Worthy and Unworthy

On October the 25^th, 1899, Louis Lewengood presented a small ledger to the United Hebrew Charities, The Jewish Board’s predecessor. Lewengood had been one of the organization’s founders, and the ledger contained the names and addresses of over a thousand charity recipients from the 1870s, when the United Hebrew Charities came into being. New York had fewer than 80,000 Jewish residents at the time. These were primarily Jewish immigrants from central Europe, those who had arrived in the city prior to the mass migration of east European Jews in the ensuing decades.

Many of the cases in the ledger included short notes. In just a few words, Lewengood described the difficult lives of the people that the organization assisted––the widows, children, the sick and infirm, and the many others who needed help. In late nineteenth century New York, the public social safety net remained practically nonexistent, save a handful of public hospitals. The individuals and families in Lewengood’s ledger had few other places to turn.

The ledger also tells the fascinating story of the middle-class Jewish New Yorkers who established the United Hebrew Charities, and reveals in stark detail how Americans understood poverty in the late nineteenth century. It divided prospective recipients into the “worthy” and the “not worthy,” among several other categories. These categories distilled what the leaders of the United Hebrew Charities at the time understood as a new approach to poverty.

The Charities’ leaders felt that “indiscriminate giving” to the poor cultivated dependency on charitable institutions. Instead, they would “lend a helping hand to those who were willing to help themselves.” The organization prided itself on exercising “sharp scrutiny” over its applicants, sending case workers to peoples’ homes to “discriminate the worthy from the worthless” ––those who it believed had refused to look for work, and instead asked for charity over and again.

This change of strategy spread across the philanthropic landscape in the United States. Under the banner of “scientific charity,” Jewish and Protestant charities sought, in the words of one historian, to “purge themselves of sentimentality.” They worked across denominational lines to root out “impostors,” enact work tests, and promote higher standards of efficiency.

This distinction between the “worthy” and the “unworthy” may be shocking to our 21^st century sensibilities. But American society has long seen poverty as a personal failing, rather than as the result of structural factors. This belief continues to shape the United States’ approach to poverty today, albeit in more subtle ways.

The United Hebrew Charities’ annual reports provide us with another crucial type of data: the names and addresses of the organization’s earliest donors. These included some of the most prominent Jewish Americans of the era, including Jacob Schiff and the Lehman brothers. The leaders and donors of the organization hoped not only to defeat poverty amongst New York’s Jews, but also to reduce the street begging that made the Jewish poor visible to other New Yorkers, and that therefore threatened middle class American Jews’ hard-won social status, signified on this map by their move uptown.

On the interactive map below, you can see our organization’s earliest recipients and its earliest donors displayed together. By putting both groups on the map, we can visualize the spatial differences between the haves and have-nots of New York City in the late nineteenth century.