Our Crowd Quotes

“Something of an exception in their approach to education—as indeed they often were to other things—were the Seligmans, led by Joseph, whose longing for Americanization was overpowering. Several of his brothers had early Americanized their first names. Henry was originally Hermann, William was Wolf, James was Jacob, Jesse was Isaias, and Leopold was Lippmann.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“New York’s German Jews began, in the 1870’s, to say to each other, “We are really more German than Jewish,” and were convinced that nineteenth-century Germany embodied the finest flowering of the arts, sciences, and technology. German continued to be the language the families spoke in their homes. The music children practiced in family music rooms was German music. When a Seligman, Loeb, or Lehman traveled to Europe, he sailed on the Hamburg-America Line; it was the best. When he needed a rest, he took the waters at a German spa—Baden, Carlsbad, or Marienbad. At their dinners they served German wines. When illness struck, the ailing were hurried to Germany, where the best doctors were.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“The attempt to bridge opposing worlds is apparent in the physical structure of Temple Emanu-El itself. Inside, with its pews and pulpit and handsome chandeliers—where hatted women worship alongside the men (unhatted), and not in a separate curtained gallery—it looks very like a church. But outside, as a kind of gentle gesture to the past, its Moorish façade calls to mind a synagogue.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Over the years the Sephardim in America had gradually modified their religious services to conform more closely to the prevailing Protestant ways. Early in the 1800’s Temple Shearith Israel had introduced English into the service. The cantors, or chazonim, began to assume the dignity, and the dress, of Protestant clergymen and were called “Reverend.” The public auctioning of honors, which began to seem undignified, was discontinued.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“A careful distinction was drawn between Jews of the “Nathan type,” and those of the “Seligman type,” between “the better class of Jews” and “vulgar Jews,” between “Sephardic” and “German,” and, finally, between “refined Hebrew ladies and gentlemen” and “Jews.” The more the Germans insisted that they were “Hebrews,” not “Jews,” the more the Sephardim tried to disassociate themselves from the accented newcomers by stressing their ancient Spanish heritage.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Moses Lazarus, father of Emma, had been a founding member of the Knickerbocker Club, New York’s second-most exclusive. The Sephardim made the most of their entrenched position, and, if German Jews found the gentiles in New York society indifferent, they found the Sephardic Jews almost unapproachable.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“The Sephardic merchant families, “remarkable for their haughtiness, high sense of honor and their stately manners,” according to a contemporary chronicler, occupied a quiet but secure place in society, Ward McAllister notwithstanding. A number of men of old New York gentile society, including a Hamilton and a DeLancey, had married Sephardic Jewesses. There were Sephardim in all the best clubs. The Union Club, New York’s most exclusive, contained several Hendrickses, Lazaruses, and Nathans, along with Mr. McAllister.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Formal anti-Semitism is based on certain specific assumptions: that Jews are recognizable from all other people as a “nation,” and should not be treated as fellow citizens; and that Jews are, from birth, unpatriotic to their adopted country. It argues an “international plot” of Jews to take over the world by such quaint measures as “the use of liquor to befuddle the brains of Christian leaders.” (In 1903 these accusations were supported by the publication of a thoroughly spurious “document,” The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.) But anti-Semitism is not always formal, nor does it always display such definite symptoms. Often it is a vaguely defined “aversion,” based on distrust or—when aimed at wealthy Jews—jealousy.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“New York’s patrician Sephardic families quickly noticed that their names were not included in McAllister’s collection either. Some Sephardim expressed relief at this. But others resented it. They blamed the new exclusivity on the behavior of the “loud, aggressive, new-rich Germans.” To the Sephardim, the Germans had become the toplofty, arrogant “Mrs. Tiffanys.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Joseph’s gift to Babet was considered one of the decorative “musts” of the day—a gold-plated rolling pin, designed to show that its owner “no longer made her own bread, but was financially able to endure the strain of purchasing ready-made loaves at the grocer’s.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Soon after their marriage, the young Belmonts established themselves in a lower Fifth Avenue house that was grander than anything that existed in New York. It was, among other things, the first private house in the city to have its own ballroom—a room designed for nothing but the annual Belmont ball and which, as Edith Wharton commented later, “was left for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag.” The Belmonts were also the first to own their own red carpet, to be rolled down the marble front steps and across the sidewalk for parties, instead of renting one, along with the chairs, from a caterer.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Lower Fifth Avenue and Washington Square were already sprouting palaces of brownstone and marble. Though there was still no Central Park to give Fifth Avenue a garden view for much of its length, that wide thoroughfare running up the spine of Manhattan was already becoming the city’s best residential address.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Caroline, furthermore, was wan, pale, and dreamily beautiful, an exquisite creature who wept bitterly when she was told that families “of wretched poor” lived south of Canal Street, which was why her coachman would not drive her there.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“He was a curiosity at first, as many in that part of the country had never seen a Jew before. Numbers of people came from the country round about to see him, and he related in his old age of an old Quakeress who said to him, “Art thou a Jew? Thou art one of God’s chosen people. Wilt thou let me examine thee?” She turned him round and round, and at last exclaimed: “Well, thou art no different to other people.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“The great Sephardic families of New York, many of them descended from the St. Charles arrivals, include the Hendrickses, the Cardozos, the Baruchs, the Lazaruses, the Nathans, the Solises, the Gomezes, the Lopezes, the Lindos, the Lombrosos, and the Seixases.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“In the unwritten hierarchy of world Jewry, the Sephardim are considered, and consider themselves, the most noble of all Jews because, as a culture, they claim the longest unbroken history of unity and suffering. The arrival of twenty-three Sephardim in New Amsterdam was not auspicious. When he discovered they were penniless, Governor Peter Stuyvesant threw the lot of them in prison. There they might have stayed, but, fortunately for them, many stockholders of the Dutch West India Company were Jewish and so Stuyvesant was persuaded to release the twenty-three on the condition that “the poor among them” be no burden and “be supported by their own nation.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“The first recorded Jewish settler in Manhattan was a man named Jacob Barsimson who arrived early in 1654. He was an Ashkenazic, or German, Jew. No one knows what happened to Mr. Barsimson, and his importance to history has been eclipsed by the arrival, somewhat later that same year, of twenty-three Jewish immigrants aboard the bark St. Charles, often called “the Jewish Mayflower.” The St. Charles had carried its passengers from Recife, Brazil, but actually the little band’s journey had begun thousands of miles farther away and years before in fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“In fusty Boston and austere Charleston, for instance, society never dined in public. But in New York society had discovered the restaurant, and the fashionable gathered at Niblo’s and Delmonico’s for dinners and even floor shows. The daring drank wine, and the less daring mixed a little wine with their milk.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“But some strange sea change had taken place. He was no longer August Schönberg but August Belmont, the French equivalent of Schönberg (meaning “beautiful mountain”). As August Belmont, furthermore, he was no longer a Jew but a gentile, and no longer German but, as people in New York began to say, “Some sort of Frenchman—we think.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“David’s final words to his son were a tearful entreaty to observe the Sabbath and the dietary laws. Fanny’s final gesture was to sew one hundred American dollars into the seat of Joseph’s pants.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Some of these families paused long enough to pick up the German language and to take German names. (In future generations, in New York, it would become a matter of some importance whether such and such a Jewish family, with a German-sounding name, had been a true native German family, like the Seligmans, or a stranger from the east, passing through.) Swelled by immigrants from the east, the Jewish population in Western Europe more than tripled during the nineteenth century.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“In Bavaria, where attitudes toward Jews were particularly reactionary, the number of Jewish marriages was limited by law in an attempt to keep the number of Jewish families constant. They were surrounded by a heavy network of special taxes, were obliged to pay the humiliating “Jew toll” whenever they traveled beyond the borders of the ghetto, were forced to pay a special fee for the privilege of not serving in the army—though it was an army that would not have accepted them had they tried to volunteer, because they were Jewish. Periodically, Jews were threatened with expulsion from their homes—and often were expelled—unless they paid an added tax for the privilege of remaining.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“There had been Seligmans in Baiersdorf for over a century. Theirs had been a family name long before Napoleon had decreed that Germany’s Jews no longer needed to be known as “sons” of their fathers’ names—Moses ben Israel, and so on. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tombstones in Baiersdorf’s Jewish cemetery recorded the upright virtues of many of David’s ancestors, all named Seligman (“Blessed man” in German).”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Every Saturday and every holiday morning,” wrote Adolph, “saw us all at the synagogue. I suppose Jesus Christ did the same, because the New Testament tells us that he drove the money-changers from the Temple and that at times he preached in the synagogue.” He added, somewhat slyly: “As a pious Jew, he must have attended the synagogue, although I suppose that toward the end of his life the authorities would not let him preach. Perhaps if he were to appear today and preach as radically as he did then, he would not be allowed in the more conservative Christian churches.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“The old differentiation between the German “uptown” Jew and the Russian of the “Lower East Side” has become a difference between the “quiet, cultivated Wall Street type” and the “noisy, pushy, Seventh Avenue type”—who do not mix any more easily than oil and water. And out of all this has come the impression that Jews “dominate” both these fields in the city.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“In his gold-and-white ballroom at 881 Fifth Avenue he held, for years, his famous New Year’s Eve parties.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“No. 965 Fifth Avenue was a considerably more tasteful house than the old “house full of horrors” at 932.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Zweig said of the Joint, “Later, at some future date, we shall again gladly and passionately discuss whether Jews should be Zionists, revisionists, territorialists or assimilationists; we shall discuss the hair-splitting point of whether we are a nation, a religion, a people or a race. All of these time-consuming, theoretical discussions can wait. Now there is but one thing for us to do—to give help.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“The new arrivals from Eastern Europe were ragged, dirt-poor, culturally energetic, toughened by years of torment, idealistic, and socialistic.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“New York City had been estimated as eighty thousand, or less than 9 percent of the city’s population;”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York