Constitution of the Universal Israelitish Alliance.

The Board of Delegates of American Israelites, the first American Jewish defense organization, was founded in 1859. Owing to divisions in the Jewish community, the new Board was not representative of the community at large. Largely unrepresented were the German congregations, and conspicuously absent altogether were the hallmark Reform congregations. Among those who led the struggle against the Board’s establishment were the leading Reform rabbis themselves. With the founding of the Paris-based Alliance Israelite Universelle in 1860, opponents of the Board used the opportunity to check its growth by founding Alliance branches on the Board’s own turf. The American Board and the Paris Alliance coolly cooperated to combat international threats to Jewish communities, but tensions between the two always remained and the relationship between the two was “never too intimate” (Szajkowski, 390). The Alliance sought to impose its leadership in the international arena, while the Board remained steadfast in its efforts to preserve the operational autonomy of American Jewry. See Allan Tarshish, “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites,” PAJHS 49.1 (Sept. 1959), 19, 22; Z. Szajkowski, “The Alliance Israelite Universelle in the United States, 1860-1949,” PAJHS 39.4 (June 1950), 389-443. This pamphlet contains the Alliance’s constitution in English and in German, the latter language reflecting the fact that the German and Reform congregations of America led the opposition to the Board in its early years. The present copy was part of the Leeser library. Leeser bequeathed his library to Maimonides College, which he helped establish in 1867. When the College closed in 1873, Leeser’s library was transferred to the Hebrew Education Society of Philadelphia. “The library, consisting of some 2,400 volumes of Judaica and Hebraica, was probably the richest private and institutional library of its time. It is a collection steeped in historical associations. Many of Leeser’s contemporaries sent him autographed copies. This collection is extremely abundant in early Jewish Americana, and includes over fifty unrecorded items of Jewish Americana.” (S. I. Wisemon, “The Library of the Dropsie College,” JBA 24 [1996-7], 46)