Jewish Americans as a middleman minority

A middleman minority—or more simply a middle minority—is a distinctive racial or ethnic group occupying an intermediate position in the class structure between the higher and lower strata in the population (which may include other minorities). Middle minorities tend to be positioned in a special economic niche, often marginal but nonetheless of value to those in statuses above and below them. They are placed broadly within the middle class but fall into two subtypes: the small-scale shopkeepers and businesspeople who arrived poor and worked their way up and the middle-class businesspeople and professionals who were already established in their chosen lines of work before arriving in the new country.

Two Types

Small-scale shopkeepers and businesspeople and independent professionals of modest practice can be considered “middle” in a limited occupational sense. These immigrants generally arrive without much wealth and little capital; shopkeepers often rely on family members for low-cost labor. In a relatively open class structure where racial and ethnic discrimination by the majority group can be restrained, these minorities can often improve their financial status—if not in a generation, then in two or three. Basically, they serve their urban neighborhoods, which are made up of predominantly working-class and lower-middle-class populations, including their own and other minority communities.

The second type of middle minority consists of those groups who were already established in middle-class businesses and professions before leaving, as emigrants or refugees, the country of origin. Although they often start by serving their own ethnic community, after a period of transition and possibly downward mobility, they can enter horizontally into the mainstream market or state economy, and they may eventually regain their original status positions. By playing a part in the larger world of corporate business, the professions, and government, they can come to exercise a considerable degree of power within private and public institutions. Although this path of mobility is also open to the other type of middle minority, their transition is usually more difficult.

The two types of middle minorities and combined versions of them are found around the world. In the United States, middle minorities include the Chinese American community in San Francisco, the Korean Americans in Los Angeles, the Cuban Americans in Miami, and the Dominican Americans in New York. Other middle minorities include the Lebanese in certain African cities, the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the Japanese in Brazil. Although these groups are called “middle” minorities, these communities generally contain a fair proportion of the near poor and the poverty-stricken.

Discrimination

Although one might expect that the buffer of class and in-group cultural solidarity would provide protection at least against the more extreme forms of racism, discrimination certainly affects middle minorities. In tightly knit urban neighborhoods, shopkeepers and small-business owners are vulnerable to severe outgroup hostility, especially from other minorities whose anger and frustration, far from being directed toward the dominant power structure, is diverted toward the middle minorities, whom they see and deal with every day. Economic downturns and political crises that render governments unstable can provoke severe discrimination against the second type of middle minority, their power and influence notwithstanding.

American Jews

American Jews, often described as a middle minority, fit this model, albeit with great variation. The American Jewish experience is vastly different from that of the court Jews of eighteenth century Western Europe or that of the Jewish middlemen and small traders, barred from landholding and many strategic occupations, in Eastern Europe. The more than 5 million American Jews are highly urbanized and overwhelmingly middle-class (although some pockets of Jewish poverty exist). However, like so many other minority populations, they are quite diverse—in religion from Orthodox to Conservative to Reform to secular, in status from lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class. In addition, they are highly assimilated structurally and culturally with a high degree of outmarriage yet still strongly attached to a variously defined “Jewish cultural heritage.” Nonetheless, generalization is possible.

The German Jews who arrived in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century exemplified a variation on the theme of the middle minority: They started as itinerant peddlers and owners of small drygoods stores and moved on and up to managerial positions in large-scale retailers and mass communication and entertainment companies and became doctors and lawyers. However, as they improved their financial status, they became integrated into the economy and the urban-suburban social structure; they were no longer in a separate economic niche or necessarily in a localized community.

The millions of Eastern European Jews, many of them working-class and impoverished, who came between the 1880s and World War I to labor in the workshops of the garment industry and to establish their small shops in the heart of the cities, exemplified the first stage of the first type of middle minority. Their children pursued higher education, many entering the professions, and the Eastern European Jews, like the German Jews before them, gradually became integrated into the central economy and the urban-suburban secular culture. Despite residual anti-Semitism (for the most part confined to the societal fringe groups but still at work in some sectors of employment, housing, and social club life), American Jews, in their class status, their mobility patterns, and their diverse religiosity and ethnic subculture, seem distant from the conventional middleman model, particularly as expressed in Europe and Asia, because there is as much variation as commonality.

Bibliography

Carlisle, Rodney P. The Jewish Americans. New York: Facts On File, 2011. Print.

Fishman, Sylvia Barack. Jewish Life and American Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000. Print.

Goldberg, J. J. The Jewish Americans. New York: Mallard, 1992. Print.

Mendelsohn, Adam. The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire. New York: New York UP, 2015. Print.

Wenger, Beth S. The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America. New York: Doubleday, 2007. Print.