Judah Leon Magnes

Judah Leon Magnes

Judah Leon Magnes , Juda Leib Magnes, (born July 5, 1877 in San Francisco , California , † October 27, 1948 in New York , NY ) was an important American rabbi of Reform Judaism , founder and leader of numerous Jewish organizations, pacifist , publicist and Politician. He was also President of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem until his death .

life and work

Judah Leon Magnes was born in San Francisco on July 5, 1877. His parents were David and Sophie Abrahmson Magnes. He had three sisters and a brother. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a BA in 1898 and passed his rabbinical examination two years later from the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati .

At the turn of the century he went to Europe and studied at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg. He was involved in the Zionist movement early on . From 1903 he lived again in the United States and worked briefly as a librarian and teacher at his former college. He was then called to Brooklyn (New York) as a rabbi . In 1906 he helped found the American Jewish Committee in New York.

Magnes was one of the most influential forces organizing the New York Jewish Community. He held the office of president from 1908 to 1922. The community (Hebrew Kehilla ) dealt with various aspects of Judaism such as culture, religion, education and work matters. She also helped with the integration of the German and Eastern European synagogues . From 1912 to 1920 Magnes was also chairman of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism .

As a pacifist, he wanted to prevent the United States from entering the war in 1917, but advocated the war against Nazi Germany .

His views were only shared by a minority within Reform Judaism. Magnes represented a more traditional form of Judaism and largely rejected the assimilation ideas of those around him. These differences of opinion regarding assimilation led him to retire in 1910 in the reform Jewish community, Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York .

Magnes also disagreed with the rejection of Zionism by large parts of Reformed Jewry. Rather, he criticized the tendencies towards the dissolution of Judaism into the majority society. For him, Jews in the Holy Land and Jews in the Diaspora were of equal importance to the Jewish people. The rebuilt Jewish community in Eretz Israel would also enrich Jewish life in the diaspora.

Although he himself emigrated to Palestine in 1922 , Magnes thought this was his personal decision and saw in it no obligation for all Jews. He was convinced that the Israel project would have to be built carefully or would fail.

In Jerusalem Magnes was one of the founders of the Hebrew University and its chancellor from 1925. From 1935 until his death he was its president. In his opinion, the university was the ideal institution where Jews and Arabs could learn how to work together for the future of the country.

He devoted the rest of his life to helping the Arabs to understand each other. Before the founding of the state of Israel, Magnes rejected a separate Jewish state. In his view, Palestine / Israel should be neither Jewish nor Arab. Rather, he advocated a binational state with equal rights for all citizens, which, as a staunch pacifist, he wanted to achieve peacefully. This was also the view of the political group Brit Shalom , with which Magnes is associated. In 1942, however, he himself founded an even smaller and nationalist association called Ihud (unit), in which he a. a. worked with Martin Buber .

When the Peel Commission put forward its proposals in 1937 to divide Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab part, with the other nationality being relocated, Magnes sounded the alarm. He wrote in the New York Times on July 18, 1937:

“With the consent of the Arabs, we will be able to take in hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews in Arab countries… Without this consent, the 400,000 Jews who are already in Palestine will be in perpetual danger despite the protection of British bayonets. The division will create a new Balkans . "

Again and again he rejected a purely Jewish nation state of its own and thus a division of the country.

During World War II, with the increasing persecution of the Jews to the point of extermination , when violence increased on all sides in Palestine, Magnes realized that the realization of his vision of a freely negotiated agreement between Arabs and Jews had become politically impossible. In a January 1943 article in Foreign Affairs magazine , he proposed a British-American initiative to prevent the partition of Palestine.

Shortly before his death, he resigned from his position in the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee , which he helped set up in 1914 , because his request for help for the Palestinian refugees and thus what he saw as an acute refugee problem had been ignored by this organization.

Magnes died in New York in October 1948 while being treated for serious heart disease.

The Judah Magnes Museum was founded in Berkeley, California , and has an extensive collection on contemporary Jewish history and a collection of documents, correspondence, publications and photographs on Judah L. Magnes and his family.

See also

• History of the Jews in the United States
• Hannah Arendt # Statements on Palestine and Israel

Fonts

• Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1982, ISBN 0-674-21283-5 .
• with Martin Buber and Ernst Simon (eds.): Towards Union in Palestine. Essays on Zionism and Jewish-Arab cooperation. IHUD (Union) Association, Jerusalem 1947.

literature

• Hannah Arendt : Magnes, the Conscience of the Jewish People (1952). In: (dies.): The Jewish Writings. Schocken, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-8052-4238-6 .

Web links

• Jewish-American Hall of Fame: Judah L. Magnes (1877–1948) biography
• Jewish Virtual Library biography

Remarks

1. ^ In German also Ichud, see: [1] Hagalil May 10, 2007
2. ^ "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 […] ” The New York Times , July 18, 1937.
3. ^ Judah Magnes: Toward Peace in Palestine. In: Foreign Affairs . 1943, accessed August 20, 2016 . 
4. ↑ Magnes 1982, p. 519.
5. ↑ Website of the Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley ( Memento of the original from February 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.