By Victor A. Walsh
SAN DIEGO — The discovery of gold in 1848 transformed the sleepy Spanish pueblo of San Diego into a bustling stopover for thousands of miners. These “emigrants” came from all over — New England, the American South, Mexico, South America, Ireland, Great Britain and Germany.
The large number of men, with few women to care for their needs, spurred the development of the ready-made clothing industry. Hotels, restaurants, billiard halls, tobacco shops, hardware, dry goods and clothing stores opened around the plaza to cater to the throngs of fortune-seekers headed for the Sierra gold fields.
In the midst of this transformation, a small enclave of European-born Jewish merchants and tradesmen, often footloose young bachelors, arrived in the pueblo. Many of them set up shops and stores either near or on a dirt street located on the backside of the adobes facing the plaza, known as Avenida de los Judios (or Jews Avenue) because of their presence.
Among the more prominent were Louis Rose, a native of Neuhaus-an-der-Oste, Hanover; Marcus Schiller and Joseph Mannasse, both from Prussia, whose long-term partnership included dry goods, real estate and lumber; and Lewis and Maurice Franklin, the English-born owners and operators of the Franklin House from 1855 until 1859 when it went into receivership.
Ambitious, industrious, and entrepreneurial, they had values and traits that were similar to those of their Yankee Protestant counterparts. Partnerships included non-Jews as well as Jews. Business interests coalesced around bringing the transcontinental railroad to San Diego, thus ending the frontier community’s isolation and opening the bay’s deepwater harbor to world trade and future settlement.
Rose, a “speculator of the ʽmake or break orderʼˮ according to his friend, Judge Benjamin Hayes, envisioned the old pueblo as a major port city. In 1866, he bought the two-story Railroad Building in Old Town, where he would live with his wife Mathilde Newman and daughter Henrietta, and would shortly develop Roseville, his bayside township in present-day Point Loma, to convince Congress to make it the terminus of the “Pacific Railroad.” His dream of fortune, however, was preempted by Alonzo Horton’s development of New Town three miles south of old San Diego.
The reconstructed Robinson-Rose building today serves as the headquarters of Old Town San Diego State Historic Park (SHP). It is the only building in the park with a mezuzah scroll on one of its doors — instructions in Hebrew from Deuteronomy 6:4-9 to “love the Lord, Your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” .
As law-abiding, sober, business-minded residents, Jews voiced growing concern about the town’s many saloons and public drunkenness, rampant state of vice and crime, and absence of public sanitation. They were active participants in the town’s civic life. Rose, by virtue of serving on the city Board of Trustees, became a member of the first San Diego County Board of Supervisors. Mannasse served on the town’s Board of Trustees; Lewis Franklin was the foreman of San Diego County Grand Jury in 1852 and a county judge in 1853; and Marcus Schiller was the Superintendent of Schools in 1868-1869.
The town’s small size and location around a central plaza encouraged social interaction. In her Diary of a San Diego Girl — 1856, Victoria Jacobs, who lived in Old Town until 1859, recounts how she and her fiancée Maurice Franklin were frequently invited to “little outingsˮ and parties by the American newcomers. Victoria regularly visited women acquaintances, including María Eustaquia Gutiérrez, the mother of Pio Pico, the last governor of Mexican California.
The more stylish or elaborate balls and bailes (dances) were usually held in Maurice and Lewis’ three-story Franklin House — San Diego’s first skyscraper — located on the south side of the plaza. Its brick facade, spindle-columned veranda, billiard saloon, and many guest rooms, some with baths, made it the town’s showpiece.
Hosting social gatherings was a common practice among other Jews. When the affable Mannasse and his partner Schiller finished rebuilding their dry goods store on Avenida de los Judios, they held what was probably San Diego’s first Christmas party. The writer Irene Phillips described the occasion in her work, Women of Distinction, as follows:
A new building among the old adobes in Old Town called for a celebration and the owners did it up brown. Mannasse & Schiller invited everyone to the opening on December 27, 1856. There was a dinner prepared by the ladies and guests danced until morning.
Jewish men were active in the town’s club and fraternal organizations. The ubiquitous Rose, Jacob Newman, Lewis Franklin and Heyman Mannasse were founding members of the San Diego Lyceum and Debating Club. Rose, Schiller, Joseph Mannasse and Solomon Goldman, another storeowner, were all officials in the local Masonic Lodge.
Jewish settlers generally sought acceptance in Old Town, but not at the price of assimilation into the larger Christian community. Their non-Christian faith and, to a lesser degree, their use of German and Spanish continued to separate them culturally from the dominant Anglo-American community.
Sunday closing laws and prejudicial credit-rating practices by G. H. Dun & Company sometimes damaged their commerce and credit. The press often portrayed them as non-conforming, litigious or unscrupulous. Celebrated trials like the Franklin Brothers’ legal and highly vitriolic squabble over their hotel assets and Moses Mannasse’s refusal to leave High Holy Day services until strong-armed by a posse to appear in court were given wide fanfare in the pages of the San Diego Herald. One satiric ditty, probably written by the weekly’s acting editor, George Derby, invoked the age-old stereotype of the Jewish moneylender.
…The natives is all sorts complected.
Sum white sum black and sum kinder speckled.
And about fourteen rowdy vagabonds that
Gits drunk and goes about licken everybody.
And four stores for every white human
Which are kept by the children of Zion
Where they sell their goods bort at auction
At seven times more than they costed…
A rich and expressive Jewish culture evolved slowly due to the community’s small numbers. The first congregation, Adath Jeshurun, began in 1861. The following year Rose donated five acres of land in Roseville for a Jewish cemetery. In 1871, the Hebrew Benevolent Society was organized at his home to provide assistance to the needy and sick and funds to bury the dead.
The predominantly German congregation followed a liberal reform version of Judaism, and held services in private residences or at the Franklin Hotel. Their history, their religious beliefs and rituals, their literacy and communal ties helped to shape a worldview of responsibility and concern for all people, irrespective of their backgrounds or origins.
As merchants, Jews interacted with Old Town’s different ethnic groups on a regular basis. Membership in the Masonic Order brought them into contact with male Protestants, but not Catholics who were banned by their church from joining. San Diego Lodge #35 met regularly at the Franklin House.
Many of them were multilingual. Rose, for instance, spoke French, German, English, and Spanish, and presumably had a liturgical knowledge of Hebrew. His daughter Henrietta remembered him as being “…very good to the Mexican people in Old Town…(who) were very fond of him.” Generous and somewhat unconventional, he also deeded considerable property, usually as outright gifts, to many women, married as well as single, in their names.
Along with English and German, Schiller and Joseph Mannasse spoke and read Spanish, and knew many of the old Californio families and more recent Mexican residents. They often called Mannasse, who was very personable but small in size, Mannasse chico or simply Mannasito. In later years, after moving to New Town, Mannasse played an important role in creating Balboa Park and constructing the County Hospital and Poor Farm.
Old Town’s steady decline after the Gold Rush created an unstable social environment, plagued by hardship, indebtedness and departures After the financial collapse of their hotel, Maurice Franklin would leave for San Bernardino in 1859, where he began a pharmaceutical practice while his brother Lewis would head to Baltimore the following year. Joseph Mannasse moved to New Town in 1868, where he and his wife Hannah, Schiller’s younger sister, lived in a beautiful home on Front Street. By the 1880s, the only member of the Jewish Old Guard still in Old Town was Louis Rose, and he would relocate, hobbled by failing health, to new San Diego in 1884.
Nearly a decade would elapse before Marcus Schiller and other congregants were able to build San Diego’s first synagogue, Temple Beth Israel, in 1889 at Second and Beech Streets in New Town. It was a joyous occasion as the sound of the shofar (ram’s horn) greeted the Jewish New Year. The dream of a wandering congregation had at last been realized.
The temple is the second oldest standing synagogue in the American West. The original synagogue has been restored and now stands near Old Town San Diego State Historical Park in Heritage Park.
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Walsh is the San Diego Coast District Historian for California State Parks