About The Jewish Messenger

The Jewish Messenger

The Jewish Messenger was an English-language Jewish weekly newspaper published in New York City from 1857 to 1903. It was founded by the Reverend Samuel Myer Isaacs, the minister of Congregation Shaaray Tefila and one of the most influential Orthodox rabbis in the United States, and it remained a family paper for its entire life: Isaacs edited it from 1857 until his death in 1878, and his son Abram S. Isaacs edited it from 1878 until it was merged into The American Hebrew in 1903.

The Jewish Encyclopedia's survey of the Jewish press classified the Messenger as a general and literary weekly of Orthodox character, and noted its supplement Hebraica, issued from 1879. In a crowded New York Jewish press that also included Reform and German-language voices, the Messenger stood for historic, traditional Judaism, argued in English, for an American readership that its founder had done much to create.

Samuel Myer Isaacs, the Founder

Samuel Myer Isaacs was born on January 4, 1804, at Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. As a young man in England he was head of the Neveh Zedek orphan asylum, and in 1839 he was called to New York as rabbi of the B'nai Jeshurun synagogue. Eight years later he became the spiritual leader of Congregation Shaaray Tefila, a group that had seceded from B'nai Jeshurun, and he remained its minister until his death on May 19, 1878.

Isaacs was the first rabbi in New York to introduce regular English sermons into the service, and he was described as the second Jewish spiritual leader in the United States to teach in English rather than in Hebrew or German. Through those sermons, in which he urged the necessity of preserving historic Jewish tradition, he became, second only to Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia, the most influential Orthodox rabbi in the country. A newspaper conducted on business and literary principles was the natural extension of that pulpit, and in 1857 he founded the Jewish Messenger to carry the same teaching beyond his congregation.

A Family Newspaper

The Messenger was from the beginning an Isaacs family enterprise. Samuel's sons helped him found it in 1857, particularly his eldest son Myer, who edited and contributed articles and opinion to the paper and remained affiliated with it for many years. Another son, Isaac, was editor from 1867 to 1878, in the last decade of his father's life, and the youngest of the three, Abram, took the chair in 1878 and held it until the merger a quarter of a century later.

That family continuity gave the paper an unusually stable identity. For forty-six years a reader of the Messenger knew whose judgement stood behind its columns, and the family's other work reinforced the paper's authority: Myer Isaacs was a lawyer, admitted to the New York bar in 1862 and a judge of the Marine Court from 1880, and the sons, like their father, were activists for Jewish rights in the United States, in Europe and in the wider diaspora. The newspaper, the synagogue, the courtroom and the charitable boardroom were, for the Isaacs family, adjoining rooms.

An Organ of Historic Judaism

The Messenger was described in its own time as a weekly organ of Orthodox Judaism, founded to spread its founder's influence as an exponent of historic Judaism more widely than sermons alone could reach. Samuel Isaacs was credited with making the previously unorganised Jewry of New York a coherent and articulate community, and with consecrating thirty-eight synagogues, including the first synagogue ever built in Illinois. The paper performed the same organising work in print, week by week, for readers well beyond the city.

Its contents matched that purpose: general Jewish news, literary matter and religious argument in English, with the Hebraica supplement added from 1879 for readers whose interests ran to Hebrew scholarship. The Jewish Encyclopedia's classification of the paper as general and literary, as well as Orthodox, captured a combination that distinguished it from a purely congregational bulletin. It was a family newspaper for a community that its editor believed needed both information and formation.

Defending Jewish Rights Beyond the Synagogue

The founder's public work repeatedly intersected with the paper's mission. As an outcome of the Mortara case, the seizure of a Jewish child in Italy that scandalised Jewish opinion worldwide, Isaacs helped create the Board of Delegates of American Israelites to defend the rights of Jews; his son Myer was one of its founders in 1859. Isaacs was also one of the founders in New York of the Jews' Hospital, later Mount Sinai Hospital, of the Hebrew Free School Association and of the United Hebrew Charities, and he was influential in the establishment of Maimonides College in Philadelphia.

Myer's charitable organising continued the same pattern into the next generation: he took the initiative in organising the United Hebrew Charities in 1873, was one of the founders of the Montefiore Home and of the Educational Alliance in 1889, became president of the Baron de Hirsch Fund in 1890, and in December 1881 called a meeting to consider relief for Russian exiles arriving in America. The Messenger reported and argued for such causes as part of its ordinary business; defence of Jewish rights abroad and organisation of Jewish charity at home were not separate departments of the family's life but the subjects of its paper.

No Politics as Israelites

Samuel Isaacs regularly insisted that Israelites, as Israelites, had no politics, a position he stated in the Jewish Messenger itself, for example in January 1861 on the eve of the Civil War. In his view, politics concerned the individual Jew as a citizen, but the Jewish community as a community should not be injected into partisan contests, and historians of nineteenth-century German Jewish life in America have treated that rule as characteristic of the period.

The rule was harder to keep than to state, and the family's own history showed the strain. In 1864 a broadside of the Jewish Union Republican Association urged Jews to vote for Abraham Lincoln's re-election, appealing to emancipation, the Constitution and the Union; Myer Isaacs, editor of the Messenger, served as a secretary in that political world, and later Jewish Democrats exaggerated Jewish numbers and wealth in an attempt to prevent Ulysses S. Grant's election. The paper's columns thus stood at the centre of a continuing argument about whether a Jewish newspaper could be both a communal organ and a political actor.

The Messenger and Chinese Exclusion

Modern scholarship has singled out one of the Messenger's editorial campaigns for particular study: its treatment of Chinese exclusion between 1869 and 1902. In the late nineteenth century both Jews and Chinese faced virulent racist prejudice in the United States, and many Jews, anxious to prove their Americanness and win recognition, sided with mainstream opinion and supported the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. The Jewish Messenger took a different path.

The paper confronted Chinese exclusion head-on and portrayed it as a menace to American honour. In its view, supporting the Chinese amounted to defending the very country that exclusionists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, claimed was under fatal threat from Chinese immigration. A study in the European Journal of Jewish Studies concluded that the Messenger thereby illuminated a path by which Jews could prove their Americanness without sacrificing their sense of righteousness, defending another excluded group rather than purchasing acceptance by joining the exclusion of others. Its columns also followed the diplomacy of Jewish emancipation abroad, as when its discussion of Romanian diplomacy in January 1880 entered the scholarly record on the struggle for Jewish rights in Romania.

Abram S. Isaacs and the Scholarly Editorship

Abram Samuel Isaacs, who edited the paper from 1878, was born in New York on August 30, 1851, and graduated from New York University in 1871. He became rabbi of Barnett Memorial Temple at Paterson, New Jersey, and for thirty-five years occupied a chair at New York University, first as professor of Hebrew, then of Germanic languages, and later of Semitics. He edited the Semitic department of the Encyclopedia Americana and published books including a study of the Hebrew poet Moses Chaim Luzzatto in 1878, What Is Judaism? and Stories from the Rabbis.

Under such an editor the Messenger's literary and scholarly character, already marked by the Hebraica supplement, had professional ballast. Abram Isaacs was a frequent contributor to other periodicals on Judaism and Jewish issues even while conducting his own weekly, and the paper's final twenty-five years were the work of a university professor as much as of a communal journalist. He withdrew from editorial work when the merger came in 1903 and died at Paterson on December 22, 1920.

Merger into The American Hebrew in 1903

In 1903 the Jewish Messenger was merged with The American Hebrew, another New York weekly, and ceased to appear under its own name. The combined paper was catalogued by libraries and by the ProQuest historical newspaper collection under the title The American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, with a run dated 1857 to 1922 that preserved the Messenger's founding year at the head of the merged title's history. The American Hebrew had previously absorbed other regional Jewish papers and periodicals from Baltimore and Rochester, and it covered topics of broad international interest, including the persecution of Jews in Europe and the waves of immigration that followed.

The Jewish Encyclopedia had observed of The American Hebrew that, although it stood editorially for conservatism in Judaism, its columns were open to views with which it could not agree, and that nearly all the prominent Jewish writers and communal workers in the United States had contributed to its pages. The merger therefore joined the Messenger's Orthodox family tradition to the larger and more capacious of New York's conservative Jewish weeklies, and the Isaacs paper's forty-six years ended not in failure but in consolidation, the normal fate of the nineteenth-century denominational press as its audience consolidated around fewer, larger titles.