he translated and quoted Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Die Theilung der Erde” (The Division of Earth), its lesson being “that real devotion to knowledge cannot be coupled with the enjoyments of earthly pleasures.”
In closing, Browne apologized for inability to do full justice to the subject in the given time, and again referred with slight disparagement to the ultra-orthodox who continued to accept Scripture and Talmud literally. He noted that it was his intention “simply to remove part of the prejudice entertained against the Talmud” not only by outsiders, but also by “Israel’s own sons [who] add now to its misrepresentations.” In America, some of the blame for those misrepresentations could be attributed to its scarcity of trained rabbis.
Turning from the fundamentalists to their opposites, Browne then criticized radical reformers who rejected the Talmud:
the American Jewish pulpit, like all professions, has its parasites, being blessed (?) with a great number of so-called Rev. Drs.... [whose] titles consist in a dozen or two of white cravats and a waist-coat buttoned up to the chin.... Yet they wish to be reformers, and to be that, they believe it a contingency to decry the Talmud, which they cannot even read. But that is a great mistake. The Talmud is a treasure of learning, and Israel’s leading reformers quote it freely in their daily works and writings.
Although Browne’s Montgomery audience may have been impressed with his knowledge, overall approval of these remarks was questionable. Few Jews, regardless of their degree of reform, were ready to accept biblical criticism, even fewer to shed their long ingrained belief in divine revelation. Also, some listeners may have taken umbrage at his condemnation of “so-called” rabbis or of those radical reformers who thought that the Talmud was irrelevant. Still others, sensitive to the reaction of Christians in the audience, may have been disturbed by his candor in criticizing conditions within the “American Jewish pulpit.”
While this does not appear to have been a prudent discourse for Browne’s debut in Montgomery, it obviously pleased his mentor in Cincinnati, whose own beliefs he so devotedly reiterated. Wise published the lecture in its entirety, spreading it over his next three issues of the Israelite.
A few weeks later, Browne preached a sermon for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, much milder and only a fraction as long as his lecture on the Talmud. The title, “Comparative Mythology - The Book of Life,” described it well, his premise being that we should not dismiss as myths the religious literature of other ancient peoples while continuing to accept as literal truth equally anthropomorphic imagery in our own. Citing the traditional Jewish New Year’s blessing “May you be inscribed in the book of life for a good year,” as a timely example, he contradicted the general assumption that it referred to an actual notation, presumably by the hand of God. He said that it was a metaphor which meant that we should inscribe ourselves for life metaphorically by the manner in which we live. Even this innocuous nod to the scientific approach, however, was apparently more radical than some of his Montgomery congregants could accept. Temple Beth Or dismissed Browne forthwith because of that sermon.17
Despite so short a tenure, the exposure of his scholarship, eloquence, and unorthodox views gained Browne recognition elsewhere. There were few rabbis in America then with a sufficient command of English for use on the pulpit, and an increasing number of congregations anxious to infuse more English into their services that were still conducted in Hebrew and German. Browne received an invitation from Philadelphia’s Reform congregation Keneseth Israel, where the fiery Einhorn had once served, to be its English preacher alongside the German speaking Rabbi Samuel Hirsch. Wary of Einhorn’s lingering influence and not yet ready to leave the orbit of his mentor, Browne declined, opting instead for Wise’s recommendation that he become the first rabbi of a newly formed, second congregation in Milwaukee.18
Milwaukee, 1869
The move took him from a southern city decimated by the Civil War to a northern city enriched by it. Congregation Emanu-El had broken off from Milwaukee’s long established Congregation B’nai Jeshurun only the year before, instigated by the community’s burgeoning Jewish population which expanded from a maximum of seventy families in the 1850s to more than two thousand individuals by 1869. Pioneer Jews who only a few years earlier had been country peddlers, small grocers, and clothiers had suddenly become manufacturers, meat packers, purveyors of grain, and moguls of transportation on the Great Lakes. Upwardly mobile and flexing their muscle, leaders of the new congregation readily offered their rabbi a three- year contract at an annual salary of $2500.19
Again Browne promptly displeased his congregants, but apparently not due to a sermon. On the grounds that he lacked the necessary qualities demanded of the position, the board asked him to resign within three months, paying him only $700 for his efforts. Having been given no specific reason for dismissal, he complained in Wise’s paper, now renamed the American Israelite. He demanded an explanation but did not receive one. His later claim that he resigned because the congregation had no building seems somewhat specious because the congregation acquired a building the following year. In light of his future reluctance to deal with financial matters other than personal ones, it is reasonable to suppose that he refused to become involved in the congregation’s building campaign and that perhaps this was the major quality in which the trustees found him lacking. It is also possible that he expressed his position in less than diplomatic terms. The former wunderkind was developing a knack for sarcasm and a short fuse for dealing with those whom he considered pompous incompetents.20
Before leaving Milwaukee, Browne had the joy of celebrating the fifth anniversary of his arrival in America—i.e., the date on which he became eligible to apply for citizenship. He lost no time in doing so. Accompanied by two Milwaukee friends, A. S. Singer and attorney Max N. Lando, who co-signed his application, Browne appeared before the municipal court of Milwaukee on January 25, 1871, to become a naturalized citizen of the United States.21
Madison, 1870
By that time he had moved to Madison and enrolled in two courses at the University of Wisconsin School of Law. In June of the same year that he became a citizen, he received his bachelor of law degree, the only foreigner and apparently the only Jew in a graduating class of twenty. With that event he completed the collection of academic letters that inspired his nickname, “Alphabet.”22
As Browne later testified, his reason for studying American law was to deepen his understanding of Talmudic law, for he was currently engaged in writing a commentary on the Talmud. Unfortunately no copy exists by which to appraise it, but in an excerpt from its introduction he clarified the connection between the two systems of law. “The Talmud as a ‘corpus juris’” he explained, “is to the Jew what the Congressional Globe [now Record] is to the American citizen.” In other words, this was the record of Jews’ beliefs and practices, whereas the Torah was their Constitution.23
Because the Talmud is written primarily in Aramaic, which few Christian scholars understood, Christians did not realize that the lex talionis [“eye for an eye” etc.] and other primitive rulings were never carried out by Jewish courts. Likewise, they did not realize that Judaism had been developing for more than fifteen centuries before the Talmud was written. As a result, Christian scholarship fostered the perception that Judaism was a religion based on violence rather than love, and that its God was a god of wrath. These ideas fueled anti-Semitism. Now the recently developed Biblical criticism, also largely promulgated by Christian scholars unfamiliar with the intricacies of Talmud and led by the notoriously anti-Semitic Julius Wellhausen, furthered these misconceptions. The flawed scholarship gave fresh support to prejudice in Europe, which was currently being spread across America by evangelists in their mission to convert Jews to Christianity. The growing movement of Protestant evangelism and its Social Gospel understandably alarmed America’s small Jewish community, struggling to retain its Judaism.
In step with nineteenth century Reform’s emphasis on ecumenism as an antidote for prejudice, and especially as a means of ending the misguided interpretation
