By Zachary Dembo
As I’ve mentioned in the last few posts, antisemitism was the single overarching factor that influenced our ancestors’ flight from Europe. The evidence to support this position is quite strong. Ethnographic snapshots of European Jewry between 1820 and 1880 clearly demonstrate the deleterious effect of antisemitism on economic, social, religious, and political conditions.
Central European Jews of the time frequently mention leaving Europe due to antisemitism in their speeches, statements, sermons, and biographical accounts. Historical analysis of emigrates from the Central European ports by historian Hasia Diner and others highlight that Ashkenazi immigrants “fled Bavaria, Prussia, Alsace, Hesse, Baden, Swabia, Westphalia, Hungary, Poznan (Posen), and Silesia in Prussian Poland and Russian Poland to America, the fabled land of freedom” at rates significantly higher than their gentile counterparts.
Even with all this evidence, labeling antisemitism as the “primary cause” of the mass migration is controversial if not simply incorrect. Historians have noted that Jewish emigration was encouraged by numerous often overlapping factors, including illiberal governments, mass conscription, devastating wars, and unplanned/unsupported social transformation of the peasant and noble class.
Another important factor was the shift away from an agrarian economy in which Jews mainly participated as middlemen, resulting in widespread pauperization.
Just as important was the advent of numerous technological advancements, including steamships, trains, standardized mail systems, and travel/emigration guides, which made it feasible for our ancestors to flee — I mean emigrate — to America.
Finally, while the abject poverty, paralyzing laws, crushing restrictions, and frequent violence and abuse inflicted on the Jews by antisemitic regimes clearly influenced their mass movement, a number of these same factors would have been experienced by many of the gentiles of Central Europe who emigrated during this time period.
Regardless of what rank antisemitism held on the list of reasons to leave, what seems undeniable is that without antisemitism the circumstances of the Jews of Europe would have been less desperate and therefore they would have been less inclined to emigrate. So while it’s clearly inaccurate to assume that antisemitism was the sole determining factor in their decision to leave, it was likely a key reason.
Enterprising spirit
Having accepted this point, we need to examine the lives of these early Jewish settlers through the lens of their experiences in Europe. By that I mean we need to understand that Jews were not instantly transformed by the freedom they found in America.
On the contrary, the Jews leaving their homes in Europe for the United States were deeply affected by their personal experiences with European antisemitism. To what degree is hard to tell and varies from person to person; however, it is safe to say that European antisemitism did influence the culture, religious practice, and — most notably from my perspective as a therapist — the psychological well being of our immigrant ancestors.
Without question, the fear of antisemitism as well as lessons learned from surviving it affected the behavior of Jewish immigrants long after they landed in America. Even in the industrial heart of Alabama, separated from the old country by thousands of miles and an ocean, our ancestors still displayed patterns of a people who for generations had been persecuted for simply existing.
For the Jews Birmingham this was manifested in a pattern seen among many Jews of the south. They were not just a people of anxious bodies and worried minds, but of proactive actions and enterprising spirit, which earned them envious respect and for some individuals even legendary status amongst their gentile contemporaries.
Joy informed by sorrow
So as I research the Jews of Birmingham I notice that their pride is palpable, their philanthropic endeavors are grand, and their civic participation is contrary to what one would believe possible for a Jewish individual in the late 1800s Deep South.
However, looking at their lives in Birmingham through a lens colored by their experiences with European antisemitism, we are reminded that joy is often informed by sorrow. Essentially, these pioneers were not just proud to be citizens of a nation they believed epitomized freedom and liberty for Jews. They also understood the alternative to the freedoms granted to them in their new home.
German Jew Ludwig Börne summed it up: “[B]ecause I was born a bondsman, I therefore love liberty more than you. Yes, because I have known slavery, I understand freedom more than you. Yes, because I was born without a fatherland, my desire for a fatherland is more passionate than yours.”
Along these same lines, the fragility of Jewish rights in America were not lost on our ancestors. Having learned from their sorrowful experiences in Europe as well as the new ones brought about by living amongst overtly and indirectly antisemitic American gentiles, Jewish Birminghamians actively sought ways to assimilate into the fabric of southern society while vociferously protecting themselves against the abrogation of their rights. Many of these behaviors have been interpreted, as was mentioned in a previous post, with unfair judgment by later generations and/or through the lens of antisemitism.
However, the facts are that these early Jewish pioneers, including those in Birmingham, built, funded, and/or supported many of the institutions that facilitated Jewish life on the continent, supported the acculturation of Jewish immigrants, and protected the rights of American Jews when they were most vulnerable.
“[B]ecause I was born a bondsman, I therefore love liberty more than you. Yes, because I have known slavery, I understand freedom more than you. Yes, because I was born without a fatherland, my desire for a fatherland is more passionate than yours.”
Ludwig Börne
For example, Birmingham’s Young Men’s Hebrew Association, a national organization and the predecessor to the Levite Jewish Community Center, was founded in 1887 to help Jewish immigrants settle into their new country and to serve as the central location for a “variety of activities including social, political, philanthropic, intellectual, cultural and religious — all of them legitimately Jewish.”
And then later, in response to the growing threat of Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, local leaders developed the United Jewish Fund, now known as the Birmingham Jewish Fund, to assist threatened communities in Europe and Russia.
The ‘Jewish Question’
So what was antisemitism like in European society during this period? The answer is complicated, because at that time antisemitism — like European society as a whole — was in a state of roiling transformation. The Age of Reason had ushered in a new era of empirical analysis and a backlash against tradition. Both groups became involved in developing and supporting specific perspectives regarding “the Jew” and “the Jewish question.”
Under the influence of these new ideas, governments across Europe reconsidered what to do with the large communities of impoverished and more or less isolated Jewish folk who were forced to live and work on the edges and in the creases of Christian society.
Even in the former Papal States, ideas of religious antisemitism and their associated solutions, which had dominated Europe for millennia, had started to fall out of vogue in favor of the pseudoscientific racial theories of antisemitism and their particular ways of “dealing” with the Jews.
A notable and striking example of this transformation can be seen in the word “antisemitism” itself, which Journalist Wilhelm Marr, in an attempt to intellectualize and draw more attention to what he saw as the nefarious influence of the jewish race on gentile society, introduced to the general public in 1879. This replacement of the more overt and less scientific term judenhass (hatred of Jews), while being criticized by some like German philosopher Eugen Duhring for “not naming the enemy directly,” epitomized the radical shift in how Jews and Judaism were being discussed, as well as how antisemites had legitimized their hatred through science in the age of reason.
Simultaneously, reformers across Europe were developing more “enlightened” yet often no less antisemitic ideas about how to solve the “Jewish Question.” This more sophisticated antisemitism still applied malicious intent to anything Jews did, but insisted that there were contextual reasons for their so-called collective misanthropy. Endemic poverty, restrictive laws preventing integration, violent religious antisemites, and especially the “degenerate” Jewish faith and culture were blamed for the perceived antisocial behavior of the Jewish people.
While many of these reformers were actual Judenfreunde who genuinely sought to improve the circumstances of their Jewish neighbors, the emancipatory policies that the governments of central Europe adopted over the course of the 19th century were by and large based on antisemitic beliefs about Jews and had the explicit objective of destroying Jewish cultural distinction.
It is therefore hard to imagine that our ancestors didn’t notice that under all that varnish of science and reason were beliefs about Jews that had existed in Europe during the fall of the Roman Empire. Nor is it hard to believe that the average village Jew saw these changes as an end to, as Charles Mailert wrote, “European slavery, German oppression, and Hessian taxes.”
To the contrary, the dismantling of Jewish communities, restricting Jewish education, outlawing Jewish participation, instituting further restrictions on Jewish worship, and forcing Jews to take traceable secular names would have seemed to many like a pretty bad sign of things to come.
To truly conceptualize the foreboding felt by so many of our ancestors during this period requires us to understand what they understood and that — regardless of the supposed modernness of both of these perspectives — neither deviated far from the core concepts found in much older antisemitic myths.
We are talking about canards that reached their peak around the Middle Ages and underpinned the violent attacks on the Jews for close to a millennia. It is in fact during that period that the archetypes of the perfidious Jew, we see in the writing of those seeking to “improve” the Jew, as well as in the demonic subhuman Jew, which was the progenitor of the antisemitic racial theories, fully evolved.
So to really understand the antisemitism that forced our ancestors to flee across the globe, we need to take a detour and examine European antisemitism.
At this point you might be wondering, “is it really necessary to talk about antisemitism in such depth when discussing the migration of Jews from Central Europe in the 1800s?”
So let me answer that question with another: Do you know what causes a person to hate a people so intensely that they are willing to kill? Conversely, have you ever experienced the feeling that the people you interact with, those who live around you, are willing to rob, ruin, and murder you for reasons that not only defy logic but are almost 2,000 years old?
I ask these questions because these were the circumstances in which the European Jews lived. The hate of the 1800s was based on the very same folk mythology and conspiracies that “put Jews outside the pale of humanity by literally demonizing them.” For our ancestors on a continent that still convulsed with deadly pogroms and crushing restrictions, the terror of past peaks of antisemitism would not have felt that distant.
Zachary Dembo is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Southern Jewish history nerd from Baltimore, Maryland — the Birthplace of the Star-Spangled-Banner. His first of many visits to Birmingham began in 2008 and he became a resident in 2019. He is married to Lauren Axelroth, a third-generation Birminghamian.
In recognition of Zach’s historical writing for The J’s blog in 2024, in January he received the LJCC’s L’Dor V’Dor Award “for embodying The J’s core value of empowering others to learn and understand Jewish values, thereby ensuring a vibrant and meaningful Jewish future.”
By Zachary Dembo:
- Because we could: The history of Jews in Birmingham
- Of secrets, omissions, and selective memory
- How the ‘German’ Jews got to Birmingham: Part 1
Bibliography
- Diner, Hasia R. A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
- Elovitz, Mark H. A Century of Jewish Life in Dixie. University of Alabama Press, 27 Mar. 2003.
- Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. 2nd ed., Yale University Press, 2019.
- Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism : The Western Tradition. New York, W.W. Norton & Co, 2014.
- Pagels, Elaine H. The Origin of Satan. New York, Vintage Books, 1996.
- Rosen, Robert N, and Frank And. The Jewish Confederates. Columbia, University Of South Carolina Press, 2000.
- Trachtenberg, Joshua. The Devil and the Jews : The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society Of America, 1983.
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