What We Don’t Want to Believe

We drove Cousin Leon home from a bar mitzvah a few years ago. He’s eighty, he’s been at that shul longer than the rabbi, and he spent the ride expounding on the ways of the world from the back seat. He wanted to tell me about August Belmont. Belmont, he said, was a self-hating Jew. Made his fortune, raised his children Episcopalian, changed his name from Schönberg so nobody would know. He said it the way people say things they’ve known for sixty years.

I remembered this story when I was reading Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. Let’s unpack that title. Horn’s argument is that the world enjoys appropriating Jewish suffering once it’s over and they can make it instructive, and has considerably less patience for Jews who are still around and have opinions, or politics, or a yarmulke. Dead Jews teach lessons about tolerance. Living Jews complicate them. In 2017 the Anne Frank House told a young Orthodox employee to cover his kippah with a museum baseball cap, and took four months of board deliberation to decide he could take it off. Horn wonders why it takes four months to let a Jew out of hiding.

The book’s harder argument is about the stories Jews tell themselves. Many Jewish families have an Ellis Island story. The great-grandfather gets off the boat, the clerk can’t spell what he hears, and he ends up with an American name that only vaguely resembles his original one. It becomes an essential fact in their Jewish American story.

Horn says it didn’t happen. The inspectors at Ellis Island didn’t write names down at all. They checked arrivals against ship manifests compiled at the port of departure, and the people doing the checking were required to speak several languages. The name changes came later, in American courthouses, when they petitioned the court to change it.

Horn didn’t think any of this was news. She’d read it on the Ellis Island museum’s own tours. She mentioned it once at a lecture at a Jewish institution and was mobbed by furious, well-read people insisting their own great-grandfather was the exception, offering no evidence beyond “my great-grandfather wouldn’t lie.” They were educated American Jews, angry at a Jewish writer for telling them something true about their own grandparents.

They had good reason to change their names. In the 1920s the Ivy League passed quotas so its colleges wouldn’t be overwhelmed by Jews, and Harvard explained that this was good for the Jews, since too many of them on campus would only produce more antisemitism. Neighborhoods wrote covenants into their deeds to keep Jews from buying houses. Employment agencies in New York ran ads specifying Christians, or Gentiles, or Anglo-Saxons. Almost none of it was against the law, and most of it wasn’t hidden.

Kirsten Fermaglich went through the New York City Civil Court’s name-change petitions for her book A Rosenberg by Any Other Name. In the 1930s Jews were about a quarter of the city and roughly sixty-five percent of the people filing. Max Greenberger filed in 1932 to become Greene, and explained in the petition that a foreign-sounding name wasn’t helping his daughter get work as a musician or his son get a hospital internship. Dora Sarietzky, a stenographer, wrote that “my name proved to be a great handicap in securing a position,” and that she’d already started calling herself Doris Watson to find work.

What almost none of them wrote down was the word antisemitism. They wrote foreign-sounding. Even in the document where they abandoned the name, they wouldn’t say why.

Fermaglich’s argument is that American antisemitism ran unofficially, through private agreements and unwritten preferences, which is exactly why people changed their names. There was just a manager who went with the other resume and never gave a reason. When you can’t get a job, you don’t have the luxury of staging a protest. Greenberger had four children. He needed his son to get the internship. Nobody filing those petitions was trying to stop being a Jew. They were trying to get hired, and the word we reach for now arrived later, from people who never had to file anything.

The myth is the most comfortable story in every way that matters to the family telling it. It has a villain who isn’t America, just an overworked clerk with a pen and a bad ear. Nobody in it is ashamed, and nobody in it makes a decision. The grandfather steps off the boat and something is done to him, and whatever it is, he’s still the man who got here.

Take the clerk away and everything has to be re-examined. Now the grandfather filled out a form and wrote a different name on it, and somebody helped him decide which one. And now everyone in the room named Greene, who grew up hearing about the clerk, is carrying a name that was handed over rather than taken. Horn reads the clerk story as the thing the parents told the kids so the kids could keep believing in America, and she calls it an act of love. The question underneath all of it is whether the grandfather hid, and the man who wouldn’t hire him has been dead for sixty years.

Leon thought he had another story about a Jew who was trying to deny his identity. I looked it up when I got home. Cousin Leon’s self-hating Jew was born Belmont. His father held the name before August was born, and August carried it his whole life. There was no Schönberg to abandon.¹

The Schönberg story came from his enemies. Belmont was the Rothschilds’ man in New York and, from 1860, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, which made him the most visible Jew in American politics at the moment the country was tearing itself in half. A Jew with a hidden name is a better villain than a Jew with an ordinary one.

The smear worked so well that it outlived every man who made it, and a hundred and sixty years later it got repeated in the back seat of my car, by a Jew, to a Jew, about a Jew. I pulled up in front of Leon’s house and he said he’d see me at the next bar mitzvah.

Footnotes

1. The name was his father’s doing, and it wasn’t a disguise. Simon Belmont was the son of Isaac, and until 1808 he went by Simon Isaac, which was how it worked before Jews in the region had fixed surnames. In 1808 Napoleon ordered every Jew in France and its German territories to take one. Alzey was under French rule at the time, so Simon chose a French one, Belmont, beautiful mountain. Schönberg is the same words in German, which is where the confusion comes from and probably where the smear found its foothold. August was born Aron Belmont in Alzey on December 8, 1813, five years after the name was settled, to a father who served as president of the town’s synagogue. The Encyclopaedia Judaica says plainly that his enemies circulated the story that his original name was Schoenberg. The sources for the rest are Richard Gottheil’s The Belmont-Belmonte Family (1917) and David Black’s The King of Fifth Avenue (1981). Plenty of reference works still print Schönberg as his birth name, including the Massachusetts Historical Society’s finding aid for his papers and the infobox on his Wikipedia page, which contradicts the article body directly below it. The myth is still winning on the page. ↩︎