uld be better off without than with their custom.”
As the Hilton and Corbin incidents made clear, the pursuit of pleasure for Jews was often fraught with disappointment. Nowhere, it seemed, was the fault line between expectation and reality, between acceptance and social ostracism, more exposed than when Americans were at play. A holiday by the sea or in the country, which promised a respite from daily restrictions, instead often heightened them. “Race prejudice at summer resorts,” explained Alice Hyneman Rhine in an 1887 exposé of the phenomenon, was “sweeping” the country. Rhine reported that like Hilton and Corbin (“Hilton the Second,” as he was dubbed in some quarters), many hotel owners were taking a dislike to Jews because of their supposed boisterousness. Others disapproved of the Jews’ “disregard of table etiquette and ignorance of the courtesies of the drawing-room.” Still others frowned upon their attire: “It is said of [the Jews] that their ill-breeding shows itself in an ignorance of the canons of good taste in dress, which causes them to affect patent leather boots, showy trousers and conspicuous and vulgar jewelry.”
Publicly, Jews were quick to defend themselves against such charges and to denounce “race prejudice” as a form of “petulant bigotry” at best and of “unjust, injurious, wicked,” and un-American behavior at worst. Privately, though, many Jews conceded that some of the allegations were not without merit, especially those regarding displays of flamboyance. When Jews walk and talk loudly, dress “showily,” and use a toothpick “profusely” while in public, said one Jewish newspaper, it was no wonder that hotel keepers were justified in “exercising discretion.” Columnist Henrietta Szold, or “Sulamith,” as she styled herself at the time, was quick to agree. Writing in the Jewish Messenger in the aftermath of the “Corbin affair,” Szold was as fierce in her condemnation of the behavior of fellow Jews as she was of Corbin’s. She roundly took them to task for their all-consuming pursuit of money and their cavalier disregard for spiritual matters.
Szold’s was hardly the last word on the subject. Well into the 1890s, German Jewish women were publicly exhorted—often by one another—to keep up their guard on vacation, to comport themselves with “unobtrusive modesty,” and to eschew material and emotional excess at all costs. In 1895, for instance, Rosa Sonneschein’s newspaper, The American Jewess, featured an editorial, “The Jewess at Summer Resorts,” in which, characteristically, denunciation mingled with apologetics:
Our Jewish ladies will, as usual, form no inconsiderable contingent of the gay throngs on pleasure and recreation intent....Let them continually bear in mind that is it their bounden duty to so comport themselves in public, as to give the lie to those aspersions cast upon the entire race ... because of the forward, vulgar and pompous demeanor of a few individuals.
If a non-Jewish woman adorned herself with all manner of trinkets and “glittering gewgaws,” laughed boisterously, and treated waiters with undisguised contempt, she would have only herself to blame. “Let, however, Mrs. Abrahams indulge in the same offenses against the canons of good breeding and Jewish womanhood, en masse, must atone for her sins.”
To prevent the further proliferation of women like Mrs. Abrahams, the American Jewish community needed “social missionaries,” insisted Sonneschein. “We need Jewish women of wealth, who will make propaganda for a dignified simplicity of dress and speech, who by their example will teach the masses to maintain their dignity at hotels and watering places.” Warming to her subject, the magazine publisher asserted that the American Jewish community required “missionaries to teach the world that American Jews are the product of civilization.”
In the years following Sonneschein’s peroration, the vacation “habit” extended to virtually all segments of the American population, from the well-heeled dowager to the recently arrived working girl. “There are towns in this state, in the Catskill region, and along 