One of my favorite primary sources, found in my exploration: an advertisement letter by the New York Edison Company for lights (presumably electronic lightbulbs), addressed to Congregation Ansche Chesed president Meyer Goodfriend, April 5th, 1915. Source: Jewish Theological Seminary Library, Congregation Ansche Chesed Records, Box 1, Folder 5. Photo Credit: Janus Yuen.
Okay, I might be exaggerating a little when I say that I “failed” in my research, but bear with me, and I’ll explain why I think the failure of my project was more fruitful than if it had “succeeded.”
In the summer after my sophomore year, I was unbelievably fortunate to receive the opportunity to participate in the Humanities Research Scholars Program with five of my classmates from across the humanities. I say unbelievably because, for me, the trade was unbelievable. In exchange for an ambitious and locally actionable research project and a promise to dive headfirst into the archives, I was given housing, a stipend, and the most invaluable commodity for Columbia undergraduates: a couple weeks of (mostly) unstructured time. Rather than expecting us to produce some final research paper, we were expected to go to the primary sources in the spirit of exploration and play—the way any research project would ideally begin, rather than procrastinated until around three weeks before a final paper deadline.
With double my usual time, my project was correspondingly (and understandably) several times more ambitious than anything I had ever undertaken before. Working with my advisor, the wonderful Professor Elizabeth Blackmar, I proposed to study a diverse array of minority religious communities—Black protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—and how they reacted to the commercialist revolution in American culture during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Limiting myself to Harlem, a community where all three macro-communities coexisted in large numbers, I tried to track down the names of institutions which existed there at the time through resources such as David W. Dunlop’s From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship (link: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/from-abyssinian-to-zion/9780231125437), find their records in archival repositories, and once located, make archival appointments to examine minute books, sermons, liturgies, church publications—anything that would give an insider, institutional, or community-centric view of internal operations, community tensions, and the outside world from the perspective of a religious institution, its leadership, and its congregants. In my wildest dreams, I could even write it all up into a study of how theology, biblical interpretation, and rabbinical law affected religious institutions financial interactions with the city or individual congregants’ relationships with secular-commercial culture, and vice-versa.
My dreams ran aground in the first step: locating the sources. I searched the Manuscript and Schomburg Divisions of the NYPL, with little luck: almost all that I found dated to the post-WWII period. The Archdiocese of New York in Yonkers simply forbade undergraduates from accessing their materials. I tried contacting churches themselves for their records, but some didn’t even have operating emails, and none answered my calls. The one pastor who answered my email said he had material and offered to set up a meeting if he had time, but later ghosted me. One church announced on its website that it had just moved, having had its last service in location in April. I even spent Sunday mornings attending church services in hopes of speaking to pastors afterwards, but they always were too busy and left before I could catch them. I was luckier with the Jewish institutions: while all of them had moved, they had deposited what was left of their records from the period with Jewish academic or research institutions such as JTS or Yeshiva University, and as a result, these formed the bulk of my archival exploration.
One synagogue’s website said it had deposited its records with the Agudath Israel-affiliated National Orthodox Jewish Archives, but noted that the archives had suffered a fire that destroyed most of the records. I decided to try anyways. Upon searching up the institution, I couldn’t find an online catalogue and had to email the Agudath Israel organization’s main address instead. Someone there put me in touch with Rabbi Avrohom Perl, their archivist, who said I could come in later that week, making it my earliest—actually, my very first—archival appointment. Once there, I was led through an office into a climate controlled back room where Rabbi Perl showed me the one remaining box from the collection. He opened the box and out came a smoke-charred minute book whose edges crumbled as the pages turned. It was barely rescued from the fire. The kicker? I couldn’t even read the book because the clerk had kept the minutes in German.
Now I could blame the world and say that I was the victim of extraordinarily bad luck. Why doesn’t anyone keep records? Why aren’t historical records donated to research institutions? Why don’t these immigrants write in English? Why don’t people set up emails or answer calls? Or I could recognize that my limited findings were rooted in serious methodological problems and take methodological lessons, rather than some grand archival discoveries, as the fruit of my frustrated experience. The first of my methodological problems was mobility and ephemerality. Most of the institutions I identified had moved multiple times, in line with the migrations of various communities across NYC’s history and likely could not keep their records every time they moved. Given the history of institutions like Columbia, many communities may not trust such institutions to treat their records justly and without exploitation. And most importantly, what institutions I could identify were likely the tip of the iceberg: the most wealthy, which could pay down mortgages on lots, build buildings, and keep meeting minutes. What about those churches and congregations that operated out of rented quarters? The prayer groups that operated out of apartments? The small churches that centered around a single charismatic leader and no need for corporate leadership? Moreover, in the dynamism of the metropole, might my focus on the “voice” of religious community have been purposefully ignorant of the pluricentrism of Gotham society? If indeed the Church and the Rabbi are sharing blocks with the department store and the theater, is it methodologically sound to study them separately? Finally, it is clear that the very mobility and vulnerability of NYC’s institutions and the preciousness of urban space shape the archival resources that survive to us today.
The fruitfulness of my failed project lay in a lesson about research which I learned the hard way: the sources must guide the questions just as much as the questions select the sources. A project dealing with diverse subjects must find itself a similarly diverse methodological toolset.
For those of us exploring the Core curriculum and grappling with its rhetoric around “timeless masterpieces,” these principles hold as well. Each text asks us to humbly approach its own world its own way, and each historical world we should handle carefully with an ear for all the texts and worlds that could not be.
Janus Yuen CC’25