Pillar of Fire

A Biography of Stephen S. Wise

A. James Rudin

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780896729117
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

During his long career, Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise received letters with only two words written on the envelope: "Rabbi USA."But the United States Postal Service was never in doubt about the intended recipient: there was only one "Rabbi USA." No other rabbi before or since has dominated the American and the international scene with such passion and power. Both his admirers and opponents—there was no shortage of either group—acknowledged him as the premier leader of the American Jewish community and a major political figure.Pillar of Fire goes behind the headlines and the once-closed archives of the White House and the State Department to reveal the complex and controversial personal relationship between Wise and President Franklin D. Roosevelt when millions of lives hung in the balance during the Holocaust. It also explores Wise's remarkable relationships with both President Woodrow Wilson and United States Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Finally, the book describes how Wise's extraordinary actions in the realm of social justice and human rights permanently influenced America's religious landscape.

Chapter 1: The Hungarian Baron’s Infant Grandson Comes to America

Because the mists of legend have enveloped Stephen Samuel Wise (1874–1949), it is conventional wisdom today to perceive him as a patrician, a charismatic “rabbinic prince” who was destined and trained from birth to be an extraordinary leader of the Jewish people and of numerous social and political causes in the United States and throughout the world.

So great was his reputation that during his long and controversial career, Stephen Wise received letters from all parts of the globe with only two words written on the envelope: “Rabbi USA.” But the US Postal Service was never in doubt about the intended larger-than-life recipient of such skimpily addressed mail: there was only one “Rabbi USA.”

No other rabbi before or since Wise has dominated the American and the international scene with such passion and power. During the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s, his admirers as well as his opponents—there was no shortage of either group—acknowledged him as the premier leader of the Jewish community in the United States and a major figure in American politics.

Wise, a powerful orator with a commanding baritone voice, burnished his public mystique with a personal mantra. In 1939 he wrote,

I am an American Jew. I have been a Jew for four thousand years. I have been an American for sixty-four years. . . . I am of the American nation, and an American citizen; and there is no conflict.1

However, Wise was not born in the United States, but rather in Budapest, Hungary, on March 17, 1874. His parents were Rabbi Aaron Weisz (1844–1896) and Sabine Fischer de Farkashazy (1838–1917), and when he was seventeen months old, his parents and their four children—Ida and Wilma, daughters from Sabine’s first marriage, and sons Otto and Stephen from her marriage to Aaron—immigrated to the United States.2 They sailed on the S.S. Gellert from Hamburg, Germany during the summer of 1875 and arrived in New York City on August 11 of that year.3

During Stephen’s long career, ended by cancer in New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital on April 19, 1949, Wise rarely spoke of his birthplace, but he often noted that his birthday coincided with St. Patrick’s Day, a fact that endeared him to many Irish Americans.4

He was a member of a wealthy and prominent family. In 1874 Hungary and its capital city of Budapest were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that the Roman Catholic emperor, Franz Joseph I (1830–1916), ruled from the Hofburg, an ornate royal palace in Vienna. But unlike millions of other Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe during the 19th century, the Weiszes were neither financially poor nor was Yiddish their mother tongue, the language of millions of European Jews; instead, the family was fluent in German and Hun­garian and at home in both cultures. Stephen and his family were not among the indigent and impoverished shtetl (village or small-town) Jews who arrived in large numbers as immigrants to America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are portrayed in the popular musical and film Fiddler on the Roof.5

Stephen’s father came from a long line of distinguished rabbis—six ­generations—that began in Moravia, now a region of the Czech Republic. The family’s original name was Weissfeld (German for “Whitefield”). However, over time that surname melded into the Hungarian “Weisz,” and Stephen’s paternal grandfather, Yosef Tzvi in Hebrew, was known as Rabbi Joseph Hirsch Weisz (1800–1881).

Some historians have erroneously claimed Weisz was “a distinguished chief rabbi of Hungary.”6 But the reality is that he became the chief rabbi of Erlau, Hungary, in 1840 and served in that position until his death.7 “Weiss” is an incorrect spelling of the family name that in Hungary was “Weisz.” Erlau, the German and Yiddish name for the town known as Eger in Hungarian, is about 110 miles northeast of Budapest.

It was a longtime center of Orthodox Judaism with its emphasis on strict ritual observance, segregation of the sexes in worship services, liturgy and spiritual education, intensive Bible and Talmudic studies for males, distinctive dress for men and women, and often a physical, spiritual, and cultural separation from the neighboring non-Jewish population.

Rabbi Weisz was a fierce foe of the new Reform Jewish movement that began with Israel Jacobson’s (1768–1828) liberal religious school in Seesen, Germany, in 1810. Jacobson, a layman, is considered the “father” of Reform Judaism.8

Weisz also opposed the progressive or “Neolog” expression of Judaism that emerged in Budapest in 1868. The Neolog movement, while less radical than Reform, represented the attempt of upwardly mobile Hungarian Jews to combine traditional Judaism with the “advances” and “advantages” of modernity.9

Joseph Hirsch Weisz’s four decades as Erlau’s chief rabbi were filled with controversy, conflict, and contention. Many religiously “enlightened” Hungarian Jews of the period attempted to end the privileged status that Orthodox Judaism held in the country. In fact, the reformers gained control of the Hungarian Jewish community for a period of time, but Orthodox rabbis like Weisz and others fought back within the civil court system. After twelve years of legal battles, they regained their favored position, but only with the help of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the imperial authorities in Vienna, including the emperor himself.10

The religious reformers as well as the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community of Hungary disliked Stephen’s grandfather. In the eyes of the first group, Joseph Weisz was the quintessential “establishment” Orthodox rabbi who was supported by the Habsburg monarchy. The second group condemned Weisz because he was an adversary of the mystical, antirational Hasidic religious movement that began a hundred years earlier in what is now Ukraine under the leadership of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), better known as the Baal Shem Tov, the “Master of the Good Name.” As a result, Rabbi Weisz, an unpopular leader, was attacked from both ends of the Jewish religious spectrum.

Years later as a rabbi in the United States, Stephen Wise rejected many of his grandfather’s religious beliefs and practices. In fact, Stephen became a leader of “liberal Judaism” (Stephen’s term for Reform), a movement that broke with Joseph Weisz’s Orthodoxy. Reform permitted men and women to sit together during synagogue religious services that often featured an organ, a choir that included Christian singers, and the recitation of many prayers in English or other vernacular languages used by Jews. Reform leaders like Wise were no longer bound to halacha (Jewish religious law and tradition) that mandated strict Sabbath and holiday observances, kosher dietary laws, and a host of other religious requirements.

While affirming Orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Joseph Weisz was also an ardent Hungarian nationalist and patriot who supported Lajos Kossuth’s (1802–1894) unsuccessful 1848 revolution against the Vienna-based rulers who had controlled Hungary as a province since 1668. Other Hungarian Jews, including members of the Weisz family, joined the “Revolution of Liberty.”11 In 1849 Kossuth served as governor-president of a revolutionary Hungarian government for only eighty-eight days before the Habsburgs, aided by their tsarist Russian allies, used military force to snuff out the short-lived independence movement. Kossuth to this day remains an enduring symbol of Hungarian national independence and freedom.12 Following the collapse of the Kossuth revolution, Vienna imposed heavy retaliatory taxes on the Hungarian rebels, including the Jewish community, as punishment for the failed revolt. As part of that crackdown, Austrian authorities tried Chief Rabbi Weisz of Erlau on the charge of sedition, but he was eventually acquitted. During that tumultuous period, the rabbi was forced to hide from his imperial pursuers and, thanks to the local Roman Catholic archbishop, Bela Bartakovics (1792–1873), he found safe refuge in an Erlau monastery.13

The saga of Joseph Hirsch Weisz’s political fervor remained a compelling model for Stephen, his rabbinic grandson. Because members of his family had fought with Kossuth, Wise liked to say the spirit of liberty and freedom was in his genes.

One reason for Stephen’s defection from his grandfather’s traditional Judaism may have been the religious training and general education of his father. Born in Erlau to Joseph Hirsch and Rachel Theresa, Aaron Weisz followed his family’s rabbinic vocation, but he also attended two German universities—Leipzig and Halle—earning a Ph.D. degree from the latter institution in 1867. His thesis focused on angels and demons within the Jewish religious tradition. A devotee of “psycho history” might infer that Aaron’s doctoral dissertation was a reflection of his father’s many personal spiritual battles in Erlau, but that is only speculation.14

When Joseph Weisz died in 1881, his widow, Stephen’s paternal grandmother, left Hungary a year later and moved to Jerusalem where she lived until her death in 1892. Rachel Theresa Weisz wrote,

I must go to the Holy Land. I go not to live there but to die there. There I wish to pray; and there to die, to be laid to rest amid the sacred dust of Jerusalem; to be buried on the slope [the Mount of Olives cemetery] facing the Holy of Holies.15

Aaron Weisz received his rabbinic training and ordination at Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer’s seminary in the city of Eisenstadt, now a part of Austria. In 1844, the year of Aaron’s birth, Hildesheimer (1820–1899) was awarded a doctorate from Halle, a rare academic achievement at the time for an Orthodox rabbi. He wrote several important books in the German language, and his seminary was a major center of the Jewish religious movement that became known as “modern Orthodoxy”: a movement that attempted to maintain traditional Judaism while encountering the contemporary secular world. Hildesheime...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Hungarian Baron’s Infant Grandson Comes to America
• Chapter 2: Columbia, Vienna, and Oxford: The Education of a Thoroughly Modern Rabbi
• Chapter 3: An “American Jewish Prince” Meets the “King of the Jews”
• Chapter 4: Stephen Gains a New Job and a Bride
• Chapter 5: Westward Ho to Oregon!
• Chapter 6: The Battle of Temple Emanu-El
• Chapter 7: Wise’s Very Own Free Synagogue
• Chapter 8: Why Was the Free Synagogue Different from All Other Synagogues?
• Chapter 9: The Year When Everything Changed—The Triangle Factory Fire and the “Subarctic” Waldorf-Astoria Dinner
• Chapter 10: The Progressive Warrior
• Chapter 11: Wise, Wilson, and War
• Chapter 12: From A (Americanism) to Z (Zionism) and Everything in Between . . . A Rebel with Lots of Causes
• Chapter 13: The Making of a Presidential Zionist
• Chapter 14: Wise and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference
• Chapter 15: Stephen Builds His Very Own Seminary
• Chapter 16: The 1920s—A Busy “Normalcy” Decade between Wilson and Roosevelt
• Chapter 17: Some of the Rabbi’s Best Friends Really Were Christians
• Chapter 18: The Rabbi Who Couldn’t Say “No”
• Chapter 19: For Zion’s Sake I Will Not Hold My Peace, and for Jerusalem’s Sake I Will Not Rest
• Chapter 20: The Historic Encounter Begins between the President and the Rabbi
• Chapter 21: Confronting Nazism in the 1930s
• Chapter 22: Wise’s Wars Within and Without
• Chapter 23: Put Not Your Trust in Presidents
• Chapter 24: Wartime Crises That Will Forever Define Wise
• Chapter 25: The Last Years Were Not the Best Years of His Life
• Chapter 26: The Final Bow
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index