The Jews in America Trilogy (9 page)

It started with a visit to Lengnau by a young Swiss divine named Johann Casper Ulrich, pastor of the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin in Zurich, a Protestant cathedral despite its name. An earnest, scholarly man, Ulrich had become interested in rabbinical studies and Jewish culture while a seminary student. He had come to Lengnau (this town and the neighboring village of Endingen were the ghettos of Switzerland) because he had heard of a certain Jakob Guggenheim, a
parnas
, or elder of the synagogue, and a
lamden
, or scholar. Pastor Ulrich was a great admirer of the Jews. (He later published a
Collection of Jewish Narratives
, one of the first books written by a Christian of the era which portrayed Jewish life with sympathy.) The pastor met the
parnas
, and the two got along very well. Jakob Guggenheim took the pastor into his home, and the two spent long afternoons discussing Jewish history and arguing religious theory. But it soon became apparent that Pastor Ulrich's main interest in the Jews was in converting them.

Ulrich made no headway with Jakob Guggenheim, who took the pastor's proselytizing efforts with good humor, but Ulrich noticed that he had a more interested listener in Jakob's young son, Joseph.

Joseph was brilliant, sensitive, and high-strung. He had been educated at a Talmudic academy, and loved theological debate. Ulrich knew that in order to work on Joseph he would have to get him away from his father, and so he persuaded Jakob—and the Swiss authorities—to let Joseph come and live with him in Zurich, a city that was open to Jews only during certain hours of the day. Why did the
parnas
let his
son go? Perhaps he was flattered by the pastor's interest. Surely he did not think that his son was susceptible to conversion.

In Zurich, Ulrich flooded the boy with pamphlets from Halle, Germany, the center of Protestant missions to convert the Jews, and gave him a copy of the New Testament printed in Yiddish. As the boy began to waver, Ulrich's pressure upon him grew more intense. When the youth burst into tears, the pastor would fling him to his knees and try to force him into an ecstasy of prayer. The atmosphere of the Ulrich home had become hysterical when Joseph Guggenheim suddenly suffered a complete mental collapse. He recovered, then suffered another.

The Ulrich-Guggenheim conversion effort grew into one of the longest on record. It lasted sixteen years. Finally Joseph announced his decision—perhaps consent is the better word—to be baptized, and, amid much prayer and weeping by both pastor and convert, the ceremony was performed. The Christian faith had gained a soul but a sadly broken man.

It was agreed that Joseph's conversion should be kept a secret from the Jewish community at Lengnau, and for two years it was. Then it leaked out, and the Jews of Lengnau reacted violently. They accused their former pastor friend of conspiracy and of violating their hospitality, as, indeed, he had done. Ulrich retaliated with accusations of his own, claiming that Joseph's mental illness had been induced by the Jews as a tactic to prevent him from accepting Christianity, and charging that the Jews now “conspired to murder” Joseph, preferring a dead Christian to a live one. The battle over Joseph Guggenheim's soul erupted into all the Jewish and Christian journals of the day, spread across the Swiss border into Germany, where at least six rabbis issued blistering pronouncements against Ulrich. Two successive govenors of Baden and nearly all the high officials of Zurich were drawn into the controversy. Eventually, the pastor was conceded to have won, and soon after that the disputed soul departed for the heaven of its choice. It must have been the Christian heaven. The name Joseph Guggenheim was expunged from the Guggenheim family tree.

Joseph's brother Isaac Guggenheim, meanwhile, was proving himself a more solid and less emotional sort. Isaac was a Lengnau moneylender, and he became quite rich. As an old man he was a patriarchal figure—grave, bearded, in kaftan and skullcap, surrounded by his hovering and attentive family, moving grandly through the streets or sitting in state in his house where he received petitioners for loans. An indication of his stern and frosty manner is the fact that old Isaac
became known locally as “Old Icicle.” From him, all the American Guggenheims descend. When “Old Icicle” died in 1807, his estate consisted of an enormous trunk. When this was ceremoniously opened, it was found to contain 830 gold and silver coins, plus all the articles Isaac had accepted, over the years, as collateral on loans: 72 plates, a mortar, a frying pan, two kneading pans, a Sabbath lamp, “a ewer with basin for washing hands,” a brass coffee pot, 4 featherbeds, 19 sheets, 15 towels, 8 nightshirts, and a child's chamber pot. The valuation of this estate was placed at 25,000 florins, which was quite a nice sum.

“Old Icicle” Guggenheim had many children; his oldest son was named Meyer, who married and had eight children, four boys and four girls, and soon one of these sons, Samuel, was making a name for himself. The typewritten translation of the following news item, with its erratic spelling and mixed tenses, now hangs in the partners' room at Guggenheim Brothers in New York:

Samuel Guggenheim

On the 25th of July, 1818, fire broke out in Wyle, in the Canton of Zurich. A whole house soon enveloped in flames, and made the hurriedly arrived people shudder. But, oh! two peacefully sleeping children were still within the building. The cries of anguish of the congregated populace of the town and the cracking of the flames and smoke woke the little ones from their sweet slumber, apparently only to die the sleep of death. Who can command the flames? Who can save the little ones? A Hebrew, Samuel Guggenheim of Largan [Lengnau], Canton Aargan [Aargau], Switzerland, a man full of presence of mind and honest courage, rushed into the blazing house, graps [grabs? grasps?] both children and carries them triumphantly through the terrible heat and smoke to safety.

But, oh! Even more thrilling exploits would the Guggenheims carry out. Equal to their ability to stir up controversy is their love of drama.

Samuel's older brother was Simon. By Samuel's and Simon's generation, the considerable competence that Old Icicle had left behind him was spent and gone, and the Guggenheims were poor again. Simon was the village tailor, and hardly saw a florin enter his shop from one week to the next. With its maze of restrictions and special taxes, life for the ghetto Jew in Switzerland was onerous anyway, but for the poor man it was hideous. Households in the Lengnau-Endingen townships were limited by decree in 1776 to the then existing figure—108—and Jews were not permitted to enlarge or alter the exteriors of their houses. To escape the tax collector, families hid with other
families. Householders received expulsion orders frequently, and the only way to avoid eviction was to renew—for a price—the “Safe-Conduct and Patronage Letter.” As early as 1840 Simon Guggenheim, a small, thin, intense man with a haggard face and brooding eyes, had begun dreaming of escaping to America. But he had a wife and five children—a son, Meyer, and, disappointingly, four girls—and he simply could not afford it. Then his wife died.

Good fortune now stepped in. In 1846, when Simon was in his fifties, another death in Lengnau created a forty-one-year-old widow, Rachel Meyer. Rachel had seven children—three sons and four daughters—and she also had a little money. Simon married her, and late in 1847 the combined families—fourteen in all—set off for America. Their ship took the customary two months to cross the Atlantic, entered the mouth of the Delaware River in 1848, and deposited them all in Philadelphia. Simon was then fifty-six; his son Meyer was twenty. Father and son set off peddling into the anthracite country, as the Seligman brothers had done a decade before.

Meyer Guggenheim was short and slender, but well-knit and handsome. That a shipboard romance could have blossomed under steerage conditions of filth, suffocation, and darkness seems strange, but it did. Crossing the ocean, Meyer had fallen in love with his stepmother's fifteen-year-old daughter, Barbara. She has been described in the family as a beauty with “unusually fair skin,” “eyes that were brown in some lights and soft warm gray in others,” and “auburn hair that burned in the sun.” Barbara's auburn hair burned in young Meyer's mind as he peddled the dreary mining towns of northeastern Pennsylvania. He married his stepsister in 1852 in Philadelphia.

But as a peddler Meyer Guggenheim made a discovery which, in the beginning, eluded men like the Seligmans and Lehmans, and which turned his career in a different direction. He realized that for every dollar's worth of goods sold he was returning sixty to seventy cents to the manufacturer. In other words, he was working two-thirds of each peddling day for manufacturers and only one-third for himself. Meyer began to consider ways in which he could reverse this situation. “Obviously,” says Milton Lomask, a Guggenheim biographer, “he must put something of himself into one of his products. But which one?”

With considerable wisdom, he decided to concentrate on the one product about which he had received the most complaints. This was a certain brand of stove polish. Housewives had told him that the polish did a fine job on their stoves, but that it also soiled and burned their hands. Meyer took the polish to a chemist friend, asked him to analyze
it and, if possible, to isolate the soiling and burning ingredient from the cleaning and polishing agent. The chemist analyzed the polish, suggested a new formula, and presently Guggenheim's stingless, stainless stove polish was offered to the ladies on Meyer's route. It was a success. Meyer's father, Simon, was now in his sixties and getting too old to peddle, and so Meyer took him off the peddling route and assigned him to the house to brew up vats of stove polish. The business ethics of taking an existing product, changing it slightly, and selling it under another label are best left to a patent attorney. There was no Better Business Bureau in those days, anyway. By a similar process, Meyer soon added Guggenheim's bluing and Guggenheim's lye to his household-products line.

The two families who would compose Goldman, Sachs started not only on foot but, romantically enough, as runaways. Young Joseph Sachs was a scholarly son of a poor Bavarian saddlemaker who grew up in a village outside Würzburg. As a lad in his teens he was hired as tutor in the home of a wealthy Würzburg goldsmith named Baer to teach the Baers' beautiful young daughter, Sophia. In a fairy-tale way, the poor young tutor and the lovely young merchant princess fell in love. Naturally her parents disapproved. So the couple eloped to Rotterdam, were married there in 1848, and that same year boarded a boat for America, landing in Baltimore. Where the money came from that financed the elopement and the schooner crossing is not clear. Very likely Sophia, a practical girl, pocketed some of her father's gold before departing.

In that same pivotal year twenty-seven-year-old Marcus Goldman, a more down-to-earth sort, arrived in New York. He was also a Bavarian, born in a small village, Burgpreppach, near Schweinfurt, and he quickly set off for the area that, rightly or wrongly, young German Jewish immigrants had heard was the peddlers' paradise, the coal hills of Pennsylvania. In 1848 another girl from Bavaria, named Bertha Goldman—of another Goldman family—had arrived in America to join her already migrated relatives in Philadelphia. She was nineteen. In Philadelphia Miss Goldman and Mr. Goldman met, fell in love, and were married. The Goldman-Goldman union was to become remarkable in New York's German Jewish crowd for the fact that, try as they might through the years, Bertha and Marcus Goldman could never discover a way in which they were even remotely related.

Before Marcus married her, Bertha Goldman had had—and it was unusual for the 1840's—a career. She had supported herself quite nicely
doing embroidery and fine needlework for Philadelphia society women. None other than Mrs. Wistar Morris wore a Bertha Goldman hat. Soon, with Bertha's help, Marcus Goldman was able to make the transition from dry-goods and notions peddler to respectable shopkeeper. He set up his own clothing store in Market Street, and rented a comfortable house in Green Street. But Bertha hated Philadelphia. She was urging her husband to take another step forward—to New York, where she had friends.

In 1849, if anyone had looked over the incoming steerage passengers with an eye to predicting which one seemed least likely to succeed, Solomon Loeb might easily have been selected. He was a thin, sallow, fidgety boy with intense, frightened-looking, blue eyes. His hair had receded prematurely from his forehead, leaving a fluffy mound of curly black hair on either side of his head, creating an effect of furry horns. He had been a sickly child of an even sicklier family—of fifteen Loeb children, only six had lived to maturity—and he had developed an obsession about his health and had a pathological fear of germs which conditions in steerage did little to soothe. He had been violently seasick the entire journey, during which, he later swore, not a mouthful of food had passed his lips. Halfway across the Atlantic—traveling with his only pair of shoes strapped to his back—he had decided that he was going to die, and begged a fellow passenger to throw him overboard. The passenger demurred and wanted to know, “Why don't you throw yourself over? Why make me do it?” Weeping, Solomon said that he was too weak to lift himself up to the rail. “Just put me up on the rail so I can roll over,” he said.

Loeb had come from the Rhineland city of Worms, where his father had been a poor wine merchant, as had several generations of Loebs before him. Still, Solomon's mother, Rosina, laid claim to a certain social standing. She was a contemporary of Kaiser Wilhelm I and liked to talk of “
Ich und der Kaiser
,” suggesting that she and the Kaiser had actually been friends. She could recall Napoleon and the time when the Rhineland was freed and Jews were first permitted to have surnames of their own. Rosina often left the impression that she herself had had something to do with this. Like Joseph Seligman's mother, Rosina Loeb had been accused of giving her son “grandiose ideas,” and she had picked Solomon as her first boy to emigrate. She had also selected Cincinnati as Solomon's destination. The son of some cousins of hers named Kuhn had gone there a few years earlier and was reported to be prospering.