The Grand Street Riot (review of Scott D. Seligman's 'The Chief Rabbi's Funeral)

Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2025

It was a hot Wednesday in July 1902 when the chief rabbi of New York City was to be laid to rest. The first and last religious leader with a plausible claim to the title—one more common in Europe, where Jewish communities were recognized by the state—the once-vigorous Jacob Joseph, paralyzed by strokes, had finally succumbed at the age of sixty-two.

Two days later, the streets of the Lower East Side were flooded with a wailing mass of mourners. An enormous procession wound through the narrow streets, a small squad of police officers in front, followed by five hundred young Jewish boys, then the hearse with the rabbi’s coffin, Jerusalem dirt scattered in the bottom. More than two hundred horse-drawn carriages came next, bearing other rabbis as well as community leaders and friends and relations of the deceased. Some thirty thousand congregants from various synagogues in the city followed on foot.

In all, estimates of the crowd ranged from one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand. En route to the East River wharves, where a ferry would carry the coffin to Brooklyn and Joseph’s final resting place in Cypress Hills—the nearby plots had been quickly bought up—the mourners carved a three-mile route past nearly every synagogue on the Lower East Side, stopping at six for blessings and eulogies.

“The East Side had never seen anything quite like it,” Scott D. Seligman writes in The Chief Rabbi’s Funeral. Neither had the rest of the city. One Brooklyn paper described the marchers as “the children of the ghetto, uncouth, unlettered, and strangers alike to the language, the laws and the customs of the land in which they are sojourners.” Clustered in their corner of the city, droning away in garment factories, living ten families to a tenement, the rapidly multiplying Jewish population of the Lower East Side—that “seething human sea,” as Forverts editor Abraham Cahan put it—had never before made such a public show of force.

As the funeral rounded onto Grand Street, the mourners passed a city-block-sized factory. The leading manufacturer of printing presses in the United States, R. Hoe & Company employed some 1,800 workers, including young apprentices who were known to harass Jewish pedestrians. “Jews had been attacked so often,” the American Hebrew later wrote, that “that part of Grand Street is abandoned while the workmen have their lunches.” The factory was known as a place for Jews to avoid, lest they draw the attention of the “whisker pullers,” but by the time the hearse came into view, the police officers in front had already passed by, leaving the marchers unprotected.

*

America was a goldene medine (golden land) for the newly arrived Eastern European immigrants, who enjoyed freedoms they never had in the Old World—the freedom to work, to worship, to move around, as well as “freedom from pogroms, the violent, antisemitic riots in which Jews were attacked, raped, and murdered and their property destroyed.” Seligman adds, “That sort of thing did not happen in the United States.”

There were also dangers, such as the constant fear, as the American Hebrew put it, that America’s influence could “make our sons and daughters forget their duty to the religion in which their ancestors lived, and for which those ancestors died.”

Earlier German-speaking immigrants, many of whom had embraced Reform Judaism, looked down on these new arrivals as unkempt, low-class adherents of obsolete religious practices. For the Reformers, the old laws were incompatible with the opportunities presented by America, where such rules could be freely ignored.

Partly in an effort to fight liberalizing influences, New York’s Orthodox leaders sought to establish order in the city’s Jewish community, particularly with regard to kosher meat certification, for which lawlessness had led to inflated prices and scandalous accounts of treif meat being passed off as kosher. There were some 130 synagogues on the Lower East Side, without any council or organization representing all of them. In the late 1880s, some decided to scout around for a “chief rabbi” to represent at least part of the Orthodox community. They prepared a job description for the role:

His mission would be to remove the stumbling blocks from before our people and to unite the hearts of our brethren, the House of Israel, to serve God with one heart and soul, and to supervise with an open eye the shoychtim [kosher slaughterers] and all other matters of holiness to the House of Israel, which to our deep sorrow are not observed nor respected, because there is no authority nor guide revered and accepted by the whole community, and each one is an authority unto himself.

Somehow the posting found its way to Jacob Joseph, a forty-seven-year-old rabbi from a small town near Vilnius. Joseph was known for his brilliant sermons, earning him the nickname “Yankele Charif,” or “Jake the Sharp.” From afar, he negotiated a handsome contract for himself and accepted the job.

When the rabbi disembarked in Manhattan, in 1888, reporters were surprised to find not a bespectacled old scholar but a robust man with a round, flat face and a scruffy beard without a speck of gray, puffing on a cigar. The New York Herald described Joseph as looking like “one accustomed to hold authority.” America was going to test his skills for doing so. Despite his great learning and worldliness—in addition to Yiddish and Hebrew, he knew Russian, Polish, and German—he did not speak English and knew nothing of the New World. “These would be obstacles,” Seligman writes.

Joseph’s first public comments only exacerbated divisions in the Jewish community. A reporter for the New York Sun noticed that younger listeners had little interest in the rabbi’s appeals for communal unity and stricter religious observance. “He is an old fogy in their eyes,” the Sun commented. “And they look with something like pity on him as a good man whom the progress of the New World has left far behind, with his jargon and his old fashioned observances and antiquated superstition.”

*

Joseph mostly stayed out of secular politics, but in 1889, on the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration, the rabbi issued a Yiddish circular warning Jewish immigrants not to vote if they had not been naturalized as citizens, which Tammany Hall operatives were encouraging them to do. “Do not allow yourself to be enticed to do wrong,” Joseph warned. “Especially in this, our country, which treats us Jews so well and so brotherly, we should certainly not return evil for good.”

Seligman paints a vivid portrait of Tammany Hall’s New York, where organized crime was a city-run business:

Tammany enriched itself and its bosses and enabled its own survival by shaking down contractors and businesses, extracting kickbacks, embezzling public funds, and charging hefty fees for the myriad political appointments it was empowered to make.

Tammany’s bosses ran the police precincts in their jurisdictions, with power to hire and fire at will and move officers around to suit the machine’s purposes. But a backlash grew among good-government and antivice groups. Seth Low, a former mayor of Brooklyn and president of Columbia University, won the mayoralty of the newly consolidated city in 1901 on the promise of ending bribery, extortion, and election fraud and clearing Tammany out of the police department.

Many Jews had supported Tammany, which, despite its origins as a nativist organization, had morphed into a powerful Irish-dominated vehicle for immigrant participation in politics. But Tammany had grown out of control. Police harassed Jewish peddlers and beat striking garment workers. “We are tired of the persecutions of Tammany,” the American Hebrew wrote during the election, in which, Seligman writes, Jewish voters in Manhattan and Brooklyn made the difference in electing Low.

As for Rabbi Joseph, he botched his mission in nearly every way, especially in his attempted reform of the kosher meat industry. Consumers resented the tax he imposed to pay for a proper certification system. A letter in the Jewish Messenger accused Joseph of “making a business out of his office and making the poor class suffer for the benefit of his favorites.”

As a Litvak, Joseph commanded little authority over Galicianers, who hired their own chief rabbi a few years after Joseph’s arrival. There were other claimants, as well. Chaim Yaakov Vidrowitz, a Hasidic rabbi from Moscow, put up a sign outside his Henry Street synagogue that read “Chief Rabbi of America.” Asked who gave him the authority, Vidrowitz answered, “The sign painter.”

Joseph’s credentials were hardly more secure. Without any coercive authority, he could only be as effective as New York’s Jewish community wanted him to be, which was not very. Abraham Cahan called the rabbi “a flower transplanted to uncongenial soil.” His six-year term was not renewed. By 1898, Joseph was bedridden; he had to be lifted into and out of a chair. Four years later, he died “not only paralyzed but nearly penniless.”

Why, then, did the entire Jewish community pour into the streets for his funeral? Seligman speculates that the Lower East Siders were “perhaps guilt-ridden over their callous treatment of him, [and] seemed intent on according him the honor in death they had denied him in life.” They had not been the Jews that Joseph had called on them to be. Massed in the Manhattan streets that hot July morning, they may have been mourning more than just a man.

*

As the funeral passed Hoe’s six-floor factory, scraps of dirty cotton were hurled down on the rabbis in their carriages, followed by pieces of steel and wood, bolts and nuts, then bricks and rocks—even a cat carcass. Penned in, the mourners could not escape. “Is this free America?” one elderly man yelled. “It is worse than Russia!”

It was about to get even more violent, and Seligman does a masterful job marshaling every piece of evidence available to put the reader on the scene. Desperate to stop the mayhem, mourners pushed their way into the lobby of the factory, pleading with the workers to stop the boys upstairs from throwing things at the marchers. But they were screaming in Yiddish, and the workers did not understand. Some picked up a hose and began spraying it, while upstairs the boys began pouring buckets of scalding water down on the mourners.

Some of the marchers grabbed whatever was raining down on them and threw it back at their attackers. Wielding umbrellas they had brought to block out the sun, they started smashing the factory’s windows that lined the street. The carriage drivers whipped their horses to get out of the clutch of bodies, but “even this caused harm as the agitated beasts trampled people who were in their way,” Seligman writes. “Groans were audible and blood was everywhere.”

Then the police arrived. Officers started cracking their batons against heads. The New York World reported that the police were striking every person who looked Jewish, including women, children, and the elderly. Hundreds were injured, some critically—though none, miraculously, were killed.

“It was somewhat difficult,” the New York Post’s correspondent wrote, “to reconcile this scene with the fact that these people had gathered there to attend a funeral, to show their veneration for a dead rabbi who was lying in the supremest peace and quiet less than a hundred yards away.”

*

Seligman has appended a note to his book that promises no “feelings or motives [have] been ascribed” to people “that were not made explicit by their words or actions.” Although such reticence is understandable—some popular history goes too far in the other direction—the book largely avoids analysis not only of individuals’ motives but of the meaning of the events portrayed. Seligman briefly weighs differing contemporary accounts of whether the incident was antisemitic or anti-immigrant (as one socialist paper put it, the Hoe workers “would have done the same to Chinese, Italians or other foreigners”). The author concludes that the attack reflected “the condescension of earlier arrivals toward an impoverished, unkempt group of latecomers.” Yet instead of exploring these questions at length, the final third of the book gets lost in courtroom proceedings that ultimately don’t provide much in the way of drama or historical significance.

I, at least, could have used a fuller airing of a theme the book only hints at: that the Grand Street riot was a response to the Jews’ increasing Americanization, the very process that Rabbi Joseph had arrived in New York to forestall.Only when they began standing up for themselves and resisting the Tammany machine did they face the full brunt of its violence. “Before the Jew became independent in politics . . . there was none of this trouble,” said one well-connected Jewish saloonkeeper. “But since he has voted against the wishes of the police, he must be punished. That is the reason for the actions at the riot.”

The attack accelerated that same process. Coming together in the aftermath to demand accountability, New York Jews had to learn to play the game of interest group politics. Although prejudice in the States could be as brutal as in Europe, here they could organize and resist.

In some ways, the riot had beneficial effects. It healed the breach, at least temporarily, between uptown and downtown Jews. The night of the attack, well-positioned community leaders and lawyers began meeting to demand a serious investigation. The hordes of new immigrants had brought negative attention and prejudice—but also more votes. “Fine words, promises, assurances as to the future will not suffice!” Di Yidishe Velt implored Mayor Low and the district attorney. “Action is called for! Examples should be made!”

Low responded accordingly. He ordered the police commissioner to “make a careful report to me on the disturbance yesterday,” then followed up by appointing a blue-ribbon citizens committee, led by Louis \ Marshall, the prominent lawyer who a few years later cofounded the American Jewish Committee and was an early leader of the NAACP. The committee came to the conclusion that, contrary to police reports, the factory workers were responsible for the violence, and police officers had beaten Jewish mourners “without the least excuse.” “This was . . . surely a first for New York’s Jews,” Seligman writes. “They had the political establishment firmly in their corner.”

Rather than a “bloody pogrom,” as the Forverts described it, the attack on the rabbi’s funeral procession—and the response to it—proved immigrant Jews’ bona fides as Americans. While patronizingly describing them as “small, bent, ill-fed, weak and ignorant,” and therefore deserving of chivalrous protection by Gentiles, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle congratulated the Lower East Siders for having responded “in good American fashion” to the attack. As Seligman’s careful study shows, they were bludgeoned into belonging.