Breaking Down the Barriers: The Encounter between Judaism and Buddhism in the Late Nineteenth Century

On September 26, 1893, in the aftermath of the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Charles Theodore Strauss (1852–1937)—a wealthy haberdasher of Jewish descent—became the first person ever to be initiated into Buddhism on American soil. Strauss traveled from his home in New York to the Windy City to attend the Parliament, a seventeen-day affair organized around the idea of bringing Eastern and Western religious traditions into contact with each other.¹ A serious student of Buddhism and “ardent admirer of the Buddha,” he attended the Parliament to learn more about Buddhism and hear teachings directly from the mouths of the Parliament’s various Buddhist representatives.²

A few days after the Parliament concluded, Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), a prominent Ceylonese Buddhist invited to the Parliament to represent “Southern Buddhism,” lectured about the topic in Chicago’s Athenaeum Building under the auspices of the Chicago Theosophical Society.³ Dharmapala, widely regarded as a charismatic speaker, drew a large audience and spoke at length about the fundamental principles of Buddhism. After his lecture, he introduced Strauss, a man of forty-one, to the audience as an earnest student of Buddhism. Strauss walked purposively up to the platform and, in front of the crowded room, gave a brief address declaring his intention to become a disciple of the Buddha. In a ceremony that newspapers characterized as “simple yet impressive,” he took on the Five Precepts of Morality—vows to abstain from harming living beings, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and intoxication—as part of a lay-Buddhist initiation rite called Pansil.⁴ Dharmapala recited the precepts in Pali, the language of sacred Theravādan Buddhist texts, and Strauss repeated after him. To those who witnessed the event, the recitation of these precepts made Strauss the first convert to Buddhism in America.⁵

Strauss’s passport indicates that he was born in St. Gall, Switzerland in 1852. At age eighteen, he emigrated to the United States and worked, along with his brother, in his father’s lace goods business. No evidence remains about his parents’ Jewish practices or identification. After his father died, Strauss and his brother inherited the business and carried it on under the firm name of Charles T. Strauss and Bro. At age twenty-five, Strauss married Katie Agatz, a Jewish woman who had been living in Hoboken, New Jersey. They had three children together before Katie died young. At the time of Strauss’s initiation to Buddhism, he was a widower of four years with young children and a lace business that was one of the oldest and largest wholesale lace-curtain houses in New York City.⁶

Though Strauss’s initiation ceremony only lasted a few minutes, it created a stir in both Jewish and non-Jewish circles. In a note to one of the leading American Jewish newspapers, The American Israelite, one reader confessed, “having traveled all over the world including the entire Orient, this incident whereby one of our co-religionists became a Buddhist was certainly novel and perplexing.” He added, “I do not believe that such a ceremony has ever before taken place, and in order to have it recorded I will ask you if space admits to insert this letter in your paper.”⁷ Other newspapers heralded the event as monumental: The Galveston Daily News [Houston] described Strauss as the “first American to break down the barriers that have stood for centuries between Buddhism and the people of the west.”⁸

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Charles Strauss’s turn to Buddhism marked the first time in history when converting to Buddhism became a serious religious possibility for Jews in America.⁹ His conversion to Buddhism is the nineteenth century’s most noted example of Jewish involvement in Buddhism, yet it is also indicative of a wider turn in that era toward Jewish interest in the tradition. As accounts from popular late-nineteenth-century Jewish newspapers make plain, Buddhism captured the interest of many Jews just as it did many Americans more generally.¹⁰

In this article, I lay out...