Jews and Judaism in World History

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immigrants from undermining their status as Americans by joining a move-
ment that was oriented around a different part of the world. This changed
when Louis Brandeis joined the movement. Brandeis, an assimilated lawyer
and an uptown Jew, came into contact with Jewish immigrants as the legal
advocate for the labor movement. Perhaps the most successful and high-
profile American Jew of his time, Brandeis belied any claim that affiliating
with Zionism somehow conflicted with loyalty to America. “Let no American
imagine,” he wrote in 1915,


that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism. ... Every Irish American
who contributed toward home rule was a better man and a better
American for the sacrifice he made. Every American Jew who aids in
advancing Jewish settlement in Palestine ... will likewise be a better
man and a better American. ... The Jewish spirit ... is essentially mod-
ern and essentially American. ... Indeed, loyalty to America demands
rather that each American Jew become a Zionist.

When he joined the American Zionist Movement in 1913, more than
300,000 Jews followed suit within a few months.
The influx of eastern European Jews transformed the religious landscape of
American Jewry. For the first time, there was a large constituency of tradi-
tional, and at least semiobservant, Jews. This prompted Orthodox rabbis,
themselves from eastern Europe, to found in New York in 1898 the Orthodox
Jewish Congregational Union, an umbrella organization for Orthodox con-
gregations. They soon discovered, however, that even observant Jews in
America had no interest in a European-style supracongregational organiza-
tion. While many congregations joined the Orthodox Union, it took decades
before it emerged as the voice of Orthodox Judaism in America.
Most Jews from eastern Europe regarded classical Reform Judaism as more
akin to Protestantism than to anything Jewish. In order to attract con-
stituents from among these immigrants, progressive rabbis such as Stephen
Wise and Benjamin Szold began to step away from the dictates of the
Pittsburgh Platform. The most significant change was to embrace Zionism,
even before Brandeis validated such a move. Interestingly, these rabbis tended
not to be of German-Jewish origin, but rather were advocates of non-German
Reform. Wise and Szold were Hungarian rabbis whose families in Hungary
had been Neolog and not Reform Jews.
The movement that benefited most from the influx of immigrants was
the nascent Conservative Movement. Founded in the mid-1880s, this move-
ment was minuscule until 1902, when a new leader was imported from
England: the Romanian-born, eastern- and central-European-trained
Genizah scholar Solomon Schechter. Like the other founders of Conservative
Judaism – the Hungarian Alexander Kohut, the Pole Marcus Jastrow, and
the Italian Sabato Morais – Schechter had embraced the moderate non-


Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914 201
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