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From the American Scene:
The Jewish Past in America
- Abstract
The three volumes of Memoirs of American Jews: 1775–1865, edited by Jacob Rader Marcus, cover the period from the beginning of the Revolution until the end of the Civil War. Some of the writers are well known, at least to students of American Jewish history; many are unknown except—if at all—to their descendants. Some of the memoirs are extracts from books and others from journals or reminiscences still in manuscript; a few are pieced together from letters, and one is an after-dinner speech as reported in a newspaper. Many show the rise of penniless immigrants to positions of importance, or at least of stability, in the general community; some show the rise of the children of immigrants to positions of importance in the professions—including the military; a few show the general decline in religious observance and religious studies and the steady assimilation of Jews into the Christian community. All this is hardly new; but the memoirs are valuable as source material and as evidence, and, in many cases, in themselves as stories of adventure or records of observation with an interest far from exclusively Jewish.
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