Читать книгу Prophet in a Time of Priests - Janice Rothschild Blumberg - Страница 6

INTRODUCTION

Little has been written about the numerous rabbis who came to America in the mid-nineteenth century except for those few who sustained long tenures in important pulpits. The vast majority served small communities throughout the country, often moving from place to place or to other professions with rapidity that suggests incompetence and lack of achievement. Such was not the case, however, with the peripatetic Edward B. M.. Browne, LLD, AM, BM, DD, MD (called “Alphabet” because he signed his name with all the letters.) Browne’s simultaneous careers as rabbi, public orator, journalist, pro bono attorney, and lobbyist provide rare insights to the Jewish experience during the formative period of American Judaism within our country’s dynamic, tumultuous era from Reconstruction through the First World War. His story is one of American history, Jewish history, and the history of church-state relations. His passion was America’s fulfillment of its promise of equal rights for all, a doctrine deeply imbedded in the hearts of most immigrants.

Browne held thirteen pulpits in eight states during a rabbinate that spanned half a century. He invited controversy at every turn, endearing himself to Christians and Eastern European Jewish immigrants while alienating the leading power brokers of American Jewry. He was admitted to the bar in two states; lectured in chemistry as well as Talmud and the life of Jesus, taught at a medical college, wrote for and edited newspapers, and embraced political Zionism at a time when it was anathema to most members of his congregation. His lectures drew enthusiastic applause across America. He traveled frequently to Europe and at least twice to the Middle East on missions of mercy for his fellow Jews, played a significant role in the presidential campaign of Benjamin Harrison, served as an honorary pall bearer in the state funeral of Ulysses S. Grant, sympathized with the labor movement, embraced the theories of Henry George, was referred to in New York newspapers as “The Poor Man’s Friend” and in the mid-West as “The Man Who Challenged Ingersoll.” Yet his name is hardly a footnote in American Jewish history.

One is tempted to ask why. Why is it that few Jewish scholars recognize his name, that fewer yet mention him in their published work, and even then in negative context? Why did biographers ignore him? Why have his achievements been overlooked and only his foibles remembered? Was he an unsung hero, a charismatic braggart, or merely an annoying gadfly? Was his failure due entirely to his own eccentricities, or because he was ahead of his time and dared to buck the mainstream? Those are questions for the reader to decide. This study seeks to illuminate the issues, not to resolve them.

Edward B. M. Browne was my great-grandfather. He and his only grandchild, my mother, formed a close bond which led to his spending much time with us in Atlanta during the last five years of his life and the first five of mine. I retain a brief but vivid memory of him as a warm, witty old man with a full head of curly white hair and a walrus mustache, who sometimes teased me and always seemed to enjoy my company. Family tradition, far from endowing him with a halo, cast suspicion on almost everything that he was purported to have done, perhaps due to the jaundiced memory retained by my grandmother who endured childhood as “the preacher’s kid.” Her attitude is not hard to understand. Moving from place to place and hearing public criticism of one’s parent does not make for a happy childhood.

Furthermore, her father by words and actions upheld Jewish distinctiveness at a time when she and her Jewish Victorian friends most wanted to blend into the mainstream. Her only glowing reminiscence of those days was that of viewing Grant’s funeral procession from an area outside New York’s posh Fifth Avenue Hotel reserved for celebrities and families of the participants, an awesome experience for a romantic nine-year-old. She never tired of showing me the identifying black armband that her father wore that day, a souvenir that unfortunately disappeared during ensuing decades.

My interest in writing about Browne began when I discovered the partial galley of a book intended as a tribute to him from an organization of “downtown” New Yorkers whom he inspired. It detailed how he saved the life of a seventy-year-old Hungarian Jewish immigrant who was falsely accused, convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. What a perfect plot for a play or a novel! I thought, and determined to write it someday.

That day came fifty years later. By then I realized that the story deserved serious attention as a poignant portrayal of handicaps confronting immigrants in the1880s. Here was a rabbi born and educated for success in the elitist world of German Jewry, who ignored the accepted rules of “uptown” society and befriended the deeply observant refugees from persecution and poverty in Eastern Europe. He approached them not as a benefactor but as a fellow Jew and fellow immigrant who understood their language and their angst. It read like fiction but it was not fiction. It was an account of suffering due to discrimination against immigrants, something that many of our forebears experienced when they came to America. He confronted it as a prophet acting on his own, not as a conventional rabbi who in those days was expected to be a priest representing acknowledged authority. Fearless and independent, he pursued the realization of America’s promise as his conscience demanded, undeterred by opposition and its consequence. He spoke not primarily to please his listeners, but to lead them.

One can easily get hooked on writing history. At times my quest resembled a game, similar to a scavenger hunt in which each clue leads to another. For example, an inquiry at the New York Public Library yielded nothing on the requested issue but, thanks to a diligent staffer, opened a treasure trove of information on even more significant points in Browne’s life. A chance acquaintance with Tweed Roosevelt, great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, led me to the microfilm collection of presidential correspondence at the Library of Congress that yielded a jackpot of Browne’s correspondence not only with T.R. but also with Presidents Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson. Most surprising of all, in a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about Browne that my mother assembled after he died, I noticed the report of a 1912 lecture memorializing Theodor Herzl in which the rabbi was identified as “a close personal friend” of the Zionist leader. This astonished me because, prior to the Holocaust, I had never heard anyone in my family mention Zionism or Herzl. Browne’s descendants were staunch anti-Zionists in those days. Did my mother realize the significance of this news when she pasted it in the scrapbook? It was too late to ask her but not too late to inquire at Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem if Herzl’s papers contained anything about E. B. M. Browne. The answer came in two file folders of correspondence (1897-1898) wherein Browne gave Herzl his unvarnished view of American Jewish life, its leaders, their negative attitude toward Zionism, and his readiness to resign his pulpit in order to work full time promoting Herzl’s vision.

These are the sorts of nuggets that delight unsuspecting historians who stumble upon them while following well defined paths of research. For this writer, the journey promised additional joy by illuminating the life of a revered forefather, previously ignored but deserving of remembrance. As the fourth generation of his progeny, I derive deep satisfaction and take great pleasure in dedicating his story to the generations that follow, to my beloved children Marcia and Bill Rothschild and my incomparably beloved grandson, Jacob M. Rothschild. May they enjoy the heritage as my mother and I have enjoyed it before them.

Janice Rothschild Blumberg

May, 2011