Abstract
For centuries, the Jewish community of North America labored under
the stigma of being culturally backward. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the
leader of nineteenth-century Reform Judaism in the United States,
recalled that when he arrived in New York in 1846 he found "but three
men in private life who possessed any Jewish or any Talmudical
learning ignorance swayed the scepter, and darkness ruled."1 Cyrus
Adler, then the librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, complained as
late as 1894 that American Jewry had "no libraries, no publications and
no independent scholars. ''2 Nineteenth-century European rabbis often
described America as a treifene medina, an "unkosher land." The dearth
of Jewish books, book learning and book publishing, help to explain