Archaeology of San Francisco Jews: Themes for the Study of Jewish Domestic Life

Abstract

This article shows how archaeology contributes to our understanding of life in the nineteenth-century Jewish diaspora. Using both qualitative and quantitative (statistical) methods, I compare several family-specific, archaeological artifact collections from San Francisco, California, to show how diaspora Jews adapted their traditional practices to modern life while retaining their ethnic identity. Themes include the development of diverse religious practices, consumerism and social mobility, urban geography, and materiality.

Public Archaeology and Math Phobia

One of the realities of public archaeology is that practitioners do not chose the topic of their investigation. While some agencies have created broadly applicable research designs (e.g., Caltrans 2010), commercial archaeologists are often called on to create topical research designs from scratch. This article is about the archaeology of Jewish immigrants to California during the second half of the nineteenth century. Its main purpose is to respond to the need for research themes and practical research questions by those who study the historical archaeology of Jews in the diaspora.

The article’s second purpose is to interpret the 1870s artifact collection from site CA-SFR-216H using both qualitative and quantitative/statistical methods. The latter have lost favor in historical archaeology since South’s (1977) pattern analysis fell out of vogue with the rise of post-processual archaeologies. Our discipline continues to count and weigh but, except for the study of particular artifact classes (food bones, ceramics, etc.) and geospatial/landscape analysis, the field has trended towards the qualitative. I have been part of that trend both for epistemological reasons and math phobia, partly excusing the latter by appeal to the former.

I use statistical data in this article to compare and interpret archaeological collections. And yet statistics have intimidated me even before my graduate advisor, Jim Deetz, told me to take a course in the subject. Deetz believed that both qualitative and quantitative, deductive and inductive approaches, have something to offer the archaeological imagination. It is worth noting that although his 1960 study of Arikara ceramics was lauded at the time as an example of scientific, processual archaeology, both that and his later structuralist model of colonial re-Anglicization had actually been inspired by the visual and tactile qualities of the materials (Deetz 1960, 1977:38, and pers. comm.).

My conversion to the use of statistics was the outcome of a series of very large archaeological projects in Oakland and San Francisco, California (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2004, 2009). The work developed nearly 200 archaeological collections, each with a well-documented historical association, excavated and analyzed to create a truly comparable database of almost 1,000,000 items. The volume of data was enormous and demanded a radical revision of how Mary Praetzellis and I had previously analyzed, interpreted, and presented our results. The kind of highly contextualized interpretation we had been doing since the 1970s seemed inadequate and would squander the opportunity to use one of the scholarly bases of archaeology: comparison (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2011). Fortunately, our colleague archaeologist Bruce Owen was willing to take on the statistical analysis. All the statistics I refer to herein come from his work (Owen 2009a, b, 2020).

I begin this article with the discovery of CA-SFR-216H and its creators, the family of Sussman and Babetta Frohman. Next, I describe the effect of the Haskalah—the so-called “Jewish Enlightenment”—on the declining role of the synagogue in San Francisco Jewish life and concomitant changes in Jewish identity in the diaspora. This idea forms the basis of a general research theme and related questions that I apply to the Frohman collection by comparing it to other San Francisco collections also associated with Jewish families. I conclude with some ideas about the future of Jewish household archaeology and its potential contribution to contemporary Jewish life in the diaspora.

CA-SFR-216H and the Frohman Family

CA-SFR-216H consisted of a filled 4 x 7 x 3-ft deep (1.2 x 2.1 x 0.6 m) privy pit (Feature 200) that had been cut by a redwood-lined drain. It was discovered in 2015 during construction for the San Francisco Central Subway project at what, in the nineteenth century, had been 246 Fourth Street, San Francisco (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2020) (Fig. 1). The pit feature was cross-sectioned, stratigraphically excavated, and found to contain two artifact-rich strata. The feature was overlain by a debris layer with an artifact-based terminus post quem (TPQ) of 1875 and an in-situ burn layer that represented the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2020:5-3). The Feature 200 collection has a ceramic mean date of 1864, based on marked vessels only, comprising 14 marked pieces from eight manufacturers, and an artifact based TPQ of 1867 (a US silver dime) and an estimated deposition date in the early or mid-1870s.

Fig. 1

The Frohman home and shop at 246 Fourth Street in San Francisco’s South of Market district. This 1873 Bancroft Company map shows the many backstreets, dead end alleyways, and enclosed courts that would have given the area a rather warren-like feel. Image courtesy of the California Digital Library and David Rumsey Map Collection

Fragments of at least 572 artifacts, mostly household items, were found in the fill layers. The summary that follows is highly selective and offers merely the collection’s highlights. A minimum of 101 objects in the collection are ceramic or glass food-preparation and consumption vessels, including tableware, glass stemware and tumblers; many of the rest are serving vessels. Three-quarters of the ceramic vessels are of white improved earthenware; most of the remainder are porcelain. The collection contains no transfer printed tableware vessels, despite their popularity in the 1850s and early 1860s. Molded edge designs found on white plates, saucers, and serving vessels include Gothic, Grape, Octagon, Double Groove, Hanging Leaves, and Stafford Shape. No matching sets were noted. All the marked ceramic tableware originated in Staffordshire, England, and was made by the firms of Jacob Furnival, E. & C. Challinor, Davenport, Hope & Carter, Thomas Hughes, James Edwards and Son, Samuel Alcock, and Pankhurst. Ceramics from these manufacturers are commonly found on nineteenth-century archaeological sites in San Francisco. The remains of at least 31 alcoholic-beverage bottles were recovered, including 16 that had contained ale or beer and seven that contained wine or champagne. A total of ten commercial glass food bottles would have held olive oil, pickles, and spices. Other glass wares include the remains of at least ten glass lamp chimneys.

No bottles marked as products of a named local pharmacy were found, although the feature contained bottle fragments of several national brand patent medicines: Hyatt’s Infallible Life Balsam for diseases of the blood; Lacour’s Sarsapariphere Bitters, an alcoholic cordial with “healthy roots and herbs” to purify the blood; Lydon’s Powder, an insecticide to treat cockroaches, bedbugs, and other pests; the notorious Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for teething infants; and Shaker Fluid Extract Valerian for hysterics and sleeplessness. The feature also contained a bottle of the cure-all Balsam of Life. Numerous items indicate a concern with good grooming including containers of John Gosnell & Co. cherry toothpaste, L.W. Glenn & Co. perfume, Phalon & Son perfume, and Murray & Landman Florida Water cologne. Hair-care items include 11 hard-rubber combs and three hairpins. Fragments of toy tea-set vessels dominate the toy assemblage, with pieces representing 13 porcelain tea-set items, one piece of a glass tea set, and one of pearlware. The four matching teacups with saucers and a few other items that may have matched seem to represent a set, unlike the mismatched table setting actually used then discarded by the Frohman family.

The feature contained total of 763 animal bones, most of which are dietary. The mammalian remains are dominated by 215 fragments of cow bone representing 364.1 lbs (165 kg) of meat, sheep (141 fragments, 107 lbs, 48.5 kg), and pig (84 fragments, 43.9 lbs, 19.9 kg). Meat weights were calculated by Michael Stoyka using a modified version of the method presented by Schulz and Gust (1983). Game mammals are represented by one jackrabbit and four cottontails), none of which showed signs of butchering. Chicken, turkey, geese, ducks, and California quail (some showing butchering marks) are also represented. Combined, these birds comprise 8.5% of the total meat weight and over 40% of all land animals represented in the collection. Fish remains include cod, rockfish, Pacific mackerel, white sea bass, salmon, and a smooth-hound (possibly bat ray or leopard shark). (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2

The Frohman assemblage, excluding faunal remains. Photo by Sandra Massey Konzak. Courtesy of the Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State University

Based on its location and the manufacturing-date ranges of the artifacts from the fill, the privy contents appear to be associated primarily or entirely with the Frohman family who lived at this address from 1870 until 1879. Both Sussman and Babetta Frohman originated from what is now Germany. Sussman was born in the centrally located Duchy of Hesse in 1834 and emigrated to the United States in 1860. Babetta originated from the western Duchy of Nassau. They were married in 1862. Over the next ten years the couple had three sons and a daughter: Ferdinand, Manuel, Isaac, and Hannah. Sussman worked as a shoemaker in San Francisco, eventually taking over the business and moving it to 246 Fourth Street, where the family lived. The Frohman collection was deposited barely 25 years after the Gold Rush in the working-class district known as South of Market. At the time, Market Street separated the “labor ghetto” to the south with its factories, foundries, and tenements from the homes and businesses of wealthier San Francisco to the north (London 1909). Their business appears not to have flourished and the Frohmans moved frequently until their deaths, Babetta in 1904 and Sussman in 1910.

The Frohmans were part of the early wave of German Jews who, influenced by the Haskalah, became an important force in San Francisco. Unlike many others who sought to discard their religious identity, the Frohmans were committed Jews and quite active in the local Jewish community. Sussman joined Congregation Ohabai Shalome in January 1865, not long after its founding. Eleven years later, his 13-year-old son, Ferdinand, celebrated his bar mitzvah there. At a time of increasing intermarriage, three of the four Frohman children—Ferdinand, Isaac, and Hannah—are known to have married other Jews. Isaac Frohman and his father-in-law, Philip Stern, were officers of Ohabai Shalome from 1898, and Isaac’s wife, Rose Stern, was elected Recording Secretary of the Jewish Ladies’ Council in the late 1890s. Babetta was buried at Eternal Home Cemetery, a Jewish cemetery. Sussman’s obituary invited members of the Modin Lodge No. 42 of the Independent Order of the B’nai B’rith to his funeral.

The Jewish Diaspora and the Haskalah

Jewish dispersal by the Roman Empire in 70 CE and 135 CE is well documented (e.g., Ben-Sasson 1985). Between this event and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Jewish people were the prototypical diasporic group: they identified with a historical homeland where they had no political center. Jewish society adapted to galut (exile) by developing portable religious practices. As temple service (avodah) in Jerusalem was impossible, it was replaced by the practice of serving God through the study of religious texts. Jewish law (halacha) was codified to cover every exigency from contracts to food and sexual relations. Matrilineal by tradition and often legally prevented from marrying into the host society, Jewish communities remained largely endogamous as they had been since antiquity (DellaPergola 1997; Satlow 2001). Although isolated communities were later established worldwide, most Jews of the medieval era lived in either continental Europe or the Muslim countries of North Africa and the Near East. These two groups—called Ashkenazim and Sephardim, respectively—developed their own distinctive cultures, vernacular languages, and locally accepted religious practices (minhagim, sing. minhag).

By the eighteenth century, Jews had lived throughout northern Europe for over 1000 years. Life in these communities, particularly those in the Pale of Settlement (the western part of the Russian empire where Jews were allowed residence), was highly circumscribed. Rabbinic authorities ensured that daily life conformed to halacha and boys’ education was limited to religious texts; most girls had only rudimentary schooling. In a society where religious study for its own sake (Torah lishma) was life’s highest goal (Heschel 2006:156; R. Meir cited in Zlotowitz 1984), secular learning and unnecessary interactions with gentiles were undesirable distractions. Even where they were not confined within a physical ghetto (such as the Pale) anti-Jewish prejudice and other factors that marked Jews as perpetual outsiders effectively excluded them from advancement in the host society.

By the end of the eighteenth century this insularity began to break down as the intellectual movement known as the Haskalah (intellect, reason) took hold. Emerging from the European Enlightenment, the Haskalah was also driven by the desire to explain history, society, and the natural world by science and reason, rather than by unassailable, received religious principles (Dubin 2005: 33, Feiner 2004). At the same time, Napoleon Bonaparte’s decrees of emancipation allowed Jews who lived in France and the German-speaking states to move into mainstream society (Kobler 1988). The Haskalah was not universally acclaimed by Jews. In a debate that continues to this day, German Orthodox rabbis viewed the movement as an assault that would lead to assimilation (Breuer 1995). Other Jews embraced the opportunity and chose immigration to North America.

Sephardic Jews had settled alongside other colonists in New Amsterdam as early as 1654 and were the majority of the American Jewish population until the early nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1840s, the trickle of German-speaking Ashkenazim had become a steady flow and rapidly changed the character of American Jewry. Where their Sephardic cousins tended to be traditional in their religious practices, German Jews like the Frohmans embraced the liberal and increasing secular values of the Haskalah (Hyams 1995).

The effect of the Haskalah in North America is most dramatically represented in the rise of the Jewish Reform movement. This progressive faction sought greater integration into American society by opposing aspects of traditional culture that separated Jews from other Americans and thereby limited their social mobility. The Reform movement encouraged Jews to see themselves as voluntary participants in a religious congregation rather than as members of an exclusive ethnoreligious group. It worked to universalize Jewish religion by eliminating particularistic practices such as the kosher food system (kashrut) and distinctive dress, particularly the head coverings that set Jews apart from the American Christian mainstream (Waxman 2005:129–130). Instead of the history of the Jewish people, Reform emphasized universal ethics. America, not the land of Israel, was to be the Jewish homeland (Dubin 2005:39, Kaplan 2009). Conservative and progressive factions within the movement famously clashed at an 1883 dinner meeting of Reform leaders. The first course consisted of littleneck clams, a decidedly non-kosher way to start a meal; and it only got worse from there (Appel 1966). But although the meal broke almost every other kosher rule it did not include pork (Sussman 2005:30).

Although halacha treats the consumption of pork and its products with no more severity than, for example, rabbit meat, abstaining from it may be the most visible symbol of Jewish identity as expressed through food. Its often-forced ingestion has represented “the ultimate moment in Jewish submission” (Rosenblum 2010:102) from the Roman empire through the abuses of medieval Europe. Even in modern times, many see the pig as a symbol of anti-Jewish hate (Vered 2010:22). Conversely, the fame of this taboo has made the act of eating pork a way of “passing” for white in both contemporary (Diemling and Ray 2014:135) and nineteenth-century America (Brodkin 1998).

The final wave of Jewish immigration to the United States began in about 1870 and continued until quotas based on national origin were established by the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Immigration Act. Between 1881 and 1924 over 2.5 million Jews imigrated to the United States from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania, ten times as many as in the previous 60 years (Diner 2004:88). Many were Orthodox; others were ardent socialists, atheists who would have nothing to do with their parents’ religion. Pushed to leave the region by discriminatory laws and a wave of murderous pogroms and simultaneously pulled by the prospect of advancement in di goldene land, these immigrants “calculated the balance between problems at home and the opportunities of America” (Diner 2004:89). In contrast to the rapidly assimilating and middle-class-aspiring German Jews, many of the newcomers were wageworkers who established Orthodox synagogues and traditional self-help societies. Working in the factories of the northeast, Russian and Polish Jews became politically aware. By 1900 they formed the backbone of urban trade unions, even creating an umbrella association, the United Hebrew Trades (Diner 2004:161).

By some measures, American Jews became increasingly secular as the twentieth century progressed. The intermarriage rate of those married between 1900 and 1920 was about 2%, rising to 17% among those married between 1961 and 1965 (McGinity 2009:219) and a whopping 53% for those married from 2005 to 2013 (Pew Research Center 2013:9). Synagogue membership is also said to have declined, although this is harder to confirm. Certainly, by 2001 nearly 50% of American Jews surveyed were not affiliated with any Jewish organization and described themselves as partly or entirely secular (Mayer et al. 2002:5), further evidence of the accelerating trend towards a cultural rather than a religious identity (Waxman 2005:135).

Jews in San Francisco, 1849 to 1910

Population

The story of San Francisco’s Jews is often begun at the first religious services held in 1849 on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in what is now the city’s financial district. It is indeed a useful place to start as the attendees represent the diverse national origins of the city’s Jews: there were the native-born from the eastern United States and others from England, several German states, Silesia, and Hungary (Rosenbaum 2000:6).

Population figures for the Jews of San Francisco are hard to come by. However, during the period 1849 to 1906 it seems that about one in ten San Franciscans was Jewish. Alder and Voorsanger (1906:34) estimate a Jewish population of about 100 in 1849, the first year of the Gold Rush. About 9% of San Franciscans were German Jews in the early 1850s; only New York had a greater number of Jewish residents (Robin 1990:74). By 1860, the number had grown to about 5000, still about 9%. A decade later it had increased slightly to about 15,000, or 10% of the city’s population (Rosenbaum 2000:30; Toll 2008:220).

For much of this period, San Francisco was the second largest Jewish population center in the United States (Eisenberg et al. 2009:52). Statistics compiled in 1878 show that although New York’s Jews outnumbered San Francisco’s 60,000 to 16,000, the former represented only about 3% of their city’s population versus 6 - 7% in San Francisco (Board of Delegates of American Israelites 1880:48). In 1880, the Jewish population of the nation as a whole was about 250,000 or 5% (Board of Delegates of American Israelites 1880:48; US Bureau of the Census 1976). On the eve of the 1906 earthquake and fire, about 10% of San Franciscans was Jewish (Rosenbaum 2000:98).

Before a surge of eastern European Jewish immigrants hit the United States between 1880 and 1910, Jewish San Francisco had been culturally dominated by people from what is now Germany and the German-influenced portions of Poland. Many of the new immigrants, however, were from culturally conservative towns and villages deep in the Pale of Settlement. Many spoke Yiddish, a language that was distained by the upwardly mobile German-speakers as a ghetto tongue. As in the nation as a whole, they ranged from anti- and a-religious socialists to the Orthodox. The latter opposed the social gospel of the Reform movement that had taken hold among the German Jews, whom they called yekkes for their habit of wearing fashionable short jackets (Silverstein 1994; Toll 1990:229) (Fig. 3). In 1910, over one-quarter of the city’s Jewish population (now over 20,000) were newer immigrants (Robin 1990:74).

Fig. 3

“A Yekke goes Courting.” A dandified and assimilated Yekke—a German Jew—visits the traditional family of his would-be bride. The Hebrew placard on the upper left is a mizrach indicating the direction of Jerusalem towards which prayers should be recited. From The Jewish Immigrant 1890. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

Bayerns and Posners

While San Francisco’s Jews initially came together for that first celebration of the Jewish New Year in 1849, a schism set in early between German-speaking Jews from eastern and those from western Europe. The western faction, called Bayerns for the German region, tended to hail from France and central and southern Germany. These regions had been thoroughly influenced by the Haskalah and looked down on the residents of the northeastern German states and adjacent German-speaking region of Poland as unsophisticated provincials. The Bayerns called the eastern Europeans Posners (from the Polish region of Posnan) and while both favored loosening the Orthodox practices that made it difficult for Jews to assimilate into nineteenth-century secular society, the latter were more willing to push the envelope (Feiner 2000).

These cultural differences were brought to the fore throughout the United States when the entire community assembled for major Jewish observances. Polish- and German-style religious services (called minhag Polen and minhag Ashkanaz, respectively) were not so very different, but they were powerful and very public symbols of everything that separated the groups. In San Francisco, the Bayern faction walked out of that famous 1849 Yom Kippur service over the use of the minhag Polen (Rosenbaum 2000:8) and by 1851 Bayerns and Polens had separate congregations: Emanu-El and Sherith Israel, respectively. The former weathered a second acrimonious defection in 1864 after the traditional minhag Ashkanaz was replaced at a stroke by a more liberal ritual (Ohabai Shalome Minutes, November 13, 1864). While the new congregation–named with some irony Ohabai Shalome (Lovers of Peace)—retained much of the traditional German minhag, it allowed some non-Orthodox practices, such as mixed-sex seating (Rosenbaum 2000:49).

Religious ritual was only an external symbol of a cultural division that in Europe lasted well into the twentieth century (Weinbaum and McPherson 2000). Like her Bayern neighbors, writer Harriet Levy’s family spoke German at home in late-nineteenth-century San Francisco, but that was not enough—for her ancestors had come from Posnan. Levy’s middle-class family accepted their social inferiority as a fact of life because, she wrote, “upon this basis of discrimination, everyone agreed and acted” (Levy 1996:151).

The Synagogue and Cultural Change

Religious orthodoxy in San Francisco began a slow decline following the Gold Rush period (Rosenbaum 2000:19). The Reform movement’s emphasis on universal biblical values opposed the many daily practices required by the Talmud-based philosophy of Jewish exceptionalism. While the latter had ensured the survival of Jews in community for nearly two millennia, they also functioned to isolate those who sought acceptance and advancement in larger, Christian, society. The Reform attitude was in line with the rationalism of commercial Western society for by rejecting the system of kashrut (kosher), Reform Jews could eat what, where, and with whom they wished—and potentially pass as white gentiles. Reform services were church-like, dignified, and did not separate the genders. Distinctive religious dress and accouterments—the kippah, tallis, and tefillin (skullcap, prayer shawl, and phylacteries)—were prohibited in some synagogues. Nineteenth-century Orthodox Jews saw Reform as the road to assimilation. However, Silverstein (1994) suggests that the movement paralleled changes in American Protestantism and worked to preserve Judaism in North America by accommodating the country’s bourgeois values.

San Francisco’s nineteenth-century, liberal-leaning synagogues were not designed to be unobtrusive; just the reverse. Their visual domination of the urban landscape speaks to the status and self-confidence of the city’s Jews (Robin 1990; Silverstein 1994:20–21). The towering onion domes of Emanu-El’s Sutter Street synagogue, built in 1866, could be seen throughout the city. The building’s Gothic, church-like architecture de-emphasized the exotic aspect of non-Christian religion on the outside as the rituals practiced on the inside became more Protestant-like through the growing influence of the Reform movement. By the 1905, the historically more conservative synagogue Sherith Israel provided a stunning illustration of the desire to fully integrate Jews into modern America (Fig. 4). In the sanctuary’s west stained-glass window, Moses presents the tablets of the law to the Jewish people not at Sinai—but with a background that is plainly the Yosemite Valley, complete with Half Dome and El Capitan. The message was clear: California is the new Zion. Jews belong here.

Fig. 4

This 1905 stained glass window in San Francisco’s Sherith Israel synagogue shows Moses receiving the Ten Commandments in California’s Yosemite Valley. Photo by the author

Rosenbaum (2009:50) has written that in San Francisco the synagogue “was not the locus of the Jewish community’s vitality.” Instead, many people joined community organizations and supported Jewish charities; for example, only about one-third of Jewish Masons belonged to a synagogue (Rosenbaum 2000:31). This point is further evidenced by the fact that the 22 orphans housed by the Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum and Home Society (PHOA) were supported by about 850 Jewish subscribers in 1872 (PHOA 1873:4). Although there are no contemporaneous figures for San Francisco synagogue membership, six years later the number stood at about 700 or about 13% of Jewish households (Board of Delegates of American Israelites 1880:48).

Jewish Community Organizations

Unlike their counterparts in other religions, Jewish communities may exist quite well without resident clergy. What are required, however, are community organizations to take care of basic exigencies: care of the sick and indigent, support for widows and orphans, and respectful treatment of the dead. These are considered sacred obligations, not mere charitable afterthoughts (Danby 2008:10–11 citing the Mishnah, tractate Peah 1:1). The Eureka Benevolent Society and the First Hebrew Benevolent Society were the first of these organizations in San Francisco. Created in 1850, the mission of the latter was: “[to] afford aid and relief to indigent, sick, and infirm Jews; to bury the dead; and in general to relieve and aid co-religionists who might be in poverty or distress” (First Hebrew Benevolent Society 1891:1). A burial society (chevra kaddisha) was essential. Early San Francisco had several, including Chevra Bikkor Holim u-Kaddisha (1857) as well those tied to individual synagogues (Adler and Voorsanger 1906:34). This changed with the 1901 founding of Sinai Memorial Chapel, which began to serve the entire community (Bernstein 1975:xii). By 1906 there were 69 Jewish community organizations in San Francisco (Adler and Voorsanger 1906:35) ranging from B’nai Brith’s Ophir lodge (1863) to the Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum and Home Society (1870) and Mount Zion Hospital (1887).

Although antisemitism was not a serious problem in Gold Rush-era San Francisco, racist attitudes in East Coast financial centers made it hard for local Jewish businesses to obtain credit (Rosenbaum 2000:34, 2009:31). Ironically, the solution to this problem actually strengthened the local Jewish community. In his classic study, Peter Decker (1978:15–21) describes how the necessity to finance their businesses led San Francisco’s merchants to borrow from within the Jewish community rather than from eastern banks. One effect of this practice was to create a network of wealthy Jewish families linked by both marriage and business interests (Rochlin and Rochlin 1984:132, Rosenbaum 2009:54–55). By the 1870s, this Jewish “gilded circle” made up a significant proportion of the city’s social elite (Decker 1978:22). Two decades later a group of newly arrived eastern European immigrants organized a similar community-based loan group (Hebrew Free Loan 2019; Tenenbaum 1986). But their goal was not to circumvent anti-Jewish practices. These were Orthodox Jews whose tradition prohibited them from borrowing at interest or charging interest on loans to other Jews, and all but required them to lend to those in need (Ganzfried 1996:41–47). San Francisco’s Hebrew Free Loan still operates from the South of Market neighborhood where it was established.

Historical Archaeology of Jews in North America

For decades, archaeologists have been looking at the evidence left by dispersed populations of people of African, Chinese, Irish, and Japanese descent, among others, who arrived in the United States both voluntarily (albeit pushed by economic necessity and persecution) and involuntarily as enslaved persons (e.g., Brighton 2009; Haviser and MacDonald 2006; Ross 2013). So, it is surprising that although post-medieval archaeology has been in the mainstream for some years there has been little study of Jews of the modern era. The topic is largely absent even in Israel, where although archaeology has long been used to promote national identity (e.g., Silberman and Small 1997), there has been little work aside from the investigation of pre-1948 Palestinian villages (Kletter and Sulimani 2016) and of industrial sites (Sasson 2019). When Baram (2002) wrote of the development of historical archaeology in Israel, he was not referring to the archaeology of resident Jews but of the Ottoman Empire, which governed Palestine until 1917. In Europe, the archaeology of post-medieval Jewish households also seems largely absent although religious buildings and structures have been investigated (Silberman 2005) as well as the material remains of the Shoah (the Holocaust) at several concentration camps (Bernbeck 2018).

The situation is similar in North America. Although the term diaspora has its origins in the Hebrew Scriptures and isolated studies of Jewish sites exist, I can find no published attempt to create a broadly applicable research design for the domestic archaeology of Jews in North America. Safran’s (1991) definition of diaspora involves the dispersal of a self-identifying group from their historical homeland. Generally, group members have a single national or continental origin (such as Ireland or Africa). Not so with Jews. Much of this group’s identity as Jews—rather than as Polish Jews, German Jews, Portuguese Jews, etc.—is based on at least the potential ability to practice a particular religion. The term “national-particularistic monotheism” was used and perhaps coined by Delitzsch (1905, cited in Konig 1905:406) with reference to Judaism as both a religion and as the basis of what modern scholars would call an ethnicity. In recent years, Sacks (2003:52) has reemphasized the idea of Judaism’s particularity. By this he means that Judaism is the exclusive religion of a self-defining, matrilineal population. Even today in a world where one’s religion is usually a matter of individual belief, most Jews are simply the children of Jewish mothers.

These observations should not be taken to imply that ethnicity is an essentialized cultural given. Just the opposite. I take Barth’s (1969) constructivist view of ethnicity as a malleable phenomenon, an evolving social process, and that social boundaries are maintained by both insiders and outsiders. The term “ethno-racial” is in circulation in the field of psychology as a pragmatic recognition that in some cases identity involves both phenotype (“race”) as well as self-identification (Richomme 2009). Many Jews of European ancestry in North America found that although their phenotype did not make them particularly distinctive, this did not prevent outsiders from assigning them to a particular biological race, as the term was popularly understood. This “interplay between… ethnoracial assignment and ethnoracial identity” (Brodkin 1998:22) is one of the most enduring themes in the Jewish experience and consequently has been a leitmotif of American Jewish literature from Abraham Cahan’s immigrant classic The Rise of David Levinsky (Cahan 1993 [1917]) to the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman (1991). It also figures prominently in the rest of this article.

Topics in the Study of North American Jews

This section identifies two topics in the study of North American Jews noted by scholars in the fields of history, sociology, and Jewish Studies that have implications for archaeology. My purpose is to provide the context out of which archaeological research themes and questions can be developed that get at issues of demonstrated importance to both scholars and the contemporary Jewish community.

The “Melting Pot” and Becoming White

The notion of the United States as a cultural amalgam has early origins. Both Frederick Douglas in 1870 and Frederick Jackson Turner 20 years later referred to the nation’s "composite nationality" (Douglass 1991:241; Turner 1921) although it was the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill who coined the term “melting pot” to describe the presumed assimilation of ethnic immigrants to America: “German and Frenchman, Irishman and Englishman, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.” (Zangwill 1908:Act 1). This comfortable metanarrative provided the rationale for attempts to assimilate new immigrants into the American culture of the white native-born middle class and gained support among social scientists (e.g., Park 1914, 1950).

The idea retained currency into the 1960s when Glazer and Moynihan’s aptly named Beyond the Melting Pot (1963) revealed the cultural tenacity of five New York ethnic groups, including Jews, and set off critical reappraisals by sociologists and social historians. With the rise of the New Social History movement, American historians of the 1960s came to investigate more process-oriented questions such as how immigrants were “shaped into new people” and became “modern Americans” (Rischin 1962:i). Consumerism and the acquisition of artifacts, such as the iconic piano in the parlor (Heinze 1990:133), came to symbolize Jews’ aspirations to the white middle class as they did for other immigrant groups (Potter 1954), and as a mechanism for cultural change. The historical process by which Jews were accepted as white was examined by Brodkin (1998:22), who stressed how the social construction of race and the “interplay between ethnoracial assignment and ethnoracial identity” are historical processes. Following Ignatiev (1995), she points out that various immigrant groups were racialized by white native-born Americans in response to specific historical conditions (see also Orser 2007). Jews, according to Brodkin, did not “become White” until after World War II (Brodkin 1998:187).

Assimilative Pressures in the Diaspora

Survey data that showed increasing rates of intermarriage and declining institutional affiliation did not go unnoticed by Jews. In fact, the fear that a recognizable Jewish community would not survive in North America outside the enclaves of the hasidim (ultra-Orthodox) has been one of the central issues in American Jewish debate for decades. After the Haskalah, as Jews moved from tightly controlled social environments to the open societies of western Europe and North America, the strict rules of halacha that once structured religious practice became voluntary (Cohen 2005). If social advancement meant discarding traditional customs and attitudes, many were happy to make the exchange.

“Jews have survived one crisis after another,” wrote Shapiro (1995:257), “and perhaps they will also survive the freedom and prosperity of America.” This fear of assimilation led to fervent discussions about the role of religion in Jewish identity in the diaspora that would have been inconceivable before the Haskalah but were now viewed as critically important. What did it mean to be Jewish? Could one be a Jew in the diaspora without practicing the religion of Judaism? (Fig. 5)

Fig. 5

“Old Country and the New.” The bearded and turbaned patriarch, his modestly dressed wife, and kippah-wearing son contrast with a shaven and modishly attired man and boys. Smoking during a meal and tilting one’s chair were considered boorish behavior in mid-nineteenth century America. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

The tension between accommodation and traditionalism is exemplified by the opposing positions of Kaplan (1944) and Soloveitchik (1983) (Eisen 2007). Kaplan’s pluralistic vision sought to redefine Judaism as the culture of this historical population, a “civilization” to use Kaplan’s term, which includes the Jewish religion but is not synonymous with it. Reform-advocate Waxman (2005:351) agreed, pointing out that many Jews feel that adherence to an evolving halacha is “compatible with modern life” and wish to continue to adapt and develop it.

Conversely, Soloveitchick (1983) argued that the community would only be maintained though continuing the received tradition by rigorously adhering to halacha. A purely sentimental attachment to the cultural practices of the past would not sustain the community, wrote Hertzberg (1997:374), a fervent anti-assimilationist: “it will persist only on what it affirms and believes.” Novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer (1983:104) expressed the view of many Orthodox when he predicted through his protagonist Joseph Shapiro that liberal Jews “had barely enough strength to maintain this observance through a few generations.” In short, the decline in religious observance dooms Jewish identity. This conservative position is supported by the work of sociologist Herbert Gans who predicted the end of the ethnic self-identification of descendants of the 1870s to 1924 wave of Jewish European immigration (Gans 2014:1). Although participants in this “late generational ethnicity” may display “occasional interest in a symbolic or other ethnic activity or two” their identity lacks sustaining vigor and, according to Gans (2014:2), is in its terminal phase.

Historical Archaeology of American Jews

To assess the historical archaeology of American Jews and devise appropriate research themes, I searched published literature through 176 digital library databases, online collections such as Internet Archive, and technical reports posted on-line and accessed by Google keyword searches. This enquiry revealed information about the commercial context of Jewish archaeology, its research themes, and the scale at which it tends to be practiced.

Most studies of Jews by North American archaeologists have been done in a cultural resource management (CRM) context rather than as scholarly research although the results are frequently of high quality (e.g., Yamin 2001). Typically, a discovery would be made during legally mandated pre-construction archaeological testing or during construction itself. Next, a technical report would be created that documented the process of excavation, archival research, artifact studies, and offered an interpretation of the remains. Few of these discoveries are published in conventional scholarly media but rather as reports posted on archaeologists’ and agency websites. Both the partite nature of commercial CRM and the lack of conventional publication work against the processes by which archaeology has historically advanced: synthesis, comparison, and the cross-fertilization of ideas. This is particularly true of Jewish archaeology, many examples of which are surely buried deep in data-heavy technical reports of very limited circulation.

With the exception of gravestones, architecture, mikvot (ritual baths), and synagogues, (e.g., Gradwohl 2004; Martin 2017; Miller 2010; Spencer-Wood 1999), archaeologists have tended to study Jewish ethnicity rather than its religious expression. This is initially puzzling given that Judaism is replete with durable artifacts from mezuzah cases to festival-themed ceramics. And yet the reason is simple: these ritual objects rarely enter the archaeological record. Instead, they tend to be carefully curated by their owners and consequently have long use lives in what Schiffer (1972) calls the systemic context.

Turning to more reliably available evidence, archaeologists have frequently examined dietary remains as an expression of relative religious orthodoxy and as an indicator of cultural change/assimilation. Occasionally, a lead kosher certification seal will appear archaeologically to indicate religious conformity (e.g., Yamin 1998:76), while an intriguing collection of fish and egg remains has been interpreted as the remains of a traditional Jewish mourning feast (Gray and Yakubik 2010:301). Conversely, collections rich in pork bones and shellfish are taken to indicate the loosening of traditional dietary restrictions and, therefore, cultural change (Stewart-Abernathy and Ruff 1989). The process by which Jews became white (Sacks 1994)—that is, how they became socially accepted by mainstream American society—is implicit in these interpretations. Archaeologists have often viewed this process as all-or-nothing assimilation, which in many instances it was (e.g., Stewart-Abernathy and Ruff 1989). However, following McGinity (2009, 2014), Praetzellis and Praetzellis (1990, 2015a) suggest that there were and are gradations in conformity to traditional practices that can be studied archaeologically. This refers to the foodways of those who, although they do not follow all the requirements of kashrut, conform to some—such as the prohibition against pork—that have particularly weighty symbolic significance. This approach has important implications for the trajectory of modern Jewish life that I describe in the conclusion to this article.

Most archaeological studies of American Jews are qualitative examinations of the lifeways of individual Jewish families. In part, this is a function of the commercial context of most investigations, which are typically conducted only after an archaeological resource is deemed significant according to specific legal criteria. In addition, few commercial projects recover large enough samples from sufficient numbers of known Jewish and non-Jewish households to permit quantitative comparisons. One exception is work by Bruce Owen (2009b), who conducted nonparametric analyses including Wilcoxon rank-sum and Kruskal-Wallis tests on scores of archaeological collections from San Francisco, including comparing Jewish and non-Jewish assemblages, and discovering significant differences between them.

Archaeological Research Themes and the Frohman Collection

Three main themes emerged from my literature search that can be applied to many North American Jewish domestic sites of the second half of the nineteenth century and into the modern era:

• 1. Cultural maintenance, change, and development of diverse religious practices

• 2. Consumerism and social mobility

• 3. Urban geography and materiality

From each of these I developed research questions that seemed applicable to the Frohman collection (Fig. 5). In the following section, I present these themes and questions in a rather pedantic structure so they can be easily extracted and adapted by future researchers. I then address them in relation to the Frohman data.

Comparisons are also made with four additional San Francisco Jewish-associated collections deposited from the early 1870s to the mid-1880s using Owen’s (2009b) analysis: Wolf and Minnie Samuel came to San Francisco from Poland and Germany, respectively, in the early 1870s. Wolf was a tailor and the family spoke Yiddish at home. The Strauss and Ackerman families were German immigrants, related by marriage, who lived together from 1867 to 1875. Joseph Ackerman was a successful importer while Bernard Strauss was a butcher. Both families were members of Congregation Ohabai Shalome. Abraham and Hannah Martin were Sephardic Jews who emigrated from London in the 1870s. Abraham was a merchant. This collection may include materials from the non-Jewish McIver family who lived in the same duplex dwelling. Isaac and Hannah Aaron emigrated from Poland in about 1850. Isaac began as a peddler but prospered and was able to purchase the family home.

Each household in the 2009 study was placed into one of five ranks based on occupation: Unskilled, Semi-skilled, Skilled, Professional, and Wealthy Professional (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2009:26). As a shoemaker, Frohman would having been in the Skilled occupational rank. Occupational rank is used as a proxy for social class and wealth in this comparative analysis. To isolate the influence of ethnic identity, wealth is held as a constant by comparing households of the same rank.

The sections that follow use statistical probability/confidence values of 5% and 10% as evidence in favor of their hypotheses. Statistical confidence is the likelihood that a result is significant—that it did not occur by chance. The higher the confidence level, the more likely it is that the result is not just an aberration: a 0.05 (5%) probability value means that there are only five chances in 100 that the result is accidental. In the social sciences, 0.05 has historically been used as the default for statistical significance (Benjamin et al. 2018).

Theme: Cultural Maintenance, Change, and Development of Diverse Religious Practices

• To what degree did residents participate in popular versus traditional culture?

• What evidence is there of Jewish religious practices?

• To what degree were these practices conservative, innovative, or a mixture of both?

• Did these practices change over time?

• What specific foods were eaten?

• Do these foods or their preparation reflect a particular cultural tradition?

The several hundred food bones from the Frohman collection represent over 575 lb (261 kg) of meat. With a collection of this size one can be confident that it represents the household’s general practice during the period rather than an anomalous or unique event. The major meat species of terrestrial animals available in the San Francisco area are all represented. This category is dominated by beef which, at 364 lb (165 kg) of meat, outweighs mutton, pork, and rabbit combined. The family’s diet was supplemented by relatively small quantities of fish, shellfish, and fowl. While the chicken may have been raised on-site, all the wild bird species were readily available by market hunting.

The Frohmans’ meat consumption appears similar to that of other San Francisco households. Proportions of meat type are close to the average found in the Jewish Strauss/Ackerman and Martin collections (Yentsch 2009:167). However, the family’s preference for less expensive cuts of meat indicates that they ate a disproportionate quantity of soups and stews. The butchering pattern reflects prevailing Euro-American practices of the era, in which a retail butcher reduced carcasses to standard cuts. There is little evidence of home butchering. Seeds show the family’s consumption of soft fruits (apricot, peach or nectarine, and plum) while a relatively small quantity of grape seeds suggest jam rather than wine making.

In sum, it appears that the Frohman family bought their food from local retail stores and market-hunting outlets with the possible exception of chicken, ate similar meals to San Franciscans at large, and consumed proportionally more less desired meat than others in their rank.

• To what degree were the rules of traditional kashrut followed?

• Is there evidence of a modified system of dietary restriction?

The system of Jewish practices called kashrut governs the types of food that may be eaten and their preparation. While it would be difficult to confirm archaeologically a kosher (ritually appropriate) household, non-kosher (treyfe) practices and materials are easy to detect.

The Frohman collection abounds in the remains of treyfe species. Taken together, pork and rabbit constitute about 9% by weight of meat represented in the collection. In addition, many bones in the collection represent portions of beef and mutton/lamb that are treyfe without special treatment by a highly skilled shochet (kosher butcher). For beef, these consist of the hind shank, rump, and porterhouse, the most numerous cut in the collection with 19 examples. Non-kosher cuts of mutton/lamb are present in bones from the hind shank, porterhouse (top loin), round, and rump cuts. Treyfe fish are represented by the remains of bat ray, leopard shark, or relative.

There are at least three other archaeological collections associated with South of Market Jews in the 1870s or 1880s that have enough dietary remains to allow comparison with the Frohman materials. Like the Frohmans, Bernard and Lena Strauss emigrated from what would become Germany. Bernard was a butcher, though not a practicing shochet, as the Strauss family’s faunal remains include the same treyfe species and in similar proportions to the Frohman’s, as well as non-kosher beef and mutton cuts (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2009:Appendix B.34). The Martin collection is problematic as the family shared the building with a non-Jewish family. Their faunal collection contains moderate quantities of pork and rabbit, as well as the same popular but treyfe cuts of beef and mutton (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2009:Appendix B.2, B.36).

San Francisco Bay shellfish was freely available and inexpensive during the second half of the nineteenth century. It is also treyfe in all its forms. Bent nosed clam and Pacific oyster were found in profusion along the San Francisco Bay margins where clam digging was a popular family activity. Both of these species were found in the Strauss and Samuel collections, as well as one related to the Polish-Jewish Aaron family (Gibson 2009:Table 7.2). The Frohman collection contains 20 oyster shells.

Archaeological data suggest that some nineteenth-century California Jews followed a modified system of kashrut which, although they did not meet the requirements for a kosher home, nevertheless continued some long-established practices that contributed to ethnic identity (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1990). These practices might be indicated in an archaeological collection by the absence of commonly consumed meat cuts or species—rabbit, pork, or mammalian hindquarters. Such was not the case here. The Frohman collection is rife with treyfe species such as pork, rabbit, and oyster, and treyfe meat cuts. However, analysis conducted by Owen (2009b) suggest that San Francisco Jewish households may have consumed proportionally less pork than other meats in comparison to non-Jewish San Francisco households (averaging 9% and 15%, respectively), the shortfall being made up by additional beef. Although these patterns were not statistically significant, when the Feature 200 data are added to the 2009 sample the difference in the proportion of beef between Jewish and non-Jewish households reaches the 5% (one-tailed) level of significance. These results indicate—but do not confirm—that these preferences were a function of ethno-religious identity rather than social class.

In addition to what it does not contain, a kosher kitchen is distinguished by what it should include: two complete sets of utensils, serving vessels, and place settings. Each of these sets is used exclusively to prepare and serve either meat (fleishigs) or dairy based foods (milchigs), respectively, which are kept strictly separate (Kraemer 2005). Distinctive patterns or colors, such as blue for dairy and red for meat, are often used to prevent mistakes. The Frohman collection of kitchen ceramics consists mostly of white improved earthenware and a few pieces of gilded porcelain. Some of the earthenware has the molded edge patterns popular in the 1850s and 1860s (such as Stafford and Gothic Cameo) but most are plain white. The uniformity of these materials does not suggest that the family made an effort to separate meat and dairy foods by the conventional use of two sets of dishes and is further evidence of a non-kosher kitchen.

In sum, there is no evidence that the Frohman family maintained a kosher household. On the contrary, they appear to have mostly embraced conventional mid-nineteenth-century American foodways. There is, however, strong evidence that their purchasing patterns and those of other Jewish San Franciscans resulted in the consumption of more beef—and concomitantly less pork—than their non-Jewish neighbors. At present we cannot say whether or not this was a conscious effort to use modified kosher practices and its investigation cries out for additional research.

• Were the Frohman family’s foodways consistent with the policy of their synagogue?

• Does synagogue affiliation predict conformity with kashrut?

The archaeological study of modern garbage (e.g., Rathje and Murphy 2001) reveals the discrepancy between people’s actual practices and the behaviors that are appropriate to the “ideal self” to which they aspire (sensu Baumeister 1999). San Francisco synagogues had rigorous requirements for membership including demonstrated Jewish ancestry and willingness to conform to the congregation’s minhag or local customs, which were monitored by synagogue board members (Ohabai Shalome 1871; Voorsanger 1900:27-28). Archaeological remains provide material evidence of the degree to which these normative practices were carried out.

The Frohman family were longtime members of Congregation Ohabai Shalome, which was formed in 1864 after a split with Congregation Emanu-El over the latter’s move to more liberal practices (Ohabai Shalome Minutes, November 13, 1864) (Fig. 6). The new congregation was not strictly Orthodox although it maintained a kosher kitchen and the traditional Minhag Ashkenos (Ohabai Shalome 1871:Article 1), for no barrier (mechitzah) separated men and women during religious services (Rosenbaum 2009:46). No doubt, Ohabai Shalome’s members considered themselves the more observant congregation of the two.

Fig. 6

Isaac Frohman, youngest son of Sussman and Babetta, was a board member of Ohabai Shalome synagogue where his parents had been members for 30 years. Illustration by Frank Nankivell. San Francisco Call (1895). Courtesy of the Library of Congress

The archaeological evidence reveals divergence between the Frohman family’s private practices and the officially sanctioned minhag of their congregation. Not only did the family omit the more byzantine requirements of maintaining a kosher home, such as the additional dishes and implements necessary to ensure that milk and meat products were kept separate, but they participated comprehensively in the foodways of non-Jewish San Francisco. Oysters were the 1870s equivalent of pizza in their ubiquity and popularity. Oyster bars were common in San Francisco where hotels alone consumed 750 bu (26 m³) each day (San Francisco Call 1876). Oyster shells, like those found among the Frohman family’s refuse, are some of most common household faunal remains of the era. The family also ate pork, although in smaller quantities than non-Jewish San Franciscans.

Archival sources reveal that the Frohmans’ involvement at Ohabai Shalome was significant and involved at least two generations of the family. Son Ferdinand celebrated his bar mitzvah there while living at 246 Fourth Street and was later married by the congregation’s rabbi (Daily Alta California 1876, 1889). Daughter Hannah and second son Isaac were also married at the synagogue (San Francisco Call 1891, 1892). Isaac later became a member of the board of trustees; his father-in-law and brother-in-law were also elected synagogue officials (San Francisco Call 1898).

This leaves us with an apparent incongruity between the Frohmans’ commitment to their synagogue and the family’s disregard of the system of dietary restrictions that for nearly two millennia had been one of the most strictly enforced mechanisms by which diaspora Jews separated themselves from their host community. I have noted above and elsewhere the historical weight of the prohibition on pork (Praetzellis 2004), which the Frohmans ate in quantity. And yet, like the Frohmans, many Jews of the era ate pork at home. The Jacobs/Barnett family of Oakland, Jews from Poland, actually consumed more of it than their Christian neighbors (Praetzellis 2004:88). Perhaps more than any other food, the decision to avoid eating pork in social gatherings marked Jews as outsiders in the nineteenth century as it does today.

As Jews fully entered the life of the nation, practices that had strengthened community came to be seen by many as restricting the individual’s advancement. This tendency may have been particularly strong in San Francisco where the social hierarchy was in flux and whose sizeable Jewish population inhibited antisemitism (Rosenbaum 2009:55). With its church-like atmosphere and universalist principles, Reform synagogues drew Jews away from the restrictions that Orthodoxy placed on everyday life. Many Jews found that practices such as kashrut were no longer a necessary underpinning for their ethnicity.

In sum, I suggest that the sense of identity of many mid-nineteenth-century San Francisco Jews was no longer focused on social boundary maintenance practices such as kashrut. Although religiosity was on the decline, Jews maintained community by being active in Jewish charitable organizations—whose networking possibilities would not have been overlooked. One might ask if, in general, people affiliated with traditional shuls tended to conform to kashrut more than members of liberal congregations. And ultimately, how and why kashrut lost its significance for many? Again, more data—both archaeological and archival—are needed to resolve these issues.

Theme: Consumerism and Social Mobility

• To what degree were purchase and discard influenced by changing popular taste?

What we assume must have been aerobic and alternately wet/dry conditions in Feature 200 differentially affected artifact preservation and, consequently, the representativeness of the collection. Ceramic, glass, and similar non-perishable materials survive better than objects of cloth, wood, and even metal that is often transformed by oxidation into interpretatively useless blobs. This introduced a bias to the sample in favor of impervious goods that tend to be imported, industrial products and to the detriment of objects locally made by hand. Designed for a competitive global market, the former types are subject to frequent changes in style whereas the latter may reflect individual craftsmanship and stylistic consistency over time (Phillips and Willey 1953).

The Frohman collection’s ceramic tableware is the artifact class most sensitive to stylistic change (Fig. 7). This particular sequence for nineteenth-century domestic ceramics is well known (Coysh and Henrywood 1982), although the timing of its adoption varies somewhat by country. Britain dominated the industry and by the 1850s and 1860s when the collection was produced, and items with superseded styles were dumped on the British colonial and American markets to clear overproduction (Thistlethwaite 1958). Initially, this included California (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2015b:483) but the region’s wealth demanded and could pay for the most up to date symbols of fashionable sophistication.

Fig. 7

Tableware ceramics from the Frohman artifact collection. Photo by Sandra Massey Konzak. Courtesy of the Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State University

Many of the Frohman tablewares are whole and unchipped; others were broken in situ when they were discarded. The extensive glassware collection also contains several complete items and formerly whole objects. This suggests that the Frohman collection of table and glassware was deposited in a single event—a housecleaning which, presumably, was followed by wholesale replacement with new items.

The ceramics are exclusively white except for one abraded sherd of transfer printed ware that was probably a preexisting item of sheet refuse. This uniformity is unusual for although edged wares went of fashion in the 1840s and transfer prints in the 1850s, archaeological collections deposited through the end of the nineteenth century frequently contain individual pieces of these wares. The Frohmans’ plates and bowls are a mixture of styles: plain undecorated, multisided, and molded patterns. The collection includes some white porcelain plates that may be French. Aside from plates, the collection contains a molded berry dish, a sided Gothic pitcher, and a Fig pattern soap dish, all of which are white.

The collection as a whole generally conforms to the popular aesthetics of the era in which it was discarded. However, the mixture of designs, patterns, and forms is at odds with the uniformity desired for the table of a middle-class family (Hayes 2011). Perhaps the reason behind the mass discard that resulted in this archaeological collection was a desire to replace a medley of designs by a formal set in the same pattern.

• How might have relinquishing ethnic culture promoted social advancement?

• Which specific items or categories of consumer goods may have symbolized the process of Americanization?

• How did household material culture contribute to this process of cultural change?

Heavily influenced by the liberal values of the Haskalah, German-speaking Jews were key players in San Francisco business during and following the Gold Rush. Decker’s (1978) work on the social mobility of San Francisco’s Jewish merchants attributes this group’s advancement in part to their business acumen and social networks. And yet although they were an influential, even formidable force in early American California, the possibility of social advancement depended partly on reducing the cultural differences between themselves and non-Jewish Americans.

The Frohman collection is not the only assemblage associated with San Francisco Jews. Four artifact collections, described above, were uncovered during the 2009 West Bay Approach project and statistically examined by Owen (2009b). Although additional materials associated with Jewish households have been uncovered in San Francisco, Owen restricted his study to those excavated, cataloged, and analyzed using identical methods in order to ensure comparability. Using a nonparametric Wilcoxon rank-sum test, Owen compared these four assemblages to a baseline developed from 44 artifact collections and their historical associations discovered during the 2009 work. He reported that the collections associated with Jews exhibited patterns at the 10 and 5% levels of significance in the categories of foodways ceramics, alcohol, and grooming/primping (Owen 2009a:314-315, 2009b:Appendix F).

The Frohman collection provides an exciting opportunity to see if the patterns noted in 2009 were also evident here. Owen’s complete analysis (Owen 2020:Appendix D) compares the content of Feature 200 to the other four Jewish artifact collections using many measures; the discussion that follows merely cherry-picks his conclusions. In summary, patterns observed in the four 2009 collections are also present in the Frohman data set. Some that were indicted only weakly by the 2009 data are given support by the new information.

• 2009 conclusion: Jewish households consumed significantly more wine/champagne than non-Jewish households.

This pattern was also present in the Frohman data, which indicate that wine or Champagne was consumed at about the same rate as other Jewish households relative to the family’s consumption as a whole. When the wine/Champagne container are standardized in relation to food preparation and consumption artifacts, the finding reaches the 5% significance level. To mitigate the effect of social class or wealth, comparisons were limited to non-Jewish households of the same occupational rank.

• 2009 conclusion: Jewish households consumed more grooming and health items, as well more perfume and primping artifacts (a sub-set of the former) than non-Jewish households.

These patterns are reproduced in the Frohman collection. The 2009 data show strong tendencies at the 5% significance level in both categories, which are strengthened by the Frohman data. A comparison was also made between perfume/primping artifacts in Jewish versus non-Jewish collections limited by occupational rank. Adding the Frohman data to the other four Jewish collections confirms the Jewish households’ heavier use of these artifacts at the 5% significance level. By every measure, the pattern correlates not with occupational rank but with Jewish ethnicity.

Much archaeological material consists of objects of “ordinary consumption” (Gronow and Warde 2001:5), mundane items obtained routinely that have little ability to convey symbolic meaning. Other artifacts and categories of material culture are clearly and explicitly symbolic, although they are rarely found archaeologically. Yet others may have functioned in the symbolic realm that we cannot identify as such through conventional means—in this case, the use of wine and personal primping equipment. I am encouraged that the Frohman data are consistent with and actually strengthen Owen’s 2009 analysis. The 5% significance levels described above are a strong indicator that these patterns of artifact occurrence reflect actual patterns of distinctive cultural behavior on the part of Jewish households.

Historian Andrew Heinze (1990:4) observed that “As consumers, Jews sought important elements of American identity more quickly and thoroughly than other groups of newcomers.” This seems to have played out in the area of perfume/primping, supporting the claim of the New York advertising agency Joseph Jacobs (1946:13), which asserted that Jewish women bought more pharmaceuticals and cosmetics than other women (Jacobs 1946:13, cited in Joselit 2005:340). But while consumerism focuses on individuals’ desire for material goods, consumption encompass services and non-material goods that were a matter of choice. The model presented here does not involve a simplistic binary outcome wherein people did or did not assimilate but examines how historical actors participated in consumption, both material and social. In the case of San Francisco Jews, the trend involved gravitation toward the “secular synagogue” (Moore 1981:7) of social benefit organizations and away from religious institutions. Charitable organizations to serve the poor and the needs of the community have always been at the center of Jewish communities not as “the mere voluntary impulse of the noble-hearted and opulent individual” but as “the stern duty of all” (Sonnenschein 1884:323-324).

I suggest that the Frohmans enhanced their cultural capital (sensu Bourdieu 1984) in order to “become White” (Brodkin 1998) by applying their knowledge of fashion and gentility to the selection of appropriate material culture. These efforts were amplified by the family’s involvement with both synagogue and ethnic-Jewish social organizations, which widened their social network. Expressed in such clinical terms this sounds like a cynical strategy for social advancement. In fact, I suggest that these were elements in a transformation of habitus that can be seen most clearly in the family’s foodways. A cook—in this case, Babetta Frohman—re-creates their society by making a series of decisions that determine what constitutes potential food, as well as newly appropriate ways of preparing and serving it (Douglas and Nicod 1974). This cultural transformation is epitomized in Babetta Frohman’s presentation of treyfe foods on modern ceramics.

Theme: Urban Geography and Materiality

• What was the role of material culture in the social construction of urban space—the creation of an ethnic neighborhood?

• Would the remains (architecture, landscape, artifacts, ecofacts) have signaled a palpably Jewish presence in the neighborhood?

Although there is no archaeological evidence that the Frohmans communicated their ethnicity by visible symbols, we know from contemporary documents that the family was both Jewish in origin and by practice. I feel that this gap reflects our inability to perceive how identity was expressed at the household level, not its absence. By adjusting the scale of analysis, a different image comes into focus.

There was no exclusively Jewish neighborhood in late nineteenth-century San Francisco, unlike many American cities (Spencer-Wood 1999). The 15-odd South of Market blocks between about Third and Sixth streets were as diverse as any and yet a substantial proportion of the city’s Jews lived there, supported by a concentration of Jewish institutions and businesses. The Jewish population itself was far from homogeneous, ranging from traditional religious to those trying to divest themselves of everything that might set them apart from their white Christian neighbors. In sum, the South of Market Jewish population cannot be conveniently pigeonholed and may barely be classed as a single community.

Jewish neighborhoods in pre-Napoleonic Europe were most distinctive when laws forced community buildings and residences together into a ghetto. However, as far as we can tell no purpose-built Jewish buildings or structures were constructed in the South of Market during the nineteenth century—no synagogue, shtibl or beit tefilla (informal prayer house), mikvah (ritual bath) or cemetery. Without these traditional markers, how might residents have put their stamp on this American Christian landscape? I approach this question by reconstructing how Jews would have experienced their neighborhood.

The South of Market district was created in 1849 by imposing a grid of streets onto a wild environment of marshland and mountains of sand. These 825 x 550-ft (251 x 167-m) blocks were far larger than those elsewhere in the city and their 11-ac (4-ha) size made access to interior parcels difficult. Alleyways soon crisscrossed the blocks as developers crammed as many houses as possible into interior spaces to minimize the use of more expensive street frontage (see Fig. 1). More or less prosperous thoroughfares were lined with businesses whose owners lived above. But in the rear was a densely packed quarter of dead-end backstreets, covered passageways, and houses packed around semi-enclosed courtyards.

Among the few images of the area is an 1866 view looking southeast from Market Street (Fig. 8). It shows a jumble of buildings in many styles and no style at all. Half a dozen identical roofs indicate a small development. Ladders and stairways give access to upper floors. Laundry lies on rooftops and flaps from lines. Rich and poor lived close by each other and the gritty disorganized backstreet facades struck a distinct contrast with the elegant towers of Congregation Emanu-El built in 1864 to the north of Market on Sutter Street. Other sources such as city directories and census schedules suggest how the scene may have been experienced at street level by Jewish immigrants from Europe: snatches of Yiddish-accented German; business signs in English and Hebrew characters below the family’s upstairs apartment; the shout of “Mincha! Mincha!” emerging from a shopfront shtibl that demands attendance at the afternoon service; and during the fall festival of Succot flimsy branch-covered huts that sprout like weeds on the flat roofs and in backyards of every observant family.

Fig. 8

San Francisco’s South of Market district as seen from the Nucleus Hotel, 1865. Photo by Lawrence & Houseworth. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

This San Francisco neighborhood was part of an “instant city” (Barth 1975). Its physical layout was decided at a stroke by official action, but its cultural landscape was shaped by the people who lived there. Out of this centrally planned structure and its hastily thrown up buildings they created a vernacular environment—a “lived space” (Lefebvre 1997)—by shaping buildings and open spaces to their own needs. But unlike the ghettos of Europe, this district was not closed off either physically or socially. Jewish South of Market was not a completed or fully realized cultural landscape. It was constantly changing, ephemeral, and inextricably entangled with the life of the neighborhood as a whole and the politics of Jewish visibility in a place where diverse cultures met.

The narrative I present below attempts to capture the neighborhood’s dynamism as it might have been experienced by the Frohman family. I have intentionally not included references. These interruptions to impressionistic (in contrast to scholarly) text are like “having to go down to answer the door just as you are [making love]” (John Barrymore cited by Austin 1990:1012).

A Narrative: The Frohmans’ South of Market

Looking down from their flat over the shop, the neighborhood must have looked raw and unfinished to Babetta and Sussman Frohman. The couple were from adjacent provinces in central Germany where Jews had lived for centuries in ancient towns that had grown organically around a castle or church, largely unplanned and chaotic. In Sussman’s birthplace of Darmstadt, buildings of timber and stone in their distinctive local style crouched beside imposing Baroque blocks. History and regional distinctiveness were inescapable. It was very different here in the South of Market.

Just a few hundred feet from the Frohmans’ home gangs of men were flattening sand dunes and filling creek channels. As the nearby Mission Bay marsh was reclaimed it was just as rapidly built on. Thrown up in the hundreds seemingly overnight, these wood-framed buildings were rough and impermanent to European eyes. And yet the wide streets arranged purposefully on a grid showed the kind of order and deliberate action that was remaking Paris and Berlin into planned cities.

Like Jews from all over central and eastern Europe, Germans saw opportunities in the west that were denied them at home. A current of antisemitism had run beneath the surface and their lives were regulated solely because of their ethnicity. The infamous Bavarian Matrikel laws forced many poorer Jews to leave or remain single. A Jewish wedding required a hefty fee and the right of settlement was limited to the eldest son; the rest must leave the province. And so German-speaking Jews flocked to San Francisco in the 1850s and ’60s.

South of Market was a good location for Frohman’s new boot and shoe business. When the family moved here in 1869, the huge Southern Pacific railyard was under construction and the district was the city’s manufacturing and industrial hub. Nearby Folsom Street was a busy thoroughfare lined with an array of small businesses from boardinghouses to butchers, junk shops and stables. Potential customers of all classes lived nearby, for in early San Francisco the poorest laborer families lived on Dickensian backstreets and courts behind some of the city’s most affluent residents.

About half of San Francisco’s small merchants lived in a flat above or behind their shops, as did the Frohmans. They rented the place from Samuel Abrams, a Prussian Jewish real estate broker who lived with his family on Clementina Street, the alley immediately behind the Frohmans’ home. What were the chances that a German-speaking Jewish tradesman would find himself living next to a countryman? Actually, quite good. For although the city had no distinctively Jewish neighborhood, Germans (over half of whom were Jews) were the most numerous of foreign-born merchants in early San Francisco.

Unlike the ex-tenant farmers from Ireland who were equal in number to the city’s Jews, many of these Europeans had been small traders, shopkeepers, and artisans before they emigrated. Many started over as peddlers and market stall holders, and eventually moved up to a rented shop. They quickly came to dominate the San Francisco cigar, dry goods, and clothing trades in which nearly three-quarters of small tradesmen were Jewish.

The Frohmans’ contribution bring to at least five the number of archaeological collections from South of Market Jewish families: Samuel, Strauss/Ackerman, Aaron, and Martin. All had small or mid-sized businesses and all but one was from Germany or Poland: the Martins were Londoners whose Sephardic ancestors had likely settled there in the eighteenth century. None, it should be noted, were Bavarian—their homes were on the more affluent north side of Market Street where German Jewish institutions were clustered. The Bavarians tended to be wealthier and were recognized by all as on a higher social tier than the eastern Europeans.

Remarkably, travelers reported that Jews in early San Francisco were experiencing little of the antisemitism they had encountered in Europe and “back East.” Had centuries of embedded cultural prejudice broken down in the Gold Rush chaos? More likely it was due to the number of Jews in the population and their leading role in business and trade. Either way, these European families soon found that they would not be accepted into American society without making some profound changes in their identity as Jews. Heinrich Heine, the Prussian Jewish poet, bitterly described Christian baptism as his entry fee into society. San Francisco Jews were no less keen to embrace the modern world but found more subtle ways to adapt.

Both the archives and the archaeology show that the strictness of all five San Francisco families’ religious practices declined. The city’s synagogues, no longer the center of Jewish life, had become increasingly liberal (Fig. 9). Non-religious Jews were less likely to conceal the attitude expressed by an anonymous contributor to the American Hebrew in 1889 that:

But still I’m a Jew

Although it is true

There’s nothing that’s Jewish

That I care to do.

Fig. 9

“A Boychik Up-to-Date.” According to the 1904 Yiddish song, this boychik (young man) is “a wiseguy, a beguiler… an American man” who spends his time chasing girls. Judaism would seem to be the last thing on his mind. The English title is a transliteration of the Yiddish. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

In the lives of many, the role of the synagogue as the heart of their community was supplanted by charitable and fraternal organizations. These groups became a collective “secular synagogue,” tightly entwined with the city’s German Jewish business society. Most importantly as far as parents were concerned, the secular Jewish social network could augment the synagogue as a community meeting place where they could find partners for their children. And as synagogue membership fell off, some of the in-home practices they publicly espoused were privately flouted.

The Frohman family exemplifies these cultural and behavioral changes as well as the diversity of Jewish practices as they evolved in the New World. Sussman Frohman belonged to secular Jewish groups but, unlike the other families we studied, the family kept their synagogue membership through at least two generations. And most significantly, the Frohman children married other Jews. No one can doubt the family’s dedication to Judaism as both religion and ethnicity, and yet their commitment did not include keeping a kosher home.

This lynchpin of Orthodox observance was Babetta Frohman’s responsibility. To keep it up required diligence for the rules are numerous, but this would have been second nature to a woman brought up in the tradition. Although Babetta’s neighborhood was far from being a ghetto, there were plenty of other Jewish families around (including her neighbors, the Abrams) and the opportunity to buy kosher meat. Or, at least, not to buy treyfe. Her decision to break with the tradition was surely made consciously and one way in which she created a new cultural path for her family. A cook—in this case, Babetta—can re-create their society’s norms by the decisions they make about what constitutes acceptable food, as well as newly appropriate ways of preparing and serving it. The Frohmans’ cultural transformation, embodied in the presentation of treyfe foods on modern ceramics, is a candid 1875 snapshot of the family at that time. They had been transformed by their American experience, and yet we should not think of their cultural identity as fixed at this point in time. Forming a new identity would have been a continuous process for Jews in the South of Market, molded by individuals’ aspirations as well as all the impersonal societal forces experienced day to day in their neighborhood and city.

The Frohmans were part of that wave of European Jewish immigrants who were drawn to San Francisco in the immediate post-Gold Rush era. No homogeneous group, these German-speakers had their own rigid social gradations based on national origin, education, and cultural intangibles. This changed with the influx of immigrants from eastern Europe, such as Wolf and Minnie Samuel who came to live in the South of Market by 1880. Yiddish-speaking Jews like the Samuels were scorned by the established population. Many were poor, Orthodox in background, and had little secular education.

Perhaps only 10 years after the Frohmans had filled their disused privy with rubbish, the South of Market’s alleys and dead-end courts began to fill with these new arrivals, creating denser populations of Jews. Tiny study houses appeared over shops and some formally organized Orthodox congregations rented entire buildings. The Frohmans would have heard more Yiddish, Polish, and Russian on the street than ever before. By the turn of the century, their former neighborhood (Sussman and Babetta had since moved) had become more working class and more palpably Jewish in landscape and sound.

All this was swept away in the cataclysm of 1906, as post-earthquake redesign wiped out the maze of backstreets and the ephemeral cultures they had fostered.

Toward an Archaeology of Diaspora Jewish Life

In Jewish homiletics, a nechemtah is the finale applied to a difficult text that satisfies and uplifts the listener. The conclusion to this article attempts just that by offering some recommendations for a way forward. I begin with some practical suggestions regarding archival research and continue with a discussion of historical archaeology’s potential role in documenting the historical diversity of Jewish household practices.

Archival Research: Who is a Jew?

To determine that an archaeological site or feature was created by Jews we must be able to identify Jews in the archival record. While there is an extensive literature on the topic of Jewish genealogy (e.g., Stern and Rottenberg 1998), I suggest indicators that are relatively easy to investigate at the local level: organizational membership, language, family name, and place of origin. Although several of these may be reasonably combined to suggest an individual’s Jewish identity, the lack of evidence does not preclude it. Synagogue membership or marriage in an Orthodox synagogue are the strongest indications of Jewish identity, as they require proof of Jewish birth or conversion. For our purposes, however, Jewish-ness is considered an ethnicity of which religion is but one component. Although evidence of synagogue membership or marriage is definitive proof that an individual self-identifies as a Jew, it is not a necessary condition to establish Jewish identity in the past. In fact, only a minority of San Francisco’s nineteenth-century Jews joined a synagogue. Many more (perhaps three times as many) were members of Jewish charitable and fraternal/sororal organizations such as San Francisco’s Hebrew Ladies’ Benevolent Society. Membership in a chevra kiddisha (burial society) would be strictly limited to Jews. The membership rolls of these voluntary groups are often contained in their annual reports.

Many Eastern European Jews were bilingual. One’s national language, such as Polish or Russian, was used with government officials and other non-Jews but the language of home was Yiddish, the mameloyshen (mother tongue). The US Census Population Schedule of 1910 lists the native language of foreign-born residents. Although some people reported their national language here, the individual is almost certainly Jewish if Yiddish is indicated.

Researchers should be cautious about assuming Jewish identity or the lack thereof based on family name. Even family names that have irrefutably Jewish origins have British homonyms such as Miller and Harris. Another common name, Cohen (priest in Hebrew) was sometimes confused with the Irish name Coen by census enumerators. To add to the confusion, the descendants of male converts to Christianity (such Benjamin Disraeli) may have retained their family name over the generations but no longer identified as Jews. Stories of immigrants’ names being arbitrarily changed at Ellis Island are apocryphal. Yet many decided to Anglicize their name in their new country. These included Jacov Pjittigorsky, the writer’s maternal grandfather, who remade himself as Jack Peters.

The area known to census enumerators as Posen (also Posan, Poznan), located in the contested border area between Germany and Poland, experienced extensive Jewish emigration throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. An individual whose birthplace is listed as Posen or Prussia may be Jewish.

Archaeological Research Issues

The partite nature of cultural resource management archaeology has been cited as one of its chief flaws (Archaeological Resources Commission 2010). As projects are funded individually, few have the resources to develop the kind of historical and contextual studies that are needed to fully exploit their discoveries. This problem is compounded by the necessity that archaeological results be amenable to snackable conclusions that provide a satisfying plaisir/pleasure (sensu Barthes 1975) to agency reviewers. “What do we know now that we didn’t know before?” has been offered as the ultimate test of whether or not an archaeological excavation was worthwhile. This naïve handmaiden-to-history approach (Noël Hume 1964) conceives of archaeology as merely a technique that can be applied to narrow historical problems, which can then be checked off as “solved.” One outcome of this situation is that the historical archaeology of Jews has tended to get stuck with prefabricated cultural models into which archaeological data can be effortlessly plugged to provide bland but plausible conclusions. The most common example is how the evidence of variation from traditional Jewish practice in the form of food bones of treyfe animals is taken as the material corelate of assimilation. In the same way, the presence of matched sets of ceramics and dolls are understood to be evidence of something that 1960s historians described as Victorianism. These tame hangovers from the archaeological research designs of the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Praetzellis et al. 1980) continue to be trotted out with updated citations.

To counter this trend, I suggest the following:

• Expand on the research issues developed here rather than simply reproducing them.

• Combine qualitative and quantitative approaches through the comparison of tightly controlled contexts.

• Present the data using a standardized format to allow comparison.

• Add to the existing database for future researchers to draw on.

Seeking more societal relevance for archaeology, Cleland (2008) and Deagan (1988) appealed to archaeologists to investigate those “questions that count.” At the time, to whom exactly these questions should “count” almost went without saying: it would be to historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists. The situation has evolved somewhat with the rise of indigenous and other archaeologies that foreground the concerns of ancestral communities. This is the approach I apply to the present topic by defining research issues of importance to contemporary Jews in the diaspora, particularly that of identity. Archaeology indicates that Jewish collections are both qualitatively and quantitatively different from non-Jewish ones. More case studies are needed to investigate how and why this is so. This work will require creativity in archaeological practice—the “archaeological imagination” (Shanks 2012)—and will compel us to apply rigorously obtained data to themes that contribute to the critical issues of the day.

Being Jewish in the diaspora, now and in the past, is an entirely different proposition than in a largely Jewish environment. Israeli sociologist David Mittelberg (2011:526) puts it this way:

…in the Diaspora no one can take being Jewish for granted. One has to make the effort to be Jewish. One must create Jewish space in the non-Jewish world within which we live… In Israel, everyone takes being Jewish for granted. Since Jewishness is ubiquitous in the public domain, Israeli Jews are not compelled to affirm it (emphasis in original).

The process by which Jews created and continue to create “Jewish space” in North America as part of their journey to become Americans on their own terms is the underlaying theme of my conception of an archaeology of diaspora Jews (Fig. 10). Many religious conservatives believe that Jewish identity has no long-term future in North America (e.g., Dershowitz 1997; Gans 2014) citing, among other factors, declining synagogue membership rates and increasing intermarriage. However, there is evidence that the trajectory is not entirely set. The golden age of Jewish identity with which modern conditions are implicitly contrasted was in fact less uniformly frum (pious) than nostalgia and latter-day sentimentality suggest. One of the earliest quantitative surveys of American Jews reported that San Francisco synagogue membership in 1878 stood at about 13% of Jewish households (Board of Delegates of American Israelites 1880:48). In contrast, 31% of American Jews surveyed in 2013 claimed to be synagogue members (Pew Research Center 2013:15). Were the Frohman family’s treyfe foodways representative of congregational practices or an anomaly? Rosenbaum has noted that their synagogue’s conventions were more in line with what would become Conservative Judaism (Rosenbaum 2009:50). And while we cannot know what proportion of Ohabai Shalome’s membership kept kosher at home, the current percentage is about 31% for Conservative-affiliated Jews (Pew Research Center 2013:77).

Fig. 10

Mezuzah case containing a parchment inscribed with specific biblical verses (the mezuzah). It is fastened to a home’s doorpost to fulfil the injunction “And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house” (Devarim 6:9). Although these artifacts have been used as unmistakable indicators of a Jewish home for over 2000 years, they are rarely found archaeologically. Photo by the author

Microhistories and ethnographies like those of McGinity, who documents the small-scale decisions made by individual families, also argue against the assimilative trend identified by survey-driven sociological analyses. Rather than weakening individuals’ ties to the Jewish community, McGinity (2009:142, 220) found that in many cases intermarriage actually increased both women’s and men’s (McGinity 2014) involvement in Jewish life.

In his article “The future of Jewish practice” Wanderer (2005:262) identifies the most important goal in the study of Jewish identity and practice as revealing and explaining the development of local variability. North America is rich with examples of this cultural diversity such as households that have a third set of kitchenware for treyfe foods (Umansky 2017). Although American Jewish history still tends to emphasize large scale events and trends (Sussman 2009), the distinctive identity and practices of Jews in the American South has inspired an extensive literature (e.g., Lipson-Walker 1989). Foodways in the Dixie diaspora incorporate seemingly incompatible traditional and regional favorites such as matzoh ball gumbo (Ferris 2010) and accommodates those who might enjoy pork barbecue at a restaurant but would never do such a thing in their own home (Cohen 2004:56). Crypto-Jewish women of the Southwest developed subtle practices to adapt to a time and place where their Judaism must be hidden. In this region where many people kept pigs in their front yard, a woman might do the same in order not to attract attention although her family avoided eating pork (Jacobs 1996:106). That the material remains generated by these groups would apparently fly in the face of normative Jewish culture speaks to the necessity of developing ethnographically grounded historical contexts for interpretation. One size will not fit all.

Wanderer (2005:262) predicts the development among Jews in the modern world of “an array of novel practices,” both geographically and over time. Although anthropological archaeologists traditionally seek pattern in their data, uncovering normative behavior is only a step towards the identification of these local cultures created as people adapt to the conditions in which they find themselves. Historical archaeology’s access to the unedited, prima facie evidence of household level decisions puts our discipline in the front lines of this work, revealing new insights and complicating what we thought we already knew.

After nearly 300 pages of “Portnoy-oy-oy-oy-oy!” anguish poured out from on a psychiatrist’s couch, the novel Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth 1994:274) concludes with:

“So (said the doctor). Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”

It is one of the most startling punchlines in fiction. For in a few words Roth both knocks on the head our hope for an uplifting nechemtah and opens the possibility (however dim) that Portnoy may actually survive his “complaint.” It’s also a suitable epilog to this article, which also has no definitive resolution but may perhaps be a place to begin. Yes?