Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed

Boston's so-called white flight of the 1960s and '70s became a national symbol of the urban crisis. But what caused whites to move to the suburbs in such great numbers? Common knowledge holds that an influx of African Americans, assisted by the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group, pushed Jews out of their neighborhoods and into the suburbs. In Urban Exodus, however, historian Gerald H. Gamm argues that the driving force behind suburbanization is not race but religion.

Gamm studies two remarkably similar Boston neighborhoods, Roxbury and Dorchester, and argues that, while the Jewish population left, the Catholics stayed because of religious rules--rules that "are real not because they are written down but because they are obeyed." Looking at canon law and Talmudic guidelines, he separates issues of membership, authority, and "rootedness." In brief, Catholic congregations are bound by the geographical lines of their parishes and the physical structures of their parish churches, as established by Church hierarchy. Jewish congregations, on the other hand, are more autonomous, with the power to create and dissolve synagogues--and worshippers are not bound by geography and can attend the synagogues of their choice. Gamm is quick to point out that he does not argue that Catholics are necessarily more likely than Jews to stay in urban neighborhoods, but that the Catholic parish is better able to sustain neighborhood attachments. He also notes that race is a newer issue--"only after the urban exodus had nearly run its course, emptying apartments and lowering rents, were blacks able to overcome longstanding barriers to entry." Indeed, it was the growing population of the automobile and automobile suburbs in the 1920s that pushed suburbanization, as middle-class whites left still-white urban neighborhoods. Urban Exodus is a thought-provoking look at the shifting populations in America's cities--and the role organized religion plays in those shifts. --Sunny Delaney