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
I - WUNDERKIND AND THE PROMISE
OF AMERICA
On Saturday afternoon, May 27, 1884, a stocky, five-foot five Hungarian immigrant ascended the platform of the United States Senate to invoke God’s blessing upon the decisions to be made that day. A year later the same man represented the Jewish citizens of America as one of the fourteen honorary pall bearers for President Ulysses S. Grant, walking rather than riding with the others because the elaborate state funeral took place on the Jewish Sabbath.
The man was Rabbi Edward Benjamin Morris Browne, called “Alphabet” by his colleagues because he signed his name “E. B. M. Browne, LLD, AM, BM, DD, MD.” He had earned all of the academic degrees—three before the age of twenty—yet his contemporaries more often pronounced “Alphabet” in derision than in admiration. Controversial as much as charismatic, Browne inspired either love or hate, but rarely indifference. A prominent Christian clergyman declared him “the stoned prophet of our day” and a notable Orthodox rabbi eulogized him as “a great-hearted Jew,” yet he attracted powerful enemies among the leaders of Reform Judaism in America.
Deeply patriotic as most immigrants were, and profoundly moved by the promise of America, Browne devoted his formidable talents to testing that promise wherever he perceived it to be threatened. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he believed that here one could be both fully Jewish and fully American without compromising Jewish values or jeopardizing credentials of citizenship. Likewise, he accepted the scientific advances of his age as completely compatible with religious belief, embracing Darwinism and biblical criticism as enhancements rather than denials of religion—this despite the fact that most other ministers and rabbis, including his teacher, Isaac Mayer Wise, initially opposed them. An outspoken loner and independent, oblivious to personal considerations, his frequently unorthodox means of pursuing human rights drew public attention frowned upon by Jewish community leaders, who preferred their own brand of quiet diplomacy. The wide diversity of his activism and the range of people whose lives he touched present a rarely seen image of Jewish life in America during a period of formative growth in American Judaism as well as in the nation itself.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, American Jews strove to identify themselves both as Americans and as Jews. The vast majority were immigrants, and few, even among the highly successful, were thoroughly free of the fears that informed their lives in Europe. Most of them came from areas where, although legally included as citizens and partially acculturated, in reality they were largely excluded and treated as pariahs. In America where their skills were needed and generally welcomed, city councils, Masonic lodges and literary societies opened to them. Their Christian neighbors, many of whom also came from Germany and shared their nostalgia for its culture, found them congenial and respected them as descendants of the “Old Testament” Prophets. Together they enjoyed German music, German literature, and German dance.
On the other hand, it was difficult to practice Judaism in America. While many Jewish communities provided makeshift Sunday schools for the children, until the mass immigrations of the 1880s there was little opportunity for more than the most basic Jewish education.
