How the 1902 anti-Semitic riots changed American Jewish life

You could be forgiven for never hearing about the worst anti-Semitic riot in American history. It happened on the Lower East Side more than 100 years ago, but most of it has been lost to history. The memory of the Jews is filled with the horrors that followed, from Kishinev and Auschwitz to Pittsburgh and October 7th.

But as Scott Seligman argues in his new book, The Chief Rabbi’s Funeral, the mob attack on July 30, 1902, in which 196 Jewish mourners were beaten and bloodied, is a model for today. He also left behind a legacy of Jewish political activity. The attack on Rabbi Jacob Joseph’s funeral procession has led a fractious Jewish community to organize to demand justice for the victims and punishment for the perpetrators.

“The lesson of the 1902 riots is that when anti-Semitism crosses the line and it turns into violence and intimidation against Jews, it needs to be punished and our best response is to come together and organize. “That is,” said Seligman, a U.S.-based historian. Washington DC told me this week. “That’s what they did with the political power and influence they had.”

I last spoke with Seligman in 2020, following the publication of his most recent book, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902. In fact, he told me that an article I wrote for an earlier book, which focused on the rabbi whose funeral sparked the riots the same year, encouraged Seligman to delve deeper into that part of the story. He said it gave him an opportunity.

Joseph was a scholar of the Vilna Talmud who was brought to New York in 1888 to serve as something of a chief rabbi for the city’s teeming Jewish community (and to streamline its corrupt and unreliable kosher meat business). ). It turned out to be easier to merge all of New York’s boroughs into a single municipality than to get the Jews to agree on a chief rabbi.

By 1895, Joseph was no longer receiving a salary from the organization that brought him in, and his authority was recognized only by a small number of Orthodox congregations downtown. He was employed as a kosher supervisor in several wholesale butcher shops until suffering a stroke in 1898.

When he died in 1902 at the age of 62, a repentant Lower East Side resolved to give him in death the respect it had not accorded him in life. Hundreds of thousands of mourners joined his funeral procession, which passed through neighborhoods in lower Manhattan before his body was taken on a ferry for burial in Brooklyn.

trouble begins

The trouble began when the line passed in front of the R. Hoe printing press factory at Grand and Sheriff streets. Workers there threw debris at mourners and sprayed them with water from hoses. The crowd fought back with all its might, throwing projectiles back at the factory and breaking windows.

By the time police arrived, the clashes had largely ended, but newspaper reports said police were attacking Jewish mourners at the behest of factory owners and commanders who had instructed police to “take lives.” I started hitting him. . No Jews died in the assault, but many were arrested and taken to court by the Essex Market Police.

What happened next would be a turning point in Jewish political and communal life for a community torn apart by internal divisions. The day after the violence, various leaders formed the East Side Vigilante Group and demanded fair investigation and punishment for the offending officers.

At the same time, Jewish lawyers rushed to court to defend Jews unfairly singled out for acts of violence. “They were uptown and downtown,” Sergiman said of the lawyers. “They were Democrats and Republicans. They were reformers and orthodox.”

In the coming months, calls for justice will have a surprising and unprecedented effect. Until then, Jews had little recourse against the largely Irish police, who despised them. But New York City Mayor Seth Lowe, who narrowly won on a reform platform targeting the corrupt Democratic Party machine known as Tammany Hall, was sympathetic to the Jews who helped vote.

Roe appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission to conduct an independent review, ultimately exonerating the Jews and finding the police at fault for the violence.

“As far as I know, this was the first semi-successful attempt to get justice (by New York Jews),” Seligman said. “While many people were not seriously punished for this, there were transfers from the department. There were resignations within the department. They got something for their efforts. .”

Although the East Side Vigilante Group didn’t last long (such committees “never outlasted trouble,” Seligman said), it set a precedent. In 1908, after a police commissioner named Theodore Bingham used false statistics to claim that half of the city’s crimes were committed by Jews, Reform Rabbi Judah Magness founded the Federation of Jewish Self-Defense Organizations in New York. – Cooperated in the establishment of Kehillah (Bingham retracted his statement). .

Although the Kehillah lasted until 1922, other national organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress proved more durable. Jews learned the art of conveying their concerns to ambitious politicians. The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 after the lynching of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank in Georgia. The federation remains the most important organization helping to develop strategies to combat anti-Semitism.

More than a century after the funeral riots, unity remains an illusion. For decades, Israel proved to be a reliable cause for rallying Jews, while anti-Semitism faded into the background. The picture has been reversed, and anti-Semitism has once again become the only common concern on which Jews can come close to any semblance of agreement.

But even there, major rifts are clear. A year of campus activism has united and divided Jews as well. The ADL faces competitors who believe its approach to anti-Semitism is too soft on the left or too tied to the right.

Ironically, one of the most polarizing debates in Jewish life in recent years has to do with the Black Lives Matter movement, which aims to address police misconduct suffered by Jews in the early 20th century. I was doing it. When one of the major BLM groups took up the Palestinian cause, it further divided Jewish groups and power brokers.

But for all the divisions and infighting, there remains a broad consensus among Jews about the need for advocacy like the one that arose in New York City after Rabbi Jacob Joseph’s funeral.

“If there is a lesson to be learned from the Grand Street riots, it is that resistance to such outrages is necessary and possible,” Seligman wrote. “The key lies in uniting, organizing, building alliances, and amassing political power and influence.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.