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“A Beautiful Garden Consecrated to the Lord”: Marriage, Death, and Local Constructions of Citizenship in New York’s Nineteenth-Century Jewish Rural Cemeteries

This chapter explores immigration, race, and religion through the nation’s first Jewish rural cemeteries of the 1850s. These grounds embodied an important duality for Jewish New Yorkers’ social belonging to an emerging white middle class while also safeguarding Jewish particularity and continuity. Still recent Jewish immigrants eagerly participated in the Rural Cemetery Movement, laying out lavish cemeteries and embracing its universalism by setting those grounds in closer proximity than ever before to non-sectarian Christian counterparts. Conversely, Jews of all stripes made sure to cluster together behind clear physical barriers, and nearly all synagogues and Jewish fraternities prohibited Christian burial and maintained old links between interment rights and intermarriage. Aware of increasing acceptance in the United States, Jewish New Yorkers celebrated their costly new cemeteries as symbols of mobility and belonging. At the same time, they doubled down on physical, ritual, and intangible divisions within them to temper that integration.