Digest of Public Opinion on Jewish Matters

[The purpose of the Digest is informative. Preference is given to papers not generally accessible to our readers. Quotation does not indicate approval.–Editor.]

The conviction that the arrival of a spirit of better understanding and unity between the diverse elements in American Jewry is due in large measure to the activities of Louis Marshall, is expressed by “The Reform Advocate” of Chicago. Writing on the occasion of the attainment by Mr. Marshall of his seventieth birthday, the paper observes:

“Child of a German Jewish home, Louis Marshall, by his work in the cause of Jewry, has carried over the traditions of one group into the life of another and has in many ways brought the divergent elements of Jewish life into common action. Some of these days American Jewry will be a unit. It will have the experience that Russian Jewry had in Russia that was not originally a unit. There were Portuguese Jews, Italian Jews, German Jews and other Jews besides the Polish Jews in Russia. But as the years went by Russian Jewry developed with its schools and its community and its united striving–perhaps also strife. There never was a Jewry that was not, if we might coin the phrase, influxy. Italian Jewry had an Ashkenazi group of families. Dutch Jewry had Germans and Portuguese, but in the end they worked together. That will have to happen in American Jewish life sooner or later. But when it happens the work of Louis Marshall will not be forgotton. Respected and appreciated by the group out of which he came, and admired for his great ability by the other group that came later into American Jewish life, he is in his work a cementing influence in American Jewry.”

A parallel between the careers of Louis D. Brandeis and Louis Marshall is drawn by the “Chicago Chronicle,” which writes editorially on the occasion of the attainment of their seventieth birthday by both men.

“The year 1856 saw the birth of two great American Jews, Louis D. Marshall and Justice Louis D. Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court. The careers of these two great men bear a curious resemblance. Though born in opposite ends of the country, one in the north and the other in the south, both sought and gained fame in the legal profession. Their contributions to the growth of American jurisprudence is both copious and profound,” the “Chronicle” says.

Marshall constitutes a perfect synthesis of American and Jew, in the best sense of the two terms, declares Wm. Z. Spiegelman in the “New York Letter” released this week to the American Jewish press by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“If there is any significance in the term ‘American Jew’ it applies in the full meaning of the two words to Louis Marshall,” we are told. “His Americanism is as much of an ideal as is his Jewishness. As an interpreter of the principles of the American constitution before the bar of justice, he has the recognition of the leading minds of the legal profession. As a champion of justice along the lines of constitutional development, he has demonstrated unusual abilities which have brought benefit to the state and the nation. As a Jew–there was not, in his long and fruitful career, a Jewish matter or question which came up for consideration or which was ripe for action that its fate and course did not depend on the scrutiny of the Marshall mind.”