Cornelia Wilhelm. Deutsche Juden in Amerika: Bürgerliches Selbstbewusstsein und jüdische Identität in den Orden B'nai B'rith und Treue Schwestern, 1843-1914. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007. 372 S. EUR 48.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-515-08550-2.
Reviewed by Jason Tebbe (Department of History, Stephen F. Austin State University)
Published on H-German (July, 2008)
Bildung across the Water
In the last two decades, German historians have constructed an impressively voluminous historiography of the nineteenth-century Bürgertum. In general, this historiography questions the Sonderweg thesis by pointing to the middle class as a force for progress and liberalism within a supposedly irredeemably militarized society. To demonstrate the power of the Bürgertum, this historiography has produced plethora of studies on middle-class associations and their function in the public sphere. In her book, Cornelia Wilhelm brings this historiographical tradition into a new realm by examining the associational life of German-American Jews via the B'nai B'rith organization and its women's arm, the Independent Order of True Sisters.
Her book is not a comprehensive account of German Jews in the United States, but rather an in-depth, highly detailed institutional history of B'nai B'rith from its founding in 1843 to the year 1914, mostly using documents from the organization's archive. Wilhelm argues that B'nai B'rith represented the modernizing and universalist ideals of Reform Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany. According to the author, the organization helped foster a secular Jewish identity that allowed Jews to integrate into American life by taking part in its civil society. Furthermore, Wilhelm makes the wider claim that the universalist and humanitarian principles espoused by B'nai B'rith have continued to mark Jewish-American identity ever since the nineteenth century.
The book begins with a short account of Jewish life in America between 1820 and 1850, a time that saw increased Jewish migration to the United States, especially from German-speaking Europe. The founders of B'nai B'rith wanted to create a Masonic organization for Jews independent of the synagogue; their main model was the Odd Fellows. B'nai B'rith grew quickly, and Wilhelm provides a very detailed account of its expansion from modest beginnings in New York City to a national organization with lodges across the country.
Very early on, B'nai B'rith marked itself with an Enlightenment flavor, arguing that it worked not just in the interests of Jews, but in the interests of humanity. This humanist orientation and affiliation with the more radical segments of the Reform movement led to pitched battles within the organization as well as the formation of a rival, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), in 1874. Wilhelm spends much of her overview of the years 1850 to 1875 describing the debates that divided the members of B'nai B'rith, most of them centering on the role of religion within the Jewish community. A national conference in Cleveland in 1855 resolved some of these questions in favor of the more religious faction, although the order's universalist stance did not disappear. As B'nai B'rith evolved, other organizations stepped in to challenge its status as the only national organization for Jews. UAHC, which based itself in Jewish congregations rather taking B'nai B'rith's secular approach, cut into B'nai Brith's membership. Though debates divided B'nai B'rith, Wilhelm argues that the organization managed to create a modern, emancipated Jewish identity integrated into the political ideals of American citizenship. Interestingly, she finds that this identity owed something to German ideas of Bildung, which were proudly displayed through the building of the Maimonides Library in New York and other B'nai Brith projects.
Despite these efforts, membership in B'nai B'rith dropped considerably from 1885 to 1900, partly due to generational change and partly because of the changing demographics of Jewish immigration to America. The vast majority of Jews now came from eastern Europe, and many considered B'nai B'rith an aloof club of the German-Jewish elite. During this time of relative decline, however, in 1883 the group nonetheless opened a lodge in Berlin, which underscored its continued cultural ties to Germany.
Wilhelm also considers True Sisters, the women's auxiliary of B'nai B'rith, which in her eyes helped to articulate a modern Jewish identity for women. Echoing Marion Kaplan, Wilhelm notes that Jewish women had typically exerted their influence in the home. Expanding on that role, organizations like True Sisters allowed Jewish women to take on a public yet respectable role in expressing moral authority, for example, as charitable workers. Like B'nai B'rith, True Sisters was marked by a German cultural sensibility. Its sponsorship of a Schiller festival displayed in exemplary fashion its devotion to that cardinal virtue of the German Bürgertum, Bildung.
After a decline in membership in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, B'nai B'rith revived in the early twentieth century under a leadership attuned to ideals of the Progressive Era. Its new leader, Leo Levi, strove to shake perception of the organization as elitist by engaging with newly arrived Jewish immigrants and fighting for their interests in the United States. He also pushed governments and politicians to support and protect Jews who faced increasing violence and pogroms in eastern Europe. These efforts required overcoming some of the ill feelings between "eastern" and "western" Jews. Wilhelm argues that the concern for poor immigrant Jews by B'nai B'rith reflected wider trends of the time, particularly the Social Gospel movement. If this is true, Wilhelm's argument about the B'nai B'rith as a force for integration into wider American society is greatly bolstered. In this vein, Wilhelm discusses the founding of the Anti-Defamation League and the Hillel Foundation, both well-known in contemporary America. In her conclusion, Wilhelm invokes no less an authority than Leo Baeck to support the main result of her study: that the history of the B'nai B'rith has been unfairly neglected and that the organization played a crucial role in the formation of American Jewish identity.
The main virtue of the book is the highly commendable comprehensiveness of its research; Wilhelm leaves no element of B'nai B'rith's nineteenth-century history unconsidered. It should be commended as well for taking findings from the growing literature on the German Bürgertum and applying them to new fields of study in a different geographical context. The example of German-Jewish organizational life also points tantalizingly to other possible influences of the German diaspora on America, Jewish and otherwise, that merit further study. That said, the book's narrow focus on B'nai B'rith and True Sisters could have been widened to offer a broader perspective on Jewish life in America and the cultural activities of German-American Jews. The narrowness of focus sometimes distracts from the thesis, because the in-depth detail provided on the internal workings of the two organizations leads the reader away from a larger understanding of German-Jewish culture and influence in America. Also, although Wilhelm treats the subject of antisemitism, more could be done to measure just how willing American gentiles were to accept Jews in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century society or whether they shared German Jews' attitudes toward "eastern" Jews. Without such a discussion it is difficult to judge B'nai B'rith's success in fostering integration. The connection between German culture and the B'nai B'rith could have been treated with greater depth and nuance as well. Despite these criticisms, however, the book will be useful for historians interested in the history of Reform Judaism, Jewish immigration to the United States, and the history of bourgeois sociability.
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Citation:
Jason Tebbe. Review of Wilhelm, Cornelia, Deutsche Juden in Amerika: Bürgerliches Selbstbewusstsein und jüdische Identität in den Orden B'nai B'rith und Treue Schwestern, 1843-1914.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14772
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