Transnational Traditions Transnational TRADITIONS New Perspectives on American Jewish History Edited by Ava F. Kahn and Adam D. Mendelsohn Wayne State University Press Detroit © 2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936561 ISBN 978-0-8143-3861-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-8143-3862-9 (e-book) Permission to excerpt or adapt certain passages from Joan G. Roland, “Negotiating Identity: Being Indian and Jewish in America,” Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies 13 (2013): 23–35 has been granted by Nathan Katz, editor. Excerpts from Joan G. Roland, “Transformation of Indian Identity among Bene Israel in Israel,” in Israel in the Nineties, ed. Fredrick Lazin and Gregory Mahler (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 169–93, reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida. CONN TE TS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 PART I An Anglophone Diaspora 1. The Sacrifices of the Isaacs: The Diffusion of New Models of Religious Leadership in the English-Speaking Jewish World 11 Adam D. Mendelsohn 2. Roaming the Rim: How Rabbis, Convicts, and Fortune Seekers Shaped Pacific Coast Jewry 38 Ava F. Kahn 3. Creating Transnational Connections: Australia and California 64 Suzanne D. Rutland PART II From Europe to America and Back Again 4. Currents and Currency: Jewish Immigrant “Bankers” and the Transnational Business of Mass Migration, 1873–1914 87 Rebecca Kobrin 5. A Taste of Freedom: American Yiddish Publications in Imperial Russia 105 Eric L. Goldstein PART III The Immigrant as Transnational 6. “German Jews?” Reassessing the History of Nineteenth- Century Jewish Immigrants in the United States 144 Tobias Brinkmann 7. The Gypsy in Them: Imagined Transnationalism amid New York City’s Little Rumania 165 Lara Rabinovitch 8. No American Goldene Medina: Harbin Jews between Russia, China, and Israel, 1899–2014 185 Jonathan Goldstein PART IV Creating New Homelands in Argentina, America, and Israel 9. Cultivating Jewish Farmers in the United States and Argentina 212 Ellen Eisenberg 10. Transforming Identities: Bene Israel Immigrants in Israel and the United States 230 Joan G. Roland 11. Transnational Aspirations: The Founding of American Kibbutzim, 1940s, 1970s 253 Ava F. Kahn Contributors 281 Index 285 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No book can be completed without the considerable help of critical readers, obliging archivists, thoughtful colleagues, and supportive friends and family. First and foremost, we thank the contributors to this volume, without whom the publication would not exist. All worked diligently with us to produce this volume. Also important for a publication are encouraging editors. At Wayne State University Press, we thank production editor Kristin Harpster and edi- tor-in-chief Kathryn Peterson Wildfong, who has remained patient and sup- portive throughout the publication process. Kathryn selected two thoughtful reviewers whose detailed feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript led to revisions and a much-improved publication. We thank them for their time and insight. We are also indebted to archival and library staffs who helped us secure photographic images and research materials. We are particularly grateful to Philip Moses of the Australian Jewish Historical Society, Matthÿs van der Merwe of the Iziko Museums of South Africa, and Susan Snyder of the Ban- croft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. It is always a pleasure to work with Kevin Proffitt, the Senior Archivist for Research and Collections at the Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives. Dr. Gary P. Zola, Execu- tive Director, and Eliza Ho, Associate Archivist at the Archives also helped us in securing images. We thank them. The leadership of Hadassah generously sup- plied unprecedented access to their archives when conducting the research for chapter 11. Their help and that of the American Jewish Historical Society where their records are housed is much appreciated. Now for personal thank-yous. I benefited from colleagues who com- mented on conference papers presented at the Organization of American Historians and the Western Association of Jewish Studies. Also, heartfelt vii viii acknowledgments thanks to friends and colleagues who read versions of chapters: Ellen Eisen- berg, Norm Frankel, Ruth Haber, and my husband, Mitchell Richman. A.F.K. This project, itself a long time in the making, coincided with the birth and first two years of my son’s life. My thanks to my forbearing wife, and to Sam, who has made our lives so much fuller and funner. A.D.M. Transnational Traditions INTITRODUC ON Simultaneously celebrated as a goldene medina (golden land) by Jews attracted to its many wonders and stigmatized as a treyfe medina (impure land) by those leery of its freedoms, America has long occupied an outsized position within the Jewish imagination. The success of Jews in the United States, and the tragic fate of many of their counterparts in Europe before and during the Holocaust, crystallized the idea in the minds of many American Jews that they dwelled in an exceptional land. While not particular to Jews and those who study them, such claims of exceptionalism have been difficult to displace. All too often, the trends and challenges encountered by American Jews have been held up as unique. American Jewish history has often been depicted as a subject that starts and stops at the US border. According to this telling, Jewish newcomers jettisoned their past connections upon reaching American soil. Historians of the United States in general felt little inclination to look beyond America’s shores. Historians of American Jewry often have had par- ticular reason to limit their purview. Eager to weave Jews into the American narrative, some may have been reluctant to look for American Jewish history abroad. Others may have been concerned that by harping on the ebb and flow of connections between Old World and New they would play into the hands of those suspicious of the loyalties and political proclivities of America Jews. Many may have been daunted by the linguistic, financial, and temporal demands of following immigrants back to their point of origin. Still others, perhaps conscious that American Jewish history is a comparatively new field, may have been satisfied that there was more than enough new territory to explore if they confined their focus exclusively to the United States. This book reflects the efforts of contemporary historians to push back against the assumption that the experience of Jews in the United States can 1 2 introduction best be understood apart from the experiences of Jews elsewhere. Contribut- ing authors to this volume seek to plug American Jewish history back into the wiring of Jewish life abroad. Rather than assume that American Jewry has been the passive recipient of ideas, identities, and trends carried to its shores—that influences flowed in one direction only—several of the chapters demonstrate how American Jews shaped elements of Jewish life in Europe and Israel. In identifying elements of the American Jewish experience that are transnational—that cross political boundaries—the contributors to this volume are aiding in a broader rethinking of American, and indeed modern, Jewish history. For although Jews are the archetypal diasporic people, they have more often been studied by modern historians as citizens and subjects of single nation-states and empires—as American, Australian, Austro-Hungarian, Pol- ish, Russian, or German Jews—than as a people whose traditions, identity, sense of solidarity, and commercial, social, and religious connections crossed borders, regions, and even oceans. This was not always the case. Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow, and Salo Baron—the leading lights of earlier eras of historical writing about Jews—each composed multivolume surveys that identified unifying trends, themes, and processes that transcended politi- cal boundaries. Moshe Rosman, an eminent historian of modern Jewry, recently lamented that the soaring ambition of this earlier “transgeographi- cal” approach has given way to a “national model of history-writing” focused on the narrower goal of seeking to understand how Jews influenced and were influenced by specific geographic contexts. If the “older histories discounted political geography,” Rosman writes, “the newer ones privileged it.” Ros- man wondered whether the “political–geographical framework,” for all of its advantages, has unintentionally blinded the “researcher to connections that may compose other contexts that might be more important and prompt a dif- ferent overall view of the relations between Jews, non-Jews, and other Jews.”1 Rosman’s clarion call for a new transnational approach to writing about Jews in the modern world—a history that is sensitive to local context but also appreciates the interconnections, commonalities, and areas of overlap between communities—echoes that of scholars within several other fields of history. Among historians of America, Thomas Bender has become the loud- est cheerleader for what he and others have described as “global history.”2 But he is far from alone: in 2009, the American Historical Association selected “globalizing historiography” as the theme of its conference. More and more scholars have begun to produce works that have fulfilled the broad ambition introduction 3 of eliding the national and the transnational. Unsurprisingly, some of the