ABSTRACT
The immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe generally inherited several elements of what was, in effect, a revolution in the beliefs, lifestyles and art of a people who had always been fundamentally guests rather than permanent citizens of the lands in which they found themselves. This revolution has its beginnings in the consequences of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskallah, which is discernible in the late eighteenth century, but which has no really popular dissemination and presence until the first decades of the nineteenth century. In that period the first Reform Temples were founded in Europe and in the USA. The writings of Moses Mendelssohn perhaps proved to be the most influential on general attitudes. The important result for the purposes of understanding the rise of Jewish-American writing is that there was a spread of modern European culture among Jewish communities.
