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live uptown; Eastern European Jews were, in their vast majority, working class and
still largely lived downtown. In fact, there was significant social, cultural, and
geographic distance between the two groupings, and most of the members of each
group had little to do with the other on the level of daily life.14
The relations between Eastern European and German Jews in Baltimore
were both antagonistic and symbiotic. For example, German Jews created
philanthropic institutions that were primarily designed to aid the poorer and more
recently arrived Eastern European Jewish community, thereby strengthening the
common Jewish identity. This philanthropy, however, was often extremely
paternalistic and sometimes openly based on embarrassment over the supposedly
less civilized behavior of Eastern Europeans. Consequently, the German Jewish
philanthropy that often materially aided Eastern European Jews came at a price,
and the resulting resentment reinforced a particularly Eastern European Jewish
identity and sense of resistance. The fact that many Eastern European Jews
labored for clothing firms owned by German Jews was likewise a two-edged sword.
On the one hand, trade union struggle in the garment industry often took on the
complexion of class war within the Baltimore Jewish community. On the other,
employment in Jewish-owned firms meant that Orthodox Jews could better pursue
their religious practices, and wealth from garment production was spread
throughout the Jewish community (albeit in an unequal manner). 5
The result of the internal social complexity of the Baltimore Jewish
community was an extremely rich, varied system of ethnic culture that combined
institutions that sought to unify the community (such as the Jewish Court of Justice
, the second one established in the U.S.; the aforementioned philanthropies), with
webs of localized institutions representing distinct sections of the community (the
Reform temples, the Orthodox shules, the landsmanshaftn). Additionally, drawing
on Jewish cultural traditions of resistance, the Baltimore community had a socially
active wing that was expressed both in working class-based radicalism (labor
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