Chaim I. Waxman, “American Jewry,” in Nicholas de Lange and Miri Freud-Kandel, eds., Modern Judaism: An Oxford Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 129-143 (original) (raw)

The development of American Judaism reflects both the experiences of various groups of immigrants and the cultural patterns of American society. Indeed, the latter may be even more important because, in every society and especially an open one such as the United States, the culture of the society influences groups within the society. The first Jewish communities in the United States were created by Sephardim, who arrived to escape the Spanish Inquisitions. The initial communities were in New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, and Savanna. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the majority of immigrants were of German and Central European background, most of whom immigrated voluntarily, for economic reasons. Typically, they were among the least rooted in their native Jewish communities, and traditional Judaism did not control their lives significantly. During the second half of the nineteenth century, especially after 1881, and up until the mid-1920s there was a massive wave of Eastern European immigration, fleeing economic, social, and religious persecution. An important feature of the first synagogue communities was the absence of rabbinic leadership. Rabbis did not begin to appear significantly on the American scene until well into the nineteenth century, and the rabbi-scholar elite did not arrive until the twentieth century. The synagogue reader (hazzan) was not ordained; he was invariably the most Jewishly educated male in the community. Matters relating to divorce and other issues requiring rabbinical involvement were referred to the rabbinate in Amsterdam and London. The absence of rabbinic leadership, coupled with American culture, in which voluntary groups are of great importance and in which individual efforts are valued, make it unsurprising that the attempt to reform Judaism in the United States developed as a grassroots movement. As immigration increased there was a westward expansion of Jewish communities during the nineteenth century. Many Jewish immigrants from Central Europe arrived without traditional communal ties. Seeking economic advance, they spread around the country and established synagogues in accordance with their needs and desires, without coordination with previously established communities. Religious disorganization thus prevailed when Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), who was born in Bohemia and studied in Austria, arrived in New York in 1846 to serve as rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Albany. Concerned by