Between 1848 and the end of the Civil War, the population of Jewish people in the United States grew from 50,000 to 150,000. What did these migrants, with their own history of enslavement, think of the slavery in their new country? Samuel Strickberger, C’22, set out to answer that question in his history honors thesis, “Theological Crisis: The Jewish Orthodox Race-Based Slavery Debates, 1848-1861.”
The topic is personal for Strickberger, who describes it as “the confluence of a lot of different things that have invigorated me since high school.” He was raised in a Jewish household outside Washington, D.C., and took a gap year between high school and college to study at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a pluralistic think tank in Jerusalem. He’s also interested in politics; he’s been president of his class since sophomore year and is minoring in survey research and data analytics through the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES).
“I grew up in a household where a major aspect of being Jewish meant feeling a sense of obligation to stand up when things are not just,” says Strickberger. “At the same time, I recognize that religion does not always play that role, that theologies can sometimes promote insularity or discrimination.”
During his junior year, Strickberger did an independent study with Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, which helped sharpen his thesis topic. He spent the summer looking at primary sources, including rabbinical sermons, responsa, and newspaper articles, at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn and the Center for Jewish History in New York. The research was funded by a Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Research Fellowship, a Philip E. Goldfein Scholarship in Jewish Studies, and a College Alumni Society Undergraduate Research Grant. “It was amazing to open up a book from the 1850s and go through it with my own hands,” he says.
1848 marked the beginning of a wave of migration to the United States from European countries like Germany, which had recently experienced failed revolutions. This wave included 100,000 Jews, and Strickberger says it meant “a huge reorganizing of Jewish life in America.”
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