Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America: A Biography

Notes

541 Notes Introduction 1. NAACP: Moorfield Story–Louis Marshall Memorial Campaign, Spring 1930, LM Papers, Box 20/7. 2. American Indian Bulletin, no. 15 (Jan. 1930), LM Papers, Box 20/7. 3. These terms “German” and “Russian” are widely known cultural demarcations, but they are imprecise geographic markers of two waves of Jewish immigration to the United States—the arrival of 200,000–250,000 Jews from Central European lands in the mid–nineteenth century and the immigration of ten times that number of Jews from Eastern European countries in a forty-year period starting in the early 1880s and ending a few years after World War I. For a discussion of the problematic nature of categories such as “German” Jewish immigration to the United States: Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), 6–35. German-Russian/Uptown-Downtown demarcations in American Jewish history belong to a wider phenomenon of polarized and mythologized West-East categorization that can be found in many contexts, from the “Ostjuden” debates in pre–Holocaust Germany and the work of the French-based Alliance Israelite Universelle among Jews of Asian and African lands, to ongoing oppositions between Ashkenazi elites and masses of Mizrahi immigrants and their descendants in Israel. That is, the Uptown-Downtown mediation that became the focus of Marshall’s career in Jewish politics represents an American part of a dynamic that is becoming increasingly appreciated by scholars as a key, if not dominant, axis of modern Jewish history. To date, highly suggestive discussions of this axis tend to ignore or downplay the North American theater of Marshall’s activity (see, e.g., Aziza Khazzoom, “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity , Stigma Management and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel,” American Sociological Review 68, no. 4, 481–510). 4. See, for instance, Benny Kraut, “American Jewish Leaders: The Great, Greater, and Greatest ,” American Jewish History 78 (Dec. 1988), 201–36. 1. Syracuse 1. Proceedings: Democratic Republican State Convention in Syracuse, July 24, 1856 (Albany, 1856), 6, 13. 2. Jonathan Sarna, “Two Jewish Lawyers Named Louis,” American Jewish History 94, no. 1–2 (Mar.–June 2008), 1–19. 542 • Notes to Pages 5–7 3. Marshall to Edward Friton, Apr. 24, 1929, in Charles Reznikoff, Louis Marshall: Champion of Liberty: Selected Papers and Addresses (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1957), 1:6. 4. Marshall to Charles Sedgwick, Apr. 13, 1914, in Reznikoff, Louis Marshall, 1:4–5. Jacob was employed in Cuylerville by the father of a prominent New York City attorney, Hamilton Odell, with whom Louis was friendly. 5. B. G. Rudolph, From a Minyan to a Community: A History of the Jews of Syracuse (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1970), 17. 6. For Leeser’s description, see ibid. 39–42. The push and pull of tradition and change in Syracuse’s Jewish community can be discerned in prayer arrangements incorporated in the new building. As a nod to the Reform modernists, the Temple of Concord directors agreed to move the bimah (reader’s desk) from the center of the prayer floor to the front platform, in front of the Ark. In deference to traditional, Orthodox sensibilities, balconies for female worshippers were built around three sides of the new temple building. Ibid., 38. 7. Ibid., 192. 8. A Syracuse native, Herbert Alpert, located this Syracuse Daily Standard report, from Dec. 16, 1856. He also received corroboration of the odd windstorm incident from George Marshall, Louis’s youngest son, in a 1987 letter. Herbert Alpert, Louis Marshall, 1856–1929: A Life Devoted to Justice and Judaism (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2008), 4. I thank Herbert for the clarification of this point and his hospitable presentation of Marshall’s native grounds. 9. Rudolph, From a Minyan to a Community, 192. 10. In 1924, Marshall wrote that his father Jacob was “a man of the highest integrity,” who had the “unqualified respect and confidence of every man with whom he ever did business.” Marshall to Charles Sedgwick, Apr. 13, 1924. 11. Marshall to Charles Schwager, Dec. 17, 1928, in Reznikoff, Louis Marshall, 1:5. 12. Marshall to David Reed, Apr. 14, 1926, in Reznikoff, Louis Marshall, 1:235. That Marshall evoked cherished memories of his mother in this correspondence with Reed is interesting. Marshall wrote to the senator in protest of the US officials’ callous disregard for 8,000 immigrant Jews, who had invested in the journey to America but were marooned overseas after the passage of the restrictionist...