Judah L. Magnes
For Zion’s Sake. A Biography of Judah L. Magnes.
By Norman Bentwich.
The Jewish Publication Society of America. 329 pp. $4.00.
Dr. Judah L. Magnes’s years were spent in purposeful endeavors dedicated to the Jewish commonweal, and in the pursuit of several careers each of which brought him the esteem of his fellows, the companionship of learned and sensitive minds, and, in his younger years, the adulation of multitudes. He was, at various junctures of his public life, a leader of masses, almost a “rabble-rouser”; an advocate of elect, rather than elected, leadership (in the latter part of his tenure as head of the Kehillah); a relief worker; a university president and, simultaneously with this, an excursionist into the No Man’s Land of international diplomacy. It is as the latter—the role in which he achieved least—that he is now best remembered, with affection and with enmity.
Obviously, Judah Magnes was a man of eccentric pattern. Each of his diverse careers was striking and bold in outline, but the outlines were never filled in. An air of tragedy, the sense of a life wasted despite devotion and dedication, despite much good brought to fellow men, seems to hover over this biography by Norman Bentwich, who was Magnes’s close friend for many years. Frustration, disillusionment, renunciation marked his career from the very outset—underneath all the appearances of success.
He who raised funds for Jewish self-defense in Russia at the time of the Kishinev pogrom soon became a confirmed pacifist. He who from the pulpits of the richest temples spoke for the radical and Zionist “rabble” became in the end one who warned that the “compact majority” was a danger to orderly democracy. One of the first American-born orators of Zionism, he was to break with organized Zionism on the very eve of its first great triumph, the Balfour Declaration, and yet several years later to settle in Palestine, an act that constituted the ultimate in Zionist self-realization. He envisaged Jewish Palestine as a spiritual center for Jewry and took pride in “his” Hebrew University, which he hoped to make the hub of that center, yet he felt inadequate among the University’s scientists, and in the end was divested, for serious as well as shabby reasons, of his previous virtually uncircumscribed authority on Mount Scopus.
How disappointed the pacifist Magnes must have been in both Mahatma Gandhi and himself when he felt impelled, in 1938, to question the latter’s counsel to German Jews to offer non-violent resistance to “the godless fury of their de-humanized oppressors.” Magnes’s reply to this was: “If ever there could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war.” And when World War II broke out soon thereafter, Magnes, who had opposed World War I, wrote to James Marshall: “I have gone back on the deepest feeling that I have had, my pacifism, that is, the prohibition of spilling man’s blood. . . . I do not know whether to be ashamed of my backsliding, or to be content that for the moment at least I am not pretending to be something I am not.”
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Mr. Bentwich reveals the personal torments of Magnes’s life and the private sacrifices that he had to make. He never mastered Hebrew rhetoric and enunciation yet felt it inappropriate for the president of the Hebrew University to deliver his addresses in English. Therefore he spoke infrequently and only in Hebrew, thus renouncing, for the sake of propriety and consistency, his primary gift, the one that had brought him the greatest fulfillment—for he was among the most eloquent orators produced by the American Jewish pulpit.
Magnes’s restlessness is traced to its source in this sensitive biography: “He prepared himself ardently for the rabbinical calling,” Mr. Bentwich writes, “and it remained his dearest aspiration to rouse the Jewish people to a truer understanding and fulfillment of their religious tradition. His other efforts were second-best. . . . But he knew early that he had not the divine spark, and all his efforts in life to attain it by study, by reading, by contemplation were in vain.” Magnes himself wrote as late as 1938: “I am working for religious ends. This does not, however, make a man of religion. For I have no creative power in this sphere.”
True “creative power” or the “divine spark” is revealed, for good and for bad, in a capacity to communicate with the ordinary man, to speak and bespeak, to impart and derive inspiration. But he was destined to lose the advantage of even these gifts early in life—after the apparently traumatic experience of being overwhelmingly rejected in his position on the American Jewish Congress issue. This gift of communicating with the mass of Jews was one that Stephen S. Wise, one of Magnes’s chief opponents over the Congress issue as well as over others, was never to lose; though Wise’s preoccupations were almost wholly secular, he managed always to convey an exuberant religious pathos. I should have liked to see in this book a dramatic juxtaposition of these two men, whose efforts early in life ran so parallel only to diverge and conflict thereafter.
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Magnes “was not a philosopher, but a preacher,” Mr. Bentwich writes. “. . . What he could leave to his people was not a doctrine or a creed or a treatise, but the example of a life concentrated unswervingly on moral causes and inspired by the teaching of the Hebrew prophets. . . . He made a noble attempt to realize the ideal of a Jew devoted to the service of Judaism and of humanity. . . .”
He was essentially a pastor or minister in the finest American Protestant tradition, one who shepherded a flock. As a shtadlan he was superb, and he rendered greater service to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine than a generation that still recalls too vividly its conflicts with his contumacious dissidence is ready to concede as yet. As a shtadlan in the larger diplomatic sphere, however, as a drummer of solutions for the Palestine problem, and a mediator between Arabs and Jews, Magnes was less than a success even from the most charitable viewpoint.
His outstanding quality was moral piety, though he might have seemed wanting in the humility which is generally a concomitant of this quality. He was indeed too often self-righteous, and there was an air of superiority about him. Mr. Bentwich, who suppresses no negative trait, calls it aloofness. “His aloofness saved him from the endless discussions which often precede and hamper action.” Magnes’s disdainful reference to the “compact majority” echoed Thoreau, whom he resembled in his predisposition to anarchism—unconsciously, of course.
His tenacious advocacy, While holding Jewish public office, of views unpopular among Americans at large would bear this out. He emerged as a leader of American pacifism at the height of the Palmer raids after World War I, when he sat on the New York Kehillah. A little later he became a champion of the Soviet experiment. It was obvious, notwithstanding his strong disclaimers, that these views would be identified with those of Jewry—at least as long as he continued to hold a Jewish public office. Yet he did not resign from that office; nor did he keep a discreet silence. Magnes’s dissidence was courageous and admirable, yet his reckless disregard of its possible consequences for the community he led revealed his chronic opposition to some of the disciplines that must govern any group or society. His insistence on placing obligation to private conscience at all times above that to one’s group explains his inability in later days to get popular backing for his views. This was demonstrated very clearly in Palestine.
Magnes was not alone there in advocating bi-nationalism and in saying so aloud. Dissent is man’s inalienable right in democratic society, and he ran into public censure from the Jewish side only when he presented his proposals to the High Commissioner and other British government officials, which meant that he was pursuing a private diplomacy that went contrary to the policy of the democratically elected parliament of Palestinian Jewry. He behaved in much the same way in his fight, up to the very eve of Israel’s founding, against the Partition plan.
Henrietta Szold shared Magnes’s views and matched his fearlessness and self-confidence, but she had a humility that the strongly individualistic Magnes lacked. She wrote to him that she was “bruised and shaken” by Zionist policy which, she felt, did not accord “with the dreams, the ideals, even the sober expectations connected with Zionism.” Yet “I cannot stand up against the official [Zionist] action. . . . Suppose I were, with a word of mine, to destroy such good as may, after all, be tucked away in the folds of the [Partition] negotiations I abhor and do not understand!”
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Magnes never doubted his rightness. He was annoyed only by his ineffectiveness. “If only I were deeply religious, I think I could speak to this people, and thence also to all of Israel, and appeal to its conscience, and awaken it to its ethical ideals and to pure action. . . . But, as it is, in whose name would I speak? In my own? Who am I and what authority is that? . . . In the name of the nation? I do not feel myself ‘patriotic’ enough; moreover, it would have to be, on more than one occasion, against the nation. What would be my legitimation? Who has sent me? Where are the permanent roots of my authority?”
He asked himself such questions, and yet behaved as though wholly unconscious of their purport. Had he really persuaded himself, as more than one has said, that he was possessed of a higher authority, and had he discovered the “divine spark” within himself? There is nothing in Mr. Bentwich’s biography that implies this. Mr. Bentwich writes: “In his political leadership he was an aristocrat and individualist—sometimes an autocrat—with democratic convictions.” This is well illustrated in his relations with Ichud, a small society of Yishuv elite composed of friends of Magnes and dedicated to Arab-Jewish conciliation and bi-nationalism. “Magnes was one of the authors of their program and a sponsor of their activity. Yet he did not become a member or write for their Hebrew journal, save on one occasion, lest he might be involved by a majority decision in a policy which offended his conscience.”
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One fault of this biography is that it treats Magnes’s thoughts as though they formed a sovereign and original contribution. Yet Mr. Bentwich admits that Magnes was not a philosopher or theologian, and that his major contribution was “a noble attempt” to live Prophetic Judaism. Mr. Bentwich would have produced a more vivid book, and a distincter contribution to the history of the Jews in Magnes’s generation, had he presented his subject in terms of the environment in which he functioned and the personalities with whom he came in contact. But this would have required a familiarity such as Mr. Bentwich apparently lacks with America and American events in the period covered. He makes much of Magnes’s indebtedness to Ahad Ha-am, and mentions Quaker influence. But the debt to Ahad Ha-am was merely formal and perhaps exaggerated by Magnes himself in order to put his ideas within an acknowledged Zionist tradition to refute charges that he had renounced the Basel program.
Ahad Ha-am was a rationalist with none of Magnes’s appreciation of the ritualistic and folkloristic, or taste for the mystic. Magnes’s outlook was almost wholly formed by forces that had asserted themselves in the America of his formative years. There was the “Social Gospel,” first and foremost, which reflected and effected a kind of revolution in American Protestantism whereby the theologian became a social worker, and parish power passed from the aristocracy of wealth and birth to the middle classes that were then claiming their voice and place in American society. The “Social Gospel” meant a great concern with the underprivileged and, particularly, the immigrant proletariat of the cities. This was expressed in the Christian Socialist movement, with which Magnes had close ties.
Moreover, there had always been a Messianic Zionist strain in American Christian tradition, and this, too, asserted itself at that time. A fusion of these tendencies with the Jewish Messianism aroused by the Russian pogroms produced Emma Lazarus. It was in this pattern within the larger American movement that Magnes was cast, as were Louis D. Brandeis and Henrietta Szold. The pattern created a distinctly American tradition in Zionism in which the American “Social Gospel” and Jewish ideals and aspirations were blended, and which deserves study on that basis.
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Had he been content to minister to the needs of his Palestine “parish,” Magnes might have experienced greater fulfillment and fewer frustrations. But he aimed higher. He wished to become the moral guide of the Yishuv, and for this he lacked both background and that language of the market place which has always been the language of prophecy. Besides, other—perhaps greater—mentors were on the scene. There was that barefooted prophet, A. D. Gordon, preacher of the religion of labor. And there was another man—born to the purple of theology, one might say—Rabbi Kook.
Mr. Bentwich notes that Magnes “was prone to oversimplify a complex problem by concentrating on its ethical aspects and neglecting the state of facts, he could not adjust the order of thought to the order of things.” Creative simplification requires genius, intuition. A. D. Gordon and Rabbi Kook possessed it. Magnes, essentially a “Protestant,” treated principles as though they were Sinaic revelation, mitzvot that did not brook flexibility or relaxation. Orthodox Rabbi Kook treated moral and theological principles as dynamic elements to be adjusted to the measure, the needs, and the inherent temper of each particular situation. Thus he could discuss with charity the desecration of the Sabbath in Israel’s kibbutzim. Dr. Magnes, the democrat and the Reform Jew, was paradoxically incapable of the leniency and flexibility of the Orthodox Rabbi Kook, as far as his own set of principles was concerned.
Had he lived a little longer, perhaps he might have seen that events had brought “the order of things” into harmony with his “order of thought.” He had warned against the consequences of Irgun terrorism. “You may say it is because of our straitened position,” he wrote, “from which there is no escape, that we have declared a kind of moral moratorium, or in today’s terminology a freezing of our morals. . . . It is not within the power of man to freeze his morals. The attempt to freeze the moral senses results in their atrophy.”
I believe that the course the Yishuv and Zionism followed immediately preceding the foundation of the state was inevitable; we were the captives of history. Some of the evils Magnes predicted would follow are evident here and there in Israel today. But eventually they will disappear, and they are on the way to doing so. Were he alive today, Magnes’s views would be very much on the order of the day, and he would speak for, and not merely to, the people in calling for soul-searching and greater moral zeal.
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Magnes turned from Reform to neo-Orthodoxy and attempted to amend ritual without offending tradition. His efforts were repudiated, but only because religion was at the time the concern of the Orthodox alone, and of no others, in Palestine. Today, with a Kulturkampf being waged by the Orthodox in Israel, and secular idealism under a cloud, Magnes’s search for a neo-Orthodox compromise would have brought him a large following. At a time when most Hebrew University students were active in the resistance to British rule, he advocated, with little success, that they establish a Hull House among the Jews of the Old City of Jerusalem. Some such movement is taking root in Israel today. Hebrew University students now volunteer for work in the Maabarot and urban slum areas, to help the immigrants, to fight illiteracy, and to teach hygiene. And they do this with “Social Reformer” zeal, not hesitating to expose individuals in public office they think guilty of neglect of duty or of malfeasance.
With Rabbi Kook, Gordon, and Berl Katzenelson gone, a voice of supreme moral authority is lacking in Israel. Magnes, had he lived past October 1948, might have become that voice, and a new intelligentsia whose second language was no longer Russian, Polish, or German, but English, might have responded warmly to his American-accented Hebrew.
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