Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America by M.M. Silver (review)

Louis Marshall (1856–1929) was without doubt one of the most significant, powerful, and authoritative leaders the American Jewish community ever had. He argued more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any private attorney of his time and was briefly considered as a candidate for the Court himself. When Henry Ford agreed to stop publishing anti-Semitic attacks in his mass circulation newspaper The Dearborn Independent, it was Marshall who personally dictated and received Ford’s retraction and apology. He fought for twenty years against the imposition of restrictive laws that would stop further Jewish immigration into the United States. Were it not for his efforts and those of his colleagues in keeping the doors of America open for as long as they were, several hundred thousand more Jews would have been lost in the Nazi genocide.

Marshall rose to prominence from relatively humble beginnings. Born to poor immigrants in upstate New York, Marshall moved to Manhattan at the age of 38 in 1894 to become a partner in Guggenheimer and Untermyer, the preeminent Jewish law firm in New York City. He began his Jewish communal career as attorney, adviser, and administrator for projects funded by the city’s established Jewish elite, who hoped to aid and Americanize as quickly as possible the masses of indigent, Yiddishspeaking eastern European immigrants who were streaming into the city.

The often tense interactions between the two Jewish subgroups and Marshall’s ability to navigate between them is the central theme of this book. Silver argues that the conflict between the two groups ended with conservative patrician values being fused with the energy of radical populist outlooks; this combination eventually expressed itself in a recognizably liberal Jewish ethnic style in the 1930s and afterward. Marshall’s powers of mediation extended to industrial relations. When in 1910 a massive strike among the Cloakmaker’s Union in New York left tens of thousands without work and cost millions in lost wages, it was Marshall, Silver argues, who formulated “the Protocol of Peace” that brought the strike to an end. Other scholars might disagree with this assertion, as in many accounts, Louis Brandeis played a pivotal role.

Marshall’s name occurs frequently in any study of American Jewish history, but this volume is the first full-scale biography. Possible reasons are Marshall’s adherence to the Republican Party and nineteenth-century conservative principles when most Jews were moving in other directions. He sorely lacked charisma. Moreover, he was an affirmed non-Zionist when Zionism was growing in popularity among American Jews. Finally, the elite Jewish group that Marshall was associated with passed from power with the Great Depression and the coming to maturity and prosperity of East European Jews, and this may have led to a tendency to marginalize his contributions to American Jewish public life.

The present volume ably fills the gap and examines how Marshall achieved such eminence in American Jewish public life that the 1920s would be called the period of “Marshall law.” During his early career, while he was pursuing his profession and fulfilling a host of civic duties, Marshall helped set the first building blocks of organized Jewish life. Key institutions that Marshall helped to found, led, or championed included the Jewish Theological Seminary and the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Marshall developed a close friendship with Solomon Schechter and articulated the new middle-of-the-road denomination of Conservative Judaism in all but name. The AJC was the first organization in the history of the United States to be formed by an ethnic group for the purpose of defending its rights and those of its brethren overseas. Marshall helped set its agenda from the beginning and served as AJC president from 1912 until his death in 1929.

When World War I trapped millions of Jews in battle zones, Marshall brought together a wide array of Jewish groups to form the American Jewish Joint...