Pacifist in Palestine

In a small apartment outside Jerusalem last week, an old man read telegrams from scholars and statesmen all over the world. All week, Jerusalem had been celebrating Judah Magnes' 70th birthday. The Palestine Broadcasting Co. arranged a special program in his honor; the great Hebrew University, which he helped to found and has headed for 22 years, presented him with its first honorary degree.

In a land of violent opinions, quiet Judah Magnes has won the respect of Jews, the British, and Arab moderates. He has not always been so quiet. As the editor of the college annual at the University of Cincinnati, he once raised such a commotion when a dean tried to censor him that the university's president was replaced during the resulting rumpus. As the young rabbi of a Reform Temple in Brooklyn, he led a funeral procession up Manhattan's Fifth Avenue to mourn pogroms in Czarist Russia. His fashionable congregation objected, and Magnes resigned. During World War I he became an ardent pacifist, was booed and hissed by patriotic gatherings whenever he spoke. Embarrassed U.S. Jews denounced him as disloyal.

Job on a Mountaintop. He withdrew into scholarship. Having mastered Yiddish and Hebrew, he delved deep into Jewish culture, became a Zionist. In 1922, after being shipwrecked on the way, he landed in Palestine. There he decided to stay for the rest of his life. In 1925, when Jewish and British notables gathered on Mount Scopus to dedicate Hebrew University, he was made its first chancellor.

Since that day, Judah Magnes has seen his university grow from a tiny college of 120 students to a great research center of 1,200. He has watched 17 greystone buildings spring up, most of them erected by the students themselves. From funds raised by Jews throughout the world, he has slowly equipped its laboratories, painstakingly built up the greatest library in the Near East, is now completing its medical school. The University has become a refuge for Europe's Jewish scholars, and the greatest center of Hebrew culture in the world (all its classes are conducted in Hebrew). Its professors have developed new processes for local industries, all but arrested many of the diseases that once ravaged Palestine, set up the first cancer foundation in the region, carried on vast irrigation projects to help Palestine's struggling agriculture.

Divided Labors. In a room near his office, from which he can look out over the plains of Jordan to the Dead Sea, Judah Magnes has placed two great filing cabinets, one marked "University Affairs," the other "Political Affairs." They are a sign of his divided labors. Still a pacifist and a longtime advocate of a joint Jewish and Arab Palestine, he has been attacked by extremists of both sides. Once his students went out on strike in protest against him; once Arabs set upon a car bearing two of his guests and killed the driver. But he has never let his university become a center of violence ("this vain doctrine, this pagan torch"). From his own turbulent life, he has learned that the future of the Hebrew University lies elsewhere--"not by might, nor by force, but by [the] spirit."

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