The recent observance of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence last month brought back to mind my wife’s and my trip earlier this year to Philadelphia to celebrate the bar mitzvah of our very dear friends’ grandson. The hotel where we stayed is only one block away from Independence Hall, and the synagogue at which the bar mitzvah took place is home to what was the first Ashkenazic congregation in the United States. On the last day of our stay we visited the Weitzman Museum of American Jewish History, whose displays and artifacts tell the story of more than three and a half centuries of Jewish life in America.
In colonial times, the Jewish population was small – perhaps, 2,000 at most – concentrated in five communities along the eastern seaboard. Many of the early Jewish settlers were Sephardim, descendants of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal during the last years of the 15th century, and the synagogues that they established followed the Sephardic ritual.
A second wave of Jewish immigration lasted from 1820 to 1880 and was made up of German-speaking Jews from central Europe fleeing the reactionary regimes that had been restored to power in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat and seeking freedom and economic opportunity in America. By the late 19th century, the American Jewish population exceeded a quarter million. Many Jews had prospered in business and the professions, and they established a flourishing communal life which included synagogues, charitable organizations, hospitals, fraternal lodges, newspapers and magazines, and eventually a school for the training of rabbis.
The third wave, from the 1880s to the passage of legislation restricting immigration to America in the 1920s, was the most numerous, made up of Jews from Eastern Europe – numbering more than 2 million and coming mainly from the Russian Empire but also from Austria-Hungary and Romania. My own family history traces back to this wave of migration. It was a thrill for me several years ago to visit Ellis Island where my maternal grandparents first stepped ashore in America 110 years ago.
America to these immigrants was the goldene medina, the golden land of opportunity. And so it was: the immigrant generation struggled, but their struggle and sacrifice enabled their children and grandchildren to succeed and to contribute their skills, their knowledge, and their talent to the common good. Jews did encounter prejudice and bigotry in America, stereotyping, scapegoating, and hateful remarks, discrimination and exclusion, always hurtful and demeaning, but never remotely akin to their experience of persecution and second-class status in pre-emancipation Europe.
Antisemitism waxes and wanes. It peaked here in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Henry Ford’s slanderous libels of Jews in the Dearborn Independent, the hardships of the Depression and the proliferation of admirers and imitators of the Nazis. It subsided for a lengthy interval following World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust but, sadly, has reemerged in recent years and has entailed acts of murderous violence such as the shootings at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Antisemitism exists today at all points along the political spectrum – on the right and on the left – and it is extremely worrisome to me and to our community.
Jews have intuitively understood that where any one group is targeted by prejudice and hate, no other group (particularly one that is similarly vulnerable) can feel safe. To fight racism and other forms of hate is an obligation in its own right. Additionally, our experience has taught us that forging alliances beyond one’s own boundaries in the struggle for a society that will honor and respect difference and that will be safe and secure for all works to everyone’s benefit.
The declaration’s affirmation that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has been likened to a promise, whose enjoyment was restricted for many years to the privileged few. It took the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution, women’s suffrage enacted following World War I, and ultimately the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s to make those promises a reality for all of our citizens. Being vigilant in the protection of those rights is the responsibility of all who cherish a democratic society.
Rabbi Barry Marks is rabbi emeritus of Temple Israel in Springfield.
