5 Questions with David Endres

I corresponded recently with Fr. David Endres about his new book, Many Tonges, One Faith: A History of Franciscan Parish Life in the United States. Fr. Endres is Associate Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at the Athenaeum of Ohio where he also serves as Dean. He is also the hardworking  editor of the US Catholic Historian.


(1) Writing a history of Franciscan parishes is a huge undertaking. As you note, at the height Franciscan parish ministry in 1968, the order ran around 500 parishes and missions in the US. Tell the blog how you approached this challenge and why you settled on writing the history of fourteen specific parishes. 

Unlike the Jesuits and Dominicans, among other religious communities, there have been almost no studies of US Franciscanism to date. That was the impetus for the United States Franciscan History Project under the direction of Jeffrey Burns and the Academy of American Franciscan History: to bring together scholars to reflect on different aspects of the US Franciscan story. In addition to my book on Franciscan parishes, there has been one other monograph published in the project series: Ray Haberski’s Voice of Empathy: A History of Franciscan Media in the United States. Hopefully, additional forthcoming volumes will address other topics.




One 1950s survey of the Franciscans’ US presence blamed factionalization within the Franciscans on the lack of national or international studies that go beyond a given Franciscan province or branch of the order. He (a friar himself) lamented that he would never be able to please his confreres -- the Conventuals, Third Order Regular, and Capuchins would feel overlooked if he concentrated on the more numerous OFMs (Friars Minor) and all the priests and brothers would resent being chronicled along with the secular Franciscans and the numerous women’s branches.

I tried to keep some balance, and perhaps since I am not a Franciscan myself, I was a bit freer to shape the book around specific parishes – no matter the branch or branches of Franciscanism represented.  I looked for compelling stories that related to broader developments in the history of the Church and nation, but also attempted to provide a diverse representation of parishes – ethnically and geographically, large and small, active and now closed or merged. I knew that to tell such a large story, I had to be selective in choosing parishes to detail. The number “fourteen” was somewhat arbitrary, but I think it provides enough case studies to derive some general conclusions.

To achieve this diversity of place and kind, I made use of numerous archives. The archives of the St. Barbara Province in Santa Barbara, California and the St. John Baptist Province here in Cincinnati provided a wealth of information. Even though Cincinnati is 800 miles from New Orleans, friars from the Cincinnati province ministered in Louisiana (along with Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Arizona, and New Mexico) so archives helped extend my research reach. Other holdings were consulted in person or with the help of kind archivists and librarians.

(2) You show how Franciscans very much became tied to place in America. Tell the blog how the order was shaped by American realities. 

I think that too often scholars (who do not necessarily focus on religious history), see Catholic history in particular as not having much to do with the US historical narrative. But in addition to being tied into major developments in American Catholic history, the book, I hope, helps explore major demographic and social trends that transcend the US Catholic experience.

Those developments included the realities of frontier life, massive European immigration, and the emergence of ethnic-predominate cities. These geo-demographic shifts propelled Franciscans into pastoring parishes in the nineteenth century, though this was not part of their experience in Europe.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the Franciscans were again shaped by new American realities – the interstate highway system, growth of suburbia, the Baby Boom, feminism, and protest movements of the 1960s and beyond. All of these impacted parish life, affecting how Franciscans ministered and how they assessed their ministries.

By engaging some of these broader developments in American life and the American religious experience, I hoped to situate Franciscan parishes within the US historical narrative, not as an aberration, but as a nexus of local institutions and communities that help compose the “American story.”

(3) Many Tongues, One Faith is as much a global story as it is a national story. How does the story of the Franciscans compare to other orders? I'm thinking here of John McGreevy’s work on the Jesuits. Both orders were shaped by the secularization policies of Europe and their coming to the US, but did they respond in different ways? 

It is certainly a global story. The first Franciscans to the US – whether Irish, Italian, German, or Polish – all came from European provinces, bringing with them their own ideals and expectations about being Catholic, being Franciscan, and being ministers of the Gospel. This was not unique to the Franciscans, but I think that friars and religious sisters responded in different ways from the Jesuits and others, partly because of the distinctiveness of their charism.

In the conclusion of the book, I discuss the Franciscan charism: to be poor among the poor; to foster fraternity and community; to be ministers of reconciliation, healing, and peace; and to serve where there is the greatest need, often among those on the margins of society. Their charism, especially the commitment to ministering to the underserved, impacted the locus of their ministries. While the Jesuits had a lively Euro-American exchange of personnel among their colleges, the Franciscans were missioned to the frontier, or urban centers, or Native American missions. Though some returned home later in life, most stayed in America.  Consequently, their lives were significantly shaped by their local experiences of ministry and the people they encountered. More so perhaps than other orders, the Franciscans seemed to stay close to the people, identifying with them, no matter if their own ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic backgrounds were dissimilar.

The work of John McGreevy and others now provide some interesting possibilities for inter-“religious order” comparisons. The Jesuits, more so than the Franciscans, traveled to and from Europe – even after many years of ministry in America – and maintained a close connection to the Jesuit superior general in Rome. The order overall maintained a greater top-down, military model. Overall, my reading of the Franciscan story is that they were more decentralized in their identities and decision-making. The provinces and the semi-autonomous Franciscan “custodies” emphasized local governance. This helped them to respond to local situations and needs in ways different from other orders.

(4) Of the fourteen parishes you wrote about, do you have a favorite? 

Of those that I detail in the book, the one that has resonated most with me is the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio, located about three hours north of my home. As a Marian shrine that remains popular among pilgrims, it is a place where the present is linked to the past. In Carey, an image of Our Lady of Consolation was imported from Luxembourg and brought in procession to its new home at the church in 1875. On the day of the procession, rain threatened on all sides but did not fall on the statue or procession. The safe passage of the statue through the storm was viewed as miraculous. At the same time, unbeknownst to those in the procession, a little girl whose family had taken part in the procession was healed from an incurable illness. It was the first of many miraculous healings, which many believe continue at the shrine today. Dozens of artifacts lining the shrine’s walls stand as testimony to the claims: crutches, casts, splints, and even a six-foot-long wicker basket.
The history of the shrine is full of fascinating stories – some of which are outside the scope of Many Tongues, One Faith or could only be discussed briefly therein. I am particularly interested in the healings said to have occurred there and how they were publicized, especially in the first decades of the twentieth century. The healings shed light on ethnic and devotional Catholicism and how “holy places” operated within the psyche of American Catholics. And as much as believers venerated the location as a place of special intercession by the Blessed Virgin Mary, the shrine also has been the target of anti-Catholicism: a Ku Klux Klan demonstration, an arson attempt, and a successful theft of the famous statue. The vacillations of belief and doubt provide an interesting lens to view religious devotion, reported miracles, and the advancement of science.

My study of the shrine has developed into a near book-length manuscript, “America’s Lourdes: Devotion and Healing at the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation.” I hope to further develop the topic over the coming years and ready it for publication.

(5) Your book builds on the social history tradition of Jay Dolan and Patrick Carey’s classic studies of parish life. One might say the parish is where “the rubber meets the road.”  Why is the parish still a great lens to use to study US Catholic history?

I am indebted to earlier scholarship that helped focus on lay Catholics and their involvement in parish life. Today, as in the past, most Catholics’ experience of the Church is at the level of the parish.  More so than any diocesan structure or specialized Church-run institution, the parish is primary to a community’s religious experience. The correspondence of bishops, their sermons, and financial ledgers readily available at diocesan archives tell part of the story, but only part of it. Getting beyond institutional records to tell the stories of communities is the challenge and also the benefit of researching parishes.

I attempted to use various sources to find the “voice” of friars, women religious, and lay Catholics, utilizing local and parish histories, newspapers, bulletins, and occasionally, interviews. My hope is that it has helped flesh out the lived experience of everyday “people in the pews.” Of course, a selective, case-study approach offers some insights into that experience, but also implicitly points to the need for further studies. If my research has provided an impetus or avenues for future research, it will have achieved part of the goal of the United States Franciscan History Project.

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Jews on the Frontier, a Roundtable: Rabin response

Today we conclude our roundtable on Jews on the Frontier with a response from the author, Shari Rabin. See Parts I, II, and III here. Shari is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and the Director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture at the College of Charleston.

Shari Rabin

This book was in many ways motivated by a frustration and a hope. A frustration with what I felt was a disconnect between American religious history and American Jewish history and a hope that I might be able to create conversations between those two fields. Given that origin story, I really could not be more delighted to be having this conversation, first in person in Atlanta and now on the USReligion blog. Thank you to Charlie for orchestrating the conversation and to Andy McKee, Kate Rosenblatt, and Kati Curts for their close readings of the work.

I am going to start by attending to Kate and Andy’s questions about my subjects: who are they, why are so many of the men, and what about the mobility of women? I went looking for records of ordinary Jews moving throughout the American hinterland and their religious inclinations and expressions. I went to archives and basically tried to look at anything that dealt with American Jews before 1880 on the off chance that there would be something shedding light on mobility and/or religion. It really was needle in a haystack research and I was not able to find a whole lot of women’s materials.

Of course women are central to American Jewish history and American religious history – women’s history is American religious history, in Ann Braude’s famous formulation, and when you look to the congregations, women are absolutely present.[1] Karla Goldman’s wonderful book on this period, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Harvard University Press, 2000), draws attention to this, and in fact one of my favorite findings was that women were being counted in a minyan in the 1850s, for pragmatic reasons. As some of you have noted, however, one of the main interventions of the book was to decenter the congregation as a unit for understanding American Judaism. So, this is one possible reason for the dearth of evidence. There were, however, some intriguing hints of women’s autonomy – an ad for Jewish governesses in the 1870s and examples of Jewish women operating Jewish boardinghouses, in the process effectively commercializing the Jewish home and family. Jewish women were subject at the end of the day to the same constraints as other American women, for whom individual travel was socially suspect if not prohibitively expensive or potentially dangerous. And here it is worth noting that the bulk of my subjects are not only male but also young and economically precarious – two categories of Jews that are not often the subject of scholarly attention.

For the work on religious corporations, I must tip my hat first to Sarah Barringer Gordon for her wonderful work on African American congregations in the early republic.[2] The fact that Jews now gathered in legal corporations was significant –this was the only place where they were identified as Jews by the state. They had to write charters – which they saw as documents of great significance – create boards, and set about the work of communal governance. This also meant that they could end up in the courts – I’ve actually been working on an article for a while about this. It seems to me that some amount of transformation happens in religious life just through the process of adapting to the corporate form, and in court cases in particular, you can see how this encouraged Jews to make Judaism and its peculiarities legible to a Protestant-inflected legal system.

Both Kate and Andy raise questions about interactions between Jews and the non-Jews who surrounded them. Kate raises, in so many words, the question of anti-Semitism. To what extent were the restrictions of the moral establishment really oblivious to their implications for Jews? There were cases – most egregiously California in the 1850s – where explicit anti-Jewish motivations for Sunday closing laws were expressed, but my sense is that most non-Jews were simply too unfamiliar with Jews to directly target them. Jews were small in number and widely dispersed – they remained sufficiently individual and invisible to go un-thought of. One proposed chapter from the dissertation prospectus that I never wrote was explicitly about representations of Jewish mobility in American culture, especially literature and the press, and that kind of study would likely produce different results; but from looking at the state and at everyday life, I did not see a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment. When non-Jews did take notice, more often it was marked by curiosity and even fascination.

Andy: thank you for digging into the example of Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who, by the way, was from Charleston, and is the subject of a recent documentary called Carvalho’s Journey.[3] A few other interesting notes about him: he was traveling on behalf of the American state – looking for a route for the transcontinental railroad, and he wrote his memoir in support of the presidential aspirations of John C. Fremont, who had led that expedition. At the end of the trip he went to Los Angeles, where he helped local Jews organize the first Hebrew Benevolent Society there. So he encompasses a number of the themes of the book really nicely. As Andy noted, Carvalho was no fan of polygamy, but interestingly, he was somewhat sympathetic to Brigham Young, writing, “I received a good deal of marked attention from his excellency, Governor Young; he often called for me to take a drive in his carriage, and invited me to come and live with him, during the time I sojourned there.”[4] Far more common, however, were interactions with Protestant neighbors, however, including in churches where some Jews attended worship.

Jews regularly interacted with individual non-Jews, but they also did keep an eye on other religious communities. They mostly thought that everyone else had things figured out, and they looked to their models of doing things and debated what would work for them. For instance, we see Isaac Leeser complaining about the confusion within American Jewry, “this circumstance will not be met with in any other religious denomination in the country; for they all have statistics.”[5] A version of the denominational model was appealing to him and to Wise, but there also is one example of a Jew looking to the Mormons as a model for solving the chaos of American Jewish life, suggesting the creation of a Jewish territory and eventual state, where the Sabbath – and all of the other resources of Jewish life – could be kept. Furthermore, it would rescue Jews from being a minority and prevent conversion, intermarriage, and/or assimilation.[6]

This brings me to Andy’s questions about feelings of loss, which were real, as were feelings of anger and bewilderment when Jews denied or ignored Jewish practice or affiliation. For instance, the editor of the Jewish Messenger impugned the masculinity of Jewish who denied or ignored their Jewishness and family members in Europe wrote frantic letters to their children in America (see the Loewner family in chapter 3). And there were Jews who did convert to Christianity. For instance, on page 90 I write about a man whose brother-in-law had been converted on Isaiah chapter 53, and was desperately seeking guidance from Isaac Leeser. I think some of the flexibility within congregational life, comes from the pragmatic realization that at least these people were willing to participate. I am also glad you picked up on the history of emotions that the book details. Jewish lives were shaped not only by economic factors or by religious principles, but by visceral feelings that united and commingled the two.

Along with Kate Rosenblatt, Kati Curts pushes me on the question of contemporary relevance. She points to the final line of the book, which in some drafts I deleted, but that ultimately, in a fit of bravery, I chose to keep. I think that the book shows that American religious life has always been eclectic and confusing and outside of as much as within religious congregations. The health of Judaism – or any religious community – is in the activities of those who claim that religious identity, not in the membership rolls of congregations or the proclamations of clergypeople.

The stakes, for me, are about dropping the normative valences in our studies of American religious life – or at the very least, disentangling our operative definitions and boundaries from those of religious elites and institutions. I also want to point to the complexity of religious identity in practice and its embeddedness in the operations of capitalism and the state. At the end of the day, it is not useful to reduce people to denominational identities. They are first and foremost situated subjects navigating everyday life by using a range of resources, religious and otherwise.

In terms of theorizing concepts like “progress” and civil religion, I think I would first point to their geographic valences. These kinds of political and religious projects are appealing in part because they are mobile and capable of continental pervasiveness. Two other notes: I think it is important to recognize that these concepts and terms can be used to many different ends and can have different entry points and meanings for people. It may say more about us than about our past or our subjects if we describe something like “progress” as only and exclusively Protestant. The case of minhag further points to constructedness of geographic identities: minhag America was preceded by and continued to coexist and overlap with other minhagim, which had varying geographic and historical origins.

I think part of what I am doing in this book is leaning on the American in American religious history. I read a lot of social history in writing it, because I wanted to think about the United States not only as a neutral backdrop to the religious histories taking place there, but as a distinctive (though not exceptional!) economic and political matrix within which religious formations emerge, and to which they respond. Jews offered one set of reactions based on their own set of traditions and concerns, but other groups certainly did too. I am curious to find out if people think that I’ve described, to paraphrase Kati Curts, a religious then that is recognizable for other groups. And does it describe the religious now that she invokes? I wanted to provocatively gesture to the present-day implications in the book, but ultimately I wrote a study of the nineteenth century, and my readers are as expert as I in diagnosing the religious now. For now, I will end by thanking these particular readers for their careful and enthusiastic engagement.




[1] “Women’s History is American Religious History,” in Thomas Tweed, Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

[2] Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The African Supplement: Religion, Race and Corporate Law in Early National America,” William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 3 (July, 2015): 385-422.

[3] See also http://juvenileinstructor.org/from-the-archives-a-jewish-perspective-on-mormon-undergarments-and-more-circa-1853/

[4] Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1860), 213.

[5] "What Can be Done," Occident 10, 1852, 371.

[6] On the Establishment of a Jewish Colony in the United States, Occident 1 (1843), 28.

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Jews on the Frontier, a Roundtable: Curts

This is Part III of our forum on Shari Rabin's Jews on the Frontier. See here for Part I and Part II. Today's post is from Kati Curts, who is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South.

Kati Curts

I am an avid and long-standing fan of the project that became Shari Rabin’s award-winning book. Readers will find it to be a brisk, engaging text that is rich with fascinating historical details about otherwise unknown, often overlooked, and sometimes rather surprising sources. It recounts the lives, labors, loves, and losses of men (and, occasionally, a few women) who have not often surfaced in our histories of religion in America.

Readers of this blog have already learned about several of these figures from Kate Rosenblatt and Andrew McKee in their previous posts on Parts I & II of this book, respectively. Though I won’t spend much time myself delving into specific archival anecdotes that appear in the final section of this text, there are a great many more such men that you’ll want to read about for yourself—including Edward Rosewater, a telegraph operator who opens and helps close the book and is remembered in Rabin’s history not only for being the man who wired the text of the Emancipation Proclamation across the continent but also for founding a newspaper and Jewish benevolent society in Omaha, Nebraska. So too we meet here even less prominently positioned historical pioneers, like one Mr. Kusel, who settled on Menominee Indian land in 1851 and shortly thereafter wrote in to a Jewish periodical in order to publicly cheer and discursively map the presence of his co-religionists “in the backwoods country” who had gathered together on the Day of Atonement (1-2, 123). Indeed, it is figures like these who frequently receive pride of place in Rabin’s telling, and this is true too in the final section of the book, where an array of Jewish leaders also receive special attention. Even those rather well-known leaders we have met in other studies of American Jewish history—including prominent figures like Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and Isaac Leeser—come alive anew in this book as we learn to consider them not only as prominent founders of emerging Jewish congregations and denominations but also as mobile Jews themselves, negotiating the challenges and chances afforded them in frontier contexts and across an increasingly westward moving U.S. nation-state. Fortunately, you’ve already gleaned much about this part of Rabin’s narrative from previous posts. So, part of what I want to do here is to help draw us all yet further into key aspects and argumentative interventions of this text—particularly as they relate to the final portion of this book and contribute to debates in the broader study of religion in American history.

As we move into Part III of this book, Rabin trains our eyes upon the ways that Jewish leaders aimed to unify and address the relational challenges of fast-moving and far-flung Jews across the American continent. For leaders like Wise and Leeser, the absence of authoritative rabbis and definitive, geographically-determined rites seemed an unsettling flip-side to the new-found freedom that many Jews, including themselves, found in the U.S. Consequently, we learn in this section how American mobility meant not only the chance to respond creatively to this new continental context but also how it obliged Jews to confront new kinds of problems—problems they had not encountered elsewhere, including, notably, those that concerned the formation and maintenance of Jewish community.

Religious leaders and ordinary Jews felt themselves increasingly thrust into what they referred to as a “congregation of strangers,” a setting that prompted feelings of alienation and estrangement, loneliness and distrust, uncertainty and anxiety, even as they sought affiliation with their coreligionists and others on the American frontier (103). This is a history, then, not only of physical mobility but also of the (e)motional terrain Jews in America traversed and transformed. “Unfettered mobility” was never just the removal of obstacles for movement across space, it also provoked and compelled new kinds of concerns for Jewish Americans about identity, trustworthiness, expertise, and community. Among the prevailing questions they asked themselves and one another was how important it was, or should be, to be a member of a formal religious congregation. How was being a member of a benevolent society—for example B’nai B’rith—really all that different than being a member of a particular congregation, especially if no such congregation really even existed in the frontier locales these men inhabited? Likewise, they wondered what to do about religious leaders and functionaries—rabbis and hazanim—who might have uncertain, maybe even suspicious, identities. Did this require some kind of official credentialing process to adjudicate the credible from the con-man? And what kind of individual or organization had, or should have, that kind of licensing authority? Furthermore, they wondered, was it even possible (let alone desirable) to organize or standardize the “dizzying array of Jewish practices” that so many of these 19th-century Americans encountered and developed for themselves in America (113)? And was it ever possible to organize without also standardizing?

In Rabin’s analysis we see many different ways in which mobile Jews in the early and mid-19th century answered these questions. For some, including Wise and Leeser, congregational affiliation was central. Yet, for many others, including many of those Jews-on-the-move who corresponded regularly with leaders like Wise and Leeser, other bureaucratic and technological means proved to be far more significant in how they found and sustained community. It is for this reason that personal correspondence and its transport by way of an improving postal service, the printed press and an expanding railroad system, and statistical collection and the development of increasingly sophisticated census data, among other things, all prove to be more central to the analysis Rabin offers in this final portion of the book than whether one was a member of a formal congregation.

Jews on the Frontier attests to the ways that the tools and technologies of American political and social life made up what Rabin refers to as the “infrastructure” of 19th-century American Judaism, and she suggests, perhaps also of American religion more broadly. Rabin demonstrates how and why denominations and congregations were (and should be) less significant to understandings of 19th century religious life than previous scholarship has tended to recognize. This is one of the key interventions of the text as a whole. In this final section of the book, Rabin brings this crucial observation together with a broader argument about the structures of religion in American life—how both institutions and individuals get networked into a broader infrastructure of mobility in America. It is those institutions and individuals who best facilitated and helped other Jews negotiate their opportunities and obligations of mobility that proved to be most vital in Jewish Americans’ lives. Circulating newsprint, statistical collection, circuit-riding preachers, rail-riding rabbis, and the contingent labor of hazanim are all shown here to be central to the story of how mobile Jews sought to transform themselves from strangers into friends in 19th-century America.

It was only later and never inevitable that congregations were formalized as central unifying constructs among many Jewish Americans. If scholars have tended to emphasize those later congregational affiliations, this is because, Rabin argues, historians have tended to focus too much on later periods of American Jewish history, explaining how that later 19th & early 20th-century moment was the time when “a rising tide of institutionalization and denominational identity…would peak” (144). In this book, Rabin instead presses readers back in the chronology of American Jewish history in order not only to better see that earlier time for the more institutionally messy and mobile history it offers us, but also because, she insists, this earlier moment actually offers us a better way to understand and make sense of the patterns of our own historical present. For Rabin, what is sometimes told as a story of religious declension, de-institutionalization, assimilation, or secularization is better understood as part of long-standing movement(s), particularly those built upon and structured around the realities and relational dynamics of mobile Jewish life in America.

Indeed, Jews on the Frontier teaches us to see a considerably more complex rendering of all of American religious life – which brings me to the second intervention this book makes that I want to emphasize here. That is, how Rabin not only situates Jewish life in relation to its extra-institutional infrastructure but also connects it to a central ideological narrative or what she refers to as the “mobile imaginary” of 19th-century America: the relationship of the discourse of unfettered mobility with that of Manifest Destiny (124). It was in and through this unique mobile imaginary that Jews helped situate, stabilize, and strengthen their own particular religious forms as part of broader American movement. Indeed, mobile Jews joined other 19th-century Americans in making assumptions about and contributing to racial, social, and political projects centered upon the idea that whiteness and westward expansion were signs of “civilizational progress.” If Protestants advanced progressive theologies in support of Manifest Destiny, Jewish Americans too contributed to such imaginaries. “As Americans deemed white, they too were to replace the Spanish Catholics and Native Americans who had previously ruled and occupied the land,” Rabin explains. “They benefited from Manifest Destiny and they applied its language and concepts toward their own religious ends, mixing and matching it with Jewish diasporic and messianic traditions” (124). This part of Rabin’s argument is rather brief, offering her and other scholars the chance to expand upon it in research yet to come, but it nonetheless manages to play an important role in Rabin’s larger analysis not least because it is one place where she shows specifically the ways in which concepts of “progress” were never solely promotions of Protestantism, and demonstrates how racial and religious imaginaries in this mobile American context were never innocently rendered. Certainly Protestant Christianity contributed to Manifest Destiny’s many ideological forms in important and influential ways. This is something we know—and we’ve come to know it well from previous studies in American religious history. But we learn from Rabin here that 19th-century Jews, too, were agents of and discursively implicated subjects in the imperial project of Manifest Destiny’s racial, geographical, and sociopolitical expansion.

This striking aspect of Rabin’s argument also allows us to see one way this book confidently responds to scholarship that, she argues, tends to orient too much and too often upon an analysis of Protestant hegemony. In contrast, Rabin teaches us that too often Protestantism has served as simultaneously the documentary finding of our archival studies and the prevailing interpretive presumption of what we will find there. This is a bold provocation, but it is based not on a simple assumption that lived practice or pluralist provision is necessarily equal to or even somehow manages to exceed structural constraints. Instead, Rabin builds this argument upon a study of the creative but contingent lives of mobile Jews amid the infrastructures and imaginaries they found themselves and that they labored to reproduce. For Rabin, then, an appeal to “lived religion” isn’t a simple interpretive counter-pose to narratives of hegemonic Protestantism. One might wonder whether she just wants to have it both ways, but that does not seem quite right either. Instead, Rabin suggests that such an oppositional approach to the study of American religious life reduces the complexity of both interpretive positions. She, perhaps like the subjects of her history, moves readily, if not entirely resistantly, between and amid both. Any narrative tendency toward Protestant consensus in histories of religion may “rightly emphasize the power dynamics and social structures shaping American religions,” she writes, but “go[es] too far in declaring Protestantism to be the first cause of them all.” This is an important nuance. Rabin wants to challenge what she sees as the Protestant/pluralist binary manifest in much of the historiography of religion in America, turning instead to a different kind of diagnosis. “Beginning with Jews instead of Protestants and turning to the unexpected and unauthorized religious formations of the road,” she argues, “we can see that the United States is not primarily Protestant or pluralist; rather, it is mobile” (142). Re-centering studies of American religion on the vast array of Jews moving around and about 19th century America, as Rabin has done here, urges those of us who have learned well the narrative of Protestant hegemony to confront historical complexities otherwise belied in our presumptions about Protestantism and its legacies of domination in Christonormative conception.

The argument Rabin advances in this book contends that what is particularly American about the wide array of historical figures we meet in this text is not their tendencies to assimilate or resist patterns of Protestantism or pluralism but rather their characteristic mobility amid these interpretive prototypes. It is the opportunity and obligation to move—physically, structurally, ideologically—that best characterizes all religious life, including Jewish life, in America. Rather than create what she describes as “overwrought divisions between what is Jewish and what is Protestant,” Rabin argues that to see American Judaism for what it was (and is), historians must recognize the “commonalities, overlaps, parallels, and internal complexities” of religious lives forged and reformed on the move. In this final portion of the text—titled “Creating an American Judaism”—we see how that mobility, as infrastructure and imaginary, “as both a product of political dynamics and as a set of challenges that all religious communities must confront,” facilitated the ways in which American Judaism and American religion itself was (and, she says, is) imagined and interpreted—by historical subjects like those she uncovers in the archive but also by all of us as scholars and students, who endeavor to make sense of that documentary record (142).

As an example of that imaginative, interpretive work by both historical figures and historians, Rabin emphasizes three discursive tropes that each contributed to this broader mobile, American imaginary she describes. Concepts of “the Jewish pastoral ideal,” the motif of the “Jewish heart,” and the “progressive” appeal of a “continental minhag” are crucial components of her analysis in Part III. Some might see in the success of these three tropes the powerful press of Protestantism upon Jewish ideation in the U.S. context, but such an interpretive move is, Rabin suggests, to misunderstand the mobile dynamics of Jewish life. Instead, she explains how these ideals and imaginaries required no specific or hard-to-acquire material resources nor did they necessitate formalized institutional congregations, aspects that proved to be beneficial for many of these mobile Jews as they moved around and about the continent. Together, they helped advance a new set of forms in and for American Judaism, a set of forms and transformations that proved influential because they furthered the mobility of Jews in America and helped Jews manage the particular challenges they faced in this new continental context. Ultimately, Rabin asserts: “Hand wringing about the consequences of mobility was not a sideshow to more pressing concerns, it was the engine of the era’s transformations” (139). This book describes, particularly in this last section, how mobile Jews were not just subject to these transformations but served as crucial and creative agents of them, crafting and reconceiving American social and political life while forming an important place for themselves within its imperial contours.

These are compelling and critical contributions not only to the historiography of American Jewish life but also to the study of religion in America more broadly. To conclude, I want to hone in on two sets of lingering questions I have about the stakes of the historical rendering Rabin has offered here. First: what made an institution particularly successful in facilitating or negotiating American mobility? That is, what made an institution something more, something extra, something infrastructural? We learn, for instance, that benevolent societies like B’nai B’rith were particularly well-suited to this task, partly because they coincided with and collided less with a culture of voluntarism than other denominational institutions tended to. But I can imagine an argument that suggests this very aspect of voluntarism cannot and should not be understood outside its Protestant contours. And yet, as I write this, I am also reminded by Rabin that we too often and too easily find Protestantism in just these kinds of interpretive moves. So, how does Jews on the Frontier help us answer that question differently than we otherwise might when focusing not on those ever-present Protestants in American religious historiography but on the mobile, 19th-century Jewish Americans of this book?

Second: if prior scholarship has tended to help us recognize the ways we reinscribe and re-enact forms of Protestant subjectivity in our historiography by suggesting we are somehow all Protestant (or post-Protestant) today, Rabin counters with the firm assertion that “we are all mobile Jews, grappling religiously—in all kinds of configurations—with the uncertainties, possibilities, and limits of American life.” We—all of us—she argues, find ourselves in a world that is “best described as lonely, isolating, … suspicious, and above all, mobile.” Our world—like that earlier 19th-century one—is also shaped, she says, by chaotic geographic movement, vast technological change, and lots of new ways to seek stability, identity, and community…not only in congregations and denominations but perhaps more so “through social media, consumer products, family practices, and multiple traditions” (145–146). Among the things this book does best is to invite discussion and debate about this kind of historical description and genealogical ascription. Are we all today, as Rabin claims, mobile Jews? What are the stakes of this kind of diagnosis—of a 19th-century past rendered in and for our 21st-century present? What does it urge us to recognize—about ourselves, about the role of our institutions, about the tenuousness of our relations, (or perhaps instead our relational resiliency in the face of increasing mobility), just to name a few possibilities?

Or, to ask this second question in a slightly different register, what must we theorize differently, now that we have begun to learn how to better recognize the important contributions of mobile Jews to the historically-generated categories that we scholars and students of religion have too often tended to ascribe too quickly or too easily to Protestantism? The question of voluntarism may offer one such possibility. Another might be the concept of “progress” she (and we) continue to grapple with today. Knowing now the contested ways in which it has been imagined, not only by the Protestants of our typically-told histories, but also the ways in which 19th-century Jews debated among themselves and imagined it rather differently, how might we rethink or reinterpret “progress” as an historically-derived category of and for our own now? Or, to take another quick example, I wonder how ideas about and projects for a “continental minhag” (whether the “American” minhag proposed by Wise or the Sephardic-influenced version of shared rites described in relation to Leeser’s writings) might prompt us to re-think or re-theorize concepts of what we have otherwise referred to as “civil religion” in America (136). These are just riffs, though—random examples I’m throwing out here as points of departure for discussion and debate. I imagine Rabin and those who follow in the wake of her important book can imagine many other, and better, areas for us to re-think and re-theorize. How might we all now trek a bit more adventurously into the theoretical frontier into which Rabin has led us with such historical sure-footedness? I, for one, look forward to seeing where else she and others might take us, particularly now that we have such an archivally rewarding text with which to begin plotting our paths and for which to begin recognizing new patterns of movement and motive.

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Jews on the Frontier, a Roundtable: McKee

This is Part II of our forum on Shari Rabin's Jews on the Frontier. See here for Part I. Today's post is from RiAH's own Andy McKee, a PhD candidate in American Religious History at Florida State University.

Andy McKee

I’ve been tasked with providing a commentary on part two of Jews on the Frontier, titled “The Lived Religion of American Jews,” which contains chapters three and four of the book. These are, respectively, titled “I Prefer Choice Myself: Family and the State” and “Tis in the Spirit Not in the Form: Material Culture and Popular Theology.” Part two of the book, as Rabin explains in the introduction of the book, “explores the consequences of mobility in distinct but intersecting spheres of religious life – family and the life cycle (chapter 3), and material culture and Popular theology (chapter 4).” In this section of the book, she shows how Jews lived their lives outside of strictures of traditional Jewish law. While some have written about this as a process of assimilation, Rabin argues that a “more expansive standards of Jewish authenticity on the road, in the market, and in relationship to the American state” developed.

Rabin traces the history of “lived religion” through the usual suspects: Orsi, Tweed, Hall. Crossing, Dwelling, Faith, Community, 115th, they all make an appearance in the book’s introduction and early footnotes. Rabin notes that both Tweed and Orsi argue that the lived experiences of Catholics in America challenges the dominant Protestant narratives our field of American religious history loves to give. Indeed, as Rabin contends, in line with this scholarship on lived (as opposed to dead?) Catholicism, the study of nineteenth-century Jews in America reveals the “larger structures of race, economics, and the law” highlighting how a small percentage of the total population showed the power dynamics of America’s religious orientations.

And yet, at least by my count, there are more references to oysters in the footnotes of these chapters than to Orsis. The only citation of Hall, Orsi, or Tweed in Part Two on “Lived Religion” is footnote 8 in chapter 4, which mentions Hall’s edited volume alongside histories of capitalism and critiques of church history. This is not to say that Rabin’s use of lived religion is incorrect or fraudulent, but instead, I think, points to the ways in which the field of American religions, at least how I like to imagine it, has integrated these studies successfully. In Rabin’s work, lived religion signals, perhaps, less of a historiographical concern (though that is certainly present), and instead points us to the ways in which Jews attempted to, or not, remain Jewish when they should have been unable to. Being Jewish in the nineteenth century American West was a creative process. As Rabin so puts it, maybe “we should set aside the raucous evangelical preacher, the pious Christian mother, or the fervent Mormon pioneer,” and look at the “mobile Jew” as an archetypal religious American.

Rabin asks us therefore to consider how Jewish lives were lived Jewishly on the frontier of American life. Traditional birth, marriage, burial, and nearly everything in between challenged the lived Jewish experience of maintaining “Jewishness.” Access to proper foods, marriage partners, family life, and religious rituals determined how successfully Jews could retain their Jewishness, should they wish to. Chapter three subtitled “Family and the State” for instance, considers how “Jewish resources” were accessed, or not. Rabin examines birth, marriage, child rearing, and death in this chapter to argue that as Jews were shaped by the spaces of mobility, they to shaped how the West was shaped by Jews. While Jewish writers and later historians lamented the loss of community, Rabin moves to show how a narrative of Jewish assimilation fails to show how Judaism was lived and experienced in the nineteenth century.

If mobility, or the promise of mobility, drove Jews westward, the search for stability eventually seems to have taken over. Jews, Rabin argues, embraced the challenges of distance, worked to fulfill tradition Jewish practices but changed the meaning of Jewishness in various ways. Travel allowed far-flung Jews to get a Jewish education in large, mostly east coast cities. Rabin shows how Jews navigated funerary practices by buying plots of land to open Jewish cemeteries, but death often brought difficultly in securing proper burial grounds. Even in death, these Jews were mobile. People were mourned by friends and family, both Jews and non-Jews. Corpses were buried only to sometimes be unburied and then reburied when they could be taken to Jewish cemetery plots. Death practices, like nearly every facet of Jewish lives, were shaped by the freedoms allowed by the state, and made it possible for Jews to engage or ignore nearly every facet of their obligations to their faith.

Chapter four shows how theology was reconfigured to fit shortages of “Jewish stuff” for rituals, worship, and social relations. I like this categorization of “stuff” as an academic tool for thinking about how materials were moved, created, exchanged, and made meaningful to certain people. Rabin traces the development of information networks of knowledge, intellectual resources, and materials to show that attempts at remaining Jewish changed the boundaries of what it meant to be authentically Jewish. Mobility fueled new, creative Jewish ideologies. Sometimes, this was done from necessity. The lack of materials, knowledge, and Jewish bodies present at a gathering limited certain practices.

Mobile nineteenth-century Jews were constantly thinking about their next meals. Or, at least according to some, they should have been paying better attention. One of the main ways Rabin shows how Jewish challenges of authenticity occurred around food preparation practices and eating habits. Often hamstrung by inability to procure kosher foods, mobile Jews ate pork, shellfish, and joked, to paraphrase Rabin, about the chasm between their diets and their religion. One traveler, the Charleston, South Carolina-born artist Solomon Nunes Carvalho went hungry when in the Far West because he refused to take part in eating a porcupine that was prepared for dinner one night. He wrote “The meat was white, but very fat, it looked very much like pork. My stomach revolted at it, and I sat hungry around our mess, looking at my comrades enjoying it.” He wrote that the porcupine weighed about thirty pounds.

Jews also pop up in unexpected places. Or, at least until you finish this book, they are unexpected. Sure, we know that Jews lived in cities like Cincinnati and San Francisco, but Rabin moves us to places like Apalachicola, Florida; Silver City, Idaho; and Quincy, Illinois, to name but a few of the many, many examples given in these chapters. She also moves us between locations, and takes us on the trails of nineteenth century America, as shown in the porcupine incident of 1853. While Cincinnati and Isaac Meyer Wise pop up in this narrative, the focus is mostly on lesser known mobile Jews and the spaces of Judaism they inhabited. The specter of Wise does haunt the pages of this section, as the tension between individual practices and communal obligations were ever present and rarely ever settled. The stuff of American Judaism Rabin contends, rightly of course, were consumer choices, no longer primarily communal products.

A central theme to this section, and I think the book as a whole, is the idea of using mobility as a trope for American religious history. I really like thinking about this conception as American religion in the nineteenth century as something focused on movement. New settlements, new railroads, confidence in a future marked by new cities, opportunities, and changes. I want to return to Carvalho briefly because I found his account so interesting and in many ways he embodies the “unfettered mobility” of the lived religion of nineteenth century Jews. Though he only appears on two pages in this book, his writing in Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West, published in 1860, raised questions for me about how Jews imagined their religion against others in this mobile period.

In the preface to his book, Carvalho, writes about his engagement with Mormons in Utah. He writes, “While the Latter-Day Saints publicly adopt every opportunity to openly avow and zealously propagate the System of Polygamy – in direct opposition to the established and acknowledged code of morality, as practiced by all civilized nations – I bu (?) exercise my prerogative in exposing some of its abuses, which consider destructive to morality, female delicacy, and the sanctity of marriage.” The abuses of a polygamous life occur, Carvalho wrote later in the book, “when human passions are allowed free scope, and not subjected to laws, either social or moral.” Quoting the book of Genesis, Carvalho refutes the biblical premise of polygamy. He then spends several pages of his book giving a practical explanation of the evils polygamy writing that in a community of 50,000 men and 50,000 women, polygamy practices would leave some 27,000 men wifeless. For Carvalho, society basically collapses in on itself from there.

So my question for Rabin is this: how did mobile Jews imagine themselves in relationship to other American religions? If they viewed their religion as possessing practical tools for changing to fit the challenges of the American landscape, did they think other religious groups could do the same? Or were others less religious, however measured, compared to the adaptations Jews were able to make?

Mobility certainly affected other North American religious groups in the nineteenth century. As Jews stretched their legs and moved across the frontier, I wonder what more could be said about the lived experience of limited mobility. The idea of frontier, the west, and the promises of mobility pulled Jews across the continent. Freedom is everywhere in this book for its actors. So, which Jews could not move freely? The network of correspondence that developed during this period and connected Jews to families across the country reflects a fear by some that their relatives would be less Jewish as they moved. Of course, we all know that distance makes the heart grow fonder, but I’d love to hear more about Jews who feared that other Jews would lose their Jewishness. How did this feeling of loss reflect onto those who chose to remain Jewish? The emotional ties created, sustained, and sometimes lost during this time show how the idea of a stable Jewish identity was inherently unstable, sometimes on purpose, sometimes due to messy circumstances.

Focusing on Jews in this narrative allows Rabin, and the reader, to think through the processes of mobility over long distances, were shaped, and shaped space, place, geography, and the environment. Travel and settlement in the nineteenth century was never easy, let alone trying to remain loyal to an ever-shifting definition of authentic religion. I’ve been thinking about the issues raised within this book as I teach religion in American history this semester. This book is built from a wonderfully vast archive, both geographically and temporally, and I’d love to hear you talk about how you choose your actors. Who got cut out? Why? Rabin asks us to consider what it meant to live as Jewish person in the nineteenth century. The story told in part two, of a quest “for authenticity on the road, in the marketplace, and in relationship to the American state,” gives us a means to understand the tests, fears, and being forced to face a lived religion built from “unfettered mobility.” In this, Rabin’s work promises to challenge scholars of American religion to journey beyond our standard narratives of stable religious actors, and to explore the unruliness and the untidiness of the everyday.

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Jews on the Frontier, a Roundtable: Rosenblatt

This week at RiAH, we're featuring a roundtable of reviews of Shari Rabin's Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU Press, 2017). The book has three sections, so each of the contributions will focus on one section. On Thursday we will publish a response from the author. These presentations were originally delivered at the AAR-Southeast annual meeting in March. We start with Kate Rosenblatt on Part I. Kate is Visiting Professor at the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.

Kate Rosenblatt

Rabin begins her account by correcting the deep imbalance in American Jewish historiography that has focused much of our attention on the masses of Eastern European Jews who arrived beginning in the 1880s. Rabin highlights that the migrations of earlier Jews, largely but not exclusively from German lands, and, importantly, Jews outside of New York City. It is in this period, she argues, that many if not most American Jewish communities were created, and in which American Jews created the infrastructure of American Jewish life.

From the vantage point of the nineteenth century, away from the Lower East Side, Rabin sees the interactions – or, perhaps, the lack thereof – between Jews and the American state. Rabin notes that historians of race have long argued that American Jews became white only in the early twentieth century as the result of protracted social and cultural processes. And while Jews sometimes described themselves as a race, Rabin importantly argues that, from the vantage point of the American state, Jews were always white. Their racial categorization as white thus enabled what she calls “unfettered mobility.”

This was distinctly different from the history of Jews in Europe, which was marked by a “intense, if uneven, regulation.” Into the 19th century, European governments continued to regulate mobility and to make differentiations between Jews and others. Nationalism reinvigorated these processes, motiving states to “reinforce borders, monitor movement, and identify and surveil citizens, residents, and foreigners alike through internal passes, external passports, and a variety of other documents.” And even as many governments enacted emancipatory laws and gave Jews some rights of citizenship, they continued to classify them as Jews. In practice, this meant that Jews were tracked into certain occupations and forbidden from others; their religious lives were conducted through government-supported Jewish communities; and they faced severe limitations on landownership, residence, and travel.



The American context was radically different, given the American state’s deep disinterest in classifying Jews as Jews. The federal government had no religious affiliation, gathered no data about the religious affiliation of its citizens, and those individual states with religious establishments did away with them over the course of the 19th century. Race, rather than religion was the operative category: citizenship was open to “free white persons” who resided in the country for a number of years, declared their intention to be naturalized, and renounced foreign allegiances. And, indeed, from the vantage point of the American state, Jews were, from the beginning, white and as such had access to what Rabin terms “unfettered mobility”: the guarantee that free white men could move as they pleased.

And, indeed, in America, Jewish men had the ability to move freely across the continent, as the United States expanded both geographically and economically across the continent. In the absence of any visible difference from other white Americans (native born or immigrant), Jewish movement in the United States was neither monitored nor organized, as it was in Europe. As Rabin argues, “the mobile American was a white, individually pious male whose primary affiliation was with his fellow citizens on the move.” Indeed, as Jewish men moved into newly-acquired territories, the salient details were not their identity as Jews but rather their ability to perform “proper manners and middle-class gentility” in their interactions with strangers and customers.

It was in the context of their interactions with strangers, however, that some Jews experienced what Rabin calls the “re-fettering of mobility.” Unlike the federal government, which resisted any oversight of mobility or residence of citizens, states and local governments passed “countervailing legislation” to impose order in economic life. This was particularly onerous for the large number of Jewish peddlers. As Rabin notes, peddlers served an important function in bringing goods to far-flung places, but, at the same time, they were also “mysterious strangers whose goods promised instant self-transformation, eliciting consumer and even sexual seduction.” Thus, many cities and states sought to regulate and even limit peddling through licenses that varied in cost and requirements. Further, local authorities objected to Sabbath-breaking, passing laws that made working on Sunday illegal.

This re-fettering was amplified during the Civil War, when Jews, suspected of war profiteering, were subject to General Grant’s infamous General Order No. 11, which accused Jews as a class of violating trade regulations and expelled them from lands under his command (Mississippi and large parts of Western Tennessee and Kentucky). Jews successfully appealed to President Lincoln, who rescinded the order. In the Confederacy, General Lee refused a rabbi’s request to grant Jews a two-week furlough to travel during the fall holidays, arguing that he could not grant such permission to a class of citizens and that Jews would have to make their own individual application for travel. In other words: both the US and the Confederacy refused “to make Jewish mobility a matter of state interest,” either in service to economic regulation or religious observance.

Rabin’s account of the vast new opportunities for ambitious Jewish immigrants on the move in unfettered ways is an important intervention into the literature, one that takes seriously the legal structures of the American state with relation to 19th century American Jews. And she compelling recounts the trials and travails that come along with such opportunity for the many Jewish men who sought new opportunities in the context of America’s growing market economy and territorial expansion. But it also raises questions about the possibilities of movement for Jewish women, whose mobility was tied to family rather than to economic or geographical opportunity. Is there a Jewish female “unfettered mobility,” divorced from a woman’s relationship to a man recognized by the American state as white? Do you have any archival sources that speak to women’s mobility outside of the context of family relocation? In this respect, are Jewish women’s patterns of mobility more akin to those of Christian women, rather than to their male Jewish counterparts?

Further, Rabin interprets attempts to restrict mobility – such as peddling licenses and Sunday closing laws – as efforts to curtail mobility on the basis of time or occupation. Yet some of her own evidence suggests that Jews are being or behaving in ways that are problematic beyond their occupational or temporal patterns. As white persons, Jews had access to mobility from which African Americans and Native Americans were barred, but they remained Jewish migrants “awash in a sea of Christian faith,” to use Jon Butler’s phrase, which marked them as different even if racial categories granted them access to the spaces and privileges of white America. In other words, to what extent can or should we see this regulation as an attempt to regulate Jews as Jews whose practices and patterns run up against a deeply engrained Christian moral establishment and its concomitant anti-Jewish politics (even if the latter was mild compared to that of Europe)? And while it certainly benefitted Jews to be understood as white by the state, did this really mean that other Americans were unable to differentiate among white ethnics in day to day interactions?

In her second chapter, Rabin connects the issue of regulation – or lack thereof – to the emerging patterns of American Jewish institutional life. Monitored and regulated mobility for Jews in Europe brought with it official Jewish institutions and communities; in America, in the absence of regulated mobility, there were no such official bodies to provide access to the necessities of Jewish life and worship. Over time, Jews built ties to other coreligionists on the move – through family and hometown ties, kosher boardinghouses, the Jewish press, and informal worship gatherings – and created institutions including benevolent, mutual aid, literary and debate societies; fraternal lodges such as the Independent Order of B’nai Brith, and congregations. Indeed, in the historiography of nineteenth-century American Jews, historians have carefully tracked the emergence of institutions – most frequently synagogues – that appear, at least outwardly, as stable and coherent. Further, historians have assumed that congregational membership is a good indicator of religious commitment.

Importantly, however, Rabin reorients our approach to these institutions. Congregational membership, she argues, was “far from a decisive measure of religious commitment,” and indeed, these congregations created as many conflicts as they solve. Indeed, she notes, though rarely noted in institutional studies, “evidence of outsiders, conflicts, and misbehavior is abundant” within the archival record. Drawing on the “lived religion” history/ethnography methodologies of religious scholars such as Robert Orsi, Rabin thus provides a dramatically different account of American religion in this period by beginning not with “congregations or sectarianism, but with the many lonely migrants seeking community, identity, and stability on the road.”

On the road, these migrant Jews faced not only a sense of impermanence but the realities of religious scarcity in far-flung places with few family members, coreligionists, or institutions. Upon arriving in a new place, a migrant would often first seek out friends or relatives who had preceded them; these networks provided not only companionship and sociability but also economic assistance, including credit, capital, work, and recommendations. In the absence of such opportunities to create ties to other Jews, migrants made Christian friends and joined fraternal orders and non-Jewish voluntary associations; some Jews even attended church.

Yet such ties did not preclude Jewish associations. Importantly, as Rabin notes, while other Americans might only see white immigrants, Jews on the move often had the ability to recognize fellow Jewish bodies, names, languages, practices, and stories, and once Jews recognized each other, they could create more stable ties. Jews might, for example, choose boardinghouses overseen by Jewish women, or forge connections through the circulation of Jewish newspapers, sabbath meals, or observance of the autumnal high holidays.

Jews who had settled created a range of voluntary institutions where Jews could “more reliably and regularly locate one another,” a feat helped along by incorporation. This relatively new legal technology not only granted such institutions tax exemptions but also the ability to hold property and capital, enter into courts, and outlive individual members. Through the American state, therefore, American Jews could thus transform their institutions into “visible forms of social life that offered recognition and some promise of stability.” Thus they formed mutual aid, literary, debate, and benevolent societies; fraternal lodges; and, ultimately, congregations.

Congregations were formed once “there was a critical mass of local Jews who were geographically and financially stable,” and usually progressed from assemblages of local Jews to formal congregations in order to gather resources and routinize Jewish life. Importantly, however, Rabin argues, their success was not inevitable, and these congregations struggled to survive amidst the poverty and mobility of their constituencies. And, importantly, unlike in Europe, these congregations relied entirely on voluntary membership that presumably consisted of “sovereign individuals who shared beliefs, commitments, and religious support.” On the ground, however, it was much messier business. The stresses of mobility made it difficult for congregations to police questionable religious behavior or to entice payment of membership dues. For example, some congregations attempted to levy fines for delinquent members; others struggled with how to deal with increasing numbers of Jewish men who married non-Jewish women but wished to remain a part of Jewish communities; still more developed careful policies governing mourning and seating rites, resulting in some cases in ticket systems for high holiday worship attendance. Congregations were not along; fraternal organizations and newspapers similarly faced “wavering commitment and support.” In all, Rabin argues, membership may have been an alluring path to stability, but it was “not as supple or mobile as Jewish identity.”

Further, American congregations had to negotiate the nature of Jewish practice, particularly with respect to plans for reform and minhagim (geographically distinct rites that governed customs of pronunciation, prayer, and practice). What, in other words, would worship, ritual, and other interactions look like? Given the wide range of places of origin and practice of congregants, this was not always an easy question to work out. Would a congregation use a Polish minhag? An Ashkenazi minhag? Would services be conducted in Hebrew, and if so, could sermons or lectures be delivered in English and/or German? Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise’s program and prayer book, “Minhag America,” published in 1856, sought to achieve some uniformity of practice, but diversity persisted not only in the same places but even within individual congregations.

All together, Rabin argues, congregational affiliation would remain “a haphazard and temporary mode of religious identification, one that was secondary to informal ties, newspapers, societies, charity, fraternal orders, and family life,” not as a reflection of apathy but instead because these forms of belonging “simply worked better in their mobile and sometimes lonely, American lives.”

As a historian of American capitalism, I’m intrigued by Rabin’s move to understand Jewish congregations not only as an emergent model of American Jewish institutional life but also as corporations. American Jews used the relatively new legal technology of incorporation to build stable institutions charted under state laws. How did such incorporation change the relationship between congregations, its members, and the American state? Does the turn to incorporation change the practices and behaviors of American Jews within the spaces of these congregations? I’m particularly interested in which mechanisms of the state enter the spaces of Jewish affiliation, if at all, and how individual Jews understand those mechanisms.

And finally, if indeed congregational and/or institutional affiliation was a poor indicator of religious commitment, it begs questions about the parallels between the lives of 19th century American Jews and their late 20th and 21st century coreligionists. The story she is telling here – of emerging and unstable institutions, expansion in understandings of Jewish authenticity, and a realignment of Jewish beliefs, behaviors, and senses of belonging – very much parallels the efforts of Jews to expand, broaden, and reform the contours of post-World War II American life. Scholars have often followed the lament of rabbinical authorities and others who have insisted that such changes is tantamount to decline. Indeed, part of what is so powerful about her account is the ways in which it avoids the oft-retold narratives of anxiety of assimilation. How, then, can the history presented enrich our understandings of contemporary American Judaism? Can the eclecticism, the do-it-yourself sensibilities, the decline in institutional affiliation be seen as signs and symptoms of generative and creative reformations and expansions rather than as assimilatory and problematic?

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French Catholicism in the Early American West: Five Questions with Gabrielle Guillerm

Benjamin J. Wetzel

Gabrielle Guillerm is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Northwestern University. Her dissertation will examine French Catholicism in the early American west. She was awarded a 2017 Cushwa Center Research Travel Grant to pursue work on this topic at the Notre Dame archives. What follows is the first of several questions I recently asked Guillerm about her work.  Read whole thing at the Cushwa Center website!


BW Can you briefly describe your project for us?

GG My dissertation, "The Forgotten French: Catholicism, Colonialism, and Americanness on the early trans-Appalachian Frontier," focuses on the Midwest and Kentucky and aims to recover the French Catholic story of the early United States. I posit that, compared to the colonial period, French Catholic cultural influences strengthened in the west over the early republican period even as the proportion of Francophone Catholics in this former French territory diminished. The development of these new French Catholic influences resulted from the French Revolution.  Refugee priests in the United States created new Catholic networks between France and the United States. These networks intensified in the early 19th century and were embodied by the circulations of hundreds of female and male missionaries and thousands of religious objects. French clergy built French religious orders and schools after French examples--the Congregation of Holy Cross and Notre Dame for instance--and spread popular French devotions, such as the devotion of the Sacred Heart. Non-French clergy themselves relied on the connections with France, which further contributed to spreading French Catholic influences.

This project seeks to understand how French Catholics and French Catholic influences fit into the new nation. Analyzing the encounter between Catholics and other trans-Appalachian populations, I argue that defining American identity was a contentious process, and central to this contestation were French Catholic missionaries and French Catholics. Indeed, French missionaries' status in the new nation was ambivalent: they were both threats to the country and agents of the nation's agenda in the West, insiders and outsiders.  On the one hand, they spread an alternative understanding of the new nation that challenged the assertion of the American identity as Anglo-Protestant; on the other hand, they took an active part in the building of the colonial settler nation promoted by the U.S. government.

Read the rest here!

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