Prophet in a Time of Priests. Janice Rothschild Blumberg

he fulfilled the highest hopes of his congregants as their representative to the gentile world. He led them in intellectual activities by organizing the Evansville Literary Society and encouraging study among young adults. He pursued scholarly projects on his own, writing, translating, teaching and publishing. Most significant of all insofar as pleasing his congregation was concerned, he married Sophie. She was intelligent, personable, and one of their own. From all appearances the two were securely set to live “happily ever after.”

      For his inaugural sermon at B’nai Israel, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, 1871, Browne chose the text of Jeremiah 1:47, wherein the prophet seeks God’s help with the words, “Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a boy.” Humbly acknowledging his own youth and inexperience, the rabbi reminded his listeners that the injunction to teach was meant not only for Jews but “unto the nations” and that he would welcome their guidance in this endeavor, clearly indicating outreach to the gentile community. He then spoke of a rabbi’s duties to his congregation and those of the congregation to its rabbi. Citing the instructions given to Moses in Exodus 27:20 and Leviticus 24:2,3 for the Israelites to bring to Aaron, the high priest, pure oil of olives for the eternal light, Browne drew the parallel to himself and his Evansville congregants. It was his duty to tend the lamp of enlightenment, but theirs to supply the oil.1

      The subject was not unusual for rabbis of that era, but its message is worth noting for its relation to the times and the man. Addressing women especially, Browne invoked the Jewish view of motherhood. By asking them to help him educate their children, he drew upon the biblical injunction for mothers to introduce their children to the Torah. Also, with the intense patriotism typical of new Americans, he conjured the image popularized by novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe of mothers as primary purveyors of moral authority, charging them to “enlist as soldiers in the great army of the republic which shall free the mind from the sway of old despotic views.”

      To illustrate his role as principal teacher, he drew from his medical studies a tongue-twisting ophthalmological metaphor about people “afflicted with photophobia... myopia and presbiophia,” (meaning that they either hated light or were farsighted or nearsighted) and concluded that they “contracted those morbid tendencies by bad habits, by looking either too much at the sun and becoming dazzled, or by closing their eyes altogether.” Such patients, he said, “must have an artificial light overseen and regulated by a good oculist. The priest has to be the optician here. He must shape lenses... which will gather the eye beams in the right focus, and thus assist their vision to behold things in the true light.” The imagery, reflecting his continued fascination with science, also suggested the presence of the eye disease that soon manifested itself and plagued him throughout most of his life.2

      No sooner was Browne installed as Evansville’s rabbi than he announced a series of public lectures. He opened with “The Genesis of Christianity,” which the city newspapers asked him to repeat. Entering community affairs, he headed the Charitable Burial Association, served by his father-in-law, Moses Weil, as treasurer. He also began publishing an English periodical, the Jewish Independent, headquartered in Chicago. Within a few months the Evansville Medical College offered him faculty chairs in medical jurisprudence and diseases of the mind, and dispatched him as its delegate to the United States Medical Convention in Philadelphia.3

      Rabbis were often called upon by Jewish communities other than their own to officiate at weddings, dedicate new synagogues, and deliver lectures for charitable purposes. In Petersburg, Indiana, Browne conducted its county’s first Jewish wedding. Celebrated in the Presbyterian Church, church bells summoned all residents to the ceremony and the church choir provided music. At the luncheon that followed, guests asked the rabbi to lecture that evening at the courthouse, and he agreed on condition that they contribute the admission fee to victims of the recent Chicago fire. The townspeople printed posters for the lecture, entitled “Social Features, Ancient and Modern,” and recruited boys to go through the streets as town criers clanging large bells to announce it. The event enabled Petersburg to send more than $100 to Chicago for victims of the devastating fire.4

      In Vincennes, Indiana, Browne addressed the Moral and Social Union on “Science and the Bible,” described in the local newspaper as “the principal features of the Hebrew laws and traditions.” It was well received by most, but not all listeners. According to the report, some clergymen “did not like the idea of being lectured to by Jews and see them carry off the palm of public applause....” One Catholic priest became so agitated that he provoked Browne into challenging him to debate the subject.5

      While we cannot know if the priest objected to the message or the messenger, the lecture’s title suggests that his reaction reflected that of many religious leaders, both Christian and Jewish, to the scientific view of religion. Biblical criticism and Darwinism posed a threat to those unable to come to terms with modernism. Clergymen of all faiths feared them and believed that those who advocated them were largely responsible for the disturbing decline in attendance then apparent at worship services in their churches and synagogues alike.

      Reform rabbis had good reason for alarm. They recognized that most of their rapidly acculturating, German-born constituents, however rational their thinking on other issues, still clung to the traditional beliefs in creation by design, man’s creation in God’s image, and God’s revelation of the complete Torah at Sinai. The rabbis posited that if such devotees of logic were influenced by academic biblical scholarship or Darwinism to the extent that they abandoned those underlying tenets of their religious background, they would be left with no intellectual basis to sustain their Judaism. Indeed, some had already found expression of their socio-religious views in Unitarianism and Ethical Culture. As historian Naomi W. Cohen explained, when inquiring minds began to question their inherited beliefs, “... those [denominations] that boasted of their rational nature or their adaptability and relevance to modern society were hard-pressed to reinterpret essential articles of their faith....”6

      Although Browne and the highly respected Rabbi Bernhard Felsenthal, of Chicago, maintained that rational inquiry did not threaten Judaism, the vast majority of their colleagues condemned it. Wise gave space in his newspapers to advocates of Darwinism and biblical criticism, but he accepted neither, charging that they were based on unverified hypotheses. For once in agreement with Einhorn, who called Darwinism the “brutalization of our species,” Wise called it “Homo-Brutalism” and “the gorilla theory,” and held that it robbed humans of their “preeminence” making all of nature a battleground.7

      Browne, trained in both medicine and theology as was Darwin, viewed evolution from a vantage point similar to that of the evolutionist himself. Backed by his knowledge of biblical criticism and influenced perhaps by having read the works of the American philosopher-historian John Fiske and British philosopher-biologist Herbert Spencer, Browne emulated them in seeking a means of reconciling religion and science rather than undermining the science. Few philosophers, theologians or scientists in the Victorian era shared that view.

      Philosophical disagreement did not diminish Wise’s support for Browne’s work, however. Wise continued to promote it, praising Browne’s Jewish Independent for its “rich variety of original reading matter,” and applauding the young rabbi’s start on a new book, “The Encyclopedia of Talmudic Beauties.”8

      Browne also began translating The Book Jashar, one of the lost books of the Bible (literally, “The Correct Book”), mentioned in Joshua 10:13 and II Samuel I:18, which contained stories from creation to the time of the judges. Late twentieth century scholars believed that The Book Jashar was a collection of war songs already known at the time of the Bible’s canonization, some of which, including Miriam’s Song at the Sea (Exodus 15:1), were preserved in other sections of Scripture without attribution to earlier sources.

      According to Browne, the book had been “in the hands of our people” since time immemorial, although not translated into English until the nineteenth century. Scholars disputed the authenticity of the version most recently discovered, which included dates, genealogies, and full explanations of many obscure passages, and which Emanuel Deutsch, foremost Jewish exponent of biblical criticism, endorsed. Despite the fact that Julius Wellhausen, most famous of the critics, called it a fraud, Browne chose that newest version for his translation.9

      Browne completed the work in 1875, with