The Chief Rabbi's Funeral: The Untold Story of America's Largest Antisemitic Riot

by Scott D. Seligman

Overview

Gold Medal for the 2024 Reader Views Literary Awards in History
Winner of the 2024 Reader Views Literary Awards in Regional: North-East
Silver Medal for the 2025 IPPY Award
Finalist for the 2024 Best Book Award from American Book Fest 
Honorable Mention for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book Awards

On July 30, 1902, tens of thousands of mourners lined the streets of New York’s Lower East Side to bid farewell to the city’s chief rabbi, the eminent Talmudist Jacob Joseph. All went well until the procession crossed Sheriff Street, where the six-story R. Hoe and Company printing press factory towered over the intersection. Without warning, scraps of steel, iron bolts, and scalding water rained down and injured hundreds of mourners, courtesy of antisemitic factory workers. The police compounded the attack when they arrived on the scene; under orders from the inspector in charge, who made no effort to distinguish aggressors from victims, officers began beating up Jews, injuring dozens.

To the Yiddish-language daily Forverts (Forward), the bloody attack on Jews was not unlike those that many Russian Jews remembered bitterly from the old country. But this was America, not Russia, and the Jewish community wasn’t going to stand for such treatment. Fed up with being persecuted, New York’s Jews, whose numbers and political influence had been growing, set a pattern for the future by deftly pursuing justice for the victims. They forced trials and disciplinary hearings, accelerated retirements and transfers within the corrupt police department, and engineered the resignation of the police commissioner. Scott D. Seligman’s The Chief Rabbi’s Funeral is the first book-length account of this event and its aftermath.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640126350
Publisher:	Potomac Books
Publication date:	12/05/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the national award-winning author of numerous books, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (Potomac, 2020) and Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China (Potomac, 2023).
 
Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the author of numerous books, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (Potomac Books, 2020), the award-winning The Third Degree: The Triple Murder That Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice (Potomac Books, 2018), and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo.

Editorial Reviews

2024-10-11
Revisiting the largest violent antisemitic incident in U.S. history.

Known as “Jacob the Sharp” for his wisdom, Jacob Joseph of Lithuania came to America in 1888 to serve as chief rabbi of New York City. He died in 1902, and his funeral cortege on July 30 of that year drew tens of thousands of mourners to the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, home to many Jewish immigrants. As Seligman writes in his revealing history, when the procession passed the R. Hoe & Co. printing press factory, workers on the floors above pelted the mourners with “iron nuts and bolts, flat irons, screws, tools, bricks,” and more. Worse, arriving police officers “drew their billy clubs and started beating up Jews.” Hundreds suffered injuries. The resulting outrage compelled New York’s Jewish community to demand five investigations into police conduct, including the first citizens’ committee in the nation to investigate an ethnic riot. Seligman shows how popular revulsion to the horrific antisemitic violence unified New York City’s fractious Jewish community, the Russian and largely Orthodox newcomers downtown with the German and largely Reform Jews uptown. The author’s account portrays a Jewish community learning how and when to deploy its newfound political clout. He writes that the Anti-Defamation League reported that “2023 marked the high-water mark for antisemitic assaults, harassment, and vandalism” in the U.S.—there were 161 violent assaults in 2023. “Had the ADL been around and been counting, however, they would have exceeded that number onjust one day in 1902.” Seligman’s retelling of this largely forgotten incident of anti-Jewish violence could hardly be more timely. In 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray found that antisemitism fueled 63% of religious hate crimes in the U.S., though Jews make up only 2.4% of the population. The horrific 1902 riot does not seem so far in the past.

A valuable history of violent assault finds newfound relevance.

Kirkus Reviews