The Allied Countries and the Jews

by H. G. Enelow

It is true that the number of Jews at first was small, but before long their influence and service transcended their proportions. During the Revolution, there were only about two thousand Jews in the Colonies; yet, some of them had become so prominent, that their help was not inconsiderable, and in several instances of conspicuous and unforgettable merit. We know, for example, that Washington had an aide who was a Jew, Isaac Franks, that one of the earliest officers of our Navy was a Jew, Uriah Levy, and that a Jew, Haym Salomon, an immigrant from Poland, helped the Revolution financially, aside from what similar help he extended to some of the heroes of the Revolution individually, thus rendering it easier for them to do their share of the common task. Aside from what these instances may mean in themselves, they are important for the light they throw on the rapidity with which Jewish settlers made their way in this country, on the completeness of their civil and political assimilation, and on their public prominence in the early days of American history.

What progress the Jew has made in America since those days, he who runs may read. On the material side, she certainly has become a land of promise to millions of Jews. Gradually the Jewish population has grown to its present dimensions. During the nineteenth century the original immigration from mainly Sephardic sources, with an admixture from Poland, was supplemented by a wave of migration from German provinces. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, finally, the intense persecutions in Eastern Europe poured enormous waves of migration onto these shores. As a result of these successive movements of people, unprecedented in some respects in human history, millions of Jews have settled in our Republic, and, on the material side at least, it has become to them a veritable land of promise.

In all departments of life the Jew has prospered. It may be questioned whether ever in the past he has been blessed with such success. While it is erroneous to assume, as some people do, that all Jews are rich, or that the richest men are Jews (assumptions which are contradicted by facts), it is true that nowhere else have the Jewish people been given such an unhampered opportunity for advancement and such an unrestricted field of work and usefulness.

As a result, Jews are found in every sphere of work, in every honorable and useful occupation. In commerce, in the liberal and practical professions, in all the various forms of industry, the American Jew is found, and many have achieved eminent success. No longer can it be said, as they were wont to say of old, that the Jew is nothing but a usurer or a trader. In America hundreds of thousands of Jews work with their hands, there are numerous trade unions entirely composed of Jews, and nothing is more significant in this regard than that the President of the American Federation of Labor for years has been a Jew (at least, a man born a Jew).

It used to be said that the Jew will not be a farmer. Even if elsewhere the Jew had not disproved this assertion, he has done so on American soil, where numerous Jewish families have settled on farms and demonstrated their fitness to succeed even under adverse conditions.

What America has done for the material progress of millions of Jews is one of the marvels of history—a marvel augmented by the moral transformation which has accompanied the process. Men, who for generations had been hounded and haunted by persecution, who had been engrafted with all the moral evils of persecution, who had been humiliated and all but crushed—millions of such men by the liberty and humanity of America have been freed from the old chains, purged of the old stains, turned into free, strong, courageous, self-reliant, and self-respecting human beings. For this transformation we can never be sufficiently thankful, as it must ever continue to excite the admiration and the wonder of the world.

But the spiritual achievements of the Jew in America have been no less significant.

Now and then on this score we hear laments. Material progress, we are told, has occurred in American Israel at the expense of his spiritual life, and lurid pictures are drawn of our spiritual estate. It is even maintained that there is no hope for us spiritually in America, and that for this purpose we must turn our eyes to other parts.

Let us not forget, however, that spiritual pessimism is nothing new, whether among Jews or non-Jews. There have always been men who have thought their own time and place to be the worst-off spiritually in history. The student of history and literature finds many such resemblances through the centuries, and there is nothing said about our present-day spiritual and moral degeneration that might not be paralleled in the literature of previous generations, to which we sometimes look back as the very embodiment of virtue and spirituality.

But pessimism apart—nor is self-criticism altogether undesirable—we may say that spiritually also the Jew in America has achieved no mean things. The very fact that we have succeeded in transplanting Judaism to this country, so different from the Old World, is an achievement of importance. And the transplanting has been rapid. There have been losses, quite naturally, but there have been gains, too, and, whatever is said to the contrary, there is an intense and manifold Jewish activity in this country today unsurpassed anywhere else, though perhaps only the historian of the future will acknowledge it, just as our historians today laud the glories of the past.