Jews on the Frontier

Shari Rabin offers an unusual path to examine nineteenth-century Jewish migration to the United States. Factors involving the difficult decision to leave home could include religious persecution, economic hardship, and a desire for adventure. Rabin stresses the idea of mobility—the opportunity to leave Europe and go to a new land where old-country restrictions did not apply. This sense of mobility allowed Jews to do more than settle along the U.S. Atlantic coast. As transportation technology developed during the nineteenth century, Jews could go into the interior of the continent in covered wagons, stagecoaches, steamboats, railroads, on horseback, or on foot. Rabin defines frontier somewhat ambiguously, not only with the traditional Turnerian view of an expanding line across the continent, but as anywhere in North America that would provide new experiences and opportunities for Jewish immigrants. Her book is not necessarily an account of Jews in the West; it is about places where a Jew might settle down and begin a life that was remarkably free of the discriminatory laws and prejudices in the Old World

Adventure · Archaeology · Frontier · Immigration · Judaism · Persecution · Political science · Sociology · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Law · Race, History, and American Society