The Jews in America Trilogy (99 page)

In 1823, Uriah was assigned as second lieutenant on the
Cyane,
which was being transferred from the Mediterranean to the Brazil Squadron. The ship made a slow crossing of the Atlantic, putting in at various West Indies ports before heading for the northern coast of South America. At Rio de Janeiro, the ship anchored for repairs to its mainmast, and Uriah was put in charge of these. Normally, it seemed, such repairs were handled by the executive officer, but the captain had casually commented that Uriah could supervise the repairs as well as anyone. This angered the
Cyane
's executive officer, William Spencer, and presently word had reached Uriah that Spencer was “out to bring him to his knees.”

One afternoon while the repairs were going on, Uriah came aboard carrying a wide slab of Brazilian mahogany with which he intended to build a bookshelf for his cabin. A certain Lieutenant Ellery, a friend of the wounded Spencer, commented in “a sneering tone” that he thought rather little of officers who stole lumber from ships' stores. Uriah replied that he had bought the wood in town, and had the bill of sale in his pocket. Ellery said that he doubted this, since Uriah was known by everyone to be a liar. In a rage, Uriah challenged Ellery to a duel, to which Ellery answered that he would not fight a duel with a man who was not a gentleman. He would, furthermore, report the challenge to the commanding officer.

For several days, the affair simmered, and seemed about to die down until it bubbled up again in another burst of pettishness. In the officers' mess someone said loudly that “some damned fool” had dismissed the steward. “If you meant that for me …” Uriah put in quickly, always the first to detect an insult. “Don't speak to me, Levy,” said Executive Officer Spencer, “or I'll gag you.” Instantly Uriah was on his feet, crying, “If you think you're able, you may try!” And there it was, all over again—shouts of “No gentleman!” “Coward!” “Jew!” In the morning,
court-martial number five had been ordered started, with the drearily familiar set of charges against Uriah: “Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, using provoking and reproachful words, offering to waive rank and fight a duel with Lieutenant Frank Ellery, and, in the presence and hearing of many of the officers of the
Cyane,
inviting William A. Spencer to fight a duel.”

Once more the findings were against Uriah, with the curiously worded verdict that he was “Guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer,
but not of a gentleman.”
The sentence was humiliating. He was to be reprimanded “publically on the quarter deck of every vessel of the Navy in commission, and at every Navy Yard in the United States.” Uriah retaliated by bringing a counter-suit against William Spencer—and won, with the result that Spencer was suspended from the Navy for a year for “insulting and unofficer-like and ungentlemanly expressions and gestures against the said Uriah P. Levy.”

Uriah may have felt himself vindicated. But this action did nothing to endear him in the eyes of his fellow officers. To bring a superior officer to court was something that was not done. At the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Uriah Levy was put “in Coventry”—ostracized and ignored by everyone. Restless and bitter, Uriah applied for a six-month leave of absence. The request was quickly granted and, in granting it, his commanding officer said to Uriah with a little smile, “We would be happy to extend your leave indefinitely.”

When his words had sunk in, Uriah said, “It's because I'm a Jew, isn't it, sir?”

“Yes, Levy,” the officer said—he did not use “Lieutenant,” or even “Mr.” “It is.”

He had been asked to leave the club. In his long battle with the Navy Establishment, he seemed to have lost the final round.

*
Uriah Levy's style of speech, which sounds a little pompous, is, we must remember, the speaker's recollection—and reconstruction—of it years later, when he could devote himself to his memoirs. He may not have spoken in precisely these words, but doubtless they express his true sentiments at the time.

*
The phrase “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”—abbreviated with the letters “F.U.C.K.” in ships' logbooks, next to records of punishments—thus contributed a vivid four-letter word to the English language.

14

THE NEW JEWS VERSUS THE OLD

There may have been some in the American Jewish community who approved of Uriah Phillips Levy's well-publicized squabbles with the Navy, and the focus he had managed to bring to bear on the fact of anti-Semitism in the New World. But most did not approve, and felt that Levy's behavior had done the Jews more harm than good. As it is with any problem, it had been easier for Jews to pretend that it did not exist. The Jewish community was still small, and news and opinions within it traveled rapidly. Some of Levy's contemporaries praised him for his insistence on Old Testament justice to the bitter end. To the younger generation, however, he was merely old-fashioned and excessively “stiff-necked.” Uriah Phillips Levy had, among his other accomplishments,
helped define the split between “old Jews” and “new Jews.”

The split was more than generational. The prejudice of the old against the new was also directed at newer immigrants, who were now being looked on as troublemakers. There was nothing new about this particular form of
Jewish
anti-Semitism. Jews have always resented, and looked askance at, Jewish newcomers. “A few of us,” to the world's scattered Jewish communities, has always seemed just about enough. In Philadelphia, for example, as early as the 1760's, the Jewish congregation had swelled to such a size, from eager immigrants, that it was considered in “grave danger.” Jews rolled their eyes and muttered dark thoughts about an “infestation of Jews” from other lands. Mathias Bush was a partner of David Franks in the candle business, and both men were immigrants to Philadelphia. Yet when Franks traveled to London on business in 1769, he received a letter from Bush bemoaning that “These New Jews are a plague,” and beseeching his partner, “Pray prevent what is in your power to hinder any more of that sort to come.” Mr. Bush clearly considered himself an Old Jew. He had come to America exactly twenty-five years earlier. And the scale of his alarm can be judged by noting that, at the time of the “infestation,” there were no more than thirty Jewish families in Philadelphia.

Quite naturally the newcomers resented the snobbery of the older group—and its prosperity—and so the battle lines were drawn. At one point the squabble in Philadelphia grew to such proportions that families of the refractory new migration held separate services during the high holy days. At the same time, it was charged that the more recent arrivals were not being properly loyal to their faith, and it was certainly true that the newcomers—hungrier, more eager to get on with the business of earning livelihoods for themselves—had less time to spend on piety.

Older families of Philadelphia looked with disapproval at
newer Jewish communities springing up in other cities. New Orleans was getting a particularly bad reputation for religious laxity. Why was it, for example, that New Orleans' Jews were having to come, hat in hand, begging for funds to build a synagogue, to the Jewish communities of Philadelphia, New York, and Newport? Why weren't wealthy New Orleans businessmen such as Jacob Hart and Judah Touro—both of whom were sons of great Jewish leaders—willing to contribute money to this cause, and why were they giving instead to Christian philanthropies?

The newer immigrants were poor, they needed baths, they worked as foot peddlers, they spoke with accents. They lacked the social status that the Jewish first families had achieved, the breeding, the education, yet they called themselves brethren. They judged a man by the success of his enterprises rather than by his “engagements with God,” as pious people such as Rebecca Gratz would have preferred, yet they called themselves Jews. They were an embarrassment. By the early 1800's, they were threatening to fling the fabric of Jewish society in America apart, threatening the “tribal” feeling that is at the heart of all feelings of Jewishness.

But the real trouble was that most of the “new Jews” were Ashkenazic Jews, from central Europe. They could not trace their ancestry back to Spain and Portugal. The Sephardim pointed out that the Ashkenazim used a different ritual, and they did—somewhat. The pronunciation of Hebrew was slightly different. The Sephardim spoke with a Mediterranean inflection, the accent often falling on the last syllable. (The Sephardim say Yom Kip
pur
, for example, not Yom
Kip
pur, as the Ashkenazim do.) Sephardic ritual also included some Spanish prayers, and Sephardic music—bearing traces of ancient Spanish folk music, reminiscent of flamenco—was distinctive. These differences, which may seem very slight, began to loom as all-important in the 1800's.

The Ashkenazim spoke “heavy, ugly” languages such as German, and an “abominable garble of German and Hebrew” called Yiddish, instead of “musical, lyrical” Spanish and Portuguese. They even looked different, and it was pointed out that German Jews had large, awkward-looking noses, and lacked the elegant refinement of the highly bred, heart-shaped, olive-skinned Spanish face. But the greatest difference of all, of course, was that the Ashkenazim came from countries where to be a Jew was a disgrace. The Sephardim descended from lands where, for a while at least, to be a Jew had been to be a knight in shining armor, a duke or duchess, the king's physician—the proudest thing a man could be. From the beginning, the two groups were like oil and water.

In 1790, a Savannah gentleman named De Leon Norden, of Sephardic stock, had written in his will that “None of the Sheftalls need be present” at his funeral. The Sheftalls were German. Even before that—in 1763, across the sea in France—the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux had succeeded in persuading the king to sign an edict expelling all German and Avignonese Jews from Bordeaux. In America, many of the new arrivals had names containing combinations of the word “schine” or “schien,” and so the label “sheeny” was attached to them—an epithet of Sephardic origin. The word was picked up and used generally in the press, and when a fight broke out right in the synagogue in Montreal—with top-hatted gentlemen having at each other with walking sticks and furniture—between old and new Jews, a Montreal newspaper headlined an account of the battle with the words “
Bad Sheenies
!”

Three things were happening, all interconnected, and all at the same time. The Ashkenazim were beginning to outnumber the older Sephardim, and it was only a matter of time before majority rule would mean that Ashkenazic ritual would have to prevail in synagogues in most
American cities—while the Sephardim who insisted on retaining the old would withdraw into their own tight groups, with doors closed to the Germans. Also the first stirrings of the Reform movement were being felt in the land. Reform—with rebuke for existing forms inherent in the very word—was by its nature incompatible with traditional Sephardic orthodoxy. Reform, an attempt to bring Judaism “up to date,” to make Judaism appear to be at home with existing American religious patterns, was attacked by traditionalists as a subversive attempt to “Christianize” Judaism. Under Reform, women would come down from their secluded balconies in synagogues, and worship side by side with their husbands. Men would take off their tall silk hats. Synagogues would look more like churches. English would replace Hebrew.

And while all this was happening, the oldest Jewish families were watching with dismay as their children and grandchildren seemed to be slipping away from the faith. It is an ironic fact that the heirs and assigns of men and women who had made such an arduous journey to America in order to preserve their faith should have begun to abandon it once they were here. But that was happening. Grandchildren of old Sephardic families had begun, by the early 1800's, to marry into the Ashkenazic group, but some of them were doing something even worse than that. They were marrying Christians, and converting to Christianity.

The granddaughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman was suing to break her grandfather's will, which provided that she could not partake of a large family trust if she married a non-Jew. She wanted her share of her grandfather's money, none of the clumsy entanglements of his religion, and her Christian fiancé. It might have happened yesterday in Manhattan. It happened in Charleston in 1820. She won her case.

And was something else happening to the Sephardim? Were the long inbred centuries exacting a quirky genetic toll? Certainly, by the nineteenth century, eccentrics were no rarity among the Old Guard, and few families were without their “strange” members. More and more, moving down the laddered generations in Malcolm Stern's huge book, the notation “Insane” appears next to various names, as does the comment “Unmarried.” Spinster aunts and bachelor uncles were becoming the rule now, rather than the exception. The families, once so prolific, seemed on the verge of becoming extinct.

15

THE U.S. NAVY SURRENDERS AT LAST!

Uriah P. Levy, in the meantime, had been continuing with his crusade to have Jews treated as the equals of Christians. He had gone on with his lecturing and scolding of fellow Jews who took insults lying down, who responded to slurs by turning the other cheek. He was a frequent writer of peppery letters to the editor, and was otherwise securing his reputation as a firebrand. He had also decided—since he no longer had Navy duties to occupy him—that it was time for him to make some money.

New York in the early nineteenth century had become a more important seaport than either Newport or Philadelphia. The completion of the Erie Canal, “linking East to
West,” in 1825, secured New York's position as the maritime—hence commercial, and hence money—capital of the United States. In that year alone, five hundred new businesses were started in the city, and twelve banks and thirteen marine insurance companies opened their doors. The population topped 150,000, and—an unheard-of thing in America—one of the city newspapers announced that it would publish on Sundays. The Park Theatre declared that it would present grand opera, and number 7 Cherry Street became the first private house in America to be lit by gas.