Rabbi Dr. Joel Blau

Born: 1878.

Died: 25 October 1927 in London, England.

Rabbi Blau served as rabbi of synagogues in Rochester and Brooklyn, Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, New York and Peni-El Temple, New York before serving as assistant minister at the West London Synagogue (1924-1927).

Crowley's article, "The Jewish Problem Re-stated," published in the June 1922 English Review, was a reply to Rabbi Blau's article, "The Modern Pharisee," published in the January 1922 Atlantic Monthly. Crowley in his Confessions wrote of the article and the difficulties he was having with the English Review at that time:

"A further unpleasantness was that he [Austin Harrison] always wanted to mutilate what I wrote by removing the strongest passages or reshaping them so that my style was spoilt entirely and diluted with his journalistic commonplaces and clichés. I made the best of a bad job. My reply to Rabbi Joel Blau, 'The Jewish Problem Re-Stated', for example, seemed to me so important that any sacrifice was worth making. I doubt my wisdom. His emendations reduced a masterpiece of reasoning and eloquence to a comparatively unremarkable pleading, and it fell almost flat."

Crowley's original article submitted to the English Review can be read under the title "An Open Letter to Rabbi Joel Blau."