One of the strange quirks in history is that Rabbi Salanter and the followers of his Mussar Movement were strongly influenced by Benjamin Franklin.

One of the strange quirks in history is that Rabbi Salanter and the followers of his Mussar Movement were strongly influenced by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s personal life leaves much to be desired. However, his ideas were extraordinary in many respects.

In the 1700s, Ben Franklin had published Poor Richard’s Almanac, which includes in it a great deal of philosophy. In it he listed 13 famous character traits, which he said are the foundation of a good person and a good society. Included on the list are such traits as thrift, honesty, silence, study, etc.

A Lithuanian Jew by the name of Menachem Mendel Lefin (also Menahem Mendel Levin — 1749–1826) had traveled west and studied in the universities of Germany and France. There he read the writings of Benjamin Franklin, and became greatly influenced by them. He wrote a book of Jewish ethics based on Franklin’s ideas, almost quoting him verbatim but never mentioning his name. It was as though it was his book.

Ohr Yisrael, “The Light of Israel,” is a biography of Rabbi Salanter and a philosophy of movement penned by his main disciple.

Rabbi Israel Salanter read his book and was very impressed by it. He subsequently published it in Kovno using his own funds. The book was republished by his followers a number of times. As late as the 1930s it was still being published by the Slobodka Yeshiva.

In our day, the book was translated into English by Feldheim publishers and one can even find posters of Franklin’s list in Jewish classrooms and on refrigerators in Jewish homes. It is ironic that one will not find these principles discussed or displaying in American school and homes; only in those of religious Jews.

There have also been a number of interesting books, theses and articles written about the relationship between the followers of the Mussar Movement and Benjamin Franklin. “Accept the truth from whoever says it,” is a principle in Jewish life. Indeed, that was what Maimonides responded when he was criticized for quoting Aristotle and the Greek philosophers. The bottom line is that if a person will live by those 13 principles he will be a better person and the world will be a better place.

What is much less known about Jefferson is that he had a great connection to the Jewish people, and to appreciate this, we first have to understand the prevalent attitudes toward the Jews at the time.

The founding fathers were people of tremendous vision who wanted to try a new experiment in government, a nation without monarchy. And because they had seen how religious warfare racked England, they also had a healthy antipathy toward organized religion.

Of all the founding fathers, Jefferson was the fiercest fighter of religious intolerance. In his home state of Virginia, for example, he repealed “the Law of Disabilities for Dissenters and Jews,” a carry-over from English rule that limited Jews and dissenters (meaning Protestants that aren’t “my kind” of Protestant) in property rights and banned them from holding public office. To the Jews, this was not a major issue; they were accustomed to legal disabilities. As long as nobody was making pogroms against them, they felt they were ahead of the game. They didn’t care that they couldn’t serve on the Virginia House of Burgesses. But what was no problem to the Jews was a problem for Jefferson, not so much because he loved the Jews – he had hardly any contact with them – but because he had not led the revolution to have a country that enforced legal disabilities against minorities.

Thomas Jefferson's gravesite

Jefferson replaced that law with a new bill, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the precursor to the Bill of Rights. He considered this bill one of the major accomplishments of his life. The epitaph on his gravestone, which he wrote himself, reads: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.”

But his “test case” for religious tolerance was not Virginia, but Maryland. Maryland was founded as a haven for Catholics, but Section 33 of its Constitution read: “the State grants equal and religious rights to all persons professing the Christian religion.”

That law went unchallenged until 1818 when Maryland legislator Thomas Kennedy proposed to amend it to read “all persons” and not “all persons professing the Christian religion.” Thomas Jefferson came to Maryland to lobby with him. But revered a figure as he was, the bill lost by a margin of 50 to 24.

Kennedy and Jefferson refused to give up the fight, and in 1819, the bill was reintroduced and lost again. It lost in 1820, 1821, 1822. . . They reintroduced it every year, and it lost each time. Even when Jefferson’s health began to fail, he continually bombarded the legislature. He felt that if Maryland would rescind the law, no other state would again dare to have such a clause in its Constitution, and his idea of religious freedom would be attained. Interestingly, he did not pursue it in the Supreme Court. He did not want the Court forcing it upon the people; he wanted the people, or at least their legislators, to change their minds.

In 1824, Jefferson took a different tack. He approached Maryland legislator William Worthington with the argument that Jews in other states were building up the economy, and if Maryland continued this discrimination, it would be economically crippled. That argument won the day, and in 1824, the Maryland Constitution was amended so that equal and religious rights were granted to all persons, period.

Jefferson saw that as one of his major victories. He felt that the treatment of the Jews was the true test of how much America really meant “all men are created equal.” In that way, the Jews were the forerunners of all other minorities in America. It is therefore not difficult for us to appreciate his pride in obtaining rights for Jews. That guaranteed that the ideas he wrote into the Constitution were actually followed in practice.

American Jews today take for granted their right to hold high public office, head major corporations, and be enormously influential in every facet of the American scene. But this ready acceptance of the right of Jews to serve on the Supreme Court was certainly not taken for granted in the first half of the 20th century. The first Jew ever appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court was Louis Brandeis. Benjamin Cardozo was the second, but he died after only six years on the bench. With the “Jewish seat” empty, FDR nominated Felix Frankfurter in 1939.

The best way to understand Felix Frankfurter’s judicial and social philosophy is to contrast him with his predecessor, Louis Brandeis. And a fascinating little book called Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land by Robert A. Burt does precisely that.

When Brandeis was appointed Supreme Court Justice in 1916, he resigned from every organization that he belonged to so that there would be no question of conflict of interest – with the exception of the American branch of the Zionist movement. That was a tremendous departure because until then, prominent American Jews were reluctant about being identified with Zionism. It was seen as dual loyalty and politically dangerous. Yet Brandeis was unafraid about being the spokesman for Jewish causes.

Contrast this with the following chilling anecdote. In 1942, Jan Karski, a fighter in the Polish underground and first eye witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust, secretly came to Washington DC. He met with the ambassador of the Polish government in exile, Ciechanowski, and begged for an appointment with FDR. Ciechanowski could not get the appointment, but instead brought him to Frankfurter.

Jan Karski, 1944

Karski described what he saw: the round-ups into the ghettos, the starvation and inhuman conditions, the massive shootings, the gassings. He spoke for half an hour, until finally Frankfurter said, “Mr. Karski, a man like me talking to a man like you must be totally frank. So I must say: I am unable to believe you.”

Ciechanowski flew from his seat. “Felix, you don’t mean it! How can you call him a liar to his face?”

Frankfurter replied, “Mr. Ambassador, I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.”

He picked himself and walked out of the room, and the appointment with Roosevelt was never arranged.

Horrifying as it is for us to think of a Jew in a position of power looking away from the Holocaust, this was a matter of consistency of attitude for Frankfurter. As a justice of the Supreme Court, he consistently sought to protect property, government, and the will of the majority with one notable exception later in his career: in  Brown vs. the Board of Education, he urged the court to order desegregation “with all deliberate speed.” All of his life, Frankfurter himself vacillated between viewing himself as an “insider” or an “outsider.” Publicly, he usually assumed “insider” rank and defended the rights of the many against the liberties demanded by the few. But privately, he was nagged by gnawing doubts about his true status, especially of his acceptance by the other justices of the Supreme Court. Burt’s book reports that when his colleagues disagreed with him, he viewed it as a personal rebuke and would become bitterly angry. Thus, he had the worst of all worlds, portraying himself in his judicial stances as the ultimate insider, but knowing all the while that his closest colleagues viewed him as an outsider.

Louis Brandeis

With the recent appointment of the first Latina to the American Supreme Court, it is worth remembering the first Jewish Justice, Louis D. Brandeis, who was appointed by President Wilson in 1916. Like with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Brandeis’ appointment was a great symbol of “arrival.” It brought more pride to the Jewish community than did the election of Jews to high public office. Elections are decided by votes, and there were many Jewish voters. But an appointment to the Supreme Court was a matter of presidential nomination and senatorial confirmation, an acknowledgment by non-Jewish society of the value of the Jewish contribution to America.

Louis Brandeis’ family arrived in America with the first wave of Jewish immigrants in the year 1850. Like most Jewish immigrants of the period, they originated from Germany and did not observe Judaism, though the family never denied its Jewish ethnicity. However, Brandeis had an uncle named Lewis Dembitz who was an observant Jew and a powerful role model in his life. He was a lawyer with a sterling reputation and was also an ardent abolitionist. Brandeis’ decision to pursue a career in law came from the direct influence of this uncle. He so admired him that he even changed his middle name from David to Dembitz.

Though Brandeis himself was never an observant Jew, he described the impression that his uncle’s religious behavior made upon him:

“. . . I recall vividly the joy and awe with which my uncle, Lewis Dembitz, welcomed the arrival of the [Sabbath] day and the piety with which he observed it. I remember the extra delicacies, lighting of the candles, prayers over a cup of wine, quaint chants and Uncle Lewis poring over books most of the day. I remember more particularly an elusive something about him, which was spoken of as the ‘Sabbath peace,’ and which years later brought to my mind a passage from Addison in which he speaks of stealing a day out of life to live. That elusive something prevailed in many a home in Boston on Sunday and was not wanting at Harvard on that same day. Uncle Lewis used to say that he was enjoying a foretaste of heaven. I used to think, and do so now, that we need on earth the Jewish-Puritan Sabbath without its oppressive restrictions.” (Strum, Phillipa. Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984, page 11.)

What he failed to appreciate is that the very presence of the “oppressive restrictions” is what makes the Jewish Sabbath “a foretaste of heaven.”

Naturally, Brandeis’ appointment to the Supreme Court did not happen without bitter opposition. Anti-Semitism was rife at that time, and Brandeis’ Jewishness was an issue in the Senate confirmation hearings. Even when he was finally appointed, his colleague Justice McReynolds refused to say one word to him in his entire 23 years on the Court. Nine people in one room, deciding on the most important cases on the country, and one wouldn’t speak to the other.

Because of this, Brandeis identified with the outsiders of society. A forerunner of the Warren Supreme Court, he was the first to articulate the solicitude a democracy should show to the disadvantaged and the individual, as opposed to protecting the rights of the insiders and the Establishment. In this, he was truly a Jewish justice, in the tradition taught by the great Hillel: “One should not judge someone else unless he is capable of standing in his place.” (Ethics of the Fathers 2:4) His utopian dream resonates with the vision of the Hebrew Prophets and the Talmudic heritage of justice. He was an heir to it, albeit unknowingly so.