Though she is not widely remembered today, in her lifetime Szold was, perhaps along with Louis Brandeis, the most famous American Zionist. She was deeply involved in creating a middle-class Jewish life for the children and grandchildren of millions of poor, Yiddish-speaking, observant Eastern European Jews who came to the United States beginning in the 1880s. More significantly, she helped transform the Jewish population of Palestine from a small group living in desperate conditions to a large and established community that could provide a home for Jews with no place else to go. She died in 1945, three years before the founding of the State of Israel, so we can’t know how she would have greeted its advent. But one lesson of her life is that “Zionism” can have a range of meanings.
Szold’s parents were born in Hungary. Her father, Benjamin Szold, was a rabbi who immigrated to Baltimore in 1859 to take charge of a synagogue there. Her mother, Sophie Schaar, had been a student of his when he was a private tutor. Benjamin and Sophie Szold came of age when, for the first time in thousands of years, it had only recently become possible for at least some Jews to function as full-fledged members of a larger society. (The historian Michael Meyer refers to the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who died in 1786, as “the first Jew to participate prominently in modern European culture.”)
This was an enormous and daunting change. Where you lived, what kind of work you did, what you wore, whom you married, how you were educated, what you ate, how you prayed, which laws bound you, and in what manner you were born, married, and were buried were questions that for Jews had long been mainly resolved within a closed, self-governing Jewish community.
As that community became less subject to external restrictions, a much broader range of answers to these questions became possible. Another figure portrayed in one of Lieber Sheffer’s drawings was Abraham Geiger, a mid-nineteenth-century German rabbi who was an architect of what we now call Reform Judaism and who was known for his anti-Zionism. (By “Zionism” I don’t mean Theodor Herzl’s use of the word, beginning in the 1890s, to describe his movement advocating for the creation of an independent Jewish state, but rather the ancient concept of a Jewish homeland that diaspora Jews wish to restore and return to.) As early as 1818 the first major Reform congregation, in Hamburg, had stopped praying for the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem. In 1854 Geiger edited a new prayer book for his congregation in Breslau that removed all traditional references to the fervent hope for a return to Zion.