that some of the most beautiful young ladies in our city are setting their caps for him.”33
Wise had dedicated Evansville’s first synagogue in 1865, and was well acquainted with its Jewish community. The congregation of B’nai Israel, then known as the Sixth Street Temple, was largely composed of 1840s immigrants from Bavaria and Wüerttemberg. It leaned toward Reform from the beginning, was among the first to join the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873, and proudly claimed to be the very first to pay dues. Well situated for river traffic, its citizens prospered during the war and subsequently enjoyed the fruits of their good fortune.
Soon after Browne accepted the position in Evansville, the local B’nai B’rith lodge sponsored a ball to benefit its Hebrew Orphan’s Home in Cleveland. Since its inception B’nai B’rith had established orphanages, hospitals and other public facilities, nurturing them until they could exist on their own or were no longer needed. Balls such as these—ubiquitous as a means of supporting communal institutions and supported by Christians as well as by Jews—were scheduled to celebrate almost any occasion, especially festive Jewish holidays such as Purim and Simchat Torah at the end of Succoth, which was the case with this one. When asked to speak at the event, the rabbi noted that, although the congregation did not utilize the lulav, ethrog and succah, traditional objects for the holiday celebration, the joyous tone and charitable purpose of the event brought it closer than any other to the spirit of the festival as specified in Scripture.
Evidence of the importance that Jews placed on the approval of Christians may be seen in the report of this ball that appeared in the American Israelite. It noted that “the first American families” (i.e., native born Christian) participated, and that the local newspapers, “especially the leading and most aristocratic Journal, accorded all praise to our ladies...due homage to the beautiful ‘oriental type of our Jewesses....’” This avowal of admiration, combined with the lingering perception that Jews were somewhat foreign and exotic, reflected a well meant though mixed message on the part of Christians.34
Another note in the Evansville Journal declared, “In ball dresses amiable Miss S. W. was pronounced the most exquisite in her modest buff....” The initials identified Sophie Weil, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Moses and Clara Loewenthal Weil, well established leaders in the community.
Moses Weil had come to the region from Bavaria in1839 as a boy of twelve, settling there even before Evansville became chartered as a city. He studied law independently while working as a grocery clerk. Although admitted to the bar in later years, he never practiced law, but chose instead to remain in business. His record is similar to that of other immigrants of the time. In 1872 he was listed as a pawn broker, living on Vine Street between 7th and 8th. He later opened the first Midwest branch of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company. Active both in civic affairs and in the Jewish community, he was also instrumental in establishing Evansville’s first synagogue.35
The men of Clara’s family, the Loewenthals, were likewise active in the community and founders of B’nai Israel. Her parents had immigrated when she was a child, bringing her, her sister Sara and their two brothers from Wüerttemburg, Germany, not far from Moses Weil’s birthplace. Sister Sara married Emil Brentano, son of another German Jewish family in Evansville and brother of the bachelor August Brentano, founder of the New York bookstore that bears his name. They became the parents of the three men credited with expanding the company onto the world stage. Clara wed Moses Weil in 1853 and produced a family of four boys and three girls. Sophie, born December 12, 1854, was their first child.36
A childhood memory that Sophie often repeated suggests that the Weils may have offered their home as a station on the Underground Railroad. She recalled her parents having instructed her and her siblings that whenever they saw a dark-skinned person hurrying across the Ohio River from Kentucky, Indiana’s slave-holding southern neighbor, they should close their eyes, point to the basement of their house, and keep their eyes closed until the fugitive had time to get inside. The reason given to the children was that a white man would soon come and ask them if they had seen where the escapee went, and they must be able to say “no” truthfully—not having seen where he went.37
Pro-slavery sentiment in that corner of Indiana was so strong that those who tried to help runaways did so at the risk of their own lives and the safety of their families. For that reason abolitionists kept no records and such recollections cannot be verified. Considering the danger, it seems truly extraordinary that immigrant Jews, themselves vulnerable and easily suspected of disloyalty, would risk their own safety by defying the prevailing sentiment of their neighbors. Perhaps it was precisely the fact that they were Jewish, however, with the memory of exodus from Egypt reinforced annually at their Passover Seder, that these fervent patriots sympathized with the Union, the government of their newly adopted Promised Land, and dared to assist others escaping slavery. It must have required enormous courage.38
Whether the Weils actually were abolitionists or not, they unquestionably gave their children worthy values. Sophie, like other daughters of upwardly mobile families of her day, probably first attended public schools and later enrolled in a private seminary for girls. She mastered French and German, read the classics in those languages as well as in English, and excelled at the piano. Her mother Clara taught her the finer points of homemaking and introduced her to daily prayers with the help of a personalized Jewish prayer book for the home, written mostly in English and published in America.39
Clara taught Sophie strict German standards of cleanliness as well as culinary skills in the German Jewish tradition, nourishing recipes that avoided pork products but probably contained no other Jewish dietary restriction since Reform Jews rejected kashruth in principle. Biblical injunction against other food such as shellfish was selectively ignored by most, but ham, pork, bacon, and sausage remained taboo. Sophie retained vivid memories of the day her father took her and her siblings to a slaughter house to see its unsanitary conditions and unsavory atmosphere in order to impress upon them the reason then espoused by logic-loving Reform Jews for not eating pork.40
As a serious sixteen-year-old, Sophie wasted no time in cultivating friendship with the new rabbi. When immediately upon arrival he organized the Evansville Literary Society, a staple offering of most Jewish communities, she joined her father and some sixty others as a founding member. Her lawyer-educated father served as the club’s “prosecutor,” and she volunteered as corresponding secretary. In early November she reported to the American Israelite that the group had accepted a “tilt” (a challenge to debate) with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Henderson, Kentucky, Evansville’s neighbor across the river. This was another activity characteristic of German Jewish communities.41
Comely, intelligent, and well schooled in amenities valued by the increasingly acculturated Jews of her day, Sophie appeared to be an ideal match for an American Reform rabbi. Readily smitten, Browne courted her in proper Victorian fashion. Recognizing that her intellectual interests paralleled his own, he thought that she would like to have a copy of a particular reference book that he favored, but apparently believed that it was bad form to bring her a gift and therefore hesitated to do so. After their betrothal, announced October 9, 1871, he presented the chosen volume, accompanied by a card on which he wrote, “Miss Sophie Weil, My lady– Not being entitled to bring presents to young ladies, I only lend you the use of this dictionary. Use it freely. Your most obedient servant, Dr. EBMB.”42
Formidable formality, even for Victorian times!
The book, hardly a romantic offering, was entitled A Biblical and Theological Dictionary: Explanatory of the History, Manners and Customs of the Jews and Neighboring Nation. Nearly twelve hundred pages long and three inches thick, it undoubtedly challenged the physical as well as the intellectual capacity of anyone attempting to use it. Originally compiled by Richard Watson in 1831 and published in a new edition by the Southern Methodist Publishing House in1860, its cover page identified the contents as “History, Manners, and Customs of the Jews and Neighboring Nations, with an Account of the Most Remarkable Places and Persons Mentioned
