## Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 4; A Broad Umbrella

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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***A Broad Umbrella***


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
What happened next has been told by the historians. The organisation grew beyond the largest dreams of its founders, not least because of the massive expansion in the size of the British Jewish community brought about by the wave of immigration from Central and Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920. This transformed Anglo-Jewry from a community of some thirty thousand individuals in 1850 to one of quarter of a million by the outbreak of the First World War.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Needless to say, growth on this scale brought with it tensions, and they form much of the social and communal history of this period. Concentrated in London’s East End, the new immigrants formed a distinct and lively set of sub-communities with traditions and conceptions of Jewish life quite different from those of the already Anglicised members of the United Synagogue. There were acute problems to be faced. There was the social issue of the integration of a large Yiddish-speaking population into British society. There were intractable welfare issues of poverty and overcrowding. The established Jewish community tended to respond with an awkward paternalism, anxious to maintain its hard-won position of social acceptance within British society. At the same time it remained conscious of its duty to the new arrivals under the principle that “all Israel are responsible for one another.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
East End Jewry was not always sympathetic to these interventions. Between the two communities lay a profound gap of cultures. To those newly arrived from Poland and Russia, the Jews of the West End had already become so English as to have become almost unrecognisable as Jews. Anglo-Jewish life, with its “cathedral synagogues,” its relaxed attitude to religious observance, and its quintessentially English Chief Rabbi (“The Very Reverend”) Dr. Hermann Adler, simply failed to represent the Judaism they knew.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
A German observer of the time, Solomon Herz, a disciple of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch who arrived in London in 1881, remarked that in matters of style there was little to distinguish the United Synagogue from the Reform West London congregation. A friend of Herz, Yaakov Zinkin, published a pamphlet in 1893 arguing the need to “defend true Torah in England” where “of the whole Torah, all that is left is the temple” and where, instead of rabbis, religious leadership is in the hands of “Reverends” who “neither ask nor care” about Jewish law.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
During the whole of the period of intensive immigration, there were conflicts between the East End and West End communities, between the recent immigrants and the more established Jews, between the strictly Orthodox and the moderate traditionalists, and between those who argued for congregational separatism and those who maintained the need for community-wide structures. Within Hermann Adler’s period of office alone, the supremacy of the United Synagogue was challenged by the creation of the Federation of Synagogues (1887), the *Machzikei Hadath* (1891) and the *Adath Yisrael* (1909), together with the birth of a new movement of reform, the Liberal Synagogue (1910). It was a period of immense turbulence for a leader described by Cecil Roth as “a typical product of the placid Victorian era in Western Europe.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The mood of the times is well captured in a report published in the *Jewish Chronicle* on 22 July 1898. A few weeks earlier a conference had been held, in London’s Central Synagogue, on the state of Jewish elementary education. Strong criticisms were voiced about the *hadarim* or Hebrew classes in the East End. Their unsanitary conditions and long hours were, from the perspective of the more acculturated Jewish leaders, doing great harm to the children, making them “pale and washed out and nervously unstable.” The report of the proceedings provoked fierce reaction on the part of East End Jewry. A protest meeting was held at the Jewish Working Men’s Club, described by an observer in these terms:


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The hall of the Jewish Working Men’s Club has been the scene of many a striking meeting but seldom has such a spectacle been seen as on Sunday last when the spacious hall was not only filled to overflowing but the passages leading to it were also thronged. The speakers were decidedly aggressive and every point made against the “West Enders” was cheered to the echo, the wildest enthusiasm prevailing when the resolution “that we East Enders do not recognise the West End Jews as authorities upon Hebrew and Religious Education” was carried. Men and women stood upon their seats, hats, sticks and handkerchiefs were waved and it was some time before the meeting calmed down again. The watchword of the meeting was “Freedom from the West” and one speaker went so far as to call upon the East to emancipate itself from the yoke of the West.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Unperturbed by such demonstrations, the United Synagogue continued on its course, buffeted but not seriously distracted from its role as an overarching communal body responsible for developing religious institutions for London Jewry as a whole. It took many decades and much diplomatic activity for the old and new communities to draw closer together, but eventually they did, each coming to recognise the strengths of the other. The United Synagogue represented structure and organisation. The East European immigrants brought with them a spiritual vigour and intensity that had been in danger of suffocating under the rectitude of high Victorian Anglo-Judaism. As the Jews of the East End moved outward towards the suburbs, they formed new congregations under the United Synagogue’s aegis, and slowly a new synthesis emerged, less patrician, more religiously committed, than Anglo-Jewry had been in the nineteenth century.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It was a measure of the quality of leadership of Anglo-Jewry at the time that so massive a change in the composition of the community could be accommodated without the collapse of its religious structures. Established figures like Samuel Montagu and Lord Rothschild actively engaged with the Jews of the East End, helping them to develop their own institutions while at the same time encouraging communal unity. Aubrey Newman, in his history of the United Synagogue, rightly notes the contrast between London and New York during this period. “New York was affected by a similar wave of immigration, and there too a host community found itself faced with similar problems. However there existed no ‘umbrella’ organisation comparable to the United Synagogue, and the result was that the fragmentation of small congregations continued unhindered.” New York Jewry lacked the overarching framework of a communal structure, and as a result was hard-pressed to confront the problems of integration and antisemitism. Anglo-Jewry, smaller and more effectively organised, was better able to survive the strains of adjustment and ultimately to bring the energies of the new immigrants into existing communal bodies.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The strength of the United Synagogue lay in the fact that in coming together, its founding congregations were concerned to do more than provide for their own future. They laid the groundwork for *Kehillah,* an embracing and responsible community. It provided a central financial and administrative resource able to support the growth of new communities in the suburbs. Where Jews moved, the United Synagogue was there to help them. It sustained central institutions which guided them in their development. It organised educational services and youth groups. Eventually it built Jewish day schools and supported Jewish chaplaincy for students throughout the country. Welfare services, which had originated in the synagogue, by the 1870s had been devolved to such bodies as the Jewish Board of Guardians. But the United Synagogue continued to organise activities such as hospital and prison visitation. Above all, through its support of the Chief Rabbinate and the Beth Din, it provided central religious guidance not only for London Jewry but for the provinces and the wider Commonwealth.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
What might have happened had the United Synagogue not existed is best seen by contrast with another Jewry, Australia, which for most of its history was closely allied to the British Jewish community through the British Commonwealth and the influence of the Chief Rabbinate. Australian Jewry is extremely lively, and since the Second World War has built a Jewish day school system stronger than its British counterpart. But it lacked an overall synagogue body. One of the greatest of Australian rabbis, the late Dr. Israel Porush, has described the result:


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Each congregation went its own sweet way, without the slightest regard to the needs of the whole or the views of other congregations, and steered clear of most new burdens. So, many things for the enhancement of Judaism were left undone, because no single synagogue was strong enough or willing enough to undertake them. There was, for instance, no coordination in the support of the smaller communities, or the care of scattered individuals; no discussion on the lay level of common congregational problems, and no mutual inspiration and exchange of experience; there was no contact among the various synagogal youth groups; neither was there a centralised body that could undertake the mobilisation of our religious forces and the much needed campaign for a return to the synagogue.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Because London had a United Synagogue, these things were done, and not only for the benefit of its own congregations. As Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz put it in 1931:


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The coming of the United Synagogue...put an end to the spirit of senseless, petty rivalry between individual congregations, with the consequent overlapping in some of the communal activities, and underlapping in others, i.e., serious neglect of those vital services in a community which a single congregation could not undertake.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Hertz was blunt in spelling out the perennial danger in Jewish communal life, namely that different groups would spend more time fighting one another than fighting together the forces of religious indifference. The United Synagogue’s success lay in containing this factionalism.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
To be sure, it had significant failures. Throughout its history, it recognised, but did not effectively act on, the problem of recruiting and training an effective, learned rabbinate. Its support of Jews’ College, the seminary established by Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler in 1855, was lukewarm and inadequate and the College, despite a succession of gifted teachers, was never given the resources to develop its full potential. Anglo-Jewry was ambivalent about rabbinic scholarship. From the very outset Adler found it difficult to enlist communal support for the College. Sixty years later a lay leader, Sir Robert Waley Cohen, could still be found complaining about its emphasis on talmudic studies: “The community clamours for cultured gentlemen of whose secular and aesthetic accomplishments they are quite ready to pronounce themselves judges, whilst they are complacent in respect both of their Judaism and Hebraic learning.” Solomon Schechter was scathing about the result: “Occasionally rumour spreads anent some minister, that he neglects his duty to his congregation, through his being secretly addicted to Jewish learning. But such rumours often turn out to be sheer malice.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The lack of interest in rabbinic studies was part of a wider apathy towards Jewish education as a whole. Even in the eighteenth century Rabbi Hart Lyon of the Great Synagogue (1756–64) was complaining:


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Instead of gathering in the houses of learning people go to operas, plays, concerts and clubs... I have no pupils, not even a colleague with whom I could pursue my studies... I have established a Yeshivah but have not succeeded with it... There are no Talmud Torahs for children, and what will be the future of Judaism if this state of affairs continues?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The United Synagogue came late to the challenge of creating a network of Jewish day schools, advocated by a succession of Chief Rabbis but resisted by the community as a barrier to social integration.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
To many early observers it was simply more preoccupied with finance and administration than with matters of the spirit. Israel Zangwill bitterly complained that the United Synagogue “could be run as a joint-stock company for the sake of a dividend” without affecting the tenor of its deliberations. “Long after Judaism has ceased to exist,” he added, “excellent gentlemen will be found regulating its finances.” Anglo-Jewry failed to develop the intensity of Jewish scholarship to be found in the traditional heartlands of Eastern Europe. Neither traditional Jewish learning nor wider intellectual pursuits were given the prominence in Britain that they have held in almost every other Jewish community throughout history.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Nonetheless, the United Synagogue succeeded where Orthodoxy in many other countries failed. It held the loyalty of the majority of London’s Jews in rapidly changing times. It kept certain standards alive and at the centre of communal life. Elsewhere – in Germany, Hungary, the United States and eventually the State of Israel – traditional Judaism became the faith of a minority. Throughout the British Commonwealth, it remained the mainstream. Through the influence of the Chief Rabbinate and the Board of Deputies, a certain type of Jewish community prevailed in Jewries as distant as Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. It was less marked by strident ideological conflict than elsewhere. It was less threatened by schism. It was characterised by a broad traditionalism, flexible in form if uncompromising in principle, and it spoke to a large majority of Jews. Chief Rabbi Hertz was essentially correct when he said, in 1931, that “the United Synagogue has given its distinctive character to English Judaism.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
What was this character? Certainly there was a distinctive Anglo-Jewish style, decorous and high Victorian, which can be dated from the early ordinances of Nathan Marcus Adler and is still reflected in the architecture of London’s older synagogues and the form of its more elaborate choral services. But as we noted in the first chapter, this had more to do with the specific challenge of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewry and its desire for social acceptance than with the essential nature of the United Synagogue. In recent years it has been replaced by a search for intensity and informality on the part of a generation confident of its Englishness but seeking a more compelling form of Jewishness.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
More significant than its style is the underlying vision of the United Synagogue, about which relatively little has been written. Its aim may have been self-evident to its founders and members, but it needs restating today. For at this distance of time, in a Jewish world which has changed immeasurably since the days of its foundation, we can see most clearly that it did have a distinctive vision and one that needs re-articulation. What was it?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Paying tribute to one of its great Secretaries, Philip Goldberg, Sir Robert Waley Cohen said this:


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
He fervently believed in three great truths concerning the United Synagogue: that on the United Synagogue depended the stability and well-being of the Anglo-Jewish community; that the United Synagogue was and must always be that great central “umbrella” under which *all* who believe in our traditional orthodoxy can find spiritual comfort; that only the United Synagogue can, and consequently must, try to hold or bring back to the fold those who are drifting, or have drifted away.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Its mandate was to serve as the broadest possible “sacred canopy” under which Jews could shelter while remaining true to the classic principles of Jewish communal life. This had quite specific implications. Geoffrey Alderman puts them well in his description of the organisation’s origins:


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Communities which joined the United Synagogue lost their independence, but they gained much in terms of access to the terminals of communal power; and, like the overwhelming majority of provincial congregations that put themselves under the jurisdiction of the United Synagogue’s Chief Rabbi, their orthodox credentials were beyond dispute – even if their memberships were not particularly orthodox in practice. In this respect the United Synagogue set a standard; as an institution it was orthodox, but it admitted to membership all who were Jewish according to orthodox criteria, irrespective of their own personal degree of religious commitment. This was the essence of “mainstream” British Judaism, and its flavour was to be found in the majority of provincial communities that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The United Synagogue was to provide, within the parameters of Jewish law and practice, a spiritual home for all Jews who chose to enter its gates, regardless of their personal commitments or levels of religious observance. It offered, and still offers, a context of Jewish belonging to the least and most observant alike. That, in the eyes of its admirers, is its primary virtue. But that, in the view of its critics, is its besetting sin. It is too broad, they argue, to have any particular identity, any ideology, any incandescent sense of purpose. Precisely because it welcomes the non-observant, its temperature is cool, its philosophy amorphous, and its spiritual dynamic too undemanding to inspire. That was the criticism levelled against it in the 1880s by the immigrants from Eastern Europe, and it remains the argument of its detractors today.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This criticism is seriously misplaced. It fails to understand the vision, indeed the drama, that lies behind an organisation which, in a deeply fissured Jewish world, established itself as a *United* Synagogue, and which took as its Hebrew name *Knesset Yisrael,* the rabbinic term for the totality of the Jewish people as a single entity standing before God. To gain a sense of the importance of this achievement and its singularity, we must step back and survey the foundations of Jewish peoplehood against the broadest perspectives of history and modernity. Only when we understand what routes the United Synagogue might have taken can we appreciate the path it did in fact take, and why.