Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contents
- Note on Editorial Practice
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction: Modern Jewish Preaching
- Part I The Wars of the Napoleonic Era
- Part II The Wars of the Mid-Nineteenth Century
- Part III The Wars of the Late Nineteenth Century
- Part IV The First World War
- Part V The Second World War
- Part VI Wars of the Later Twentieth Century
- Part VII Responses to 9/11
- Source Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index of Passages Cited
- General Index
18 - J. Leonard Levy, ‘A Time for War, and a Time for Peace’, 8 April 1917, Pittsburgh
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contents
- Note on Editorial Practice
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction: Modern Jewish Preaching
- Part I The Wars of the Napoleonic Era
- Part II The Wars of the Mid-Nineteenth Century
- Part III The Wars of the Late Nineteenth Century
- Part IV The First World War
- Part V The Second World War
- Part VI Wars of the Later Twentieth Century
- Part VII Responses to 9/11
- Source Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index of Passages Cited
- General Index
Summary
J. LEONARD LEVY was born in London on 24 November 1865. He received his Jewish education at Jews’ College and his general education at University College, from which he received a BA in 1884. After four years at the Bristol Hebrew Congregation, he decided to emigrate to the United States. Serving first in Sacramento, California, in 1893 he came to the distinguished congregation Keneseth Israel of Philadelphia as the associate rabbi to Joseph Krauskopf. Despite the difference in their countries of origin the two seem to have worked closely together, sharing preaching responsibilities by delivering the Sunday discourse on alternate weeks. All these addresses were published in pamphlet form week by week and bound together in annual volumes. In 1901 Levy left Philadelphia for the much smaller Reform Congregation Rodef Shalom in Pittsburgh, where he remained until his death in 1917. There he continued the practice of the weekly Sunday morning discourse, transcribed, printed, and distributed the following Sunday, under the title ‘The Reform Pulpit’.
While still in Philadelphia, Levy voiced an enthusiastic defence of American policy on the Sunday immediately following the formal declaration of war with Spain (one week before Krauskopf 's address reproduced as Sermon 13 above). Soon after that he volunteered for service, becoming a chaplain with a volunteer brigade. That experience apparently changed him profoundly: in 1904 he was elected vice-president of the International Peace Union, and not long thereafter organized an international conference for peace held with considerable fanfare at his temple in Pittsburgh. In the autumn of 1914, speaking on ‘The War against War’, he said that since the Spanish–American War had ended he had been ‘an unfailing advocate of what is known as the pacifist policy. I am a converted man.’ The following week he spelled out the implications of this position:
if the United States government had the right to draft me today into an army, I would refuse to serve. If the punishment for refusal would be imprisonment, I would go to prison gladly. If the punishment would be that I would be shot to death, I would gladly prefer that I be shot than that the government should direct me to join in wholesale murder—for that is what I believe war to be.
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- Information
- Jewish Preaching in Times of War, 1800–2001 , pp. 324 - 345Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012