Liberty for Jews in Philadelphia

PAT JOHNSON REPORTER

In the history of American immigration, some groups, notably the Scandinavians, developed a rural farming society, heading off the boats in the New World and boarding trains to the Great Plains. American Jews, however, evolved into a largely urban population and were happy to settle where the ships docked. New York, Boston, even Galveston, Tex., were populated by Jews who landed on shore not far from where they would make their mark.

Though happy to settle anywhere they could experience the new freedoms of the United States, Jews were particularly drawn to Philadelphia. The growth of the Jewish community in the City of Brotherly Love was not a coincidence. Coming from western Europe, where anti-Semitism was always just below the surface, or eastern Europe, where it was laid bare through seemingly endless pogroms, the Jewish immigrants found genuine acceptance in Pennsylvania, where religious freedom was the founding principle of the colony.

At the time of the American Revolution, there were a mere 300 Jews in Philadelphia, though as many as 100 are said to have signed up to fight for independence. A century later, there were about 15,000 Jews who had straggled in from various locations, but mostly England and western Europe. The beginning of the great pogroms of the 1880s, however, sent the Ostjuden – the Jews of eastern Europe – fleeing for safer locales such as the United States.
Touring downtown Philadelphia today provides a remarkable lesson in the intertwined existence of the Jews and others who have made Philadelphia one of the most unselfconsciously multicultural cities in the world.

Almost all the Jewish immigrants of the 1700s and early 1800s headed for a densely populated dozen square blocks that are just off what is now the trendy South Street. Though most of the Jews are gone from this immediate area, there remain a number of institutions and ghosts of the remarkable Jewish past. At the height of immigration, in 1910, there were 80,000 Jews living in the small ghetto-like confines of this neighborhood.

New World welcome

It is a sad fact of American Jewish history that cultured, assimilated western European Jews who had been in the United States for a generation or two were among the strongest opponents of eastern European immigration. Having worked hard to gain acceptance in the New World, many believed the onslaught of crude, shtetl-reared Ostjuden would reverse the successes they had gained in public acceptance.

Philadelphia's Jews, though not without their faults, took a more positive approach, according to Henry Nechemias, a volunteer tour guide for Walk Philadelphia, a city-sponsored tour agency.

Germanic Jews set up the Jewish Alliance, which took upon itself the role of training new immigrants for gainful employment. There was even a college of agricultural studies set up under its auspices that helped create in nearby New Jersey a burgeoning Jewish chicken and egg farming industry. Though the continued existence of Jewish egg farmers in the area is doubtful, the synagogues of south Jersey remain a testament to this effort by established brethren to create a life for new immigrants outside of the tenements of Philadelphia's city centre.

Like so many other immigrant reception neighborhoods, the original Jewish quarter of Philadelphia transformed itself to accommodate the latest mass of immigrants, whether Italian, Polish or African-Americans coming up from the south in search of better conditions. The Jews began moving to the suburbs, but the traces of Jewish life remain impressed on the area through such monumental souvenirs as synagogues that are now churches serving the current residents. Another synagogue is now an antique store.

But there are some shuls that have held out, providing spiritual nourishment for the small number of Jews who have stayed and the numbers who are returning from the suburbs to the excitement of city life.

B'nai Abraham, a gorgeous old structure, has been an operating synagogue since 1910 and its tiny, intimate sister synagogue, Vilna Congregation, is the last of what used to be a common sight: a synagogue housed in a formerly residential row house.

The houses of the area were called "trinities," ironic since they were first peopled by Jewish immigrants. The style was extremely narrow and not particularly long, with three floors per building. Like immigrant housing all over North America, the row houses represented the minimal necessity. One room per family, if lucky, facilities out back and (who should complain?) shared indoor kitchens. This is the sort of architecture that greeted new Americans when the mass of Jewish migrants came from Europe between 1880 and 1910.

Philadelphia, now America's third largest Jewish metropolis, with 300,000 Jews, is a good arbiter of how Jewish immigration changed America. The comfortable intermingling of Philadelphia's Jews with their non-Jewish neighbors made a significant impact on the evolving United States of America. As the new country's constitution was being drafted after the war of 1776, a special "kosher table" was set up for the Jewish participants. It could be said that Jews found safety and acceptance in Philadelphia and that they helped expand on the Quakers' concepts of religious tolerance, a Philadelphia idea that went on to permeate the very idea of the United States after the American Revolution.

Ringing in freedom

The Liberty Bell is probably Philadelphia's best-known attraction, though its true provenance is not widely understood. The bell, with its famous crack, has been melded in the public's mind with the American Revolution, though it really predates that event by 25 years. And while the bell certainly symbolizes freedom of many kinds, its meaning for American Jews is more significant than most know.

The bell – which only gained the moniker Liberty Bell in the 1800s – was struck in 1751 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania's Charter of Privileges. Fabricated in England, it was transported to Philadelphia by Nathan Levy, a merchant who owned a transport ship and who proved instrumental in creating the city's Jewish institutions.

The city of Philadelphia was founded by Quakers led by William Penn. As non-conforming Christians in England, Quakers were subject to professional limitations and other discriminatory practices – the sort that the Jews of Europe had long endured. When they formed New World colonies, the Quakers, in what are now Pennsylvania and Delaware, were scrupulous in ensuring religious freedom. Unlike their cousins, the Puritans, who settled northern New England, the Quakers learned their lesson of oppression and created a legal framework that ensured not just religious freedom, but also judicial rights including the jury system, an end to debtors' prison and a sharp reduction in the number of crimes for which the death penalty was meted out.

These rights were guaranteed by several documents in the 1600s, but were enshrined in 1701 in what was, essentially, the constitution of the Pennsylvania colony. The Charter of Privileges set out standards for representative government, legal rights of the accused, the orderly settlement of property disputes and,
of course, religious freedom.

It is worth noting that this document was drafted decades before the American and French revolutions, events which were heralded as beacons of human rights and democratic ideals. It also certainly provided a significant precedent for the concept of separation of church and state that evolved after the American Revolution.

This is not to say, however, that the human rights concept of the time represented contemporary ideals. Religious freedoms were guaranteed with caveats. Only those who believed in one God were granted the freedom to worship in their own way – this included the Jews. But, until 1790, only those who worshipped Jesus Christ were permitted to serve in government. Nevertheless, the Jews of Pennsylvania evolved into a strong and diverse community comfortable in the milieu that emphasized free religious expression.

Interestingly, the few Jews of early Philadelphia may have been more comfortable even than the Catholics. Though the society's treatment of Jews was perhaps viewed as a litmus test to their commitment to religious freedom, the Quaker leaders didn't seem as able to overcome their traditional English mistrust of the Roman church.

It is said that, when the Jews created one of their first synagogues in Philadelphia, they were happy to construct it in a prominent location with distinctive architecture. When the Catholics built one of their initial churches, it was in an out-of-the-way location and in a style that emulated the Protestant forms of the time.

By the time of the American Revolution, the Liberty Bell was in the belfry of the Pennsylvania legislature. Its name came in the 1800s when a group of slavery abolitionists came to Philadelphia, saw the bell's inscription and decided to employ the message it bore in the service of ending slavery.

It reads: "... Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all inhabitants thereof...."

The bell has since taken on a meaning associated with the American Revolution and the abolition of slavery. But the meaning of the bell and the religious tolerance that it originally represented have had a strong influence on the Jewish community of Philadelphia and the United States at large.

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