Henry Pereira Mendes

• Born: April 13, 1852
• Birthplace: Birmingham, England
• Died: Ocotber 21, 1937
• Place of death: New York, Yew York

British-born rabbi, theologian, and writer

Mendes served as rabbi to the influential Sephardic congregation Shearith Israel in New York, where he worked to improve Jewish charities and promote Orthodoxy and Jewish education in the United States. He founded the Jewish Theological Seminary and wrote several books promoting Jewish culture and Zionism.

Early Life

Henry Pereira Mendes (HEHN-ree puh-REH-rah MEHN-dehs) was born in Birmingham, England, in 1852. Although of Portuguese descent, the Mendes family held important positions in the Sephardic Jewish community throughout the British Empire. Mendes’s family had been closely tied to rabbinical scholarship and leadership for several generations. Mendes’s father, Abraham Pereira Mendes, was a rabbi in a congregation in Birmingham, England, and Mendes’s grandfather and two uncles served Sephardic congregations in British colonies in the Caribbean region. Given this impressive family background and his later work in promoting ritual observance in America, it is likely Mendes was raised in a traditional Orthodox environment and continued this perspective into adulthood.

Mendes’s earliest instruction came from his father, but he began formal studies at Northwick College and University College in London, as he prepared for the rabbinate. After he completed his education at age twenty-two, family connections and notoriety helped open doors for Mendes. In 1875, he began his rabbinical career by serving as the leader for the newly established Sephardic congregation in Manchester, England. Mendes worked in this position from 1875 to 1877. In 1877, Mendes was invited by Congregation Shearith Israel, a well-established Sephardic community in New York City, to serve as rabbi. He accepted and quickly assumed leadership of the congregation, establishing a Torah school and serving on philanthropic boards and charity organizations in New York. Mendes eventually married one of his former students, Rosalie Piza, in 1890.

Life’s Work

Shearith Israel is the oldest Jewish community in the United States, established by Portuguese Jews in the seventeenth century. As rabbi to this esteemed community, Mendes worked to build close relationships with other Sephardic congregations in the United States and abroad. In 1881, for instance, Mendes worked to reestablish a synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, which had once been the site of a thriving community of Sephardic Jews in the eighteenth century. Mendes also dedicated a new Sephardic synagogue in Philadelphia in 1909. As late as 1933, after his official retirement from Congregation Shearith Israel, Mendes praised a New York City Jewish day school for its adherence to Sephardic ritual and tradition.

Mendes was also instrumental in unifying diverse groups of Orthodox Jews from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions. He embraced what biographer Eugene Markovitz has termed “Modern Orthodoxy,” which insisted on strict adherence to Talmudic traditions and ritual, while encouraging greater engagement with the modern world and avoiding Jewish isolationism. Mendes endorsed Jewish learning and tradition, and he also promoted secular education (in 1884, Mendes earned an M.D. from the New York University Medical School). Mendes organized several distinctly Jewish charities while rabbi of Shearith Israel, including New York’s Young Women’s Hebrew Association (founded in 1902) and the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind (1908). In addition, he worked alongside other members of the clergy and public officials to alleviate social problems in New York. Mendes served on the board of the Guild for Crippled Children (founded 1896,) the Crippled Children’s East Side Free School (founded 1901), and Montefiore Hospital (founded 1884). He also helped establish Jewish schools in New York and encouraged the creation of nurses’ training programs in the city.

Alongside his philanthropic work, Mendes was instrumental in strengthening Orthodox Judaism in America. During his lifetime, reformers challenged fundamental tenets of traditional Judaism, abandoning Jewish dietary laws, ritual observance, Zionism, and liturgical forms. Mendes welcomed modernization and reform when addressing social problems and charitable organizations, but he argued that Judaism’s traditional worship was essential and timeless. Thus, Mendes was a counterweight to the prevailing pattern of reform in late nineteenth century American Judaism, exemplified in the creation of the Pittsburgh Platform in 1885. When reformer Isaac Mayer Wise created the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873, Mendes responded by organizing a group of traditionalist rabbis to ensure that Jewish education and kosher standards were upheld in the United States (this led to Mendes’s formation of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America in 1898). Likewise, the opening of reformers’ Hebrew Union College in 1875 prompted Mendes to seek an alternative seminary for Orthodox students. Mendes organized and led the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (initially housed at Congregation Shearith Israel), which opened in 1887. Mendes continued to promote Orthodox and Sephardic traditionalism until his death in 1937.

Significance

While other Jewish immigrants to the United States, including many of his fellow rabbis, urged abandoning Orthodox practices for the sake of Americanization, Mendes insisted that Jewish tradition could be nurtured, even strengthened, in the United States. His writings, notably The Jewish Religion Ethically Presented (1904), present biblical history and Jewish ritual to both Jewish and gentile readers. In Looking Forward (1900), Mendes aimed for a broad audience in arguing for the centrality of Zionism in Jewish culture, a point that was vigorously denied in Reform Judaism’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform. Above all, Mendes’s career focused on reconciling Orthodox Judaism with American pluralism and expressing Sephardic tradition while promoting wider engagement with other Jewish communities and the American public at large.

Bibliography

Ben-Ur, Aviva. Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Discusses Mendes’s perspectives on Sephardic schools and gives significant attention to Shearith Israel.

Markovitz, Eugene. “Henry Pereira Mendes: Architect of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 55, no. 3 (March, 1966): 364-384. Describes Mendes’s response to Reform Judaism and to organization of Orthodox institutions.

Mendes, Henry Pereira. The Jewish Religion Ethically Presented. 1904. Reprint. Charleston, S.C.: Nabu Press, 2010. Mendes’s overview of Jewish history, culture, and tradition exemplifies his view of Orthodoxy.