Blowing the Shofar

Blowing the Shofar

In a rented room above Max’s Grocery, 10 men gathered to read the Torah and blow the shofar in celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It had not been easy to assemble 10 men—a minyan—to hold this ceremony. But with Jewish immigration increasing, that would soon change.

The year was 1836, and the place, St. Louis, Missouri—a city perched astride the Mississippi River and a gateway to the West. St. Louis radiated opportunity for those who came as voluntary migrants. Its merchants stocked the steamboats traveling the Mississippi, opened trade with Mexico via the Santa Fe Trail and provisioned wagon trains heading west.

Jews didn’t come to the Mississippi Valley to proselytize. Nor did they seek to bring all other Jews with them. They did, however, claim a place and a future for themselves in the West. By migrating to St. Louis and practicing their traditions, they exercised the freedoms often denied them in Europe because of their religion.

“Passover Seder,” Once a Week, 1862
Alamy

The Port of St. Louis

The Rosh Hashanah service at Max’s Grocery took place near this busy riverfront. Steamboats ferried goods and passengers in a traffic propelled by westward expansion. Provisioning stores like Max’s advertised “pilot bread,” a hard baked cracker made of flour, salt, and water “warranted to keep two years.” Others sold cast iron cookware, heating stoves, covered wagons, and oxen.

Missouri's status as a slave state is on clear display. The artist, Swiss immigrant J.C. Wild, represented the port’s labor force through the figure of an enslaved Black worker pushing a wheelbarrow. A whip-wielding overseer observes him from horseback.

Wild also depicted two Native figures climbing the levee. By 1840, tens of thousands of Native peoples had been forced west of the Mississippi River. Perhaps Wild included these two figures to represent the “frontier,” making a nod to St. Louis as the "Gateway to the West."

J.C. Wild (ca. 1804–1846)
View of Front Street, 1840
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society

United Hebrew Congregation cemetery ledger, 1840s–60s
Courtesy United Hebrew Congregation and Missouri Historical Society

A Jewish Cemetery

Jewish religious tradition required proper care for the dead. In 1840, the pioneering group of St. Louis Jews—mostly Central European immigrants who had first settled in Philadelphia—purchased and consecrated their own cemetery. They could now practice the communal customs of ritual burial on their own land.

A year later, the group formally established the first Jewish congregation west of the Mississippi, United Hebrew Congregation (1841–present). Soon after, they formed a benevolent society to aid indigent Jews and provide small loans for business or personal needs. Next, they built a synagogue. All these steps created a future in St. Louis for a Jewish community.

An English-language Torah

In the 1840s, Rabbi Isaac Leeser translated the Torah into English. The Torah includes the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—what Christians call the Old Testament. Leeser’s monumental work broadened access to Judaism’s core text and propelled the Americanization of Jewish life and worship. It also offered American Jews an alternative to Protestant versions of the Bible, which included disparaging references to Jews and Judaism.

Leeser vigorously argued for Jewish belonging in America. His article, “The United States Not a Christian State,” admonished those who called the US a Christian country. How could that be, he contended, when neither the federal nor most of the state governments “demand the existence of Christianity as a prerequisite for the existence of the government”?

The Law of God, edited with former translation diligently compared and revised by Isaac Leeser, 1845
Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society

“The United States Not a Christian State”

“We have often maintained that no one can claim for the United States the name of a Christian state. The authors of the union and state constitutions have shown their wisdom; they found men of the most opposite opinions joined together in this country, and they would not, and could not take upon themselves to decide which should be the orthodox or state religion. The laws of the country know nothing of any religious profession, and leave every man to pursue whatever religion he pleases.

It is foolish to pretend to assert that there is a state religion; either that it is Judaism, Christianity, or anything else. All men have an equal right to be here; one does not tolerate the other, nor has he to thank him, legally, for leaving him undisturbed, however practically the minority are at the mercy of the majority. Might makes right here as well as elsewhere; and the fanatics for all opinions know this perfectly well, and they therefore endeavour to make their views those of the majority, that they may carry them through and force them on the community by the brute power of numbers.”

—Isaac Leeser, The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, February 1, 1850

Sacralizing the Landscape and US-Mexico War