An American Movement Is Born Essay
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An American Movement Is Born Essay
AN AMERICAN MOVEMENT IS BORN
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LARGE NUMBERS OF AMERICAN Jews into American Zionists would be a slow and often turbulent process. The reasons for this tortuousness had virtually nothing to do with the presence of another people in Palestine, but rather with reasons peculiar to the Jewish community. Fearful of provoking the anti-Semitism that lurked beneath the surface of American society, the majority of Jews still viewed the idea of re-creating Jewish statehood as anachronistic, if not dangerous. Zionism, warned the celebrated Reform rabbi Rudolf Grossman in 1897 strikes “a fatal blow at the patriotism and loyalty of the Jew to the country under whose protection he lives.” Congressman Julius Kahn of California, also a member of a Reform congregation, feared that Zionism would expose the American Jew to charges “of merely being a sojourner in the United States, using the benefits…that he get by residence here with the ultimate object of becoming a Palestinian and a resident of the Jewish State.”
Anti-Zionism was not confined to Reform Jews. Orthodox Jews also opposed the movement—not because of its emphasis on Jewish nationhood but rather because of its secularism. Zionists represented “the most formidable enemy ever to have arisen among the Jewish people,” according to the Orthodox association Agudath Israel. “Their entire desire…is to remove the burden of Torah…and to uphold only their nationalism,” claimed Shalom Dov Ber Schneerson, the revered Lubavitcher rebbe. For the broadening ranks of socialist Jews who saw themselves not as members of a distinct people but as workers in an international proletariat, Zionism was also anathema. Indeed, antipathy to the Zionist idea was one of the few positions around which, in the early 1900s, most of American Jewry could rally.
Earthshaking events were required to detach even a small portion of that community from its anti-Zionist stance. The Russian pogroms of the 1880s, taking tens of thousands of Jewish lives, convinced American Jews of the need for concerted action, while the Dreyfus trial in 1890s France reminded them that anti-Semitism continued to fester even in presumably enlightened Europe. With Western Europe looking increasingly inhospitable and American cities already bursting with immigrants, American Jewish leaders began to consider alternative havens. One possible shelter was Palestine, climatically harsh and politically problematic though it seemed. “I am in favor of any…outlet for any portion of our Russian coreligionists,” wrote Oscar Straus, the former ambassador in Istanbul, to the former American consul in Alexandria, Simon Wolf. “No failure, however great, can result in a condition comparable with the Russian condition.” But supporting the resettlement of Russian Jews in the Holy Land was one thing; converting that land into a Jewish state—a move that both Straus and Wolf opposed—remained distinctly another. The same Adolph Ochs who gave front-page coverage to the Armenian massacres in the New York Times sought to squelch all articles on Zionism.
Zionism nevertheless gained adherents, especially among the recently arrived Eastern European Jews, and in 1897 the Federation of American Zionists was formed. In contrast to Zionist unions in Russia and Poland, which urged their members to relocate to Palestine, the American organization never promoted Jewish emigration from the United States. Zionism, rather, remained as it was in Emma Lazarus’s conception, a refuge for Europe’s downtrodden Jews. “We believe that such a home can only naturally…be found in the land of their fathers,” posited Richard J. H. Gottheil, the Columbia Semitics professor who served as the first president of the Zionist Federation. But, the scholar added, “we hold that this does not mean that all Jews must return to Palestine.” Gottheil’s dynamic student Stephen S. Wise, one of the few Reform rabbis to promote the creation of “a little Jewish principality within…Palestine,” also specified that the American Jew “longed for no Palestine,” but rather “gives his allegiance to this land which alone can satisfy his very passion for liberty.” Those Jews who did leave the United States for Palestine—among them Golda Meyerson (later Meir) and Henrietta Szold, both profiled in a later chapter—were rarities.1
In spite of its success in redefining itself in distinctly American terms, the Zionist idea of reviving Jewish statehood appealed to only a fraction of the country’s Jews. Of the approximately three million Jews living in the United States in 1914, only fifteen thousand paid dues to the Zionist Federation, whose budget barely exceeded $12,000. Zionism remained an overwhelmingly European movement, with its headquarters situated in Berlin. The question posed by Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl, “Will the Jews of America…in their own happiness in the glorious land of freedom, forget the heavy bondage of their brethren?” seemed fated to remain unanswered.
Though statistically minuscule, American Zionists nevertheless wielded influence greatly disproportionate to their numbers. Talented and articulate leaders such as Gottheil, Wise, and Felix Frankfurter enjoyed access to American policymakers and to Jewish philanthropists who, even if opposed to statehood, were willing to cooperate with the Zionists in rescuing Jews. Unlike the marginalized Jews in Europe for whom Zionism presented a solution for deepening insecurities, these assimilated American Jews viewed Zionism as an expression of the growing confidence they felt as citizens of the United States. The same processes of secularization and modernization that were alienating American Christians from the restorationist idea were freeing and emboldening many American Jews to embrace it. Overcoming anti-Semitism, university quotas, and social restrictions, they had succeeded in breaching the bastions of Protestant power to become respected—if not yet fully accepted—members of the American elite. And like other minorities that had successfully integrated into the country, they saw no contradiction between pride in their ethnicity and allegiance to their flag. “Is the German-American considered less of an American because he cultivates the German language and is interested in his fellow Germans at home?” Professor Gottheil asked. “Is the Irish-American less of an American because he gathers money to help his struggling brethren in the Green Isle?”2
Of this emerging breed of superbly educated and connected Americanized Jews, none would prove more effective in wedding Zionist goals with those of the United States than Louis Dembitz Brandeis. Named for an uncle who had helped nominate Lincoln for president in 1860 and born in the American heartland of Kentucky, Brandeis had almost no contact with Jewish customs or religion, considering himself thoroughly American. “Sanity, soundness, clarity, nobleness, all were his,” Wise later wrote of Brandeis. “I never see him without thanking God for him.” He was also handsome, blessed with sharp, chiseled features, and stunningly brilliant. Graduating from high school at age fourteen, he finished first in his class at Harvard Law a mere six years later. Success came naturally to Brandeis, both as a law professor and as a litigator. By middle age, he had established his reputation as a debonair, if sometimes domineering, figure with a headstrong devotion to the principles of racial and social equality and to America’s role in liberating the world.
These convictions, Brandeis came to believe, fully accorded with Zionism. He initially encountered the idea at Harvard, where, in spite of almost impenetrable restrictions against the admission of Jews, a Zionist society had been formed and was even encouraged by several restorationist-minded professors. The young attorney saw parallels between the hardworking frontiersmen of colonial America and the Zionist pioneers in Palestine—“Jewish Pilgrim Fathers” with whom “the descendants of the [American] Pilgrim fathers should not find it hard to understand and sympathize.” While arbitrating an end to a strike by Jewish garment workers in New York in 1910, Brandeis was for the first time exposed to his people’s traditions and outlooks. The Jews, he deduced, were natural democrats, “possessed…of a deep moral feeling [and]…a deep sense of the brotherhood of man,” and worthy of national preservation. Two years later, while conversing with Jacob de Haas, an old colleague of Herzl’s and now editor of a Zionist paper in Boston, Brandeis heard about a Zionist experimental farm that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had helped establish near Haifa and about the Jewish nationalism of his own uncle, Dembitz. Excited by the goals of “these so-called dreamers,” he joined the Zionist Federation and, in 1914, at age fifty-eight, was unanimously elected its chairman.
On matters of Jewish nationalism, Brandeis was hardly an original thinker. “There is no inconsistency between loyalty to America and loyalty to Jewry,” he posited, closely echoing Wise and Gottheil. “Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though…neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.” The European Zionists, who preferred unglamorous settlement building to abstract ideas, found Brandeis overly attached to his theories and unwilling to be dissuaded by facts.3 But while Europeans might supply picks and shovels to those settlements, Brandeis, the quintessential American Zionist, supplied the movement with the one commodity it needed most: power. A close adviser to Wilson and soon to become the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, Brandeis had access to the most senior levels of American governance. With the transfer of the World Zionist headquarters from belligerent Berlin to neutral New York, that entrée would become crucial not just to the economic well-being of Palestine’s Jews but, in many cases, to their physical survival as well.