Prophet in a Time of Priests. Janice Rothschild Blumberg

pressure. Laymen (women did not vote, hold office, or even membership in congregations) accustomed to making congregational decisions, refused to relinquish power to rabbis. Rabbis and congregations also came into conflict over reforms—which ones, how many, and how quickly were they to be implemented. From the 1870s into the 1890s rabbis were hired and fired on a regular basis as either the more Reform or traditional faction within their congregation held sway.

      The Pittsburgh Platform’s stress on social service over religious observance, the availability of rabbis trained at the Hebrew Union College, the trend toward three separate movements within American Judaism—Reform, Orthodox, and Conservative—and the firm move of congregations into those camps, among other factors intertwined and contributed to the rise of prestige of the rabbinate and the shift of power within congregations toward the rabbis. Consequently, this extended rabbinic tenures.

      For the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries with few exceptions, the important” rabbis—institution builders and thinkers like Isaac Leeser, Isaac M. Wise, David Einhorn, Kaufmann Kohler, and Emil Hirsch— have drawn the greatest historical attention. Yet itinerant rabbis like Alphabet Browne who struggled from one pulpit to another are perhaps far more representative of the typical rabbinical experience of their era.

      As readers of this biography will see, Hungarian-born Browne earned degrees in law and medicine besides rabbinical training and ordination. Well read, fluent in several languages, an international traveler and speaker, Browne was a Renaissance man with an ego to match. I.M. Wise’s protégé and newspaper competitor, he made friends (including President Grant and other public figures) and enemies at every stop.

      One of the things that made writing about him so difficult and reading about him so interesting is that he proves impossible to pigeonhole. He is a Reform rabbi with strong tendencies toward Conservative practices and beliefs. Whereas most Reform rabbis rejected political Zionism and remained aloof from the East European Jewish immigrants who flooded into America especially between 1881 and 1924, Browne ardently supported Zionism and became a champion of the poor Jewish immigrant. He ascribed to the authority and prestige of the modern, professional rabbinate but seemingly went out of his way to foment controversy and antagonize powerful opponents. During a period in which rabbis tended to eschew politics, Browne ardently campaigned for candidates, emphasized Jewish bloc voting, and lobbied for patronage positions. A direct descendent, his biographer depicts him in all of his strength as well as his numerous weaknesses.

      I first became familiar with Janice Rothschild Blumberg’s work when I began studying southern Jewish history during the late 1970s. She had written a history of Atlanta’s Hebrew Benevolent Congregation (The Temple), which she revised twenty years later. She followed this with two insightful articles on the early history of Atlanta Jewry for the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (now American Jewish History). Janice also wrote a memoir treating her first husband, Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, and their experiences with the civil rights movement. We share devotion to the Southern Jewish Historical Society (SJHS), an organization over which she presided, and where we meet regularly at annual conferences.

      I have had the pleasure of editing three of Janice’s articles. She provided a fascinating memoir of Rabbi Rothschild and her experiences for an anthology, Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, I co-edited with Berkley Kalin. Her preliminary articles on Rabbi Browne’s Atlanta years and on his wife, Sophie Weil Browne, as a rabbi’s wife and clubwoman appeared in the SJHS journal I edit. In all of these works as in her biography of Browne, Janice Rothschild Blumberg melds the literary verve of the journalist with the critical, analytic skills of the historian.

      Those who know Janice view her as the model of the southern lady in the highest sense of the concept. Far from being perched on the proverbial pedestal, she is rather a brilliant conversationalist and thinker, who in her eighth decade, has completed a scholarly project that has taken years of research, writing, and repeated revision. In these pages she offers readers great insights into immigration and identity, the roles of rabbis and their wives, interaction between rabbis and between rabbis and congregations, religious ideas and debates, divisions within Judaism, the nature of nineteenth century politics and political figures, regionalism and movement across sections, foreign affairs, and the life and travels of an unusual but also often typical individual of his class, vocation, and age. Enjoy!

      Mark K. Bauman

      Editor, Southern Jewish History

      INTRODUCTION

      Little has been written about the numerous rabbis who came to America in the mid-nineteenth century except for those few who sustained long tenures in important pulpits. The vast majority served small communities throughout the country, often moving from place to place or to other professions with rapidity that suggests incompetence and lack of achievement. Such was not the case, however, with the peripatetic Edward B. M.. Browne, LLD, AM, BM, DD, MD (called “Alphabet” because he signed his name with all the letters.) Browne’s simultaneous careers as rabbi, public orator, journalist, pro bono attorney, and lobbyist provide rare insights to the Jewish experience during the formative period of American Judaism within our country’s dynamic, tumultuous era from Reconstruction through the First World War. His story is one of American history, Jewish history, and the history of church-state relations. His passion was America’s fulfillment of its promise of equal rights for all, a doctrine deeply imbedded in the hearts of most immigrants.

      Browne held thirteen pulpits in eight states during a rabbinate that spanned half a century. He invited controversy at every turn, endearing himself to Christians and Eastern European Jewish immigrants while alienating the leading power brokers of American Jewry. He was admitted to the bar in two states; lectured in chemistry as well as Talmud and the life of Jesus, taught at a medical college, wrote for and edited newspapers, and embraced political Zionism at a time when it was anathema to most members of his congregation. His lectures drew enthusiastic applause across America. He traveled frequently to Europe and at least twice to the Middle East on missions of mercy for his fellow Jews, played a significant role in the presidential campaign of Benjamin Harrison, served as an honorary pall bearer in the state funeral of Ulysses S. Grant, sympathized with the labor movement, embraced the theories of Henry George, was referred to in New York newspapers as “The Poor Man’s Friend” and in the mid-West as “The Man Who Challenged Ingersoll.” Yet his name is hardly a footnote in American Jewish history.

      One is tempted to ask why. Why is it that few Jewish scholars recognize his name, that fewer yet mention him in their published work, and even then in negative context? Why did biographers ignore him? Why have his achievements been overlooked and only his foibles remembered? Was he an unsung hero, a charismatic braggart, or merely an annoying gadfly? Was his failure due entirely to his own eccentricities, or because he was ahead of his time and dared to buck the mainstream? Those are questions for the reader to decide. This study seeks to illuminate the issues, not to resolve them.

      Edward B. M. Browne was my great-grandfather. He and his only grandchild, my mother, formed a close bond which led to his spending much time with us in Atlanta during the last five years of his life and the first five of mine. I retain a brief but vivid memory of him as a warm, witty old man with a full head of curly white hair and a walrus mustache, who sometimes teased me and always seemed to enjoy my company. Family tradition, far from endowing him with a halo, cast suspicion on almost everything that he was purported to have done, perhaps due to the jaundiced memory retained by my grandmother who endured childhood as “the preacher’s kid.” Her attitude is not hard to understand. Moving from place to place and hearing public criticism of one’s parent does not make for a happy childhood.

      Furthermore, her father by words and actions upheld Jewish distinctiveness at a time when she and her Jewish Victorian friends most wanted to blend into the mainstream. Her only glowing reminiscence of those days was that of viewing Grant’s funeral procession from an area outside New York’s posh Fifth Avenue Hotel reserved for celebrities and families of the participants, an awesome experience for a romantic nine-year-old. She never tired of showing me the identifying black armband that her father wore that day, a souvenir that unfortunately disappeared during ensuing decades.

      My interest in writing