Countdown to Arrival Day: Week 4



This post continues the countdown to Arrival Day 2003. Arrival Day is a non-religious celebration of the founding of the American Jewish community, which occurred with the landing of the first Jewish immigrants in New Amsterdam on September 7, 1654. Every Sunday until September 7, I will post an essay on American Judaism from a historical, contemporary or personal perspective. Both Jews and non-Jews are invited to participate in the Arrival Day Blogburst on September 7; if you're interested, let me know via e-mail or in the comments. Those of you who are impatient can also read Randy McDonald's excellent early entry, to which I will also link in September.



A number of places other than Israel have been proposed as Jewish homelands - Uganda, Birobidzhan, Madagascar and Northern Rhodesia are only four. The majority of these proposals involved the African continent or isolated parts of Asia, but to two nineteenth-century Jewish utopians, the promised land was the United States.



The first of these was an eccentric New York editor, playwright and Tammany Hall politician named Mordecai Manuel Noah. Despite his name, Noah's ancestry was primarily Ashkenazic; he was born in Philadelphia in 1785 to a German Jewish father who had fought in the Revolutionary War. As a young man, he moved to New York and held a number of political offices, serving as sheriff, city judge and surveyor of the port. He also served briefly as consul to Tunis - an episode that may have galvanized his plan to establish a Jewish colony in upstate New York.



In 1825, Noah persuaded a wealthy acquaintance to Grand Island, located north of Buffalo, as a Jewish refuge. Amid high ceremony, he put out a call for settlers:

As an American and as a Jew, Noah was constantly looking for points where American and Jewish interests might intersect. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, America's greatest need was for immigrants. In his travels in Europe and Africa, Noah learned that Jews in the Old World desperately needed a haven for themselves and their children. To bring such Jews to a welcoming America would be a signal service to both.



The drama Noah staged in Buffalo on September 15, 1825, in dedicating Ararat as "A City of Refuge for the Jews," with men marching, band playing, and "Judge" Noah in regal vestments orating, was for both America and world Jewry. The pageant, the proclamation, and Noah's speech were intended to grab the attention of newspaper editors to whom description and text were sent. Accounts of the Ararat drama appeared in newspapers throughout the United States and in England, France, and Germany as well. The drama presented the Jews as the most desirable citizens a nation could want-able, ambitious, productive, and loyal; to the Jews of the Old World, it portrayed what kind of country America was for the Jews. Political dignitaries, leaders of society, and the general populace joined to celebrate the establishment of a city for Jews, while America's most prominent Jew proclaimed a Jewish state on American soil and welcomed his brethren to settle it.

His efforts, however, met with failure due to lack of interest, poor planning and inadequate financing. Within a few years, Noah abandoned his American colonization plan and became an early advocate of Jewish settlement in Palestine.



It is one of history's unexplored coincidences that the revelation of Joseph Smith, which led to the founding of the Mormon church, occurred in virtually the same place less than two years later. It is unlikely that the two men ever met, but some of Noah's articles were published in the newspaper of Smith's hometown of Palmyra, and the Noah plan was the subject of much discussion in upstate New York at the time. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Smith knew of Noah's proposals, and it is fascinating to imagine the effect Noah's messianism might have had on Smith's. At least one historian has characterized the Ararat plan as a "blueprint for the Mormon Zion."



It's also interesting to compare Noah's career to that of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the other sponsor of Jewish agricultural settlement in the New World. Baron de Hirsch was born in Germany in 1831, a few years after the failure of Noah's colony. He came from one of the first Jewish noble families in Germany, but made his fortune in a time- honored way - by marrying his boss's daughter. By the time he was forty, he was a railroad tycoon, a major commodities trader and a noted philanthropist.



Unlike Noah, Baron de Hirsch never embraced Zionism; on one occasion, he refused a request for aid from Theodor Herzl on the ground that the concept of a Jewish state was a dangerous fantasy. He did, however, share Noah and Herzl's belief that life for Jews in Europe - at least Eastern Europe - was a dead end. He proposed, instead, that colonies of Jewish yeomen be established in the United States, Canada and Argentina:

Hirsch envisioned the transformation of Eastern European Jewry into a class of independent farmers and handicraftsmen in the New World. He established the New York based Baron de Hirsch Fund in 1891 facilitate this goal. Hirsch recruited Mayer Sulzberger, William B. Hackenburg, Jacob H. Schiff, Myer S. Isaacs, Oscar S. Straus and other American Jewish leaders to serve as officers and trustees. Later that same year, Hirsch created the Jewish Colonization Association to facilitate mass emigration of Jews from Russia to agricultural colonies particularly in Argentina and Brazil.



The desire of Hirsch and his Fund's leadership to recast Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the image of "biblical farmers" was shaped by a mix of attitudes. The trustees wanted to reverse the historic discrimination that banned their Eastern European brethren from farming. At the same time, they shared a negative Western European stereotype of Eastern European Jews as unskilled workers, beggars and peddlers. Therefore the goal of the Fund's leadership was to improve the lot of Eastern European Jews and transform them into a socio-economic class acceptable to the tastes of the 19th century Jewish elite.

Baron de Hirsch's colonies were far better financed and coordinated than Noah's, and a number of settlements such as Woodbine, New Jersey actually got off the ground. In the end, however, these colonies also failed. Most of the settlers drifted to cities with established Jewish communities, and the Hirsch fund ironically ended up financing colonies in Israel. Some of the charities established by Baron de Hirsch still exist, but his farming colonies and trade schools closed up shop by the 1930s.



By that time, however, there was no need for utopians to sponsor Jewish settlement in America. Between 1880 and 1920, more than 1.8 million Jews entered the United States in one of the greatest mass migrations in Jewish history. The failure of sponsored Jewish colonization in the New World no longer mattered, because the modern American Jewish community had created itself. The United States may not have been the promised land, but for millions of Jews it was the goldeneh medina.