ion from the vast community of European Jews made the structure and content of American Jewish life difficult to define, although there appears to have been a negative reaction to authoritarian synagogue institutional culture and a pluralism of temples.
When German Jews began arriving in large numbers in the nineteenth century, particularly after the failure of the revolution of 1848, the Jewish cultural landscape began to shift. Urbanization of the Jewish community, particularly in New York, was increasingly a function of Jewish immigration. Because those who immigrated were peasants, the peasant petty economy (peddlers, butchers, etc.) installed itself in these communities, over time transforming from a culture of peddlers to retail mercantilism (187-8). The price paid for immigration became evident because unlike their Irish and later Russian Jewish counterparts, they did not come in big groups but as individuals or smaller family units. Loneliness for families still in Europe was the negative, but ability to "move somewhat more easily into the mainstream of American life" (189) was the positive.
German Gentile and Jewish immigrants also found linguistic and cultural common ground in America that had never been available in Europe, although the center of Jewish community life was typically the synagogue and local fraternal orders. Meanwhile, the absence of a charismatic Jewish leader had the effect of dispersing and acculturating individual Jews among the general American population and, over time, fostering the practice and thought of Reform Judaism side-by-side with America's culture of individualism, and preferring the more informal cohesion of religious and social solidarity to anything like a formally organized Jewish Union or (worse) ethnic enclave.
The steady pace of German Jewish immigration in the early part of the nineteenth century was followed by mass immigrations of Jews and others from Eastern and Southern E...