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The History of the San Diego Jewish Community—Part I
(with latter-day commentary by Donald H. Harrison)
By Myron Lustig
Southwestern Jewish Press, February 8, 1952, pages 1, 2
letter from Hyman Wolf, Feb. 22, 1952
Editor's Note: Temple Beth Israel is commemorating the 75th Anniversary of
its founding with a three-day festival beginning March 21. This story is an
exclusive feature of the Jewish Press and is the first time any of this material
has appeared in print. The History of the Jewish Community will appear
each issue for the next few months.
Congregation Beth Israel will observe its 75th anniversary in
March of this year. One of the features of the event will be the publication of
a comprehensive history of the Congregation and the Jewish community of San
Diego. Research for this ambitious project revealed records of many items of
note, heretofore little known or completely forgotten, among them being the
proff that the San Diego Jewish community is more than 100 years old.
The first Jew in San Diego was Louis Rose, who arrived May 30, 1850. For the
first 20 years of his residence here Rose was identified very little with the
Jewish community; in 1868 he was married to Mrs. Mathilda Newman, by a Justice
of the Peace. But by 1870 he began to join with other Jews in communal efforts
that resulted a few years later in the formation of Congregation Beth Israel.
The narrative of that effort will be revealed in full in "The Anniversary
Story," the history of which Beth Israel is producing for its observance.
It will contain details of the first Jewish wedding in San Diego; the first
record of the birth of a Jewish child; the first recorded Jewish relief drive
here; and other such momentous events which laid the pattern for the community
we know today.
In preparation for those tidbits of San Diego Jewish history it is advantageous
for us to paint the background picture against which early-day Jewish
personalities developed. The locale centered around what we now know as Old
Town. In 1850, when California became a state, and the first legislature
chartered San Diego as an incorporated city, this community was barely a
village, set uncertainly on the almost inaccessible mudflats at the mouth of a
sometime river that trickled in to a magnificent bay. It had two or three
stores, an inn, a few permanent homes and many impermanent shacks, and the
entire population totaled no more than 500.
There were merchants looking for communities, lawyers looking
for communities that could support lawyers, and traders and promoters, and
speculators. a few of them were Jews, and many of them, Jews included, decided
to give San Diego a try as a base for their plans. This accounts for the amazing
flux of Jewish people in San Diego in the early days; many of them stayed only a
short while; some remained for several years before moving on; and a few became
permanent settlers who, in a very short time, were viewed as leaders in the
community.
When the first Jew settled here, more than three-fourths of the community was
"native"—Mexican Catholics. Within one year, by the middle of 1851,
the town had changed in many ways. The officials of this incorporated city were
running it into disastrous debt; the town boasted a weekly newspaper it could
not support; there was talk of improving the harbor so that San Diego might
become a worthy seaport; and the idea of a railroad to San Diego from the East
was taking form.
The sale of land, in which many of the Jew here were among the prominent purchasers, was the nucleus of the boom of 1852. During the slump which inevitably followed, the government sent a work-crew of army engineers to build a dike (still recognizable even today) to turn the "outpouring" of the San Diego River from San Diego Bay into False (now known as Mission) Bay. This work crew was in command of Lt. George Derby, the famous writer "Phoenix" of whose contact with the Jews of the town we shall hear in a later article.
Louis Rose as one of the group who visualized San Diego as a railway terminus and his story is part and parcel of the vague yearnings of the town. As for the newspaper, the San Diego Herald, its remaining files are the source of all we now know of early-day Jewry in San Diego. In the first 20 years of the Jewish community in San Diego, the only physical expansion of the town that occurred will be told in the story of Louis Rose, whose development at Roseville-on-the-Bay gave the town its first, though unsuccessful, suburb. Otherwise the background picture remained the same; a lazy little village sprawled out from a central plaza around which clustered the only business life of the community...a community in every phase of whose growth relied heavily upon its "fellow-citizens of the Hebrew faith," as Editor Ames so often phrased it (Continued Next Issue.)
* * *
Commentary by Donald H. Harrison, author of Louis Rose: San Diego's First Jewish Settler and Entrepreneur
Mr. Lustig's article captured the spirit of early San Diego, but, as the saying goes, "the devil is in the details." It is clearly a misstatement that "For the first 20 years of his residence Rose was identified very little with the Jewish community; in 1869 he was married to Mrs. Mathilda Newman, by a Justice of the Peace. But by 1870 he began to join with other Jew in communal efforts that resulted a few years later in the formation of Congregation Beth Israel."
Rose was among the Jews of Congregation Adath Jeshurun, which
was organized in 1861 by Marcus Schiller. (1) Shortly afterwards, he
donated the land for San Diego's first Jewish cemetery (2). His Jewish
learning was well-enough regarded that on June 26, 1863 he served as officiant
of the wedding of Hyman Mannasse and Hannah Schiller. (3)
Mr. Lustig also was mistaken when he reported that Rose's development of
"Roseville on the Bay" was the "first, though unsuccessful,
suburb" of San Diego. Alonzo Horton began developing his
"Horton's Addition" in 1867; whereas Rose did not start selling
property in Roseville until 1869. There had been other attempts to expand
San Diego, notably in 1850 when William Heath Davis unsuccessfully attempted to
lure San Diegans to "New Town," (in the area later developed by
Horton) and a consortium of old-line San Diegans also attempted to create
"Middletown," between "Old Town and New Town."
(1) Samuel I. Fox, "Looking Backward," The San
Diego Jewish Community News, Vol IV., No. 20, Sept. 20, 1922, page 6.
(2) Laurie Bissell, "San Diego Cemeteries: A Brief Guide," The
Journal of San Diego History, Vol. 28, No. 4, Fall 1982, page 272.
(3) Audrey R. Karsh, "Mothers and Daughters of Old San Diego," Western
States Jewish Historical Quarterly, Vol. XIX.