Transcending Boundaries:

Boston’s Catholics and Jews, 1929-1965

Jenny Goldstein

 

 

Chapter 1 Notes

1. Isaac M. Fein, Boston – Where it All began: An Historical Perspective of the Boston Jewish Community (Boston: Boston Jewish Bicentennial Committee, 1976), 1.

2. John Winthrop, first Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote in 1630 that Boston shall be a "City upon a hill," on board the ‘Arabella’ on the Atlantic Ocean en route to America. John Winthrop, "A Modell of Christian Charity" in The Many Voices of Boston: A Historical Anthology, 1630-1975, ed. Howard Mumford Jones and Bessie Zaban Jones (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), 7.

3. Thomas H. O’Connor, Bibles, Brahmins and Bosses: A Short History of Boston, rev. 2d ed., (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1984), 22.

4. Thomas O’Connor, Bibles, 29.

5. Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its People (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), xii.

6. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951),117.

7. Thomas O’Connor, Bibles, 29.

8. Paula M. Kane, Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 50.

9. James Carroll, "Boston’s Jews and Boston’s Irish." Boston Globe, 12 January 1992.

10. In fact, notable family names have permeated through Boston, which has been called the most exclusive of all American cities. Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: EP Dutton and Co Inc, 1947), 12.

11. Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians, 13 and Jonathan D. Sarna "The Jews of Boston in Historical Perspective" in The Jews of Boston, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, 9.

12. Thomas O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 11.

13. Boston Puritans traditionally expressed hostility to anything French and Catholic, but upon French intervention, their antipathy was subordinated under the necessity of securing aid in the struggle for independence. Thomas O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 12.

14. Thomas O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 16.

15. Thomas O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 17.

16. William M. Shannon, The American Irish: A Social and Political Portrait, 2d ed. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1966), 28.

17. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 531.

18. William M. Shannon, American Irish, 27.

19. Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 88.

20. William M. Shannon, American Irish, 183.

21. William M. Shannon, American Irish, 183.

22. Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 90.

23. However, most of the covenant’s forty-four students were not Catholics, but Unitarians, daughters of Boston’s aristocracy. Working class Congregationalists saw the covenant as upper class Unitarians and "foreign" Catholics uniting. Lawrence H. Fuchs, John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism (New York: Meredith Press, 1967), 47.

24. J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground Lukas: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 77 and Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 64.

25. Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 90.

26. Frederick A. Bushee, Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston (New York: Arno Press, 1970, reprint, New York: MacMillian Company, 1903), 1.

27. The Catholic population of Boston also differed from other cities, because as the French priest l’Abbé and Félix Klein, professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris, observed in the late nineteenth century that the Roman Catholic Church in Boston was essentially an Irish one.

28. William M. Shannon, American Irish, 28, 182.

29. Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 158.

30. Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 159.

31. Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 129.

32. Paula M. Kane, Separatism and Subculture, 58.

33. Isaac M. Fein, Boston, 1.

34. Franco was caught in a legal battle between Gibbons and the Dutch merchant Immanuel Perada about who would pay him. Franco found himself, without pay, stuck in America when the ship departed Boston for Holland. However, three months later, Franco gathered together money for his passage and left Boston. Ellen Smith. "Strangers and Sojourners: The Jews of Colonial Boston" in The Jews of Boston, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, 23.

35. Jonathan D. Sarna, "The Jews of Boston in Historical Perspective" in The Jews of Boston, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, 4.

36. Boston Jews did not erect their first synagogue, Kahal Kodosh Ohabei Shalom (The Holy Community Lovers of Peace), until 1843.Ellen Smith, "Strangers and Sojourners: The Jews of Colonial Boston" in The Jews of Boston, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, 24.

37. Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880-1920. The Jewish People in America, vol. 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 137

38. I used the term anti-Judaism because there had been a long history of anti-Jewish traditions. Wilhelm Marr only coined the term antisemitism in 1879 in his pamphlet ‘The Victory of Judaism over Germandom (Judentum ueber Deutschtum). Antony Polonsky, Walter Stern Hilborn Professor of Judaic Studies and Social Studies, Brandeis University, lecture notes, 30 January 2001.

39. Some Jews wanted to radically assimilate into Russian society and other Jews tried to create an autonomous Jewish community in Russia by establishing the Bund, composed of Yiddish socialists.

40. Notes from a 25 December 2000 lecture in Kiev, Ukraine by historian Paul Liptz, professor at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem.

41. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 25.

42. Founded in 1881 by East European Jews, HIAS intended to help their brethren acclimate to America. Irving Howe, World, 47.

43. Thomas H. O’Connor, Bibles, 123.

44. William A. Braverman, "The Emergence of a Unified Community, 1880-1917" in The Jews of Boston, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, 74.

45. William A. Braverman, "Emergence" in The Jews of Boston, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, 76 and Thomas O’Connor, Bibles, 115 and Gerald H. Gamm, "In Search of Suburbs: Boston’s Jewish Districts, 1843-1994" in The Jews of Boston, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, 135.

46. Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880-1920. The Jewish People in America, vol. 3, 137.

47. Hecht House Report, 1953, Box 1, folder: history and purpose of Hecht House, Hecht House Papers American Jewish Historical Society ((from henceforth will be AJHS), Waltham, Mass.

48. Hecht House Report, 1953, Box 1, folder: history and purpose of Hecht House, I-74, AJHS, Waltham, Mass.

49. Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 181.