LIKE STEPHEN S. WISE, Leo Franklin was in the middle of a successful rabbinic career in a large metropolitan synagogue during the First World War. Born in 1870, he attended the University of Cincinnati and was ordained by the Hebrew Union College in 1892. Following seven years in Omaha, Nebraska, he became senior rabbi at Detroit's Beth El Congregation, where he remained until his retirement in 1941. In 1903, following the model of Krauskopf, Levy, and others, he instituted the regular Sunday morning service oriented around a major weekly address. Unlike some of these other preachers, he did not have these addresses printed, but the Franklin Archive at Beth El contains the texts of approximately 1,500 of his sermons, a few (from 1899) in his handwriting, the rest typescripts. Franklin received some national exposure because of his friendship with Henry Ford and the break between the two men engendered by the publication of antisemitic material in the Dearborn Independent. Recognition by his colleagues was reflected in his service as president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis from 1919 to 1921.

No text of a sermon by Franklin remains from spring 1898, as America moved towards war with Spain, but a handwritten text on the biblical lesson ‘Mishpatim’, delivered in Omaha on 11 February 1899, and repeated at Beth El on 14 March 1902, recounts a memory of those months in the context of a theme to which he would frequently return, including at the conclusion of the sermon reproduced here: the respective attitudes towards war of Christianity and Judaism.