Birmingham's Rabbi: Morris Newfield and Alabama, 1895-1940

BIRMINGHAM’S RABBI

Judaic Studies Series

Leon J. Weinberger, General Editor

BIRMINGHAM’S RABBI

MORRIS NEWFIELD AND ALABAMA 1895–1940

MARK COWETT

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 1986 by The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 35486. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cowett, Mark, 1951–

    Birmingham’s rabbi.

    (Judaic studies series)

    Bibliography:  p.

    Includes index.

    1. Newfield, Morris, b. 1869.   2. Rabbis—Alabama—Birmingham—Biography.   3. Jews—Alabama—Birmingham—Politics and government.   4. Birmingham (Ala.)—Biography.   5. Birmingham (Ala.)—Ethnic relations.

I. Title.   II. Series.

BM755.N48C48   1986         296.8′32′0924      [B]      85-20897

0-8173-5003-9 (pbk: alk. paper)

Publication of this book has been assisted by a grant from the Birmingham Jewish Foundation.

978-0-8173-8271-1 (electronic)

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

ONE

The Early Years: From Hungary through Hebrew Union College

TWO

A Leader of Birmingham Jews, 1895–1914

THREE

Newfield the Man

FOUR

A Leader in Birmingham, 1895–1920

FIVE

A Leading Social Worker in Alabama, 1909–1940

SIX

A Moderate in Times of Reactive and Radical Change, 1920–1940

SEVEN

Altered Attitudes toward Zionism, 1895–1938

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Morris Newfield

Samuel Ullman

John Herbert Phillips

The Samuel Ullman School

Birmingham and Vicinity

Temple Emanu-El

Leah and Morris Newfield at Home

Support for the Prohibition Amendment

Demonstrators on the Day of the Vote on Prohibition

Henry M. Edmonds

Robert Jemison, Jr.

Roberta Morgan

Mervyn Sterne

Monsignor Eugene L. Sands

Chaplain Morris Newfield

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As all scholars are wont to do, I used to dream of the day that I could write a page of acknowledgment for the successful completion of a manuscript. I could never hope to thank everyone who nourished my dream, but I would like to recognize a few:

To my Mother, Sylvia Kazin Cowett, who has never failed to say you can,

To my brothers, Dr. Richard M. and Jon Cowett, who always encouraged me,

To my teachers, William W. Bremer, Roger Daniels, Peter A. Fritzell, Arthur Mann, Jacob R. Marcus, Harriet Russell, Thomas Sakmyster, and Anne J. Schutte, who taught me to appreciate and to write history,

To my students and colleagues at Keith Country Day School, with whom I have shared some wonderful times,

To two men in Birmingham, Alabama, Mayer U. Newfield, the rabbi’s son, and Dr. Marvin Y. Whiting, who aided me greatly in the writing of this book,

To two very special women, Judith Casto and Linda Wantz Summerfield, for their love and friendship,

And especially to my Father, Allen Abraham Cowett, a native Birminghamian, who showed me love and told me to follow my dreams.

This book is because of, and for, all of you.

Mark Cowett

1–3–86

PREFACE

Since World War II, various commentators on American Jewish history have asked historians to present American Jewish history not as separatists chronicling events and experiences of Jews as they stand apart from the main currents of American history but as interpreters of how these are part and parcel of American history. Complaints have been raised about the parochial nature of American Jewish history because it has consisted largely of chronicles of American Jewish life and has often failed to explore the relationship between Jews and other ethnic groups in America. This parochialism, however, has not been linked to American Jewish history alone but has been a hallmark of ethnic history.¹

The present biography of Morris Newfield, a rabbi who led Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham, Alabama, from 1895 to 1940, is written, then, with a number of purposes in mind. It relates the deeds and thoughts of a significant Alabama rabbi who achieved importance in Birmingham, in Alabama, and throughout the South, and it explores the conflicts with which Newfield struggled to help his group maintain a sense of religious identity at the same time that he understood the Jews’ need to develop close relationships with other ethnic groups in a somewhat hostile environment in Birmingham. American Jews and American Jewish leaders, in particular, faced the same task everywhere, not just in Birmingham and in the South.

Using Newfield’s life and career as a vehicle, I explore the nature of ethnic leadership in America. The Birmingham rabbi must be seen not only as a leader of Jews but also as a Jewish leader in Birmingham and in Alabama, because, as I will demonstrate in the following pages, much like his contemporary Jane Addams, Newfield inhabited reality and understood that his success as a Jewish leader depended on his ability to comprehend the competing needs of a number of ethnic groups and to offer them meaningful leadership. His work, as a consequence, both affected and was affected by influences emanating from a fairly broad ethnic spectrum, from Orthodox Judaism to fundamentalist Protestant Christianity.

I will consider three questions: how and why did the rabbi become a leader of both Jews and Christians in Birmingham and in Alabama at this time? How did Newfield maintain his leadership in particularly stressful times? Does Newfield’s style of leadership suggest that models of leadership might help us explain the activities of successful ethnic leaders?

The key to understanding Rabbi Newfield’s work lies in the rabbi’s sense of Jewish marginality in a largely Fundamentalist Protestant area, a sense that I shall seek to define. In particular, I will explore three reasons for Newfield’s success as an ethnic leader: first, Jews needed a leader who could help them maintain a link with their tradition in a new and often threatening environment, but they also expected their leader to smooth the way for them with Christians in Birmingham; second, Birmingham Christians, exhibiting a distinct sense of religiosity, respected him; and third, and most significant, Newfield’s own tactical style of leadership, stressing brotherhood instead of accentuating differences, overcame the ambivalent feelings that both Jews and Christians held toward each other.

Newfield’s career, however, can also help us understand the essence of social welfare efforts in Alabama during the so-called Progressive era. Admittedly the chapter on his social welfare efforts differs from the other six chapters in this biography; I have emphasized the atmosphere of social reform in Alabama rather than concentrating solely on Newfield’s actions and responses. Lest readers be puzzled by this shift in emphasis, I shall state my reason: many previous historical efforts on the South have either ignored or underestimated the humanitarian impulses in the South in general and in Birmingham in particular during the Progressive era. A study of Newfield’s work can increase our insight into this problem.

Finally, Morris Newfield’s life is important simply because his work makes him, contrary to the statement made by sociologist Kurt Lewin regarding ethnic leaders in general, a reliable spokesman for the dilemmas confronting many southern Jews and Christians. Inasmuch as the problems, styles, and expectations of a particular ethnic group can be illuminated by a study of the life of any one member of that group, Newfield’s biography can help explain the situation of many southern Jews who, in the early years of the twentieth century, hoped to remain loyal to their ethnic group but at the same time to develop successful relationships with southern Christians. For Newfield and for many southern Jews, the task was sometimes extremely challenging.

ONE

The Early Years: From Hungary through Hebrew Union College

On an early afternoon in June 1895, twenty-six-year-old Morris Newfield heard the Reverend Washington Gladden deliver the baccalaureate address to his graduating class at the University of Cincinnati. Five years had passed since Newfield had come to Cincinnati from Hungary to study at the Hebrew Union College with Isaac Mayer Wise. But Newfield had escaped from Hungary too, bringing with him keen memories. One was his father’s unbowed commitment to Talmudic scholarship and his hope that Morris would carry on the family tradition in the rabbinate. Another was the great pain that the family’s poverty had caused him, first as a young boy in Homanna and then as a student in Budapest. Morris’s father, although revered as a learned man, was very poor. Morris would become a rabbi but not in Hungary. He would work in America, where he would earn not only the respect that the rabbinate endowed but also the security of a pulpit, which had been denied his father.

Mór Neufeld, as he was known in Hungary, was born on January 31, 1869, in Homanna, county of Zemplén, a German-speaking area in northern Hungary. He was a younger son of Seymon Shabsi Neufeld and his second wife, Lena (Klein). Mór’s father was the last of a line of Orthodox rabbis who had moved eastward in Europe after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the wake of the Inquisition in 1492. His grandfather, Rabbi Jehudah of Berlin, Germany, had emigrated southward to Bonyhád, Hungary, looking for a congregation. Seymon Shabsi, the name given to all firstborn males in the Neufeld line, studied Talmud, as his father had asked him to do, under Meyer Ash, the chief rabbi of Ungvár (Uzsgorod). After receiving his Morenu diploma in 1842, he, like his father before him, had gone searching for a congregation, but he had not found one. As a result, the rabbi was forced, as were many of his fellow Orthodox scholars, to open a business, in his case a yardage goods store in Homanna, and to study the Talmud simultaneously.¹

Seymon Neufeld’s family had a difficult time making ends meet during Mór’s childhood. For one thing, Seymon Neufeld, as was the custom among scholars, studied most of the time, hunched over a huge wooden desk that would later be used as his casket. He read and also received other scholars from various parts of Hungary. His wife, Lena, a small, intelligent, and industrious woman, ran the business. Unfortunately, their home on the main street (fö-utcā) attracted few customers, although there were many visitors because of Seymon Neufeld’s reputation. Then, too, Seymon had married twice—his wives were sisters—and had fathered eleven children. By his first wife, there were five offspring, and by Léna, his second and Mór’s mother, there were six, three boys and three girls.² The family had many mouths to feed.

Because of the poverty, Seymon’s sons had to leave home while they were in their teens to find their places in Hungary or elsewhere. Emil Neufeld, one of Mór’s elder brothers, left Homanna when Mór was quite young and in the 1880s came to America, where he developed a flourishing coal business in New York City. Frida and Teréz, two of Mór’s sisters, lived in Homanna and helped with the family business. Mano, another brother, became a teacher at one of the gymnasia in Budapest.³

Such upward mobility, which was displayed by Hungarian Jews in general, indicated that some conditions were improving by the time of Mór’s birth. As a result of newly won social and political freedoms after 1867, Hungarian Jews faced prospects of wider social opportunities. Actually, Jews had already been living in Hungary for nearly a thousand years, having moved there after the dissolution of the Frankish empire of Charlemagne and before the Magyar conquest of Hungary in A.D. 896. For the next 800 years, like Jews in most of Christendom, they were subject to the whims of the conquering peoples of the Danube basin. In 1239 the Magyar emperor Béla IV wanted Jews to help him raise money for his court, but a century later, after the Black Death, they were expelled from Hungary after refusing to convert to Catholicism. The Turks, who reigned in Hungary for 150 years after subduing the Magyars at Mohács in 1526, also persecuted the Jews. Although the Turks protected Jewish traders in the main commercial areas, the traders were forced to pay special taxes in the royal territories. There Jews were also impelled to curry favor with the pompous Hungarian landowners, who used them as managers of their farms but abused their right to act freely.⁴

By the end of the eighteenth century, the fortunes of Jews began to improve with the rule of Joseph II, the enlightened despot of the Habsburg empire. Although his mother, Maria Theresa, despised Jews, Joseph II was determined to turn them into useful subjects by allowing them to rent property and to settle in towns. In 1839, Jews were granted the right to live anywhere in Hungary except in a few specified mining towns. The new Jewish communities that sprang up in towns and cities included the twin cities of Buda and Pesth.⁵

In the three decades before Mór Neufeld’s birth in 1869, discussions in the Hungarian Diet about economic and social equality for Jews became particularly intense. Joseph Eötvös (1813–1871), a fervent Hungarian nationalist and liberal whose ideas were expressed in his book The Emancipation of the Jews (1840), urged complete and unconditional equality for Jews because he hoped that they could play a significant part in the rebuilding of a great Hungarian nation. Other Magyars as well, including Louis (Lajos) Kossuth, recognized that the Magyar element in the Hungarian part of the Austrian empire was weak; if Hungary was to achieve the hoped-for goal of independence, other cultural groups willing to identify with, and to be assimilated into, the Magyar nation had to be cultivated.⁶

In 1848, when the Magyars revolted against the Habsburg dominance, many Jews, including Seymon Shabsi Neufeld, embraced the cause of Hungarian independence and volunteered to serve with Kossuth’s army. This loyalty induced Kossuth to adopt a more favorable attitude toward Jews, and in July 1849 a bill for Jewish emancipation was submitted to the National Assembly in Budapest. The bill was stillborn, however, for the revolution was crushed in the summer of 1849.

Only with a partial restoration of Hungarian political life in the early 1860s, when the Emperor Franz Josef recognized that he needed Hungarian help to maintain his empire, did the question of Jewish emancipation again arise. Ministers Gyula Andrássy and Kálmán Tisza, as well as Ferenc Deák, the foremost political leader of the period, were favorably disposed toward emancipation. Following the Compromise of 1867, the Law of Emancipation was passed, granting full civil and political rights for Jews as individuals.⁷

Respect for Jewish rights in Hungary grew at this time because the Magyars needed Jewish assistance in developing an industrial state and in subduing other cultural minorities in Hungary, such as Romanians and Slavs. Native Magyar aristocrats, preferring the leisurely life of land ownership and civil service to the dirty task of building a firm industrial and financial base in Hungary, allowed Jews to operate in almost every branch of industry and trade. The Act of Trade of 1859 abolished religious discrimination and decreed that nobody could be excluded from the practice of either trade or commerce on account of religion. Because the first large industries in Hungary would necessarily work with agricultural products, Jews in 1860 were able to aid in the development of mills, distilleries, and sugar factories. According to István Végházi in The Role of Jewry in the Economic Life of Hungary, Jews founded some of the great industrial concerns in Hungary and also made significant contributions in the world of finance.⁸

Jews could also study for the free professions such as medicine, law, and journalism. In fact, by the end of the period 1867–1914, they formed a majority of Budapest’s lawyers and doctors, owned and edited most of the Budapest newspapers, and were generally very visible—disproportionately so—in the gymnasia and universities across Hungary.⁹

In 1884, Mór Neufeld, at age fourteen, went to Budapest to take advantage of one of the new opportunities for Jews, the Jewish Theological Seminary in Budapest. This liberal, or as they called it in Hungary, Neolog, seminary had opened seven years earlier as a rabbinical school and center of Jewish learning. It offered rabbinical degrees and doctorates in advanced studies in Jewish learning.¹⁰

Although both Orthodox and more liberal Jews attended the seminary, it was a symbol of a growing tension among Hungarian Jewry. The school had been started after a split had opened between the Orthodox Jews, who continued to accept past traditions, and the Neologs, who acknowledged Enlightenment influences and wanted fuller integration into the Christian society around them. While many Orthodox Jews continued to study Talmud in the cheders and yeshivas in Hungary, the Neologs, led by the Hungarian Jews from Slovakia, or the area where the Neufelds lived, sought a more secularized education.

In 1869 the internal struggle within Hungarian Jewry reached a high point at a Jewish congress at Pesth, which had assembled for the purpose of organizing the Jewish community on a local, regional, and national basis. The Neologs advocated a centralized system, while the Orthodox Jews were in favor of a large measure of independence for the individual communities, thus thwarting reformist tendencies from above. When the Neologs refused to consider an Orthodox demand that the congress not consider any statute or regulation which was not in accordance with the written and oral law as codified in the Shulchan Aruch, the Orthodox delegates left the congress. With governmental encouragement, the Neologs adopted a constitution for the Jewish community of Hungary and Transylvania and also established a seminary to train liberal rabbis.

Family tradition holds that Seymon Shabsi Neufeld, although trained in a yeshiva in strict accordance with Orthodox ritual, was not an extreme traditionalist and wanted his son to attend the Neolog institution. Mór began his studies in the high school section of the seminary in 1884. His first- or freshman-year report card, however, indicates that he did not do very well. While he studied the Scriptures, the Talmud, Hebrew, Jewish history, the Hungarian, Greek, and German languages, math, science, and singing, Neufeld missed fifteen lecture hours, an extraordinary number. The reason for his absences is not recorded, but he did finish the year. According to his family and his own records, Neufeld spent five years at the seminary and earned a B.D. in 1889.¹¹

While he was a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Budapest, Mór Neufeld studied with three of the great Jewish scholars in Europe, David Kaufmann, Wilhelm Bacher, and Joseph Bonoczy. He also attended classes with a few students who would later attain illustrious careers. Lajos Blau became a teacher and director of the seminary in Budapest, Gyula Fischer became the chief rabbi of Budapest from 1921 to 1943, Morris Feuerlicht later moved to Indianapolis and served as a secretary of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and Samuel Kraus achieved renown first as a professor and director of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Vienna, 1905–1933, and later at Cambridge, 1937–1948.¹²

Young Neufeld also matriculated at the Royal Catholic Grand-Gymnasium in Budapest, from which he graduated in 1889. This opportunity to study with boys of other faiths was also a result of the Emancipation Law of 1867. At least one other Jew graduated in the class of thirty-seven in 1889.

The Budapest Gymnasium was a training ground for future Hungarian leaders. Many of Mór’s classmates achieved some distinction in the government of Hungary in the twentieth century. Béla Jakobb was a police commissioner in Budapest, István Kemény became a general counsel of finance, Aurel Knapp was an undersecretary of defense, István Marky served as a colonel in the Hungarian army, Albert Stoffer became a judge in the Royal Supreme Court in Budapest, Béla Szendey was a director of the Credit Bank, and royal Hungarian general counsel of the government, and János Szilárd (Schramar) served as the general counsel of finance of the Ministry of Commerce.¹³

The two years following his graduation from the Royal Gymnasium were terribly unhappy ones for young Mór Neufeld. He had very little to eat and was pursuing a career in medicine without telling his father. He could not admit to his father that he had chosen not to finish his rabbinical studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary and that he had instead enrolled at the Medical College of the University of Budapest. Feeling that this decision would hurt his father deeply, he kept it a secret. But Mór was paying dearly for his independence; correspondence from a friend spoke of his uncomfortable and desperate life in Budapest in 1890.¹⁴

After Neufeld had started at the Medical College, his father became very sick. Before he died, the elder Neufeld asked Mór to promise him that he would complete his rabbinical studies, and Mór agreed to please his father. He gave up his dream of a medical career, and a year later, on September 20, 1891, Mór Neufeld (now Morris Newfield) sailed from Rotterdam, Holland, with money that his brother Emil had sent him from New York. He landed at Ellis Island ten days later.¹⁵

Morris Newfield came to the United States to attend the Reform rabbinical seminary in Cincinnati, the Hebrew Union College. Isaac Mayer Wise had founded the school in 1875 to train modern rabbis because he felt that upwardly mobile Jews of German heritage were losing interest in maintaining traditional Judaism in America. From the beginning he hoped to develop rabbis, not in the traditional role as legal scholars, but after the model of Christian ministers. His rabbis would be pastors to their flocks, preaching and teaching. They would also be scholars, but their scholarship was expected to embrace secular learning as well as Jewish studies, so Hebrew Union College students took a degree at the University of Cincinnati as well. Wise wanted rabbis who could operate both as representatives of modern Jewish communities in the larger society and as synagogue leaders nurturing the minds and spirits of their congregations.¹⁶

Although there is no evidence bearing directly on the subject, there were probably several reasons why Newfield decided to come to America and Hebrew Union College rather than remain in Hungary and attend the Jewish Theological Seminary in Budapest. On the one hand, the struggling young student was attracted by the free tuition that Wise offered him. The reformer was having trouble at that time finding students who could pay; a rabbinical career lacked the prestige in America that it would later have. Well-to-do Jewish parents were not allowing their sons to enter a profession that was poorly paid and seemingly unglamorous. As a result, Wise was forced to turn to students such as Morris Newfield