Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist by David Barak-Gorodetsky (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist by David Barak-Gorodetsky Chad Alan Goldberg (bio) Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist. By David Barak-Gorodetsky. Translated by Merav Datan. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2021. xxx + 328 pp. This superb biography of the American rabbi, Zionist, and first president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Judah Leon Magnes (1877–1948) makes two broad contributions. First, by emphasizing the religious roots of Magnes's political thought, David Barak-Gorodetsky contributes to a wider scholarly effort to reintroduce "the question of religion's place in the Zionist story" (xv). Second, the author provides a "comprehensive conceptual study on the American aspects of the Jewish perspective on binationalism, of which Magnes was the main representative" (xxv). The first of the book's three parts, "'Mending the World,'" traces the formation of Magnes's religious and political views in the United States. Born in California, Magnes was ordained as a rabbi at Hebrew Union College in 1900 and received his doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1902. From 1906 to 1910, he served as a rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in New York City. In these years, under the influence of the rabbi and scholar Solomon Schechter, Magnes underwent a "religious evolution … beyond Reform Judaism to what would in time be known as the Conservative movement" (12). He subsequently worked to establish and then led the Jewish Kehillah of New York, an experimental attempt from 1909 to 1922 to provide the city's burgeoning Jewish population with a unified and democratic community structure. Surprisingly, Barak-Gorodetsky devotes scant space to Magnes's leadership of the Kehillah, noting only that his role as a mediator between the city's affluent, assimilated, "uptown" Jews and its poor, eastern European, Yiddish-speaking "downtown" Jews prefigured his later commitment to binationalism in Palestine (20). Barak-Gorodetsky has more to say about Magnes's Zionism, cultural pluralism, socialism, and pacifism. Magnes welcomed Zionism during his studies in Germany "because of its contribution to promoting Jewish self-respect among young Jews in Europe," and he subsequently embraced Zionism as a means of "reviving the spirit of Judaism in the United States" (26, 22). He also espoused a form of cultural pluralism similar to that propounded by the philosopher Horace Kallen. Because Magnes distinguished between religiosity and its manifestation in "formal [End Page 411] religious institutions," he was able to see "elements of the sacred" in the secular Jewish socialist and Zionist movements (48, 50). Furthermore, he understood Jewish socialism, like Zionism, as a means to "the renewal of Jewish life" (41). His pacifism likewise had religious roots in Christian pacifism and Reform Judaism's Mission Theology. Magnes's distinction between religiosity and religious institutions allowed him to criticize the latter's support for the First World War as a religious betrayal. Part Two, "'For the Sake of Zion,'" describes Magnes's political thought and practice from 1922, when he emigrated to Palestine, to 1939. As the chancellor of the Hebrew University when it opened in 1925 and its first president from 1935 until his death in 1948, Magnes envisioned the university playing a cultural and even spiritual role for the Jewish people. These years were characterized inwardly by an unfulfilled desire to achieve the closeness to God that he associated with authentic Judaism and outwardly by his involvement in the binationalist group Brit Shalom. Magnes shared with the religious philosopher and Brit Shalom member Martin Buber a "prophetic orientation for the Jewish politics of Palestine," but they "articulated [it] differently" (179). These differences stemmed in part from the influence on Magnes of William James's pluralistic ideal of a federal republic and of American reliance on political institutions and constitutionalism to "bridge political divides" (131), which informed his commitment to binationalism. Magnes's identification with the prophet Jeremiah, who advocated a "peaceful path" and preached "against the supposedly imminent danger of Jewish nationalism" but "ultimately failed to convince the kingdom of Judah to mend its ways" comes to the fore in Part Two (174, 117, 186). Interestingly, though the German sociologist Max Weber also identified with Jeremiah, Magnes's striving to bridge...