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12 In the summer of 1925, America was riveted and riven by the trial of John Thomas Scopes, a Dayton, Tennessee, high school teacher accused of teaching evolution in violation of state statute. Although many saw the trial as a skirmish between science and religion, less than two months after a guilty verdict was handed down the leading rabbis of New York City joined forces to condemn Scopes’ conviction.1 There was drama in the unanimity of the condemnation, and it was amplified by the rabbis’ choice of venues: the pulpits of congregations throughout the town, on the high holiday of Rosh ha-Shanah.2 Rabbi Nathan Krass of the storied, elegant Reform Temple Emanu-El told his congregants that “it has been the avowed aim of Judaism not to divide the world into the sacred and secular, but rather to sublimate the secular life into the sacred. Religion has no quarrel with poetry or science or philosophy. . . . Hence, for the Jew, there can never be any conflict between religion and science as recently manifested in the notorious trial in Tennessee .” Rabbi Maurice Harris, speaking at the newly built, grand Temple Israel, told his congregation that“evolution has tremendously advanced our conception of the eternal source behind all.” Speaking to the Montefiore Congregation in the Bronx, Rabbi Jacob Katz (who also served as chaplain of Sing Sing prison), applauded the “past history of the human race [during which] our development has been characterized by a successful attempt to control nature.” Rabbi Jacob Kohn of Temple Ansche Chesed preached a sermon called “The God of Truth in Science and Religion,” declaring that “true religion, adoring the God of truth, will bid science Godspeed in its mighty task of conquering nature through knowledge.” Further, “it is only an irrational and dogmatic religion and an irrational and dogmatic science CHAPTER ONE “Holding High the Torch of Civilization” American Jews and Twentieth-Century Science “Holding High the Torch of Civilization” 13 which clash and are in conflict.” Temple Beth-El’s Rabbi Samuel Schulman criticized the “Literalists” who opposed science and whose “intelligence is limited. These literalists are not modern and liberal enough.”3 “The trial was certainly nothing of which, as Americans, we could be proud. By the possibility of such a trial,” Schulman said, “we showed ourselves to be at least fifty years behind the age. We were made the laughing stock of Europe. We proved that while we are politically in advance of Europe’s culture, spiritually we are lagging behind.”4 Rabbi I. Mortimer Bloom of the Hebrew Tabernacle warned his parishioners : America, once a land of light and liberty, bids fair soon to be shrouded in a pall of ignorance and illiberalism that will extinguish the torch of learning and bring back the darkness of medieval night. Contemplate the multiplying efforts and proposals to compel Bible reading in the public schools, to outlaw the teaching of organic evolution in schools and colleges , to elaborate and rigorize the Blue Laws, to introduce censorship of the stage, the cinema, the novel. What are all these but opening guns in a cunningly contrived campaign to control education, to establish statutory morality, to convert government into the secular arm of the Church and institute a state religion with religious tests for office, for suffrage, for citizenship and, ultimately, for property-owning and for residence. These grandiose schemes must be blasted, this campaign must be aborted, if America is to remain true to her traditions, if she is to keep her place among the civilized and progressive nations of the world. We must not suffer illiterates and fanatics, the back-looking elements of the community, to stop the wheels of progress, to set back the hands of time. The hour has struck for all literate, liberal and enlightened Americans to awake to the peril that menaces our Republic and, holding high the torch of civilization, to disperse the gathering darkness that threatens to blot out all that is high and holy in American life, all that has made and can still make America a beacon light to all the world.5 These were angry words, and fearful ones. Bloom looked to Dayton and saw that not just science was under attack. So too were secular public schools. So too was artistic freedom. So too was all that allowed Jews to live as equals in the United States. Left unchallenged, Bloom warned his congregants , the Christian attack on science could leave America a place in...

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