On many levels, the Crimean War of 1854-6 marks a significant historical watershed between the Romantic and the Modern. That constitutes a great loss to them and to society, one that this exhibition is a small contribution toward filling. Today, even fewer American Jews have much awareness of the journey, its aftermath or how it shaped the country in which they live. But for the Jews who came to America long after the Civil War, the role that Jews played in that conflict, which made that tolerant host society possible, was largely an unclaimed inheritance. By 1900, the Jewish population in the United States had exploded, as waves of European Jews found themselves in the most tolerant host society Jews had ever encountered. The “Golden America” encountered by millions of Jews and other immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was refined in that passage through the fire. America as we understand it emerged from that examination of conscience. The greatest of these gifts may have been the answer that emerged to the question, what kind of country will emerge from this conflict? That answer will always be contested to some degree, but it seems to have been this: one with a broad concept of citizenship and great latitude for religious and cultural diversity. That Jews brought their talents, skills, networks, energy, ingenuity, courage, readiness to sacrifice, and passion to the search for answers to countless urgent questions that arose in the war constituted a real gift to the country. The aftermath of the Civil War brought new forms of racism and antisemitism into being, yet for Jews, their passage through the fire had made them generally more secure in American society, readier to assert a role in public life, and better able to advance in the realms of finance, commerce and manufacturing.
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