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Reviews of Books
cans and Federalists as sharply drawn as Mushkat
sometimes suggests. Leading Federalist judges, including James Kent, often supported Van Buren's republican jurisprudence, and Federalist attorneys assisted
him on many occasions in the presentation of his cases.
In short, a final verdict on the "little magician" is not
yet in.
MAXWELL BLOOMFIELD
Catholic University of America
DAVID G. DALIN and JONATHAN ROSENBAUM. Making a
Life, Building a Community: A History of the Jews of
Hartford. New York: Holmes and Meier. 1997. Pp. x,
326.
The histories of individual American Jewish communities, or Italian-American, Polish-American, AfricanAmerican, Chinese-American ones, deserve to be told.
They offer the base on which larger, more conceptually
framed generalizations can be built, and they provide
fundamental details about lived life on the local level.
After all, without the narratives of specific communities, how would we know about housing patterns,
occupational structures, family adjustments, institution building, and educational engagements? It was in
places like Buffalo, Indianapolis, Portland, and, in the
case of this book by David G. Dalin and Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Hartford, as well as hundreds of other
cities and towns, that immigrants settled, made a
living, reconstituted families separated by the process
of migration, carved out new institutional forms to suit
their new living conditions, and reconnected, albeit in
novel ways, to their sisters and brothers dispersed
around the world. Local histories help us understand
these matters in concrete ways for all groups who made
up the American people.
For American Jewish history, local community studies play a particularly significant role in fostering
understandings of the past. Official government documents, the United States Census in particular, offer
few clues about where Jews lived, how many actually
established themselves in any particular place, how
they earned a living, and how those patterns changed
from decade to decade and generation to generation.
Focusing on particular places provides a way, in the
aggregate, to overcome the general invisibility of Jews
in larger, public documents. Additionally, American
Jewish history, and American Jews in general, have
suffered from a "New York problem." Since New York
was American Jewry's behemoth, dominating not only
the numbers but also the power, the production of
texts, and the public consciousness of the Jewish
people in America for most of their history, narratives
of smaller communities, like Hartford, offer important
correctives. This book, like the studies of other Jews
outside of New York, demonstrates the complexities of
adaptation and forces us away from telling the story of
America's Jews solely from the vantage point of those
who lived in the giant city.
American Jewish historians have remained very
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
much rooted in the social history paradigm of the
1960s and continue to focus on the basic building
blocks of community as a way of crafting their analysis
of the past. The kinds of questions they ask are very
much dependent on uncovering local realities. They
continue to assert, as do Dalin and Rosenbaum, the
need to study ordinary people doing ordinary things as
a way of exploring history. Although the authors here
do not always keep their promise to avoid an "elitist"
focus, they do provide much important data on, and
compelling stories about, the Jewish women and men
who tried to make a living in Hartford and who
considered it their responsibility to help build a community there. This book deserves a place on the
shelves of libraries alongside studies of other Jewish
communities. It augments the store of available data
on Jewish life in America, focusing on employment,
housing, generational mobility, institutional infrastructure, engagement with politics, and inter-group relations. Following the pattern set by the earliest Jewish
community histories, Dalin and Rosebaum predictably
chart the themes of first settlement; early integration;
the origins of, and continued debate over, religious
innovation; successive waves of immigration from farther east on the European continent; the uneasy
encounter between newer immigrants and the longtime Jewish residents; and the eventual success of the
Eastern European majority in creating the kinds of
institutions that it, and its American-born children,
preferred. Like most American Jewish tales, the history of the Jews of Hartford contains, and particularly
ends on, a bittersweet note. After decades of struggle
to make their lives and build their communities, Jewish
affiliation has weakened, and the descendants, literal
or figurative, of the book's subjects seem to take a
relatively nonchalant attitude toward the meaning of
their Jewishness, contemporaneous with their astounding economic successes and social integration.
Dalin and Rosenbaum weave into their narrative the
biographies of institutions, synagogues in particular,
and the biographies of notable individuals, the sons
and daughters of Jewish Hartford, whose personal
stories reflected the larger narrative of a community
that went from obscurity and marginality to prominence and public acclaim. Like most of the works of
this genre, the authors posit a trajectory that spans the
themes of obscure beginnings, communal instability,
institutional and personal achievement, and relatively
grim forebodings about the future. It has a slight but
predictable celebratory tone, praising Hartford as a
setting for its "firsts" among American Jewish communities and particular individuals for their commitments, accomplishments, and leadership.
Although it certainly is among the best of its type of
scholarship, this book, as a text, does raise some
questions. Although it has all the markings of a
scholarly book-dense footnotes, an extensive bibliography, the imprimatur of a respectable publishing
house, and reasonable prose-it was paid for by a
member of the Hartford Jewish community, who is
DECEMBER 1998
United States
discussed in the book as a subject of historical analysis.
There is no reason to believe that the family of the
donor (now deceased) exercised any kind of censorship or pressure on the presentation of the material;
nevertheless, it leaves a problematic impression.
Should works of history be underwritten by their
subjects? Furthermore, while controversies within congregations and institutions appear here, they are
muted, and the authors, without any evidence, conclude that "Greater Hartford Jews have historically
been agreeable even in disagreement" (p. 3). Changes
take place organically, and the tensions that have
ripped through Jewish communities do not make their
way into the text. Rather, community consensus appears as the leitmotif, and we have no way of knowing
if the data supports it or if the Jewish community of
Hartford and its leaders, who are thanked so warmly in
the introduction, wanted it that way.
As Dalin and Rosenbaum bring their narrative to a
close, they become policy planners and predictors of
the future, risky business for scholars whose task it is to
analyze the past. Indeed, instead of offering an analytic conclusion about the history of Hartford's Jews,
Dalin and Rosenbaum address themselves to those
overseeing the future of Hartford itself. The book ends
with recommendations to local officials on how to
enhance life in Hartford and on the need to tie the
financially strapped, numerically dwindling city to a
larger, more vibrant regional economy, just as Hartford's Jews have connected themselves and their institutions to a Jewish regional infrastructure. Matters like
this are not the business, or the expertise, of historians,
and the ending and blurring of the historical focus
raises questions about the authors' real interests and
purposes.
HASIA R. DINER
New York University
WALTER EHRLICH. Zion in the Valley: The Jewish Community of St. Louis. Volume 1,1807-1907. Columbia:
University of Missouri Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 441. $35.95.
Walter Ehrlich, despite his statement to the contrary,
has written the comprehensive history of the Jews of St.
Louis. This is the first volume of two, instead of the
proposed three, and covers the years from 1807 to
1907. Ehrlich very carefully and thoroughly examines
the history of the Jewish community during these
years; however, he does state that it could not really be
considered a community until the 1870s, when the Jews
of the city came together to provide relief for their
coreligionists who fled the Great Fire of Chicago.
Ehrlich, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish
family in St. Louis, wanted to work on such a topic in
graduate school but was persuaded by his advisers that
ethnic studies were of lesser importance than subjects
national in scope. Thus, he became a constitutional
historian. His training is reflected in this work. For
example, in chapter one, he meticulously examines
those individuals who might have been the first Jew in
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1697
the city. He weighs the evidence, makes a judgment,
and leaves the reader in no doubt about the correctness of his conclusions. Each of the following chapters
is also carefully researched and written. The volume
clearly reveals years of research.
The good points of the book are also its shortcomings. Its very thoroughness is intimidating. A myriad of
synagogues and charitable organizations, often with all
their officials listed, come and go. Since the book is
organized chronologically for the most part, one does
not get a complete story of most of these but rather a
fragmented one. Few individuals stand out, except for
the "colorful and dynamic"-and controversialRabbi Solomon H. Sonneschein, who had a "wonderful
talent for making and keeping enemies" (p. 280).
Descriptions of others seem to come from their obituaries. Ehrlich remarks about an early Jewish newspaper that "Nothing appeared in the Tribune that might
present a detrimental view of the Jewish community.
Certainly disreputable or indiscreet Jews existed in St.
Louis, some even occupying cells in the city jail, but
one would never read about that in the Tribune" (p.
240). The same could be said, with a few exceptions, of
his book. In addition, women are barely mentioned.
The Jewish community of St. Louis never numbered
more than seven percent of the total population during
this period, but there were about 10,000 Jewish residents by the 1880s. They followed many occupations
and lived in many parts of the city. Perhaps as many as
half did not regularly participate in religious events.
The original Jews came mostly from Germanic lands.
They tended to Americanize and move away from
Orthodoxy or Judaism itself. Just as they were becoming assimilated, the huge wave of Jews from Russian
lands began arriving. They tended to be Orthodox and
formed their own synagogues and charitable institutions. All this makes for a fairly complex history of the
Jewish people of St. Louis.
This is a good book and an important book. It will be
consulted by researchers as long as a copy exists. It is
a treasure trove for those wanting to know about a
specific synagogue, charitable organization, or community leader. This reader, however, fears that its encyclopedic nature means that few will read it in its
entirety. The book has illustrations interspersed
throughout, a bibliography, and an index. The index is
especially important when one tries to trace an organization or individual.
JAMES W. HAGY
Charleston, S. C.
MARK COLVIN. Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain
Gangs: Social Theory and the History of Punishment in
Nineteenth-Century America. New York: St. Martin's.
1997. Pp. x, 294. $45.00.
Mark Colvin has written a useful, if flawed, survey of
the history of the American penal system in the
nineteenth century, one tailored to undergraduate
students. A sociologist, Colvin explores three develop-
DECEMBER 1998