With the attainment of independence as a self-proclaimed, self-sovereign republic, the dynamism unleashed had charged the very air of the land with a new quality. As has been expressed in the above-quoted source:

There emerged ... a heavy challenge; to be woven into the fabric of the American nation and yet to persist in Jewish identity and goal, to sustain the integral Jewish self.

This was the challenge that confronted post-Revolution American Jewry, as it has confronted their successors ever since.

As the message of an unshackled America began to penetrate Old-World lands, it touched Jewish communities baffled by a multitude of problems spawned by the onset of a new time. Although America was still seen as a remote wilderness, some began to respond to its allure of freedom and fresh opportunity. What had been a slow trickle of new arrivals throughout the colonial era became a rivulet of migration in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and then became a rising stream. The Jewish newcomers, mostly western and central Europeans, of Ashkenazic identity, settled alongside the older, established families in the existing communities and formed groups in the new cities and settlements that were springing up in the widening reaches of a pulsating nation. An undirected, spontaneous migration, it was born by an adventurous spirit that made for an individualistic rather than a cohesive development.

MAKING THEIR OWN WAY

The new Jewish settlers, no less than their forerunners, had been reared in the traditional faith of Israel that was still the universal spiritual currency of the Jewish world. But while some were scrupulous in their observance, among others the tenets of religious practice were apt to be honored more in the breach than in the observance as the newcomers plunged into the flux of American life and shared in the movement to the far reaches of the ever - widening frontier. The tight-knit cohesion of colonial days gave way before the new promptings, not to be replaced.

From the previously quoted historical review given in 1927 by Captain N. Taylor Phillips, it appears, however, that among the original group, religious standards continued to be carefully maintained as the generations passed. He narrated that:

Quite as late as 1818, the Common Council of the City of New York passed an ordinance giving the Board of Trustees of the congregation the absolute power over the matter of kashruth. They were the controlling body by law, and they decided who could be shochetim, who could kill [cattle and poultry] and who should not kill, what is kasher and what is treifa.... Most people kept in line ... the things that were of their religion were absolutely part of their lives .... For the first century and a half and more, the women of the congregation were real actors in the kitchen business. No matter how well off they were, how rich they were, or who they were, the women either did the cooking themselves or superintended. The house that permitted the servants exclusively to run the kitchen was [considered] a treifa house. People would not eat there. . . .

Also, in regard to Pesach observance, Captain Phillips related that while prior to the Revolution 'the cow would be brought to the house" of each family during an eight-day period and milked into the householder's can, therefore, "(t) children would be sent up to the farms, up around what is now Greenwich Village. . . . I have heard my father say that in his boyhood at Passover time, he would carry the can to a farm on Greenwich Street at what is now Thirteenth Street."

Those newly arrived, whether in the earlier or in the later nineteenth century decades, struggled hard for the barest livelihood. Some found their place as craftsmen or employees of business enterprises, some opened small retail stores; many others, however, took packs and roamed far-flung towns and distant rural byways as peddlers of assorted merchandise. The hardships exacted a harsh toll - physically, emotionally, and, not least of all, religiously.

From the diary¹ of one of the newcomers of the time, Abraham Kohn, who, at age 23 in 1842, journeyed from the little town of Monschroth in Bavaria to New York, a sense of this experience is conveyed. Arriving in New York after a long, trying voyage on a sailing ship, Kohn found the city bewildering:

The frantic hurry of the people, the hundreds of cabs, wagons, and carts -the noise is indescribable. Even one who has seen Germany's largest cities can hardly believe his eyes and ears. Feeling quite dizzy, I passed through Grand Street. . .... Sunday, New Year's Day. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah I found myself with a new career before me. What kind of career? . . . At night, in the Attorney St. Synagogue, I prayed to the Almighty...

During this period I was in New York, trying in vain to find a job as a clerk in a store. But I had to do as all the others, go out into the country with a bundle on my back, peddling various articles. This then is the vaunted luck of the immigrant from Bavaria: 0 misguided fools ... you have left your friends, your relatives and your parents, your home and your fatherland and your religion-only to sell your wares in the wild places of America, in isolated farmhouses and tiny hamlets.

Is this fate worth the losses you have suffered . . . is this the celebrated freedom of America's soil, when in order to do business one must profane the holy Sabbath....

Such as are married not only suffer themselves but bring suffering to their women. How must a woman feel when, after a brief stay at home, her supporter and shelterer leaves with a pack on his back, not knowing where he will find lodging the next night? On how many winter nights must such a woman sit forlornly with her children, wondering where this night finds the head of the family, which homestead in the forests of Ohio will offer him a poor night's shelter?

0 son of Israel, to follow God sincerely one must follow the holy Torah-but leading such a life none of us is able to observe the commandments.

From sources such as the preceding and studies of surviving records such as Leon Jickes's The Americanization of the Synagogue 1820 -1870, ² it appears that in the early- to middle-nineteenth-century decades America attracted from Europe Jews largely of humble, small-town background:

They were primarily villagers who came from poor but devout homes. Their education in both secular and Jewish learning was minimal. The Yiddish vernacular in which they frequently wrote was full of errors in grammar and spelling. Lacking authoritative leadership ... groups of immigrants gathered wherever they were and organized congregations, each governing their own affairs....

Yet, Jickes points out,

All of the thirteen congregations established between 1800 and 1840 followed the North, European ritual, and all sought to recreate the traditional synagogues of their European villages. Because minor variations in ritual had existed in various European localities, they sometimes distinguished between [the German and the Polish versions of the nusach ashkenaz].

There was as yet no inclination to allow or condone deviant or heterodox encroachments on synagogue practice, irrespective of the observance standards of the congregants. An example cited in The Americanization of the Synagogue concerns the first congregation to have been established as far west as the Mississippi River-the United Hebrew Congregation of St. Louis, Missouri, founded in 1838:

Its constitution states that "the prayers shall never be performed otherwise than among the Polish Jews [the words Minhag Polin appear in Hebrew script]. This section shall never be altered or amended whatsoever. We win be guided only by the laws of the Shulchan Aruch [the name is written in Hebrew characters]."

Jickes observes matter-of-factly: "The time eventually came, in this as in all other congregations, when strictures designed to prevent changes proved futile." Today, however, with an awareness driven home by the all - to - painful evidence of the cumulative cost of the "changes" that subsequently occurred, one stands aghast at the sequences of brazen captures of congregations and their houses of worship irrevocably established for and committed to a specific faith and practice, for the purposes of an altogether different, fundamentally incompatible, creed. Many years were to pass before such outrages upon elementary morality and religious rights were effectively checked, as will be discussed elsewhere in this volume.

GROPING AND FRAGMENTATION

By the time of the Civil War, the number of Jews in the United States had grown to a total of about 250,000. Now, shaken by the cataclysm that had erupted, America's Jews were prompted to a new awareness of their collective selves. There came a groping for a defined course for American Jewish life.

A potpourri of notions and urges was astir, a viscous mix of ill-formed ideas crudely garnered from the turbulent American scene and the uncertainties of personal experience. In, too, swept an alluring attitude brought from an Old-World source shaken by epochal change. It was an ideology of sorts, engendered among Jews of Germany swept by the desire to share in the attractions of the new age of enlightenment and industrial progress.

Of the German Jewish immigrants coming to the United States after the revolutionary ferment of the mid-century period, some were touched by these notions of an about-face for Jewry. The conditions of the time lent themselves to teachings calling for the abandonment of cherished fundaments of Jewish belief and practice and the adoption of a pattern of life and religious criteria closely assimilated to those of the Christian world. Bearers of these ideas navigated shrewdly amid the volatile promptings and undirected confusions of the American Jewish communities of the time.

Now, in the post-Civil War decades especially, amid the continuing void of valid, resident rabbinic authority, one after another of the congregations established as vessels of the historical Jewish faith fell under the sway of the 'Reform' advocates.

The parent congregation, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, also encountered the onrush of the rising trend, but, ever staunch, it did riot succumb. In 1841, the president of Congregation Shearith Israel, Moses L. Moses, responded reassuringly to a communication from the leadership of London's venerable Sephardic synagogue, including Moses Montefiore, that warned against threats to religious integrity. An organized attempt at a takeover of that synagogue, Britain's oldest, had been routed by the London congregation, and secession of the Reform protagonists had followed. The New York synagogue president wrote to the London leaders:

The authorities of our congregation fully participate with you in decided disapprobation of the alteration made by a portion of your congregation. To this time we have steered clear of the rock of innovation, the most trifling or immaterial has not been permitted in public worship, fearful that it might afford argument for farther, and more important, alteration. What has kept us together as brethren under the influence of the Divine Presence for so long a period, but a strict and uniform adherence to our ceremonial law and customs? And what assurance can any set of men of the present day have, that their new-fangled notions will continue for any length of time as they may have formed them? . . . until nothing remains of the beautiful consistency of our ritual as established by the sages of our nation and has stood the test of so many ages.

LEESER: TEACHER AND DOER

Other leaders strove to check the sweeping assimilationist trend. Especially notable was. the labor carried on over many years by a unique figure of the time-Isaac Leeser. Signal appraisal of Isaac Leeser's role in a doctoral dissertation by Maxine Schwartz Seller³ may be aptly quoted here:

Can a minority group maintain its identity while integrating itself into American society as a whole? Can the individual members of such a group participate simultaneously in his own culture and in that of the majority? This was the problem that challenged Isaac Leeser, immigrant from Westphalia, from his arrival in the United States in 1824 until his death in 1868. For four decades Leeser waged a heroic battle. Through constant traveling, lecturing, and publishing he stimulated the self-consciousness of the American Jew on the frontier as well as in the city, and helped him to preserve his Jewish identity. He organized synagogues . . . started schools . . . and wrote books . . . (led campaigns] everywhere . . . for the defense of Jewish rights in the United States and overseas . . . . Leeser's primary religious task was to strengthen [among America's Jews) their basic commitment to Judaism itself . . . by taking measures to combat the basic reasons that led Jews to fall away from their faith and by making adjustments, within the frame of religious orthodoxy, [for) the new American environment. His second task was to preserve American Judaism from the growing tendency to fragmentation or sectarianism which came with the rise of the Reform movement.

While battling the inroads made by the Reform forces, Leeser brought his homiletic gifts to bear in elevating the spiritual vistas and moral purpose of his contemporaries of all persuasions, as per the following extract from an address on 'The Spirit of the Ages."⁴ But in the very pursuit of wealth there is at times something so heartless, that the man of feeling, even if we leave religion totally out of view, ought to shrink from it as he would from destruction.

Quite remarkably for his mid-19th century time, Isaac Leeser sought fervently the restoration of the Jewish people in their homeland. He stressed that the Torah, the House of Israel, and the Land of Israel were made for each other ⁵ :

The whole Torah was precisely adapted to the character of the country they inhabited . . . our religion is in its nature permanent and requires at the same time a certain location for its perfect execution; it follows that a time will come when the people . . . shall be enabled to fulfill to the letter all the duties enjoined on them . . . it likewise follows that our redemption . . . cannot be accomplished by a mere civic emancipation. . . . We do not ask merely to be freed from tyrannical rule, but to see die supremacy of our code restored.

In furtherance of his far-seeing purposes, Isaac Leeser projected moves to bring some unity to America's Jews and to link them with endeavors for the building up of Jewish fife in the Holy Land. Not surprisingly, these attempts were foiled by leaders of the Reform forces. 'The stupid cry [by the Reformists] for changes in our religion has estranged brother from brother and has endangered almost any united effort," was Isaac Leeser's saddened message, but on he went nevertheless, carrying on his consecrated work to the end of his days.

The struggle for loyalty to the historic faith in that time of spiritual muddle was engaged in many Jewish communities, Cincinnati among them. In that "bed of Reform," the loyalist cause was led by the noted Isaacs family, established there since the early nineteenth century - a family whose successive members, to the present day, have been marked by undeviating fidelity to Orthodox Judaism. The pillar of this family, the "Reb Schachne" of proud memory, at a time in the 1850s moved to "a tiny crossroads village more than 30 miles away from Cincinnati." In this outlying fanning community, as recorded by a grandson, ⁶ "where the only shopping day was Saturday," Reb Schachne boldly set up his general store-on undeviatingly shomer - Shabbath basis.

On the first Saturdays, the farmers learned they could get nothing by pounding the locked door, but little by little they learned that it was worthwhile to drive in some other day for what they wanted. . . . The admiration for a person to whom his religion came first, together with appreciation for his honest merchandise, led to a complete change in the buying habits of the community.

THROUGH CONCERNED EYES

The onset of a new flow of immigration in the years before and especially after the Civil War brought marked changes to American life as a whole and to the American Jewish scene. As the era bringing ideas of "Enlightenment, " scientific progress, industrial development, and social stirrings moved across Europe from west to east, its currents collided with prevailing mentalities and social and political compositions. Especially in the domains of Czarist Russia, which then included most of Poland and Lithuania and the Baltic lands, as well as the Ukraine and White Russia, Jewish life was enduring crushing pressures. Difficult, too, was the situation of the Jewish communities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire-whose multinational domains included Galicia, and the lands of the Czechs and Slovaks. And so too, in other areas with deep-rooted Jewish communities, including Rumania, now no longer under Turkish rule. Jews from these parts had been finding their way to the United States and lands of western Europe since the early eighteenth century, but this had been a migration of adventuresome individuals. By the 1870s, the flow of Jews from eastern Europe seeking a better life had taken on more substantial proportions, vanguard of the mass influx to come. Most came with little, if any, means, and were perhaps even worse equipped for the radical unfamiliarities of American life than the previous arrivals had been. Coming from lands with a nationality-conscious Jewish populace and a richer Jewish life, these newcomers brought with them a more pronounced Jewishness. Yet the challenge of the American environment attained much the same spiritual attrition as it had with the prior arrivals.

BENJAMIN II IN AMERICA

Among the visitors who came to observe the American scene in that period was "Benjamin II," the cognomen of the extraordinary traveler I.J. Benjamin. Inspired by the examples of the famed world travelers of centuries before, Benjamin of Tudela and Petachia of Ratisbon, this latter-day Benjamin wandered from his native Moldavia to remote lands to see and meet his fellow Jews. After journeying through Asia and Africa from 1846 to 1855, Benjamin's world-roaming itinerary brought him to America, where he spent the years 1859 to 1862 in coast-to-coast travels.⁷

Benjamin's encounter with New-World fife prompted severe judgment on what he saw as the materialistic conditioning of American society in general. He saw-to a degree perhaps sharpened by his visits to California settlements born of Gold -Rush impetus and its continued urgings-the drive for wealth and 'gold' as permeating the ranks of Americans of all backgrounds. Insofar as this attitude was shared by Jews, he maintained, its effects on Jewish life were pernicious:

The principle cause for the decline of Judaism [in the U.S. as then found] is due to two sources: One is materialism. The grubbing and hunting for money and gold, which is hardly interrupted by night, almost buries the soul; it permits no higher thoughts to spring up and kills ... all nobler and sacred feelings.... The second source ... is the mentality of many spiritual leaders and teachers, who have knowledge neither of the Talmud nor of the literature of Judaism.

Like others before him and many since, Benjamin voiced his deep concern at the educational gap. He was particularly pained at the failure to provide girls with meaningful Jewish education:

The Jewish boys attend some Hebrew school or other, or are instructed privately, but in this respect, what does the situation look like for the daughters of [the House of] Israel? How sad is the provision for the religious education of these Jewish mothers and housewives of the future! How little do they learn of their duties to God and man! ... All who are members of the religious community are to blame, as a body. They should have established Jewish schools for girls as well as for boys.

LOYALTIES NEAR AND FAR

At each place he visited, Benjamin II took careful note of the synagogues and their origins, rituals, and accomplishments. He took satisfaction in noting the Orthodoxy of various synagogues. Among these were some that were later proved, by their abandonment of their original commitment, to have been less well safeguarded in their religious integrity than Benjamin had supposed. Here are some examples from among his citations:

The place now occupied by Chicago was still in the possession of Indians as recently as thirty years ago. . . . There are three congregations in Chicago, [including] Anshe Ma'ariv ('Men of the West") founded in 1847 (5607); in 1851 (5611) the congregation built a very beautiful synagogue. . . . This congregation consists mostly of Germans, its ritual likewise and consequently stiff truly orthodox. . . . B'nai Sholom, founded somewhat later than the former, has no teacher; it follows the Polish rite.

There are two congregations in St. Louis (Missouri). One is Achduth Israel; it has eighty members and its rite is Polish. It was organized in 1842 (5602). Two years ago, the congregation erected a very beautiful synagogue on Sixth Street; it cost about $130,000 to build. The money was borrowed and interest had to be paid for it. It had been announced twice that the synagogue would be sold to the highest bidder, for the congregation could not or would not pay the interest. . . . I visited the synagogue on a Shabbos but must report to my regret that the minyan necessary for public services were hardly present.

In his roamings in the far West, Benjamin viewed congregations such as the following:

Congregation Shearith Israel was organized in San Francisco in 1849. It held services in various places which, from time to time, were destroyed by fire. Finally, the congregation in 1850 bought a place on Stockton Street. . . The congregation has about 110 members. They all come from northern Europe or England. The service follows the correct Polish Minhag and is strictly orthodox. From the very beginning the congregation was founded on these principles and they are embodied in its constitution so that they remain in force to this day and, according to all appearances, it is very unlikely that innovations will be made.

While Benjamin 11 found much in the life of America's Jews to deplore, he also found occasion for praise, particularly in the area of charitable giving. He summarizes:

Perhaps in a short time Judaism in America will recover; for the many charitable institutions there, without equal in any other land, show that the Jewish spirit still lives, and we may hope that the other two pillars of Judaism, Torah and Avodah, Torah learning and religious service, which along with charity, Chesed, have been declared by our Sages to be the foundation of our religion, will soon rise up again in full splendor.