In the fall of 1910, an officer of the Savings Bank Insurance League called on Jacob de Haas, the editor of Boston’s Jewish Advocate, seeking some publicity for the program in the Jewish community. De Haas considered the topic “dry and remote,” but thought that if some of the benefits of the program could be made more specific to low-income Jewish households, such as savings for dowry or college tuition, it might attract his readers. De Haas arranged to interview Louis Brandeis, and after spending an hour or so talking about insurance, he asked if the Boston attorney was related to Lewis Dembitz. Brandeis said yes, whereupon de Haas replied that “Dembitz was a noble Jew.” Brandeis asked what de Haas meant, and the journalist explained that Dembitz had been one of the first Americans to support Theodor Herzl and his plans to rebuild a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Four years later—years filled with work on the protocol, political campaigning for La Follette and Wilson, advising on the New Freedom, serving the Interstate Commerce Commission on the advance rate case, writing Other People’s Money, and, from time to time, looking after his law practice—Brandeis took over the American Zionist movement and turned it from a moribund organization into a powerful political presence. The reasons why Louis Brandeis became a Zionist remain a matter for debate, but the events at the end of August 1914 did not occur without a foundation. Although he had not been active in Zionist or Jewish affairs in these years, neither had he been ignorant of them, and he had gotten to know a number of Jewish leaders and journalists. As had happened so often in his life, Brandeis did not go out seeking a new cause; it came to him.
ALTHOUGH BRANDEIS HAD A NUMBER of Jewish clients and did some legal and advisory work for the Boston Jewish community, he had avoided taking on major responsibilities. His contributions to various Jewish charities had been nominal, well below what a person of his means could have given. As Jacob Schiff told House in 1912, Brandeis could not be considered a “representative” Jew. Nonetheless, when the American Jewish community celebrated the 250th anniversary of the landing of Jews in colonial New Amsterdam, Boston Jewish leaders asked Brandeis to give the keynote talk at the celebration.
Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement
The brief remarks he gave at the New Century Club on 28 November 1905 could have been made by any upper-class assimilated Jew. He spoke not at all about religion, but rather addressed the fears of many in his audience—how the great emigration of Jews from eastern Europe would affect the status of Jews already in the United States. The new immigrants had to be taught that loyalty to America required three things. First, they had to abandon all prior loyalties to country or caste or even religion. “There is no place for what President Roosevelt has called hyphenated Americans. There is room here for men of any race, of any creed, of any condition in life, but not for Protestant-Americans, or Catholic-Americans, or Jewish-Americans, not for German-Americans, Irish-Americans, or Russian-Americans.”
Second, people had to live their lives according to the ideals embodied in the nation’s institutions. “Free government cannot endure, the purposes for which it exists cannot be attained, except among a people honest, courageous, intelligent and just.” While America may not discriminate between people of different races or creeds, it was possible to distinguish “between the honest and the dishonest, between the pure and the corrupt, between the just and the unjust, between the man of public spirit and him who is steeped in sordid selfishness.”
Third, every citizen had to participate actively in governmental affairs, primarily through the intelligent use of the ballot box. “It is not sufficient that men vote,” he declared, “it is essential that they vote right.” This meant seeking information on important public issues and deciding between the good and the bad, the genuine and the sham. Here Brandeis enunciated what would later be a central theme of his public philosophy, that in a democracy there is no higher office than that of citizen, and that role requires the intelligent and conscientious effort of each person to live up to democratic ideals.
Financier Jacob Schiff
He had no doubt that Jews, both those who had arrived earlier and those then coming, would be able to live up to these demands. And in what would become the leitmotif of his Zionist philosophy, he declared that these high American values had first been proclaimed by Jews over two thousand years earlier. Jewish ideals and American ideals were in the highest sense the same, and both attempted to inject greater ethical standards into everyday life. This emphasis on the ethical, or prophetic, standards of Judaism fit easily into Brandeis’s progressive views on the responsibilities of the citizenry. He totally ignored the ritualistic, or priestly, requirements. This division would be the basis both of his strength in creating an American Zionism and of his weakness in dealing with the European leaders of the movement.
In sending a copy of his talk to his father, Louis said, “I am inclined to think there is more to hope for in the Russian Jews than from the Bavarians & other Germans. The Russians have idealism & reverence.” That sense would be reawakened in the summer of 1910 when he went to New York to help establish the Protocol of Peace in the garment industry, and from then on, while still not getting involved in Boston or national Jewish affairs, he started to give more attention to the Jewish community. After his initial meeting with de Haas, he began reading books about Zionism and then discussing them with the journalist. In early 1911 he answered a query from a New York journalist, Bernard Richards, declaring, “My sympathy with the Zionist movement rests primarily upon the noble idealism which underlies it, and the conviction that a great people, stirred by enthusiasm for such an ideal, must bear an important part in the betterment of the world.”
ALTHOUGH THE ANCIENT HEBREWS had been expelled from Palestine by the Romans, they had never given up the dream of someday returning to Zion. Every year at Passover, the holiday marking the exodus from Egypt and signifying the achievement of freedom after slavery, the seder, or ritual meal, ends with the phrase “L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim!”—”Next year in Jerusalem!” For religious Jews redemption would come only in the time of the Messiah and only by God’s will. In the latter nineteenth century, however, two factors caused a number of European Jews to start a movement to re-create a Jewish homeland and to do it by the efforts of human rather than divine will. First, rising anti-Semitism, especially in Russia, forced hundreds of thousands of eastern European Jews to flee, many of them coming to America. Second, the forces of nationalism, which redrew the map of Europe and created modern countries such as Germany and Italy, affected Jewish thinkers as well. If Germans or Italians or Spaniards could have a land of their own, why not the Jews?
In 1896 the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat—The Jewish State—which became the founding document of the modern Zionist movement. Herzl, a fully assimilated Jew, did not even mention Palestine; he would have accepted any land in which Jews would be the majority and could therefore control their own destiny. Not until the First Zionist Congress in 1897 did Herzl realize that the vast majority of Jews would never accept any place but Palestine as the Jewish homeland. Zionist chalutzim—”pioneers”—created small colonies in Palestine, which, with the help of patrons like Baron de Rothschild, grew so that on the eve of World War I, 85,000 Jews lived in Palestine on fifty-nine settlements supported by the World Zionist Organization.
In the United States, Zionism ran headlong into the type of opposition embodied in Brandeis’s speech, although at the time he probably did not recognize it, knowing little or nothing about Zionism. The established German-Jewish leadership, people like Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall, opposed Zionism because they believed it involved “dual loyalties.” They took Theodore Roosevelt’s opposition to hyphenated Americans to mean that for Jewish immigrants to become fully accepted in America, they could have no other political allegiances. Supporting Zionism, which called for Jews to immigrate to a Jewish homeland, meant one could not be fully devoted to the United States since one had a loyalty to another political entity, the Jewish state, even if it had not yet come into existence.
Schiff and others worried that if the new immigrants from eastern Europe supported Zionism, they would be accused of treachery, and this would in turn jeopardize the status that the earlier, and by now assimilated, German-Jewish immigrants had achieved, as well as fuel the rising nativism they feared. They failed to realize that these immigrants had already chosen their new Jerusalem, and it involved not a return to Palestine but a long and hardship-filled trip to America, which they called der goldenah medinah—”the golden land.” Those American Jews who joined the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ) did so not because they planned to make aliyah, to “go up” unto the Holy Land, but to help other Jews back in Russia who might not be able to get to the United States and needed a place to escape the pogroms.
The FAZ, despite the great influx of eastern European Jews, remained a marginal group within the Jewish community. At its annual convention in June 1914, the FAZ had a budget of $12,150, which exceeded anticipated revenue by $2,600; no one willing to serve as president (Professor Richard Gottheil of Columbia agreed to continue on as honorary head); and a membership of a little over twelve thousand, out of a Jewish population in the United States of three million. Only a few people at the meeting in Rochester knew that one of those members was the famous Boston attorney Louis Brandeis.
BY 1912, Brandeis’s reputation had spread across the country, and Jewish groups wanted to claim him as one of their own. Going out to Chicago to campaign for Wilson that fall, Louis reported to Alfred that rabbis in St. Paul, Omaha, and elsewhere had wanted him to occupy their pulpits, “so you see I am making headway in Judaism.” He had also met a number of Jewish editors, interested in him because of both his religion and the role he had played in the New York garment strike.
Brandeis had formally paid the shekel, or membership dues, and joined the FAZ in June 1912, but he resisted any efforts to involve him in Zionist affairs until March 1913, when he agreed to introduce Nahum Sokolow at a Boston rally. Sokolow, a member of the World Zionist Organization’s executive committee, had come to the United States to try to raise both awareness of Zionism among American Jews and money to support the Palestinian settlements. Brandeis told the crowd of twelve hundred in the Plymouth Theatre “that in the message of Judaism, carried by the dispersed race in its wanderings for 2000 years, … the world’s best hope lies.” Zionism provided the means by which the ideal could become real. “The noblest people in every civilized land are striving today for what has been the ideal of the Jew for centuries,” he declared—social righteousness, the war against iniquity, relief for the burdens of the oppressed, and the lessening of the toll of the poor.
Sokolow thought he had finally found an American Jew who could lead the movement and raise money, and after the Boston rally he hoped Brandeis would take his rightful place in American Zionism. But in the spring of 1913, Woodrow Wilson had first call on Brandeis’s time, and Sokolow wrote rather dejectedly to Brandeis that fall after the Boston attorney had not attended the World Zionist Congress. Sokolow had, after their conversation in Boston, expected him to do so, and “our friends cherished the hope that your presence … will be fruitful for the development of this work in America.” At Sokolow’s urging, the FAZ had elected Louis a member of the national executive committee, but there is no record that Brandeis ever attended any of its meetings.
During this period Brandeis met one other important Zionist, Aaron Aaronsohn. In January 1912 he attended a dinner in Washington in honor of Aaronsohn given by Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago philanthropist, who had funded some of the agricultural experimentation in Palestine. A Romanian-born Jew who had immigrated to Palestine with his family at age five, Aaronsohn had developed a strain of wheat well suited to the arid soil of Palestine. Louis wrote to Alfred, “The talk was the most thrillingly interesting I have ever heard, showing the possibilities of scientific agriculture and utilization of arid or supposedly exhausted land.” He urged his brother to send for Aaronsohn’s Department of Agriculture publication. Aaronsohn remained a favorite of Brandeis’s until his death in a plane crash over the English Channel in 1919. To Brandeis the young Palestinian represented all that he idealized in Zionism—an effort to make an old land fertile again by applying the most modern scientific knowledge, adaptability, and bravery (Aaron and his sister served as spies for the British during the war). As he began to give some speeches on Zionism, Brandeis would constantly cite Aaronsohn as the type of young Jew who would make the Zionist experiment work, and when Aaronsohn came back to America in 1913, Louis invited him to dinner at 6 Otis Place. For the most part, however, Brandeis resisted efforts to draw him into greater involvement.
THEN, IN EARLY AUGUST 1914, war broke out in Europe. A few weeks later Brandeis received a telegram that the World Zionist Organization, headquartered in Berlin, was in disarray, with its leaders scattered across Europe on both sides of the battle lines. An emergency meeting had been called for 30 August at the Hotel Marseilles in New York. At the urging of Jacob de Haas and Horace Kallen, Brandeis agreed to chair the meeting. Most of those assembled in that hot, crowded room expected little other than some oratory on the seriousness of the situation and the announcement of an emergency fund. For a while the scenario went as expected. After explaining the dangers facing Jews in Europe and Palestine, Brandeis announced the creation of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs (PEC) to develop a relief program; he contributed $1,000 toward the fund, and then Nathan Straus, the head of Macy’s, added another $5,000. Now, according to the script, Brandeis would contact his rich friends for more money while everyone else went home. They were in for a very big surprise.
Pleading his ignorance of the many organizations represented, Brandeis asked the assembly to stay on and meet with him that evening and the following day. He needed to know more about them, their leaders, their memberships, and their administrative arrangements. For the next day and a half, Brandeis sat patiently in a crowded hotel suite, absorbing fact after fact about Zionist and Jewish life in America, occasionally asking a question or repeating a strange-sounding Hebrew or Yiddish name. When he finally adjourned the meeting late on 31 August, his orderly mind might well have been reeling from the realization that nearly all the groups present suffered from poor organization, modest enrollments, minuscule financial resources, and very, very few people to do real work. But the shock to the men and women representing American Zionism was immeasurably greater. Rather than giving them a figurehead, the extraordinary conference had brought them a man who had the ability, determination, and reputation to be their leader, and who intended to be just that. The Hotel Marseilles conference marked a turning point in the fortunes of American Zionism, and also in the life of Louis Brandeis.
Why did Brandeis become a Zionist? There have been many explanations, but none of them seem quite as perceptive as his own.
Professor Horace Meyer Kallen of the University of
Wisconsin
The first proposed rationale came from an Israeli political scientist, Yonathan Shapiro, who tied Brandeis’s conversion to Zionism to his rejection for a seat in Wilson’s cabinet. Brandeis had failed in his “bid for power,” Shapiro argues, because he lacked the backing of Jacob Schiff and other influential leaders. According to Shapiro, Brandeis then spent so much time on Zionism and gave great sums of money to Jewish organizations so that when he made his second bid, for the Supreme Court in 1916, the overwhelming support of the Jewish community led to his confirmation. The problem is that in an era of rising nativism, in which each session of Congress saw new attempts to cut back on emigration from eastern Europe, identification as a Jew would do little to bolster one’s political prospects. Wilson did, in fact, want a Jew in his administration, but, as we have seen, he decided not to take Brandeis primarily because of opposition from the business community. Moreover, it is hard to describe Brandeis’s actions in the winter of 1912–1913 as a “bid for power,” and in the confirmation fight the alleged influence of the Jewish community played practically no role.
Ben Halpern believed that despite the claim that Adolph and Frederika raised their children without religion, a certain “elitist, liberal self-consciousness” dating back to Frankist times survived into Louis’s generation, and whether he recognized it or not, his devotion to certain principles could be traced back to that heritage. Here the key figure is Lewis Naphtali Dembitz, his beloved uncle. While his parents lived, especially his mother, Louis had to ignore Judaism because of her strong antipathy to religion in general and traditional Judaism in particular. When Lewis Dembitz died in 1907, Louis Brandeis became free from the constraints imposed on him by an earlier generation and adopted the ethnic community exemplified by his uncle. His emergence as a Zionist leader, Halpern claims, “signified no conversion to new beliefs.” Rather, it signified a “shift in social attachments and emotional ties to a sharper sense of the American-Jewish terrain and his own place in it and a fatefully deepened personal commitment.” In becoming a Zionist leader, Halpern claims, “Brandeis had come home.” This psychoanalytic view of the resolution of identity conflict is questionable, but Halpern is close to the mark in noting that the idealism of Zionism appealed to Brandeis, who often said, “Idealism is the most important thing.”
Allon Gal, a student of Halpern’s, made more than most scholars of the mild anti-Semitism he believed Brandeis faced in Boston, and claimed that Brandeis had begun to feel “the burden of his Jewishness” around 1910. This made him more receptive to a movement that promised to solve the “Jewish problem” and gave him a better understanding of what a homeland for persecuted people could mean. In addition, he looked at Palestine rather naively; both reports of Aaronsohn’s wild wheat experiments and claims about the lack of crime in the Jewish colonies led him to see the yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine, as a sort of Jeffersonian paradise. The only problem is that no proof exists that Brandeis suffered from anti-Semitism in the years before he became a Zionist, or that he saw it as a reason to join the movement.
It will be more logical if, when we talk about Louis Brandeis as an American Zionist leader, we start with the word “American.” It makes no sense to try to define his conversion to Zionism in Jewish terms, either as a political opportunist trying to capitalize on his Jewishness, or as a victim trying to overcompensate, or as a disillusioned visionary seeking to regain his idealism in the new Zion, or as a prodigal returning to his roots. It is true that his uncle Dembitz had inspired him, but not because of his Jewish interests; it had been the abolitionist and the lawyer in his uncle that led Louis David to change his name. He had never been ashamed of being born Jewish, nor had he tried to hide it or that he had little Jewish background. His daughter described Brandeis as “completely non-religious, a non-observant Jew.” When a Jewish periodical interviewed him in 1910, the reporter felt he had to confirm that Brandeis was, in fact, Jewish. “There should be no doubt where I stand,” Louis said. “Of course, I am a Jew, [but] my early training was not Jewish in a religious sense, nor was it Christian.”
Brandeis, however, never allowed himself to be defined by his religion or birth. He understood the notion of communal responsibility and contributed to Jewish charities, but always on a nominal basis; he gave as much or more money to other causes. His success as a lawyer had led Boston Jews to try to enroll him as a leader, an effort he had strongly and successfully resisted. In the fifty-four years before he met Jacob de Haas, things Jewish mattered little to him; on the other hand, things American mattered a great deal. Those ideas of democracy, of opportunity, of challenge that defined American freedom for him had been endangered by industrialization, and while he believed, perhaps wrongly, that controlling competition would ameliorate the worst problems, he also understood that it would be impossible to re-create the America that had existed in the age of Jefferson and Jackson.
Palestine, on the other hand, a country just starting out, could be fashioned into a democratic society, one where there would be no curse of bigness, where the idealism that he believed Jews and Americans shared could be allowed to flower. Unlike those Zionists who wanted to create a nation governed by Jewish religious law, Brandeis envisioned a secular society populated by Jews who lived according to American values that Brandeis conflated with those of the prophets.
Brandeis said on many occasions that he came to Zionism through Americanism, and there is no question that his experiences as an American lawyer and progressive reformer shaped his leadership of the Zionist movement. His approach to the problems of the moribund Federation of American Zionists is identical to his approach in resolving secular problems. Research the matter, devise a workable solution, recruit adherents to the cause, and then educate others to accept the solution. Brandeis and the men and women he attracted to the movement had a firm commitment to American ideals and democratic principles. They objected to anti-Semitism not from personal suffering but because it offended their sense of decency. Zionism reflected progressive ideals, and to some extent became a type of reform, akin to women’s suffrage or factory legislation. This outlook on Zionism, as a reform to solve the Jewish problem, provided the strength—and the weakness—of the Brandeis leadership.
The enthusiasm for Aaron Aaronsohn tied in closely to Brandeis’s support for scientific management, a trait shared by many progressives. A problem existed—in this case, the need to find a grain that would grow in Palestine’s arid soil—and by the application of intelligence and science a solution had been devised, the adaptation of a form of wild wheat that could be cultivated. Brandeis also became involved in a plan proposed by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York, a man who would become one of his closest lieutenants for the next three decades. Wise believed that many possibilities existed in Palestine for development, but no one knew enough about the situation to be able to set priorities or determine areas that needed to be expanded. So in typical progressive fashion, Wise proposed an investigatory commission made up of a team of experts whose report would explain the possibilities of Palestinian development, lay out the problems and proposed solutions, and set a budget for tackling these problems.
The commission members had their bags packed and were ready to depart when one of the sponsors, Jacob Schiff, pulled out because of a controversy over use of the German language at the Haifa Technion. Wise immediately set about finding other sponsors, and in early June, Louis Brandeis agreed to step in with the needed funds, more than $2,000. Here again one has to note the very American progressive nature of the enterprise—the identification of a problem and its examination by experts leading to rational proposals for solutions. Unfortunately, the war broke out in Europe just as the commission was about to sail, thus aborting the project.
There is one difference regarding Zionism that must be noted. While Brandeis cared a great deal about his other reforms, with the exception of savings bank insurance he did not form a lasting and intense relationship to them. He remained, of course, an inveterate foe of bigness, both in business and in government, all his life, but in regard to women’s hours legislation, for example, he fought hard, but his great contribution came from his creativity as a lawyer. Not even his sister-in-law claimed that he had been fervent about the Muller case. He certainly had been passionate in his fight against the New Haven and in ferreting out the truth in Pinchot-Ballinger, but at the end he walked away, a job done. Within a short time it became clear that he cared a great deal about Zionism, and people who knew him as a Zionist, even his opponents, never doubted his commitment to the cause.
BRANDEIS FACED three great tasks on assuming the Zionist leadership, and his success or failure in handling them would determine whether Zionism would emerge as a potent force in American Jewish life or would continue as a sideshow of little consequence. He had to reorganize Zionist forces into an effective form; he had to identify specific projects that would attract those who shared only a marginal interest in Zionism; and, most important, he had to redefine Zionist assumptions to fit the needs of American as well as Jewish society.
As late as 1910, Louis still held the views he had expressed in his 1905 talk “What Loyalty Demands,” and he told a reporter that “habits of living or of thought which tend to keep alive differences of origin or classify men according to the religious beliefs are inconsistent with the American ideal of brotherhood, and are disloyal.” In order for Brandeis to overcome the charge of “dual loyalty,” he had to come up with some means to make Zionism compatible with the demands of loyalty to America, and here the young philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen played a key role.
Kallen had first met Brandeis while an undergraduate at Harvard. In December 1913, he sent Brandeis a copy of a paper he had written on Zionism and Palestine. Brandeis asked him to work the ideas up more fully, but Kallen, who by then had taken his first teaching position at the University of Wisconsin, did not get a chance to meet with Brandeis and discuss the issue with him until August 1914. They finally held the long-postponed discussion on the overnight boat from Boston to New York on their way to attend the Hotel Marseilles conference.
Kallen would be the chief theorist of a new idea of American society and the role that immigrants played in it, one that he labeled “cultural pluralism.” The older notions of assimilation, often labeled loosely as the melting-pot theory, held that when immigrants came to the United States, the shock of adjustment stripped away their Old World characteristics and they emerged as Americans, speaking English (albeit with an occasional accent) and sharing the same attitudes and values as native-born citizens. Kallen believed that in fact immigrants, no matter how hard they might try, never lost the cultural traits of their home countries, and this is what had made America great. Rather than discard their uniqueness, immigrants contributed to a unique American tapestry in which each ethnic group retained some of its own individual flavor while making the whole that much richer. The retention of Old World cultures, Kallen argued, did not lessen one’s loyalty to America, but reinforced it.
Kallen would prove to be an important influence in Louis’s life, if nothing else, giving him the idea of cultural pluralism. But Kallen also served as a link between Brandeis and Alfred Zimmern. Kallen had met Zimmern in 1912 when the Englishman gave a lecture at the University of Wisconsin, and the two enjoyed a long and intimate correspondence. Kallen kept Zimmern informed of American Zionist developments, and Zimmern, who knew Chaim Weizmann, the head of the English Zionist Federation, passed on information from the Russian-born chemist that could not go through regular mail.
Brandeis quickly grasped how Kallen’s ideas could resolve the issue of dual loyalty. Brandeis and other progressives came to understand that diversity need not be detrimental in a democratic society, providing that all groups subscribed to a common set of ethical and social principles. By interpreting Jewish-Zionist idealism as complementary to and supportive of American democracy, Brandeis undercut the claim that Zionism was either inconsistent with or antithetical to American ideals. “America’s fundamental law seeks to make real the brotherhood of man. That brotherhood became the Jews’ fundamental law more than twenty-five hundred years ago. America’s twentieth-century demand is for social justice. That has been the Jews’ striving ages-long.” Addressing the 1915 Zionist convention in Boston, he proclaimed, “The highest Jewish ideals are essentially American in a very important particular. It is Democracy that Zionism represents. It is Social Justice which Zionism represents, and every bit of that is the American ideals of the twentieth century.” Time and again he declared that “Zionism is the Pilgrim inspiration and impulse again.” The desire for liberty that had characterized the earliest Americans and had shaped the nation’s destiny had been reborn in a movement to allow Jews to live in freedom in a land of their own. How much more American could Zionism be?
(Brandeis, it should be noted, either consciously or unconsciously used “Jewish” and “Zionist” interchangeably. While nearly all Zionists were Jewish, the obverse was far from true. This juxtaposition endowed Zionism with all the traits Louis found so admirable in Jewish culture and ethics and forced anti-Zionist Jews into the awkward position of trying to explain how a Jewish movement was not really Jewish.)
Throughout the rest of 1914 and 1915, Brandeis told numerous audiences that his approach to Zionism had been through Americanism, that the two shared common principles of democracy and social justice. He fully admitted his lack of a Jewish background, but said that since his conversion to Zionism, he had been learning about the Jewish heritage, and proudly declared that “Jews were by reasons of their traditions and their character peculiarly fitted for the attainment of American ideals.” This led him to make the ultimate link, not only bridging Zionism and Americanism, but welding the two together: “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists!”
As for the problem of dual loyalties, Brandeis himself had often argued that one could not serve two masters at once. But that assumed that the goals somehow opposed each other, that support of Zionism contradicted support of American values. Such a conflict did not exist, Brandeis explained. “Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent,” he argued, but the American political system clearly proved this need not be the case. “A man is a better citizen of the United States for being also a loyal citizen of his state, and of his city; for being loyal to his family, and to his profession or trade; for being loyal to his college or lodge.” An American’s true loyalty consisted not of a superficial allegiance to the country’s symbols but of a deeper commitment to the principles that the nation represented. One believed in freedom, justice, and democracy not just in one place for one group but everywhere for all people, and in working for these goals, one demonstrated the greatest love of America. “Every Irish-American who contributed toward advancing home rule was a better man and a better American for the sacrifices he made,” Brandeis asserted, and the same would be said of Jews. In joining together to build a free and democratic homeland for their brethren in Palestine, they would be giving the best possible proof of their loyalty to the United States.
There remained the problem of aliyah, the bringing into the Jewish homeland of all those who lived in exile. European Zionism had made aliyah a personal requirement, the need to shake off the dust of centuries in exile and return home. Clearly, American Jews had no intention of leaving, neither those whose families had been here for several generations nor those who had gotten off the boat just a few years earlier. Immigrants fleeing from persecution in Europe had already chosen America as their homeland, as their new Zion. This idea had been around since 1841, when Rabbi Gustav Poznanski had dedicated the first Reform Jewish temple in the United States in Charleston, South Carolina: “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple.”
Here again Brandeis proposed a simple and effective solution. Zionism did not require that Jews who lived in countries of freedom, such as the United States and Great Britain, make aliyah. Rather, their obligation lay in political activism and fund-raising to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine to which Jews who lived in lands of oppression, such as Russia, could find haven. While some younger Americans might want to go and be pioneers, no obligation existed for them to do so. American Jewry, however, had the responsibility for making it possible for Jews in distress to make aliyah.
That an established member of the Boston bar, a progressive reformer of national reputation, and a confidant of the U.S. president’s said these things gave them a sanction hitherto lacking among Zionist spokesmen. His own personal career, now that he had assumed the mantle of Zionist leadership, confirmed his faith that Zionism and Americanism did not preclude each other. In 1915 he became the first Jew chosen to give the Fourth of July address in Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, an honor by which Boston put its seal of approval on the impeccable character of Brandeis’s patriotism. (The choice had been made by the city’s Democratic leaders and not by the Brahmins.) And on 28 January 1916, Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the Supreme Court. With some satisfaction, Brandeis wrote that “in the opinion of the President there is no conflict between Zionism and loyalty to America.”
U.S. Circuit Court Judge
Julian W. Mack
BRANDEIS’S PERSONAL REPUTATION, as well as the manner in which he articulated an Americanized Zionism, struck a chord among many Jewish progressives who for the most part had had little or no previous contact with either Zionism or Jewish communal life. When the European leader Shmaryahu Levin joyously reported to the Actions Committee in 1915 that a “new Zionism” had developed in the United States, he called the leadership “men of earnestness and of character, who demand logical completeness in the movements with which they affiliate, who devote themselves full-heartedly to the movement of which they are a part.” These leaders, many of whom Brandeis personally recruited, shared his view of American ideals and supported Zionism because it reflected that vision.
The most important figure, next to Brandeis himself, was the U.S. circuit court judge Julian W. Mack. Louis had met him in 1911 and had been favorably impressed, describing him to Alice as “quite an up to date Federal judge.” Mack, unlike Brandeis, had been heavily involved with Jewish communal life in Chicago, but had made his reputation for pioneering the concept of a juvenile court system. Mack came to Zionism because of his growing convictions on cultural pluralism, and he embraced the cause not for religious reasons but because of what he saw as its inherent justness. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 he declared that the Zionists “ask no more for the Jews than we do for anyone else.” After Brandeis went on the Court in 1916, Mack be came head of the Zionist organization, and although it seemed to some that he still served as no more than Brandeis’s lieutenant, in fact he stood on his own feet.
Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the Free
Synagogue in New York
Alongside Brandeis and Mack, the most important voice in the leadership belonged to Stephen S. Wise, the maverick rabbi of the Free Synagogue in New York. Wise had made his reputation as a reformer, first standing up against political corruption in Portland, Oregon, and then founding his own synagogue in New York against the then normal mode of congregational officials’ dictating what the rabbi could say in his sermons. Although trained in Hebrew and Talmud, Wise seemed just as at home in the writings of the Transcendentalists and felt a particular kinship with the Protestant reformers of the Social Gospel. He was an unabashed patriot who repeatedly and publicly thanked God for his parents’ decision to emigrate from Hungary to America.
Although he eschewed a leadership position, Felix Frankfurter was also a part of the Brandeis coterie. His parents had observed traditional rites, but Frankfurter had little use for Jewish ritual or dogma. “I remember leaving the synagogue in the middle of a service,” he recalled, “saying to myself, ‘It’s a wrong thing for me to be present in a room in a holy service.’ … I left the service in the middle of it, never to return to this day. By leaving the synagogue I did not, of course, cease to be a Jew.” Frankfurter entered the Zionist movement at Brandeis’s request, and in 1919 served as legal counsel to the Jewish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. After the Brandeis group stepped down in 1921, he had little direct connection to Zionism, but continued to serve as an informal adviser to Mack and Wise.
Although Judaism does not canonize, if it did, nearly everyone would demand that Henrietta Szold be made a saint. A gentle woman, she devoted her life to caring for her people, providing medical care in Palestine through the organization she founded, Hadassah, and in the 1930s and 1940s trying to rescue children from the Nazis. She came to Zionism before Brandeis, because, she claimed, it provided an ideal for her. Palestine would be a refuge not just for persecuted Jews but for Judaism itself, a place where the Jewish people could be rehabilitated and regain self-confidence.
Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah
Brandeis admired Miss Szold for her single-mindedness. She had a vision in Ha dassah, and she refused to play political games with other Zionist groups. With Brandeis’s encouragement, and often with his monetary support, the women’s group built hospitals and clinics that ministered to Jew and Arab alike. Hadassah tried to introduce modern sanitary methods and sell clean pasteurized milk to families, again to both Jew and Arab. Brandeis took scrupulous care not to interfere in Hadassah’s work, because Szold and her lieutenants had already embraced his philosophy—identify a problem, study it, come up with a solution, and then get the people who can work to make it happen. In nearly every Jewish community in the United States, a Hadassah chapter sprang up, and tens—ultimately hundreds—of thousands of women joined, not out of any religious conviction, but because they had found an area in which they could work for well-defined goals.
Jacob de Haas played a critical, although often shadowy, role in the new leadership. He took the credit for bringing Brandeis into the movement, hailing him as a “second Herzl,” and he exploited this relationship to enlarge his own influence. To his credit, de Haas had a clear grasp of Zionist policies and politics and proved an invaluable guide to Brandeis in these years. But his devotion to Brandeis also had a downside. He would brook no criticism of his leader, and when the Brandeisian style of Americanized Zionism began to cause friction with some of the eastern European immigrants, de Haas sheltered him from it, thus leaving Brandeis totally unprepared when the unhappiness broke out into open revolt. Although de Haas irritated many people, Brandeis remained loyal to him until de Haas’s death in 1937, always grateful to him as his teacher in Zionism, finding positions for him, and eventually partially supporting him.
Provisional Executive Committee Secretary Jacob de Haas
This new leadership took an especial interest in recruiting Jewish college students and graduates, a group that the FAZ had ignored. “It is from those still young to whom we must look in Jewish affairs, as in others, for progressive work,” Brandeis wrote. The provisional committee agreed to subsidize the work of Henry Hurwitz and the Menorah Society, a Jewish intercollegiate group, and Brandeis and his colleagues personally undertook the sponsorship of the University Zionist Association, a federation of Zionist clubs at different schools. Brandeis himself spoke a number of times to the Harvard group and underwrote the club’s expenses in bringing in other speakers. The prestige of Brandeis, Mack, and Frankfurter and their standing as reformers appealed to idealistic college students, and even some papers unfriendly to Zionism conceded that the Brandeis leadership had done a great deal to reclaim Jewish youth alienated from their people.
Brandeis’s strategy involved not just attracting college-educated men and women who could provide leadership and funds but also counterbalancing the overwhelmingly eastern European nature of existing Zionist membership. The movement could not afford to be seen as being by and for immigrants who did not understand America and therefore had no loyalty to it. Beyond that, Brandeis realized, perhaps from his experience with the garment workers, that these new immigrants, much as they remained grounded in the religious attitudes of eastern European Jewry, with its commitment to a love of Zion, also saw themselves as greenhorns in America. They wanted to outgrow this status; they wanted to become Americans. In this, of course, they were no different from other immigrant groups who submerged their feelings for ethnic nationalism in the desire to Americanize. Given this situation, only a thoroughly assimilated leadership like the Brandeis group could exploit the latent Zionism of eastern European Jewish immigrants while at the same time reassuring them of their acceptance into American culture and society. They all had relatives back in eastern Europe affected by the war, and even those with small means wanted to do something. When Brandeis called upon them to help the Zionists help their European brethren, and then declared Zionism and Americanism compatible, he tapped into deep-seated emotions.
Members and staff of the Provisional Executive Committee. Seated from left:
Henrietta Szold, Stephen S. Wise, Jacob de Haas, Robert D. Kesselman, Louis
Lipsky, Charles Cowen, Shmaryahu Levin, and Meyer Berlin; standing from left:
Blanche Jacobson, Adolph Hubbard, and A. H. Fromenson, 1915.
Anti-Semitism also played a role. The new immigrants learned English, shaved off their beards, threw away their skullcaps, and turned their backs on the old ways, just as the German-Americans urged them to do. But one does not become an American overnight, and the newcomers soon ran into prejudice which, while not as pervasive or anywhere near as brutal as in Europe, still reminded them that they were Jews. They found their opportunities restricted and their liberty sometimes not as full as they had hoped it to be. When Brandeis urged them to become Zionists, to be proud of their Jewishness, and said that in so doing, they could stand tall as Americans, they responded wholeheartedly.
Brandeis served as a bridge between two cultures, that of the assimilated American society and that of New York’s Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side, even though he had practically no roots among the latter. The man who had, prior to 1914, never set foot inside a synagogue had not forsaken his people, and they saw his return through Zionism, like that of the prodigal son, as a sign. Abe Goldberg, the editor of Dos Yiddishe Folk, wrote him a moving note that summed up the thoughts of many recent immigrants. “I am myself mystically and religiously inclined,” Goldberg said, “although I usually appear very rationalistic. And believe me, that … never yet a day passed that I did not think of you, and I never went to bed without praying for your health.”
IN 1914 THE FAZ had a little more than 12,000 members; by 1919 its successor, the Zionist Organization of America, had over 176,000 dues-paying members, with thousands of others associated with Mizrachi (religious Zionists) or various Zionist labor groups affiliated with the ZOA. The huge jump in membership made possible an increased budget to provide war relief to the colonies in Palestine. In all his efforts, Brandeis stood by the motto “Men! Money! Discipline!” He understood that without numbers the Zionists could do nothing, and that while he could attract a few well-known individuals, real growth had to take place at the local level.
Brandeis hammered home the demand for members wherever he went, and until the announcement of his appointment to the Court he traveled all over preaching the message. “Organize! Organize! Organize! Until every Jew in America must stand up and be counted—counted with us—or prove himself, wittingly or unwittingly, of the few who are against their own people.” Members provided muscle with which to lobby governments and to spread Zionist propaganda. Members raised money for the Palestinian colonies or, in the case of Hadassah, to provide medical care. Without members, one could do nothing; with members, everything seemed possible.
Brandeis brought to Zionism all the lessons he had learned as a reformer, including how to organize. There had never been any formal method of securing members for the FAZ, so he introduced a multi-tiered system with membership committees at different levels and processes by which follow-ups could be made. Once the local committee got a person’s name, it would contact that person again and again until it had secured a new member. Nothing was left to chance, with quotas assigned to different groups for so many new members each month, so much propaganda distributed, so much money raised. Where societies were weak or no Zionist group existed at all, Brandeis co-opted existing Zionists to start new groups. In a typical letter establishing such a committee, Brandeis or the office committee enclosed a set of model bylaws, suggested annual dues, fixed quotas for growth, and explained the form that weekly reports on membership and income should take. Every person who paid the shekel, or who had attended a Zionist meeting, or whose name had been suggested as a potential member or donor, had his or her name entered on a card file kept by Jacob de Haas, which ultimately ran to half a million entries. This list would serve as the basis for a continuous recruiting and fund-raising campaign.
And Brandeis watched over everything. He received daily reports and read them carefully, deluging poor Benjamin Perlstein, the head of the office committee in New York, with long letters of numbered paragraphs and constant demands for detailed information. Why did certain information seem to be missing, why had certain committees not reached their quotas, how could one explain a discrepancy in the accounts? Exceedingly orderly in his own business habits, Brandeis imposed a like regimen on the PEC, formerly the FAZ, staff. He had a time clock installed, a potent symbol that the old days of “slippered ease,” as de Haas called them, had ended. Some of the older workers, who had seen their jobs as sinecures requiring little work, suddenly found themselves inundated not only with donations and applications for memberships but with a constant demand for information and more information, all of it accurate, and they left.
Brandeis soon installed Jacob de Haas at PEC headquarters to oversee the general administrative direction for recruiting, although Perlstein remained nominally in charge of the growing office. Perlstein and the staff, however, proved woefully unable to satisfy Brandeis’s demand for daily and weekly fiscal reports. As one might expect, nothing irritated Brandeis more than financial mismanagement. Felix Frankfurter recalled that Brandeis wanted the Zionists to handle their money as conservatively as a bank, accounting for every penny collected and expended. Brandeis eventually hired Robert Kesselman, a certified public accountant, and put him in charge of the provisional committee’s finances. Kesselman had a tough time getting the old-line workers to accept the need for proper money handling and record keeping. They had always been rather casual about it, collecting when they could, keeping donations in their coat pockets or paper bags, turning the money in whenever they happened to be near the office. Many of them, in fact, never reconciled to the new regime, but by mid-1916 Kesselman could finally send reports that met the chief’s demand for accuracy and detail.
In addition to his daily, sometimes hourly, letters to the office, Brandeis wrote directly to local leaders. “Much disappointed by smallness of collection made in Milwaukee,” he wired the local chairman. “Feel confident that if you will call on all the members of the Committee that entertained us at dinner, and their friends with whom we spoke after the meeting, you will be able to secure the expected contribution of five thousand dollars from Milwaukee.” No detail seemed too small for him to ignore. After a meeting in Connecticut, a tailor came up to Brandeis and gave him $3, saying he wanted to help Jews in Russia. Brandeis wrote out a personal check for the $3 and sent it to the treasurer of the American Jewish Relief Committee with specific details on not only where the money should be directed but how it should be accounted for as well.
We have a portrait of Brandeis as Zionist manager, by Louis Lipsky, one of the leading FAZ officials:
He would come to the Zionist offices in New York early in the morning and remain for hours, receiving visitors, questioning them and assigning tasks. He presided at the frequent meetings of the committee and won general admiration for the cogency and subtlety of his questions and the sagacity of his conclusions. He was innocent of vanity or conceit and unconventional in his behavior. He had a cordiality that won confidence. He was seldom direct in attack, but with rare subtlety insinuated the trend of his thinking into the discussion. But he could be merciless in judgment too, and his indignation could be devastating. You did not feel that he was forcing his views; he drove them home by logic and dominated the situation with tact and reason. He would take his coat off, loosen his tie, ruffle his hair, use his hands actively and twist his body in the chair as he carried on a hearty discussion with infinite patience.
There is no question that Brandeis micromanaged Zionist affairs in late 1914 and 1915, but he faced a situation different in both quantity and quality from his prior experience. In Boston he had for the most part dealt with educated businessmen and professionals in reforms involving street franchises, gas supply, and the New Haven, men accustomed to running their own affairs the same way he did, with proper accounting, accurate records, and timely reports. One does not find letters to Joseph Eastman of the Public Franchise League that in any way resemble those sent to Perlstein and the PEC staff. These men and women, many of them immigrants, had never been required to manage FAZ affairs with the attention to detail that Brandeis and his peers took for granted. The FAZ had no experience in mounting national drives for membership and money, or setting up the types of records necessary to keep track of people or income, or generating the propaganda needed to educate the wider Jewish community on the immediate and long-term goals of Zionism. There is initially a tone of frustration in Brandeis’s letters as he looked for information he expected and could not find. For Zionism to succeed, not only did he need the money and the men to do disciplined work, but he also needed organizational discipline. It frustrated him immensely when people signed up in Boston and their names wound up on lists of other cities. He planned, as he always did, for the long term. Jews not only had to be brought into the Zionist movement but also had to renew their memberships and provide names of others who could be approached; after they gave their initial donation, they had to be asked for more money. This could be done only if the PEC ran its organization on a businesslike basis, something that it had never done before. Moreover, although he did not know it yet, the World Zionist Organization was no better, and its slipshod methods would be one of the causes of the great rupture in 1921.
THE HOTEL MARSEILLES meeting had been about money, primarily to raise funds to help the suffering Jews in the war zones of eastern Europe. Although no one realized it at the time, the war marked a turning point for Zionist finances as well; after 1914, American Jewry provided the bulk of the money for the movement, which meant support of the Palestinian settlements. Considering that the FAZ had never raised more than $12,000 a year before the war, Brandeis’s announcement of a $100,000 (between $1.5 million and $2 million today) relief fund struck many of the old-timers as little more than wishful thinking. After all, as Louis Lipsky and others had told the Berlin office just a few weeks before the war, the leading Jewish philanthropists all opposed Zionism and would not give a penny to the yishuv. In some ways the doubters were right; not until World War II would the very wealthiest American Jews contribute to Zionism. But in 1914 and 1915, hundreds of thousands could and did donate small amounts, and while it surely would have been easier to get one person to give $10,000, the same amount could be raised by a thousand donations of $10. This is the route the new leadership took.
(Ironically, the American Jewish Committee, whose members included some of the wealthiest Jews in America, found itself paralyzed at the beginning of the war regarding aid to European Jewry. Louis Marshall reported that not only did the AJC not have funds on hand to begin work, but he doubted that it would be able to get the approval of the State Department to transfer funds into the war zone. Only after the Zionists had shown that they could raise money and that the American government would cooperate did the committee establish the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.)
It has been said that guilt is the great motive force of charity, and Brandeis laid it out very simply. The Jews in America had been blessed with peace and prosperity, and they now had the duty to help those in Europe who were being devastated by the war. “The Jews in America,” he declared, “most fortunately placed, can and must work out the gigantic problem that now confronts our people. And in American Israel—we, the Zionists, must bear the brunt of effort and sacrifice. We are that ‘saving remnant’ which our traditions tell us have always escaped the holocaust and saved our people.” Not since the exile of the Jews from Spain in 1492 had there been such suffering in the Jewish community, and the more fortunate Jews in the United States had to give “quickly and liberally, not from their income merely but from their capital also.” Never one to urge others to do what he would not do himself, he pledged $1,000 a month to the general campaign and committed himself for lesser amounts to local Boston funds. He then urged his colleagues to set an example for the rank and file, and form letters poured out of Zionist offices asking every member to give at least $10 a month during the war, with special letters going to those who could afford larger amounts, and allowances for those who could give only $1 or $2 a month. (The Zionists could count on only one very wealthy Jew for support. Nathan Straus of Macy’s department store gave the PEC over $50,000 for Palestinian relief and then sold his yacht, with the proceeds going to the PEC. Straus also funded a good part of Hadassah’s work in the Holy Land.) In the nine months following the Hotel Marseilles meeting, the provisional committee brought in $170,000, more than the FAZ had raised in its entire fifteen years of existence.
In what must be counted a masterstroke, Jacob de Haas proposed and Brandeis implemented a transfer operation that not only provided millions of dollars in relief but also won a great deal of favorable publicity for the Zionists. Because of American neutrality between August 1914 and April 1917, both the Allies and the Central Powers allowed various relief and charitable groups to distribute food, clothing, and money in the war zones. De Haas suggested that if the belligerent governments would allow it, much more could be sent on an individual basis. People might give $25 to a general fund, but if they knew they could send money directly to their relatives, they would give a great deal more. Utilizing his contacts in the Wilson administration, Brandeis went to the State Department to see if there would be any objections and whether such a program would violate American neutrality. After receiving approval, the provisional committee established a transfer department. At first it handled only a few dollars a day, but as word spread, the volume swelled to thousands, and before American entry into the war the total sum reached into the millions. The Zionists had originally planned to aid suffering Jews, but then Christians began approaching the transfer department to see if they could send funds to their relatives as well, and the Zionists agreed to handle their donations. The sender paid nothing for the service, and the committee bore the costs of transmittal and exchange. The State Department utilized its service to help transfer money and private messages, while large companies like Standard Oil, which had many overseas branches, facilitated the work. Brandeis also used his good offices with Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and the USS Vulcan carried sorely needed foodstuffs and medicines to the Hadassah unit in Palestine.
The hardships of the war made raising money the first priority of the Zionists. Brandeis recognized that in many ways the emphasis on fund-raising necessarily diverted Zionists from the prime task of building up the Jewish settlements in Palestine. But he also understood that American Zionists now had their first opportunity to reach out to the wider Jewish community. Through fund-raising, Brandeis explained, “we must unite the Jews and make clear to them also that it is through the establishment of a publicly recognized, legally secured home for the Jews in Palestine that our unity must find expression.”
The Brandeis leadership has been criticized for diverting the energy of American Jewry from the central goal of Zionism—from Jewish unity built around a Palestinian homeland into mere moneygrubbing—and thus is responsible for the fact that no significant aliyah ever took place from the United States to Palestine/Israel. The exigencies of the situation in 1914 made fundraising essential and the top priority, but Brandeis never saw it as an end in itself; rather, it provided a means to awaken a Jewish consciousness and a Zionist interest. Money would buy food and clothing and medicine, but the donor had to understand that the situation of the Jews made them suffer more than other victims of the war and that only a homeland would alleviate that condition. “If there can be awakened in America a desire to tackle the problem of the Jew fundamentally and see it through to a successful end,” he declared, “we shall have passed on one stage further in our struggle for complete and universal rights.” Brandeis said many times that money mattered to him personally only as it made him free; money would be important to the Zionists only if it freed the minds of American Jews to see the ultimate need of a Jewish homeland.
TWO OTHER ISSUES faced the Brandeis leadership: the unification of all American Zionists under one organizational roof, and the role that American Zionism and its leaders would henceforth play in world Zionist affairs. For all practical purposes, the Federation of American Zionists ceased to exist after August 1914. Although the skeleton, including the small office staff, remained intact, responsibility for members, money, propaganda, relations with the American government, and correspondence with European Zionists passed into the hands of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs, and more particularly into those of Louis D. Brandeis.
Tipat Halav (Drop of Milk), Hadassah’s fresh milk program in Palestine
In the call for members, at least in 1914 and 1915, new Zionists would join a local society, which would then be affiliated to the provisional committee. Those groups with a special Zionist agenda, such as the religious Zionists (Mizrachi) or the various socialist groups (Poale Zion) or Hadassah, remained organizationally independent of the PEC and cooperated with it only insofar as its leaders recognized Brandeis’s leadership. The tone of the hundreds of letters Brandeis wrote to local leaders and chapters is conciliatory, urging them to raise more money and get more members, since he had no authority at all to give them directives. Brandeis understood that he would never be able to get the socialists or the Mizrachi to cede all of their authority to one umbrella agency, but he assumed that groups like the Chelsea Zionist Society, and hundreds like it, the so-called general Zionists, would be glad to join a centralized organization that would make both its individual members and its constituent chapters feel more powerful. The Zionists would never have great influence unless they could speak in one voice.
The problem of reorganization stood high on Brandeis’s agenda from the moment he assumed the PEC leadership, and by 1915 a plan had developed that ultimately led to the creation of the Zionist Organization of America in 1918 (see chapter 21). The plan involved identifying the PEC as the national spokesman for the American Zionist movement; it would create services for all local societies, and this in turn would attract the interests and loyalties of both chapters and individuals, encouraging them in understanding the need to act together. In typical reform manner, the reorganization could take place only after the educational process; American Jews had to be taught the necessity of becoming Zionists and then the benefits of uniting.
Even such luminaries as Brandeis, Julian Mack, and Stephen Wise could not dictate such a reorganization, but they could focus the attention of all Jews on the PEC. The massive propaganda effort the PEC launched involved not just teaching about the symbiosis between Judaism and Americanism or the importance of a Jewish homeland; it also trumpeted the achievements of the transfer program, the securing of an American naval ship to carry supplies to Palestine, the amount of money raised and distributed. All this would not have happened unless American Zionists acted together, and they needed a better organization to allow them to do so. As Brandeis explained to Nathan Kaplan of the Chicago-based Knights of Zion, by centralizing in the PEC those activities that required national direction, the Knights and other groups would be relieved of an onerous burden and could concentrate on their special interests and responsibilities, the things they did best. Rather than view a central organization as a weakening of the Knights, Brandeis urged Kaplan to see it as a special opportunity to strengthen the group.
To show just how effective unity could be, Brandeis persuaded the ten largest Zionist groups to hold a joint annual meeting in Boston at the end of June 1915. The PEC dominated the gathering, and Brandeis’s personal prestige led city officials to prepare a near-royal welcome for the delegates. Special floral arrangements, featuring the Star of David, decorated the Public Gardens; local groups held dozens of receptions for the delegates; and Boston newspapers gave extensive coverage to the convention proceedings. For those who had been in Rochester the year before, the differences between the two gatherings could not have been more striking. In 1914 no one had paid any attention; in 1915 everyone in Boston took notice. The affiliates, whose individual meetings had passed unnoticed, could not help but realize that the simple act of meeting together had made the whole so much more than the sum of its parts. As Brandeis hoped, the Boston meeting provided a marked momentum for the idea of reorganization.
At the same time that Brandeis moved to create a unified American Zionism, he also had to deal with the World Zionist Organization. The international composition of the Actions Committee doomed it to fragmentation at the war’s outbreak. The group could no longer meet in Berlin, the WZO headquarters, and many of the members, caught up in war fever, joined governmental bureaus. Those like Shmaryahu Levin and Nahum Sokolow, caught away from the Continent and unable or unwilling to go home, tried to work for the cause through the PEC or the English Zionist Federation. The central committee set up a temporary office in Copenhagen, but in the absence of forceful leadership never exerted any influence. With the WZO institutionally crippled, its sources of revenue closed, and the sudden emergence of the Brandeis faction in America, pressure arose on both sides of the Atlantic to shift the leadership of the world body to the United States.
In calling the Hotel Marseilles meeting, both Levin and Louis Lip-sky assumed that the Actions Committee no longer functioned. At the meeting itself, and in the hectic weeks to follow, Brandeis also assumed that the movement had lost whatever central direction it once had. In England, Chaim Weizmann wanted to disassociate Zionism from anything and anybody German and believed the management of Zionist affairs should be entrusted to the PEC. “In view of the tensions now prevailing,” he wrote to Brandeis, “I consider the activities of the old Actions Committee impossible and even dangerous for the future of our cause…. The American Provisional Committee should be given full power to deal with all Zionist matters until better times come.”
Brandeis and his lieutenants were not political naïfs, and well understood the issues. The WZO had been headquartered in Berlin and, even if its executive committee had not disintegrated, would be suspect as under the thumb of one of the combatants. Chaim Weizmann, who would rise to power as head of the WZO after the war, realized that he could not try to claim authority since England had also gone to war. As for Palestine, it formally belonged to Turkey, a member of the Central Powers. In 1914, alone among the great powers, the United States remained neutral. A Zionist movement headquartered there could deal with both sides, without suspicion of favoritism by either.
Jacob de Haas urged Brandeis from the start to push for full and complete autonomy in world Zionist affairs. In October, the PEC informed Weizmann that it stood ready to act “on behalf of the whole Zionist organization at such times when action is necessary.” The PEC would send money to Palestine, it would communicate with Zionist bodies in other countries, and it would take political action when necessary, on behalf of the Actions Committee, over all Zionist affairs. By November 1914 a steady stream of telegrams had reached the Copenhagen office urging a full transfer of power to the PEC.
It is doubtful Brandeis wanted to become head of the international Zionist movement, even on a temporary basis. As he had shown at the Hotel Marseilles meeting, he had little knowledge of the American constituents; he had none at all, other than the rough briefings he had gotten from de Haas and Sokolow, on the arcane politics of the WZO, or the complicated problems associated with the Palestinian settlements. As it turned out, within a few weeks of the war’s start, enough members of the Actions Committee had made their way back to Berlin to make the office appear at least semi-functional. Sokolow urged the PEC not to push too hard, and Weizmann also retracted his earlier demand that the Americans take over. By the spring of 1915 the Americans had accepted the fact that the Actions Committee had not gone under. This caused little hand-wringing, except from de Haas, since neither Brandeis nor Mack wanted to tackle the international problems. They had their hands full at home.
The PEC did, however, impress upon the Actions Committee that it alone now spoke for American Zionists. It demanded and received full authority to collect moneys and to disburse them as it saw fit, without the approval of the Berlin office. For funds channeled to Palestine, Brandeis insisted on a centralized authority in the Holy Land, in place of the existing patchwork of multiple and semiautonomous recipients, each wanting more money than its neighbors. Arthur Ruppin, the WZO agent in Palestine, had long supported this idea, as well as the introduction of modern business and accounting procedures. Brandeis also urged the WZO to stop sending confidential information to various American Zionist groups; the PEC now stood as the voice of American Zionism, and he demanded that the WZO recognize this and send its information to, and only to, the PEC, which would then determine how to share it. Although the minutes of the PEC meetings went regularly to the Copenhagen office, the flow of information from Europe to America remained sketchy, far more so than could be blamed on the war. Time and again the PEC complained, as had the FAZ before it, that the Europeans demanded more and more money from American Zionists but did not treat them with respect and failed to keep the Americans informed about important matters. It would be an issue that would rise up again and again between the Americans and the WZO for the next thirty years.
AT THE END OF 1915 an American Zionist conversant with the history of the movement would have been well satisfied with recent developments. A new, energized, Americanized leadership had emerged. Membership had increased astronomically, and a highly efficient and effective means had been found to funnel American dollars to European Jews hard-hit by the war. The PEC produced reams of propaganda, and there could hardly have been a Jew in America who had not received at least one piece calling upon him or her to join the Zionists and to make a pledge of money. A haphazard business arrangement had been reorganized, and Brandeis had a level of respect and influence never before enjoyed by a Zionist leader in this country. The slogan of “Men! Money! Discipline!” had wrought a rich harvest in an unbelievably short time.
The success had been due in large measure not just to Brandeis’s personal charisma but also to the very American ideas and methods he had employed. This had been the PEC’s greatest strength, but in it could be found the seeds of future trouble. An accommodation still had to be reached with the powerful American Jewish Committee regarding who spoke for American Jewry. The increasing prominence of the PEC aroused a great deal of resentment in the European offices of the WZO, and at some point there would have to be a showdown between the Americans and the Europeans over what direction the movement would take. But for now all seemed well.