By Rafael Medoff
Issue of June 26, 2009 / 4 Tammuz 5769
Seventy years ago last week, David Ben-Gurion sat down to write a long
letter to Louis D. Brandeis, the recently-retired Supreme Court
justice, elder statesman of American Zionism, and one of the most
influential Jews in America. That Ben-Gurion was updating Brandeis on
the latest developments in British Mandatory Palestine was routine.
That Ben-Gurion was briefing Brandeis specifically on recent efforts
to smuggle European Jews into the country, in defiance of British
immigration restrictions, was more than a little unusual.
Since 1937, Ben-Gurion’s rivals, the Revisionist Zionists and their
Irgun Zvai Leumi allies, had been engaged in “aliya bet,” or
unauthorized immigration. Irgun emissaries in Europe had been sending
boatloads of European Jews to Palestine, landing late at night at
deserted coastal locations, out of view of British patrols. Recently,
the Labor-affiliated Mossad l’Aliya Bet had joined the effort and
organized its own ships.
By contrast, most American Zionist leaders opposed taking any steps
that might upset America’s ally, Great Britain. Veteran U.S. Zionist
leader Rabbi Stephen Wise told Ben-Gurion that he (Wise) was urging
American Jews “to march shoulder to shoulder with England in the war
against fascism,” and he could not deviate from this position even if
the Zionist cause suffered.” Wise’s Emergency Committee for Zionist
Affairs claimed that the Irgun’s aliyah bet ships “resemble
concentration camps.”
Ben-Gurion, too, aimed his share of barbs at the Revisionists. In his
June 1939 letter to Brandeis, he claimed that the food and hygiene on
the Irgun’s ships were unsatisfactory and that Mossad l’Aliya Bet was
doing a much better job. He described how it was using small motor
boats to meet the ships several miles out in the Mediterranean and
then taking the passengers to shore in small groups. But if American
Zionist leaders were opposed to aliyah bet, why was Ben-Gurion
offering Brandeis all these details of the operations? The standard
biographies of Brandeis make no mention of him breaking from the rest
of the American Jewish leadership on the aliyah bet issue.
The recent discovery of Ben-Gurion’s letter to Brandeis prompted my
colleagues and I at The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
to dig deeper into the question. Our findings were surprising and
significant.
Another clue that galvanized our search appeared in the published
letters of Brandeis, edited by Prof. Melvin Urofsky. In a letter to
his American Zionist colleague Robert Szold on May 23, 1939 — just
eight days after the publication of the British White Paper, severely
restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine — Brandeis wrote: “The
landing of the 308 ‘illegal’ immigrants was a dramatic event, coming
at this time.” Brandeis’s use of quotation marks around the word
“illegal” hinted that he did not regard them as illegal at all.
An additional hint may be found in the 1981 memoirs of Yitshaq
Ben-Ami, an Irgun activist who was deeply involved in the aliyah bet
operations. Ben-Ami described a meeting between an Irgun supporter and
Brandeis, in Washington in early 1939. According to Ben-Ami, Brandeis,
after hearing a report on the aliyah bet effort, remarked, “If I were
a young man like you, I would be with you.”
The smoking gun turned up in the papers of the late Isadore Breslau,
the American Zionist movement’s chief representative in Washington in
1939. The document, composed by Breslau, recounts a private meeting
between Brandeis and six veteran American Zionist activists, at
Brandeis’s home, on July 31, 1939. Breslau wrote:
“Speaking on the question of immigration [Brandeis] said that Jews
would continue to immigrate regardless of the White Paper. When
someone suggested that it was illegal, he said that the Jewish people
considered it legal in view of the fact that any attempt to curtail
immigration was in violation of the terms of the Mandate; that it may
be considered illegal by Great Britain but that we Jews considered it
to be legal.”
Thus one of the most distinguished and widely-respected jurists in
America, a man who had devoted his life to upholding the law, was
embracing an activity that America’s closest ally regarded as criminal
— and which even fellow-Zionists such as Stephen Wise opposed.
To understand this seeming paradox, one needs to recall that as a
rising young legal star in Boston in the early 1900s, Brandeis earned
the nickname “the people’s attorney,” because of his commitment to
helping the disadvantaged and his heartfelt interest in how the law
affected the lives of ordinary people. To him, the law was not just a
collection of words on paper, but had to relate meaningfully to real
life.
The British policy of keeping most Jews out of Palestine was “legal”
only in the dry, technical sense; it was not legal in any sense that
had to do with what was happening in the real world. A law that helped
doom millions of innocent Jews could not be truly legal, not in the
sense that Brandeis understood the law. And the modern day
‘Underground Railroad’ that was taking Jews out of the Nazi inferno
and smuggling them to freedom and safety, could not be truly illegal.
Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust
Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org.