The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (43 page)

Unlike many later feminists’, her unique ideas did not develop from only intellectual brilliance. Emma’s ideology grew straight from her troubling, active, and colorful life, fleeing an abusive father in Russia, toiling in sweatshops, planning the execution of a great industrialist, editing an anarchist journal, nursing the sick, and loving men much older and much younger who captivated her mind and stirred her sexuality.

Goldman considered marriage a kind of murder (Margaret Sanger, the influential Christian feminist and birth-control advocate, compared it to suicide). But Emma could not live without men, and unlike many radical feminists she insisted that women’s lives would only improve if there was more common ground with men. Not only did men have to change the way they viewed women, they also had to change their views about fatherhood and the mother’s role in the family. Men could work and be fathers at the same time. Why couldn’t women too?

Despite a disastrous early marriage to a factory worker in Rochester (Emma married not for love but to have sex, only to discover that her husband was impotent and a gambler), she was attracted to men all her life. The image of Emma Goldman as a frumpy matron with intense eyes glaring through spectacles was belied by a woman who was careful about her dress, insisting always that to be a feminist did not mean one could not be beautiful. A feminist should have fun. When her longtime friend and short-time live-in lover Alexander “Sasha” Berkman chastised her for bringing home cut flowers for the table, she threw him out of their otherwise drab apartment, screaming that to be a revolutionary and worker did not mean that one had to be denied a little beauty.

When steel magnate Henry Clay Frick (later the founder of New York’s Frick Collection) ordered hired thugs to shoot at striking workers, she plotted his assassination with Sasha. He wounded Frick, Emma went into hiding (she had not accompanied Sasha due to an involvement with another man), and Sasha was given a twenty-five-year sentence. Emma began to make a series of incendiary speeches, and after a famous harangue in Union Square in New York City was arrested and incarcerated for one year for inciting rebellion.

In the prison infirmary she attended the sick, and taken with nursing, upon her release (and with the support of another lover, Edward Brady) left for Vienna to study nursing (attending some classes taught by Dr. Sigmund Freud). She returned a year later to find herself disillusioned with her radical friends. What they said did not seem to be relevant anymore.

Giving up nursing (and Brady), Emma opened a beauty parlor, specializing in applying head and neck massages. She started a journal called
Mother Earth,
dedicated to freeing the earth for all individuals. Her anarchist background merged with her feminist concerns. She examined why women are different from men and how their differences could be understood. Emma insisted that examining these differences should not demean a woman or make her less than a man.

She began a well-publicized relationship with an ugly doctor named Ben Reitman who spent much of his professional time assisting the unemployed. Known as the “King of the Hobos,” his free love match with the “Queen of the Anarchists” made amusing reading for those seeking to ridicule Emma’s activism.

Yet despite her active social and professional life, she toured America speaking in over three-dozen cities, spreading her particular mixture of anarchism and women’s rights. By 1910 she was the leading anarchist and feminist in America and had published essays setting forth her beliefs.

After Sasha was released from prison, in 1919 they organized an anti-draft organization, the No-Conscription League, to fight U.S. involvement in the First World War. Both Emma and Sasha were arrested for their activities and deported from the country. She was never during her lifetime permitted to return to America, and wandered through Europe and Canada for her last twenty-one years. Initially taken with the Russian Revolution, Emma became disgusted with Lenin’s tsarist tactics. The revolution in reality was a hoax and just another power play.

Emma Goldman’s lasting influence is not for her political involvements but rather for her active role along other pioneering women such as Sanger, Florence Nightingale, Emily Davies, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Caroline Norton, who in Margaret Forster’s words were significant sisters at the grassroots of active feminism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

R
itual murder, the alleged ceremonial killing of Christians and the drinking of their blood by Jewish perpetrators, is a libel that is more than eight centuries old. The first claim of ritual murder against the Jews was made in 1144 in Norwich, England. As no dead person could be found to justify the crime, no retaliation was sought. However, in 1255 in the town of Lincoln, a Christian boy named Hugh, missing for three weeks, was found dead in a cesspool. Jews of the town and Jewish guests visiting there for a wedding were accused of kidnapping the boy, fattening him up for ten days with sweet food, then brutally murdering him in a mad ritual of crucifixion and bloodletting. Nineteen Jews were lynched by a mob. The blood libel, as it became known, was copied, becoming a widespread method of persecution for generations of anti-Semites.

In the same England some six hundred years later, Moses Montefiore, the son of Italian Jewish immigrants, became a prosperous stockbroker (as brother-in-law of Nathan Rothschild) and then confidant of Queen Victoria. In 1840, Sir Moses led the first international effort in Jewish history to protest an example of anti-Semitism, the vicious Damascus blood libel. Organizing a group from the leading western nations, Montefiore was successful in securing the release of most of the Jews wrongly imprisoned for a crime they did not commit (two had died from the brutal Syrian torture).

After retiring at a young age from successful military and business careers, Montefiore devoted his many remaining years to the improvement of Jewish life throughout the world. Although many of his triumphs proved to be short-lived, Sir Moses set an example that was emulated by Benjamin Disraeli and succeeding Jewish leaders. It was possible for a Jew not only to compete in international finance (the Rothschilds had made this plain), but also in world politics and diplomacy. With the help of enlightened modern nations such as democratic England, Jews could take care of their own.

Montefiore was born in Leghorn, Italy. His parents visited London when he was small, and remained. Young Moses gained his first business experience as an apprentice to wholesale grocers. He became a stockbroker, known as one of the twelve “Jew brokers” of London, worked for and then (through marriage to Judith Cohen, who later as Mrs. Montefiore would write the first book of guidelines for social behavior in the English language, a precursor of Emily Post) befriended Nathan Rothschild, served in the Surrey Militia, carried dispatches at the Battle of Navarino, and then at the age of forty began his true calling, the saving of Jews worldwide from oppression.

In his early years he was not an observant Jew. However, in 1827 after the first of seven visits to Palestine, Montefiore began to revel in ritual, building his own synagogue on his estate and including in his entourage wherever he went a
shohet
or ritual slaughterer. Ironically, the man who would be most instrumental in the fight against the accusation of ritual murder knew from daily living the positive values behind the strict observance of Jewish law.

Many (including Paul Johnson in his
History of the Jews)
have described Montefiore as the last of the so-called
shtadtlanim
, respectable Jews whose high social and business standing allowed them to undertake international diplomacy on behalf of persecuted Jewry. His friendship with Queen Victoria began when she was a young girl (in 1837 the Queen knighted Sir Moses, who served then as the first Jewish sheriff of London). Johnson feels her pronounced sympathy for Jewish history and culture arose out of a high regard for Montefiore.

Another important British leader (first secretary of war under Wellington, then foreign secretary with Grey, Melbourne, and Russell, and finally prime minister of England), Viscount Palmerston, believed that helping the Jews return to Palestine would hasten the return of the Messiah. Palmerston was for many decades a great supporter of Jewish causes. Montefiore secured Palmerston’s aid in creating a coalition of European nations (with the support of President Martin Van Buren of the United States) in securing the release of imprisoned Jews falsely accused of murdering and drinking the blood of a Capuchin friar. The Damascus affair was an early edition of the infamous Dreyfus case of France, but more a matter of international power politics than only old-fashioned anti-Semitism. The French, seeking to dominate the Middle East, were viciously encouraging the libel and attempting to suppress any investigation. A prominent French-Jewish lawyer, Adolphe Crémieux, opposed his government’s cynical position and allied himself with Montefiore. With the support of Palmerston and the English government, Montefiore and Crémieux convinced the Syrian ruler, Mehmet Ali, to free the tortured prisoners and avert an international crisis.

Over the next forty years Montefiore continued to use his influence in the British Foreign Office in combating anti-Semitism. Many of his good faith attempts had, in the end, negligible results. In the Mortara case, a young Jewish Italian boy was kidnaped by Catholics seeking to convert him to Christianity. Montefiore protested to Pope Pius IX and the Italian government without success (the boy, Edgardo Mortara, became a pious Christian, took the name of Pius from the Pope, and ended a professor of theology and canon in Rome). In 1863, supported by the British Foreign Office, Montefiore convinced the sultan of Morocco to warrant the safety of Moroccan Jews. Yet when Sir Moses had returned to England, the Sultan withdrew his decree, plunging Moroccan Jewry into decades more of persecution.

Despite the fleeting achievements of Montefiore’s campaigns, he was an important symbol to Jews and Gentiles. Oppression had to be fought, preferably by diplomacy, but always vigorously. Jews learned from Montefiore that they could organize into powerful groups devoted to bettering their people. The support Zionists later received from England’s Lord Balfour and others for the formation of a Jewish state was surely helped by the dignified example of one of the greatest Victorians, Sir Moses Montefiore.

T
he grand Ziegfeld production in 1927 of
Show Boat
by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II was a turning point in the history of American musical theater. Thereafter, every theater composer and lyricist was touched by their integration of the drama into the musical fabric.
Show Boat
had songs and incidental music that contributed to, helped move along, and enriched the play, bringing the characters into sharper and more humane focus, making them people we care about, whose dramatic lives are important to us.

Although Jerome Kern generously stated that Irving Berlin “was” American music, Kern’s influence on generations of composers is immeasurably greater. Berlin was an incomparable melodist with the uncanny ability to write unforgettable songs of simple and direct meaning. However, it was Kern to whom George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, and many others turned for guidance and inspiration. Kern had moved away from the European (particularly Viennese) operetta model, which dominated American musical theater at the beginning of this century, toward a fully expressive style committed not just to entertainment, but to theater. Gershwin noted that
Porgy and Bess,
his folk opera masterpiece, could not have been written without
Show Boat
as a model. Rodgers’ later almost seamless integration of songs into dramatic contexts is wholly derived from Kern (with a crucial assist from Hammerstein, colleague first of Kern, then of Rodgers). The musical plays of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, are also direct descendants of
Show Boat.
Only with the grand opera productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber has Kern’s true influence waned. The excess of Lloyd Webber is a reversion to effect for its splashy sake, theater as amusement park, Ziegfeld without
Show Boat.