Lessons on American Antisemitism from the Grand Union Hotel
FROM THE ARCHIVESZev Eleff
Zev Eleff is president of Gratz College in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania.
On June 14, 1877, while on their way home to New York City, Joseph Seligman and his family were delayed by a boat accident and rerouted to the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York. Saratoga was America’s top resort town, and the Seligmans had summered at the Grand Union for the better part of a decade. This time, however, and seemingly all of a sudden, the Seligman family was not welcomed. This unexpected rejection and the commotion it caused, now infamous as the Seligman Affair, compelled Jews of the time to reckon with how Protestant America viewed and even ranked them.
The Grand Union Hotel, Saratoga Springs, New York. Credit: Library of Congress
Revisiting it today, some 150 years later, the Seligman Affair also throws light on the social and cultural differences that fractured the American Jewish community of the time: ethnic origins, religious practices, and economic success all played a role in Seligman’s fateful trip to Saratoga Springs. The same forces divide America’s present-day Jewish community. The Seligman Affair, then, accords us the chance to revisit internal divisions that tend to splinter American Jews: the ethnic, religious, racial, economic, and political lines we draw and the social rankings we construct around them. The prejudices directed at Joseph Seligman are a reminder that a group’s internal social order can be at odds with how others outside the group view and rank its members. That lack of perspective amounts to a dissonance of differences, a misalignment in how we separate ourselves and pour meaning into these oft-artificial smaller subgroups. In the aftermath of the Seligman Affair, Jews took stock of their differences and, to some measure, chose to focus on the forces that united them rather than the factors that kept them apart. Our moment presents a similar opportunity not only to question and reduce our internal divisions but to insist that outsiders must do the same, as well.
The Seligman Affair
Joseph Seligman was one of the better-known Jews in the United States in his day. Bavarian-born, Seligman had migrated to Pennsylvania in the late 1830s. He started peddling, later opened a dry goods store, then a clothing store, and finally rose to prominence on Wall Street as a banker. From this post, he advised the administrations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rutherford B. Hayes. He even turned down an offer to join Grant’s cabinet. Seligman, in short, was a premier case of the rags-to-riches story, something straight out of a Horatio Alger tale. Seligman, in fact, hired none other than Alger to tutor his children. Given both his prominence and his previous relationship with the Grand Union, he was altogether blindsided by the icy reception he received at the hotel that night in June 1877.
Seligman’s rejection from the Grand Union Hotel was significant enough to merit attention on the front page of the New York Times. According to the article that appeared there, when Seligman approached the hotel manager to arrange accommodations, the manager responded that: “Mr. Hilton has given instructions that no Israelites shall be permitted in the future to stop at this hotel.” Judge Henry Hilton had assumed responsibilities for the Grand Union upon the death of his client, A.T. Stewart, in 1876. Seligman had some years earlier opposed and slighted Hilton on political and social fronts—but personal or not, Hilton’s decision betokened rising anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States.
“Do you mean to tell me that you will not entertain Jewish people?” queried Seligman.
“That is our orders [sic], Sir,” was the reply.
Seligman was unsatisfied. “Are they dirty, do they misbehave themselves, or have they refused to pay their bills?”
“Oh, no,” replied the manager, “there is no fault to be found in that respect. The reason is simply this: Business at the hotel was not good last season, and we had a large number of Jews here. Mr. Hilton came to the conclusion that Christians did not like their company, and for that reason, shunned the hotel. He resolved to run the Union on a different principle this season, and gave us instructions to admit no Jew.”1 Much as a New York Times report of blatant antisemitism might today, the barring of Seligman from the Grand Union Hotel as a Jew touched off a furious debate in the national press, outcries from pulpits, and a series of Jewish boycotts of Hilton’s other businesses.
In the late 20th century, Irving Howe argued that the Seligman Affair marked the starting point of American antisemitism and, in particular, later efforts to stop Jews from rising through America’s social ranks (though not all subsequent historians have agreed with him). There is no question that because Hilton sought to deny Seligman a station that the latter had already achieved, the controversy triggered an unsettling feeling that Jews could be dislodged, on a whim, from the firmest social footholds. Revisiting it now, as American Jews are contending again with rising antisemitism from multiple political fronts, the Seligman Affair sheds light on two aspects of the American Jewish experience in the late 19th century that resonate with contemporary American Jewish life. The first is the place of Jews within the pluralism of American society more broadly. The second concerns how Jews view their internal social order. The former helps explain why—just as painfully today as a century-and-a-half ago—Jews and other minority groups feel the sting of intolerance in the United States. The second provides a historical antecedent for our current moment, allowing us to recognize it as a time of social reorientation both inside and outside the Jewish community.
The Grand Union’s Patrons
Stewart had purchased the Grand Union Hotel for $2 million in 1872. He expanded it to accommodate 2,000 guests in 350 individual suites, making it the largest hotel in the world at that time. Newspaper accounts described it as a “thing of wonderful beauty.”2 It boasted, by its own estimations, “unsurpassed” cuisine, and it had top-level musical entertainment.
The Grand Union marketed itself as a hotel—a high class experience—for “all” Americans, or at least a larger quotient of non-elites than rival resorts. Because it offered rooms at more affordable rates, the hotel needed to maintain a consistent occupancy of 1600 guests per night throughout the summer season to be profitable. When Hilton assumed responsibilities for the Grand Union after Stewart’s death, he kept this marketing plan in place. One published advertisement read: “Rooms only $1 and upwards per day. Families can live better for less money at Grand Union than at any other first-class place in the city.”3
Hilton’s new Jewish ban defied this aura of openness. Defending the anti-Jewish policy to friends and boarders, he claimed that the previous owner, Stewart, had already “determined to do all in his power to keep objectionable people out of the Grand Union, to discourage outsiders, unless friends of the guests of the house, from making it a place of resort.”4 But while Stewart and his wife, Cornelia, held no particular sympathies for Jews, Hilton’s claim was false. On the contrary, Jews like Joseph Seligman who could afford the bill, chose Stewart’s hotel specifically because it was not brimming with upper class Americans of Puritan stock, whether Boston patricians or their Manhattan counterparts. Recent Jewish émigrés to the New World from Central Europe feared these elites’ prejudice against immigrants. In short, the Grand Union Hotel had been a rare site of high-class American culture that was not only accessible to Jews but comfortable for them.
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Immigrant “Jews” and Puritan “Hebrews”
The image of upper-class New England Puritans relates to a second aspect of the affair, the perception of divisions within the Jewish community, particularly as they informed social ranking in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews. Hilton and other antisemites rationalized their prejudice by claiming a certain false form of sophistication. As Hilton explained to the New York Times, he rejected Seligman not because he was Jewish, but because he was a certain kind of Jew:
Years ago…Mr. Seligman absolutely threw overboard the Hebrew Bible and Moses, and he now, belongs to the [Felix] Adler set of Liberals; and this being the case, he but plays the mountebank if he attempts to arouse the prejudices of the Orthodox Hebrew Church by circulating any stories or insinuations to the effect that he was turned out of the Grand Union Hotel simply because he belonged to that ancient faith. Such is not the case, said Judge Hilton. Mr. Seligman is a “Jew” in the trade sense of the word, and the class of Jews he represents, while they are not forbidden to come to the Grand Union, are not encouraged to come. The proprietors have good reason for the discrimination.5
Hilton’s distinction between “Hebrews” and “Jews” echoed language Seligman himself might have used to name ethnic and religious differences among American Jews. But the way Hilton defined these terms, and the relative status he granted to each, confounded Jewish self-understanding.
Within the 19th-century American Jewish community, “Jew” often connoted an antisemitic caricature of an unworldly European immigrant, while “Hebrew” indicated someone more sophisticated and socially suitable within American society. Some would have added “Israelite” as an even higher social designation.6 Well-heeled Jews liked to use the Hebrew and Israelite monikers in the names of their newspapers and cultural societies.
Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and other immigrants of German Jewish background used distinctions between these terms in their efforts to synergize Judaism with modern sensibilities, and thus adapt it to Protestant expectations of American society. Wise was one of the formative figures of the Reform movement. However, in an effort to illustrate his group‘s salience in American life, Wise described his followers as the “orthodox Jews in America,” defining their Jewish practice as the “status quo” from which the earlier Spanish-Portuguese and tradition-abiding German congregations differed by maintaining an “other-worldly” traditional practice.7
Hilton overturned this Jewish self-understanding by using the term “Hebrew” to designate the descendants of the first Jews in North America, referring to their tradition-abiding institutions as the “Orthodox Hebrew Church.” The Judaism of “families like the Hendricks and Nathans,” well-heeled members of Shearith Israel and other Spanish-Portuguese congregations, were the Jewish equivalent to the Lowells and Cabots, families of noble Puritan stock. According to Hilton, such American Jews were “welcome everywhere,” including, presumably, at the Grand Union Hotel.8
In declaring that Seligman had thrown traditional Judaism “overboard,” Hilton reminded the readers of the New York Times that Seligman was both an immigrant and a religious liberal. Seligman was indeed the president of the Ethical Culture organization, which had been founded by Felix Adler just months earlier. Though most of its adherents were Jewish, Ethical Culture distanced itself even from Reform Judaism by downplaying belief in God, developing a ritual based in modern thought rather than biblical or rabbinic texts, and making Sunday its holy day. Adler and Seligman no doubt would have been, like Wise, baffled by Hilton’s presentation of an “antiquated” sort of Judaism as more elite than their religious practices, which had been intentionally adapted to American mores.
Parlors of the Grand Union Hotel, Saratoga Springs, NY. Credit: Library of Congress
Wise further saw Hilton’s anti-Jewish prejudice as part of a broader nativism that had captured the attention of Protestant America in the decades surrounding the Civil War.9 He argued that Hilton’s hotel policy in Saratoga Springs signaled a rising animus toward all immigrants:
The Hilton-Seligman controversy again calls our attention to the social prejudices of some native American Christians against foreign-born Hebrews, especially in the Eastern cities, where Knownothingism has left its imprints in social life. Two facts which experience teaches must be taken into consideration: (1) The native American Israelite is not exposed to those prejudices, not even in the Eastern cities; and (2) these social prejudices exist chiefly, or, perhaps, exclusively in Eastern cities, and there again they are outspoken in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In the West these ridiculous prejudices could not exist to any considerable extent, because the foreign element is too numerous and influential, and the West has been thoroughly liberalized by men who understood that business.10
Wise sarcastically expressed gratitude to Hilton for alerting East Coast Jews who were hitherto complacent about their local climes. “Truly, your Haman-like decree,” he wrote, addressing Hilton, “was a God-sent to rouse those Jews to the consciousness.” By “consciousness,” Wise, I think, meant the raised awareness of his coreligionists to the realities of anti-Jewish hate among America’s elite classes. It was an opportunity for Jews to reorder their priorities, to acknowledge that even in-vogue sensations like Adler’s Ethical Culture movement would not secure a strong social foothold among America’s elite classes.
Wise also compared the predicament of American Jews to the situation of their coreligionists in Europe. There, Reform Judaism was recognized as aligned with modern education (Bildung) and values, and the Orthodox were hardly ever held up as the aristocrats: “In Europe people reading this scandal must sneer at American intolerance and stupidity, for there they know not that in America the scum of society occupies the largest space in all watering places.”11 Sure enough, the German writer Berthold Auerbach expressed those very sentiments about life in America while decrying the rising antisemitism as a pernicious “attempt to mock everything meaningful in life.”12 In England, the Jewish journalist Henry Marks parodied the whole affair in a four-page pamphlet Down with the Jews!, fictionalizing a Society for Suppressing the Jewish Race led by Judge Henry Hilton. Marks sketched a speech to that group delivered by Hilton. The lampoon offers a sober indication of how poorly Europe’s Jews thought of the situation in the United States:
The Jew in America was becoming like their ancestors in Egypt, too numerous and powerful to be tolerated. Their business energy and abilities were a constant menace to the welfare of truly Christian trade—such as he practiced and, in America, was not to be Judaized, the Christians must unite to suppress these formidable rivals. By excluding them, as much as possible, from social advantages, by holding their men up to scorn and their women to ridicule, by never missing an opportunity to harass and pursue them he thought they might soon be persuaded to return to Jerusalem where, he said, they ought always to have remained.13
The Troubling Legacy of the Seligman Affair
Strikingly, Seligman’s defenders rejected Hilton’s definitions of Jewish social class and insisted on using the nomenclature of Hebrew and Jew as they usually did, as when they noted, “Naturally those of the Hebrew faith have taken the indignity offered to Mr. Seligman to themselves.” The New York press took up Seligman’s cause in broader terms; the Brooklyn Union claimed that “Americans have a strong partiality for the under dog in the fight, and if it should happen that the bone over which the fight is made is race, creed, or color, that partiality is soon turned into partisanship.”14 In this post-Civil War era, liberals hoped that Americans would have learned a lesson from so much bloodshed, that tolerant people would prevail over the intense layers of nativism laid on thick by the Know-Nothings of the antebellum period.
Both the openness of the Grand Union Hotel under Stewart and Seligman’s financial success represented the promise of America. After Hilton’s prejudiced order and others like it betrayed that hope of social mobility, the original Grand Union Hotel became an erstwhile symbol of tolerance and fairness. Within the Jewish community, the Seligman Affair alerted Jews in the United States that their inner calculations of status did not necessarily match the calculus of non-Jewish America’s most elite classes. Just when the most economically privileged and religiously liberal Jews thought they had successfully acculturated into the American mainstream, they discovered that they might have misjudged Americans’ capacity to tolerate difference.
This, then, is the disorienting legacy of Joseph Seligman, Henry Hilton, and the Grand Union Hotel: the deeply held strategies and assumptions of certain Jews about “making it” in American life were confounded by a streak of hate and a calculation of the American social order very different from theirs. America’s Jews saw in this miserable bigotry the opportunity to reevaluate the degrees of their internal differences and whether those differences mattered. For a short period, Jews rallied around one another to campaign against rising forms of antisemitism.
In our time, we are witnessing much of the same. Jews of all types are rediscovering one another based on a common bond of social insecurity. We read about antisemitism on the Far Right and the Far Left and support one another because these are common threats. I wonder, however, whether we might leverage this renewed awareness into something far more sustainable. We might find that we have suffered through all kinds of divisions based on assumptions that Jews of one type of background, political affiliation, or religious proclivity cannot possibly find common ground with Jews of another variety. Skeptics might presume, for example, that Jews animated by differing perspectives—say, halakhic observance, Zionism, social justice, or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—do not possess a common language. Owing to a shared historical heritage and textual traditions, I hope that’s not the case. Perhaps our unsettling American Jewish moment can instead give rise to a Jewish “grand union,” a moment of Jewish togetherness in which we set aside our differences for the sake of Jewish peoplehood.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2023.
Endnotes
1 “A Sensation in Saratoga,” New York Times, June 19, 1877, 1.
2 “At the Saratoga Hotels,” New York Times, June 24, 1876, 3.
3 “Important to Persons Visiting or Leaving New York,” Brooklyn Union, May 9, 1877, 3.
4 “Last Days of the Season at Saratoga,” New York Herald, September 15, 1877, 10.
5 “A Sensation in Saratoga,” 1.
6 Philadelphia, “Hebrews, Israelites or Jews?” Jewish Messenger, March 24, 1871, 1.
7 Isaac M. Wise, “Reply,” The Israelite (March 30, 1855): 301.
8 “A Sensation in Saratoga,” 1.
9 Wise declared that before the Seligman Affair, antisemitism of this sort was “unknown,” dismissing counterexamples such as General Ulysses S. Grant’s famous “Order No. 11” as idiosyncratic, and based on particular personalities rather than indicative of a social trend. “The Social Prejudices,” American Israelite, June 29, 1877, 4.
10 “The Social Prejudices,” 4.
11 “The Hilton-Seligman Affair.” American Israelite, June 29, 1877.
12 Auerbach’s letter was published in German and English in American newspapers. See “Berthold Auerbach and the Hilton-Seligman Affair,” American Jewish Archives Journal 11 (October 1959): 186-87.
13 Henry H. Marks, Down with the Jews! Meeting of the Society for Suppressing the Jewish Race (New York: Groneberg’s Book & Job Printing Office, 1979), 1. My thanks to the staff of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives for bringing this source to my attention.
14 “The Hebrew Affair,” Brooklyn Union, June 21, 1877, 2.
