Pioneer Jews

PIONEER

In European ghettos and shtetlach or in older, more convention-bound American Jewish enclaves, communal security took precedence over self-expression. On the Far Western frontier, where innovation was a necessity, self-sufficiency was considered a practicality, and a zestful, progressive outlook constituted a pragmatic approach to a new way of life, Jewish individuality blossomed. A number of remarkable characters-humdingers, in the vernacular of the period-of all kinds surfaced: eccentrics, renegades, expeditionaries, stage personalities, community luminaries, crusaders, reformers, artists, and scientists. Cultivating their personal inclinations, obsessions, and talents, these one-of-a-kind personalities tested modes of behavior and endeavors few Jews could have or possibly would have tried before. Some earned notoriety, others acclaim. But reprehensible or praiseworthy, their pursuits widened the range of Jewish experience.

JEWS

acters-humdingers, in the vernacular of the period-of all kinds surfaced: eccentrics, renegades, expeditionaries, stage personalities, community luminaries, crusaders, reformers, artists, and scientists. Cultivating their personal inclinations, obsessions, and tal ents, these one-of-a-kind personalities tested modes of behavior and endeavors few Jews could have or possibly would have tried before. Some earned notoriety, others acclaim. But reprehensible or praiseworthy, their pursuits widened the range of Jewish experience.

His name was Jim Levy, and he was born in Ireland in 1842 of Jewish parents, who brought him to the United States when he was a young boy. Levy's first shoot-out occurred in Pioche, Nevada, on May 30, 1871. Levy, who was working as a miner at the time, witnessed a street killing. The victor, Michael Casey, later maintained he had shot in self-defense, but Levy publicly contradicted him, asserting that Casey issued the first shot. Casey met Levy at a local store and challenged the unarmed miner to a gunfight. Levy accepted the challenge, rushing off to obtain a weapon. He returned a short while later to confront Casey, gun in hand, in the alley behind the store. Levy called to his opponent, then opened fire; his bullet grazed Casey's skull. Casey dived at Levy, who shot him again, this time in the neck. When the wounded man keeled over, Levy struck him on the head with his revolver. Casey's companion, Dave Neagle, put one bullet into Levy's jaw, then turned and ran. Casey died.... Levy was arrested, tried, and acquitted.

HUMDINGERS IN THE FAR WEST

In an atmosphere where ventures spiraled or plummeted on luck, or so people believed, the proverbial bearer of good fortune, the "beloved madman," was tolerated and in some cases indulged. A few eccentric Jews earned fame ensuring...the favor of the gods and providing a few belly laughs.

In some sections of the frontier, a man

Soon after this incident, Levy gave up mining to earn his living as a professional regulator, a gambler, and, on occasion, a merchant in mining and cattle towns all over the Far West Virginia City (Nevada), Cheyenne, Deadwood, Leadville, Tombstone, and Tucson. He survived an estimated sixteen shoot-outs before he was gunned down himself.

On June 5, 1882, Levy was gambling and drinking at the Fashion Saloon in Tucson when he and John Murphy, the faro dealer, began to argue. They exchanged a barrage of insults, which culminated in talk of a shoot-out. Levy had no gun, nor would friends who were trying to keep him out of trouble loan him one. Murphy's friends, on the other hand, urged the faro dealer not to engage in a gun battle with a skilled gunfighter like Levy, but rather to catch him unawares. Later that night, as the still-unarmed Levy was leaving the Palace Hotel, Murphy and his friends sprang at him and without warning shot him dead.

The same year, 1882, some sixty miles southeast of Tucson in the mining town of Tombstone, eighteen-year-old Josephine Sarah ("Josie") Marcus, daughter of Sophie and Henry Marcus of San Francisco, was carrying on a love affair with Wyatt Earp, who was thirty-three and still married to his second wife, Mattie. It was not romance, however, that prompted the lovers' flight late one spring night. Wyatt had just killed Frank Stilwell and was on the run from his victim's cohorts and the sheriff. The murder was one of many reprisals triggered by the most publicized shootout in the Far West, the gunfight at OK Corral on October 26, 1881, which began as a showdown between the ranching and rustling Clanton family and the highhanded lawmen and businessmen, the Earp brothers.

Josie, who claimed to be an eyewitness, wrote her version in I Married Wyatt Earp. More to the point here is her own story, which she modestly supplied as background. Josie ran away to the Arizona Territory in 1879 as a (very) minor member of the cast of the Pauline Markham Troupe's production of Gilbert and Sullivan's H. M. S. Pinafore. By the time the actors reached Prescott, her family had alerted Jake Marks, a Jewish merchant, whose wife apprehended the runaway and escorted her back to San Francisco. Josie, however, had already acquired an ardent suitor, Johnny Behan, a perennial office seeker who followed her home to ask for her hand. Josie claimed that she overcame the objections of her parents, who were by her description "models of conformity." That is hard to believe when you consider that Behan was forty-two, nonJewish, a divorced father of two, and just entering a new business. On the other hand, she had run away before, had developed Saint Vitus's dance when she was returned home, and had never found it difficult to express her opinions, so she may have been telling the truth!

Shortly after Behan's visit, Josie followed her suitor to Tombstone. Several months after she arrived, her romance with the wily, ambitious Behan soured. Unwilling "to go home like a beaten dog," Josie sought employment. She found instead Wyatt Earp, deputy sheriff and proprietor of the Oriental Saloon, a gambling establishment. Earp at the time was involved in a pitched battle for the sheriff's job, which...went to Behan. Life after Tombstone was only slightly calmer for this common-law couple. (Despite Josie's protestations, no record has been found of their alleged wedding aboard Lucky Baldwin's yacht.) They spent nearly fifty years together mingling with a fast crowd of celebrities, gamblers, prospectors, and promoters in a number of boomtowns throughout the Far West, and in Nome, Alaska, where they operated a saloon during the Klondike Rush. They finally settled in Los Angeles near the movie studios, where Wyatt hoped to turn his experiences into cash. He never succeeded...although others did.

Equally distinctive and far more numerous were those Jewish individualists who came to the Far West in their youth and spent the rest of their lives cultivating a personal style that added to the color and character of their communities. One such was matriarch Mary Ann Magnin. Her offspring called her "Queen Victoria" behind her back, but face to face the doyenne of San Francisco fashion usually got what she wanted. What she wanted was to build a business selling high-quality attire to luxury-loving San Franciscans and to keep her five sons working with her toward that end. Although the family firm was named for her husband, Isaac-a pamphlet-passing Socialist dubbed "Karl Marx" by his children from its inception Mary Ann was in charge. She conceived of the elegant specialty shop, guided its growth into an important chain, and trained her sons to carry on the enterprise in her footsteps. Only genteel notions of the Victorian Age prevented her from using her own name over the door.

Born in Scheveningen, Holland, in 1818, Mary Ann Cohen later moved with her family to London, where at age fifteen she met Isaac Magnin. The red-bearded young man from Assen, Holland, was six years her senior and had already been to the United States, an adventure that included an unwilling stint in the Union Army and pushcart peddling in New Orleans. Unable to locate his father upon returning to Holland, Isaac was referred to the Cohens in London, and he soon had a bride.

Married at sixteen, Mary Ann started her family almost immediately. In 1875, when they set sail around Cape Horn for San Francisco, the entourage included young Samuel, Henrietta, Joseph, Emanuel John, Victor, Lucille, and Flora. All survived the rigorous sea journey, despite the lack of amenities in the ship's grubby steerage section.

It didn't take long for the Magnins to achieve a more comfortable economic standing. Skilled at wood carving and applying gold leaf-a trade much in demand in those days-Isaac soon went to work as a frame gilder for art and antique dealer Solomon Gump. Gump reportedly offered Isaac a substantial raise to work on the gilded ceiling of Saint Mary's Cathedral, but Mary Ann vetoed the idea, fearful that she would lose her husband in a fall off a scaffold. Having thus eliminated the family's source of income, Mary Ann went to work in a profession popular among Cohen women, that of making baby clothes for the gentry. In 1876 she and Isaac opened their first tiny business establishment, a Yankee Notions store in Oakland.

As Mary Ann's reputation for fine handiwork-which included lace-trimmed lingerie and bridal gowns-grew, so did her ambition and business acumen. She and Isaac established I. Magnin in San Francisco in 1877, and by 1886 the store was doing business on Market Street, in the heart of San Francisco's business district. During that year... [she] also gave birth to her last child, Grover.

From the outset Mary Ann fashioned I. Magnin into a lavish shopping establishment adorned with Rose de Brignolles marble and expensive bronze fixtures. She was a "penny-pinching, stubborn woman who never bought unwisely," according to her grandson Cyril Magnin. She courted the upper crust of San Francisco society but had the common touch as well, playing poker with her employees on Saturday night and catering to the raunchy but rich... of the Barbary Coast.

As the children grew, Mary Ann, still clinging to her old-country ways despite her own considerable worldly achieve ments, taught them along traditional gender lines: the girls learned handiwork, the boys business. Grover later recalled that his mother trained him to identify fabric by touch alone and that during his apprenticeship he had worked in every department of the store.

In 1900 Mary Ann retired from the dayto-day operations of the company and named son John, then twenty-two, as president, passing over her older sons Sam and Joseph. (This led to some rancor, so that Joseph sold his stock in the company in 1913, soon thereafter forming his own self-named chain of department stores.) Five years later Mary Ann sent John to New York to establish and head East Coast and European buying offices and made twenty-year-old Grover, her favorite son, the general manager. He was in that post in 1906, the year the great San Francisco earthquake leveled a six-story I. Magnin Store under construction and nearly leveled the company. But no matter-Mary Ann responded by setting up shop in her house while new commercial quarters were being completed.

Until almost her last breath, Mary Ann Magnin still visited her San Francisco store daily, arriving in a limousine from her luxurious Saint Francis Hotel suite two blocks away. When finally confined to a wheelchair, she took to rolling down the aisles, and it has even been said that she had herself wheeled around the store on a gurney shortly before her death in 1943 at the age of ninety-five.

No less a luminary was Frances Wisebart Jacobs, who dedicated the last twenty years of her life to brightening the prospects of Colorado's infirm and impoverished [people]. Jacobs' ...approach to good works made her a Colorado folk heroine as well as a pioneer philanthropist. Born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and raised in Cincinnati, Jacobs came to Colorado in 1861 as the eighteen-year-old bride of Abraham Jacobs, the Central City, Colorado, business partner of her brother Ben Wisebart. For fifteen years she kept house in the mountaintop mining community and later in Denver; cared for her two sons and a daughter; and played a supporting role in...numerous civic and social undertakings.

After the family moved to a chaotically burgeoning Denver the city grew from approximately five thousand to about eighty thousand between 1870 and 1887-Frances made the needy her pri mary concern. The city at the time was overrun with "lungers," most of them indigent. Denver hospitals and clinics could not or would not accommodate them, particularly those too poor to pay, and many landlords refused to rent them quarters, forcing the ailing newcomers to camp out wherever they could. Jacobs' first response was personal and immediate. Unable to pass a tubercular collapsed or hemorrhaging in the street-a frequent sight-Jacobs summoned her doctor or placed the sufferer in a hospital at her own expense. It soon became apparent that the widespread problem could not be substantially ameliorated by an individual acting alone, so Jacobs enlisted the aid of the Hebrew Benevolent Ladies Society and then of the Denverwide Ladies Relief Society. Her passionate interest and outstanding ability swiftly brought her in contact with Denver's leading social workers and philanthropists. In 1887, to heighten the effectiveness of individual charity organizations, Jacobs, two Protestant ministers, and two Catholic priests formed the Charity Organization Society, a federation of twenty-four charity groups and the forerunner of the Den ver Community Chest. Jacobs worked to assist the impoverished in a variety of ways, but Denver's sick continued to occupy most of her time. To raise funds to build a muchneeded hospital, she badgered businessmen for contributions, wrote letters to newspapers, and spoke at countless balls, luncheons, and meetings. Those activities were, however, only ancillary to her daily, often daylong, on-the-spot ministering. She visited the poor in their homes; brought them food, clothing, and medicine; changed the sheets on their sickbeds; cooked meals; chided the errant; and encouraged the disheartened. Her dress austere, her hair pulled back into a tight bun, and her capacious handbag full of Grandfather's tar soap to press on anyone who would use it, Jacobs became a familiar sight in the Denver slums. In contrast to her severe appearance, she had a ready wit and an unfailing sense of humor. More conventional practitioners of good works were often aghast at the merriment she inspired amid misery.... Her work ended abruptly in 1891 at the age of forty-nine: She went out in a rainstorm to bring medicine to an ailing baby, caught pneumonia, and succumbed. Two thousand people attended her funeral at Temple Emanuel, and a second memorial service was held a week later at Denver's First Congregational Church. In 1899, "the Queen of Charities," as Jacobs was dubbed, was awarded a permanent place of honor in Colorado history. She was one of sixteen pioneers (the only woman) selected for depiction in the stained-glass windows that were placed in the rotunda of the new Colorado state capitol building.

A crusader of a different ilk, Rachel "Ray" Frank-teacher, journalist, and celebrated public speaker in the Far West in the 1880s and 1890s beamed her evangelical light on the practice of an ethical and socially conscious Judaism. Her soft though unsparingly honest elocutionary style caused her to be called "the Prophetess," and "the Lochinvar of the West."

Frank was born in San Francisco in 1864 or 1865 to eastern European Jewish parents. After graduation from high school in 1879, she taught school for six years in Ruby Hill, Nevada, instructing the miners' children by day and their hardworking parents by night. In 1885, yearning for intellectual companionship, she moved to Oakland, California, where she gave private lessons in literature and elocution and began to write articles and short stories. During those years, vitriolic journalist Ambrose Bierce became her devoted friend, lively correspondent, and literary mentor. She also took a job as a Sabbath school teacher at the First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland. Her efforts to understand her faith and convey its meaning to her pupils won Frank a wide reputation as a Jewish educator.

When the rabbi left...she became superintendent of the Sabbath school.

Frank gave the first of her thoughtprovoking sermons in 1890, after only a few hours of preparation. While in Spokane Falls (Spokane), Washington, on a writing assignment, she inquired if a holiday service were being planned for the following day, Rosh Hashanah. Only if she consented to speak, her coreligionists replied. She was already well-known as a writer and a lecturer, and a swiftly placed announcement brought a huge crowd to the opera house to hear her speak. Frank was rousingly received and invited to preach again on Yom Kippur Eve. Viewing the occasion as an auspicious first, Ray declaimed: From time immemorial the Jewish woman has remained in the background...and it is well that it has been so; for while she has let the strong ones do battle for her throughout the centuries...she had gathered strength to come forward in an age of progressive enlightenment to battle for herself if necessary.

By 1892 she was much in demand as a lecturer and journalist throughout the Far West and Midwest. She declaimed to Jewish groups on such subjects as class and ethnic schisms among Jews, the pressing need for Jewish organization and modern methods of education, and the role of the emerging American Jewish woman. Frank was also popular with general audiences, whom she addressed on aesthetic and intellectual topics. In 1898 she spent several months study ing with Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in Cin cinnati. Wise was an advocate of women's rights, but he did not think Frank or any other woman was suited to serve in the rabbinate. Frank apparently concurredpulpits were offered to her, but she turned them down. Nor did she support the suffragists, believing that women were not yet strong enough for politics, a view born possibly of her own difficulty in dealing effectively with the opposition leveled at her as a woman in the public eye and a social critic. In a series of letters to Bierce the first dated January 1897-she complained of an ailing throat and emotional distress. He lovingly chided her inability to accept even the "friend liest and gentlest of criticism" and urged her to adopt a more just and cheerful view: Wrote Bierce to Frank: The hand of everybody is not against you. The things that rouse your anger are not always sig nificant of unfriendliness....I'm rather an expert in enmities and antagonisms, and I find that they have not so large and im portant a place in one's life as one has a tendency to think.

He challenged her disinclination to serve as a rabbi, suggesting she was afraid of incurring the hatred...of her own sex, and he urged her to reconsider her ideas about the rights of women.

In the spring of 1898 she accepted an assignment to cover a world Zionist meet ing in London. When it concluded, Frank traveled in Europe, where in Munich she met a young Russian Jewish economics student, Simon Litman, who had been living in Paris. He was going to the Uni versity of Zurich for the winter semester, and she joined him there. They were married in London on August 14, 1901. Thereafter, she lectured occasionally and wrote articles but never fully resumed an active public life.

As the career of one Far Westerner in Europe ebbed, that of another was about to begin. In the early 1900s Gertrude Stein, figuratively, swam far out to sea, caught an incoming wave, rode it to shore, and planted her flag triumphant ly in the twentieth century. Of her abundant achievements, none superseded her Early understanding and enthusiastic espousal of the baffling new age. She sensed the character of the emerging epoch, said Stein, because she was a Westerner and had a pioneer's affinity for the new. Like other Westerners who went east (to Paris) to find the timeless West within the mind (as literary critic William Gass put it), Stein was most extravagantly a Westerner when far from home. When she visited Oakland after a thirty-year residence in France, she was dismayed to find that "there was no there there"-certainly not the peppy and pastoral "there" she called Gossols (Oakland) in her autobiographical novel, Making of Americans.Stein described her longtime compan ion, Alice B. Toklas, the granddaughter of a Jewish forty-niner, to be "as ardently Californian as I." The pair met in Paris in 1907. Their relationship was partially re vealed in the best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein's rendition of her dutiful but acerbic mate's views of the great and obscure who passed through their menage.

Gertrude, the youngest of Daniel and Amelia (Kaiser) Stein's five children, was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and was five in 1880 when her family moved west. Her restless father, on arrival a confirmed and fervent Westerner, settled his wife and children in a big house on ten acres in an undeveloped part of Oakland, then rushed out to make a killing in mining, the stock market, and real estate. He fi nally struck it moderately rich after invest ing in the Omnibus Cable Car Company.

From early childhood on, Gertrude was markedly attached to her brother Leo and with him explored the environs. After their mother died in 1881 and her father followed in 1891, the fourteen-year-old Gertrude's ties to her brother intensified. Leo's intellectual interests and fantasies became hers, particularly the aspiration to be revealed a genius and become en shrined in history. In 1892 Gertrude went to live with her relatives in Baltimore, who were initially amused by the bulky, garrulous, and disheveled girl and who attributed her idiosyncrasies to the fact of her being a Westerner. When that arrange ment wore thin, Gertrude enrolled at Radcliffe College to be near Leo, who was studying at Harvard University. Three years later, after stops at Johns Hopkins University (she studied medicine briefly) and London (she read novels at the Brit ish Museum), the pair, still together, estab lished themselves in Paris, residing at 27 rue de Fluerus. Leo was captivated by modern art and had begun collecting the works of [the Impressionists]. Gertrude, as usual, caught his passion.They had been living at "27" a year when Gertrude made her first solo effort, a novel she dashed off in two months, called Q. E. D. Her second effort was another novel, Three Lives. The style she had developed-it was rhythmic, repetitive, and laden with many subconscious undertones-elated Gertrude. She was convinced that she had captured the immediacy Picasso hailed as the essence of modern art. Leo despised the first novel, and they argued about it at length. When, despite his objections, she did the second in much the same manner, they continued to wrangle until a schism developed between them.

Alice Babette Toklas was born in San Francisco in 1877 to Emma (Levinsky) and Ferdinand Toklas and was raised in Seattle, where her father was a partner in the firm of Toklas and Singerman. After she graduated from Mount Rainier Seminary, she enrolled in the University of Washington to study music, hoping to become a concert pianist. The year she turned twenty her mother died, and she and her ten-year-old brother Clarence were sent to live in San Francisco with her...grandfather, Louis Levinsky.... With Harriet and her friends Michael and Sarah Stein, who were Gertrude's brother and sister-in-law, Alice-at loose ends after the death of her grandfathertraveled to Paris in 1907. She met Gertrude for the first time at Sarah's artchoked apartment. Remembered Alice: "She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun....She wore a large round coral brooch, and when she talked...I thought her voice came from this brooch."

Gertrude was equally attracted to Alice. She invited her on walks and, exhibiting her pleasure, elicited from Alice increasingly bold views. Eventually, she gave her Three Lives to read; a work of genius, judged Alice. Gertrude took her new friend to the Stein's summer retreat at Fiesole, Italy, and there she declared herself. Wrote Toklas's biographer, Linda Simon, "What she proposed to Alice was nothing less than marriage. They would live together, Alice as wife, Gertrude as husband." Alice wept, and continued to weep for days, but her answer was a definite yes. With Alice serving as the cook, hostess, typist, critic, and proofreader, Gertrude turned out work after work. The forty-year union ultimately yielded a controversial body of novels, plays, poems, essays, and criticism; friendships-en-during and ephemeral-with some of the twentieth century's cultural path finders; and the fame that two California girls had craved.

Of all the laudable careers launched by exceptionally talented pioneer Jews in the newfound freedom of the Far West, none towers above that of the famed physicist Dr. Albert Abraham Michelson. The son of a struggling mining camp merchant, Michelson, who helped prepare the ground for Einstein's theory of relativity, in 1907 became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for science.

Albert, the oldest of the eight Michelson children, was born in Strelno, (Polish) Prussia, in 1852. He was four years old when his parents, Samuel and Rosalie (Przlubska) Michelson, settled in Murphys Camp, Calaveras County, California. Albert's intellectual and creative gifts (he became an artist, a musician, and an athlete, as well as a scientist) were apparent early to his father and to his mother, his first teacher. While still of grammar school age, Albert was sent to live with relatives in San Francisco, where better educational facilities were available. The principal of Lowell Boys' High School, Theodore Bradley, encouraged him to pursue an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, where he could get a fine scientific education at no cost. Years later Michelson recalled his debt to Bradley in an interview: The principal of the high school...was an unusual man. I owe a great deal to the toughness of his training..... He took a liking to me, and drilled me very hard, especially in mathematics. I did not enjoy it at the time; it was work! But [with the passage of time] I came to appreciate its value.

Interestingly, Albert may have received his appointment because of his Jewish origins and the family's removal to Nevada (the Michelsons resettled in Virginia City in the 1860s). Applying on the Nevada quota, he emerged as one of the top three candidates but lost to the son of an impoverished Civil War veteran with one arm. Inexorable in his quest for an appointment, he traveled by train to Washington, D.C., bearing a letter of strong recommendation from the Nevada congressman: Had I felt at liberty to be governed by consideration of expediency I should have selected him. His Father is a prominent and influential merchant in Virginia City, and a member of the Israelite persuasion, who by his example and influence has largely contributed to the success of our cause, and induced many of his coreligionists to do the same. These people are a powerful element in our politics. The boy who is uncommonly bright and studious is a pet among them, and...his appointment at your hands, would do more to fasten these people tothe Republican cause, than anything that could be done.

The president had filled his allotted slots, and young Michelson was told to go to Annapolis and wait there. After three days, with hope dissolved, he was about to start back to Washington when he received a message informing him of his appointment.

Michelson entered the United States Naval Academy in June, 1869. His ingenuity and creativity in problem solving on one occasion led to a charge of cheating. When he demonstrated that he had solved the problem in question by his own method, the case was dismissed. After graduating ninth in a class of twenty-nine in 1873, he spent two years at sea, then returned to the academy as an instructor in physics and chemistry under his commanding officer, William T. Sampson. During this period he married Sampson's niece, Margaret Heminway, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. The twenty-year marriage ended in divorce. In 1899 he married Edna Stanton and with her had three daughters.

Michelson made his first major contribution at twenty-six. He invented a tendollar device that measured the velocity of light with six times the accuracy achieved by prior methods. He recorded his discovery in a letter that appeared in the American Journal of Science in May 1878, earning an international reputation. In the ensuing decade, he developed the epoch-making Michelson interferometer, used to test the relative velocities of the earth and the ether. His third major contribution was the extremely original echelon spectroscope, a device permitting high spectroscopic resolution. For these

Selected Reading

The Jews of the West: The Metropolitan Years, by Moses Rischin, Editor, American Jewish Historical Society, Waltham, 1979.

Guts and Ruts: The Jewish Pioneers on the Trail in the American Southwest, by Floyd Fierman, KTAV Publishing House, Inc. New York, 1985.

We Lived There Too, by Kenneth Libo and Irving Howe, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1984.

From Charcoal to Banking, The I.E. Solomons of Arizona, by Elizabeth L. Ramenovsky, Westernlore Press, Tucson, 1984.

and related achievements, in 1907 Michelson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics by the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Throughout his career he received many prestigious honors and awards. From 1901 to 1903 he was president of the American Physical Society; in 1907 he received the Copley Medal from Britain's Royal Society; in 1910 and 1911 he was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; from 1923 to 1927 he presided over the National Academy of Science. A plaque was laid and a street was named for him in Strelno, and the United States Navy named in his honor the Michelson Laboratory of the Naval Weapons Center at China Lake, California, Michelson Hall at the Naval Academy, and an oceanographic ship the USNS Michelson. Physicist Robert A. Millikan summed up the significance of Michelson's work, saying, "The whole development of modern physics is ultimately bound up with Albert A. Michelson's precision of measureIndeed." Millikan also took the trouble to point out that "Michelson received no religious training, had no interest in Judaism, and did not take a part in Jewish communal affairs."

In this aspect, as in other facets of his exceptional personality, Michelson was extraordinary. Not all but certainly a large percentage of the early Jews in the Far West helped to organize and were active in Jewish religious and ethnic organiza-tions, or sought to maintain their ties to Dr. Albert A. Michelson, Nobel prize-winning physicist, exhibited originality in many pursuits, including portraiture. Michelson made his first major contribution to science at twenty-six, with a device to measure the velocity of light. In 1910 and 1911 he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and from 1923 to 1927 presided over the National Academy of Science. Courtesy Special Collections, United States Naval Academy Jewish life in small, temporary groups or as individuals. The difference between their Old World traditions and their radically new lives on the frontier caused considerable conflict in the early years. Presented with the necessity and pro-vided with latitude to change, Far West-ern Jews created new forms as diverse as they were hard won.

Harriet Rochlin began researching and writing about pioneer Jews in the late 1960s. Her work has appeared in Westways, Journal of the West, Jewish Historical Quarterly, and other periodicals. Fred Rochlin, an architect and native of Nogales, Arizona, has amassed an impressive collection of photographs and memorabilia of Southwestern Jews.