Biography
He was born in San Francisco to David and Sophie (Abrahamson) who named him Julian. He changed his name to Judah as a young man. As a young boy, Magnes's family moved to Oakland, California, where he attended Sabbath school at First Hebrew Congregation, and was taught by Ray Frank, the first Jewish woman to preach formally from a pulpit in the United States.
Magnes's views of the Jewish people was strongly influenced by First Hebrew's Rabbi Levy, and it was at First Hebrew's building on 13th and Clay that Magnes first began preaching. His bar mitzvah speech of 1890 was quoted at length in the Oakland Tribune.
Magnes gained a degree of notoriety while studying at the University of Cincinnati in a campaign against censorship of the "Class annual" of 1898 by the university faculty. In June 1900 he was ordained Rabbi and went to study in Germany. He enrolled in the Berlin Jewish College, Lehranstalt, and in Berlin University where he studied under Friedrich Paulsen and Friedrich Delitzsch. It was while in Berlin that he became an ardent Zionist and spent time visiting Jewish communities in German Poland and Galicia.. In December 1902 he received a doctorate of Philosophy at Heidelberg and returned to American in 1903.
On Oct. 19, 1908, Magnes married Beatrice Lowenstein of New York, who happened to be Louis Marshall's sister-in-law.
Read more about this topic: Judah Leon Magnes
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