Judah Leon Magnes

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Judah Leon Magnes (born in San Francisco, California, July 5, 1877; died in New York, New York, October 27, 1948), was a prominent Reform rabbi in both the United States and Israel.

In America, he spend most of his professional life in New York, where he helped found the American Jewish Committee in 1906. Magnes was also one of the most influential forces behind the organization of the Jewish community, or Kehillah, in the city, serving as president throughout its existence from 1908 to 1922. The Kehillah oversaw aspects of Jewish culture, religion, education and labor issues, in addition to helping to integrate America's German and East European Jewish communities. Magnes was also the president of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism from 1912 to 1920.

The views he extolled as a Reform rabbi were not in the mainstream, especially regarding Zionism. Magnes favored a more traditionalist approach to Judaism, fearing the assimilationist tendencies of his peers. It was a disagreement over this issue that led him to resign from Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York in 1910. Magnes also disagreed further from the overall Reform attitude towards Zionism by strongly disapproving of the denationalization of Judaism. To him, Jews living in Eretz Israel and Jews living in the Diaspora were of equal significance to the Jewish nation. The renewed Jewish community of Eretz Israel would enhance Jewish life in the Diaspora. Although he emigrated to Palestine in 1922, Magnes maintained that emigration to the Holy Land was a matter of individual choice, and did not reflect any kind of "negation of the Diaspora." He thought that the land of Israel should be built in a "decent manner", or not built at all.

In Israel, Magnes paid a key role in founding the internationally reputed Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1918 along with Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. He served as the first chancellor and later as president (1935-1948) of the new institution. Magnes believed that the university was the ideal place for Jewish and Arab cooperation, and worked untiringly to advance this goal.

Magnes dedicated the rest of his life to reconciliation with the Arabs. Before the State of Israel was declared, Magnes objected to a particularly Jewish state. In his view, Palestine would be neither Jewish nor Arab. Rather, he advocated a binational state in which equal rights would be shared by all. This was the view advanced by the group Brit Shalom, which with Magnes is often associated. He founded an even smaller and even less nationalistic group: Ihud (Unity)

When the Peel Commission made their recommendations in 1937 about partition and population transfer in Palestine, Magnes sounded the alarm:

With the permission of the Arabs we will be able to receive hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews in Arab lands [...] Without the permission of the Arabs even the fourhundred thousand [Jews] that now are in Palestine will remain in danger, in spite of the temporary protection of British bayonets. With partition a new Balkan is made [..] New York Times, 18 July, 1937.

With the increased persecution of Jews, the outbreak of World War II and violence in Palestine, Magnes realized that his vision of a voluntary negotiated treaty between Arabs and Jews had become politically impossible. In an article in January 1942 in Foreign Affairs he suggested a joint British-American initiative to prevent the division of Palestine.

Just before his death in October 1948, he withdrew from the leadership of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a committee he had helped establish. The reason was that the organization had not answered his plea for help for the Palestinian refugees: "How can I continue to be officially associated with an aid organization which apparently so easily can ignore such a huge and acute refugee problem?" (p. 519, Magnes 1982)

As a devout pacifist, the principles of compromise and understanding suited Magnes well, and he continued to work towards these ideals until his death in 1948.

Memorializing his passing, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations wrote of Magnes that he was:

...One of the most distinguished rabbis of our age, a son of the Hebrew Union College, a former rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, New York, the founder and first chancellor of the Hebrew University, the leader of the movement for good will between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, a man of prophetic stature by whose life and works the traditions of the rabbinate, as well as the spiritual traditions of all mankind were enriched.

"If we cannot find ways of peace and understanding, if the only way of establishing the Jewish National Home is upon the bayonets of some Empire, our whole enterprise is not worthwhile, and it is better that the Eternal People that has outlived many a mighty empire should possess its soul in patience... It is one of the great civilizing tasks before the Jewish people to enter the promised land, not in the Joshua way, but bringing peace and culture, hard work and sacrifice and love, and a determination to do nothing that cannot be justified before the conscience of the world." -- Judah Magnes.

The Judah L. Magnes Museum, in Berkeley, California, the first Jewish Museum of the West, was named in Magnes' honor, and the museum's Western Jewish History Center has a large collection of papers, correspondence, publications, and photographs of Judah Magnes and members of his family. It also contains the conference proceedings of The Life and Legacy of Judah L. Magnes, an International Symposium that the museum sponsored, in 1982.

[edit] Bibliography

Magnes, Judah Leon: Russia and Germany at Brest-Litovsk, a Documentary History of the Peace Negotiations, The Rand School of Social Science, NY, 1919. (Later Reprinted)
Magnes, Judah: Amnesty for Political Prisoners, New York, No date. <1919?>
Magnes, Judah L.: Addresses by the Chancellor of the Hebrew University Azriel Press, Jerusalem, 1936. 308 pp.
M. Reiner; Lord Samuel; E. Simon; M. Smilansky; Judah Leon Magnes: Palestine - Divided or United? The Case for a Bi-National Palestine before the United Nations, Ihud Jerusalem 1947. Includes submitted written and oral testimony before UNSCOP; IHud's Proposals include: political, immigration, land, development issues (Reprinted Greenwood Press Reprint, Westport, CT, 1983, ISBN 0-8371-2617-7)
Magnes, Judah L.: Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes. Harvard University press Cambridge, Mass. 1982 ISBN 0-674-21283-5
Like All the Nations? The Life and Legacy of Judah L. Magnes by William M. Brinner, Moses Rischin, Albany State University of New York Press, 1987.