Jewish Immigration and Culture in Missouri

“No Jew is ever the first Jew anywhere.  There has always been at least one there before him,” wrote famed Jewish historian Jacob Rader in The Colonial American Jew.  That might be true anywhere in the world—anywhere, that is, except Lebanon, Missouri.  When Matt Friedman ventures to the small town in Talley’s Folly, he may well have been the first Jew to set foot in the rural terrain.  According to the 2000 census, not much has changed since Lanford Wilson’s imagined 1944: Lebanon remains without a single Jewish-identified resident.  In stark contrast, Matt’s home, St. Louis, is one of the top dozen centers of Jewish culture in the United States.  When Matt emigrated, he joined St. Louis’ century-old, rich cultural tapestry of Jewish immigrant experience. 

The earliest documented example of a Jew residing in St. Louis is Joseph Philipson, who moved to the city in 1807.  It wasn’t until the 1830s, however, that a visible Jewish community emerged—a development facilitated by an increase in German immigrants, a substantial portion of whom were Jewish.  This German population was soon complemented by Eastern European Jews, who first immigrated to the United States in the 1860s and continued well into the early twentieth century.