America on the Responsa Map: Hasidim, Mitnagdim, and the Trans-Atlantic Social Network of Religious Authority (original) (raw)

Michael A. Meyer, “German-Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Jacob Katz, ed., Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987), 247-267

Such centers spiritually strengthened those younger or weaker Jewish communities that were dependent on them. Yet in the course of time and for a variety of historical reasons, some of these initially peripheral settlements themselves made successful bids for hegemony. Thus, according to Dubnow, Spanish Jewr y gained independence from the Oriental Gaonate in the tenth century,,and live hundred years later the mantle ofleadership fell upon the German-Polish Jews. In ,the twentieth.. century, Dubnow looked.toward a joint hegemony shared by kws in the European-American Diaspora and in the land of Israel.' Whatever the shortcomings of Dubnow's grand scheme, when applied to the entire course of Jewish history the notion of an inchoate Jewry looking to an established, intellectually productive one for inspiration and guidance, then gradually-or li!fully-breaking away to assert its own primacy is suggestive for specific instances. It can, for example, be usefully applied to the relation of the American-Jewish community to its German-Jewish origins durjng Jhe nineteenth century. 2 From the beginning of large-scale Jewish i)nmigration from Germany to the United States in the 1830s until the demographic submergence of German Jewry in America beneath the flood tide of East European immigration at the end of the century, there. was a discc:rnible tension between forces making for preservation of the German-Jewish heritage as represented by Jews still in Germany, and those that pressed, in the direction of greater spiritual independence. While German Jewry could and did serve as a moder of modernization, especially · in matters of religion, acculturl!tion 247 248 Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model in the United States worked mostly in the opposite direction: toward an assertion ofindependence from the German matrix. Although for a period of time German Judaism was venerated almost without qualification, by the last decades of the nineteenth century its hegemony was under severe attack even by those German Jews in America who owed it the most. The purpose of this essay is to trace {his conflict of forces-as it appeared in the realms of culture and religion and to explain the eventual disavowal of German Judaism as a model for American Jewry.

Jewish Immigration to the American Continent

The Journal of Migration Studies, 2018

This study investigates the migration of the Jews from the Ottoman Empire from the 1860s onward and from modern Turkey to the American continent. It provides a picture of the process of Jewish migration to and Jewish integration in the destination countries in the continent. Country-by-country analyses of the integration processes and the profile of immigrants disclose parallels and differences of the integration of Jewish people in different countries in the American continent. The article finds that Jewish immigrants established communities around religious, educational , and philanthropic organizations that facilitated the preservation of their distinct culture and their integration in the host nations.

Jewish Identity in America

1991

Efforts to foretell the future of the American Jewish community date far back to the nineteenth century, and for the most part the prophecies have been exceedingly gloomy. Fonner President John Adams predicted in a letter to Mordecai Noah in 1819 that Jews might "possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians." A young American Jewish student named William Rosenblatt, writing in 1872, declared that the grandchildren of Jewish immigrants to America would almost surely intennarry and abandon the rite of circumcision. Within fifty years "at the latest," he predicted, Jews would be "undistinguishable from the mass of humanity which surrounds them." Just under a century later, in ] 964. Look magazine devoted a whole issue to the "Vanishing American Jew," at the time a much-discussed subject. More recently, in ]984, Rabbi Reuven Bulka, in a book entitled The Orthodox-He/ann Rift and the Future 0/ tlte Jewish People, warned that "we are he...

Chaim I. Waxman, “In the End Is It Ideology?: Religio-Cultural and Structural Factors in American Aliya,” Contemporary Jewry, vol. 16, no. 1 (January 1995): 50-67

This article reviews the major studies ofAmerican Jewish immigrants to Israel. It shows that the immigrants are increasingly comprised of Orthodox Jews, and argues that the increasing concentration of Orthodox among those immigrants is not solely the result of religio ideological sources but, perhaps even more importantly, ofsophisticat ed structural ones. The significance of Zion in traditional Jewish thought and culture serves as the basis for the religio-cultural value of aliya (Waxman 1989: 21-38). With the creation of the State of Israel, a structural mechanism was established to recruit and settle Jewisb immigrants from around the world. The overwhelming majority of immigrants to Israel, olim, were fleeing persecution and thus came because of •push" reasons. American olim, on the other band, were and are voluntary immigrants, many of whom, it may be presumed, came and come because of "puU" reasons, that is, because of attractions presented by Israel.