Judah Leon Magnes
Judah Leon Magnes was a prominent Reform rabbi in both the United States of America and Mandatory Palestine. He is best remembered as a leader in the pacifist movement of the World War I period, his advocacy of a binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine, and as one of the most widely recognized voices of 20th century American Reform Judaism. Magnes served as the only chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later as its first president.
Biography
Magnes was born in San Francisco to David and Sophie who named him Julian. He changed his name to Judah as a young man.As a young boy, Magnes's family moved to Oakland, California, where he attended Hebrew school at First Hebrew Congregation, and was taught by Ray Frank, the first Jewish woman to preach formally from a pulpit in the United States.
Magnes's views of the Jewish people were strongly influenced by First Hebrew's Rabbi Levy, and it was at First Hebrew's building on 13th and Clay that Magnes first began preaching. His bar mitzvah speech of 1890 was quoted at length in the Oakland Tribune.
Magnes graduated from Oakland High School as a valedictorian in 1894. He then studied at the University of Cincinnati, where he gained a degree of notoriety in a campaign against censorship of the "Class annual" of 1898 by the university faculty. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati with an A.B. in 1898. He also attended rabbinical seminary at Hebrew Union College, and was ordained a rabbi in June 1900. He then went to study in Germany. He studied Judaism at the Berlin Jewish College, Lehranstalt, and pursued his doctoral studies at Berlin University, where he studied under Friedrich Paulsen and Friedrich Delitzsch, and at the University of Heidelberg. It was while he was in Berlin that he began embracing aspects of Zionist thought, though always strongly opposing its nationalistic elements. He spent time traveling through Eastern Europe, and visited Jewish communities in Germany, Poland, and Galicia. In December 1902, he received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg, and returned to the United States in 1903.
On October 19, 1908, Magnes married Beatrice Lowenstein of New York, who happened to be Louis Marshall's sister-in-law.
New York
In America, he spent most of his professional life in New York City, where he helped found the American Jewish Committee in 1906. Magnes was also an influential force behind the organization of the Jewish community in the city, serving as president throughout its existence from 1908 to 1922. The Kehillah oversaw aspects of Jewish culture, religion, education and labor issues, in addition to helping to integrate America's German and East European Jewish communities. He was also the president of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism from 1912 to 1920.The religious views Magnes extolled as a Reform rabbi were not within the mainstream. Magnes favored a more traditional approach to Judaism, fearing the overly assimilationist tendencies of his peers. Magnes delivered a Passover sermon in 1910 at Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York in which he advocated changes in the Reform ritual to incorporate elements of traditional Judaism, expressing his concern that younger members of the congregation were driven to seek spirituality in other religions that cannot be obtained at Congregation Emanu-El. He advocated for restoration of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony and criticized the Union Prayer Book, advocating for a return to the traditional prayer book. The disagreement over this issue led him to resign from Congregation Emanu-El that year. From 1911–12 he was Rabbi of the Conservative Congregation B'nai Jeshurun.
The Kehillah
In New York he set himself the task of uniting the Jewish communities. In 1880 the city contained around 50,000 Jews mostly of German origin. By 1900 there were nearly a million Jews, most coming from what is now Poland, Hungary, Romania, Belarus and Ukraine, making it the largest Jewish population outside of Europe and the Russian Empire. On 11 October 1908 he was chairman of a conference of Jewish organisations, the invitations to which, in English and Yiddish, had also been signed by labour leader Joseph Barondess and Judge Otto A. Rosalsky, amongst others. The conference authorised the formation of a representative community, the Kehillah, and gave Magnes the power to appoint an executive committee. The 25-man committee included Professor Solomon Schechter and Joseph Silverman. They called a convention in February 1909 to form a constituent assembly. Two hundred and twenty-two organisations responded, including 74 synagogues and 42 mutual benefit societies, out of some 3,500 Jewish organisations existing in the city at the time. The Kehillah's aim was "to wipe out invidious distinctions between East European and West European, foreigner and native, Uptown and Downtown Jew, rich and poor; and make us realize that the Jews are one people with a common history and with common hopes."The committee proceeded to set up a series of boards, or bureaus: Education, Social Morals ; Industry ; and Philanthropic Research. The first secretary of the Bureau of Education was Henrietta Szold. A report by Mordecai Kaplan revealed that of some 200,000 Jewish children of school age no more than 50,000 received any form of Jewish education. By 1916 the Bureau directed or supervised 200 schools, 600 teachers and 35,000 pupils. Funding was dependent on wealthy New York Jews such as Jacob Schiff, Felix M. Warburg and Louis Marshall who made an endowment for girls' education. The Bureau eventually evolved into the Jewish Education Committee of New York. Magnes was also closely involved with the Social Morals Bureau which held investigations into the white slave trade
and Jewish underworld. Its work helped to reduce Jewish juvenile delinquency in New York from 30% to 14% over a period of 20 years. In the Bureau of Industry he was Chairman of the Conference of the Furriers Trade.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
At the end of 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, Magnes became involved in collecting funds for the Jewish population in Palestine. The following year, a greater crisis arose with the war on the Eastern Front, devastating the Jews of the Pale of Settlement. Magnes devoted all his energies to this issue. Firstly he set about coordinating the three bodies that had been set up to face the catastrophe. These were the American Jewish Relief Committee, associated with the Kehillah and the American Jewish Committee, the Central Relief Committee from the Orthodox community, and the People's Relief Committee set up by labour organisations. The result was the creation of a single body called the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.In December 1915, a fund-raising appeal was launched at Carnegie Hall. His emotional speech raised a million dollars in donations. By the end of 1915 around five million dollars had been raised. In the spring of 1916 Magnes visited Germany and Poland to organise the distribution of the funds. The visit, via Scandinavia, started in Hamburg and Berlin, from there, with the assistance of the German authorities, he visited Poland and Vilna. He had to overcome the suspicions of the Zionist leadership in Europe, who accused him of bias. Despite this, he was able to organise the distribution of funds bridging the gulf between the Central and Eastern European Jewish communities.
Amongst the leaders he met were Max Warburg, head of the German Jewish Society, and Rabbi Leo Baeck, then Jewish Chaplain in the German Army. He returned to America in the winter of 1916 and launched a fresh relief appeal to raise ten million dollars. At one meeting he was again able to raise a million dollars in donations and pledges in a single evening. With President Woodrow Wilson's decision to enter the war, he switched his attention to anti-war campaigning.
Pacifism and the anti-war movement
Magnes was a Pacifist activist. According to Israeli professor Arthur A. Goren, he considered himself a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and the prophet Jeremiah, and opposed all forms of nationalism by military force. He had developed Pacifist views in 1898 as a result of the Spanish–American War. Magnes believed it to be an "unrighteous" war. Following the assassination of President William McKinley, who had led the United States into war with Spain, by an anarchist activist, Magnes wrote to his parents from Europe that he was not "enraged at the anarchists for it at all. In my opinion, dishonest men in public office are greater anarchists than those who kill a president once in twenty years".Following the United States' entry into the war in Europe in the spring of 1917, Magnes switched all his attention to campaigning against it. He became one of the movement's high-profile leaders. Like most of its leaders his sympathies were with the working classes. People such Eugene Debs who was sentenced to ten years in prison for his activities; Norman Thomas; Roger Nash Baldwin; Scott Nearing; Morris Hillquit, who took 22% of the vote in New York's Mayoral elections on an anti-war platform; and Oswald Garrison Villard. Most of these men were involved in what became the People's Council of America for Democracy and the Terms of Peace with Magnes its first chairman. On 30 May 1917 he gave the keynote address to a mass meeting of fifteen thousand people in the Madison Square Gardens. A follow-up meeting in Minneapolis was banned and hastily reconvened in Chicago but with a military force threatening to break it up.
Magnes moved home in Connecticut because of hostility from his neighbours and was interviewed by an agent from the Department of Justice. One of his colleagues from the "Joint", B. D. Bogen, was questioned by Attorney-General Thomas Watt Gregory about Magnes' activities.
Magnes worked with the newly-formed National Civil Liberties Bureau which defended pacifists and conscientious objectors. In America more than 2,000 prosecutions were brought against war-resisters under the Selective Service Act of 1917 or the Espionage Act of 1917; Magnes avoided prosecution since he was over conscription age.
Despite coming from a wealthy background—by 1920 he had become financially independent—Magnes reacted to the Russian Revolution with enthusiasm; in 1921 he was the spokesman at Philadelphia for the Society for Medical Relief to Soviet Russia. He also spoke on behalf of the Italians Sacco and Vanzetti.