B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership

CHAPTER FOUR: Ideological and Institutional Challenges

CHAPTER FOUR Ideological and Institutional Challenges B'NAI B'RITH'S MIDDLE-CLASS CHARACTER, democratic structure, secular ideology, and innovative program of social service and internationalism placed in center stage in its self-chosen role as unifier of American Jewry. When Adolph Kraus became president of B'nai B'rith in 1905, succeeding Simon Wolf who had held an interim one-year term, he sought to build on the heritage handed down by Levi. Kraus inherited a prominent Order, well-known for its Industrial Removal Program and Kishinev petition campaign. Aware of B'nai B'rith's new national significance, he insisted that it adopt a professional posture by hiring, for the first time, a paid national secretary. A. B. Seelenfreund, secretary of Kraus's District 6, became the first chief professional executive of the Order, which moved its headquarters to Chicago, Kraus's home town. Thus Kraus prepared B'nai B'rith to meet the ideological and institutional challenges of the twentieth century. In this period secularist Jews generated the major ideological debate. Reform Judaism's universalism, its liberal progressive faith, seemed out of touch with a world stirred by fervent nationalisms and convinced of the scientific necessity of class conflict. As romanticism replaced rationalism as the surest path to perfection, Jews found a new messiah in secularism. Secular nationalism competed with secular socialism for the minds and hearts of Jews in Eastern Europe as well as of Jewish immigrants in America. What were these messianic longings that exploded in the immigrant ghettos and touched even native-American Jews with their visions? Actually, > Home | TOC | Index Ideological and Institutional Challenges / 81 Simon Wolf, B'nai B'rith president for one year (1904-05), acted as B'nai B'rith's Washington representative from his early years as a lawyer in the capital during the Civil War t;ntil his retirement. Active on the Union of American Hebrew Congregation 's Board of Delegates Committee, Wolf also served as liaison between B'nai B'rith and the UAHC coordinating diplomatic protests to American presidents. Courtesy American Jewish Archives. both nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions of faith - that of the progressive univers2.lism of German-Jewish Reform, and the > Home | TOC | Index B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership I 82 notion of redemption through revolution common among Jews stemmed &om the Enlightenment's impact and the promise of Jewish emancipation. When Enlightenment ideas had first reached Jews in Western Europe, rationalism already dominated the ideals of liberal gentile intellectuals. By the time Enlightenment thought penetrated the East European shiell, however, either romantic nationalism or scientific socialism preoccupied gentile thinkers. While Western Jews saw emancipation on the verge of becoming a reality, Eastern Jews knew that only a revolution in their society could liberate them. These widely differing perspectives and conditions led East European Jews to abandon Judaism in favor of messianic secularism, either cosmopolitan or nationalist. B'nai B'rith, the first modern secular Jewish organization, discovered by 1905 that the idea of Jewish secularism no longer aroused debate. Rather discussion revolved around the type of secularism to be espoused. The major difference's lay between the cosmopolitans, who advocated an internationalist socialism, and the nationalists, who supported either Zionism or a diaspora nationalism capable of synthesizing Yiddish culture and Jewish ethnicity. Often Jews combined the cosmopolitan and nationalist visions, but even in such ideologies as labor Zionism, the nationalist component ultimately achieved prominence. As a middle-class organization, B'nai B'rith rejected socialism just as it had once refused to debate religious Reform. It declared the issues between capital and labor, between employer and employee, outside the consideration of the Order. Since it no longer attracted working-class men as members, B'nai B'rith could afford to affirm its support of capitalism as an American institution. The nationalist ideologies could not be dismissed as easily, however, for they shared B'nai B'rith's emphasis on the international nature of Jewish ties, a sense of collective responsibility of Jews for each other, and an understanding that the basis for Jewish-gentile relations stemmed from a fact of birth not belief. On each of these issues, however, B'nai B'rith parted company &om the other secularist ideologies. The Order first began to consider proto-Zionist ideology in the wake of the establishment of a Jerusalem lodge. Moritz Ellinger, in his role as editor of The Menorah, had...