Going west

When it comes to Jewish history, Pittsburgh was once further west than cities far to the west of it. To understand this riddle, you have to think of “west” in two ways. The first is a geographic designation: West is the land of the setting sun. The second is a state of mind: West is the perpetual American frontier, an open space waiting for the future.

If you rank American cities by their first synagogue, you find that Pittsburgh (1848) followed Buffalo (1847), Chicago (1846), Cleveland (1842), St. Louis (1841), Louisville (1836), and Cincinnati (1824), as well as many southern cities. Fort Wayne (1848), Wheeling (1849), Detroit (1850), and Milwaukee (1850) all nipped at our heels.

We tend to think of American expansion as a gradual push from the coasts. In Jewish history, westward expansion proceeded stepwise to the Allegheny Mountains, jumped to Ohio and points beyond, and then doubled back to Western Pennsylvania.

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The general explanation for this lag in Jewish activity is economic. Already industrialized by the mid-1820s, Pittsburgh eventually had more supply than demand. It needed to export, but seasonal obstructions in the Ohio River limited trade to the west and improved transportation corridors from the east bypassed Western Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh also struggled to attract economic activity from back east. An east coast trader heading west in 1830 had three options: taking the National Road from Cumberland, Pennsylvania, to Wheeling, West Virginia, and from there to the Ohio and the Mississippi; taking the Erie Canal from Troy, New York, to cities along Lake Erie; or spending six weeks leading pack mules over the Allegheny Mountains between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Eager to compete, the Pennsylvania General Assembly launched a major public works project in the late 1820s. The Pennsylvania Canal would connect Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with lateral branches into various parts of the commonwealth and several railroads and inclines. When the main line opened in 1834, the trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh took less than a week. This certainly contributed to early Jewish settlement.

There has been continuous Jewish settlement in Pittsburgh since 1838, and possibly earlier. The local Jewish historian Jacob Feldman determined that date through clever research. The July 1843 subscriber list of the American Occident included five readers from Western Pennsylvania. Using city directories and other primary sources, Feldman tracked these men backward year-by-year to determine when they got to town.

The Pennsylvania Canal also facilitated a Jewish dispersion that remained a defining feature of the Jewish experience in Western Pennsylvania for 150 years. The Erie Extension Canal was a lateral connecting Pittsburgh to Erie, and several towns along its route quickly experienced Jewish migration: Franklin (1839), Erie (1842), Meadville (1843), New Castle (by 1848), Greenville (by 1850), and so on. An alternate path for the extension would have followed the Allegheny River north from Kittanning. Jewish migration along that unchosen route remained forever spotty, and those towns never produced a Jewish community large enough to support an independent congregation.

The Pennsylvania Canal was a technical marvel and an economic failure. It was famously unprofitable and ever beset by the need for repairs. By the time it reached its full extent, it had already been made obsolete by the new Pennsylvania Railroad and by improvements to the natural waterways. The Pennsylvania Canal did, however, facilitate the movement of goods, which eventually attracted some Jewish merchants and peddlers.

The reconstruction of Pittsburgh following the Great Fire of 1845 and the completion of a rail line from Philadelphia in 1852 gave Western Pennsylvania an economic supercharge. Still, our Jewish community was slow to grow. Feldman noted that Pittsburgh had some 60 Jewish families in the mid-1850s, while Milwaukee had 200. Even by 1880, with the Gilded Age well underway, our Jewish population lagged behind Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis and Milwaukee — all cities we eventually surpassed.

Feldman cites various causes: rampant nativism in Pittsburgh, internal divides in our Jewish community and a harsh setting. Pittsburgh was a daunting place to live back then. It can be a daunting place to live today, even with the assistance of many bridges, and tunnels, and pavement, and snowplows, and locks, and dams, and retaining walls.

A local journalist once described the city thusly, “Frequent and loud complaints are uttered, both by transient and stationary residents, against the filthy streets, villainous smells, licensed swine and other nuisances, equally hard to ensure, which are so peculiarly the characteristics of Pittsburgh.” The writer proceeded to eloquently mock the city as muddy, smoky, disorganized and lawless before concluding, “With all these crying and trying perils, inconveniences and wants, which daily and nightly beset them, the great majority of our citizens are doggedly contented with their place of abode.” He wrote those words in 1826, and the description only became more apt as the city grew.

Even so, the 18 years between the opening of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal and the opening of the Pennsylvania Railroad had several significant markers of Jewish settlement: the first Jewish cemetery, the first synagogue, and the first Jewish families spread across multiple small towns. Those 18 years mark the moment when the experiences of individual Jews expanded into each other to create a Jewish community.

Eric Lidji is the director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center. He can be reached at rjarchives@heinzhistorycenter.org or 412-454-6406.