Background
Magnes, Judah Leon was born on July 5, 1877 in San Francisco, California, United States. Son of David and Sophie (Abrahamson) Magnes.
Magnes, Judah Leon was born on July 5, 1877 in San Francisco, California, United States. Son of David and Sophie (Abrahamson) Magnes.
He was educated at the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, where he was ordained as a Reform rabbi. His Zionism was unusual in the anti-Zionist college and his first student essay was entitled “Palestine — or Death” — death being assimilation. He also studied in a number of German universities, receiving his Ph.D. at Heidelberg in 1902.
Magnes’s first pulpit was in Brooklyn, and to many his appearance on the rabbinical scene heralded the arrival of a new-style Amcrican-Jewish rabbinical leader, brought up in the American west, whose enthusiasms included baseball. He joined the infant American Zionist Federation and took part as an English secretary in the 1906 Zionist Congressm Basel. Influenced by the teachings of Altad Ha’Am, he sought to restrain the nationalistic element of the Zionist movement.
In 1906 Magnes became rabbi of New York’s elite Temple Emanu-El, but resigned in 1910 since he found its outlook too assimilationist. The young rabbi had a broad appeal to Zionists and immigrant radicals (for his social views). For the next twelve years he tried to create a New York democratic community structure, a Kehilla, that would encompass all facets of the New York Jewish community and serve as a roof organization for Jewish bodies. He won a reputation as a maverick prepared to dissent on all matters of conscience and as a communal gadfly. His popularity waned during World War I as a result of his uncompromising espousal of pacifism. However, he remained prominent in all Jewish affairs and was among the founders of the American Jewish Committee, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the New York Board of Jewish Education.
In 1923 Magnes moved to Jerusalem, where lie was deeply involved in the preparations to open the Hebrew University. He served as its first chancellor from 1925 to 1935. The university became his passion and he watched over and directed its growth and expansion, raising funds and creating its faculty, based largely on Jewish scholars from Europe (after 1933. especially from Germany). However his program and administration came under severe criticism from Albert Einstei and Chaim Weimann and atler a period of internal bitterness, he was relieved in 1935 of the post of chancellor and “promoted” to the largely nominal position of president.
The events in Europe in the 1930s led him for a time to abandon his faith in pacifism and he actively supported the Palestine war effort in World War II. However, during the war he led the opposition to the Biltmore Declaration, in which the Zionists for the first time came out with the demand for a Jewish state. He saw this as a declaration of war on the Arabs. Although claiming to be a loyal Zionist, he maintained that every Zionist group had the right to pursue its views as it saw fit and he lobbied the U.S. State Department to oppose the official Zionist line. Magnes fought the U.N. partition resolution of 1947, fearing that an Arab-lsrael war would destroy the country and his university. A few days before the establishment of the State of Israel, he was in America trying to persuade President Harry S. Truman to change his support for the U.N. resolution. He died in New York a few months later.
The tension with Weizmann also extended to Magnes’s political views. Magnes developed plans for a binational Arab-Jewish state and was severely critical of Zionist policies. Pinning his hopes on the moderate Arab leadership, he spoke of the Jewish community in Palestine becoming integrated into an Arab Near Eastern federation. He was active in the Ihud and Bcrit Shalom organizations, which sought a peaceful arrangement between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. He was aware that while a number of prominent Jews in Palestine (such as Martin Buber) supported his views, they had no influential Arab counterparts. The moderate Arabs were cowered into silence by the radical leadership under the mufti of Jerusalem. Magnes opposed the 1937 proposal to partition Palestine.
Married Beatrice Lowenstein, October 19, 1908.