Thin Capital and Thick Culture: Jews in the American Indian Heritage Trail

For Jews, migration to the American West meant social mobility, economic security, and the creation of new communities, textures and timbres.  For American Indians, Euro-American migration meant radical cultural transformation, economic turmoil, and political bedlam. For Jews, Native Americans were alternatively and simultaneously a barrier to safe and successful settlement, economic stepping-stones, and the source of compelling but fraught curiosity. 

Markets for American Indian heritage goods boomed at the turn of the century, and Jewish entrepreneurs helped invent and supply specimens for ethnological museums, relics for the antiquity trade, Indian fine arts for an emerging art market, and souvenirs and curios for the tourist industry.  In the process, they unwittingly transformed themselves, Native culture and commerce, and the place of American Indians in the national imagination.  Jake Gold, Louis Fisher, Thomas Dozier, Hyman Lowitzky, and H.H. Tammen pioneered the curio trade in the Southwest.  Likewise, a cadre of Jewish merchants including Fredrick Landsberg, Samuel Kirshberg, Alfred Aaronson, and J.J. Hart were key players in the blossoming business that rushed the Pacific Northwest.

This paper will consider how the triumphant Jewish American immigrant story can be retold as it intersects with the Native experience, and will explore how attention to inter-ethnicity enriches our understanding of Indian trading and commerce.   It will analyze economic encounters between Jews and Native Americans, touching on the fur and provisions markets, and focusing on the Indian curio market where Jewish businessmen acted as economic and cultural intermediaries between Natives and whites, as they labored at the social and commercial margins of America in order to eke out a living at the “bottom” of the economic ladder.  Most of these young Jewish men eventually moved to larger cities and larger businesses and abandoned the Indian trade. Their legacies, however, outlived their operations.