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Article Excerpt
"I feel grateful to the almighty that be has enabled me to lead in this sacred cause for right, justice, and equality." (1)
In the spring and early summer of 1919, Louis Marshall spent three arduous months at the Paris Peace Conference defending the rights of Jews in the new states of eastern Europe. This brilliant and indefatigable Jewish lawyer, communal leader, and champion of freedom in the United States conducted grueling negotiations in the French capital with Jewish and non-Jewish representatives and the result was an unprecedented minority treaty.
Marshall's principal biographers, Charles Reznikoff and Morton Rosenstock, have focused principally on his domestic accomplishments, and the two accounts of his Paris sojourn have assessed his achievements uncritically. (2) This essay, based on Marshall's papers and other private and published documents, seeks to assess the goals, methods, difficulties, and accomplishments of Marshall's most important and controversial international initiative, in which he confronted a divided Jewish world and unpredictable statesmen in a postwar environment of heightened nationalism and antisemitism. Here we see another side of Marshall: his tenacity and his courage but also his insistence on the congruence of American and Jewish interests. (3)
American Jewish Diplomacy before January 1919: A Brief Overview
On the surface at least, a discernible "Jewish diplomacy" at the Paris Peace conference seems like a preposterous concept. Not only was there no Jewish sovereign state in 1919 but there were scarcely twelve million Jewish people in the entire world, living under widely different circumstances, from the almost four million free, largely assimilated, and increasingly prosperous citizens of the United States and western and central Europe to the almost equal number of oppressed and ghettoized masses of Romania and Russia, not to mention the ancient rural and urban communities of North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and East Asia, which are not the subject of this study. (4)
To be sure, individual Jews had long played a prominent role in international politics. In the nineteenth century, western European Jewish communal leaders had appeared at the Congresses of Vienna (1814-15), Paris (1856), and Berlin (1878) to urge the Great Powers to protect their beleaguered kindred, first in Germany, then in southeastern Europe. (5) At the end of the nineteenth century, the American Jewish community began mobilizing against Romania's discriminatory policies, urging Washington to intervene but failing to sway the nationalist government in Bucharest. (6) Following the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 American Jews urged their government to transmit their protest, which the tsarist government ignored. (7)
In 1906 the American Jewish Committee (AJC) was formed specifically to combat foreign persecution and domestic antisemitism. Even before he succeeded Judge Mayer Sulzerger as the AJC's second president in 1912, Marshall was the organization's major strategist in lobbying against immigration restriction and against tsarist Russia's exclusion of American Jews. Neither campaign, however, produced a clear-cut victory and both had damaging consequences. Congress simply delayed the restrictive legislation, and America's abrogation of its 1832 trade treaty infuriated St. Petersburg and did little to alleviate the plight of American or Russian Jews. Nonetheless, the AJC had now joined its British, French, and German counterparts as an international spokesman for Jewish minority rights. (8)
Despite the AJC leadership's wealth and influence, its international diplomacy before World War I reflected an uneasy blend of strength and powerlessness, altruism and anxiety. The AJC's activism derived not only from a deep concern over the suffering of its distant brethren, but also out of fear that persecution would lead to additional westward migration of the Ostjuden--with their distinctive garb, language, religious practices, and politics--and would threaten the resources and stature of the earlier arrivals. (9)
Moreover, the traditional American Jewish leadership faced mounting problems at home. Despite their alliances with the press, prominent politicians, and religious and working class groups, they had been unable to stem the nativist backlash, the exclusionary demands, and the rise of antisemitism in all segments of American society. Marshall and his colleagues also confronted the defiance of the newly arrived masses from eastern Europe, who challenged their claim to represent American Jewry and demanded the convocation of a democratically elected Jewish congress. (10)
On the global scene, the Jewish world also was in a parlous state. In addition to the rivalries among Jewish leaders in New York and London, Paris and Berlin, the birth of Zionism had greatly complicated their work. Theodor Herzl's solution to the plight of the Ostiuden was to cease pleading for special protection, proclaim a Jewish national identity, and demand, with the support of one or more of the Great Powers, a homeland in Palestine. His message struck a positive note with the Ostjuden and even with a small portion of French, British, and German Jews along with American Jews such as Justice Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. But Marshall and the AJC declared their opposition, even hostility, to an ideology that threatened the core of their personal and political loyalties. (11)
The AJC's political spectrum was further complicated by the rise of Jewish socialism that quickly spread to America, denouncing nationalism and preaching working-class solidarity and a robust nonsectarian internationalism. Thus, while the antisemites had a broad target to attack--from Jewish plutocrats to Jewish anarchists--Jewish leaders on the eve of the Great War lacked a unified leadership, a coherent solution to the suffering of their distant kindred, and a firm guarantee of their own safety and standing as minority citizens.
World War I, which found the Jews fighting on both sides, shattered the efforts to establish a unified international voice. (12) American Jews, deeply divided over the conflict, accepted President Woodrow Wilson's neutral position but also maintained discreet ties with their kindred on both sides. Moreover, American antisemitism and the threat of exclusionary legislation did not subside, leaving Marshall and the AJC with huge self-defense tasks at home along with massive relief efforts abroad. At the first news of Jewish tribulations in the eastern war zone, American Jewish leaders launched a major international program under the auspices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to aid civilians suffering from privations, forced removals, and pogroms (see Fig. 4). (13)
Everything changed after 1917, with America's entry into the war, the Balfour Declaration, and the Bolshevik Revolution. The United States now became the Allies' chief supplier and its political and ideological leader. Britain's capture of Palestine stirred the Zionists' hopes, but Lenin's coup and Russia's collapse--followed by the redrawing of borders from the Baltic to the Black Sea--kindled the ambitions and militancy of a dozen national groups in eastern Europe and threatened millions of Ostjuden about to become their involuntary subjects. On the very day of the armistice, Marshall cheered the Allied victory on the Western Front and the defeat of three autocratic empires; but he also expressed his alarm to Wilson over the wave of pogroms in newly liberated Poland. (14)
With the gates of emigration to the United States and elsewhere about to be closed, and the Palestinian Arabs noisily protesting British rule and Jewish settlement, American Jewish leaders turned an anxious eye to the impending peace conference in Paris, the first to be attended by a U.S. president. In December 1918, at the inaugural meeting of the American Jewish Congress in Philadelphia, American Jewry formally announced its diplomatic program. In addition to a strong statement on the Jewish claim to Palestine, the congress passed a comprehensive "bill of rights" to protect Jewish and other minorities in the newly liberated states of eastern Europe. (15)
For Marshall, who played a significant role in the drafting of this document, the bill of rights represented a major political and ideological shift in the formerly conservative AJC leader. (16) Long an opponent of the Zionist claim of Jewish peoplehood, Marshall had devoted all his legal and political efforts...
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