After learning about the Irish and the Germans from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the Jews.
The Jews
Three kinds of Jews migrated to the US. First the Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal; then the German Jews; then the Eastern European Jews after 1880.
Sephardic Jews were doing OK in Spain/Portugal until they were expelled in 1492. Many arrived penniless in colonial North America but soon recovered their wealth. There were about 2,000 Jews in the colonies at the time of the Revolution. But they looked down on the Ashkenazi Jews.
Ashkenazi Jews from Germany began as a trickle but ended up at half a million by 1880. They spread out throughout the nation, "working as small tradesmen and professionals". Many started out as peddlers on foot, then graduated to horse and buggy and finally opening local stores. The Guggenheims and Gimbels started out as peddlers. By 1880 40 percent of German Jewish families had at least one servant. Less than one percent were still peddlers or laborers.
Eastern European Jews came from the Russian Pale of Settlement that suffered pogroms after the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. These Jews had settled in Eastern Europe with the encouragement of Polish royalty in the 13th and 14th centuries. But then Catherine the Great confined them in the Pale of Settlement in eastern Poland and western Russia. Fleeing from persecutions over one third of he Jews in eastern Europe fled to the United States in the four decades after 1880.
The eastern European Jews arrived penniless, but about 50 percent were literate. The "uptown"German Jews in New York looked down upon them, the "downtown" Jews, that worked in the needle trades in the Lower East Side. But the uptowners still gave the newcomers the benefit of the dense network of Jewish philanthropic institutions.
Because of their distinctive appearance and limited language skills and strict religious rules, the eastern European Jews could not spread out, but had to work among Jews. So they worked in the "sweatshops" of the garment trade of the Lower East Side in incredibly crowded tenements using Isaac Singer's new sewing machines. The garment factories were mostly owned by German Jews; a generation later eastern European Jews owned the factories and Italians were the workers.
The sweatshop today is a scandal, but they enabled women to work in the home without leaving children unattended. But the workers managed to save from their earnings to help the rise of themselves and their children. The children worked in the sweatshops, but seldom full-time, because their parents wanted them to go to school. But they didn't all go to college. Not in the first generation.
The spectacular rise of the Jews -- to top of the income rankings by 1980 -- is a testament to the experience of Jews over the centuries. They knew about barriers but knew how to circumvent them. And they largely created the clothing production industry and the movie industry. Plus many of them already had centuries of experience with urban life and commercial activity.
The Italians
Immigrants from Italy are primarily from southern Italy, mostly peasants and agricultural laborers. The culture they brought to the US reflects the culture of their homeland. Southern Italy is all wrong for prosperous agriculture. The growing season is dry; the rain comes in torrents; the agricultural land is malarial; people live in the hills; the landowners are beasts. So southern Italians trusted no-one except direct family; they did not experience a culture of law and policing. They have learned that individual initiative is dangerous, and right wrongs with the old system of vengeance. They opposed the education system imposed on them from the north, and weren't that keen on the Catholic Church.
There is a big difference between northern and southern Italian immigrants. Around 1900 12 percent of northerners were illiterate, but 54 percent of southerner. The northerners liked to pass for Americans and separate from the embarrassing southerners.
Italian immigrants from the same village tended to cluster near each other, and didn't trust people from other villages. They interacted fairly peaceably with the Jews, but not the Irish. They were dependable on the job, but lacked initiative and thus required close supervision. Typically they worked for an intermediary, a padrone, rather than an employer.
The employer paid the padrone, and the padrone paid the workers -- after deducting his fees, expenses, advances, rent, and credit charge.
Social reformers hated the padrone system and it eventually died out, as Italians became better adjusted to American life.
Immigrant culture focused on the family, and the church did not earn their loyalty. In Italy they had not attended church much, and in America they didn't get on with the Irish that ran the church and the Catholic schools. They created mutual-aid societies, but they were fragmented according to village or provincial origins. Italian immigrants were active in labor unions, but created few organizations themselves. They had lower crime rates than other immigrant groups, but because they immediately responded to an insult or an attack with a knife people learned not to provoke them. The famous Italian Mafia didn't take off until Prohibition.
Italians were anti-education, and took a while to change their minds. This meant that the experts regarded Italians as mentally inferior. Even in 1980, college attendance by Italian Americans was below average. Still, the Italians did rise. In 1910 in Boston, two-thirds were manual laborers, but only 38 percent at the end of their working life.
Italian Americans caught up with the Irish occupationally. Even in 1909, 22 percent of Italians in Boston were in business compared to 5 percent of the Irish. But they made their way in ways that did not require formal education. They did not just work; they saved.
When they first arrived Italians had less hostility to blacks than other immigrant groups. But later the groups grew apart. Partly that is because Italians are less inclined to participate in "white flight" from lower-income neighborhoods. Italians get on much better with Chinese than with the Irish.
Next: Chinese, Japanese
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