The Jews in America Trilogy (6 page)

Though there was no explicit anti-Semitism in New York at the time, it was generally considered “better”—among such families as the Roosevelts, Van Rensselaers, Goelets, and Morrises—not to be Jewish. Yet there was, at the same time, a distinct Jewish upper class, composed of families who had been in the city even longer than some of the leading gentiles.

The first recorded Jewish settler in Manhattan was a man named Jacob Barsimson who arrived early in 1654. He was an Ashkenazic, or German, Jew. No one knows what happened to Mr. Barsimson, and his importance to history has been eclipsed by the arrival, somewhat later that same year, of twenty-three Jewish immigrants aboard the bark
St
.
Charles
, often called “the Jewish
Mayflower.
” The
St
.
Charles
had carried its passengers from Recife, Brazil, but actually the little band's journey had begun thousands of miles farther away and years before in fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal. There, after the violence of the Inquisition—and, by a prophetic coincidence, in the same year that Columbus discovered the New World—the Catholic monarchs had ordered all Jews to adopt Christianity or depart the Iberian Peninsula. Those who would not convert had fled and scattered—to Italy, Turkey, Hamburg, and to various Baltic ports. Many had been drawn to the tolerant atmosphere of the Netherlands, and when the Dutch conquered Recife in 1630 and urged settlers to go to the new possession and form colonies, many Jews had migrated to South America, where they found a few years' peace. But in 1654 Recife had been reconquered by the Portuguese, and Brazil was no longer safe for Jews. They fled once more. The
St. Charles
passengers were on the last stage of an exodus of the ancient Sephardic culture from medieval Spain.

In the unwritten hierarchy of world Jewry, the Sephardim are considered, and consider themselves, the most noble of all Jews because,
as a culture, they claim the longest unbroken history of unity and suffering. The arrival of twenty-three Sephardim in New Amsterdam was not auspicious. When he discovered they were penniless, Governor Peter Stuyvesant threw the lot of them in prison. There they might have stayed, but, fortunately for them, many stockholders of the Dutch West India Company were Jewish and so Stuyvesant was persuaded to release the twenty-three on the condition that “the poor among them” be no burden and “be supported by their own nation.” Within a year most had established themselves as merchants, trading in tobacco, fish, and furs, though they were not admitted as freemen until the next century. As a group, the Sephardim were proud, diligent, but an aloof and somewhat crusty people, and they were once labeled “the obstinate and immovable Jews.”

The great Sephardic families of New York, many of them descended from the
St. Charles
arrivals, include the Hendrickses, the Cardozos, the Baruchs, the Lazaruses, the Nathans, the Solises, the Gomezes, the Lopezes, the Lindos, the Lombrosos, and the Seixases. By the beginning of the nineteenth century a number of the Sephardim had become quite wealthy. Old Harmon Hendricks, for instance, had a copper store in Mill Street (now South William Street) and a factory in New Jersey which was the first copper-rolling mill in the country. He died in the 1840's, according to one report, “immensely rich, leaving over three millions of dollars” and a great deal of valuable real estate. His daughter was married to Benjamin Nathan, a stockbroker in Wall Street, and, in fact, Hendricks copper shares were considered among the blue chips of the era. In
The Old Merchants of New York City
, published in the 1860's, Joseph A. Scoville reported that

With all the revulsions [sic] in trade, the credit of the [Hendricks] house has never been questioned, either in this country or in Europe, and today in Wall Street, their obligations would sell quite as readily as government securities bearing the same rates of interest. No man stood higher in this community while he lived, and no man has left a memory more revered than Harmon Hendricks. When he died, the synagogue which he attended lost one of its best friends, and the rising generation of that numerous family could not have a better example.

Elsewhere the Jews were regarded with a similar admiration and respect and, because they were still relatively few in number,
*
with curious interest. In 1817, when a watchmaker named Joseph Jonas became the first Jew to settle in Cincinnati, one report says:

He was a curiosity at first, as many in that part of the country had never seen a Jew before. Numbers of people came from the country round about to see him, and he related in his old age of an old Quakeress who said to him, “Art thou a Jew? Thou art one of God's chosen people. Wilt thou let me examine thee?” She turned him round and round, and at last exclaimed: “Well, thou art no different to other people.”

In New York the Sephardic families and their temple, Shearith Israel, had a distinct and special status. Many of their men had fought on the side of the colonists in the American Revolution, and as merchants and bankers they had helped finance the war and provision and outfit its armies. Haym Solomon, who had come from Poland, worked closely with William Morris and the Continental Congress as a broker, and helped raise a particularly large sum for the Revolution. For his services he was given the official title of “Broker to the Office of Finance.” Even earlier, Jewish bankers had lent money to Lord Bellamont, a particularly improvident eighteenth-century colonial Governor of New York, helping to keep the colony financially on its feet, and New York's first Lutheran church was built with money advanced by Jewish bankers—among them Isaac Moses, who helped establish the Bank of North America in 1781.

But by the beginning of the nineteenth century the complexion of the Jewish community in New York had begun to change. German Jews had begun to trickle in. At first, the Germans were taken into the established Sephardic congregation, intermarried with the Sephardim, and adopted the Sephardic ritual, which had already become quite Americanized. But, as the German migration grew, it became increasingly difficult for the Sephardim to accept the Germans. As Charles Bernheimer has said, “The small Sephardic communities, in defence of their own individuality, could not, and, by reason of their hidalgo pride would not, continue to absorb the new element. On the other hand, the prominent, useful individuals of the German section felt the propriety of devoting themselves to the needs of their countrymen.” This was part of it. There was also a matter of “native American” versus “foreigner” and, more than anything, a matter of class. The Sephardim had become successful businessmen and—to their way of thinking, certainly—sophisticated and cultivated city dwellers. The Germans, on the other hand, particularly after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the beginning of European reaction, were for the most part poor, soiled-looking, and underfed. Most of them were arriving, like Joseph Seligman, in steerage. When they could manage the language at all, they
spoke English with heavy and guttural accents. Most had had little education. They seemed uncultivated, and—because they were poor-aggressive. They were an embarrassment. The Sephardim were merchants and bankers; the Germans were going off as foot peddlers. And so by 1837 the doors of the Sephardim—and of Temple Shearith Israel—were closing to Germans. August Belmont,
né
Schönberg, may, with his usual acuity, have realized this also. His quick and complete apostasy—and his determination to climb into the gentile society of the Morrises and Mrs. Van Rensselaer—may be explained by the fact that the best class of Jews in New York would not have asked him to
their
picnics, hunts, and parties.

The first thing New York society noticed about August Belmont was that he had lots of money. It was Rothschild money, to be sure, but he used it lavishly. As a financier with the funds of the world's largest private bank at his fingertips, he was immediately important not only to American companies but to the United States Government, which was always running out of cash and whose credit needed constant infusions from bankers. August Belmont became a figure, both as a host and as a guest, at New York parties. He spoke some Italian, a little Spanish, a little French, and all three languages with an atrocious accent, but nobody in New York knew the difference. It was exciting to hear him drop phrases in foreign tongues, and he was admired for his handkissing “Continental manner.” (New York society regarded anything European as synonymous with elegance.) August Belmont could by no means have been considered handsome. He was short and rather stout, with iron-colored side whiskers. His features were round and Germanic, but his eyes were arresting—small, but astonishingly black and bright. Yet they were evasive eyes, which never looked directly at a person and seemed forever focused on some object in the middle distance.
*

For all this, there was something about him that caused women to have impure thoughts—a hard-to-define but vaguely titillating vulgarity. Meeting a woman, those jet-black eyes would, fall to rest upon that curve below her throat and appear to be defrocking her, crinoline by crinoline, from that point downward. At the same time, his cynical manner and harsh, bitter tongue, along with his clear reluctance to reveal his past, made him a figure of mystery and glamour. It was whispered that he had insatiable sexual appetites, and was a cruel and demanding lover. It began to be rumored that the Rothschilds “had a
reason” for wanting Belmont out of Europe. To what hideous Rothschild secret was he privy? There had to be something. Why, if he was their “representative,” was his new banking house not called N. M. Rothschild & Sons rather than August Belmont & Company? The unfounded rumor started—and is still heard today—that Belmont was actually an illegitimate Rothschild son.

The men did not take to him quite so much as the ladies did. Still, they knew it was wise to listen to him, and so he went everywhere and met everyone. He announced himself to be an epicure, and was perhaps the first person in New York to make the serving of good food fashionable. His own dinner invitations to Delmonico's assumed priority over all others. In the early days, to be sure, no one quite knew where he lived. (Some said he slept in his office.) And men who had accepted his hospitality and eaten his food began to say to their wives afterward, “For God's sake, don't introduce that man Belmont to our daughters!”

But it would be to no avail. For the next fifty years New York society would dance to whatever tune August Belmont chose to play.

*
There were probably less than one thousand Jews in America by the end of the eighteenth century.

*
An animator for the Disney studios in California told the author that he had modeled the character of the evil coachman in
Pinocchio
on a portrait of August Belmont.

4

ON THE ROAD

There was no society in Mauch Chunk to distract Joseph Seligman, even if he had been able to afford its pleasures. Mauch Chunk isn't much of a town today, and it was less in 1837, when Joseph arrived.
*
But Joseph took to the town, and his work with Asa Packer, with gusto. Packer, a dozen years older than Joseph, became Joseph's tutor and protector.

The Yankee Packer's affection for Joseph was understandable. Jewish immigrants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had found themselves treated with special friendliness by people from New England. New England Puritanism, with its literal interpretation of the Old
Testament, was a sort of neo-Judaism—a Judaism translated into Anglo-Saxon terms. The Puritans coming to America had identified themselves with the Israelites in search of the Promised Land, and King George III was equated with the Pharaoh. They called the new land Canaan and frequently referred to the Covenant they had made with God. Early in New England the Hebrew language became a major subject taught in colleges, and even secondary schools. To refer to a fellow New Englander as “a good Jew” was to pay him the highest compliment; it meant that he was pious and industrious; it had nothing to do with his blood or his religion. New England parents gave their children Old Testament names—Moses, Joshua, Abraham, and so on. New England Protestantism was considered an outgrowth, or extension, of Judaism, and New England preachers spoke continually of Zion and Jerusalem, of “the God of Israel” and “the God of Jacob.”

The Puritans were also convinced that the second coming and final judgment were at hand, and knew, as an article of faith, that the conversion of the Jews would precede these cataclysmic events. It had become a New England tradition to cherish the people who would play such an important role in Puritan salvation, and to encourage their conversion. This lingering belief that Jews were worthy of special respect and honor would stand them in good stead when they began to enter the financial community of Wall Street, a world whose dominant figures were men whose roots extended back to Puritan New England.

At the end of the first year Packer wanted to raise Joseph's salary to $500 a year, but Joseph, who had managed to save $200, was anxious to go out on his own. Reluctantly, Packer let him go.

During his stay in Mauch Chunk Joseph had noticed that men and women from outlying farms made occasional, and laborious, wagon trips to market in the town. He had also made note of the things people bought. His theory was that for the convenience of having goods brought to their doors farm families would be willing to pay a bit more than the prices charged in town, miles away. With his savings, he bought some merchandise—small jewelry, some watches, rings, and knives—and, with a pack, set off on foot, peddling his wares through rural Pennsylvania. Within six months he had put aside $500, enough to send passage to his two next oldest brothers, William and James, who, back in Baiersdorf, itched to join him.

They were a strange-looking lot, the three Seligman brothers and peddlers like them—bearded, shaggy-headed, their faces dusty from the road, in long ill-fitting coats and baggy trousers, walking in mud-caked shoes, with a shuffling gait, stooped under their packs—but how they
looked didn't matter to them. They carried sticks to ward off dogs, and they had to endure children who came running out after them crying, “Jew! Sheeny! Christ-killer!” Boys pelted them with handfuls of gravel, sticks, and green apples, and leaped at them to pull their beards or knock off their hats. They shuffled on with their dreams bottled inside them, driven by a furious singleness of purpose—to make money. At night they slept in open fields, under their coats, with a pack for a lumpy pillow. In return for a few chores a farmer might let a peddler sleep in his barn. A true bed was a luxury and baths were rare. Keeping the dietary laws was an impossibility. Yet the Seligman boys always assured old David, in their letters home, that the laws were being faithfully kept.