SOURCE: "Money Versus Mitzvot: The Figure of the Businessman in Novels by American Jewish Writers," Modern Jewish Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, 1987, pp. 48-55.

In the following essay, Scholnick investigates the thematic loss of Judaistic ethics in exchange for the worship of profit as dramatized in the works of several Jewish-American writers.

In the thirty-one years from 1899 to 1930, nearly two million Jewish people arrived in the United States from Eastern Europe, joining the approximately 500,000 who had already arrived since 1621—first Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin and then, from about 1820 to 1880, Ashkenazic Jews from Germany. Most of the Eastern European Jews came to this country without money or salable skills. To review the statistics, 60 percent of these Jews in 1900 were blue-collar workers, half employed in the garment industry; 20 percent were in business, half as owners of retail stores, one-fifth as peddlers and hucksters; and 2.6 percent were professionals. Dramatically, by...