NYT: Prohibition presented a dilemma. “Should Jews insist on ‘special rights’ for the sake of their own historical continuity, or break with the past for the sake of assimilation?” That dilemma, [Marni] Davis writes, meant that “in the years leading up to and during national Prohibition, Jews who made a living selling liquor, or who defended alcohol’s legal availability, unwittingly acted as flash points for American anxieties about immigration and capitalism.”
But the more scholarly challenge Davis faces is making a case for Jewish exceptionalism when it comes to the temperance movement and America’s response to it. She prudently avoids conclusive findings, gingerly pointing out that while Jews generally opposed Prohibition, class, cultural and denominational divides reflected a profound ambivalence.
Jews usually defended their exemption for sacramental wine, but so did Roman Catholics (although she aptly notes that Catholics consumed their wine in church, while Jews were allowed to drink at home, leaving a lot more latitude for bootleggers). Anti-Semites like Henry Ford blamed Jewish distillers for poisoning the flower of American youth, but, Davis writes, “the populist movement cannot conclusively be described as either indifferent or hostile toward Jews.” Similarly, “while many regarded Jewish bootlegging as proof that Jews were incapable of conforming to American values,” she adds that “one might instead regard it as evidence of Jewish acculturation, since the flouting of Prohibition law was practically a national pastime.”
We do learn that there were disproportionately large numbers of Jewish saloonkeepers in many cities, particularly in immigrant and black neighborhoods (and that their occupation was rooted in Eastern Europe, where it also provoked divisions). But when it comes to comparing customers, is it fair, or accurate, to equate German immigrant saloongoers with Jewish cafe habitués? The temperance movement held Jews up as models of moderation at the same time that Jews (and German immigrants, among others) viewed Prohibition as a potential infringement on their religious and civil liberties in a nonsectarian state.
