>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. 
^M00:00:04
^M00:00:16
>> Mary Jane Deeb:  [Inaudible] the chief of the African and Middle East Division and I'm delighted to be reading today to celebrate Jewish American heritage month. And we have been doing this every year and each section of the division has done -- has partnered with the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington. So [inaudible] back here and I met Mary Jane again who was part of the society. And we had [inaudible] Mary Jane's. The African Middle East Division, as you know, has [inaudible] section which connects [inaudible] from all over the world. [Inaudible] and [inaudible] from all over the world. We also have an African section. I think that all the countries of Africa in the [inaudible] section that goes from Morocco to Afghanistan to Central Asia and the Caucasus. So we do collect widely and hopefully deeply as well, and but the most important is our specialists. And our specialists are scholars themselves who know the world, who know the country, who have wide network among scholars like yourselves, and we invite them to join us here in the library because it is from the scholars that we learn so much about what we hold. In other words, it's a circle. You teach us, and we will [inaudible] the books that inform you. So it's [inaudible]. And today we have one of the professor who introduce by Ms. Horowitz and [inaudible] but I just wanted to read a few things that was said about the book, Roads Taken: Jewish Peddlers and their American Journey. And I was searching it and I found one review. First of all, it's about the book, which was a finalist in the 2015 National Jewish Book award in the category of American Jewish Studies. And it was this time that this landmark study permanently changed our perceptions of the modern Jewish experience and Jewish social and economic history. It is Jonathan Karp, author of The Politics of Jewish Commerce, Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638-1848. So as this [inaudible] book and this marvelous account of [inaudible] that was [inaudible] fiction in [inaudible] Hasia Diner imaginatively paces down some of the dusty roads in this Jewish peddler's [inaudible]. She shows how work, pressure, and religious belief are deeply entwined. That was Walter Friedman, author of Birth of a Salesman. And a third one is [inaudible] Robin Cohen from Oxford University who describes the book as this intensely researched book about the underside Jewish migration which provides a [inaudible] account of how [inaudible] intervention [inaudible] influence your societies. [Inaudible] is [inaudible]. So now to introduce Hasia Diner, Professor Diner, is our own Ms. Horowitz. 
^M00:04:07
^M00:04:11
>> Sharon Horowitz: Okay. Thank you, Mary Jane. Let me add my welcome to everyone. Yes. I'll try. On behalf of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington and the Hebraic section, I want to thank you all for coming to today's program in celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month. The Hebraic section marked its beginning in 1912 with the receipt of 10,000 Hebrew books and pamphlets whose purchase was made possible by a gift from New York philanthropist Jacob Schiff. From those humble beginnings, our collections have grown to around 250,000 items in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo, Persian and other Hebraic script languages. The Hebraic section also includes an important collection of books in Ge'ez, Amharic and Tigrinya, the languages of Ethiopia past and present. Two of our missions in this division are to publicize our collections and to bring people into the library. One way we accomplish this second goal is by holding lectures and by having programs such as the one we are hosting here today. Before I introduce today's speaker, it is my pleasure to call upon Ms. Sheila Wexler, President of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington and one of today's program's cosponsors, to say a few words about the society. 
^M00:05:43
[ Applause ] 
^M00:05:46
>> Sheila Wexler:  Thank you and this is a pleasure for us to be here today and to sponsor our wonderful speaker. The Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington was created about 37 years ago, a little over that, and the purpose was the interest in tracing your family tree. And as time went on, we found out that our mission was more than that. It was education. We wanted people to understand how research was done, what was the purpose of doing genealogy, and then to go beyond that, and that was to understand our families and those that made up our ancestral peoples. Where they came from, how they lived, what they did in the United States, and how they existed before they got here. So it was more than just getting a name and a date. And I think we've been successful with that. While the focus still remains on, you know, finding your ancestors and building that family tree, we've gone beyond that. And with DNA testing, we're finding even more people who are interested in genealogy. So we're winding up with more than Jewish members, that is those who identify as Jewish today. We're winding up with people from other cultures who are saying, "I don't understand why this is showing up in my DNA." I had one lady who came up to me and said, "I don't understand what this Iberian thing is." She's never been [inaudible] the American Revolution. And I said, "Hmm. Iberian. You know, possibly you've got a Sephardim, a Jewish person from Spain, in your background." And she just -- then she proceeded to tell me the story about a great-great-great grandmother who, on her death bed, started speaking another language. So I think you may have somebody spoke [inaudible]. And she walked away just shaking her head. I had a letter from someone from a university the other day who was interested in our group. She has Jamaican background and said, "Jamaican Jewish? Is that possible?" It is. So, you know, we're finding more and more people who are interested because of the DNA. So we welcome everybody to come to our meetings. Become members. We help each other learn. And so it isn't just pick up the book and you're going to find your names in there. It's understand what your family did when they got here, and that's what we're so happy to have Hasia Diner [inaudible] here with us today. 
^M00:08:15
[ Applause ] 
^M00:08:17
>> Sharon Horowitz: Thank you very much, Ms. Wexler. And now a word about our speaker. Hasia Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University with the joint appointment in the Departments of History and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She's also the director of the Goren Center for American Jewish History. Professor Diner is a specialist in immigration and ethnic history, American Jewish history and the history of American women. She has published a great deal on these topics and has lectured widely. We are indeed fortunate to have her with us here today. Two items of business before we begin. Professor Diner's book will be available for sale and that she will be signing in the back. And this event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcasting. There will be a formal question and answer period after the lecture, at which the audience is encouraged to ask questions and offer comments. But please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event. By participating in the question and answer period, you are consenting to the library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks. And now please join me in welcoming Professor Hasia Diner. 
^M00:09:35
[ Applause ] 
^M00:09:40
>> Hasia Diner:  Okay. Let me get myself situated here. 
^M00:09:44
^M00:09:48
Okay. Just take a second. Okay great. Well, so I want to thank [inaudible] and the Jewish Genealogical Society for inviting me to this talk. 
^M00:10:05
Okay. I want to thank the Jewish Genealogical Society for inviting me and -- how about that? Is that better? Okay. Then let's see what I'm going to do with my notes. Okay. I should be fine. Okay. Thank you. Let me just begin very quickly by saying this is a bit of a homecoming for me because I began my career as a graduate student sitting in the reading room for months on end and then in the Hebraica room working on my dissertation and on a number of subsequent projects. And there was a time in which I'd say the Library of Congress was my home away from home. And it was a tremendous privilege for me, as a both young and not so young scholar to have on the -- a tremendous riches, unimaginable riches of this constitution at my command. So I thank the library for making my career. So let me begin. Israel Abrams, a scholar at Cambridge University writing in the 1890s, like many other Jewish intellectuals of his time, saw in the study of history a way to defend the Jews against scurrilous attacks. In 1896 in his probably most famous book, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, in a chapter on trades and occupations, he directly challenged the French writer [inaudible] who the year before in his book had asserted that Jews were cowards. You know, there's an air quote there. They were cowards because they, quote, "shunned arduous physical undertakings and were averse to dangerous occupations." Abrams countered this directly, and in his words, the Jewish peddler of recent centuries was no coward. Had he lacked courage, he must have remained at home. We're going to use Abrams words as a way to -- as a point of entry to thinking about the historic significant of peddling and its connection to the transformative phenomenon of Jewish migrations in the modern period. Going out on the road laden with a jumble of goods, sometimes specializing in a particular type of wear, was a profound binding and nearly universal Jewish experience in the -- what we now, as historians, call the long 19th century, starting in the late 18th century and going into the 1920s. Not that all Jews peddled, but rather so many did in the modern history of the Jewish people that it provided the central pivotal -- that it played a central pivotal role in shaping new Jewish communities. Jewish migrations out of familiar but economically declining regions to new lands wide open for settlement and business, opened up because of colonial expansion and the spread of capitalism, made it possible for Jewish peddlers to take to the road. Peddlers very ordinary prosaic, peripatetic figures, who unfortunately left us very little in the way of a paper trail, served as the juggernauts for the Jewish migration, Jewish migrations. Their experiences on the road as the human engines that drove the massive Jewish population shift, which brought over four-and-a-half million Jews out of central and eastern Europe as well as the Ottoman Empire, to new lands, deserves to be thought of in historical -- in a historical context. Now, before I go on, I want to make three points that -- just to serve as an introduction. First, who was a peddler? And probably if I asked how many -- in fact, let me do that. How many people here had peddlers in their family background? Okay. So it's really common, and the older we are, the more likely that we had a grandfather, a great grandfather, an uncle, a great uncle who did this. I'm going to be looking at, and in the book, I look at those men, and these are all men, and ironically for me, as somebody who defines herself as a women's historian, I ended up writing a book about men, although women play a very important role in this story. And you'll see this very shortly. The men who I'm looking at were peddlers who were on the road, who on Sunday morning or Monday morning, slung their pack on their backs or got up in a wagon behind a horse, an ox, a mule, and went out. And they didn't return to Jewish settlement, be it their homes or boarding house or some other place of residence in a Jewish community, until Friday. So they were on the road all week. And so as such, I am not dealing with urban peddlers, okay? The men and women who hawk their wares in the city streets but in the evening went back to their own homes, their own communities. They had an amazing history also all over the world and their story needs to be examined, but I didn't do that. So urban peddlers are not my subject. Secondly, I want to note that Jews were not the only peddlers in America or in the many other places that I'm going to mention. In the context of U.S. history, in the early republic, there was the stock figure of the Yankee peddler. Young men from declining New England towns who fanned out to Western Massachusetts, to upstate New York, to the south, to the Midwest. And notably, all the terrible things that were later on said about Jewish peddlers were exactly what was said about Yankee peddlers, okay? So it's maybe their peddling that caused the ire of some people around them and not if they were Jewish or not. Okay. So there was the Yankee peddler. There were German immigrants who peddled. There were some Irish immigrants who peddled. The only other group, in which for the, again, this long 19th century, whose migration we could say was shaped by peddling or Arabs. Okay. And these were primarily young men coming from what was then referred to as Syria, Lebanon. So these were primarily Christian Lebanese who went to some of the same places the Jewish peddlers went to. And they, like the Jewish peddlers, functioned in a migration process in which peddling was literally the engine that drove migration. And their story also needs to be told, and some good historian will make some nice comparisons to find either similarities or differences between Arab peddling and Jewish peddling. Again, I didn't do that but somebody who has access to the languages of the Lebanese peddlers surely should do that. Okay. And then finally which will get me into the heart of my talk, Jewish peddling was not new in the long 19th century. Jews had been peddling for centuries back to the middle ages, and the existence of Jews on the road in all over Europe as well as in the Ottoman Empire, was a fixture of Jewish history well before my period and their story also deserves to be written about. But I was interested in the way in which peddling shaped the Jewish migration out of their old world into their new -- the new one. And the way in which starting in the late 18th century, peddling provided the startup by which Jews discovered a number of new worlds with peddling linking their movement out to some place -- from some places and into others. So let me say something about the places they left. So we could say on the one hand, Jewish men left all of the European continent, from Alsace in the west, all the way through to the Ukraine. Young Jewish men seeking to leave their homes picked up the idea of peddling. Some places sent a much larger percentage of peddlers out than others, and I could tell you the numbers are elusive. Okay. We -- you may be in the question [inaudible] I'll tell you [inaudible] I'll talk about why it's very hard to know how many. But places like Bavaria was a very large sender of peddlers as was Romania, Posen -- that is that part of -- perhaps I don't need to tell the genealogists where Posen was. That is that part of Poland that was sucked into Prussia. Lithuania was probably the largest sender of Jewish peddlers on the European continent, okay? And the stock figure of the Lithuanian Jewish peddler is a kind of universal new world phenomenon. So they left every place. And all of these places were spots and then also the Ottoman Empire and again with particular communities sending larger or smaller numbers of young men out as peddlers. They went to nearly every place in the new world. Okay. Now I'm going to distinguish two kinds of new worlds for the Jewish peddlers. So on the one hand, they went to places that we would not ordinarily think of as, quote, the new world, because they were still in Europe. But they were places that were experiencing the expansion of capitalism and in which ordinary people now had cash to buy things. So the migration of Jews out of Poland, parts of Bavaria, to the British Isles, okay? Not only to England and the English countryside. To Wales, Scotland, Ireland, okay, were fostered by peddling. So these are places that are actually also sending out immigrants, okay? Jewish peddlers from Lithuania are also showing up in Sweden in the 1860s and 1870s. And what makes the British Isles and Sweden, what holds them together vis-a-vis Jewish history, and why I think -- I consider them new worlds, is that these are places that had had no substantial Jewish presence before. So the young Jewish -- Lithuanian Jewish men from the province of Kovno, who show up in Ireland, okay, starting in the 1870s and 1880s, went to a place where there had never been Jews before. So to them, as Jews, it was a new world. But other than that, other than those spots in what we may have called the old new world or the new old world, for the Jews, Jewish peddlers went to no fewer places than the Americas -- north, south, central, as well as the Caribbean, Southern Africa, and Australia and New Zealand. All over that new world, part of the colonial expansion of Europe, drew Jewish peddlers. The activities of the peddlers cleared the ground for the eventual formation of settled Jewish communities in many places. In other places, the peddlers did not stay but moved on elsewhere. So, again, I'm going to throw out a series of questions or -- that will form in a way almost the bulk of the talk. So, first, what did they sell? Okay. Notably, it didn't matter if I'm thinking about -- and I have documentation about a Jewish -- a Lithuanian Jew who shows up in Sweden or one who shows up in the Cape Colony in what will become South Africa, if they show up in Mississippi or in the Pacific Northwest in Jamaica, in the Irish Midlands. They sold goods that we would say were not necessities. They didn't sell food, they didn't sell fuel. Because really those are the two things one needs to survive. But they sold a class of goods that one historian has called popu-lux. Popular luxuries. Now, they're goods that we would not consider luxuries, like eyeglasses, needles, threads, mirrors, pictures and picture frames to put up on the wall, bed linens, towels, napkins, tablecloths, okay? So these were goods that theoretically one could live without. One doesn't need to have pictures on your wall or you don't need to have a mirror or even eyeglasses, although every time I read about a peddler selling eyeglasses and the customer would say, "This is the first time I've had glasses." I thought for me, my God, I'd be paralyzed without my glasses. These are people who are entering into a new economic and social mode and having glasses was something that opened up their eyes. Okay. There's a wonderful memoir by a man who became the president of Colombia South America. And he had grown up in a small town and he said, "Until the Jewish peddlers came into our town, no peasant in this town ever owned a pair of shoes." Okay. And, again, one can say a bit, I think, maybe imaginatively, the world felt literally different having those shoes for the first time. What is notable is that the peddlers sold goods to women. Their customers were all women. The men were off working. The peddler comes during the day. He established a business connection with the wives of farmers, miners, loggers, mail workers, suburbanites, steel workers, Native people on -- living on reservations, the workers in sugar cane plantations, rubber plantations, on American slave plantations, American cotton plantations and tobacco plantations.  The peddler established the relationship with the women as they sold the kind of goods that were within women's domain. So one of the very poignant sort of details that emerged is that in places like Cuba, in Jamaica, and elsewhere in Central America, the peddlers sold neckties and cloth handkerchiefs to the wives of sugar cane plantation workers. And while they leave us very little information about what went on between customer and peddler, one can get the sense that for that woman to buy her husband the necktie or suspenders meant that her husband on, let's say Sunday, when they went to church, could look good. He didn't look like a plantation worker. He was going to now have a tie and a cloth handkerchief in his pocket and look no poorer, no less subservient than possibly the owner of the sugar cane plantation. So wherever the peddlers went, they sold this category of goods. Most of them began by being pack peddlers with packs on their backs and their first purchase with some saved money was to get a cart, okay, possibly bought or rented with some kind of draft animal, depending on what animals were being used in that region. And then the peddler could carry larger goods, perhaps stoves or other kinds of items for the home furniture so that it expanded what he could sell. Interestingly, in many places, peddlers, once they had their wagon, began carrying photographic equipment. And so when they would come into a home, they'd say, "Would you like to have a portrait -- a picture taken?" Now, again, we could see this leap into luxury for a poor family to think that, yes, let's have a photograph of all of us to put up on our wall. As part of this move upward to having a wagon with a draft animal, many of the peddlers, as they made their route, entered into business relationships with the women to whom they sold, and created a connection where the woman would bond -- during the week, and I'm going to turn to the -- kind of the calendrical pattern here. During the week, the woman would spend some of her time collecting feathers, bones, scraps of paper, scraps of leather, fabric that had been thrown out. Sometimes they collected herbs. And they would then exchange these to the peddler when he came back, often in exchange for a certain amount of feathers, okay, or bones in exchange for a watch or a necklace or some other -- a broach. Some other kind of a piece of jewelry or whatever good that the woman might want. Okay. The peddler would then sell the -- what was essentially refuse, okay, to manufacturers who would buy the old bones to grind up for fertilizer or for -- use it to make buttons. The feathers might be used by somebody who was going to make mattresses. 
^M00:30:00
The old scraps of paper could be used for beating down into some kind of other good. We might call them kind of early recyclers, okay, which is not what they were called. Not surprisingly, many peddlers around the United States, as well as elsewhere in the world, when they ceased peddling, became the owners of junkyards, okay? Of scrap metal yards because they had already been in this business. So this is what they sold. I've already indicated that they tended to sell to farmers, to suburbanites, to textile mill workers, miners, loggers. They -- many peddlers got the license to go onto the Indian reservations in the American west. And these were usually people who had limited money, who had no access to stores and to the marketplace. So the peddler came to where the customers were. The peddlers, wherever they went, sold on a -- the installment plan. So I don't know, maybe my glasses would be a dollar. Okay. Probably not. At least these weren't. And so the customer might pay a nickel, five cents. And then he would come back, however many weeks, to collect on the rest that was owed with the hope that each time he came, she might look in his bag and say, "Oh, I see now you're also carrying eight watches. I could use one of those also." Or, "I'd like my husband to have one also." So selling on the installment plan not only helped the customer, because the customer was relatively poor, but it also helped the peddler because it expanded the number of weeks to which he would go to that home. Peddlers had a specific route, okay? And the route was given to them by their wholesaler or their retailer, the person who outfitted them, who was almost always -- I would -- in fact, maybe I would take out the word almost. Who was always another Jew who was a shopkeeper or who owned a peddler warehouse or who owned some kind of business stationary enterprise that wholesaler, retailer outfitter of the peddler gave new immigrants, because it's only Jewish -- it's only immigrants in this Jewish population who are peddling, would give him the first bundle of goods interest free. I mean, this is a Jewish -- traditional Jewish obligation of [inaudible] the loan has to be interest-free. And then every week, the peddler would come back to -- for the weekend, the Sabbath. Although if I call it, say they came back for the Sabbath, it implies they came back to engage in religious activities, which maybe they didn't. Some did. Some didn't. But Saturday night around the peddler's world, the peddler came to the wholesaler, paid him that which was due to him, loaded up with a new bundle of goods and then Sunday morning went back out on the road again. So this weekly cycle was built into the lives of the peddlers. In England, they were often referred to among themselves as Wochers, okay, using the Yiddish word or German word of woche, a week. In Ireland, they were called weekly men, and in Irish materials, the -- whoever the memoirist or whatever, the newspaper, would [inaudible] weekly men. The weekly man was here. Okay. In parts of South America, we had evidence that they were referred to as semananics. So there you have the semana, the Spanish for week, and then the nic as a kind of Yiddish sort of suffix to the word. So peddlers worked with the -- or they began with the wholesaler, the supplier, a supplier who was the shopkeeper in a town or in a large city. Okay. He may be the owner of a peddler warehouse. Had numerous peddlers more -- numerous peddlers working for him. And each peddler was giving a route. Okay. And they in fact referred to the route as their medina, okay, their state. Okay. Peddlers could not compete with each other. They could not encroach on each other's medina. Why? Because the wholesaler didn't want competition among the peddlers, but rather the more peddlers who worked from this shop or that shop, this warehouse or that warehouse, the more the wholesaler made a profit. So the weekly cycle, the connection to a node of Jewish life, from which the peddler got his goods, and to which he returned at the end of the week. Now, so this is again how they sold, this is what they sold, this is how they got their goods, but the obvious middle part of this is -- oh, let me actually add one other thing. The -- particularly for the brand new immigrant who didn't know Swedish or English, Ute or French, many in Quebec, or whatever other language was the dominant language, the wholesaler, who's now somebody who's been in the destination land for five years, 10 years, whatever, would give the new peddler a piece of paper, a crib sheet like we all used in high school when we were studying some foreign language. We kept it under our notebook so we could get through the test. Written out in Yiddish characters or for the peddlers from the Balkans, many of whom go to South America in particular, he would write out in -- let's make an English -- going to an English-speaking land, in Yiddish characters or Hebrew characters, "Good morning, ma'am. How are you? Would you like to look in my bag?" Okay. And then over the course of weeks, months, years, the peddler had no choice but to develop his linguistic skills. Many of them peddled in places where there were multiple languages being spoken, so the peddler in parts of Quebec were selling to English speakers and French speakers, okay? Peddlers, almost all of them came from Lithuania, who went to Southern Africa, who were selling to English speakers, Afrikaan speakers, as well as the speakers of the various African languages that were spoken by the people who had preceded either the English or the Afrikaaner so that the crib sheet might have three languages or five languages. Okay. Now, I think one of the interesting phenomenon involved here is that many Jews came from places where they had always had to have some level of polylingualism because they may have sold to Lithuanians, to Polish speakers, to German speakers, and while one might be hard pressed to say they actually spoke Lithuanian or spoke Polish, they knew enough to buy and sell. And so this was not a great leap to move from that to learning English, Spanish, and Navajo, okay, or whatever combination of languages were required in that particular medina to which the peddler went. So from the peddler's point of view, this was a great way to get started in a new land. It may have been a great way but it was also very difficult. And I'm just going to read you one quote and this is from a man named Abraham Cohn who came from Bavaria in the 1840s, and he fortunately left us a diary. And he wrote very eloquently -- almost too eloquent to read this since it's not a poetry reading. "Beware oh youth of Bavaria for you shall rue the hour you embarked for this country and a life far different what you dreamed of. This land --" and he was in western Massachusetts. "This land and particularly this calling, being a peddler offers harsh, cold air, great masses of snow, cold towards foreigners and to all who do not speak the language perfectly." Okay. Again, this could have been a young Lithuanian man going through, traipsing around the transmal or a Hungarian Jew in the Australian outback.
^M00:39:56
The descriptions we have of the misery, the heat, the cold, the snow, the burning sun, the muck, the mud, was a universal trope. I should also say that peddlers were robbed left and right because they were men on the road with money and goods. And I saw no evidence of them ever arming themselves. There were some peddler murders and there were enough that -- that's actually one of my best paper trails, where when peddlers were murdered and the state then came in to investigate. So then I could find out in my research who were they, where were they from, what goods did they carry, how did their customers feel about them, who were their suppliers and the like. So so far, this is -- everything I've said has been about the peddlers. But the important link in the story between the peddlers and the suppliers are the customers, okay? The women whose homes, the peddler -- whose threshold the peddler crossed in order to sell. And from all accounts, and as you could imagine there's body. There's nothing consistent about where one can get reactions of the customers to the peddlers, they -- it seems to have been an extremely positive encounter for women living in remote places, for women who couldn't get credit in stores, who couldn't get to the stores. The idea of this man coming into their home and offering them the eyeglasses or the shoes or the neckties or the picture frames was an absolutely wonderful way to enhance their own lives, to announce their status as somebody who could afford to have eyeglasses or picture frames or tablecloths and the like. Some memoirs give us evidence of very positive exchanges between peddlers and customers. So one of my very favorites was a book by an African-American social worker and dietician named J. Ida Jiggetts. And she grew up in a small town in the south and she said, "The best day of the week was when the Jewish peddler came to our home and he would take wonderous things out of his bag and explain to us where these goods came from." And her father happened to have been a minister and seemingly he was home when the peddler came. It was not just selling to the -- to his wife. But the father, J. Ida Jiggetts' father, entered into an arrangement with the peddler. "I'll buy something but you have to teach me a Hebrew word." Okay. So that she went on to say the day he came, he -- or when he came, he reminded us of Santa Claus because who else comes bearing gifts into your home. The peddlers, because I've already told you had this weekly cycle, the obvious question was, well, where did they sleep and where did they eat? Okay. So the peddlers for the most part slept in the home of the last customer of the day. They talked about arranging their medina so that the last customer was the nicest, okay? And that the person would give them a bed, not make them sleep in the barn. Might give them a place in front of the fireplace because it was freezing cold out. And rather than send them off into the elements to have to sleep on the ground. So they slept in their customers' homes, which then opens up for -- opened up for them and for the customers and for us a kind of universe of meaning and thinking about the integration of immigrants into -- a particular kind of immigrant into a new place. So first issue, okay, the Jewish peddler comes into a home in Arkansas, in New Mexico, in Southern Africa, in Cuba, in Sweden, okay, wherever. And that very nice customer who at the end of the day invites them to sleep over, says, "Yes, you can sleep here." She says, "Would you like to eat with us?" How very kind of perhaps venal question. "Would you like to eat with us?" Although maybe not so venal because I'm sure if somebody knocked on my door and said, "Can I sleep here? Would you like -- can I come in and sell you something and by the way, can I sleep over?" Obviously, the answer is I wouldn't have opened the door in the first place. But, "Would you like to eat with us?" Now, perhaps it's a very ordinary question except these were immigrant Jewish men for whom the problem of food loomed large. That is, can they eat? Should they eat? Might they eat? The pork, squirrel, bear, whatever people were eating and considered tasty and nutritious and was just the ordinary fare of ordinary life. So we have, again, in very spotty ways, narratives that span the, "I was so hungry I would have eaten anything. I didn't care what it was." And it was -- actually, it tasted pretty good. And who were not troubled while on the road about the Jewish dietary laws. And others who would say to this woman who now has opened her house to him, "I cannot eat your food." Which, from her point of view, had to raise the most obvious question of, "Why not?" Okay. Now, these are all places where there are no Jews, okay? These are the only Jews who come into these communities and into these people's lives. So the peddlers, again, in the evidence we have, would say, "My religion does not allow me to eat that." "Well, what religion are you?" I mean, the person might know Catholic, they might know Methodist, they might know Presbyterian. They might know -- but what -- which of those religions say you can't eat something? And so, "I'm Jewish. I'm of the Hebrew faith." Whatever the formulation. And, on the one hand, this seems like it would have been a barrier, a kind of the door comes down, "Well, then get out of here." But to the contrary in, again, the material that is available to researchers, in most cases, the woman says, "What can you eat? If you can't eat the meat, what can you eat?" "Bread, fruit, vegetables." Sometimes peddlers would actually leave a pot in the home of the -- in the customer's home, so every Monday his pot would be in one person's home and another pot in another person's home. Or he carried a pot with him and he either prepared his own food or she would make what he told her was acceptable. So this -- and we have beyond the food issue, although I think the food issue was so crucial and the most formative part of this, but many of the peddlers in their sporadic narratives talked about or recalled waking up early in the morning in the customer's home and going and praying by himself in a corner, putting on his prayer shawl, putting on his -- to fill in the leather boxes with straps for the forehead and for the arm and for the customer, "Well, what is this? I've never seen it before." Okay. These are not people who had taken comparative religion 101. And, again, the peddler is required, required because he wants to make a sale. He is not required because he wants to foster interfaith understanding. He wants to make a sale. He explains, "This is how Jews pray." The next few stories I'm going to tell you come from memoirs, and generally as a historian, I'm extremely suspicious of memoirs. Okay. Why? Because how people remember and how they want their children and grandchildren to remember can be somewhat embellished. But I've seen the following couple stories in a number of places that I'm going to take it as at least potentially accurate. And since I have no way of checking up, okay, we'll have to listen to their words. And the words, even if they're embellished, still offer us a window into the peddler experience. So one man talked about putting on his tefillin with the long leather straps and at that moment, the -- somebody from the family came into the room where he was donning his phylacteries and she screams. Okay. "Mr. Goldberg is trying to commit suicide by hanging himself." Okay. And he had to explain, "No. This is part of Jewish prayer." 
^M00:50:01
Likewise, in stories that come out of the American south in both white and African American homes, as well as in the Midwest in South Africa, in places particularly where Protestantism was the dominant faith and in which there was a great emphasis on the family Bible reading, according to these narratives, the man of the home -- he's now in charge -- the wife buys the stuff but the man of the home is in charge of the family Bible reading -- would hand the Bible to the peddler and say, "Since you are one of the Hebrews or you are one of the chosen people, will you read the Bible for us." Okay. And indeed my absolutely favorite story, and I do hope it's true, but it comes from a memoir which a daughter wrote down about her father's life. He was a Lithuanian Jewish peddler who peddled in the Dakotas. And his customers knew him to be an extremely pious man. So pious, his name was Moshe, Moses. So religious that they called him Holy Moses. And in one particular swing around the week in this primarily German population in the Dakotas, several customers approached him and said, "Moses, we have a favor to ask you." So what was the favor? Said, "Our minister died and it's going to be months -- I mean, it's winter. It's going to be months until the church, the synod in Minneapolis will send us a new preacher. You are such a religious man. Would you come and lead services for us until we get a new minister?" So as his daughter wrote down and as he recalled, for several months on Sunday morning, Holy Moses went to this local German speaking church. Now, he didn't lead them in prayers that he left for them to do for themselves. But she said he led them every week in a exposition of the weekly Torah reading, the Parshat ha-Shavua. And now he spoke -- because he came from Lithuania, he was a Yiddish speaker and he also had a smattering of German that he was able to communicate with them. And as the daughter recalled, he was so proud of the fact that he taught them about Rashi, as this medieval Jewish commentator who, as a young man in Lithuania, Holy Moses would have studied in whatever level. Wherever the peddlers went, they were in search of one thing only and it wasn't brotherhood. It wasn't religious kind of fraternity with people who were different. It was, they wanted to sell something. And so one of the issues that becomes very significant in the study of Jewish peddlers in the American south is that they sold willy-nilly to white families, to African American families. Okay. It didn't matter to them who the customer was, what the local morays were, a woman, an African American woman had as much ability to buy eyeglasses or needles and thread as a white woman. One commentator, one observer of the time said that the Jewish peddler was the only white man who came into African American homes who doffed his hat to the woman, bowed to her, all right, in tremendous respect and tried to proceed with having her be enticed by something in his bag. Notably, he was probably the only white person whom she could throw out if she wanted. He was a stranger, he was an immigrant. He had no authority behind him. He was not the representative of the landowner, he was not the representative of the state. He was just an immigrant trying to sell something. So I want to end with one more part of this story, and I hope you all have some questions. Wherever they went, Sweden and Ireland, Southern Africa and Australia, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Mississippi, Missouri, Kansas, Oregon, the peddlers, however much the women like them and enjoyed having the -- this person come into their home and sell them something, they raised the ire of the local shopkeepers. The local shopkeepers hated them, okay? So the peddler could come into a woman's home. He could flatter her. "Oh, your daughter looks so beautiful today. What a beautiful table you have." He could make her feel good and he could sell for less because he had no overhead. He didn't have a store that he -- property or that he had to either pay mortgage or pay a rent for. And the women seemed to prefer the peddler over the local shopkeepers for all sorts of reasons. And so the local shopkeepers engaged in political activity all over the world to try to push out the peddlers. Okay? Sometimes it was by trying to get their representatives, the local city council, the local state legislature, even in the parliament, to raise the taxes or to raise the fee for a peddler's license. Okay. Making it prohibitive. Okay. The state of North Carolina tried to pass a law that said only citizens could get peddler's licenses. Well, that was certainly not in the interests of the peddlers because they were all immigrants and by definition, they weren't citizens yet. Some places, peddler local merchant antagonism sparked into violence, okay, and there were acts of violence perpetrated against the peddlers. In some places, laws were introduced to actually expel them. One representative to the parliament in the Cape Colony of Southern Africa, in an inquest on the peddlers said, "As far as I'm concerned, the only thing we should do with these Jewish peddlers is expel them. But our wives and daughters would never put up with that." So we have their story and their story ends, as does my talk, with the fact for none of them, as far as I can tell, because the numbers are elusive, but for I'm going to say none of them was this a lifetime occupation. It was two years, three years, four years. Some of them became so fabulously wealthy that their names are emblazoned in our public culture. The late lamented Lehman Brothers, okay? Well, that's how Mayer Lehman got his start. Or Guggenheim, Rosenwalds. So Julius Rosenwald's father came as a peddler, as did his maternal uncles, Gimbels. Okay. And on and on and on. Very few of them became Lehman or Guggenheim or Rosenwald or Gimbels. That is a very unusual and atypical story. Most became the owners of small stores in back -- in small towns or they became the owners of stores in larger cities. They might go open a peddler warehouse, a junkyard. Some kind of a business venture. But they did not remain for a lifetime behind that horse or on the road, and for sure their sons did not get up on the wagon and get behind their father's horses. So in some, these men whose -- most of whose names we do not know, most of whom were not great political actors, they were not great intellects, they were not famous political activists. However, I want to content, had as much role in the making of the modern Jewish experience as did the political people, the great activists, the writers, the scholars, and the famous ones. And by just picking up that pack and taking the road, they transformed not only Jewish history but the history of the places to which they went. Thank you. 
^M00:59:53
[ Applause ] 
^M00:59:59
Okay. Could I trouble you to open this? I had a little encounter with a knife and an eggplant. Yeah. So I just had -- I'm going to take your questions. I will repeat them but I just wanted to explain I can't open my own water bottle. Okay. I'm just fine. Yes, sir. 
^M01:00:18
[ Inaudible Question ] 
^M01:00:36
Okay. So the question was, did the peddlers keep their own records and what kind of sources did I use? So some of them did and you can imagine for most of these men, by the time they finished peddling, their 18 months or their 36 months or whatever of peddling, and they had their little pieces of paper, they threw them out. Okay. What was more important was the store that they were going to have. But there's some in scattered places. And -- if you can read them because they're almost incomprehensible. But what's important about their record keeping is they were essentially independent entrepreneurs. They were not like the Fuller Brush Man or the Singer Sewing Machine, you know, the traveling salesman who worked for a corporation who gave the traveling salesman a record book and a standard way to record sales, expenses, and somebody in the home office would go through their books. These guys worked for themselves, and while they had a wholesaler, they could pick up other kinds of goods as they wanted and that was not the business of their wholesaler. So the fact even that they kept the records themselves tells us something about them and their independence. So what did I use? So picture a -- one of those all-you-can-eat places and you'll say, "I can take a little this and then a little of that and all the --" I mean, there's no one source. I would say this was a book that could not have been written without the internet and those vast search engines like the [inaudible] Trust. And when I plugged in the word Jewish peddler, I got millions of hits and was obviously unable to read them all to take advantage of them all, but I'll just give you a smattering. They show up in Jewish communal histories. They show up in local Jewish newspapers or even in global Jewish newspapers. So like the Jewish Chronicle of England, you know, published in London, had little articles all the time about a Jewish peddler was just murdered in the big -- you know, in the South Island of New Zealand. So that and then where it seemed to be useful, I would then try to track it down. Where there were controversies between Jewish peddlers and local shopkeepers, those were fantastic, because somebody came in to investigate and here I'll just mention that in the first decade of the 20th century, there was a two-year boycott of the Jewish peddlers in Limerick, Ireland. Okay. Organized by a local priest at the urging of the local Irish Catholic shopkeepers. So the local newspapers are writing about this. Somebody -- investigators come from the board of delegates of deputies of British jury to come in to try to patch over the controversy. Those left paper trails, and so again, you get to find out what they were selling. And so the record books of R.G. Dun, okay, which are at the Baker Library at Harvard, where the -- these were investigations by anonymous agents who wrote about the credit worthiness of local businessmen. So they're organized by state, by year. I mean, it's -- they're voluminous. And I only picked Maine and South Carolina, okay? And in fact I ended up with South Carolina only picking one or two counties. And, fortunately, the investigators for Dun happened to have a thing about Jews and so they'd write Jewish, you know, which was great. I mean, he may have been terrible to be so essentializing, but then I got to seeing what was being said about them. And so the investigators for R.G. Dun would write, so and so store, former Jewish peddler, used to peddle, Jew, used to peddle. Customers say he is hardworking sober industrious and trust him. Okay. So that was a source. When there were murders, okay, inquests, biographies, autobiographies, the works of local Jewish historical societies where they did oral history projects. So like that all-you-can-eat place, I couldn't go to all the archives to see all the memoirs, but I tried to sample as much of them as possible. And what I ended up getting was, I think, a pretty accurate story. Yes? 
^M01:05:36
[ Inaudible Question ] 
^M01:05:49
Sure. So that's a great question. So, yes, I mean, it was in that area because they could only go so far because they had a weekly cycle. So if Saturday night they loaded up their wagons or loaded up their backpack, how far could they get from where that store was? Now, as new transportation technology came in, they might take a train an hour away and then peddle and come back on the train. Or they might take a canal boat, a boat on a canal, or some other conveyance. But it was relatively routed in a particular area, southwestern Missouri or upstate New York. And the route was as large as they could walk or go by horse. So Isaac Mayer Wise, the kind of founder of the reform movement and reform Judaism in America, wrote a lot about peddlers. That's, again, another place where people observed what they were doing. And he said the typical peddler started with a pack of over 100 pounds. Okay. Now, I know when I buy groceries and it's about 10 pounds, I get it delivered. So how far can one get carrying that on one's back? So it was a relatively small circuit. Once they had a horse and wagon, obviously they would negotiate with the wholesaler to give them a bigger territory. Yes? 
^M01:07:20
[ Inaudible Question ] 
^M01:07:38
Yeah. I mean, I would say they were definitely a transmission agent of current events in that they had just been in the larger town and they're going to this isolated area. And they said, "Oh, you know what happened." But they were -- they tried to steer very far away from politics because you never know. You want to sell something and the last thing you want to do is offend somebody. I didn't see books and I didn't see newspapers. And -- but it's very interesting. The word for peddler in Hebrew is [inaudible] which means gossip. And so yeah. So and the best gossip was, "Your neighbor just bought a tablecloth. Don't you want one too?" Yes? 
^M01:08:28
[ Inaudible Question ] 
^M01:08:48
Okay. So that's a great -- so the question -- I'm sorry. I was supposed to repeat the questions. So who produced the goods and did their wives perhaps produce some of the maybe crafts that they sold? Certainly, there were cases, but what's important is the goods were brought to them through these peddler warehouses which were often connected to Jewish manufacturers, okay, in the very large cities. So there'd be a Jewish manufacturer in New York who's making, you know, mirrors. Okay. And the wholesaler might make four trips a year from Talladega to New York to get to buy goods. Okay? And so he had his Jewish contacts with whom he -- from whom he got goods. The Jewish peddlers in Ireland were getting their goods from Jewish manufacturers in England or from Jewish -- they -- in Ireland, there was a lot of picture frame and picture frame making, and the picture frames were all made by former peddlers in -- living in Dublin, Limerick, and Cork, who went into picture frame making. 
^M01:09:57
And then the peddlers would go out in the countryside with the picture frames and usually with Catholic, religious pictures. You know, Bleeding Heat of Jesus, Mary, the Last Supper, and so on. Now, the other part of the question, which is something I didn't touch on, but it's really important, and you mentioned their wives. So here the question is, are these married men or not? And so some of the men were single, okay, and there is a whole story from all over the world where these single Jewish peddlers meet local women who are just not Jewish and end up in relationships, both legal and just common, but often for lifetime. Some of the peddlers, particularly towards the end of the 19th century, from places like Lithuania and so on -- oh, and let me go back. The ones who are unmarried, they find Jewish -- those who don't marry local women will marry when they stop peddling. So opening a store in Tupper Lake, New York means now I'm going to get married. And sometimes they go back home to the community in Posen or Bavaria or wherever, and they'll find a young woman and marry her and bring her over. Sometimes, the local -- whatever is the closest local Jewish community will have the daughters of. Okay. So I mentioned Julius Rosenwald. His father was a peddler. His outfitter, the Baltimore-based outfitter for Samuel Rosenwald, who himself had been a peddler, had -- you know, there were four brothers. Their name was the Hammer [inaudible] Brothers and they had one sister. Okay. Well, when Samuel Rosenwald was ready to settle down, he married the sister of his creditors. Some of the peddlers left wives and children back in the old home -- Europe, or in the Balkans or other parts of the Ottoman Empire. And when they could settle down, when they were going to stop peddling, they'd then call for the wife and children to join them. And some of them left their wives and children in a big city, let's say in New York, but then they went to peddle in the Adirondacks and might see the wife and the rest of the family at Passover or at the holiday, you know, in the fall holidays. So this whole connection between peddling and marital patterns was very -- was really central to this history. Yes, sir, in the back. 
^M01:12:38
[ Inaudible Question ]  
^M01:12:50
Okay. So was there a genre of manuals for dealing with how to observe the holidays and the Sabbath and Kashrut? Manuals, no, but other kinds of sources. And what I think is really notable in this concept of new world Jewish peddling -- and, by the way, there are such manuals in Europe, for Jewish peddlers in Europe. But here, the men are pretty much improvising on their own. "I will, I won't, I'm going to eat the food, I'm not going to eat the food. I'm going to only eat the food if." Okay? And I see a direct connection between this improvisation and kind of trying to figure it out on their own without rabbinic or authoritative sources. And the creation of a new kind of Judaism in the new world, particularly in America, which gave much greater license to ordinary people to decide what they want to do and how. And rabbis in the big cities writing for, you know, the [inaudible] or some of the other Jewish newspapers coming out of New York or Philadelphia thought that peddling was horrible. They thought, this is terrible because it's leading to exactly that individual choice in determining, you know, how to observe the law. And they wanted to get Jews out of peddling. And the peddling continued to be attractive until it was just economically no longer the mode by which people -- ordinary people got their stuff. Yes, sir?               
^M01:14:27
[ Inaudible Question ] 
^M01:14:43
Okay. So the question was did I find competing wholesalers? Yes. In the same [inaudible] absolutely. Okay? There'd be two, three, four peddler warehouses. And so they all want to make a kind of sweet deal with the peddler because they need the peddlers because that's how they're going to get their goods out. And so they have to offer the peddler good rates for the goods, favorable rates on the goods, good -- the kind of goods that the peddler says the customer wants. Lot of people, there are lots of fights. Not necessarily physical fights but anger. You know, kind of people take offense and peddler will switch from one wholesaler to another. Many of the peddlers, once they finish, set up their own wholesale enterprises. So essentially they're competing with their old wholesalers. So, yeah, there was a great deal of competition. So those folks could be competing with each other but the peddlers could not compete with other peddlers. [Inaudible] my pleasure. 
^M01:15:43
[ Applause ] 
^M01:15:46
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.