American Jewry builds itself anew

One must begin with what America did not have. There was no kahal—a community one cannot leave. There was no rabbinic court with compelling force. There was no cheder to which a boy is sent at six because everyone does. The community was voluntary, like the neighbours' church, and Jewish knowledge did not pass down in it of itself.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century this had become visible. Children grew up among Christians, attended common schools, read English and knew nothing in Hebrew. They were not going over to another faith but simply nowhere.

Rebecca Gratz solved it from the side that was open. In 1819 she founded the country's first Jewish charity outside a synagogue, and in 1838 the Sunday school: a form familiar to all the neighbours, filled with her own content. Once a week, in English, boys and girls together, the curriculum her own. The model spread through the country and became the standard; and Jewish women gained for the first time the place of a public teacher of religion.

Rabbi Isaac Leeser solved the same problem from the side of the book and the word. On 2 June 1830 he preached at Philadelphia the first synagogue sermon in English in America—before that the hazzan only sang. Then: the prayer book in translation (1837), the Occident (1843)—the first periodical to last a quarter of a century—the Pentateuch with an English translation (1845) and the whole Bible (1853), the first translation of Scripture into English by a Jew. Shortly before his death, in 1867, he founded Maimonides College, the country's first Jewish theological college.

Both held to tradition, and both held that English was no hindrance to it but the way to reach. Out of that grew the American community which half a century later received two and a half million people from the Russian Empire: by the time they came, the institutions were standing.