Browne, supervised his secular education, and masterminded his moves for the foreseeable future.19
The Wises mingled freely in gentile society and introduced Browne to it as one of their own. They were the only Jews living on College Hill, so named because of several institutions of higher learning located there, including Farmer’s College, the Medical College of Ohio, and the Ohio Female College. Browne, while studying privately with Wise for the Reform rabbinate, enrolled in Farmer’s College to further his general education and entered the medical school to follow his interest in science. At the Ohio Female College, where the Wise daughters were the only Jewish students, he spent a sufficient amount of time to become friends with some of more literary minded ladies.20
Although he did not study English before coming to America and later claimed to have had little fluency in it during his initial stay in Cincinnati, Browne made himself understood well enough by members of the Hesperian literary society of the Ohio Female College for them to invite him to contribute to their publication, The Hesperian Gazette. He obliged by submitting a number of humorous, romantic verses. In 1869, Browne inscribed these poems along with others in a 276 page handwritten album entitled “Floral House Weeds,” which he dedicated to Wise and presented to him and Theresa on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Browne’s first body of work in English, it also included four items in other languages that Wise understood—one in Hebrew, one each for Rabbi and Mrs. Wise in German, and a translation of Lord Byron’s “Maid of Athens” in Hungarian. The verses were mostly romantic and about women, probably tongue-in-cheek. One that was both serious and touching he dedicated to his sister Ilona.21
Despite a disclaimer that his views, “religious or otherwise, should by no means be inferred from these writings,” they often foreshadow issues that he would espouse in the future. In one that suggests the rising voice of organized labor, which he vigorously supported as the movement grew, he seemed to be scolding those who demanded higher wages without having earned them.
We are always complaining, we have less than our neighbor,
Why man! do compare your reward with your labor!
If he works more than you, more reward he may claim;
And he receives that reward. ‘Tis yourself you must blame.
Certainly no Walt Whitman, the would-be bard tended to imitate Algernon Charles Swinburne and Edgar Allen Poe, often emulating their meter and rhyming schemes as well as their flowery romanticism. Yet for all his sophomoric versifying, the ardent youth revealed an astonishing breadth of knowledge and interests. His metaphors ranged from copious use of scripture to such references as mythology, ancient and modern history, astronomy, botany, and Dalton’s law on the use of gasses. He also displayed, for one so recently arrived in America, a surprising knowledge of national politics. The impeachment of President Andrew Johnson inspired him to write the last poem in his collection, entitled “North and South.”
To you in the North
Whose arrows go forth
To strike a fallen hero,
Whose venomous mouth
Denounces the South:
“Remember the end of a Nero!”
And the South in despair
I remind: “be aware,
There are roses enough among thorns.
Wade and Butler the beasts
The devil’s best priests
Have lost the power of their horns.
Though radical wrath
Presages but death
And sends you defying the challenge;
Up on high watches God
With righteousness’ rod,
Adjusting the uneven balance!”
Browne’s apparent sympathy for the South, particularly the allusion to Generals Benjamin Wade and Benjamin Butler as “the beasts,” probably stemmed from Wise’s influence. Although there is no evidence to suggest that either man ever condoned slavery—Browne, in fact, as shall be seen, displayed unpatronizing friendship for African Americans even while serving Southern congregations—it is likely that as Wise’s disciple he absorbed his teacher’s views that the South should have been allowed to secede unchallenged in order to avoid war. Browne probably dedicated the poem to Johnson out of personal sympathy rather than endorsement of the president’s political decisions.22
After one year Wise sent Browne to Savannah, Georgia, for “seasoning” and to improve his English while teaching Hebrew at the Savannah Hebrew Collegiate Institute. It is possible that he also wanted to divert his protégé’s attentions from Cincinnati’s social life. The wily mentor may even have tried to arrange a suitable marriage, a shittoch, for Browne, as he reputedly did for future rabbinic candidates at Hebrew Union College, cautioning them to take a wife before signing on with a congregation. He secured lodgings for Browne in Savannah at the home of the school’s superintendent, Rabbi Raphael Lewin, whose wife, Adeline, had an unmarried sister. They were daughters of Abraham Einstein, one of the city’s wealthiest Jews and a founder of the Hebrew Institute. According to rumor, the Einsteins encouraged Browne to become their son-in-law and never forgave him for declining the favor. Over a decade later, when false charges were brought against Browne in New York, his nephew believed that they had been instigated by the Einstein family in revenge.23
Besides teaching at the Hebrew Institute, Browne matriculated at the Savannah Medical College, and also gave several lectures there in chemistry. His experience in the laid-back city of colonial origins and wartime captivity enabled him to deepen his understanding of American history, to acquaint himself directly with a segment of the South under the burden of Reconstruction, and to intensify his sympathy for southerners of both races.24
Browne returned to Ohio the following year, resumed his medical studies at the institution that later became the Medical School of the University of Cincinnati, and earned his Doctor of Medicine degree by the end of the term. At the same time Wise gave him s’micha—rabbinic ordination—possibly the first and only one conferred in America before the first graduation at the Hebrew Union College in 1883.
Now Wise believed that his protégé was ready to test his skills as an American rabbi. Browne was well connected, well endowed intellectually, and no less well suited sartorially for the very visible position of Jewish leadership in the rising middle class communities of the United States. Photographs reveal him as a courtly youth with a full head of brown hair above a wide oval face, sporting a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, garbed in black cutaway with a medal dangling from his watch chain, posed proudly in Napoleonic stance with right hand in vest and gray eyes determinedly forward. Although only five foot three and three quarters inches tall—slightly less than average height—he was slim, fashionable and debonair, suggesting affluence and sophistication, attributes much admired and eagerly sought by nineteenth century American Jewry.
Happily, Browne had none of the negative characteristics generally associated with the typical “greenhorn.” What he lacked was not visible, its absence not quickly detected. It was, however, an ephemeral quality highly necessary for success as a congregational rabbi. As Wise later expressed the need, one must be “very circumspect, particularly in an age and in a country where rabbis are looked upon as ice cream only.”25
Browne could not be compared to ice cream. His persona more closely resembled the culinary specialty of his native land. Hungarian goulash
