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Pnt 2 THi: SOUTHERN ISRAELITE April 25. 1975
One Man s Family
by Jacob R. Marcus
Director, American Jewish Archives
Edward Hirsch Levi, nominated
by President Gerald Ford to head
the Department of Justice, has
been confirmed by the Senate as
Attorney General of the United
States.
He is the first Jew to serve the
cabinet in that office, though not
the first Jew to be considered for
the post, since Woodrow Wilson
had thought of nominating Louis
D. Brandeis, but had taken no ac
tion because Brandeis, still in his
pre-Zionist phase, was deemed a
radical. In 1804, Thomas Jefferson
had discussed with Secretary of the
Treasury Albert Gajlatin the ap
pointment of Judge Moses Levy,
of Philadelphia, as Attorney
General, but Jefferson finally
decided to bypass him. Levy, who
came from a notable colonial
family, had married out of the
faith, and was not a member of the
Jewish community. Edward H.
Levi, president of the University of
Chicago since 1968 and a member
of Chicago Sinai Congregation,
can claim no colonial ancestry, but
does come from one of the most
remarkable rabbinical families in
all American Jewish history.
Edward's father, Russian-born
Rabbi Gerson Benedict Levi,
received his early schooling in
Glasgow, Scotland. When
necessary in later years, Gerson
Levi found it easy to conjure up a
delightful Scottish burr with a
twinkle in his eye. This Russo-
Scottish Jewish family finally
came to the United States where
Gerson studied for the rabbinate at
the Jewish Theological Seminary
and earned a Ph.D. at the Univer
sity of Pennsylvania.
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he
was also a member of the Z.B.T.
fraternity, in its formative days a
Zionist society ("Zion By justice
To be redeemed”). The young
clergyman, his Jewish Theological
Seminary experience notwithstan
ding, settled in Chicago as a
Reform rabbi and became ,known
there as an accomplished Hebraist
and Semitist; otherwise, one may
be sure, Emil Gustav Hirsch would
not have given him the hand of his
beloved (and still living) daughter
Elsa in marriage
Gerson’s father-in-law, Emil G.
Hirsch, rabbi of the Sinai
Congregation, deserves to be
remembered as one of the most
distinguished and most scholarly
rabbis of his day. For many years
he also served as professor of
t Jewish studies at the University of
Chicago. Hirsch and his friends
took considerable interest in the
University, and when it was
reorganized in 1890, Sinai's
wealthy Jews raised a Substantial
sum of money in order to match a
proposed grant from John D.
Rockefeller — and appear to have
saved the school.
Emil G. Hirsch was a great
orator, an editor of the "Reform
Advocate," and the outstanding
Jewish religious liberal of tran-
sallegheny America as far West as
the Pacific Coast. He preached on
Sunday only, usually to a packed
house. It was he who wrote
Reform Judaism’s social justice
plank at the famous Pittsburgh
Conference of 1885; prior to the
rise of Stephen S. Wise in New
York, Hirsch was unquestionably
American Jewry's leading rabbinic
fighter against the social ills of the
Gilded Age. He was a Hebraist as
well, and when he visited the
Hebrew Union College in the days
before America’s entry into World
War I, he and Dr. David
Neumark, professor of
philosophy, would pace the halls
conversing in Hebrew, followed by
a pack of admiring youngsters who
were trying to understand what the
two giants were talking about.
Hirsch’s father was Dr. Samuel
Hirsch, who had received his
Ph D. degree from Leipzig and
had finally become chief rabbi of
the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
The elder Hirsch, one of the out
standing Reform rabbis of Europe,
an active leader in the continental
conferences, which helped bring
the new liberal theology to birth.
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was called to Philadelphia when he
was already past the age of fifty. A
learned philosopher, he had as a
young rabbi in his twenties already
written his magnum opus, "The
Religious Philosophy of the Jews."
This religious radical, who in 1869
presided over the first left-wing
rabbinical conference held in
America, was not disinclined to
hold religious services on Sunday
and was called to Philadelphia
when his friend Rabbi David
Einhorn moved to New York.
It was in all probability Einhorn
who induced his Philadelphia con
gregants to bring Hirsch from
Luxembourg. Einhorn. had come
to America in 1855, leaving behind
a Europe which would not accept
his religious radicalism. His life
there had been a series of disap
pointments. The brilliant, bold,
and abrasive Einhorn was a native
of Fuerth (where Secretary of
State Henry A. Kissinger was born
in I923). At seventeen, young
Einhorn, raised as an Orthodox
Jew, received a rabbinical cer
tificate, but moved speedily to the
left, where ultimately his intran
sigent liberalism brought him not
only leadership but bitter heart
ache. He finally left for Hungary,
but the reactionary government
there closed his synagogue, and he
was no doubt happy to come to
Baltimore’s liberal Har Sinai pupit
in 1855.
Here, in his new American
home, he established the monthly
German language "Sinai, "un
doubtedly in its day the country's
most learned and liberal Jewish
periodical. When the Civil War
broke out and pro-South riots
erupted in Baltimore, Einhorn, an
outspoken anti-slavery man, was
compelled to flee to Philadelphia
where he officiated until I866
when he moved on to New York.
Three years before his death in
1879, Einhorn preached at the
centennial of the Declaration of
Independence. It was
characteristically a powerful ser
mon praising America for its
egalitarian ideals but denouncing
the country’s growing religious
bigotry and its corruption in high
places. The 1870’s, one recalls, was
the decade which witnessed the
taint and the rottenness of the
Grant administration.
One of Einhorn’s daughters
married Emil G. Hirsch, Edward
Hirsch Levi’s grandfather. Thus
Samuel Hirsch and David
Einhorn, two of the great figures in
European liberal Judaism, are
both great-grandfathers of Edward
H. Levi. The Jewish Theological
Seminary from which Gerson B.
Levi had graduated has given
Edward H. Levi an honorary-
degree as has the Hebrew Union
College, which had also honored
grandfather Emil G. Hirsch and
had had for its president grandun
cle Kaufmann Kohler. Einhorn
had been a bitter opponent of the
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Hirsch-Einhorn clan made their
peace with the College when-
Kohler, who had married another
of Einhorn’s daughters, was
elected its president in 1903.
Edward H. Levi is fully able to
stand on his own two feet His emi
nent career at the University of
Chicagowhich he served as law
school Dean and University
provost as well as president has
made this abundantly clear. But
surely it can be only a source of
added strength for him to be able
to look back to a family which in
cludes a learned father, an il
lustrious grandfather, and two
remarkable great-grandfathers, all
notable rabbis. Levi’s new post is a
tremendous challenge, but with his
own native ability and the shades
of his forefathers hovering
benevolently over his shoulders,
one ventures to predict that his
chances after Watergate of
rehabilitating the office of At
torney General are excellent.
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