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“Their New Jerusalem”: Representations of Jewish Immigrants in the American Popular Press, 1880–1903

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2021

Deborah Varat
Deborah Varat*
Affiliation:
Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Millions of immigrants arrived in the United States during the Gilded Age, drastically altering the ethnic character of the American citizenry. This dramatic social change was met with mixed reactions from the native-born population that were vividly communicated in the popular press. Cartoonists for newspapers and magazines across the country developed a language of caricature to identify and distinguish among ethnic groups and mocked new arrivals in imagery that ranged from mild to malicious. One might assume that the masses of Eastern European Jews flooding into the country (poor, Yiddish-speaking, shtetl-bred) would have been singled out for anti-Semitic attack, just as they were in Europe at the time. However, Jews were not the primary victims of visual insults in America, nor were the Jewish caricatures wholly negative. Further, the broader scope of popular imagery, which, in addition to cartoons, includes a plethora of illustrations as well as photographs, presents a generally positive attitude toward Jewish immigrants. This attitude aligned with political rhetoric, literature, newspaper editorials, and financial opportunity. This article will propose a better alignment of the visual evidence with the scholarly understanding of the essentially providential experience of Jews in America during this period.

Keywords

cartoonsAmerican JewsKishinevimmigrationanti-Semitism
Type
Article
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 277 - 300
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 The Dreyfus Affair was surely the most egregious example. Americans, in contrast to Europeans, were enchanted with Dreyfus, as I argued in “Dreyfus in America: A Pictorial Romance,” Shofar 37 (Summer 2019): 35–59.Google Scholar

2 See Appel, John J., “Jews in American Caricature: 1820–1914,” American Jewish History 71 (Sept. 1981): 103–33.Google Scholar

3 An undercurrent of anti-Semitism ran through American visual culture of the nineteenth century, punctuated by periods of prominence and recession. The Civil War years were marked by an intensification of prejudiced caricature not seen in the periods either directly before or after, according to Gary L. Bunker and John Appel. The anti-Semitic cartoons they found were prominent, “not buried in some remote corner of an illustrated periodical,” and the tone was “harsh and hostile.” During the years addressed in the article, the insulting imagery had receded to the back pages while the large format covers and centerfolds with Jewish subjects ranged from tolerant to admiring in tone. The economic expansion and prosperity of the Gilded Age may have allowed for greater willingness to see industrious immigrants in a positive light. Gary L. Bunker and John Appel, “‘Shoddy,’ Anti-Semitism and the Civil War,” American Jewish History 82 (194): 42–71, quote on 69.

4 Baigell, Matthew, The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–1935 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Baigell, The Implacable Urge to Defame, 3.

6 The historical understanding of anti-Semitism during the Gilded Age has gone through several ideological phases since the 1930s, when historians first began to address the topic. As Higham, John had already noted back in 1957 (“Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age: A Reinterpretation,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (Mar. 1957): 560–61)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the scholarly interpretation tended to reflect the outlook of the era in which it was written. Thus, the rise of fascism in the thirties “caused some historians to scrutinize earlier American anti-Semitism with a new intentness,” whereas in the sunny postwar period, “the anxieties that spurred much of the scholarship of the thirties and forties subsided, (and) interest in anti-Semitism correspondingly diminished.” Handlin, Oscar promoted this perhaps simplistically upbeat view in the fifties (“American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the Twentieth Century,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 40 (June 1951), e.g.)Google Scholar. Dinnerstein, Leonard presented a more complex analysis in his comprehensive history of American anti-Semitism, titling the chapter about this period “The Emergence of an Antisemitic Society (1865–1900)” (Anti-Semitism in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, while others since, notably Hasia Diner, have written extensively about the uniquely open environment into which Jewish immigrants settled, and the fortunate match between their skills and experiences and the needs and opportunities of their adopted country. Diner, lays out this view in her recent book Doing Business in America: A Jewish History (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2018)Google Scholar, as well as in her article, “The Encounter between Jews and America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11 (Jan. 2012): 3-25. If Higham’s theory is correct, Baigell’s thesis, published in April 2017, may be inflected with newly inflamed fears that have arisen in the current climate of growing authoritarianism and ethnic hatred.

7 “Uncle Sam’s Lodging House,” Puck, June 7, 1882. The caption reads “Uncle Sam:—“Look here, you, everybody else is quiet and peaceable, and you’re all the time a-kicking up a row!” For more on anti-Irish imagery in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American press, see John, and Appel, Selma, Pat-Riots to Patriots: American Irish Caricature and Comic Art (East Lansing: Michigan State University Museum, 1990).Google Scholar

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9 The recent biography of Nast (Halloran, Fiona Deans, Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012)Google Scholar) does not address this aspect of Nast’s work outside of his anti-Tweed imagery, but a variety of articles do. See Appel, John J., “From Shanties to Lace Curtains: The Irish Image in Puck, 1876–1910,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (Oct. 1971): 365–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and more recently Soper, Kerry, “From Swarthy Ape to Sympathetic Everyman and Subversive Trickster: The Development of Irish Caricature in American Comic Strips between 1890 and 1920,” Journal of American Studies 39 (Aug. 2005): 257–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 “Be just–even to John Chinaman,” Judge, June 3, 1893.

11 La Libre Parole , Dec. 23, 1893.Google Scholar

12 Appel, puts it this way, “Seldom drawn in a wholly favorable manner, but also pictured less frequently than in Europe with wholly negative traits, the American caricature Jew reflected complex, ambivalent emotions and attitudes of his creators and their audiences.” Appel, , “Jews in American Caricature,” 17.Google Scholar

13 Perkins, David, “A Definition of Caricature and Caricature and Recognition,” Studies in Visual Communication 2 (Spring 1975): 1.Google Scholar

14 It is important to note that the adult literacy rate in the 1890s was 86.5 percent, and of those some unknown percentage were functionally illiterate, making clear communication through widely understood symbolic visual language so important.

15 Wechsler, Judith, “The Issue of Caricature,” Art Journal 43 (Winter 1983): 317 Google Scholar. For caricatures, see Martha Banta, Martha, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).Google Scholar

16 Handlin, Oscar, “American Views of the Jews at the Opening of the Twentieth Century,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 40 (June 1951): 329.Google Scholar

17 “The Modern Moses,” https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343634 (accessed Apr. 24, 2019).

18 Hamilton, Grant E., “Their New Jerusalem,” Judge, Jan. 23, 1892.Google Scholar

19 Zimmerman, Jonathan, “Donald Trump, Jews and the Myth of Race: How Jews Gradually Became “white” and How that Changed America,” www.salon.com/2017/04/09/donald-trump-jews-and-the-myth-of-race-how-jews-gradually-became-white-and-how-that-changed-america/ (accessed Apr. 9, 2019).Google Scholar

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22 American Jews worried about the effects on their own established community of a horde of poor Eastern Jews attracting negative attention. The community of assimilated, native-born Jews, who had come largely from Germany due to the upheaval of 1848, were more prosperous, less religious, and more politically moderate than the new arrivals. For more, see Benton-Cohen, Katherine, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 72–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 For more on the history of nativism in the United States, see Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1973).Google Scholar

24 This theme had appeared on Mar. 13, 1881, as a centerfold cartoon in Puck called “The Modern Moses.”

25 Feiler, Bruce, America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story (New York: William Morrow, 2009), 6.Google Scholar

26 Baigell, Implacable Urge to Defame, 50.

27 Baigell, Implacable Urge to Defame, 50.

28 See those included in Selzer, Michael, ed., “Kike!”: A Documentary History of Anti-Semitism in America (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1972).Google Scholar

29 Judge’s nativist bias is on full display. “The New Jerusalem, Formerly New York,” The Judge, July 22, 1882.

30 Translation provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn544630 (accessed Sept. 3, 2019).Google Scholar

31 The written evidence, such as that collected by Michael Selzer in his book “Kike!”: A Documentary History of Anti-Semitism in America, is open to interpretation. In chapter 3 covering this period, Selzer uses almost exclusively the writings of two men, one (Henry Adams) only citing his (albeit deeply prejudiced) private letters, and the other (Thomas Telemachus Timayenis) a relatively recent Greek immigrant whose three anti-Semitic books plagiarized heavily from the writings of Edouard Drumont.

32 A petition campaign that was launched in Germany in the summer of 1880 to demand a legislative solution to the “Jewish problem” caused a bump in German Jewish immigration to America. The petition sought to limit Jewish immigration and prevent Jews from holding positions as judges, teachers, and other civil service posts.

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36 Jacob Riis, “In the Gateway of Nations,” Century Magazine (Mar. 1903): 674–82. Jacob Riis’s reputation as a friend of the Jews declined later in 1903 due to the discovery of his involvement with Christian proselytizing to poor ghetto children, as reported in the American Hebrew on August 14. That this revelation “may well have shocked many within the New York Jewish community” implies that in March, when the Century Magazine piece ran, Riis was recognized as “one of the most knowledgeable and supportive friends of these new immigrants.” Gurock, Jeffrey S., “Jacob A. Riis: Christian Friend or Missionary Foe? Two Jewish Views,” American Jewish History 71 (Sept. 1981): 30.Google Scholar

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39 Hapgood, Hutchins, The Spirit of the Ghetto (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1902).Google Scholar

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41 New York Times, Apr. 28, 1903.

42 “In Behalf of Hebrews,” Indianapolis Journal, June 16, 1903.

43 “Particularly heart-warming for Jewish immigrants,” writes Gil Ribak, “was the participation of many non-Jews at hundreds of protest meetings and benefits across the country, and the many sympathetic editorials in the American press. Even if those texts were inaccessible to many, the Yiddish press or English-reading family members and friends were quick to inform them.” Ribak, Gil, Gentile New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 81.Google Scholar

44 New York American Journal, June 14, 1903.

45 http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/guide/port-2.html (retrieved Apr. 1, 2019).

46 Schiller, Dan, “Realism, Photography and Journalistic Objectivity in 19th Century America,” Studies in Visual Communication 4 (Dec. 1977): 86–98.Google Scholar

47 Penkower, Monty Noam, “The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: A Turning Point in Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 24 (Oct. 2004): 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Quoted in Philip Ernest Schoenberg, “The American Reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 63 (March 1974): 266.Google Scholar

49 Booth-Tucker, Frederick, “Salvation Army Plan,” The New York Times , May 24, 1903.Google Scholar

50 Quoted in Cyrus Adler, ed., Voice of America on Kishineff (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1903), 47.

51 Quoted in Voice of America on Kishineff, 76. In addition to his support for refugees, Teller had a reputation as a champion of Native American land rights.

52 Quoted by Dorsey, Leroy G. and Harlow, Rachel M., “We Want Americans Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (Spring 2003): 56.Google Scholar

53 From a January 3, 1919, letter to the president of the American Defense Society. Bishop, Joseph Bucklin, ed., Theodore Roosevelt and his Time Shown in his Own Letters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 474.Google Scholar

54 Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and his Time Shown in his Own Letters, 474.

55 Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 58–77.

56 In a fascinating article on this subject, Taylor Stults argues that “American public opinion, led by the Jewish community, forced President Theodore Roosevelt into a more anti-Russian posture than he would otherwise have taken.” This thesis presents Roosevelt as a follower on this issue, not one setting the tone for the American people. Stults, Taylor, “Roosevelt, Russian Persecution of Jews, and American Public Opinion,” Jewish Social Studies 33 (Jan. 1971): 13–22.Google Scholar

57 Comments made at the consecration of Grace Memorial Reformed Church, Washington, DC, June 7, 1903 in Alfred Henry Lewis, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, 1901–1905, (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1906), 1: 481.

58 Detroit Free Press, May 31, 1903.

59 Quoted in Voice of America on Kishineff, 11.

60 Matthews, Joshua Steven, “The American Alighieri: Receptions of Dante in the United States, 1818–1867” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2012), 234.Google Scholar

61 Though written in 1883, Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” became well known only in 1903 when it was installed at the Statue of Liberty on an engraved bronze plaque.

62 Caption: “Again the weekly record of immigration has been broken. In 1902, 650,000 persons came here to live, and now it seems certain, from the record of the first three months of 1903, that this enormous figure will be exceeded this year.”

63 The Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 8, 1903, 1.