One need only glance at the titles and chapter headings of Deborah Moore's At Home in America and Robert Orsi's The Madonna of 115th Street to recognize the vastly different ways in which immigrant Jews and Catholics conceived of themselves in relation to the unfamiliar and often hostile surroundings of New York City in the 20th century. Jews not only managed to participate in the "outside world," but to maintain and even reinforce their religious and ethnic distinctiveness through such "associationism" (240). The outward focus of Jews, evident in the headings "Jewish geography," "From Chevra to Center," "A Collective Enterprise," and "The Rise of the Jewish Democrat" clearly opposes the "intense inward preoccupation" of Catholic consciousness, which revolves around the domus, the focus of Orsi's study (113).
Not surprisingly, the distinction between the centrifugal and centripetal impulses of the two groups manifests itself in both religious practice and in the broader understanding of what religion means to individuals and the community at large. The fact that Orsi focuses his entire study of Italian-American Catholics on the devotion to a single saint (and status), indicates the particularlity and specificity of the Catholic consciousness, in contrast to the generality and expansiveness of the Jewish one. This contrast reproduces itself in the methodologies of the historians and also in the aesthetics of the two books.
Orsi's and Moore's studies are effective because their approaches are determined by the nature of their subjects, not the other way around. Put simply, for Italian Catholics, religion is domus, whereas for New York Jews, religion is neighborhood and community ("potential moral community" 149). Given this fundamental difference, Orsi's "local" approach and Moore's "global" one, seems at once logical and necessary. Historians may supplement "hard" research with interviews, but for Orsi, these represent the core of his investigation. Typically, religious historians examine church documents, theological treatises, and Biblical exegesis or commentary, sources which reveal little (directly) about the individual or cultural experience of religion.
Orsi studies relgion in terms of ritual and ethical belief. These, he argues, are "what matters," not to thechurch hierarchy but to the "people themselves" (xvi). It is telling that the one chapter with a broad theme--immigration--is titled "Toward an Inner History of Immigration." Also revealing, in terms of what matters to Orsi, is that the chapter is by far the shortest in the book.) Moore uses more traditional sources, quoting not just rabbis, but the leading figures in the "myriad" economic, social, educational, political, and charitable organizations in which Jews took part. Like Orsi, her concern is with the people themselves, as her almost ethnographic study--"Jewish Geography"--attests. But for those she studies institutions matter almost as much.
Both historians, then, display concerns with the psychological and experiential dimensions of religion, a similarity not immediately apparent for the reasons just discussed, but resulting less from substantial theoretical disagreement, than from real differences in their subjects. Neither Orsi nor Moore really theorizes about why Catholics and Jews experienced immigration the way they did, or about which inherent features of each group caused it to adjust to life in America as it did. Each historian provides plausible explanations for what did in fact occur, but neither one goes the further step to explain why each groups basic mode of acculturation was logical or necessary, or why, if the clocks were somehow turned back, the group's immigrant experience would follow the same course. The absence of this type of analysis may be explained by a simple fact: these texts are not works of comparative religion.
But in reading the two studies, it is clear (and evident in Moore's title), that Jews were simply more comfortable conducting their lives in a manner consistent with their values and traditions than were Italian Catholics in the same period. The reason for this may seem so obvious that Moore neglects to mention it: Jews were what might be called "professional" immigrants. From the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Jews lived in the Diaspora, a condition which resulted in a fusion of ethnic and religious identity. While German and Spanish (Sephardic) Jews certainly differ, their status as Jews binds them together in a unique way. Wandering and exile--and their emotional concomitant of fear--are integral, constitutive elements of Jewish psychology.
Unlike Jews, Italian Catholics were "virgin" immigrants, for whom minority status was arguable more traumatic than for , say, Catholics from predominantly Protestant nations such as Germany or England. The basic distinction then, between first-time immigrants and pepertual immigrants, provides a fram through which the already noted Catholic inwardness and Jewish outwardness may be understood. While fear was part of the Jewish world-view (or New York world-view), Vivian Gornic explains, "We of the second generation were frightened of America also--but we hungered for it more than we feared it" (86). Certainly, American was more hospitable than many other places Jews had lived, where they had nevertheless learned to create self-sufficient communities. One can hardly imagine one of the Italian Catholics of the same generation calling America "hospitable." For them, fear, suspicion, and hostility toward Americans and American values were predominant, at once necessitating and justifying the authoritative claims of the domus. According to Orsi, "Immigrants [who] wanted to criticize their children's new ideas about themselves and the ways they wanted to organize their lives, accused them of being American" (78).
It is hard to convey, with a few quotations ,the pervasive disparagement of anything which differered from those ideas or activities sanctioned by the domus. That which did not receive such endorsement was not only bad; it simply did not exist. That a person would want to marry a non-Italian meant thta he or she had failed to learn the values of the domus, or simply values, since the domus represented the only legitimate source of truth and goodness. Such a person, Orsi explains, "would hardly be a person" (80). The "offspring" of the "blood violator" would be "animals" (82), or what was equally repulsive, "Turks" (86). Those outside the domus, or at least Orsi's book (in some ways a simulation of the domus), cannot grasp the devastating power of the latter designation. This power dervies from the domus's insistence upon defining not just "values," but "meanings of words" (85), and thus, reality itself.
Within the epistemology of the domus, a Turk was "the opposite of a Christian" (86). One could nto be a Christian without adhering to the rules of the domus; one could not be good person, or a person at all, without being a Christian. The circularity and enclosure of this system is astonishing; it's "voracity," Orsi implies, relates to its epistemological as well as its moral authority. Thus, the domus did not simply shape values. It determined them. When Orsi makes statements like "there were no individuals in Italian Harlem, only people who were part of a domus" (80), he means this quite literally. Only through the reptition of this idea, by him and those he interviews, can one fully grasp the domus's radical suppression of the individual. One man, after speaking with Orsi two full days, said that he wanted to make sure that the historian understood (as if he could possibly have missed this point) that "the biggest emphasis was on the family" (77).
In this context, both the hostility toward institutions and the devotion to the Madonna make perfect sense. The domus, based on fear and cotnrol, could not tolerate the recognition of any alternative or competing sources of power. The division Orsi points out in the introduction between "religion" and "church" emerges from the fear of that which would challenge or or threaten the domus. The Madonna represented a desperately needed salve for the wounds inflicted on individuals by the domus whose very existence, ironically, was a response to the traumas of immigration, a means of proection against "external powers" (xx). But, as is often the case, the cure was at least as bad as the disease, producing a rage within Italian Catholics so intense , that it could only be "turned inward" (106). It was far too "threatening" to direct such emotions toward the domus, which however problematic, was perceived as the last and only defense against the outsdie world, a perception which reinforced the dependence upon the very system perpetuating the original trauma.
In addition to offering a general source of healing for immigrants, the Madonna also assuaged their feelings of alienation. The church of 115th Street was viewed "as the end of the long journey of immigration, a source of peace, protection and pardon" (164-5). Embedded in the festa ritutal were themes of wandering and arrival, as immigrants traveled through the neighborhoods of New York to "the Madonna's throne" ( 165). In addition, through prayer to the Madonna, women , especially, overcame the pain of distance from sons, brothers, and husbands. One women tells Orsi, "Many time in this long period of four years I was without word from my son.. But for all this I never succumbed but always had recourse to prayer" 167).
Paryer not only provided a means through which individual needs could be fulfilled, but through which individuals couldregains at least some of the personal authority and autonomy which the domus systematically denied. One's relationships to the Madonna was, again for women in particular, the only one which did not depend upon the surrender and suppresion of self. Thus, while individuals might not be able to control the essential aspects of their outer lives, the Madonna empowered them to influence their inner livs, allowing them to create within themselves personal sanctuaries.
As much as any other religious or ethnic groups, Jews understood the need to create an internal refuge in the face of external chaos. To retain their identities in the absence of a homeland, Jews became adept at devleoping cohesive communities in regions with pre-existing political and cultural institutions. Their survival depended upon their ability to co-exist with otherness. History taught Jews that real security rests not on domination and conformity but on acceptance and diversity. Moore presents a vivid picture of what she calls the "democratic pluralism" of New York Jews: "What enabled Zionists to debate Socialists, Anarchists to attach Orthodox, Americanizers to compete with Survivalists, Bundists to oppose Universalists, and Yiddishists to struggle with Hebraists as their common situation as immigrants in New York City" (7).
This toleration of multiplicity can be traced back in part ot the tradition of rabbinic commentary, which differs in form and attitude from Christian Biblical exegesis. Rabbinic Judaism was by no means democratic, but it left more room for debate between opposing viewpoints than did the Catholic hierarchy. Texts such as The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan sought to preserve the current generation's link to the tradition, while at the same time fashioning a unique , current identity.
The influence of commentary on the organization of second-generation life parallels that of the domus on the organization of Italian-American immigrant life. This is the type of inherent trait which neither Moore nor Orsi attempts seriously to link to the acculturation patterns of his or her group. Still , Moore offers a number ofu seful images which capture the ways in which second-generation Jews participated in, and remained separate from, New York as a whole. The first of these relates to the residential pattern of "concentrated dispersion" which "combined residential segregation with mobility." She adds: "Residence in a Jewish neighborhood and associational ties with other Jews brought one into the orbit of the community into a 'world of Jewish unconsiousness'... secure by strands at once both conscious and unconscious, built up through secondary and primary associations" (16). The notion of strands which create a strong net or web of support itself builds up from one chapter to the next.
Moreover, the idea implicity in the words "orbit" and "unconscious" of an overarching or underlying conceptual bond between Jews, suggests the multiple levels on which Jewish identity existed. In general, living in America led to the creation of "institutional bulwarks of middle-class ethnicity, but no longer an ethnicity based on town of origin" (129). Here Moore is describing the synagogue, but her comment applies to most of the institutions she surveys. Religious observance was but one element of being a good Jew: community action and involvement were others. Thus, "While religious organizations emerged as key agencies encouraging Jewish ethnicity , secular alternatives existed" (14, emphasis mine). The interaction between Jews and the neighborhood school exemplifies Jews' commitment to broader social and political concerns. But the school, like the synagogue, failed to create an "institutional community broader than the neighborhood" (147). Moore concludes that "any effort to build a city-wide community would have to rest on a nonsectarian foundation." In the final part of the book, she explores broad-based philanthropic , educational, and political ventures undertaken by second and third generation Jews.
By the time one reaches the final chapters, whose heading "At Home in America" Moore selects as the title of the book, it is clear that Jews, both collectively and individually, defined themselves in a variety of contexts. Flatbush Jews, for instance, did not all feel and act one way, while the Grand Concourse Jews felt another. Even within neighborhoods , there existed great multiplicity, satisfying the "age-old Jewish need .. to escape from the consciousness (if not the fact) of being a minority in exile" (60). Many Jews, in fact, did not belong to synagogues, yet this did not diminish their significance for all Jews.
The synagogue , Moore argues, "served as the Jewish home which Jews conveniently could take for granted and ignore" (123, emphasis mine). This, as I have tried to show, reveals a strategy of identity formation more complex, from a developmental and psychological standpoint, than the strategy of Italian Catholics, who for many reasons, seemed to fear that loosening the strictures of the doums wou.ld lead to annihilation. In contrast, leaders of the synagogue centers, which promoted the "preservation and transmission of Jewish religious and cultural traditions" were confident of their "American identity and psychosocial health" (134).
As many psychologists would agree, maturity involves the capacity of individuals to know themselves in relation to others, but not exclusively so. The tendency of Orsi's Catholics to think in binary, absolute categories contrasts with the tendency of Moore's Jews to think in more fluid and varied terms. To make such a claim is not to indict Italian-Catholics , but merely to recognize that , as a group, their model of identity formation (the domus) reflexts a more acute level of fear, and that this may related to their status as first-time immigrants.
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