Morris Lazaron

Lazaron was born on April 16, 1888, in Savannah, Georgia.[1] His father Samuel Louis Lazaron was from Americus, Georgia, and his mother Alice Zipporah de Castro was a Sephardi Jew from New Orleans whose ancestors hailed from Curaçao, Saint Croix, Saint Thomas, Morocco, Amsterdam, and Lisbon.[2][3]

In 1914, Lazaron was ordained by the Hebrew Union College. He served as a rabbi at Congregation Leshem Shomayim in Wheeling, West Virginia, for a year. In 1915, he was appointed as rabbi of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. Lazaron was a founder and co-president of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. Lazaron's anti-Zionism was uncontroversial until after the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, which lead to the severing of ties between Lazaron and Baltimore Hebrew and his resignation as rabbi emeritus in 1946.[4] Lazaron was forced to resign after refusing to comply with a request from the synagogue's board of directors to refrain from attacking Zionism in his sermons.[5] While opposing Jewish nationalism, political Zionism, and the establishment of a Jewish state, Lazaron did support the existence of a Jewish spiritual and cultural homeland in Palestine / Eretz Yisrael. Although Lazaron had once considered himself a Zionist, he began to critique Zionism after visiting Nazi Germany during the 1930s, concluding that nationalism was a destructive force and could not be used in service of Jewish redemption. Lazaron believed that Zionists had exploited the tragedies in Europe to justify Zionism. Acknowledging that his anti-Zionist views made him deeply unpopular within Jewish circles, Lazaron wrote that Zionists hated him because he "was once a Zionist" but "left the Zionist camp and is now against them" and was therefore considered a traitor to the cause.[6]

In 1934, Lazaron wrote a letter defending the use of Jewish quotas in American universities. He claimed that "Too many of our Jewish students are going into medicine" and felt it necessary to "to divert, if possible, the increasing flow of Jewish students into this profession". He believed that an inundation of Jewish students at medical institutions would lead to an increase in antisemitism. Lazaron canvassed 65 medical schools, asking their deans for their impressions concerning Jewish medical students and their proportions of the student population. Responses from Lazaron's survey are collected and displayed at the "Beyond Chicken Soup" travelling exhibit that was shown at the Jewish Museum of Maryland and other institutions.[7][8]

Lazaron was also a member of the National Council of the American Friends of the Middle East. He was the author of several books.[1]

• Ask the Rabbi, 1928
• Common Ground: A Plea for Intelligent Americanism, 1938
• Homeland or State: The Real Issue, 1940
• In the Shadow of Catastrophe, 1956
• Is This the Way?, 1942
• Olive Trees in a Storm, 1955
• Seed of Abraham: Ten Jews of the Ages, 1930
• Side Arms (Readings and Meditations for Soldiers and Sailors), 1918
• The Consolidation of Our Father, 1928

• Morris S. Lazaron Papers, American Jewish Archives