Peddlers Peddling, Judaism Spreading
How the market revolution helped bring Judaism to the American frontier
By Jonathan Sarna
Reprinted with permission
from American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press).
The America that Jewish immigrants
from Central Europe encountered [in the 19th century] when they disembarked in
coastal port cities was in the throes of economic change. What had been,
outside of a few port cities, a largely subsistence economy--consisting of
small farms and tiny workshops that satisfied local needs through barter and exchange--gave
way during the first half of the 19th century to a market-driven economy in
which farmers and manufacturers produced food and goods that they shipped for
cash to sometimes distant places.
Canals, turnpikes, and later
railroad tracks linked far-separated points of the country, producing a vast
national transportation network along which goods and commodities flowed.
Foot Soldiers
The result was what
historians call a market revolution. Entrepreneurial values coupled with new
economic and cultural resources enabled people "to make choices on a scale
previously unparalleled: choices of goods to consume, choices of occupations to
follow educational choices, choices of lifestyles and identities." As we
shall see, the market revolution also profoundly shaped the lives of America's
growing community of Jews. They too now made choices on a scale previously unparalleled,
ones that affected their patterns of settlement, their occupational preferences,
their values and attitudes, and the practices of their faith.
Peddlers were the foot
soldiers of this far-reaching revolution. They were the proverbial middlemen
who purchased goods (usually on credit) from producers and set forth to
transport and market them to far-flung consumers, residents of America's
rapidly expanding frontier. Peddling was a difficult and tiring occupation, but
it required very little capital and promised substantial returns.
As the desire for goods rose
among those who once found most of what they needed close to home but now pined
for luxuries from faraway places, young, vigorous, success-minded immigrants
rushed in to meet the burgeoning demand. Many of these immigrants--indeed, most
of the 16,000 peddlers listed by the 1860 census-taker, according to one
source--were Jews.
Peddling, of course, long
predated the 19th century. The "Yankee peddler" was a familiar figure
in 18th-century America, and Jewish peddlers roamed around Europe as early as
the Middle Ages. For immigrants to America in the 19th century, however,
peddling was less a career than a starting point; it served as the standard
business apprenticeship for able-bodied young male Jews (Jewish women almost
never engaged in peddling) looking to ascend the economic ladder to success.
Coming to America in their
late teens or early 20s, these young men spent one to five years selling
notions, dry goods, secondhand clothing, cheap jewelry, and similar products as
they learned English and accumulated capital. Then they moved on to something
better. Some succeeded handsomely: Most of the great Jewish department store
magnates began their lives as peddlers. and so did a large number of other
Jewish businessmen.
One Success Story
A typical rags-to-riches
story went as follows:
"Philip Heidelbach... arrived
in New York in 1837. A fellow Bavarian helped him invest all of his eight
dollars in the small merchandise that bulged in a peddler's pack. At the end of
three months the eight dollars had grown to an unencumbered capital of $150. Heartened
by this splendid return Heidelbach headed for the western country, peddling
overland and stopping at farm houses by night, where for the standard charge of
25 cents he could obtain supper, lodging, and breakfast.
"In the spring of that
year Heidelbach arrived in Cincinnati. He peddled the country within a radius
of 100 miles from the source of his supply of goods, frequently traveling
through Union and Liberty counties in Indiana. Before the year was out
Heidelbach accumulated a capital of 2,000 dollars. Stopping in Chillicothe to replenish
his stock, Heidelbach met [Jacob] Seasongood and the two men, each 25 years old,
formed a partnership They pooled their resources, and for the next two years
labored at peddling.
"In the spring of 1840,
they opened a dry goods store at Front and Sycamore Streets in the heart of commercial
Cincinnati under the firm name of Heidelbach and Seasongood. The new firm became
a center for peddlers' supplies at once, business expanded they branched into
the retail clothing trade."
The majority of Jewish
immigrants, of course, did not climb quite so high on the ladder to success. In
Philip Heidelbach's own city of Cincinnati, for example, just over a third of a
sample group of Jewish peddlers in the early 1840s moved up into more sedentary
professions within three years; the other two-thirds took longer. A great many
peddlers never rose above the level of small-town shopkeeper. An undetermined
number failed completely: Some committed suicide, others lived out lives of
penury, a few returned disappointed to Europe.
Frontier Judaism
Yet however they ultimately
fared, this army of Central European Jewish immigrant peddlers transformed
American Jewish life. As they fanned out across the country, spreading the
fruits of American commerce to the hinterland, building up new markets for
producers, and chasing after opportunities to get rich, they also carried
Judaism to frontier settings where Jews had never been seen before.
By the Civil War, the number
of organized Jewish communities with at least one established Jewish
institution had reached 160, spread over 31 states and the District of Columbia
(the 1860 U.S. Census listed synagogues in 19 of these states, plus the
District of Columbia). Jews spread through every region of the country,
including the rapidly developing West. In the wake of the 1848-49 gold rush,
there were some 19 Jewish communities and five permanent congregations in
California alone.
Subscription lists printed in
Jewish newspapers show that individual Jews, though not a sufficient number to
form a community, also lived in more than 1,000 other American locations during
this period, wherever rivers, roads, or railroad tracks took them. That these solitary
Jews subscribed to a Jewish newspaper indicates that maintaining ties to their kin
remained important to them.
Jews never distributed themselves
evenly across the American landscape: Over a quarter of all the nation's Jews
in 1860 still lived in New York City. Still, the fact that as a group they had
dispersed throughout the country by the Civil War remains deeply significant,
securing Judaism's position as a national American faith.
Adherents had voted with their feet
(and their packs) neither to confine themselves to a few major port cities, as
colonial Jews largely had done, nor to form Ararat-like enclaves [places
reserved exclusively for Jews to live in], as proponents of Jewish colonies
advocated and some other persecuted minority groups did. Instead, like the bulk
of immigrants to America's shores, Jews pursued opportunities wherever they
found them. In so doing, simply by taking up residence in a prospective boomtown,
they legitimated Judaism, winning it a place among the panoply of accepted
local faiths.
Challenges of Dispersion
At the same time, however,
dispersion also posed significant religious problems for Jews. Without a minyan
[prayer quorum], communal worship could not take place. Nor could peddlers and
frontier settlers, living apart from their fellow Jews, easily conform to the
rhythm of Jewish life, with its weekly Sabbath on Saturday and its holidays
that fell on American workdays.
"God of Israel,"
one such isolated peddler prayed into his diary in 1843, "Thou knowest my
thoughts. Thou alone knowest my grief when, on the Sabbath's eve, I must retire
[alone] to my lodging and on Saturday morning carry my pack on my back,
profaning the holy day, God's gift to His people Israel. I can't live as a Jew."
Another peddler kept careful track of his observances and calculated that over
the course of three years he had been able to observe the Sabbath properly
fewer than ten times.
Settling down in a remote
corner of the frontier did not necessarily make life easier. Joseph Jonas, the
first permanent Jewish settler west of the Alleghenies and the founder of the
Jewish community of Cincinnati, recalled that he remained "solitary and
alone.. . for more than two years, and at the solemn festivals of our religion,
in solitude was he obliged to commune with his Maker."
Some frontier Jews, in the
absence of any available Jewish worship, went so far as to attend Sunday church
services, thereby reassuring Christian neighbors of their piety. But this was
hardly a satisfactory solution. More commonly, isolated Jews looked forward to
the arrival in
town of other Jews, enough to
establish a community.
Jonathan D.
Sarna is the Joseph and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at
Brandeis University.
(c) 2004 by Yale
University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press from American Judaism: A History by Jonathan Sarna.
