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Article Excerpt
Beginning in 1902, the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward), already well on its way to becoming the most widely-read Yiddish newspaper in New York, debuted a series of debates that provided conflicting perspectives on serious as well as frivolous issues, from questions of morality and honesty to the proper use of cosmetics. Given the Forverts' standing as the foremost secular and socialist Yiddish newspaper, it is surprising that debates focusing on religion sparked the most responses, and endured longer than all the other features. The debate over the question, "May a progressive lodge admit believing members?" ran from September through November 1904, drawing eighty letters. Interrogating the boundaries between ideology and practice, the 1904 debate examined the religious practices of socialists as it considered the case of members of the Workmen's Circle, a socialist fraternal organization, who had been "caught" attending High Holiday religious services. The following spring, an exchange titled "A shabesdige shayle" (A Sabbath question) garnered fifty letters from February through Apri. (1)
In both debates, religious matters were analyzed seriously, if from a somewhat unconventional perspective. While discussions of the "Sabbath question" in the Yiddish press typically referred to the plight of observant Jews forced to work on Saturday, the Forverts addressed the topic from the standpoint of freethinking, or nonreligious, Jewish immigrants who encountered religious Jews and observed their Sabbath dilemma at work. The debate asked: Should a free thinking hat maker help his religious coworker finish his work on a Friday afternoon so that the religious coworker would be able to leave the shop in time for the Sabbath, or would this assistance, in its direct support of religious behavior, constitute a violation of free thought? This article examines the two Forverts debates, the 1904 Workmen's Circle feature and the 1905 Sabbath question forum, to gain insight on the complex and variegated religious identities of eastern European Jewish immigrants to America.
The Forverts' debates point to the vigor with which Jewish immigrants and their organizations wrestled with religion. They are especially significant in showing how religion and reactions to it did not disappear with the waning of religious authority, but rather became all the more pressing. By the turn of the twentieth century, religious authority had diminished in importance for most eastern European Jews, whether they remained in eastern Europe or traveled to America. American principles of religious voluntarism and freedom of religion made religion a private, not public, matter, and sent religious leaders into somewhat of a tailspin as they had to forge new ways of reaching their audience and protecting their way of life. (2) Industrialization, urbanization, and migration within eastern Europe and to America weakened communal bonds and introduced drastic lifestyle changes that dealt severe blows not only to institutional religion, but also to the individual's sense of piety. (3) Bereft of guidance and in constant encounter with the newness of the urban world and its challenges, individuals struggled to balance work schedules, political ideologies, and other secular interests with religious piety. Many immigrants, confronted with the economic requirement of Saturday work, sought ways to be religious, even when they could not adhere to every aspect of halacha (Jewish law). As the debates will show, even the Jewish radicals, who theoretically dismissed religion altogether, grappled with the novel endeavor of fashioning a Jewish identity without religion and figuring out how to interact with other Jews--coworkers, neighbors, family members--who retained religious practice and sensibilities.
The two debates place the focus on the immigrants' attitudes toward and questions about religious issues, and in so doing, challenge the way in which historiography has tended to divide immigrants into two groups: the religious and the secular. In a sense, historians have followed the cues of immigrant ideologues, the rabbis or the radical leaders, whose own writing and rhetoric tended to create a stark divide between the pious and the political radicals. As a result, the "secular" immigrant looms large in the historiography, organizing strikes, peddling on the street, and voting on Election Day, while the "religious" immigrant, seemingly overwhelmed by American life, typically stays within the confines of the storefront synagogue. (4) Certainly, many historians acknowledge that a religious immigrant also may have been a member of a union, or that socialists held meetings in storefront synagogues. (5) But usually these acknowledgements are mentioned in passing, as the focus of the studies traditionally has been on either the ways in which the people pursued their secular lives--whether engaged in politics, the workday, amusement, or shopping--or alternately, the struggles and accommodations of lonely religious leaders. As a result, we have a very limited sense not only of how socialists and religious people, whom we know worked in the same factories, walked on the same streets, and even married one another, interacted, but even more important, how religion was experienced in daily life. (6)
The way in which this dichotomy has overshadowed the role of religion is apparent in the use of the term yidishkeyt, or Jewishness. In discussing the immigrant neighborhoods, many historians and sociologists have used the term to evoke the cultural world of the eastern European Jewish immigrant. Often, yidishkeyt seems to be presented as an alternative to religious identity, referring specifically to secular and socialist activities. (7) The Forverts' Sabbath question debate demonstrates the problems inherent in these distinctions, for when the respondents of the letters themselves used the word yidishkeyt, they referred to the world of the pious Jew. (8) Further, both debates show how the "secular" and "socialist" immigrants grappled daily with religious issues, in somewhat of a religious manner. The debaters' coinage of terms like "half-religious" and "half-enlightened" and even "half-heretical" to describe themselves testifies to this active engagement with religion and religious issues, in turn pointing to the need to reinscribe religion into our understanding of the term yidishkeyt in this context.
Together, the two Forverts debates offer a more complex sense of yidishkeyt by sketching the processes by which immigrants came to terms with religion and the religious once in America, as well as the conditions, ranging from family to politics, that shaped these processes. The debates, and the very vocabulary, suggest a continuum that stretched between the two poles of Orthodox practice and free thought. (9) Immigrants, lacking religious authority and constantly exposed to the changes of urban life, negotiated and renegotiated their own approaches to and participation in religious activities. Regardless of where they eventually positioned themselves along the continuum, all encountered the ways in which new work schedules, political ideologies, the Jewish calendar, life cycle changes, and family commitment conditioned the process. In both debates, the common process of scrutinizing religious questions and issues, and of balancing new ideologies and practices, and doing so in new forums such as the Yiddish newspaper, proved more important than whether immigrants were classified by others or classified themselves as religious, secular, or socialist.
Eastern European Jewish immigrants shared a world that forced a new engagement with religion. In the following pages, the two debates are examined in reverse chronological order because this arrangement provides the most helpful approach to understanding and analyzing the contours of this shared world. The 1905 Sabbath question debate is an excellent starting point because it highlights the physical and spatial interactions between immigrants of differing religious outlooks--how freethinking and God-fearing Jews worked in the same factories, walked on the same streets, and lived in the same tenement apartments, and on a very basic level, had to devise ways to coexist. The 1904 Workmen's Circle debate moves us to more complex issues, showing not only how Jewish socialists responded to the presence of religious neighbors and coworkers, but also how religious practice was very often part of their culture.
Abraham Cahan and his Readers
On a larger level, the development of the Forverts itself reflects the shared world of "religious" and "secular" Jews, and the way in which religious sentiments and practices had to be honored, or at least not offended, as avowedly socialist institutions moved beyond their rank-and-file base to court the immigrant masses. The Forverts" great success was in large part attributable to editor Abraham Cahan's overt efforts to make his paper tolerant of and acceptable to all immigrants, regardless of religious ideology. Cahan had founded the Forverts in 1897, but left soon after to work as a reporter for Lincoln Steffen's Commercial Advertiser. Influenced by more tolerant American practices, Cahan returned to the Forverts in 1902 and sought to tone down the paper's antireligious sentiment. (10)
This deliberate shift disenchanted some writers and readers who wished to cleave to a more doctrinaire socialist ideology, and stressed that the Forverts should serve solely as an "organ of the working class." (11) Cahan published the angry letters of these critics in the editorial section, enabling him to respond and restate his embrace of tolerance. In an editorial titled "Have Respect for Another's Honest Opinions," Cahan defended his policy: "In America we have learned many things and one of them is to have respect for another's opinion.... Whether you are pious or not, socialist or not, in the Forverts you can live well, and have the greatest respect for one another." (12) Cahan's editorials portray the Forverts' shift in policy as an evolution. Just like a young boy who wears long pants for the first time and is constantly aware of his grown-up status, Cahan explained, newly discovered socialists wear their ideologies like a new outfit, constantly proclaiming their ideology in front of the pious by eating nonkosher meat on Yore Kippur. By 1902, however, Cahan argued that "years have passed, we have become used to our pants," and this maturation enjoined socialists to respect and tolerate others' opinions, even those of the religious. (13)
The debates in 1904 and 1905 provided additional opportunities for Cahan to reiterate his embrace of tolerance. Though there is a perceptible attempt to present the debates in a neutral manner, in introducing the Workmen's Circle debate, Cahan could not resist emphasizing the overall importance of tolerance. He acknowledged that his editorial page had highlighted tolerance "more than once," but explained that the debate allowed for the application of the abstract principle of tolerance to concrete examples. Perhaps to assuage the more doctrinaire socialists, Cahan pointed in his concluding editorial to the Social Democratic Party of America, a predecessor to the Socialist Party of America, which accepted socialist Catholic priests under its wing. "If respectable, honest priests are good enough to be members of the Social Democratic Party," Cahan wrote, "then Jewish believers are good enough to be members of the masses that read the Forverts and organizations like the Workmen's Circle." (14)
These debates, and especially the editorials that bracketed them, not only embraced the ideal of tolerance, but also served as an invitation to a much broader and diverse audience within the Jewish immigrant neighborhoods than Cahan's current readership. Historians such as Moses Rischin and Irving Howe have shown how successful socialist leaders and organizations found that it behooved them to avoid criticism of religion and religious practices in order to reach the masses. (15) "We were not believers and the Forverts naturally had an anti-religious character," Cahan later explained in his autobiography, "But a large part of the Jewish working population was religious, and a workers' paper, I believed, must not be limited to one class of workers, the freethinkers." (16) The fact that leaders tailored their political messages so as not to alienate the religious sentiments of their prospective audiences and, in fact, skillfully reworked religious tropes and formats to meet socialist ends, naturally suggests a populace that hesitated to abandon religious practices and sensibilities even as they became interested in modern ways and progressive ideologies. (17)
Cahan's sensitivity and tolerance succeeded, and immigrants of all ideologies read the Forverts. (18) To be sure, some immigrants made it a point to only read a certain newspaper as an expression of their ideology. Most, however, read several newspapers a day and did not necessarily base their selection of a newspaper on their religious or political beliefs. (19) Some encountered the writings of the Forverts even if they themselves did not purchase it. As many have shown, it was very common for workers to read articles aloud to their coworkers on the shop floor. (20) Many "Sabbath observant" or "religious" immigrants cherished the Forverts. (21) Thus, the newspapers, like the workplaces, constituted part of this shared world of immigrants that, to a certain extent, transcended the pure conceptual boundaries of ideological beliefs.
In championing tolerance and recognizing the ideological fluidity and ambiguity among his readership, Cahan appealed to the "ordinary person." Not only did the Forverts publish stories that the editors believed would reflect what immigrants wanted to hear, but it even cultivated the views and words of the readers themselves in columns such as the famous "Bintl briv," or bundle of letters, in which immigrants wrote in requesting advice on particular situations. (22) Even before the "Bintl briv" debuted in January 1906, Cahan creatively sought to attract the active participation of his readers. As noted, starting in 1902, Cahan beckoned to readers to submit their life stories and to respond to debates. Columns featured topics as diverse as "May Women Rouge?," "How Long Does a Working Girl Keep Her Charm?," and "How I Ridded Myself of Superstition." (23) These calls for reader submissions spoke to Cahan's goal "that the Forverts should receive stories 'from life itself,' dramas, comedies, or simply strange episodes, which were not created at the desk of a writer, but in the tenements, in the factories, in the cafes--everywhere where life plays its own dramas." (24)
"The Sabbath...
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