Gold Rush-era Bavarian Jews quickly became S.F. aristocracy
The last Portals described how a small group of German Jews escaped the restrictions and prejudices of their homeland to prosper in Gold Rushera San Francisco. By 1870, a group of several dozen families, almost all from Bavaria, had come to constitute a kind of aristocracy.
This Jewish elite was unique in the U.S.: Its members became wealthier faster, were more acculturated, more cosmopolitan, less religious and more accepted by gentile society than in any other city.
The Jewish community in early San Francisco was not monolithic. The Bavarian Jews rubbed shoulders uneasily with a contingent from the former Polish province of Posen. In Posen, as Fred Rosenbaum writes in “Visions of Reform: Congregation EmanuEl and the Jews of San Francisco 1849-1999,” “Jewish life in the first half of the 19th century still approximated that of an East European shtetl.”
The Poseners, who mostly arrived about a decade later than the Bavarians, were more old-fashioned and less commercially successful. The Bavarians regarded them as backward and derided them as “Polacks.”
The tension between Bavarians and Poseners was responsible for a rupture within the Jewish community that took place in the early years of the Gold Rush. In April 1851, a
meeting to form a synagogue broke down when the two sides could not agree on who was to be the ritual slaughterer. The meeting was so stormy that it was decided to establish two synagogues — Temple EmanuEl for the Bavarians and Sherith Israel for the Poseners.
The two congregations, Rosenbaum writes, “would be as rival siblings ever since.”
Religion actually did not play much of a role in the lives of the Jewish elite. The Jews who came to California during the Gold Rush were already a special breed — younger, mostly male, more risk-taking and less devout. And as they became financially successful and socially prominent, they became even less observant.
By the end of the 1870s, there were more than 16,000 Jews in San Francisco, making it the second-largest Jewish community in the country. But, as Rosenbaum notes, only 16 percent of them belonged to one of the city’s seven synagogues. A prominent rabbi who visited San Francisco in the 1870s said, “‘I take no interest in Jewish affairs’ is a remark you hear 10 times a day made by men of prominence.”
San Francisco’s Jews’ already-feeble attachment to religion was further weakened by the fact that they encountered so little anti-Semitism in their new home. Julius Kahn, who represented San Francisco in Congress for more than 20 years and worked to block Jewish statehood at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, said, “The United States is my Zion and San Francisco is my Jerusalem.”
Life in one of the great surviving mansions of the aristocracy, the Haas-Lilienthal house, was a typical example of Jewish acculturation. For three generations, it appears that no Jewish rites were practiced there. The high point of every year was Christmas, which was celebrated with a lavish feast for 50. Easter was a day of egg hunts and Sunday dinners.
The social world of San Francisco’s Jewish aristocrats was narrow. Their mansions were located on Van Ness Avenue, Franklin Street, and the cross streets between Post Street and Pacific Avenue. They socialized at the same exclusive clubs and usually married within their small set. “By World War I, the city’s Jewish aristocracy had become so inbred it almost resembled the royalty of Europe,” Rosenbaum writes.
But not all the city’s Jews belonged to the prosperous German-descended elite. Starting in the late 19th century, increasing numbers of impoverished Jewish immigrants began arriving from Eastern Europe and Russia. The German Jewish establishment viewed these poorly educated, Yiddish-speaking newcomers with grave misgivings, sometimes with outright hostility.
The city’s most influential rabbi, Temple Emanu-El’s Jacob Voorsanger, warned that the new arrivals’ tendency to “herd together and refuse to scatter” would lead the public to confuse the less clannish “Israelites” with “Yiddish mumblers.”
Despite their misgivings about the “riffraff of Europe,” the Jewish establishment provided material help to the newcomers, many of whom lived South of Market and in the Fillmore. Eventually, the gulf between the two groups narrowed.
From the beginning, San Francisco’s Jewish elite were noted for being public-spirited. From the pioneer days to today, the list of Jews whose generosity left a mark on the city and the Bay Area is remarkable.
Levi Strauss gave money to more than a dozen civic organizations, and in 1897 endowed 12 scholarships at UC Berkeley. Isaias Hellman donated a wing to Mount Zion Hospital, among many other gifts to the city. His great-grandson, Warren Hellman, underwrote the beloved free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival.
In the 20th century, Walter Haas Sr. and Daniel Koshland, who together ran Levi Strauss & Co., were tireless philanthropists, helping create the forerunner of the United Way and the San Francisco Foundation. The Haas family endowed the UC Berkeley business school and underwrote the renovation of Haas Pavilion.
Elise Stern helped create the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her mother, Rosalie Meyer Stern, donated the land to San Francisco that became Stern Grove. Herbert Fleishhacker funded the Fleishhacker Pool and Zoo, and played a major role in funding the War Memorial Opera House.
Rhoda and Richard Goldman endowed the Goldman Environmental Prize. Lloyd Dinkelspiel gave the Dinkelspiel Auditorium to Stanford University. Ignatz Steinhart gifted the city Steinhart Aquarium, which became the California Academy of Sciences. And the list goes on.
This impressive record of civic achievement all started with a small group of German Jewish immigrants, who had come to San Francisco with few resources, from a land where anti-Semitism was still powerful. Those former peddlers and small merchants not only helped build many of San Francisco’s most beloved monuments, they helped create its even more cherished values — generosity, civic-mindedness, nonparochialism. That is no small legacy.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com