Introduction
By
mid-nineteenth century the American Jewish community stretched clear
across the continent from New York to San Francisco. More than one
hundred congregations and an even larger number of charitable
organizations served its needs. One monthly, The Occident, established
by Isaac Leeser in 1843, and
three weeklies, The Asmonean in New York, The Israelite in
Cincinnati, and The Gleaner in San Francisco, reported its
activities. News comprised only a small part of the reading matter,
the greater part being devoted to educational and polemical articles,
and to occasional fiction and poetry.
In the first issue of The Asmonean, "For
the Week ending Friday, October 26, 1849," publisher Robert
Lyon, an English-born New York businessman, wrote to his subscribers:
In the circular announcing our intention to
publish the Journal, we set forth that the Asmonean would be
devoted to the advocacy of a congregational Union of the Israelites
of the United States, and the general dissemination of information
relating to the people. That its columns would be open to all and
every communication appertaining to our Societies, our
Congregations, our Literature and Our Religion. That all Foreign
and Domestic News would be collected up to the latest moment prior
to going to press, and that all matters of public interest, would
be temperately commented on.
Such turned out to be a true description of the
journal's contents during its decade of publication, until the death
of its publisher in 1858. From 1852 until his departure to Cincinnati
in 1854, Isaac Mayer Wise, then
in Albany, served as the journal's coeditor.
The masthead of the
Jewish weekly, The Asmonean, of November 23, 1849. It was
founded and published by English-born New York businessman Robert
Lyn. It displays the American flag, on it a shield with the Star
of David, in the star a lion, and above and below a wolf and ox,
animals resident in the peaceable kingdom which Isaiah
envisioned. The Hebrew legend is from Ecclesiastes: “Two are
better than one, and a Threefold Cord is not quickly broken.”
The Asmonean, New York, November 23, 1849. General
Collection
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Not long after Wise arrived in the Queen City to
serve as rabbi of Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, he decided to
undertake the publication and editorship of a new weekly, which he
called The Israelite. In his Reminiscences, he
describes the tribulations of founding the journal:
As early as the month of May I began to take
steps towards establishing a Jewish weekly. I wrote very many
letters and received very glowing promises, which, however, were
never kept. I began to look for some merciful individual who would
... publish a weekly under my direction; but such a man was not to
be found.... Finally I came across a visionary, Dr. Schmidt, the
owner of the evening paper the Republican ... [who] accepted
my promise that I would make good all losses at the end of the
first year.... I locked myself in my room from two o'clock in the
afternoon till four in the morning, and wrote a prospectus ...
I promised Judaism a sharp weapon. I promised
progress, enlightenment, spiritual striving, a fearless organ.... I
visited ... M., where about ten Jewish families lived, to whom I
gave the prospectus. Seven of them declared they could not read
English; one said that a Jewish paper was a useless commodity, and
two subscribed.... I visited Louisville.... I delivered two public
addresses there. I was admired by the public.... My prospectus was
received coldly, except by the few friends of reformed tendencies,
who were very enthusiastic. At the end of June we had almost five
hundred subscribers ... and began to print and mail one thousand
copies. The first number appeared on the sixth of July. It
contained the beginning of a novel, "The Convert," a
poem, news, leading articles, my Fourth of July oration, an opening
article on the institutions of Cincinnati, and miscellanea.
Founded and edited
by Isaac Mayer Wise, with his rabbinic colleague Max Lilienthal
as corresponding editor, The Israelite, "A weekly
periodical, devoted to Religion, History and Literature of the
Israelites," published in Cincinnati, was the longest
running Jewish periodical in the history of American Jewish
journalism. Its motto: "Let There Be Light." Here we
see the masthead from its October 27, 1854, issue.
The Israelite, Cincinnati, October 27, 1854. General
Collections
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Two years later, in 1856, Rabbi Julius Eckman
(1805-1877) of San Francisco began to publish The Gleaner under
even more trying circumstances. Ten years earlier, he had gone to
Mobile, Alabama, to serve as rabbi, but his tenure there was brief,
as it was subsequently in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans. In
1854, he accepted the pulpit of San Francisco's Temple Emanu-El, but
at the end of one year he was without a position. Temperamentally
unsuited to the pulpit, Eckman devoted his life to his Heptsibah
Hebrew School and his weekly newspaper. As late as March 1861, he had
to plead with his subscribers:
We have a number of names in our book of
subscribers who receive the "Gleaner" since the issue of
the first number, without receiving any remittance, whatever, for
subscription....
Will our subscribers try to settle in some way.
if not able to pay at all, or at present, a few lines to that
effect will satisfy us....
We shall be glad to assent to any mode of
settling, as we, in a publication like the "Gleaner"
cannot adopt strict mercantile rules. We wish the paper, as a
religious messenger, with all its faults, to be received
religiously.
In the Passover issue of that year, Rabbi Eckman wrote of the Festival in a brief
sermonette ("Our Declaration of Dependence"), commented on
"Dr. Raphael's Pro-slavery Sermon," reported on two letters
of appeal for funds for the poor in Jerusalem, published a scholarly
letter from Dr. Elkan Cohn (rabbi of Temple Emanu-El on Sabbath
observance, with citations in Hebrew from the Mishneh Torah, printed
a reminiscence of "San Francisco in 1849," and reported on
his Religious School.
In his California Sketches (Nashville,
1882), 0. P. Fitzgerald remembered the rabbi.
Seated in his library, enveloped in a faded
figured gown, a black velvet cap on his massive head ... Power and
gentleness, childlike simplicity, and scholarliness, were curiously
mingled in this man. His library was a reflex of its owner. In it
were books that the great public libraries of the world could not
match-block- letter folios that were almost as old as the printing
art, illuminated volumes that were once the pride and joy of men
who had been in their graves many generations, rabbinical lore,
theology, magic, and great volumes of Hebrew literature that
looked, when placed beside a modern book, like an old ducal palace
along-side a gingerbread cottage of to-day.
These journals were established too late to report two battles waged by American
Jews for rights at home and for the security of fellow Jews abroad.
Source materials on both the struggle for the Jew Bill in Maryland
and the protest against the Blood Libel in Damascus are found in the
Library's holdings.
Sources: Abraham J. Karp, From
the Ends of the Earth: Judaic Treasures of the Library of Congress,
(DC: Library of Congress,
1991).
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