BORN in Budapest in 1874, Stephen Samuel Wise came with his family to the United States as a small child. His father, Rabbi Aaron Wise, served at Rodeph Sholom Congregation in New York; the son studied Jewish texts with his father and other New York rabbis. After attending City College of New York and Columbia, from which he graduated before his nineteenth birthday, he travelled to Europe to study with the celebrated Viennese scholar and preacher Rabbi Adolf Jellinek, who granted him an individual ordination. Returning to New York in the spring of 1893, he was chosen to be the assistant rabbi at New York's Congregation B’nai Jeshurun under Henry F. Jacobs. Soon after this, he succeeded to the position of senior rabbi following Jacobs's sudden death.

Very little has been written about Wise's tenure at B’nai Jeshurun, perhaps because of the absence of documentary material and Wise's own reticence about these years. The best-known aspect of his career during this period was his embrace of Zionism, including the part he played in establishing the Federation of American Zionists and his participation in the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. At the same time he also pursued graduate work at Columbia, being awarded a doctorate after writing a dissertation on a medieval Jewish ethical text originally composed in Arabic.

For our purposes, the key issue would have been his position regarding the Spanish–American War. As we have seen above, on the weekend following the formal declaration of war with Spain Jewish preachers throughout New York, indeed throughout the nation, were mustering their rhetorical talents in claiming an exalted justification for the American war effort. Rudolph Grossman at Rodeph Sholom, speaking on ‘Patriotism and the Jew’, said— according to the New York Times report—that ‘if ever a war was waged for a holy cause it was this one’. The previous week, Kaufmann Kohler, speaking on ‘God's Ultimatum to Spain’, pronounced the solemn question in this momentous hour to be ‘whether we are indeed worthy to be soldiers in God's army of battlers for men's liberty and sovereignty’.