Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way by Hasia R. Diner

Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way Reviews

• 
  Jan Rice

  "This sack will teach you to talk, will give you food to eat, will give you an opportunity to emerge from your greenness, will teach you to integrate yourself into American life."(204)

  
  
  I found this book, which illuminates an aspect of history I knew little about, surprising and inspiring. It came out this year; it's in essence the Jewish
  The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (and more), although so far I don't think it's getting that degree of publicity. I discovered it almost by chance.
  
  In the 19th century, extended by an additional two decades on either end, half of the Jews in the world (about five million) emigrated, with a third (over three million) crossing national borders. Whereas from the 11th century on through the 15th and further, their movement had been southward and eastward (think Crusades, expulsion from Spain in 1492, and so on), the new movement was back toward the west and north.
  
  The commonly accepted picture has been that the migration was due to persecution ("pogroms"), but according to the author, NYU professor Hasia Diner, that's only part of the picture. This migration was not like today's Syrian migration of refugees from war-torn areas. Rather, Jews studied geography, read novels and tried to understand the news to decide whether and where to go, their aim, as with other groups, being to seek new opportunity in the face of change. But in that extended 19th century, Jews made up the majority of migrants in many places. They moved to worlds new to them, largely places where the new economic ways had taken root. The newly built railroads brought them out, and steamships brought them across oceans. The telegraph enabled communication with those left behind and the wiring of money to bring wives, brothers, cousins. "America fever" was burning brightly but many came to the British Isles first; Australia and South Africa were also major destinations. Cuba, Latin America, and other destinations loomed larger later, especially after the 1924 law limiting immigration in the US. It was largely the poor who left; they had nothing to lose. (In the German-speaking lands, for example, the educated and better-off moved to the cities.) And the engine that was driving this mass migration was the lowly occupation of peddling.
  
  Peddling had been one of the occupations permitted to Jews in Eastern and Central Europe from medieval times, as well as under the Ottoman empire, but in those locales it had been a life sentence. Nor did peddling bring about social integration in the old countries where the peddler would have to make it to the next Jewish enclave by nightfall. But in the new worlds the peddler had to have the social skills to get the woman of the house not only to open the door but to provide a place to lay his head--quite a feat, considering he began with but a few words of English and a little advice. But if one could do it, one could peddle for a number of years, working for oneself, and, usually before a decade was out, be able to start a sedentary store; not so with laboring in factories and sweatshops.
  
  What is peddling? The author distinguishes peddling from other similar occupations. The peddler is someone who knocks on the door and crosses the threshold--so they had to learn new languages and learn their customers' ways. Thus, they are different from urban pushcart vendors whose customers came out to them. (There were urban peddlers who met that criteria: kloppers ("knockers") they were called.) Peddlers aren't traveling salesmen, who work for a particular company and not for themselves and so wouldn't be attuned to their customers' wants and needs as the source of new commercial opportunities, as peddlers were. In my youth in 1950s-era Southern suburbia, we still had the Fuller Brush man, but peddlers were long gone. We had the milkman, too, and the vegetable man (or "costermonger:" a term I learned from the Maisie Dobbs mystery series) came around weekly--the latter self-employed and, maybe, close, since he did come to the door. Peddlers also weren't drummers, who worked for manufacturers and went to stores to "drum up" business.
  
  All peddlers weren't Jews. The changes going on in the old countries made peddling an opportunity for others as well. Wherever there were peddlers, the same negative vibe followed them:
  
  

  Like the Jewish peddlers in the new world...non-Jewish peddlers in Europe, Christians selling among Christians, inspired fear and distrust among elements of the population, particularly guild members and settled merchants who resented the competition posed by the peddlers. Local officials eager to maintain the peace sided with the peddlers' critics.... In every region peddlers penetrated, repressive legislation flourished in an effort to keep them out. Their presence as fixtures of everyday life and the pervasive sense that society had to protect itself against them provided a lived backdrop to "stranger" theory developed by the early-twentieth-century German sociologist Georg Simmel. "In the whole history of economic activity," Simmel wrote, "the stranger makes his appearance everywhere as a trader.... The trader must be a stranger." (9).

  
  
  From that perspective, peddlers were conniving sharpsters who got the rubes into their clutches. So, in England they were hawkers, with connotations of spying, sharpness, and thievery. Sweden's peddlers were knaller; they could sell from the road but could only sell certain goods, which had to be made locally--and could only sell three times a year on officially-fixed dates. Before there were Jewish peddlers in America, there were Yankee peddlers, looking for an alternative livelihood to eking a living from over-farmed land: cheap jacks. There is some literature on them, and there is this book:
  History of Pedlars in Europe. But there is no prior history of Jewish peddlers. The author has crunched hundreds, if not thousands, of memoirs, biographies and local histories to extract the picture she has given us. Names for Jewish peddlers from elsewhere were smous, referring to the large numbers hailing from Lithuania--probably from Yiddish schmooze via Dutch; wocher meant weekly man; I think that semananik and ceuntanik are terms from countries from which the Sephardic Jews hailed, countries that had been part of the Ottoman empire.
  
  Other groups peddled in the new worlds that were opening up--Irish and Scotch in Pennsylvania and the American South, Germans who weren't Jews, and the Chinese in Cuba in the early 20th century, but for only one other group was peddling an institution as it was for the emigrating Jews: Arabs, mainly Syrian (sometimes called the Syrian Lebanese), mostly Christian, who also developed an intricate economy with city wholesalers connected with smaller town merchants and peddlers as the road delivery system, who learned the languages and dialects in local settings and destinations that changed with emerging opportunities.
  
  It may be the history of these other peddler groups has yet to be written. This book is the history of Jewish peddlers in the extended 19th century. It looks at all the new worlds, not just America, but America is a big part of it since eighty percent arrived on these shores.
  
  Peddling was the delivery system to the hinterlands, sometimes to marginalized groups and sometimes following the frontier. Thus, it benefited existing Jewish-run stores, which became the centers for resupply. Jewish peddlers became known as "weekly men," wanting to get back to their base of operations for the Sabbath. These bases of operation also were Jewish-owned. The peddlers might be the relatives of the already settled store owner, or friends from the original locale in the old country, or, at least, other Jews, and therefore trusted. Development spread from those bases: new little stores when the former peddler settled down, peddler suppliers, known as "jobbers" (and eventually warehouses) and workshops (and eventually factories) to make the products for them to carry back out to the customers. And, also, banks: the peddlers would sometimes sell on credit or the installment plan ("on the tick") and would move from that to loaning money (think microloans!), the starting point for banks. Congregations originated to meet basic needs--often first as societies to give an unfortunate fellow a Jewish burial. Gradually the peddler could become a pillar of the community, or, if not him, at least his children. Most succeeded in making a basic living, some spectacularly.
  
  The peddlers also took in salvage--rag and bone, one always hears. Bone for fertilizer? My husband thinks ink was made from the bones. It was the early recycling. When the peddler could afford a horse and cart, he could take scrap metal too. Back in the cities, Jews started salvage businesses--junk yards. The peddler also might keep an eye out for new opportunities. They began to buy ginseng from their women customers after someone noticed it was desirable to Chinese communities back in the cities. In some cases that and other herbs led to the development of pharmaceutical concerns back in the cities. In South Africa, ostrich feathers became the basis of a worldwide industry. The women who gathered these herbs or feathers or whatever was available in their areas benefited from the money they earned.
  
  Peddling as an institution empowered women. Not so long ago, a woman experienced "civil death" upon marrying, having no property rights or legal standing outside the family. Stores used to be rough places, male hang-outs, not places for a woman to go alone. But where the peddler was concerned, the woman had the power. It was she who decided whether to open the door and whether to buy. And if the merchandise--or the peddler's behavior--was no good, she wouldn't be buying from him again. And she would warn off her friends.
  
  So, yes, you may be thinking, they spread consumerism. For the most part, this book turns the negative valence on material consumption upside down. These peddlers went to the marginalized segments of society: slaves on plantations and, after the Civil War, new freedmen, rural areas such as Appalachia, American Indian tribes, and in places other than America, those disenfranchised populations whose economies had been destroyed by recent colonization, and they wove those people on the fringes into the economy and into the national ethos. These peddlers, by getting certain material goods to them, enabled them to raise their standards of living. The peddlers went to new places that were otherwise beyond the reach of urban centers. They treated everyone politely--people who were not due such attentions in the societies of the time. In mining and mill centers they undercut the company store by giving the customer an alternative.
  
  They brought news. They brought innovation. And they brought respect. People who are treated with respect come to respect themselves, and to demand their rights. That is upsetting to the powers-that-be. I am still thinking about such matters. I am currently reading another book (
  After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory) that I think gives full voice to an opposite view. But truth be told at this time I think the view expressed in the present book (as well as in others I've studied) has merit. I read that for Hegel material goods aid in the establishment of individualism. Free people can have property; slaves or serfs can't. And I notice that people are usually concerned about someone else's purported materialism. They are not usually condemning their own belongings as luxuries. Material goods are "facts on the ground" that aid in one's being an end and not somebody else's means.
  
  And the peddlers for the most part established good relationships with their customers, who knew they were Jews and didn't mind, even showing interest and curiosity. The customers, who were often among the disenfranchised of society, had the chance to be English teachers and teachers of local mores, as well as to learn about people of another religion and background. I think the fact they wanted and needed the products being purveyed was a key element. In another book I studied,
  The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, the author wrote that in America at least, when antisemitism rose, accompanying the disruptions of industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th century, the fact that people wanted the new products and technologies limited its impact. I think we are seeing the same thing with the peddlers and their customers.
  
  In America the integration of the peddlers was aided by a dynamic economy, and when that faltered, so did attitudes toward them. With time, though, we are no longer talking peddlers, but shop owners in towns and store owners in the big cities. This book ends with the former immigrants and their children ensconced in pre-WWII America and to a great extent integrated into their communities, albeit facing increasing attitudes of antisemitism in the public sphere. In the cases where the former peddlers had succeeded, they became major employers themselves and, indeed, pillars of the community. The author has focused on the slice of time ending before the war.
  
  America was a hotbed of religious innovation during the 19th century, and Judaism followed suit with the further emergence of Conservative and Reform, more liberal religious forms. That wasn't the case to that extent in other countries. In Britain and its outposts the office of the Chief Rabbi tended to enforce conformity with Orthodoxy and suppress dissent (which, therefore took other directions, such as Zionism or Socialism). Neither was there impetus toward religious innovation in the Catholic countries of Latin America. In the US, the result was that Jews were more in contact with their non-Jewish countrymen than in those other countries, and the former isolation, itself an adaptation to centuries of abuse, declined.
  
  At a certain point in time, the "Jew Peddler" was a recognizable stock figure in the American imagination. Just as someone might have attended a costume party as a princess or pirate, they might have gone as a Jew Peddler.
  
  It is the case that with the Jewish peddlers in particular, the anti-peddler mentality could merge with the prior "Wandering Jew" trope in a manner distinct from the other peddler groups, so the "Jew peddler" terminology was not always free of specific pejorative meaning. I found elsewhere online this picture that the author used in an earlier article.
  
  
  "Our peaceful rural districts as they are liable to be infested if this Russian exodus of the persecuted Hebrews continues much longer." The Judge, American Humor Magazine, July 8,1882. (Courtesy of the Antisemitic Literature Collection American Jewish Historical Society, New York and Newton Centre, Massachusetts.) (Located online here:
  http://www.myjewishlearning.com/artic...)
  
  Elsewhere in the world there were uprisings against Jewish peddlers. In 1902 an Irish priest fomented violence against them, and that became a bone of contention between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic theology better lent itself to the condemnation of materialism, and local Protestants used the situation to portray the Catholics as backward and depraved, in the sense of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But, observes the author:
  
  

  ...(I)n fact in every place, regardless of predominant religious denomination, someone considered these immigrant Jews a threat to some value or cornerstone of social and political life.

  
  
  In America, too, there were instances of "No Peddlers Allowed" signs or exorbitant increases in charge for licenses and frequency of renewal. Although the issues had to do with their being peddlers (not with their being Jews), the rhetoric often devolved into traditional antisemitic tropes.
  
  During those years, Jewish elites--those who had themselves become professionally established--bought into the negative ideology regarding trade and, especially, peddling: that transient peddlers caused antisemitism, so that Jewish aid organizations themselves tried to get immigrants to go into agriculture instead. But that never did work; it indeed would have been out of sync with economic changes in progress. By the end of the peddling period and as antisemitism was peaking in the interwar years, Jewish leaders caught on and were able to describe the contributions of former peddlers in more objective terms.
  
  Rhetoric notwithstanding, in America, the greatest danger to Jews during the peddler years had not been from antisemitism but from common crime. After all, these men were traipsing the countryside with 100- to 150-pound packs of valuable commodities. But such cases bespoke undesirable breakdowns in orderly society so were not allowed to go unpunished.
  
  I don't know if I had peddler ancestors in America. I do know that my maternal grandmother's family of origin moved from Ohio to Chattanooga, where my great-grandfather opened a shoe store. Maybe he came with a nest egg that enabled him to go straight to a store--or maybe he first plied the back roads of Ohio.
  
  
  This book is academic in style but it is not one of the unreadable ones. It could use a little more organization. It could use a bibliography: it has lots of footnotes and an index, but to find a referenced author again, you have to go first to the index, then to the page indicated, and from there back to the footnote. Those are just little quibbles in an overall great and informative enterprise.
  
  
• 
  The Jewish Book Council

  
  Review by Zachary M. Baker for the Jewish Book Council.
• 
  Thomas Isern

  This is a valuable book in a couple of ways. First, its scope (if not quite its reach) is global. The work identifies the Jewish peddler as pervasive and positive figure. Second, its applicability is distinct. In any locality, you become conscious of not only the peddler as a figure, but also the great diaspora of which he is a part, and the emergence of the human and economic network in which he operated. The content is intrinsically interesting--and yet somehow, the book does not take off. Repetitiveness is one problem, exacerbated by a lackluster prose style.
• 
  Jessica Solomon

  I am using this book to better understand the relationship between the Jewish community and peddling. This book answered all my questions and then some. Pardon my ignorance, but I always thought that peddling was done by the Ashkenazi community, but was delighted to learn of North African and Spanish Jewry traveling and selling wares.
• 
  Anna

  Hasia Diner is one of my favorite scholars, but for some reason I did not enjoy this book as much as her others. Regardless, an interesting topic.
• 
  Kathleen McRae

  This book was just not that interesting to read. I really liked the subject and a few scattered stories were great to read but much of it seemed to be a summary.
• 
  NellyBells

  Second time. The history of Jewish peddlers is world-wide. It was the fastest way for immigrant Jews to enter commerce in the New World. From peddling with goods on their backs, they might then have graduated to a horse and wagon, then move to town and open a dry goods store. They peddled in mining towns in Wales, in slave states in the South, wherever there were people cut off who needed household goods. They came without English and had to learn fast. They knocked on doors in frontier places and needed to seem safe and necessary to the women who bought most of their goods.
  Where they slept, how they ate, who fed them and had them overnight, and peddlers brought ribbons and fabric and tea kettles and all manner of labor-saving items. The story is a big one--and as peddlers achieved stability many were against them for the peddlers were taking business away from the white shopkeepers. Fascinating story.
• 
  Kirsten

  A fascinating look at a piece of Jewish immigration I'd never considered before. It did get repetitive.