PART VII.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. PRESENT CONDITIONS.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
SYNAGOGUES AND INSTITUTIONS. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA. ROUMANIA AND THE ROUMANIAN NOTE.
Synagogues and other Jewish Institutions—General improvement and moderation—The Jewish Encyclopedia—Its editors and contributors—The Roumanian situation and the American Government’s interest in it since 1867—Benjamin F. Peixotto, United States Consul-General in Bucharest—Diplomatic correspondence between Kasson and Evarts—New negotiations with Roumania in 1902—The Roumanian Note to the signatories of the Berlin Treaty—The question still in abeyance.
More than six hundred thousand Jews arrived in the United States from the beginning of the new exodus in 1881 until the end of the nineteenth century, and the total number in the country was now considerably more than one million. There were Jews in more than five hundred places, and there were 791 congregations, 415 educational and nearly five hundred charitable institutions of a distinctly Jewish character, according to an enumeration made in the beginning of the new century.[52] But the number of congregations or synagogues was very much larger, probably more than double than the figures gathered by the enumerators. For the American, even the American Jew, had then not yet learned to take seriously those small and exceedingly unchurchlike synagogues of the small congregations, of which five or six, or even a larger number, can sometimes be found in one block in a thickly settled Jewish neighborhood in the great cities. A second and more thorough enumeration made in 1907 gave to New York City alone a number of synagogues almost as large as the one given by the statistics of 1900 to the entire country; but the actual increase was very far from such proportions. Probably four-fifths of the congregations of New York and of the other great Jewish centers in the East and the Middle West were more than ten years old, and they simply escaped the notice of former enumerators. The organizing of small synagogues is now out of fashion; the tendency is to consolidate the smaller ones and to erect more fashionable and spacious buildings in the newest neighborhoods, to which the immigrants usually move after they leave their earliest abode in the tenement house districts. In the fields of charity and education the predilection for new organizations is disappearing, and there is a desire to build on more solid foundations, and to improve and strengthen rather than form anew. New synagogues are now built usually in new communities or in new Jewish neighborhoods, or by old congregations who need a larger edifice.
America now had the largest community of free Jews in the world, i. e., of Jews who labored under no special disadvantages and who had no special difficulties, like those which are making life a burden to the Jews of Russia or Galicia. The great masses which arrived in the last twenty years progressed rapidly and were becoming Americanized in every respect. There arose new intellectual needs; the extremists had to yield to the influence of those who were more acclimatized, and even the most radical periodicals began to respect the susceptibilities, if not the opinions, of the other classes. The number of the educated and the well-to-do was fast increasing, and the community was now well prepared for “the capital event in the history of Jewish learning in America”—the publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia.
This monumental work, the greatest Jewish work of reference in any language, was projected by Dr. Isidore Singer (b. in Weisskirchen, Moravia, 1859; a. 1895) and edited by a board of well-known scholars, of whom Dr. Isaac Funk (b. in Clinton, O., 1839; d. 1912; of the firm of Funk and Wagnalls, which published the work) was chairman, and Frank H. Vizitelly (b. in London, Eng., 1864) secretary. The original editors were: Cyrus Adler, Gotthard Deutsch (b. in Kanitz, Austria, 1859; a. 1891), Professor of History at the Hebrew Union College; Louis Ginzberg (b. in Kovno, Russia, 1873; a. 1899), now Professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York; Richard Gottheil; Joseph Jacobs (b. in Sydney, N. S. W., 1854; a. 1900), the folklorist and statistician; Marcus Jastrow; Morris Jastrow, Jr.; Kaufman Kohler; Frederick de Sola Mendes (b. in Jamaica, W. I., 1850; a. 1873), rabbi of the West End Synagogue of New York; Isidor Singer, and Crawford H. Toy (b. in Norfolk, Va., 1836), Professor (now “emeritus”) of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at Harvard University. This editorial board was given on the title page of the first volume which appeared in May, 1901; but several changes were made during the five years of its publication. From the beginning of the second volume Herman Rosenthal became editor of the new Department of the Jews of Russia and Poland, and it is due to his efforts that the Jews of the Slavic countries are more extensively treated in the historical and biographical parts of the Encyclopedia than was ever the case in works of Jewish science which appeared outside of Russia. Dr. Emil G. Hirsch of Chicago succeeded Morris Jastrow as editor of the Department of the Bible, with the beginning of the third volume. From the fourth till the seventh volume the name of Solomon Schechter (b. in Fokshan, Roumania, 1847; a. 1902), the President of the Jewish Theological Seminary, appears as editor of the Department of the Talmud; and from the eighth volume to the end the name of Wilhelm Bacher of Budapest (b. in Hungary 1850) appears as editor of the Department of the Talmud and Rabbinical Literature, succeeding both Schechter and Ginzberg. The editorial board was assisted by boards of American and foreign consulting editors, which included many of the best known Jewish scholars and Orientalists, and many other scholars from various countries were among the four hundred contributors who participated in the preparation of the work, in which the vast “Record of the History, Religion, Literature and Customs of the Jewish People from the earliest times to the present day” was for the first time systematized, classified and made available in a modern scientific manner.
Prof. Gotthard Deutsch.