It was, indeed, from their broad-minded
scholars that there originated the widespread liberal Judaism which
has become a potent ethical force in our great cities.
The Austrian and Hungarian Jews followed. The Jews had always received
liberal treatment in Hungary, and their mingling with the social
Magyars had produced the type of the coffeehouse Jew, who loved to
reproduce in American cities the conviviality of Vienna and Budapest
but who did not take as readily to American ways as the German Jew.
Most of the Jews from Hungary remained in New York, although Chicago
and St. Louis received a few of them. In commercial life they are
traders, pawnbrokers, and peddlers, and control the artificial-flower
and passementerie trade.
By far the largest group are the latest comers, the Russian Jews.
"Ultra orthodox," says Edward A. Steiner, "yet ultra radical; chained
to the past, and yet utterly severed from it; with religion permeating
every act of life, or going to the other extreme and having 'none of
it'; traders by instinct, and yet among the hardest manual laborers
of our great cities. A complex mass in which great things are yearning
to express themselves, a brooding mass which does not know itself and
does not lightly disclose itself to the outside."[41] Nearly a million
of these people are crowded into the New York ghettos.
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