East European Jewish Detroit in the Early Twentieth Century

Judaism, Summer, 2000 by Kenneth Waltzer

EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH DETROIT IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH century appears to us at the end of the century, at best, obliquely. Three valuable works of history written during the past generation by Olivier Zunz, Robert Rockaway, and Sidney Bolkosky provide only a general sense of the contours of work, life, and community in Detroit,s Jewish ghetto. [1] Unlike the literature on immigrant Jewish settlements in other major cities, there are few important memoirs or specialized studies of Jewish life, mobility, and cultural change in the Motor City. Few photographs of the Jewish area survive. Apparently, no Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine shot city scenes in Little Jerusalem. Neither did a Hutchins Hapgood or Jane Addams do field work here. Unlike New York's Lower East Side, which many writers remembered and "invented" during the 1920s and 1930s as "teeming with life and feverish activity, rich in movement and isms," then reinvented again during the 1960s and 1970s as an "immigrant portal to America," Detroit's Hastings Street seems little remembered. The Lower East Side became a nostalgic center for New York Jews as early as the interwar years, a place of cultural meaning, and an American Jewish landmark. [2] However, Detroit Jewry either did not nourish writers or remember Jewish urban space in similar fashion, and Detroit's Jewish community appears today to think about its east side roots only a bisl, if at all.

In this essay, I seek to survey what we know and might like to know about East European Jewish Detroit in the early twentieth century, drawing a preliminary portrait based on secondary sources and some census and archival research. [3] I seek also to explore what was distinctive in East European Jewish Detroit, which grew from the mass exodus of Eastern European Jews from the lands of their captivity in Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Rumania and from the explosion of industrial production, population, and commercial opportunity in the expanding Motor City. [4] East European Jewish Detroit was distinctive among newcomer "colonies," as observers called them, in the auto capital, for it was mostly a commercial settlement with few members who worked in the auto companies or were subjected to their direct Americanizing influences. East European Jews focused heavily in commerce and trade and their key neighborhood settlement was both an enclave economy and staging area for commercial pursuits extending throughout th e city. Immigrant Jews worked out their adjustments to Detroit in a largely Jewish milieu and in independent interaction with other newcomers. East European Jewish Detroit was also distinctive among East European Jewish communities in the major cities, for it was small in size, primarily a bourgeois community, and lacked a substantial working class and powerful currents of organized labor and Socialism. Initially a fragmented community, comprised of many elements from several lands organized according to an Old World cultural geography, by the 1920s Detroit Jewry was becoming more Americanized, oriented to success, mobility, respectability, and, at the same time, increasingly committed to ethnic group defense.

Hastings Street District: A Ghetto of "Natural Born Traders"

A regional trading city with a population of 116,340 people in 1880, Detroit grew in size and population to 285,704 in 1900, and then mushroomed into the fourth largest city in the United States in 1920, with 993,678 inhabitants. An industrial city focused on transportation and metal, pharmaceutical, chemical, and industrial goods manufactures in 1900, Detroit exploded into the auto capital of the country during the first two decades of the century. Some 29 different automobile companies operated in the city or nearby by 1920, spreading outward along the railway system with main plants locating along a semicircular ring several miles out from downtown. These companies dominated the urban economy, offering the greatest share of employment to immigrant newcomers and drawing on 135,000 workers. The auto industrialists also ruled Detroit society and politics. Into this new society came migrants from many lands, especially from central Poland and southern Italy, in this era. During World War I and thereafter, migr ants also came from regions in the American South. Foreign-born whites numbered 289,297 and comprised 29 percent of Detroit's population by 1920. African Americans, slightly more numerous than Jews, counted 40,838 in the city and comprised an additional 4 percent. [5] In the shadows of this gigantic, spreading industrial empire and as an ingredient in a kaleidoscopic multi-ethnic and racial mix, an estimated 25,000 East European Jews also settled. With German Jews who arrived a generation earlier, they comprised the Jewish community of 35,000 people in 1920 (about 3.4 percent of the city's total population). [6]

Detroit was already a multiethnic city before the twentieth century, with clear patterns of ethnic settlement among its neighborhoods. German and Polish settlement dominated Detroit's east side, the city's main working-class area, which served also as a port of entry for immigrants. Silas Farmer, who published The History of Detroit and Michigan in 1884 and knew the city landscape well, spoke of "Dutchtown," or the German quarter, on each side of Gratiot beyond Brush Street on the city's eastside, and "Polacktown" to the east and the north. [7] Detroit newspapers already talked of a growing Jewish settlement on the east side in the mid-1890s, especially near the intersection of Hastings and Gratiot. The Detroit Sunday News-Tribune in September 1896 described a distinctive environment, with "churches, synagogues, breweries, and... beer gardens" and with areas that are "'striking examples of foreign customs transported to American soil." The paper identified a burgeoning Jewish "ghetto" near the downtown on th e east side, noting that in a rectangle formed by Monroe, Watson, Brush, and Orleans streets, "the larger portions, by far, of all the Jews in Detroit, have made their homes." Around Hastings Street, the key business thoroughfare, and along the streets adjoining it, said the newspaper, clustered "pretty much all that is orthodox and distinctive of the Jewish race (sic) in Detroit." [8] Olivier Zunz describes the Jewish area in 1900 as mixed in small clusters along otherwise industrial and commercial streets and concentrated near Hastings and Gratiot. East European Jews lived in small tenements near the Stroh's Brewery and mostly in one- and two-family houses, built by German builders, who rented to the newcomers. [9]