Who should come to the United States? Who should stay?
From this publication’s earliest days, Jews in the Bay Area were preoccupied with questions of immigration, citizenship and assimilation.
The Emanu-El, a forerunner to J., was a staunch bastion of established Reform Judaism, which strongly favored assimilation and touted American liberty as the best of all possible systems. The Emanu-El was read by — and indeed run by — immigrants who sought to leave their past behind.
Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger, our founding editor and the spiritual leader of then-Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, was himself born in the Netherlands. Many of the city’s big names, who donated money to charities and sat on boards, were immigrants from Germany. They viewed America as a promised land of freedom for Jews and truly believed in California as the Golden State. They thought that Jews in this country could, and should, assimilate and become model citizens.
“America is unquestionably ‘God’s Own Country,’ and California is the very arcana of Paradise,” Australian journalist Maurice Brodzky wrote in our pages in 1906. “Where does the Jew occupy a better position than in the United States of America?”
Like most liberal Jews of their day, the Emanu-El’s editors largely rejected Zionism as a kind of anti-American tribalism and furiously repudiated any claim that Jews couldn’t become the best kind of Americans.
In 1895, for example, the paper denounced a visiting German “anti-Semitic agitator” who railed against Jews: “He does not believe they should hold offices, enjoy the rights of citizenship, or have any share in public affairs. The wretched spirit which prompts the persecution or ostracism of the Jew is the joint product of ignorant dogmatism and religious bigotry.”
However, the Emanu-El showed bigotry of its own at times. The situation became especially tricky for the editors and writers when they were confronted with immigrants unlike themselves, particularly Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. In the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th, a huge number of Jews fled Russian-controlled territories and the Pale of Settlement, which included what is now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova.
“We say hundreds of thousands” have arrived, Voorsanger wrote in 1905, “and we believe we do not exaggerate the numbers, considering the vast immigration of the past two decades.”
Many Jews escaped to avoid starvation. Others, “believing they owe no duty to the Czar or a government that would not object to their being shot to pieces but denies them the prerogatives of free citizens, are withdrawing from the sovereignty of the emperor and the gloomy environments of Russian life to venture in the unwonted surroundings of the United States.”
The Emanu-El — and, we can infer, some of its readers — inherently understood why people would want to leave Russia but simultaneously had a low opinion of these more religious, less educated Russian Jews who showed up on America’s doorstep.
An article from England’s Daily Mail, which ran in our pages in 1896, offers a vivid example of how Russian Jews were viewed:
“The class of Jew who comes here, although we confess he is quickly transformed into a fairly decent citizen when vouchsafed a fair field of freedom, upon his arrival presents terrible marks of grinding oppression which has been the staple of his existence,” the article stated.
“He is nearly always stunted, both physically and mentally, and too frequently he carries with him to these shores the germs inhaled in the disease-laden pale, which must lay him in an early grave.”
Still, this paper argued, they were Jewish and shouldn’t be rejected. It wasn’t their fault they were so downtrodden.
This led to some tortuous logic in the paper. Mostly it was OK to let in more Jews because they’d be taken care of by other Jews — but not too many, and with the caveat that they should not settle in New York or speak Yiddish.
Basically, it was American to oppose immigration in order to protect America. Yet it was Jewish to support Jews.
This 1908 editorial was written by Voorsanger himself: “It is a patriotic duty to discourage all undesirable immigration, but it is also proper to demand logical definitions of that adjective ‘undesirable.’”
He didn’t want education to be considered a necessity for immigration, for instance: “The attempt to impose an educational qualification, for instance, upon the immigrant seems wholly impracticable.” And as far as Jewish immigration went, education, or lack thereof, wasn’t an issue, he wrote.
“Whilst a very large percentage of the Russian nation neither write nor read, not a single Russian Jew could be found at that time who could not write his name in one of three languages, either Russian, or German or Yiddish.”
(Voorsanger also noted that schooling could actually be a detriment. “As a rule the anarchist is a person of some education,” he wrote, “and he certainly is undesirable.”)
And don’t forget, he noted, that the country needed people who were ready and willing to undertake physical labor.
That attitude is reminiscent of today’s debate swirling around who will perform the back-breaking work in America’s agricultural fields amid a crackdown on immigrants.
Voorsanger pointed out that there was room and more for workers.
“Instead of its eighty millions, this vast country might have two hundred millions or more of inhabitants, and that native labor is utterly inadequate to the demand of developing the national resources, it does not seem just to impose restrictions upon immigration that will ultimately stop the flow and close the ports,” he wrote.
Throughout it all, a belief in freedom stands at odds with other, frankly racist, opinions, a duality summed up in Voorsanger’s take on immigrants from China.
In one 1896 editorial, he was capable of making bigoted statements about Chinese Americans, calling out their “non-assimilative tendencies” as “natural.” Yet he also argued that they were part of the fabric of America.
“The native Chinese is not an alien. He is a citizen. He is respected as such,” Voorsanger wrote.
This extension of an open hand stands out amid the protectionism, reflecting a generosity of spirit toward the newcomer that is worth preserving in Jewish tradition.
Leon Sanders, president of the Hebrew Sheltering & Immigrant Aid Society of America, addressed the subject in 1916: “The Jew in America has a duty, a sacred duty. Liberty has come to him so that he might become a factor in the solution of the Jewish question. American Jewry is no longer isolated,” he wrote. “Freedom, when enjoyed by the individual himself, is meaningless and is of no consequence. No man stands alone.”