Lots of people traveled to Arizona during its early days as a territory, and later as a state. Those people came from many places, and were of many backgrounds — and librarians at the Arizona State Library have been looking into Jewish History, specifically in southern Arizona.
Yahm Levin, the Arizona Collection and Reading Arizona Librarian at the State of Arizona Research Library, joined The Show to discuss, starting with how robust a history of Jewish people there is in that part of the state.
Full conversation
YAHM LEVIN: I think there's a lot that still needs to be uncovered. There's a wonderful, a few really wonderful books about Arizona history, and they really try to break it down by different cities. I mean, Phoenix gets a lot of attention, but I think we have to remember that, throughout Arizona's history, when it was a territory and even when it was part of New Mexico territory, there were so many opportunities to start a new city, to start a new business, if you just had a little bit of capital or you knew some people, or you had a friend, or a cousin, so I think it's a lot more extensive than many of us realize.
MARK BRODIE: So you kind of alluded to this, but I wanted to ask you more specifically, like for the people who came, especially, you know, sort of in the early days of Tucson and Pima County in southern Arizona, did Jewish people who came, come for the same reasons as other people, in terms of maybe looking for a fresh start, or a new opportunity or just to get away to someplace new?
LEVIN: Absolutely. You know, I think if we think about Jewish American history very, very, very broadly, we have a few images in our mind. We think of, maybe people know about the massive immigration of Sephardic Jews very early in the United States history, and then there is the really big wave of Eastern European Jews, when a lot of Europeans were coming to the U.S., but not everybody wants to live in New York City. You know, or North Carolina.
And so people just moved west, just like everybody else, to have a homestead or to start a business or have a family, or sometimes people kind of wanted to get away from bigger Jewish communities and be maybe a little more secular, or start a different branch of Judaism, cause Judaism there's a lot of branches or a different like sect, so it's pretty it's like everybody else, really, you know, just a new fresh start and opportunities.
BRODIE: Yeah, well, it's so interesting because I think, you know, for a lot of people, myself included, you know, you think about, for example, that big wave of immigration in the early part of the 20th century, and you immediately think of, for example, like the Lower East Side of Manhattan with lots of delis and tenements and, and you don't think, for example, of places like Tucson, or even places like Arizona, but as you're saying, there were lots of people that were coming west for all sorts of reasons.
LEVIN: Yeah, you know, and I think maybe for some people it might have been political too. You know, maybe they didn't want to live in more liberal areas, cause Arizona has a history of more conservative leaning Jewish people, and I think that's true to today also. Yeah, and I think it's a slightly different culture because a lot of people really try to integrate themselves into what was happening wherever they were settling.
So, a really good example of that is Harry Drachman. He was the Drachman family was really prominent and they had stores and a cigar shop and a shoe store and and they were, they were philanthropists and they did a for building Tucson as a city, and he was an active member of The Order of Knights of Pythias, and he ran for Pima County supervisor, and he was a Democrat in 1902, which is not the same Democratic Party that we think of today, right? So, I think a lot of the people who moved west, especially to Arizona, were kind of on a different path and let's say the folks who ran the very delicious delis of New York City.
BRODIE: For those Jewish people who traveled west and ended up in southern Arizona, what kind of reception did they get when they got there?
LEVIN: From what I saw, and what I read, it seems to be a really positive reception. In, another example is, in Graham County, the town of Solomon used to be the county seat, and it was actually started by I.E. Solomon and his wife Anna, and when he moved there, there was an and started he's I think he started with that with like a bank, and he was, he had a — I'm sorry, he had a store and then he had a bank and he really built up Solomon back then Solomonville to to a very prominent, to the point where it became the county seat and there was an article in a newspaper and somebody commented something like, “oh, there are Jewish people here, this is a good place to move to for new opportunities,” which is really nice to see, considering the history of antisemitism, right? Like that, I think for the most part, people were really accepting of Jewish people in Arizona, at least territorial Arizona from what I've read.
BRODIE: Sure. So when you look at southern Arizona now, can you still see elements and evidence of some of these early Jewish settlers in that area?
LEVIN: Oh sure. So, well, first off there's the Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center, which is wonderful, and they do all kinds of programming, but there's also the buildings that have been left over, that have maybe some of them have been repurposed, but some of them are around in Tucson. Like Steinfeld's building, it was repurposed, I forget what it was repurposed into, but, the building itself is still there and so people who, maybe who are longtime Tucson residents, they might remember the Steinfeld's building.
