15. The Forty-Eighters

Young America

In 1852, Mazzini sent his right-hand man Adriano Lemmi (1822 – 1896)—Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy and a purported successor as head of the Palladian Rite—and Lajos Kossuth (1802 – 1894), the most famous of all the 1848 European revolutionaries, to the United States to organize Young America lodges.[1] The revolutions of 1848 drove so many Jewish refugees to the United States that several organizations were formed to aid them, including the Free Sons of Israel, founded in New York City in 1849, and affiliated with the B’nai B’rith, the oldest national Jewish fraternal order still in existence.[2] Though the term “Forty-Niners” refers to the wave of settlers who move to California in search of gold in 1849, the failed Revolutions of 1848 spurred the significant immigration of “Forty-Eighters,” including many Jews, to America. The Free Sons of Israel were founded by nine Jewish men who, like the B’nai B’rith, were Freemasons and Odd Fellows. It still uses regalia, passwords, ritual and is organized in lodges governed by a Grand Lodge.[3] Hirsch Heineman, a founder of the B’nai B’rith, served as the first Grand Master.[4]

The Revolutions of 1848 were celebrated by Americans with frequent parades and proclamations, and foreign revolutionaries like Kossuth emerged as national celebrities. At the highest levels of government, the United States offered diplomatic support.[5] After 1848, a faction of Democrats, concerned about the nation’s failure to support “democratic” revolutions abroad, formed a group identified as Young America.[6] John O’Sullivan (1813 – 1895), who is generally credited with coining the term Manifest Destiny in 1845, was the editor of the Democratic Review in New York City, which was the center of the Young America Movement, inspired by European reform movements such as the Young Hegelians, Young Germany and Mazzini’s Young Italy, who in league with the B’nai B’rith, the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the Golden Circle, and with backing from the European Rothschilds, played a formative role in the American Civil War.

The motto of the Democratic Review was “The best government is that which governs least.” Contributors included Samuel Tilden, William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, Herman Melville and two its members, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. The Democratic Review also published some of the early work of Walt Whitman, James Russell Lowell, and Henry David Thoreau. Hawthorne married O’Sullivan’s goddaughter, Sophia Amelia Peabody, sister of Elizabeth Peabody, a leading member of the Transcendental Club. Edgar Allan Poe, a fellow contributor to the Democratic Review, referred to Hawthorne’s short stories as “the products of a truly imaginative intellect.”[7] Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick and a contributor to the Democratic Review, considered Madame de Staël among the greatest women of the century.[8]

Young America was founded in 1845 by Edwin De Leone (1818 – 1891), who was born in Columbia, South Carolina of Sephardic Jewish parents, and later became a confidant of Jefferson Davis (1808 – 1889), a Freemason and the first and only President of the Confederacy. In their heyday in the 1840s and 1850s, argues Yonatan Eyal, Young America were led by Stephen Douglas, August Belmont, James Knox Polk (1795 – 1849), and Franklin Pierce (1804 – 1869).[9] The Young America movement also inspired writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Hawthorne wrote the glowing biography The Life of Franklin Pierce in support of Pierce’s 1852 presidential campaign, which was positively reviewed in the Democratic Review.

Kossuth completed a tour of several Masonic lodges to educate the Masonic hierarchy on how to recruit, organize, and train the youth in revolutionary strategy.[10] In the same year, Kossuth made contact with Franklin Pierce, offering him the propaganda services of Young America to promote his bid for the presidency in return for appoint particular individuals to important posts. Earlier in the year, the New York Herald reported that Pierce was a “discreet representative of Young America.”[11] Mazzini confirmed in his diary that Pierce was willing to accept help from Kossuth and his network of Masonic operatives: “Kossuth and I are working with the very numerous Germanic element [Young America] in the United States for his [Pierce’s] election, and under certain conditions which he has accepted.”[12] Pierce appointed several Young Americans to the foreign service: George N. Sanders (1812 – 1873) as Consul to London; Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864) as Consul to Liverpool; James Buchanan (1791 – 1868) as Minister to the Court of St. James, Great Britain; Pierre Soulé (1801 – 1870) as Minister to Spain; John L. Sullivan as Minister to Portugal; and Edwin De Leone (1818 – 1891) as Consul to Egypt. Mazzini wrote, almost all of Pierce’s nominations “are such as we desired.”[13]

Rothschild agent August Belmont (1813 – 1890), whose real name was August Schoenberg, was a German-born Jew who would become party chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 1860s, and the founder of the Belmont Stakes, third leg of the Triple Crown series of American horse racing. Belmont lent financial and political support to Pierce’s campaign, resulting in sustained attack from the city’s Whig newspapers, which accused him of using “Jew gold” from abroad to buy votes and maintaining “dual allegiance” to the Habsburg and Rothschild families. In a journalistic war of words that became known in New York City as the “Belmont affair,” Belmont demanded a retraction of a Tribune story, but after he was rebuffed by Horace Greeley, he enlisted the Democratic Herald and Evening Post in his defense.[14] Pierce won the 1852 election easily and appointed Buchanan and Belmont to diplomatic posts in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, respectively. In 1853, Pierce appointed Belmont Chargé d’affaires to The Hague.

George N. Sanders, a founder of Young America, was a close friend of Mazzini. At his home in London on February 21, 1854, Saunders hosted a dinner party with the guests of honor being Mazzini, Blanqui, Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin.[15] Also in attendance were General Giuseppe Garibaldi, Felice Orsini—one of Mazzini’s henchmen who would attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858—Alexander Herzen, and Arnold Ruge.[16] George Sanders gave the toast: “To do away with the Crowned Heads of Europe.”[17]

Standing out among the leaders of the Forty-Eighters was Carl Schurz, who has been described by some historians as the most influential U.S. citizen of German birth.[18] Schurz and his Jewish wife, Margarethe Meyer-Schurz, moved together to the United States, where she used the training she gained in Germany under Friedrich Fröbel to create the first kindergarten in the United States. After briefly serving as ambassador to Spain, Schurz became a general in the American Civil War, fighting at Gettysburg and other major battles. He was instrumental in helping Abraham Lincoln gain the presidency and also in helping abolish slavery. In the Illinois campaign of 1858 between Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas (1813 – 1861), he took part as a speaker on behalf of Lincoln—mostly in German—which raised Lincoln’s popularity among German-American voters.

 

Lincoln Assassination 

Douglas, the U.S. senator from Illinois, became the leading political figure for citizens who wished to make America a more effective beacon of revolution overseas. Douglas, however, had failed to win the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency in 1852. Douglas’ 1860 presidential campaign was supported by his friend Benjamin Franklin Peixotto (1834 – 1890), who was the American head of the B’nai B’rith and an ally of the Alliance Israélite Universelle.[19] As a delegate to the pivotal 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, Belmont supported Douglas, who had triumphed in the famous 1858 Lincoln-Douglas Debates over his long-time political rival, the newly recruited Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, in their battle for Douglas’ Senate seat. Douglas subsequently nominated Belmont as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Belmont also used his influence with European business and political leaders to support the Union cause in the Civil War, trying to dissuade the Rothschilds and other French bankers from lending funds or credit for military purchases to the Confederacy and meeting personally in London with the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, and members of Emperor Napoleon III’s French Imperial Government in Paris.[20]

Most often serving as attorney for the Forty-Eighters was Peixotto’s friend and collaborator, Simon Wolf (1836 – 1923), the head of the B’nai B’rith for Washington DC, and also a friend of John Wilkes Booth.[21] Wolf was meant to be at Ford’s Theatre on the night of Lincoln’s assassination, but was not able to attend, due to an illness in the family. Back when Wolf lived in Cleveland, was a stronghold for the Knights of the Golden Circle, he’d been involved in theatrical productions with both Peixotto and Booth.[22] Lafayette C. Baker (1826 – 1868), the chief of the War Department’s Detective Bureau, arrested Wolf because he suspected him of working as an enemy agent and because of his leadership in B’nai B’rith, which Baker considered, “a disloyal organization which has its ramifications in the South, and… helping traitors.”[23] Working in Montreal for the operation to assassinate Lincoln was Sanders. Jefferson Davis had named Sanders as his Representative as an ex-officio member of the Confederate Micheners in Canada late in the Civil War.[24] In 1864, a stranger who appeared to be a well-dressed Italian spoke with a Mr. Boteler, a member of Congress from Virginia, who claimed to have been sent on a mission to Richmond. He admitted:

 

I belong to the society of the Carbonari! It sympathizes with the Southern Confederacy; and it is the only power in Europe that can compel its recognition, for Napoleon III is secretly a member of the society, and dares not disobey its mandates. More than this, I hold in may hand the life of Abraham Lincoln; the victim who the Carbonari designate cannot elude them.[25]

 

Finally, on May 2, 1865, President Johnson issued a $25,000 reward for Sanders’ arrest in connection with Lincoln’s assassination. The charges were ultimately dropped, but Sanders had probably encouraged John Wilkes Booth, although he was ultimately able to absolve the Confederacy of any blame in the plot.[26] In Murdering Mr. Lincoln, Charles Higham asserts that Sanders was the driving force behind the assassination. Higham alleges that in June 1864, Sanders plotting against Lincoln with the Confederate Secret Service in Montreal. Higham asserts that when Booth arrived in Montreal in October of that year, he fell under the influence of Sanders and arranged Lincoln’s assassination there. Lafayette C. Baker was recalled to Washington after the assassination. Within days, Booth was arrested and along with David Herold was eventually shot and killed.

When Peixotto was appointed United States Consul at Bucharest in 1870, Wolf, along with the “robber baron” Seligman brothers, was among the leading advocates for the appointment, with the aim of devising plans to improve the condition of the Jews of Romania.[27] The key influence in Peixotto’s appointment as consul in Romania was Chaim Tzvi Schneerson (1834 – 1882), the great-grandson of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidism, who had been accused of being a Sabbatean.[28] In 1840, Schneerson immigrated with his parents and his brothers to Palestine and settled in Hebron, which was the center of Chabad Hasidism in Israel at the time.[29] As the age of eighteen, he began going on missions as a doctor to Jewish communities such as Syria, Egypt, Iran, Romania, England, and France. On behalf of the Hebron and Jerusalem communities, he also went to Persia, India, China and Australia. In India, he mainly visited Mumbai and Calcutta. Schneerson also saw his trips as opportunities to spread ideas of Zionism to the isolated Jewish communities. Schneerson’s international talks gained prominent coverage in Jewish newspapers around the world.

In 1869, Schneerson travelled to the United States to raise funds and publicize his views on the coming of the messiah.[30] Upon his arrival, an invitation was sent to him by the following Rabbis which resulted in a lecture at the New-York Historical Society on February 17, 1869.[31] Among those who signed the invitation were American Transcendentalist Henry Ward Beecher, Samuel Adler (1809 – 1891) of Temple Emanu-El, Rabbi Dr. David Einhorn of Adath Yeshurun, and Rabbi Yehuda Lyons (1814 – 1877) of Shearith Israel, co-founder of Mount Sinai Hospital. During the American Civil War, Joseph Seligman was president of Temple Emanu-El in New York City, a flagship congregation in the Reform branch of Judaism in the United States. In 1857, after the death of Founding Rabbi Merzbacher, another German Jew, Samuel Adler, became his successor. Adler was succeeded in 1873 by a Prussian-born American rabbi Gustav Gottheil (1827 – 1903), the father of “reluctant father of American Zionism,” Columbia professor Richard Gottheil (1862 – 1936). The list included Rabbi Samuel Myer Isaacs (1804 – 1878), who was editor of The Jewish Messenger and a founder of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, whose president was Moses Montefiore. Isaacs’s sons were lawyer and judge Myer S. Isaacs (1841 – 1904), who was also a member of the Central Committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and Rabbi Abram S. Isaacs (1851 – 1920), who also became editor The Jewish Messenger. The president of the board was Isaac’s friend Adolph L. Sanger (1842 – 1894), a leader of the B’nai B’rith, and superintendent of the Temple Emanu-El religious school.

In 1864, Joseph Seligman (1819 – 1880), and his brother James founded J. & W. Seligman & Co., a prominent U.S. investment bank. In 1870, Joseph Seligman founded the Continental Bank of New York with Jacob Schiff (1847 – 1920). German-born Schiff belonged to a Frankist family. Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz’s mother was also a member of the Schiff family. His most famous ancestors included the eighteenth-century dayyan David Tevele Schiff (d. 1791), who became rabbi of the Great Synagogue in London.[32] David was a close friend of Jacob Falk.[33] For many years, the early Schiffs shared ownership of a two-family house with the Rothschilds. In 1877, President Rutherford Hayes asked Seligman, August Belmont, and a number of other New York bankers to come to Washington, D.C., to plan a refinancing of the war debt.

 

Free Religious Association

Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, reportedly told Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819 – 1900), a member of the B’nai B’rith and the “Moses of America” as some called him, that his father was Jewish.[34] Fellow B’nai B’rith member Benjamin F. Peixotto also contributed to the establishment of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), which was founded by Wise which has since been renamed Union for Reform Judaism.[35] Wise was born in Bohemia, left when teachings came under suspicion by the Austrian authorities, and settled in the United States were his teachings followed no less controversy. In 1850, Wise applied attempt to lead Beth Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, the same synagogue that produced many of the founding members of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. But when he was asked by the congregants whether he believed in the coming of a Messiah and the resurrection of the body, Wise unhesitatingly answered, “No, the Talmud is no authority for me in the matter of doctrine.”[36] Wise returned to Albany, but he was again challenged for his views. His followers seceded from the synagogue and founded a Reform congregation called Anshe Emeth. Following a storm of controversy, Wise accepted a post at the Bene Yeshurun Congregation in Cincinnati, a stronghold of some 30,000 Germany Forty-Eighters.

A Scottish Rite Freemason, Wise declared, “Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from the beginning to the end.”[37] In August 1855, Wise published a response in The Israelite to a letter which had been published in The Boston Morning Times from an anonymous Mason from Massachusetts, in which he had claimed: “… here in Massachusetts Masonry is a Christian, or rather Protestant institution; Christian, as it merely TOLERATES Jews; Protestant, as it abhors Catholics.” Wise countered:

 

We characterize the above principles as anti Masonic, because we know that not only Catholics but Israelites in this country and in Europe are prominent and bright Masons. We know still more, viz. that Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords and explanations (sic) are Jewish from the beginning to the end, with the exception of one by-degree and a few words in the obligation, which true to their origin in the middle ages, are Roman Catholic. (…) it is impossible to be well posted in Masonry without having a Jewish teacher.[38]

 

Two weeks later, Wise published a response from “A Young Mason” from Boston, Massachusetts, who asserted that Rev. Brother Randall insisted that Masonry “was once mainly Jewish but now it is mainly Christian.” Wise’s sarcastic response was:

 

It is a great favour, the Rev. R. believes that the Jews are admitted in the lodges etc. of which they must be sensible and grateful. Why does he not consider it a favor, that we have the privilege of living in our houses. Masonry was founded by Jews as a cosmopolitical institution, hence it is a favor for the Jew to be admitted in the lodges, viz. in our own house. How sapient!

We Jews have given birth to the masonic fraternity as a cosmopolitical institution; but we consider it no favor to admit you in the lodge, provided, however, you leave your sectarianism outside of the consecrated walls. We have given you Christianity to convert the heathens gradually to the pure deism and ethics of Moses and the Prophets; still, we consider it no special favor bestowed on you from our side, that you have the privilege of being a preacher in one of the churches.[39]

 

Wise was also a member of the Free Religious Association (FRA), which connected many reform rabbis to the Transcendentalists of the Democratic Review. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first person to join the FRA, which was formed in 1867 in part by American minister and Transcendentalist author David Atwood Wasson, with Lucretia Mott, and Reverend William J. Potter, to be, in Potter’s words, a “spiritual anti-slavery society” to “emancipate religion from the dogmatic traditions it had been previously bound to.”[40] The FRA was opposed not only to organized religion, but also to any supernaturalism in an attempt to affirm the supremacy of individual conscience and individual reason. The FRA carried a Masonic message of the perfectibility of humanity, democratic faith in the worth of each individual, the importance of natural rights and the affirmation of the efficacy of reason. The first public assembly was held in 1867 with an audience ranging from Progressive Quakers, liberal Jews, radical Unitarians, Universalists, agnostics, Spiritualists, and scientific theists.

Also a member of the FRA was Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882). The proponents of Reform Judaism had consistently claimed since the early nineteenth-century to aim to reconcile Jewish religion with advancements scientific thought, and the science of evolution was of particular interest. In a series of twelve sermons published as The Cosmic God (1876), Rabbi Wise offered an alternative theistic account of Darwinism. Hirsch, for example, wrote:

 

In notes clearer than ever were entoned by human tongue does the philosophy of evolution confirm essential verity of Judaism’s insistent protest and proclamation that God is one. This theory reads unity in all that is and has been. Stars and stones, planets and pebbles, sun and sod, rock and river, leaf and lichen are spun of the same thread. Thus the universe is one soul, One spelled large. If throughout all visible form one energy is manifest and in all material shape one substance is apparent, the conclusion is all the better assured which holds this essentially one world of life to be the thought of one all embracing and all underlying creative directive mind... I, for my part, believe to be justified in my assurance that Judaism rightly apprehended posits God not, as often it is said to do, as an absolutely transcendental One. Our God is the soul of the Universe… Spinozism and Judaism are by no means at opposite poles.[41]

 

Other Reform rabbis who were more sympathetic to Darwinian included Kaufmann Kohler, Emil G. Hirsch, and Joseph Krauskopf. The FRA included numerous American Jewish Reform rabbis, including Max Lilienthal the editor of The Israelite, Moritz Ellinger, Aaron Guinzburg, Raphael Lasker, S. H. Sonneschein, I.S. Nathans, Henry Gersoni, Judah Wechsler, Felix Adler, Bernhard Felsenthal, Edward Lauterbach, Solomon Schindler, Emil G. Hirsch and eventually the Sabbatean Stephen Wise, founder of the of the national Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), forerunner of the Zionist Organization of America.[42]

Wise made Cincinnati the center of his Reform movement for the continent. In 1873, delegates of many reform congregations met there and organized the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Hebrew Union College (UAHC), which Wise founded in 1875. In 1885, Rabbi Alexander Kohut (1842 – 1894)—a follower of the Frankist Rabbi Zecharias Frankel (1801 – 1875), originator of Conservative Judaism—attacked the UAHC for abandoning “traditional” Judaism. A small group of conservatives withdrew from the UAHC in protest and founded the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA). At first unifying almost all non-Reform currents, it developed into the center of Conservative Judaism. The first graduate to be ordained, in 1894, was Joseph Hertz (1872 – 1946), who would go on to become the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. Many graduates of the JTSA joined the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), founded by Wise in 1889, in fulfilment of his dream of uniting the American congregations. The CCAR is largest and oldest rabbinical organization in the world. The CCAR primarily consists of rabbis also educated at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, New York City, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem. While Pittsburgh Platform was never formally adopted by the UAHC or the CCAR, the platform exerted great influence over the movement in the next fifty years, and still influences some Reform Jews who hold classicist views to this day.[43]

 

Free Religious Association

Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, reportedly told Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819 – 1900), a member of the B’nai B’rith and the “Moses of America” as some called him, that his father was Jewish.[44] Fellow B’nai B’rith member Benjamin F. Peixotto also contributed to the establishment of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), which was founded by Wise which has since been renamed Union for Reform Judaism.[45] Wise was born in Bohemia, left when teachings came under suspicion by the Austrian authorities, and settled in the United States were his teachings followed no less controversy. In 1850, Wise applied attempt to lead Beth Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, the same synagogue that produced many of the founding members of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. But when he was asked by the congregants whether he believed in the coming of a Messiah and the resurrection of the body, Wise unhesitatingly answered, “No, the Talmud is no authority for me in the matter of doctrine.”[46] Wise returned to Albany, but he was again challenged for his views. His followers seceded from the synagogue and founded a Reform congregation called Anshe Emeth. Following a storm of controversy, Wise accepted a post at the Bene Yeshurun Congregation in Cincinnati, a stronghold of some 30,000 Germany Forty-Eighters.

A Scottish Rite Freemason, Wise declared, “Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from the beginning to the end.”[47] In August 1855, Wise published a response in The Israelite to a letter which had been published in The Boston Morning Times from an anonymous Mason from Massachusetts, in which he had claimed: “… here in Massachusetts Masonry is a Christian, or rather Protestant institution; Christian, as it merely TOLERATES Jews; Protestant, as it abhors Catholics.” Wise countered:

 

We characterize the above principles as anti Masonic, because we know that not only Catholics but Israelites in this country and in Europe are prominent and bright Masons. We know still more, viz. that Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords and explanations (sic) are Jewish from the beginning to the end, with the exception of one by-degree and a few words in the obligation, which true to their origin in the middle ages, are Roman Catholic. (…) it is impossible to be well posted in Masonry without having a Jewish teacher.[48]

 

Two weeks later, Wise published a response from “A Young Mason” from Boston, Massachusetts, who asserted that Rev. Brother Randall insisted that Masonry “was once mainly Jewish but now it is mainly Christian.” Wise’s sarcastic response was:

 

It is a great favour, the Rev. R. believes that the Jews are admitted in the lodges etc. of which they must be sensible and grateful. Why does he not consider it a favor, that we have the privilege of living in our houses. Masonry was founded by Jews as a cosmopolitical institution, hence it is a favor for the Jew to be admitted in the lodges, viz. in our own house. How sapient!

We Jews have given birth to the masonic fraternity as a cosmopolitical institution; but we consider it no favor to admit you in the lodge, provided, however, you leave your sectarianism outside of the consecrated walls. We have given you Christianity to convert the heathens gradually to the pure deism and ethics of Moses and the Prophets; still, we consider it no special favor bestowed on you from our side, that you have the privilege of being a preacher in one of the churches.[49]

 

Wise was also a member of the Free Religious Association (FRA), which connected many reform rabbis to the Transcendentalists of the Democratic Review. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first person to join the FRA, which was formed in 1867 in part by American minister and Transcendentalist author David Atwood Wasson, with Lucretia Mott, and Reverend William J. Potter, to be, in Potter’s words, a “spiritual anti-slavery society” to “emancipate religion from the dogmatic traditions it had been previously bound to.”[50] The FRA was opposed not only to organized religion, but also to any supernaturalism in an attempt to affirm the supremacy of individual conscience and individual reason. The FRA carried a Masonic message of the perfectibility of humanity, democratic faith in the worth of each individual, the importance of natural rights and the affirmation of the efficacy of reason. The first public assembly was held in 1867 with an audience ranging from Progressive Quakers, liberal Jews, radical Unitarians, Universalists, agnostics, Spiritualists, and scientific theists.

Also a member of the FRA was Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882). The proponents of Reform Judaism had consistently claimed since the early nineteenth-century to aim to reconcile Jewish religion with advancements scientific thought, and the science of evolution was of particular interest. In a series of twelve sermons published as The Cosmic God (1876), Rabbi Wise offered an alternative theistic account of Darwinism. Hirsch, for example, wrote:

 

In notes clearer than ever were entoned by human tongue does the philosophy of evolution confirm essential verity of Judaism’s insistent protest and proclamation that God is one. This theory reads unity in all that is and has been. Stars and stones, planets and pebbles, sun and sod, rock and river, leaf and lichen are spun of the same thread. Thus the universe is one soul, One spelled large. If throughout all visible form one energy is manifest and in all material shape one substance is apparent, the conclusion is all the better assured which holds this essentially one world of life to be the thought of one all embracing and all underlying creative directive mind... I, for my part, believe to be justified in my assurance that Judaism rightly apprehended posits God not, as often it is said to do, as an absolutely transcendental One. Our God is the soul of the Universe… Spinozism and Judaism are by no means at opposite poles.[51]

 

Other Reform rabbis who were more sympathetic to Darwinian included Kaufmann Kohler, Emil G. Hirsch, and Joseph Krauskopf. The FRA included numerous American Jewish Reform rabbis, including Max Lilienthal the editor of The Israelite, Moritz Ellinger, Aaron Guinzburg, Raphael Lasker, S. H. Sonneschein, I.S. Nathans, Henry Gersoni, Judah Wechsler, Felix Adler, Bernhard Felsenthal, Edward Lauterbach, Solomon Schindler, Emil G. Hirsch and eventually the Sabbatean Stephen Wise, founder of the of the national Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), forerunner of the Zionist Organization of America.[52]

Wise made Cincinnati the center of his Reform movement for the continent. In 1873, delegates of many reform congregations met there and organized the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Hebrew Union College (UAHC), which Wise founded in 1875. In 1885, Rabbi Alexander Kohut (1842 – 1894)—a follower of the Frankist Rabbi Zecharias Frankel (1801 – 1875), originator of Conservative Judaism—attacked the UAHC for abandoning “traditional” Judaism. A small group of conservatives withdrew from the UAHC in protest and founded the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA). At first unifying almost all non-Reform currents, it developed into the center of Conservative Judaism. The first graduate to be ordained, in 1894, was Joseph Hertz (1872 – 1946), who would go on to become the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. Many graduates of the JTSA joined the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), founded by Wise in 1889, in fulfilment of his dream of uniting the American congregations. The CCAR is largest and oldest rabbinical organization in the world. The CCAR primarily consists of rabbis also educated at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, New York City, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem. While Pittsburgh Platform was never formally adopted by the UAHC or the CCAR, the platform exerted great influence over the movement in the next fifty years, and still influences some Reform Jews who hold classicist views to this day.[53]

 


[1] John Daniel. Scarlet and the Beast: A History of the War Between English and French Freemasonry, Vol. 3 (John Kregel, Inc., 1994).

[2] “Free Sons of Israel.” New York Times (April 7, 1895). Retrieved from https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1895/04/07/102510715.pdf

[3] “Jewish Orders.” Freimaurer-Wiki. Retrieved from https://www.freimaurer-wiki.de/index.php/En:Jewish_Orders#Free_Sons_of_Israel

[4] Daniel Soyer. “Entering the ‘Tent of Abraham’: Fraternal Ritual and American-Jewish Identity, 1880-1920.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 9, no. 2 (1999), p. 166.

[5] “Revolution - 1848 and ‘young america’” Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy. Retrieved from https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/O-W/Revolution-1848-and-young-america.html

[6] Ibid.

[7] Arthur Hobson Quinn. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 334.

[8] Joel Porte. In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1991)), p. 23.

[9] Yonatan Eyal. The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (2007)

[10] Daniel. Scarlet and the Beast.

[11] Merle E. Curti, “Young America.” American Historical Review (October 1926), p. 44.

[12] As cited in Daniel. Scarlet and the Beast.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Irving Katz. August Belmont: a political biography (New York/London: Columbia University Press, 1968), pp. 10–21.

[15] Sigmund Diamond, ed. A Casual View of America—The Home Letters of Solomon de Rothschild (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 22.

[16] Ibid.; Mark A. Lause. A Secret Society History of the Civil War (University of Illinois Press, 2011), p. 1.

[17] Michael Walzer “On Democratic Internationalism.” Dissent (Spring 2016). Retrieved from https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/democratic-internationalism-hungarian-revolution-irving-howe

[18] Charlotte L. Brancaforte (ed.) The German Forty-Eighters in the United States (New York: Lang, 1989). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/forty-eighters

[19] Cyrus Adler, E. A. Cardozo. “Peixotto.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11993-peixotto; Benjamin Peixotto. “Principality, now Kingdom, of Roumania.” Menorah, I: 1 (July, 1886), p. 212.

[20] Allen Johnson (ed.) Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), pg. 170.

[21] Steven Hager. “Is Simon Wolf a key to the Lincoln assassination?” The Tin Whistle (September 23, 2014). Retrieved from https://stevenhager.net/2014/09/23/is-simon-wolf-a-key-to-the-lincoln-assassination/

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ellis Washington. “Myths vs. Facts (Part 8) – Young America: Illuminati Influence on Education.” (June 14, 2019).

[25] Edward Pollard. Life of Jefferson Davis With a Secret History of the Southern Confederacy (1869), p. 412.

[26] Melinda Squires. “The Controversial Career of George Nicholas Sanders.” Masters Thesis (Western Kentucky University, 2000).

[27] Max J. Kohler. “Simon Wolf.” The American Jewish Year Book, 26 (1924), p 409.

[28] Immanuel Etkes. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Origins of Chabad Hasidis (Brandeis University Press, 2015), p. 185.

[29] “Hyam Zvee Sneersohn: The First Chabad Rabbi in Los Angeles, 1870 – JMAW – Jewish Museum of the American West.” Jewish Museum of the American West. Retrieved https://www.jmaw.org/sneersohn-chassid-los-angeles/

[30] Jonathan D. Sarna. “President Grant and the Chabadnik.” Jewish Review of Books (Spring 2012). Retrieved from https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/200/president-grant-and-the-chabadnik/

[31] “Rabbi H. Z. Schneersohn…” The American Israelite (February 12, 1869), pp. P6. Retrieved from https://www.newspapers.com/image/531505295

[32] Naomi Wiener Cohen. Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership, (Brandeis University Press, 1999), p. 2; Falk’s commonplace book: Jewish Museum, London: United Synagogue Beth HaMidrash Library, London, as summarized in Adler, “Baal Shem,” 149, 166–73.

[33] Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 217.

[34] Lenny Picker. “Was John Wilkes Booth Jewish?” Forward (April 3, 2015). Retrieved from https://forward.com/culture/217871/was-john-wilkes-booth-jewish/

[35] Cyrus Adler, E. A. Cardozo. “Peixotto.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11993-peixotto; Benjamin Peixotto. “Principality, now Kingdom, of Roumania.” Menorah Vol. I. JULY, 1886 No. 1. p. 212.

[36] Michael Feldberg. “Isaac Harby.” My Jewish Learning. Retrieved from https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/isaac-harby/

[37]. Dr. Isaac Wise. The Israelite (August 3 and 17, 1855); quoted in Samuel Oppenheim. The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810. Reprint from Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 19 (1910), 1-2.

[38] Rabbi Wise. The Israelite (August 3, 1855)

[39] Ibid.

[40] W. Potter. “The Free Religious Association: Its Twenty-five Years and Their Meaning” (1892), pp. 8-9.

[41] Emil G. Hirsch. “The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism,” in Some Modern Problems and Their Bearing on Judaism Reform Advocate Library (Chicago: Bloch & Newman, 1903), pp. 25-46.

[42] Benny Kraut. “Judaism Triumphant: Isaac Mayer Wise on Unitarianism and Liberal Christianity.” AJS Review, 7, pp. 179-230.

[43] Meyer. Response to Modernity, p. 270.

[44] Lenny Picker. “Was John Wilkes Booth Jewish?” Forward (April 3, 2015). Retrieved from https://forward.com/culture/217871/was-john-wilkes-booth-jewish/

[45] Cyrus Adler, E. A. Cardozo. “Peixotto.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11993-peixotto; Benjamin Peixotto. “Principality, now Kingdom, of Roumania.” Menorah Vol. I. JULY, 1886 No. 1. p. 212.

[46] Michael Feldberg. “Isaac Harby.” My Jewish Learning. Retrieved from https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/isaac-harby/

[47]. Dr. Isaac Wise. The Israelite (August 3 and 17, 1855); quoted in Samuel Oppenheim. The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810. Reprint from Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 19 (1910), 1-2.

[48] Rabbi Wise. The Israelite (August 3, 1855)

[49] Ibid.

[50] W. Potter. “The Free Religious Association: Its Twenty-five Years and Their Meaning” (1892), pp. 8-9.

[51] Emil G. Hirsch. “The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism,” in Some Modern Problems and Their Bearing on Judaism Reform Advocate Library (Chicago: Bloch & Newman, 1903), pp. 25-46.

[52] Benny Kraut. “Judaism Triumphant: Isaac Mayer Wise on Unitarianism and Liberal Christianity.” AJS Review, 7, pp. 179-230.

[53] Meyer. Response to Modernity, p. 270.

Divide & Conquer