealed the ordinance and recognized that all Jews in New York City could select their own sources of kosher food without reference to any one authority.
So even this early in American Jewish history, Jews sought to take full advantage of the country’s promises of individual liberty and human rights, even at the cost of unity in the Jewish community itself.
This proved to be a shaping influence in the culture of the community and in the unfolding of its history, said Sarna. Those Jews who wanted to preserve Judaism ended up outlining and struggling between three different ways to do it:
• Educating Jews in Judaism and trying to preserve “tradition in an American key,” which became the way of Modern Orthodoxy and early Conservative Judaism.
• Changing Judaism itself to make it and its practices more compatible with American life, which proved the path of the Reform movement.
• Emphasizing Jewish peoplehood and culture, which characterized B’nai B’rith and other non-religious Jewish organizations.
“The history of American Judaism oscillates” among these “core values,” all of which are important and yet “exist in tension with one another” and receive different emphases from different Jewish individuals and groups at different times, Sarna said.
And this fact has been and still is beneficial to the American Jewish community, said Sarna. All these different strategies and the movements and organizations based on them “checked each other’s excesses” and provided choices for individuals.
These advantages come at “a steep price” in “acrimonious contention” between people and groups and the “unseemly specter of Jews battling Jews,” he said.
But they also have given rise to the “contradictory trends” of American Jewish life today: growing assimilation with intermarriage rising and birth rates declining; yet also growing revitalization with schools proliferating and (according to Sarna’s book) about two-thirds of American Jews belonging to a synagogue at least “at some point in their lives.”
“History suggests,” Sarna concluded, “that American Jews will find creative ways” to maintain the community and raise “another vanishing generation” of a people that has been “dying for a thousand years.”
Sarna’s talk was part of the Jewish Book & Culture Fair organized by the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center; and his appearance was co-sponsored by the Milwaukee Jewish Historical Society, a program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, in association with the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning and Congregation Beth Israel.
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