Two Jewish Lawyers Named Louis

The year 1856 was a vintage year for brilliant Jewish lawyers named Louis. On November 13, 1856, Louis Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky. One month later, on December 14, 1856, Louis Marshall was born in Syracuse, New York. Louis and Louis were both first-generation Americans, born of central European Jewish parents. They both compiled stellar academic records. They both went on to have a profound affect on American law. Both were considered for seats on the U.S. Supreme Court, although only one of them made it.¹ And both became eminent leaders in American Jewish life.

Yet while both men earned enormous respect within the Jewish and general communities, they never became friends and rarely worked together. They differed religiously, philosophically, and politically. They approached Judaism, America, and even the law itself from sharply different perspectives.

The parents of Louis Brandeis and Louis Marshall arrived in America at approximately the same time in the middle of the nineteenth century.² Brandeis’ parents hailed from Prague, Marshall’s father from Baden and his mother from Württemberg. The two fathers had experienced prejudice and privation in central Europe that precipitated their emigration. Adolph Brandeis, who grew up in an urban area and studied at the Technical School of Prague, was imbued with German liberalism and sympathized with the Revolutions of 1848. Jacob Marshall, born in a border village, was more traditional in his outlook. Both men luxuriated in the freedom America granted them, and both were married to fellow immigrants in the United States (Brandeis to Frederika Dembitz and Marshall to Zilli Strauss). Adolph Brandeis, who became a grain and produce merchant in Louisville, prospered. His youngest son, Louis, grew up in what his biographer calls an “atmosphere of comfort and success.”³ The family’s financial fortunes only declined later, in the 1870s, when Louis Brandeis was a teenager. Jacob Marshall, by contrast, experienced real poverty. For a time, he barely scraped by: he was a porter, a peddler, and ran a fruit stand. The year his eldest son, Louis, was born, he entered the hide and leather business and did better, but never became rich.

Religiously the Brandeises and Marshalls differed markedly. The Brandeises formed part of an extended network of liberal central European Jews, some of whose ancestors had followed the pseudo-messiah Jacob Frank.⁴ Their descendants—people with surnames such as Wehle, Goldmark, Dembitz, and Brandeis—married one another and, with a few notable exceptions (the most outstanding being Louis Brandeis’s Orthodox uncle, Lewis Dembitz), steered clear of formal religion. Brandeis’ extended family (he called them “unser eins”) cherished instead a series of “desirable virtues.”⁵ Attributed by one descendant to Frank, these included high intelligence, a blameless mode of life, and “the most rigid sense of morals, justice and charity.”⁶ Adolph and Frederika Brandeis were buried in Louisville’s Adas Israel cemetery but maintained only minimal ties, so far as we know, to Jewish religious life. They observed no Jewish holidays or rituals whatsoever.⁷

The Marshalls, by contrast, were Orthodox Jews. They kept kosher, observed the Sabbath, and celebrated Jewish holidays. When the Syracuse synagogue, Society of Concord (Keneseth Sholom), split over the introduction of religious reforms in 1864, Jacob Marshall was one of those who departed to form the more Orthodox Adath Jeshurun. Louis Marshall’s parents remained traditionally observant for the rest of their lives.⁸

Orthodox or not, central European Jews in America, like the Brandeises and the Marshalls, cultivated the ideals of bildung. They promoted both the acquisition of knowledge and a sharpened appreciation for everything “good, beautiful and true.”⁹ They believed deeply in the value of education. Both Louises, in response, made their parents proud. Brandeis, at sixteen, won a gold medal at the Louisville Male High School for “pre-eminence in all his studies” and spent three terms in Germany, where he became an outstanding student at Dresden’s Annen Realschule.¹⁰ Marshall, with his photographic memory, mastered four foreign languages—French, German, Latin, and Greek—at Syracuse High School.¹¹ Neither man went to college but...