Author: By Thomas H. O'Connor

Date: SUNDAY, February 28, 1999

Page: F1

Section: Books

In 1992, Hillel Levine, a sociologist at Boston University, and Lawrence Harmon, a Globe editorial writer, wrote a book titled ``The Death of an American Jewish Community: The Tragedy of Good Intentions.'' They argued that the movement of Boston's Jewish community out of Mattapan, a neighborhood of Dorchester, during the 1960s was the result of a well-meaning but disastrous plan by the city's political and financial leaders to make low-interest mortgages available to African-American residents. As a result of greed, fear-mongering, panic-selling, and blockbusting, according to Levine and Harmon, the Jewish population was deliberately driven out. What had been a mainly Jewish district became, almost overnight, an all-black community.

In his new study, ``Urban Exodus,'' Gerald Gamm, who teaches politics and history at the University of Rochester, takes serious issue with what by this time has become the standard interpretation of the abandonment of Blue Hill Avenue. Insisting that what has become known as ``white flight'' can actually be traced back to the 1920s, when the automobile came into its own and the federal government began building roads, Gamm maintains that the middle-class movement to suburbia began long before the 1960s. The exodus of working-class Jews out of the Roxbury-Dorchester area after World War II, he states, was only the final stage of a movement that had begun much earlier.

``Urban Exodus'' is much more than a controversial response to an earlier theory, however. Gamm examines not only why the Jews moved out of Mattapan but also why the Roman Catholics did not. In confronting this fascinating puzzle, the book gets into an extended contrasting of the various cultural and institutional traditions that led one group to pick up and move to other locations, like Brookline and Newton, and another to regroup, resist, and remain where it was.

During the 1920s and '30s, about 77,000 people, half the Jewish population of Boston, moved into the Dorchester-upper Roxbury area of the city, settling on the western side of the district along Blue Hill Avenue. To the east of this Jewish area lived about 136,000 Catholics, predominantly Irish. To dramatize these two religious groups, Gamm compares two structures erected generations ago -- the temple built by Congregation Mishkan Tefila on Seaver Street, near Franklin Park, and St. Peter's Church on Dorchester's Meeting House Hill. Both structures are still standing, and Gamm maintains that they reflect dual modes of survival -- images of what institutions can mean for the neighborhood they inhabit.

On the one hand, Gamm paints a heartrending description of the once beautiful temple that was Mishkan Tefila. Dedicated in 1925, it now stands empty and abandoned, overwhelmed by bushes, weeds, heaps of trash, and broken bottles. On the other hand, Gamm finds St. Peter's gray puddingstone structure, completed in 1891, an imposing sight atop Meeting House Hill. Things have changed, of course. Most of the 180 young students at the nearby St. Peter's School are African-American, Haitian, Hispanic, Asian, and other: But the church remains a vital part of the community.

There were a remarkable number of synagogues and churches built in the Dorchester-Roxbury area during the early 20th century. Gamm, however, focuses on Mishkan Tefila and St. Peter's as archetypes of two distinct institutional forms -- the typical Jewish synagogue, and the typical Roman Catholic parish. Each had its divergent codes of institutional organization and behavior, which eventually dictated the crucial decision to leave or to stay. The decisions they ultimately made, Gamm says, were neither good nor bad. They were simply the results of two different sets of long-established rules that each institution had inherited, and by which each had to abide to survive in a rapidly changing and often hostile environment.

In keeping with Jewish tradition, there were no physically defined boundaries for their people, and synagogues were forced to compete with one another for members and support. Catholics, on the other hand, were supplied with strict territorial boundaries to which all members belonged, and over which a central authority exercised jurisdiction. In Jewish law, the Torah is considered holier than any synagogue structure. Since the Torah scrolls are portable, it was possible for Jewish congregations to move freely from building to building, from one district to another.

A Catholic church, by contrast, is a permanent structure, built around an altar that is unmovable. On this basis, Gamm concludes, a territorial parish's relationship to its neighborhood was inalienable. And finally, the Jewish synagogue reflects the authority of the congregation, in a system where the rabbi and any religious hierarchy are superfluous. A Catholic parish, however, does not exist apart from a priest and a hierarchy.

This scholarly analysis of the various codes of institutional behavior is supported by a valuable series of maps of the Dorchester-Roxbury area. They document the location of synagogues and churches, outline the boundaries of parishes and the location of Jewish congregations, and illustrate the changing demographics of the district. On this basis, Gamm maintains that the exodus of the Jews from Mattapan was facilitated by the rules that had always assured the continuation of their faith and the security of their members.

While the institutional differences Gamm describes between the two religions certainly demonstrate how much easier it was for one to move and the other to stay, they still do not necessarily explain the reasons the Jews felt impelled to abandon Mattapan completely. Nor do they explain why Catholics, too, moved out of the area in large numbers. Churches, rectories, and parochial schools may have continued to remain in place, but a great part of the white population did not. The maps show quite graphically the course of the steady influx of an African-American population into the Dorchester-Roxbury area, but the accompanying text fails to convey the sense of fear, panic, and paranoia that precipitated the displacement of families and accelerated the remarkable white exodus from the district.

Gamm's examination of the institutional characteristics of two modern religions in a beleaguered community is a fascinating study. It shows the ways in which organized religions not only help shape the community in which they live but also the ways in which communities themselves help organized religions determine the most effective ways of carrying out their spiritual objectives. But as a specific response to Levine and Harmon's arguments as to why Boston's Jews abandoned Mattapan during the 1960s in the face of racial change, the reader is still left with the nagging question -- why?