Western Reality: Jewish Diversity During the "German" Period *‪.‬

Recognition of diversity in American Jewish history has emerged during the last several decades. Where New York and other eastern Jewish communities were once accepted as the model of development, recent histories recognize variations in the trajectories of communities outside of these major urban manufacturing centers. Most significantly, historians have recognized that the widely accepted chronology of Jewish waves of immigration--first Sephardic, then German, then East European--does not apply to the Pacific West. (1) Indeed, in part because the East European Jewish migration to the West was far smaller than in the East, it is widely accepted that Germans were the major founders of the nineteenth-century Jewish communities in the western states. The stereotype of German dominance is attributable not only to the fact that East Europeans came to the West in smaller numbers than to the East. The successes of Jews of Bavarian origin made their names prominent in San Francisco and Portland. From the Levi Strauss Corporation to the Steinhart Aquarium, the Fleishhaker Zoo, and dozens of other businesses and philanthropies, the names of German and especially Bavarian Jews are visible to this day on San Francisco's landmarks and corporate logos. Likewise, many of Portland's most prominent Jews in the nineteenth century, including Portland mayors Bernard Goldsmith and Philip Wasserman, and Aaron Meier, founder of Meier and Frank department store, were Bavarian born. The visibility of these Bavarian Jews and the congregations they formed, Emanu-El in San Francisco and Beth Israel in Portland, has fed the stereotype of German dominance of the nineteenth-century Jewish West.