As a very young child, Moshe Braun was frequently called upon to recite randomly designated Talmudic passages in public, which he did verbatim, for charitable events in the synagogue. Being so encouraged to show off, this adored only son of prominent parents received ongoing adulation from the entire community. The exploitation may have affected his character for his adult ego appeared to be over-developed, but apparently it did not detract from his popularity as a child. One elderly woman remembered him as bold and outspoken “but always beloved by all,” and another as “a hard student” and very kindhearted.9
During Moshe’s bar mitzvah year, a new rabbi, Mayer Austerlitz, came to Eperies. A disciple of Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, renowned teacher of modern Orthodoxy before Reform became an established movement, Austerlitz may well have sparked the boy’s interest in becoming a rabbi dedicated to reforms.10
Both science and religion fascinated young Moshe. This was not surprising because German culture placed special importance on the study of science. It was likewise not unusual for German speaking Jews to combine this discipline with the study of Judaism. For millennia great rabbis were known to combine medicine with religion. Now the prescient among enlightened nineteenth century Jews foresaw the risk of assimilation, the logical antidote to which was an increased emphasis on Jewish education.11
At seventeen Moshe Braun entered a government technical college to study science. He gave some lectures on the subject while there, and graduated two years later. Then, perhaps influenced by the Modern Orthodox background of his home town rabbi, he enrolled in an early outpost of modern Judaism, the Fünfkirchen Theological Seminary. Its director, Rabbi I. H. Hirschfeld, gave him a theological degree after only one year. Then Braun came to America.12
There is no sure answer as to why he came. His daughter, having heard that he charmed the ladies during his bachelor years in America, imagined that he had perhaps done so to excess in Europe, departing in order to escape the consequences of a careless romance. This, however, went contrary to the view of the elderly woman from his home town who had known him since his childhood. She recalled that he was a straight-laced young man whose friends often chided him for not joining in their student revelries. A contemporary who came to America with him remarked on his “uprightly and independent behavior,” noting that he “never cared for money... never buys on credit, never owes a cent... never asks for a favor... never drank and is not a society man” a characterization backed by accounts of his future life. Many years later, Browne described his lifestyle in approximately the same words to Theodor Herzl, the visionary of modern political Zionism. “I find it important to tell you,” he wrote in support of his offer to work for Zionism, “that I do not drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t gamble, I am not a gourmet, make no visits and receive no guests and work 18 hrs a day.”13
Although such testimonials do not disprove the possibility that he fled Europe to avoid a shotgun wedding, it seems far more likely that he left in order to pursue a career in a progressive form of Judaism. Many others from Central Europe, among them the renowned liberal rabbis Samuel Adler, Max Lilienthal, Isaac M. Wise, and David Einhorn, did likewise during the middle and late nineteenth century.
Einhorn, no relation to the fiery Ignaz Einhorn of the Pesth congregation, had in fact followed his namesake as rabbi in Pesth in1852, but had to leave after two months because the government closed his synagogue. Having so inflamed the powers governing European Judaism, David Einhorn came to America as rabbi of Temple Har Sinai in Baltimore, where he became known as this country’s uncompromising leader of radical Reform. A generation older than Braun, he shared much of the younger man’s temperament, possibly because both were influenced by their native environment in Hungary.14
When Moshe ben M’hader Yaakov Braun came to America in late August, 1865, he became Edward Benjamin Morris Browne—Ed to his intimates. At least one of his friends was among the many young men who traveled with him that year, just a few months after the American Civil War ended. Adding to the attraction of new opportunities for work and individual enterprise was the novelty of crossing the Atlantic by steamship which had just begun when the war ended. Although this radically improved mode of travel was launched in the early 1860s, it was used exclusively for government priorities and not available to the public until after the war. Thus did the voyage hold exceptional promise for young men like Browne who were embarking not only on a new form of transportation, but on a new life as well.15
Such an experience remains a milepost in memory, easily becoming romanticized and embellished. Years later Browne recalled standing on the docks in Hamburg, “with a longing look [toward] this land of freedom... watching in wonder the many different kinds of ships “ungearing, loosening their tackles, heaving anchor, developing steam, setting sails and saluting with a cannon ball a farewell to old Europe.”16
Musing on the destinations of so many ships, the young rabbi asked an old mariner on a small schooner where he was going. “New York,” the man answered.
Next, Browne noticed a bark and asked its skipper, “Where to, good friend?”
He, too, replied “New York.”
Then Browne spied another ship, the “Red, White and Blue.” It was manned by two sailors and a dog, also going to New York. Browne considered this an indication of American foolhardiness.
Then, according to his memoir, the young emigre watched hundreds of vessels start for New York, “with proud or humble masts, with swelled or baffled sails, with steam, with screws, and with side wheels....” Following them in the distance as they scattered in different directions, he saw them “float on for awhile, and finally rise and sink and recede in the mist....”
Weaving this image into a sermon years later, Browne noted that his ship had reached New York before the others. After three weeks ashore he returned to the docks and encountered the skipper of the “Red, White and Blue,” which had just arrived. Greeting him, Browne mentioned that this crossing had taken much longer than his own, whereupon the seasoned seaman replied, “You traveled by steam.... I had to travel by sail.... The steamer can no more deride the sail than the sail the rudder, for they are the developments of each other. First the rudder, then the sail, then the steam, next electricity. Or the sunbeam, for all we know.”17
Even assuming that Browne concocted the story to enhance a sermon, the words provide evidence that his early interest in science and technology continued throughout his life, as indeed it did. In 1912 he designed an airplane which, after the United States entered the first World War, he offered to the War Department. Even more revealing was his reference to sailing toward the same place by different routes and diverse sources of power, which became a metaphor for his entire life. As shall be seen, he sought the same basic goals as others did, but by different vehicles and different routes. More often than not, he plied the waves alone on uncharted seas, powered solely by his own resourcefulness.18
Browne stayed a short while in New York before departing for Cincinnati at the invitation of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a leader of Reform in America, then in its initial stages of development. Reform had no national organization, no standard of observance, and no American-trained rabbis. Wise, who became its chief organizer and institution builder, emigrated from Bohemia in 1846, and after a stormy eight-year tenure in Albany, New York, accepted a call to Congregation B’nai Jeshurun (now known at Wise Synagogue) in the well established German Jewish community of Cincinnati. Soon renowned throughout the country, it was he whom most congregations other than those in the large Jewish centers of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore consulted when they needed a rabbi. In this capacity Wise was constantly on the lookout for promising young scholars with rabbinic potential.
Wise probably heard of Browne from mutual friends or colleagues in Europe. The renowned rabbi soon took the neophyte under wing and into his home, treating him like a member of the family. Theresa Bloch Wise, the rabbi’s wife, became a surrogate mother to Browne, and he became the brotherly confidant of her children, especially
