Jews in new cities. Introduction

In 1942 Jewish historian Salo W. Baron published an ambitious survey of Jewish community life from antiquity to the American Revolution. The three volumes remain among of the most influential works in the field of Jewish history. In his introduction, Baron noted a new settlement pattern in the Jewish world.

Today probably over three million Jews, or nearly one-fifth of all world Jewry, live within one hundred miles of Times Square. There is an enormous difference between a Jewish community counting a few hundred or a few thousand members and the new gigantic agglomerations of Jews found in New York City or even in Chicago, Philadelphia, London, Moscow, Budapest and other great cities.¹

Like other contemporary Jewish observers Baron wondered about the implications of this pattern of urbanization. Would settlement in large cities erase cultural and religious differences? Would urban life produce new types of communities and new forms of Jewish sociability? Or would traditional forms and structures survive in large cities?

Arthur Ruppin, a Jewish sociologist and prominent Zionist, also used the term ‘agglomeration’ in his 1930 study about the ‘Sociology of the Jews.’ Ruppin associated the term with new forms of Jewish sociability in huge Jewish settlement concentrations in cities like New York, where more Jews lived in some neighborhoods than in entire countries in Europe. New York, Ruppin pointed out, constituted a ‘Jewish world in itself.’ He remained skeptical about the long-term effects of urbanization for maintaining Jewish life but conceded that agglomerations gave rise to new forms of Jewish Gemeinschaft. As he put it, ‘The effect of urbanization [on Jews] is centrifugal, [but] the agglomeration has a centripetal effect.’²

When Ruppin and Baron were writing, Jewish (and general) mass urbanization was still a relatively recent phenomenon. Over the previous century, Jews had been migrating in unprecedented numbers to a few major urban centers in Europe and the United States. Especially in Eastern Europe – in regions belonging to the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires – Jews moved to cities earlier and in far larger numbers than members of other ethnic and religious groups. Baron experienced the increase of the Jewish populations in towns and small cities in Eastern Europe firsthand. He was born in 1895 in Tarnow, a largely Polish-speaking city in West Galicia, which then belonged to the Austrian Empire. During his youth Tarnow’s Jewish population grew substantially. In 1910, shortly before he left to study at the University of Vienna, Tarnow was home to more than 15,000 Jews who represented over 40% of the city’s population. This was hardly atypical. Around 1900 many mid-sized towns and cities in the Austrian province of Galicia and the Russian Pale of Settlement resembled Tarnow. In some cities Jews even were in the majority. In Białystok, an expanding industrial center located between Warsaw and Vilna, the number of Jews exceeded 75% of the population of 63,000 in 1897.³

The Jewish migration to smaller cities in Eastern Europe was overshadowed by the dramatic growth of Jewish communities in very large cities on both sides of the Atlantic, largely as a result of movement from and within Eastern Europe after 1860. New York’s Jewish population grew from an estimated 80,000 in 1880 to over 1.5 million by 1920. Again, Baron experienced this firsthand. He had moved to New York in the late 1920s from Vienna after accepting an offer from Stephen S. Wise to teach at the newly founded Jewish Institute of Religion. In 1930 he was appointed to a chair for Jewish history of Columbia University.⁴

Though the rapid expansion of the Jewish community in New York City was exceptional, similar processes played out elsewhere. After the First World War Philadelphia and Warsaw were home to about 300,000 Jews, Chicago and Budapest to over 200,000, and Łódź to almost 200,000. Over 100,000 Jews lived in Vienna, Odessa, Berlin, London, Paris and Kiev, and Buenos Aires. In the early 1920s Soviet cities outside of the former Pale attracted large numbers of internal Jewish migrants. For members of a very small group who constituted less than one percent of the population in most countries, their proportional share of the urban population was even more impressive than the absolute number. In New York Jews made up about 25% of the population in 1920, in Chicago and Philadelphia they represented about 10%, and in Warsaw and Odessa over a third.⁵

The “people of the city”?

Jews of different religious and social backgrounds have long embraced modern cities – and shaped them in significant ways. Cities symbolized opportunity and freedom for a group whose members had been marginalized socially and economically for generations in different territories in Europe. Indeed, Jews are now often imagined and depicted as quintessential ‘people of the city.’

The period around 1500 marks a transitional phase in Jewish history and in the history of modern cities. After 1500, cities in different parts of Europe expanded and gradually became more accessible for Jews and members of other marginalized groups. Several cities in Italy and Central Europe, most famously Venice, formally admitted Jews, albeit under a set of tightly enforced rules. In Venice, Livorno, Rome, and also in Frankfurt, Prague, and Vienna Jews were relegated to separate quarters that became known as ‘ghettos.’ The institution of the ghetto represented a compromise between groups favoring economic development and those favoring exclusion, especially the Catholic Church. Rather than symbolizing Jewish exclusion ghettos marked a step towards the acceptance of Jews as members of a different religious group. The ghettos were based on formal agreements and ended a period when Jews could be violently expelled from cities on arbitrary grounds. Most ghettos were formally dissolved when Napoleon’s armies conquered Central Europe and Italy after 1795.⁶

Following the Reformation, Amsterdam and a few port cities in Western Europe and the Americas also accepted Jewish settlement. Unlike in Italy and Central Europe, Jews were free to choose where to reside. It was not a coincidence that these cities were crucial nodes of emerging global trading networks and colonial empires, and mostly ruled by Protestants. Amsterdam, for example, became home to a flourishing Sephardi community during the 1600s. In 1654 Jews from Amsterdam received permission to establish a community in London. Sephardi Jews participated in the discovery and settlement of colonies in the Americas. They were not permitted to practice their religion in territories under Catholic rule. By contrast, Jews could and did move to colonial settlements in Dutch and British territories such as New Amsterdam/New York during the 1600s.⁷

Yet in 1800 the overwhelming majority of the population was still excluded from cities in Europe: most Christians were tied to the land and only very few Jews were permitted to or had the necessary means to settle in cities. This changed in the first half of the 19^th century. In Central and Western Europe, as well as in the United States, urban centers became focal points of industrialization and expanded rapidly, in some cases from small settlements into boom towns. By 1870 most Jews in the United States, France, Britain, and the German States were concentrated in a handful of larger cities such as New York, Paris, London, and Berlin and had become members of the urban bourgeoisie. However, since Jews represented a relatively small group, Jewish urbanization was not particularly visible.⁸

Until 1870, over 80% of the world Jewish population lived dispersed in less developed regions of Eastern Europe, primarily in small market towns. The expansion of railroad networks into this region after 1860 was a catalyst for industrialization and urbanization. Railroads triggered an economic transformation that displaced Jews earlier from their economic niches as peddlers, artisans and small service providers than it did Christian agricultural workers. Strong population growth, economic pressure, and the integration of markets for labor, goods and services explain why Jewish (and general) migration from Eastern Europe began to increase after the late 1860s. The United States exerted an enormous pull for Europeans looking for better economic opportunities. Industrial expansion and urbanization in North America and mass immigration from Europe were mutually dependent processes. Internal migration to industrializing cities such as Warsaw and Łódź was closely related to transatlantic migrations. Many migrants heading to the United States stopped over in cities closer to their hometowns to earn money for the journey.

After 1880 the transatlantic migration from Southern and Eastern Europe increased sharply. The overwhelming majority of Italians, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and others settled in industrial and commercial centers in the Northeast and Midwest where they were employed for low wages in industrial and service jobs. Even though Jewish urbanization rates were impressive, especially after 1880, many other groups also moved to cities. In large American cities, an influx of migrants from the South of Italy outnumbered that of Jews. However, the remigration rates for mostly younger men from Sicily, Apulia, Calabria, and adjacent regions exceeded 60% in some years before 1914.⁹

Within a few decades Jewish migration from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires transformed Jewish communities around the globe. Two developments stand out. Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe clustered in a handful of major cities in the United States, above all in New York, but also in Chicago and Philadelphia. Several Jewish communities in Europe – notably London – also expanded dramatically as a result of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. But others did not. Relatively few Jewish migrants from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires settled in Imperial Germany because of its restrictive migration policy. Jews from Eastern Europe bypassed cities such as Amsterdam because of the absence of economic opportunities. Apart from those drawn to London, most Jews who did not move to the United States followed a general pattern by heading to cities in their respective country. Jews settling in Vienna overwhelmingly hailed from Galicia. Budapest attracted Jews from the Hungarian part of the Habsburg monarchy. The increase of Berlin’s Jewish population by 1900 was tied to internal migration from Prussia’s eastern provinces. In the Russian Empire, the rise of Warsaw and Łódź – but also to dozens of mid-sized cities such as Vitebsk and Białystok – was related to Jewish migration from the northern Pale of Settlement.¹⁰

Not all cities were attractive or even accessible. For instance, Jews remained largely excluded from major cities in the Russian Empire until the First World War. The authorities permitted Jews to move to cities in the Pale of Settlement, notably to Kiev, Odessa, and the main Polish cities. Only a small number of Jewish merchants, army veterans and students could legally settle in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities outside of the Pale. After the collapse of the Russian Empire Jews relocated in large numbers to Soviet cities, boosting the populations especially of Moscow and Petrograd/Leningrad, and Kharkiv. Migration restrictions passed by the United States Congress in the early 1920s and relatively liberal migration policies in postwar France and Germany explain why thousands of Eastern European Jews headed to Berlin and Paris, cities whose Jewish populations had mostly been drawn from within the borders of Germany and France respectively before 1914. São Paulo’s small Jewish population increased substantially after 1918 because Brazil was one of the few countries in the western hemisphere that admitted Eastern and Southern European immigrants.¹¹

The second noteworthy aspect of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe was its global dimension. Jewish migrants either established entirely new communities or quickly outnumbered established Jewish populations even in distant cities. In 1870 Buenos Aires was home to a Jewish community that could barely muster a minyan, the ten men required to conduct a Jewish service. Jewish immigration increased when the Jewish Colonization Association began promoting agricultural settlements in Argentina among Jews in the Russian Empire in the 1890s. Most migrants who initially settled in colonies in Santa Fe province soon drifted to the bustling capital city. A similar pattern was evident in Palestine where many migrants abandoned agricultural settlement schemes for better economic opportunities and living conditions in nearby cities. By 1920 Buenos Aires was the largest Jewish community in the southern hemisphere with an estimated Jewish population of over 100,000. The new city of Tel Aviv grew rapidly during the 1920s and early 1930s.¹²

South Africa also illustrates the dramatic impact of Jewish mass migration. Around 1880 about 4,000 Jews lived on the southern tip of the African continent, primarily in the Cape Colony. After the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in the 1880s, the frontier town of Johannesburg emerged from nothing on the Transvaal Highveld. In the 1890s and early 1900s a network of Jews from a few towns in Lithuanian pulled thousands of Jewish families to Johannesburg, boosting the Jewish population in South Africa to about 40,000 by 1914. By the time Harry Graumann was elected Johannesburg’s first Jewish mayor in 1909, the center of Jewish life had shifted from the Cape to the new commercial center.¹³

Can Jews be described as a ‘people of the city’? The share of Jews living in cities, and in particular in very large cities, far outpaced that of the general population between the early 19^th century and the post-1945 period. Jews moved to cities in Central and Eastern Europe – and beyond – earlier and in larger numbers than others for economic reasons. Economic transformation displaced Jewish peddlers and small service providers earlier than others, forcing them to seek and embrace new opportunities in expanding cities. After 1850 Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs launched major businesses in American and European cities, especially in retail, in the garment sector, and in financial services. And urban Jews, ranging from trade unionists to philanthropists, religious leaders, women’s’ rights activists, scholars and politicians, have stood out as reformers who drove efforts to improve living and working conditions in cities.

Critics of urbanization often singled out Jews as the symbolic ‘other.’¹⁴ Indeed, the strong commitment of Jews to political liberalism in the United States and other countries was in no small part tied to the embrace of the modern city. In late 19^th century Europe antisemites specifically blamed Jews for the ills of urbanization, notably labor exploitation, extremes of wealth and poverty, the disruption of traditional hierarchies, pollution and the destruction of rural landscape, political radicalism, and corruption. In the United States critics of urbanization and immigration also used antisemitic stereotypes to build political coalitions across cultural and class divisions. Rural Americans, who were overwhelmingly Protestant and represented a majority of the population well into the middle decades of the 20^th century, associated big cities with vice, political corruption, and irreligion. Members of the Protestant business establishment, who often lived in cities and employed immigrants, often subscribed to an idealized vision of a preindustrial period of rural harmony and racial homogeneity. Nativists cleverly tapped these sentiments by employing widespread antisemitic stereotypes.¹⁵

American nativists, who were concerned about ‘racial’ transformation, considered Jews as particularly dangerous because, unlike Chinese or Italian immigrants, they passed as ‘whites.’ In the 1916 essay The Passing of the Great Race, New York socialite and environmentalist Madison Grant lamented the transformation of New York into a ‘cloaca gentium’ (sewer of nations). As he put it in one of the most notorious passages of the book, the ‘man of the old stock … is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women.’¹⁶

Leading Zionists also viewed Jewish urbanization critically. In a 1904 study, Arthur Ruppin, for example, warned that high Jewish urbanization rates might lead to the dissolution of Jews as a group. He described large cities as ‘hotspots of assimilation.’ This pessimistic view of cities intermingled with suspicion of modern capitalism. Ruppin uncritically accepted German economist Werner Sombart’s characterization of Jews as ‘incarnation of the capitalist-commercialist spirit.’ In 1908 Ruppin left Berlin for Palestine where he became one of the key architects of Jewish agricultural colonization.¹⁷

New cities

The processes of mass urbanization described above have not received their due from historians of modern Jewry. Nor has the relationship between Jews and the modern city. But this special issue has a more modest objective. It takes as it focus the ‘new gigantic agglomerations’ identified by Salo Baron. Our six case studies – Łódź, Manchester, Chicago, Miami Beach, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires – reflect cities that exploded into existence after 1800 or were rapidly remade by a massive influx of newcomers after that date.¹⁸ They had features distinct from other types of cities including imperial capitals like London, Paris, Budapest, and Berlin.¹⁹

All attracted vast numbers of migrants and grew at an unimaginable rate, eliciting equal measures of wonder and dismay from contemporary observers. As we will see, these new cities were often good places to be a Jew. A variety of structural and social factors related to the newness of these cities presented particularly opportunities, but also challenged traditional concepts of community and family in distinct ways. Everyone was a newcomer, everyone was an outsider, and everyone had come to make money. Not all, however, were equally welcome.

The authors address a variety of questions. What features made the city attractive to Jews, and what functions did Jews fill within the urban economy? What, if anything was distinctive about the experience of Jews within the city? Were cities that were particularly inclusive for Jews also welcoming for others, not least colonial subjects and persons of ‘color,’ often descendants of former slaves? (European immigration to Buenos Aires and São Paulo was in no small part the result of government policies to ‘whiten’ the respective societies.²⁰) Did Jews promote inclusion? Were Jews comfortable to express their difference in the urban space because they were accepted as insiders, or did they keep a low profile? Did the nature of the city shape the Jewish community? And how, if at all, did the presence of Jews shape the city?

The six cities presented here – Łódź, Manchester, Chicago, Miami Beach, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires – share some features but also were and are very different. Łódź, the subject of Eliyana Adler’s article, is the only city located in Eastern Europe. In 1940 the German occupiers forced the Jewish population into a notorious ghetto. Very few Jews from Łódź survived the Holocaust. Miami Beach is far younger than the other cities and primarily a destination for tourists and retirees. Apart from Miami Beach, the other cities developed as industrial centers and railroad hubs. Manchester, the subject of Tony Kushner’s article, became the quintessential symbol of industrialization. Even today Łódź is known as Polish Manchester. The Jewish population of Manchester was smaller than that of comparable cities, in part because Manchester’s transformation into an industrial city occurred long before the 1880s when significant numbers of Jews began leaving Eastern Europe.

After 1880 other industrial centers, not least Chicago, the subject of Tobias Brinkmann’s article, offered better opportunities. The industries that developed in Chicago, but also in São Paulo and Buenos Aires, were closely tied to railroad expansion and to the processing and global export of cash crops planted (or in the case of livestock, raised) in the vicinity of both cities. São Paulo, the subject of Jeffrey Lesser’s article, only became an important destination for Jews after the First World War, not least because Brazil pursued a relatively liberal immigration policy during the 1920s, when most other countries in the western hemisphere shifted to restrictive migration regimes. Buenos Aires, the subject of the article by Ra’anan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin and the only capital city in our sample, attracted far more Jewish migrants and earlier than São Paulo, as a result of a massive agricultural colonization scheme promoted by the Jewish Colonization Association in the fertile Pampas of Santa Fe province.

Taken together, these case studies reflect the challenges of adopting a conceptual approach to studying Jews and the modern city – the experience of Jews in each city reflects particular local dynamics, influenced by a particular national context – but also the virtues of adopting such an approach. In some ways, to be a Jew in Johannesburg was entirely different than to be a Jew in Chicago (or Łódź, or Buenos Aires, or any other new city that attracted large numbers of Jews). But as these essays collectively argue, there was a common experience too.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tobias Brinkmann

Tobias Brinkmann is the Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History and Director of the Jewish Studies program at Penn State University, University Park, PA. His study Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2024.

Adam Mendelsohn

Adam D. Mendelsohn is Director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He is the author, most recently, of Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army (New York University Press, 2022).

Notes

1. Salo Baron, The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1942), vol. 1, 26.

2. Arthur Ruppin, Soziologie der Juden (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), vol. 1, 118 (quote), 129.

3. Antony Polonsky, ‘Tarnow,’ 2010, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Tarnow (accessed September 4, 2023); Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 19–20; American Jewish Yearbook 46 (1944–1945): 491–503

4. Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History (New York: NYU Press, 1995), 16–26.

5. American Jewish Yearbook 20 (1918/19), 339–352; American Jewish Yearbook 44 (1942/43), 422–430; American Jewish Yearbook 51 (1950), 245–250; Ruppin, Soziologie der Juden, vol. 1, 67–88; ‘Jews in New York Number 906,400,’ New York Times, January, 27, 1912.

6. Daniel B. Schwartz, Ghetto: The History of a Word (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 9–48; Benjamin Ravid, ‘All Ghettos Were Jewish Quarters but Not All Jewish Quarters Were Ghettos,’ in The Frankfurt Judengasse: Jewish Life in an Early Modern City, eds. Fritz Backhaus, Gisela Engel, Robert Liberles, and Margarete Schlüter. (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2010), 5–22.

7. David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History over Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 72–81, 224–233; and Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

8. Saskia Coenen Snyder, Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

9. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise: Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1977); John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), xviii; Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); Ewa Morawska, Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Dino Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

10. Marsha Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1983), 13–98; Tobias Brinkmann, ‘From Hinterberlin to Berlin: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Berlin before and after 1918,’ Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7 (2008): 339–355; Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok.

11. Nathans, Beyond the Pale; Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton NJ University Press, 2004), 216–371; Jeffrey Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

12. Mollie Lewis Nouwen, Oy, My Buenos Aires: Jewish Immigrants and the Creation of Argentine National Identity (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2013); Gur Alroey, An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the early Twentieth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).

13. John Simon, ‘At the Frontier: The South African Jewish Experience,’ in Jewries at the Frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Milton Shain (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 67–90; Mendel Kaplan and Marian Robertson, Founders and Followers: Johannesburg Jewry, 1887–1915 (Cape Town: Vlaeberg Publishers, 1991). A noteworthy exception to this pattern was Australia. See Suzanne Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1997), 76–106.

14. Joachim Schlör, Das Ich der Stadt. Debatten über Judentum und Urbanität, 1822–1938 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2005).

15. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955); George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).

16. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 81, 186.

17. Arthur Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart: Eine sozialwissenschaftliche Studie (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1904), 175, 267.

18. See James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) for the dramatic growth of cities during this period as the result of a ‘Settler Revolution.’

19. For a useful typology of cities see: Göran Therborn, Cities of Power: The Urban, The National, The Popular, The Global (London: Verso, 2017).

20. David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín, Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).