Adam Mendelsohn
How Jews Made it in 19th-Century America
Summary
A study of the economic mobility of Jewish immigrants in 19th-century America, particularly their role in the clothing trade through the demand for uniforms during the Civil War and the ready-made clothing industry on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Adam Mendelsohn
Adam Mendelsohn is a historian of Jewish life in English-speaking lands. Much of his work focuses on the adjustment of Jews to living in challenging societies, whether liberal and laissez-faire antebellum America and Victorian London or the racialized southern United States and South Africa. Adam is the author of The Rag Race (2014), an award-winning comparative history of Jews and the clothing trade in America and the British Empire. He is also coeditor of the journal American Jewish History. He directs the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town and is an associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies. The Centre, the only of its kind in South Africa, conducts research focused on Jews in South Africa, past and present.
Before the Civil War, much of the buying and selling of goods on behalf of plantation owners in the South was done by what were known as cotton factors - people who acted as middlemen in the southern economy. Jews stepped in as middlemen in a variety of ways after the war. The Isaac brothers and the clothing that they manufactured in London needed to get to the Confederate States of America. They bought ships to act as blockade runners and they shipped goods to Bermuda and then put the goods aboard fast sailing vessels to beat the blockade. If successful, it was very profitable. But, there was still a tremendous risk that whatever didn’t get through would be confiscated by the United States government.
The Singer sewing machine accelerated these processes. We already had sweat shops and innovation in ready-made clothing, manufacturing and things of that kind prior to the Singer sewing machine. But the Singer sewing machine allowed for entrepreneurship, for speeding up production, for prices of clothing to decline. At the beginning of the 20th century, it cost less than a hundred dollars to set up a sweatshop of your own. If you were an immigrant, one of the things you could afford to buy was a sewing machine so you could compete with others involved in clothing manufacturing.