SOURCE: "David Levinsky's Fall: A Note on the Liebman Thesis," in American Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter, 1967, pp. 696-706.

[In the following essay, Singer examines The Rise of David Levinsky in light of Charles Liebman's thesis that most Jews who emigrated to the United States were shaped more by cultural and social mores than by religious orthodoxy.]

The notion that the overwhelming majority of East European Jews who came to the United States between 1880 and 1915 were Orthodox has assumed a central position in the popular mythology of American-Jewish life. On a more scholarly level, this same idea has established itself in the canon of American-Jewish historiography. The standard works on American Jewry have, in varying degrees, accepted this premise, and their interpretations have been fashioned accordingly. Even Moses Rischin, whose The Promised City is perhaps the most sophisticated achievement to date in the reconstruction of the American-Jewish experience, seems for the most part to have accepted the prevailing thesis of the Orthodoxy of the East European masses. In part, this view follows from the tendency of historians to construct a rather stereotyped portrait of East European Jewish life, in which the Orthodox shtetl completely dominates the scene. On the other hand, the Orthodoxy of the immigrant masses would appear to be confirmed by every shred of evidence accumulated thus far by students of the period. Virtually everybody, including the immigrants themselves, has accepted the Orthodoxy of the "first generation" as an unquestionable fact.

Recently, however, this generally prevailing view has come under direct assault in the work of Professor Charles Liebman, whose illuminating studies of American Orthodoxy are setting in its proper historical perspective a subject long neglected. In essence, Liebman has argued that most of the nominally Orthodox immigrants who came to the United States were bound by commitments that were ethnic rather than religious. Because they often outwardly conformed to many traditional religious norms, they were regarded as Orthodox by their more acculturated coreligionists. At best, however, their residual piety was what Leo Baeck has called Milieu Frommigkeit.

In support of his thesis, Liebman has compiled a body of evidence which, while it is often rather fragmentary, does raise serious doubts about the generally accepted view. In dealing with the European setting of the exodus to America, Liebman correctly asserts that historians have not paid sufficient attention to the forces of secularism which were shattering the Orthodox consensus of the East European Jewish communities. At the very time when large groups of Jews were emigrating to the United States, traditional Judaism was facing the challenge of such movements as the Haskalah, political Zionism and Marxist socialism.

Turning specifically to those Jews who came to these shores, Liebman argues that it can be expected that those who emigrated first would be the least traditional, since they were willing to uproot themselves from home and family. Among the evidence that Liebman cites in support of this contention is the significant fact that leading Rabbinic authorities such as the Hafetz Hayyim, warned their fellow Jews not to endanger their Judaism by leaving home. The Rabbi of Slutsk, on a visit to the United States, castigated those Jews who had emigrated to a trefa (impure) land.

Liebman's strongest argument, however, is the evidence he cites to show that the East European Jews failed to create those institutions which were necessary for the maintenance of an Orthodox community. The very multiplicity of synagogues which were established far exceeding the number necessary for the purposes of worship, Liebman argues, indicates that their primary purpose was cultural and social, rather than religious. While there was a superabundant proliferation of synagogues, there is evidence to indicate that there was a serious shortage of mikvaot (ritual baths). The most serious failure of the East European Jewish community in the United States, however, was in the area of Jewish education. A New York survey taken in 1908 produced the remarkable information that only 28 per cent of the Jewish children between the ages of six and sixteen were receiving any Jewish education at all. Until 1915, there were only two Jewish day schools in the whole country. America also suffered from a paucity of distinguished rabbinic scholars among the immigrants. When the New York Orthodox community began to search for a rabbinic leader, no American rabbi was even considered. Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Vilna was finally selected in 1887.

The implications of Liebman's thesis are, of course, revolutionary. If he is, in fact, correct, his arguments necessitate a radical reconstruction of our understanding of the American-Jewish experience. No longer will it be tenable to view Jewish history in the United States as a simplistic conflict between religious orthodoxy and secularism. Historians will have to refine their conceptual apparatus to deal with more subtle categories. The popular notion of the development of the Conservative movement will also have to be drastically revised. The rise of Conservative Judaism and secularism, according to Professor Liebman, "did not entail a decision to opt out of traditional religion. It was, rather, a decision to substitute new social and cultural mores for the older ones, which had been intermingled with certain ritual manifestations."

It should be emphasized that Liebman has presented his thesis in a rather tentative manner. In his writings thus far, the question of the Orthodoxy of the East European immigrants has been marginal to his primary concerns. Obviously, a great deal of basic research will have to be done before the issue can be considered with any kind of finality. To illustrate, however, how fruitful Liebman's thesis can be as an analytical tool in American-Jewish historiography, I would like to turn to an examination of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky.

Published in 1917, The Rise of David Levinsky was the foremost literary achievement of the man who, more than any other individual, helped shape the cultural pattern of New York's Jewish community. As the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, Cahan, who arrived in the United States in 1882, served for many years as the central mediating force between the Jewish immigrant masses and the great metropolis. The Rise of David Levinsky, which was hailed by many at the time of its publication as a masterpiece of realistic fiction, and which served to introduce New York's East Side to the American reading public, has continued to evoke high praise from discerning readers. The novel has been acclaimed by Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld and Nathan Glazer. John Higham has lauded the novel as a "unique masterpiece of social criticism," and as "the unrivaled record of a great historical experience."

While The Rise of David Levinsky has been praised both in terms of its literary merits and as a document of social history, it has been, I would contend, often misunderstood, because it has been analyzed from the perspective of the prevailing thesis of the Orthodoxy of the East European immigrants. To illustrate the standard interpretation of the novel, let me quote Nathan Glazer:

We read in The Rise of David Levinsky of how a young Russian Jewish yeshiva student, learned and pious, emigrates to this country. On the boat he eats no forbidden food and prays daily. In America he seeks out and finds solace in the synagogue established by people from his home town. But he also moves inevitably from one transgression to the next. First his earlocks are cut off, then he shaves, soon he abandons the synagogue in favor of night school and English studies. And soon nothing is left—and with practically no soul searching.

To the casual reader of the novel this summary may well appear as quite accurate. A closer examination of Glazer's analysis, however, raises a serious problem. Glazer is certainly correct in placing great emphasis on the two dramatic scenes in the early part of the book, where Levinsky cuts off his earlocks and then his beard, for the loss of these two symbols does, in fact, immediately open the floodgates to a host of transgressions, and to Levinsky's complete abandonment of Jewish religious law. To the modern reader, however, these happenings can only be viewed with bewilderment. Why should a beard and earlocks, which are only customs, play such a pivotal role in Levinsky's religious development? Are we to believe that a "learned and pious" yeshiva student is so unable to distinguish between the essentials and nonessentials of Judaism, that the surrender of these customs becomes the decisive factor in his complete alienation from traditional norms? Yet Glazer has not erred in viewing Levinsky's loss of his earlocks and beard as a dramatic turning point in his life. The fundamental weakness of his argument is that Glaser views Levinsky's abandonment of these customs as the beginning of a process of alienation, when in fact, a close reading of the novel reveals that Levinsky's surrendering of his earlocks and beard is the culmination of an estrangement from his traditional roots that had begun much earlier, while he was still in Europe.

The society into which David Levinsky was born, and in which he remained firmly rooted until his eighteenth year, Cahan makes it abundantly clear, was one that would do justice to the most unsophisticated popular stereotype of the shtetl. Cahan was able to draw upon his own experience in sketching the background milieu of Levinsky's early years, since he was the scion of a rabbinical line and had lived for many years in Vilna, a city renowned for its Jewish learning. In The Rise of David Levinsky, however, the features of East European Jewish life often appear in an extreme form, since the scene is set in Antomir, a small backwater town.

In Antomir, where the "bulk of the population lived on less than fifty copecks (twenty-five cents) a day, and that was difficult to earn," grinding poverty was a lot shared by most of its inhabitants. The Levinsky home was a room in a basement, which David and his mother shared with three other families. The spiritual life of the community also testified to the influence of a small-town atmosphere in that it was characterized by an intense but simple piety. Thus, in speaking of his relationship with God, Levinsky tells us that it was "of a personal and of a rather familiar character. He was interested in everything I did or said; He watched my every move or thought; He was always in heaven, yet, somehow, He was always near me, and I often spoke to Him." David's description of his mother's piety is even more revealing: "She was passionately devout.… Being absolutely illiterate, she would murmur meaningless words, in the singsong of a prayer, pretending to herself that she was performing her devotions. This, however, she would do with absolute earnestness and fervor, often with tears of ecstasy coming to her eyes."

Together with piety, the central value in Antomir's ethos was learning, and particularly the study of Talmud. It was taken for granted by the inhabitants of the town that "the highest mathematics taught in the Gentile universities were child's play as compared to the Talmud," and parents were prepared to "starve themselves to keep their sons studying the Word of God." For the first eighteen years of life, the portals of the yeshiva constituted David's world, a world inhabited by the rabbis of the Talmud. "I could almost see them," Levinsky later recalled, "each of them individualized in my mind by some of his sayings, by his manner of debate, by some particular word he used, or by some particular incident in which he figured. I pictured their faces, their beards, their voices." It was, however, a world that was fated to disappear quickly under a succession of painful experiences.

It is rather remarkable that so many readers of the novel have assumed that when David Levinsky arrived in the United States he was a "pious" Jew, for in terms of the literary handling of the problem, Cahan is rather heavy-handed in delineating Levinsky's estrangement from the life and ethos of Antomir well before he came to America. This transformation, dealt with in two short chapters, comes about all too abruptly. In terms of its causes, Cahan makes it clear that three factors operated together to uproot David from his former way of life. Let us examine each of these.

A central motif running through The Rise of David Levinsky, as Leslie Fiedler has pointed out, is that of Levinsky (the Jew) as lover. While the sexual theme of the novel becomes increasingly important as Levinsky grows older, it is of major importance even in the earliest stage of the plot, for, at a moment of crisis in his life, Levinsky was in the midst of a sexual awakening that was shaking his psychological balance. One of the children who lived in the same apartment as the Levinskys was Red Esther, with whom David had often fought as a young child. Suddenly, however, Red Esther began to appear to him in a new light. "I still hated her," he later remembered, "but, somehow, she did not seem to be the same as she had been before. The new lines that were developing in her growing little figure, and more particularly her own consciousness of them, were not lost upon me. A new element was stealing into my rancor for her—a feeling of forbidden curiosity." In Antomir the relations between the sexes were "largely a case of forbidden fruit and the mystery of distance." This, however, only served to intensify David's curiosity and the anguish of the guilt feelings that followed. The psychological havoc wrought by his emotional maturation is made abundantly clear by Cahan: "The worst of it was that these images often visited my brain while I was reading the holy book.… in addition to the wickedness of my indulging in salacious thoughts, there was the offense of desecrating the holy book by them." That Cahan entitled the chapter dealing with Levinsky's sexual awakening "Enter Satan" was therefore an augury for the future, for it was indeed the opening wedge of a new life that awaited him.

Levinsky's emotional balance, already strained by the anxieties and uncertainties of growing up, suffered its most severe blow when his mother was murdered by a group of Russian peasants. It was, in fact, a blow that shook the very foundations of his world. David had lost his father when he was an infant, and had since then centered all his emotional life around his mother, whom Cahan portrays in the classical image of the saintly, self-sacrificing Jewish woman. The thought that his mother was dead smote Levinsky with "crushing violence." He was obsessed with the thought that "mother was no more, that I was alone in the world." Levinsky's incessant brooding over his "irreparable loss" made him a "nervous, listless wreck," a "mere shadow" of his former self.

The third blow to Levinsky's world-view, coming fast upon the death of his mother, was the painful discovery that his closest friend had become an atheist. David had always admired Naphtali, both for his piety as well as for his learning. With the loss of his mother, David, out of a need for both consolation and companionship, drew even closer to his friend. Therefore, when Naphtali one day proclaimed, in the most matter-of-fact way, that there was no God, that it was "all bosh," Levinsky was "hurt and horrified." His friend's words continued to haunt him. What was most painful, however, was David's discovery that while he yearned to smash his friend's atheism, he had "nothing clear or definite to put forth" in reply.

The cumulative effect of the events examined above was to break the bonds that tied Levinsky to the life of his community. Cahan was quite careful to underline David's alienation from the ethos to which he had been tenaciously loyal for his first eighteen years. "The shock of the catastrophe," we are told, "had produced a striking effect" on him. Levinsky now found that he "was incapable of sustained thinking," and that his "communions with God were quite rare.…" Though he tried, he was "powerless to restore … [his] former feeling for the Talmud." He was conscious of the fact that "the spell was broken irretrievably." David was restless and "coveted diversions." His surroundings had "somehow lost their former meaning. Life was devoid of savor, and … [he] … was thirsting for an appetizer … for some violent change, for piquant sensations."

A thirst for violent change! Here indeed is the key to Levinsky's growing desire to emigrate to America. It was neither economic privation nor religious persecution that first aroused in David the thought of leaving his home, but rather his own estrangement from his former way of life. America appealed to him precisely because it was not Antomir, because in his mind it represented an entirely different pattern of existence. It was while David was in the state of anomie described above, we are specifically told, that "the word America first caught my fancy." To Levinsky, America was a land of "mystery," a realm of "fantastic experiences," a place of "marvelous transformations." To seek his fortune in "that distant, weird world" seemed to him "just the kind of sensational adventure my heart was hankering for."

The fundamental link between Levinsky's alienation and his desire to emigrate to the United States is also under-scored by Cahan through his emphasis on the antithetical ways of life represented by Antomir and America. On four separate occasions Cahan has David's friends and advisers make the point that America is indeed a trefa land. In his search for money to purchase a steamship ticket, Levinsky first thought of turning to a wealthy woman who had befriended him. He quickly realized, however, that she would never consider helping him in his plan to "abandon my Talmud, and go to live in a godless country.…" More significantly, the same point is made twice by Reb Sender, who functions in the novel as the pious Jew par excellence. He was absolutely thunderstruck to hear that David could even contemplate going to the United States. "Lord of the World," he is made to say, "one becomes a Gentile there." When Levinsky was about to board ship, Reb Sender made a final plea that David "not forget that there is a God in heaven in America as well as here [Antomir]." It is thus clear that when David spoke of America as a "far-away land" he had something much more profound in mind than mere distance.

Our analysis thus far has been focused upon the course of Levinsky's estrangement from the traditional pattern of East European life, a process which, as we have seen, was virtually complete before David sailed for the United States. As for the new values and the new life-style that were to fill the void created by his alienation from his former way of life, these were, for the greater part, the result of Levinsky's later assimilation to the American environment. It is important to note, however, that David's initiation into the new life that awaited him in America began while he was still in Europe, for in the very heart of traditional Antomir, he was able to discover an island of modernism.

While in the state of emotional upheaval which followed upon the death of his mother, David, as was mentioned above, had been befriended by a wealthy woman, Shiphrah Minsker, who out of pity had taken him into her home. The Minsker family was one of the oldest in town, but its mode of existence differed drastically from that of the vast majority of Antomir's inhabitants. For the Minskers were, as Cahan informs us, a "modern" family, which prided itself on being enlightened. The younger members of the household had been educated at Russian schools, and in general "behaved like Gentiles." It was in the Minsker home that David first encountered the modern world and absorbed many of its values. Here he met Matilda, Shiphrah's oldest daughter, with whom he fell in love, and indulged in romantic behavior certainly not becoming a pious yeshiva student. As the most assimilated member of her family, Matilda demanded of David that he give up the "idiotic Talmud," and study at a university. At an earlier time, such a suggestion would have appeared to Levinsky as sacrilegious, but now Matilda's ideas seemed perfectly reasonable. He confessed that they "did not shock me in the least." Levinsky was determined to be "no more slouch of a Talmud student," and he faithfully promised to implement Matilda's proposals as soon as he arrived in America. Is it then any wonder that when David visited a synagogue before he sailed to the United States, "everybody and everything in it looked strange" to him?

Given the above analysis, there is little cause for surprise over the fact that shortly after Levinsky's arrival in the United States his Orthodoxy completely disintegrated with "practically no soul searching." Levinsky's transformation proceeded so swiftly and so smoothly precisely because there was so little left of his former piety by the time he reached these shores. The nontraditional atmosphere of New York merely served to precipitate a cultural change that had long been in the making. It is to this culminating process that we shall now turn.

From Cahan's literary handling of the problem, it would appear that two factors worked together to bring about the final collapse of Levinsky's Orthodoxy. The first of these was the trauma inherent in the ocean voyage to America. Stanley Elkins, in his brilliant institutional study of slavery, has attempted to account for the Sambo image by arguing that it was the result of an actual transformation of the slaves' personalty structure. Drawing upon the literature of the concentration camps, he has contended that through the uprooting process of the trip from Africa to the United States, and the introduction of the slave into a tightly regimented system, the Negro adopted a new identity. Without attempting to carry the analogy too far, since Cahan's description of Levinsky's voyage is rather sketchy, we can, I mink, see much the same process at work in the novel. It is significant that the chapter dealing with the ocean crossing focuses exclusively upon David's sense of "desolation, homesickness, uncertainty, and anxiety." This sense of terror is underlined by Cahan, when he informs us that Levinsky felt as one "abandoned in the midst of a jungle," and that he was caught "in the embrace of a vast uncanny force." David's "peculiar state of mind" during the trip is further underscored by Cahan's use of hallucinatory imagery. Levinsky thought himself to be in a "trance," a state of "ecstasy" in which America appeared as an "enchanted" land, the likes of which he had never "dream[t] of before." The new world, he tells us, unfolded itself to him like a "divine revelation." The implication of all of this for Levinsky's final estrangement from Orthodoxy is made strikingly clear, when Cahan states that David arrived in this country like a "new-born babe." The trip had, in fact, been a "second birth" for him!

If Levinsky's journey from Antomir to the United States had a corrosive effect on his psyche, the New York environment offered him little emotional relief. Having undergone the anguish of the ocean voyage, Levinsky was now forced to cope with the sense of isolation and inferiority that resulted from his being a "green horn" in the New World. Here, indeed, is the final factor in David's alienation from Orthodoxy. It was his intense discomfort at being called a "green one," and his frantic desire to blend into the American milieu that impelled Levinsky to discard the last vestiges of his former way of life. What is at work here is, of course, the process of social adjustment to American mores which Liebman has emphasized. This in turn serves to explain why David's earlocks and beard assumed such a central position in his personal development. For, though merely social customs, they stood out as the most tangible symbols of the life-style he was feverishly attempting to shed.

Again and again, Cahan stresses Levinsky's feelings of pain and frustration at his being a "newly arrived, inexperienced immigrant." "It stung me cruelly," he tells us, to be called a greenhorn. If he did not actually hear the term, he "saw it in the eyes of the people who passed [him]." Levinsky found himself "shuddering at the prospect" of his being singled out for comment. The relationship between Levinsky's sense of isolation and his surrendering of his earlocks and beard is, in fact, explicitly underscored by Cahan. The elderly gentleman who gave David the money to have his earlocks cropped told him that "now you won't look green." As for Levinsky's cutting off his beard, he confessed that it was the result of "a remark dropped by one of the peddlers that my down-covered face made me look like a 'green one'." The pressure of events had simply proven too powerful for Levinsky to resist.

That David's loss of his earlocks and beard was not, as Glazer has argued, the beginning but rather the culmination of his alienation from Orthodoxy is made quite clear by Cahan. After cropping his earlocks, we are informed, Levinsky "scarcely recognized [him]self." Most significantly, Levinsky himself realized that "the hair-cut and the American clothes had changed my identity." This new identity, however, did not become completely manifest until David had made his final break with the past by cutting off his beard. The very next chapter, symbolically entitled, "A Green Horn No Longer," describes Levinsky's attempt to seduce two married women. It was, in fact, the "beginning of a period of unrestrained misconduct." The "last thread [had] snapped" and David Levinsky's new life had begun.

Given the present state of our knowledge, it would, I think, be presumptuous to attempt to generalize from David Levinsky's experiences. Cahan's novel is, after all, only a single, if quite significant, piece of a complex picture that can be clarified only through further research. It may safely be stated, however, that Professor Liebman's thesis will prove to be of invaluable aid in that process of clarification.