Jews and Booze:
Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition
By Marni Davis
New York University Press, 272 pages

The title of Marni Davis’s Jews and Booze turns out to be the only playful thing about the book, the only place Davis lets herself have fun—and a book about drinking should allow for a little fun. You wait for it, and wait for it, but it never comes. What you get instead is a deeply serious, respectably sober investigation into the intertwined stories of American Jews and demon rum, too academic for the nature of the grape, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless.

The story begins with the first Hebrew sleeping with a calf skin of wine under a terebinth tree, his mind filled with talking donkeys and sacrificed sons, a career of vice recorded in the oldest books of the Bible: in Genesis, when Noah “drank of the wine, and was drunken, and was uncovered within his tent”; in Psalms, when “the Lord awaked [one] as out of sleep, like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine.”

But Davis, who teaches at the University of Georgia, skips over the ancient days, starting instead in Russia and the Pale of Settlement, where, in the age of the czars, Jews were forced into the liquor trade as they were forced into money lending and tax collecting: because the peasants wanted it, and the czar needed it, and few Christians would sully their souls with it. “Jewish economic life in the Pale was severely circumscribed,” Davis explains. “The liquor trade, however, had long been open to them….In 1496, the Polish monarchy granted its noblemen an exclusive monopoly for the production and sale of alcohol. The noblemen leased the monopoly to Jews.”

The book finally takes flight with the great migration of Russian Jews to America. Some went into booze, beer, and whiskey as well as kosher wine, the manufacture of which had become an art. By the end of the 1800s, these men, most of whom came through Ellis Island, had made their way to dozens of small American cities and towns, where they climbed the ranks of the trade, from salesman to tavern owner to distiller. Jewish beer barons did what Jews have always done—what Leonard Chess did with the blues in Chicago, what Sam Zemurray did with bananas in New Orleans: discovered a niche, a place where a man could make a living.

Jews were soon disproportionately represented in the trade. Take Louisville, Kentucky, for example, where, according to Davis, they “made up 25 percent of the whiskey distillers, rectifiers, and wholesalers in [a city] where the Jewish population was about 3 percent of the municipal whole.” These figures represent a mass of humanity, thousands of individuals, each a tiny epic of rise and fall—this one was killed in a robbery, that one went into motion pictures, this one became a gangster known as Nails. Among them was Fred Astaire’s father, Fritz Austerlitz, who wandered from Vienna’s Ringstrasse to Oklahoma City, selling beer.

If there is a flaw in Davis’s book, it’s the failure to turn this mass into anything other than a mass—to make living men and women out of the statistics. Instead, those people who appear in her pages remain as little more than decoration, a name cited by a lawyer making a case. “Isaac Wolfe Bernheim’s trajectory into the alcohol industry illustrates a few of these forces,” Davis writes—the key verb being illustrates. Too many of the Jews who appear in the book quickly disappear, merely illustrating some greater point, and are never to be fleshed out or explained, or followed back to their neighborhoods, the seedy dives where the billfold is reflected in a flash of gold teeth.

It can mean a frustrating read: Just when you get a hold of a strand, it breaks, leaving you lost in the minutiae. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: Begin with an individual and you end with a type; begin with a type, and you end with nothing. Or, put another way, start in the muck and mire, where an immigrant works to survive, and, if you’re lucky, you end with a picture of an age; start with a picture of an age, and you end with a textbook.

Jews and Booze, the history as well as the book, races toward an apex: the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, the Volstead Act of 1919, which banned the production and sale of liquor. You feel the vibrations of the Prohibition era long before it arrives: in local ordinances and temperance leagues, in the pamphlets that claimed booze was another tool—along with usury—the Jews used to impoverish the goyim. “The Jew is on the side of liquor,” Henry Ford wrote in 1921, “and always has been.”

Most Jews opposed Volstead—because wine was part of the ritual, because such laws were seen as exactly the kind of intrusion that had never been good for Jews, because drinking was not one of our vices. If asked about the evils of public insobriety, Jewish leaders often suggested the temperance nuts look less to the Congress than to their own Jewish neighbors. “Throughout the late nineteenth century, Jews generally rejected the anti-alcohol movement,” Davis writes. “They dismissed the movement’s claim that morally right-minded people never touched a drop, and pointed to themselves as proof that alcohol could be consumed in a spirit of self-restraint.”

For it is a fact that even the Jews who ran taverns were rarely drunk. (Davis quotes Charles Dickens, who condemned the “Jew distiller who brews the vile corn brandy…while, with Semitic obstinancy, he keeps sober in their midst.”) Many reasons are given for this sobriety, the most interesting credited to Immanuel Kant, who, according to Davis, “explained [this] aversion to heavy drinking as a reflex of communal self-defense. ‘Intoxication…deprives one of the cautiousness.’” In other words, a drunk Jew is a Jew in trouble.

Of course, in America, as Jews would learn, the old rules did not seem to apply. Everyone is an immigrant in the United States, a nation of cast-offs. As Lucky Luciano told Joe Adonis when the latter complained about Jewish mobsters from Hester Street: “You’re nothing but a f—ing foreigner yourself.”

Prohibition, which meant the end of the legitimate liquor trade, also meant a golden era for Jewish gangsters: Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Longy Zwillman, murderous figures who suddenly found themselves in possession of a multi-million dollar industry, handed to them, early one autumn morning, by the U.S. Congress. It made criminals of men who might have otherwise made honest fortunes. That’s what the FBI agent meant when he said Lansky “would have been chairman of the board of General Motors if he’d gone into legitimate business.” But the temptation was too great. Here’s how Davis puts it: “Few had been involved in large-scale criminal activity before Prohibition, but a significant number had been members of ethnically homogenous urban gangs. Because of class and ethnic discrimination, they viewed traditional paths of economic opportunity as closed to them, and rejected slower, societally approved routes to upward mobility.”

A great novel on the theme of Jews and booze has already been written—Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here, the thinly disguised story of the Bronfman family, the Canadian tycoons who traded booze across the border with Meyer and Bugsy and the rest. As Lansky himself said, north of the border, you’re in the Fortune 500; south of the border, you’re Public Enemy No.1. Gursky and Jews and Booze might be read side by side, as companion volumes, Davis giving you the historical realities, Richler giving you the gonif riding shotgun on the whiskey truck, shooting it out with Joe Kennedy’s boys.

By 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed the Volstead Act, the age of the Jewish beer baron had passed. In the end, Jews and Booze is yet another story of assimilation, another account of how Jews went from wheat peddlers to whiskey haulers to a more recent display of the profitable effects of alcohol on the great unwashed—“Girls Gone Wild.”