How the Gilded Age (the era, not the TV show) created American Jewry

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL | JTA

Mike Hale ruined “The Gilded Age” for me. After reading his New York Times pan of the HBO series about Old New York — he called it ”a muddled and slapdash portrait … that consistently dips into caricature” — I figured there were plenty of other series worth my time and attention.

He did not, however, ruin the Gilded Age for me — that is, the actual historic period, roughly from the end of the Civil War to the end of the 19th century. Like many others, I am fascinated by the hallmarks of an excessive age: the lavish homes of the “robber barons,” the stultifying cultural codes of the high society “Four Hundred,” the literary treatments by Edith Wharton, Henry James and Booth Tarkington.

I am also appalled by the misery of the period: the abject poverty of the inner city captured in Jacob Riis’ photographs, for example, and the racist terrorism and white supremacist laws that ended Reconstruction. As the historians Adam Mendelsohn and Jonathan Sarna describe the age, it was a “giddy era marked by freedom and disenfranchisement, excess and immiseration, opportunity and exclusion, confidence and anxiety.”

What I rarely thought about was how Jews fit into this picture. I knew of figures such as August Belmont and the Lehman Brothers, who amassed great fortunes but were treated as arrivistes by the WASP elite. I knew Jewish immigrants from Romania and the Russian empire had begun to pour into New York by the 1880s, but I always felt their story belonged to the 20th century (when, not so coincidentally, my own grandparents arrived). When I read a Wharton novel, my encounters with Jews were both rare and unhappy.

Mendelsohn and Sarna have set out to restore the place of Jews in the post-Civil War period. They have edited the massive, forthcoming anthology, “Yearning to Breathe Free: Jews in the Gilded Age” (Princeton University Library). The title is taken, of course, from the poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty and written by the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, as fascinating a Gilded Age figure if there ever was one.

Earlier this month, the American Jewish Historical Society in Manhattan put on a day-long conference, “Jews in the Gilded Age,” with panels featuring many of the authors who contributed to the new book. It was a bit like Comic Con for history nerds, or at least for buffs like me who regularly listen to New York history podcasts such as “The Bowery Boys” and its spinoff, Carl Raymond’s “The Gilded Gentleman.” Like the book, the symposium fleshed out a complicated era, especially in describing the seeds it planted for the American Jewish community as we know it today.

One big seed was the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, founded in 1886. Before it became the flagship of Conservative Judaism, JTS was an attempt by traditionalists to thwart the rise of the intimidatingly liberal Reform Judaism. Only later did it emerge as the “third way” of American Judaism between Reform and Orthodoxy, as Sarna discussed on a panel that included Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel and the current chancellor of JTS, Shuly Rubin Schwartz.

The enormous economic expansion of

SEE GILDED AGE, PAGE 16