Paths Not Taken: The Frankfurt Model

On 1 December 1844 an election took place in London to choose a successor to Chief Rabbi Solomon Hirschell, who had died two years earlier. In the final ballot there were four candidates, among whom was a young German rabbi who had already established an impressive reputation as an articulate spokesman for Orthodoxy in the new age. In the event, though, he received only two of the 136 votes cast, 121 going to the victorious candidate, Nathan Marcus Adler. With hindsight he may not have regretted his defeat, for in the course of time he was to emerge as one of the most famous rabbinic figures of the nineteenth century. His name was Samson Raphael Hirsch.

Hirsch was born in Hamburg in 1808. As a child he had grown up in an atmosphere of communal crisis. The Jews of Germany had not yet achieved full civic equality, and they faced determined opposition. The view taken in liberal circles, both Jewish and non-Jewish, was that Jews themselves would have to accelerate the process of social acceptance by removing some of the differences that still stood between themselves and gentile, predominantly Christian, society. This led to some extreme responses. In 1799 a Berlin Jew, David Friedlander, suggested that there should be a mass baptism of Jews. He made one proviso, that they would subscribe not to Christian dogma but to a neutral religion of nature. By then there had been a wave of intermarriage on the part of wealthier and more acculturated Jews, including several of the children of the leading Jewish enlightenment scholar, Moses Mendelssohn. Significant numbers in Germany and Austro-Hungary converted to Christianity.

The broad mass of Jews rejected such drastic measures, for they meant admitting that they could be tolerated as full citizens only at the cost of their disappearance as Jews. The next generation took a different approach, though it was to prove no less fateful. Gradually the idea gained ground that Judaism itself should be radically reformed by the surgical removal of those elements of its faith and practice that served as a barrier between Jews and gentiles. This meant among other things the drastic curtailment of Jewish law in such areas as Shabbat observance and kashrut, the abandonment of circumcision, and the deletion from Jewish faith of the hope of an ultimate return to the land of Israel – an expectation that laid Jews open to the charge that they could not be true citizens of Europe since they did not regard it as their ultimate home.

The first Reform “Temple” opened in Hamburg in 1818, when the young Hirsch was ten years old. Throughout his life he carried with him vivid memories of meetings in his home at which the Orthodox leaders of the community, his father and grandfather among them, discussed ways of combating the challenge of Reform. One biographer, basing himself on the testimony of Hirsch’s descendants, writes that

As an eleven or twelve year old lad, he witnessed the meetings in his parents’ home, in which the traditionalists discussed the events of the day and the steps to be taken in order to oppose the bold, impertinent actions of these innovators. The helpless, despairing pain that these valiant men bespoke with their words and their destitute countenance, had so affected the boy, that he then vowed to dedicate his life to the Jewish heritage which had been given up by its own children.

Subsequent commentators have questioned whether the situation of Orthodoxy was as desperate as Hirsch portrayed it. Unquestionably, though, this is how he saw his own times and the role he felt called on to play. He was convinced that Judaism lacked a capable defender, one who understood the mood of the age and could rescue it from the onslaught of change. Jewish tradition had identified two figures who had taken on this role in biblical times: Pinhas, who stepped into the breach at a time when Moses’ own authority was being undermined, and Elijah who confronted the false prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel. Both of these precedents resonated strongly with Hirsch throughout his life and he often described his role in similar terms. This aspect of his character was recognised by his contemporaries. In its first issue, on 18 October 1844, the Jewish Chronicle published an article about the forthcoming Chief Rabbinate election, and commented that “Dr. Hirsch was known as the author of controversial pamphlets that evinced...more zeal than charity.” Hirsch would not have objected. He relished controversy and flourished in it. He saw himself as the defender of Jewish faith in faithless times.

In his first published book, The Nineteen Letters, Hirsch criticised equally the practitioners of the new Reform and the old Orthodoxy. The former “look upon Judaism as a lifeless framework, something which should be interred in the grave of a past long since dead and buried.” The latter “has inherited uncomprehended Judaism as a mechanical habit” which they cherish “as a sacred relic, as a revered mummy.” What was needed, said Hirsch, was a new approach to Jewish education – “to know Judaism out of itself” – out of which would come a true renaissance of the Jewish spirit.

With this work, published when Hirsch was only twenty-eight, a new tone entered Orthodoxy: assertive, confident and at home in the modern world. Hirsch was the first traditional rabbi to see creative possibilities in the new social and political environment in which Jews found themselves. Where others saw only danger and dissolution, he took the view that emancipation would free Jews from the medieval ghetto which had not only circumscribed their rights but also narrowed their character and spirit. Jews would now be free to pursue their religious mission as exemplars to humanity of righteousness and love. The breakdown of the old political order meant that religion was no longer associated with hierarchies of power, and would instead have to win adherents through the force of persuasion alone. Hirsch, bold then as he was to remain throughout his life, welcomed the change. “I rejoice that the scales hang free, held by God alone, and that only intellectual efforts mutually balance each other, but that no temporal power can interpose the sword to check the freedom of the swinging.”

By the time The Nineteen Letters appeared Hirsch was already serving as a rabbi in Oldenburg, a post for which he had been recommended by his predecessor, the man who later defeated him in the contest for the English Chief Rabbinate, Nathan Marcus Adler. Hirsch subsequently moved to Emden and then Moravia. But it was in his call to Frankfurt in 1851 that he was to achieve his greatest renown.

By the late 1830s the board of the Frankfurt community had become heavily dominated by supporters of Reform, and in 1844 they appointed a rabbi sympathetic to their cause. Five years later the Orthodox members of the community successfully petitioned the local senate for the right to establish their own congregation and eventually appoint their own rabbi, and it was to Hirsch that they turned. By 1853 the independent congregation, the Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft, had opened a new synagogue together with a Jewish day school where Hirsch’s educational philosophy of Torah im derekh eretz, Torah combined with general culture, could be put into practice. Hirsch was an effective leader, and under his aegis both the synagogue and the school grew in numbers and repute.

Throughout much of Hirsch’s lifetime the character of Jewish communities in Germany was the subject of bitter dispute. In Britain the Jewish community was organised along voluntary lines, but in Germany membership of a religious congregation was compulsory and regulated by the state. Jews, if they were not to declare themselves religionless, had to belong to the local Jewish community and pay its dues. The community, which comprised all the Jews in a particular locality, was responsible for the provision of religious and welfare services. With the growth of Reform, communal life became a battleground between contending parties in which the civil authorities were often called to intervene. For decades, calls were heard on the part of the minority – Reform in Orthodox dominated areas, Orthodoxy in places where Reform had gained power – to secede and form independent congregations at their own expense. Reform Jews had done so in Hamburg and Berlin. Orthodox Jews had done so in Frankfurt. The question now was whether these independent groups could receive state recognition in the form of a proviso entitling Jews to secede from the general Jewish community.

In 1873 a Law of Secession was passed allowing Christians to leave the established Catholic Church and form separate congregations. Hirsch, who had led an independent Jewish congregation for more than twenty years, now began a campaign for the right of secession to be extended to Jews. His argument, in the form of a memorandum submitted to the Prussian Parliament, was simple. The principle of freedom of conscience could not be applied to Christians and denied to Jews. The contention that Jewish communities would disintegrate as a result, he quickly dismissed. They had survived for centuries on a purely voluntary basis, and did not now need state coercion to guarantee their health. As for the view that internal differences within the Jewish community were relatively minor, Hirsch was vehement in his denial. “There is no wider gap between any of the various Christian denominations than there is between Reform Judaism and Orthodox Judaism.” The proposal failed in 1873 but succeeded at a second attempt, and on 28 July 1876 the Law of Secession was duly extended. Jews could now disengage from the official community. Where, as in Frankfurt, it was led by Reform Jews, Hirsch believed that it was imperative to do so.

He had won his battle with the Prussian Parliament. Ironically, the battle within his own congregation was harder. Many Orthodox Jews in Frankfurt were against secession, among them Rabbi Moses Mainz, a distinguished talmudist who had been one of the founding members of Hirsch’s congregation. They now sought the advice of one of the greatest rabbinic authorities of the time, Rabbi Selig Baer Bamberger of Würzburg. On 1 February 1877 Bamberger had written a letter in support of Hirsch’s stand. He was now urged to come to Frankfurt to see the situation for himself. He did so, and on 20 March he indicated that he now took a different view.

The Reform leadership, alarmed by the prospect of widespread defection from the official community, offered significant concessions. Orthodox Jews would now be given their own synagogue and facilities which they would run autonomously. They would no longer be asked to contribute to specifically Reform institutions. This was enough to satisfy Rabbi Bamberger that an Orthodox Jew could remain within the larger community without offending conscience or Jewish law. Hirsch was incensed, and a tense and inconclusive exchange of letters took place between the two. In the event, only seventy-five members of Hirsch’s congregation followed his lead in resigning from the community. Seventy accepted the compromise formula, and some two hundred remained full paying members of both communities. In 1878, to Hirsch’s intense displeasure, a new Orthodox congregation was formed within the aegis of the overall community, under the leadership of Rabbi Marcus Horovitz, a disciple of the great Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer. A significant split had occurred within Orthodoxy, between Gemeinde and Austrittsgemeinde, “communal” and “secessionist” forces, and it was to deepen in the course of time.

The argument was less clear-cut than has often been portrayed. Though it is often seen as a German phenomenon, secession actually began some years earlier in Hungary and remained a more divisive issue there. Nor were the leading protagonists divided on matters of general principle. Rabbi Bamberger was in favour of secession elsewhere. Hirsch for his part wrote in 1876 that had he been in Hamburg he would have accepted the compromise arrived at there, in which the Reform community which had always been a minority was given its own autonomous institutions.

Bamberger was as uncompromisingly opposed to Reform as was Hirsch. Moreover, Hirsch emphasised that his argument was about Judaism, not Jews. The second and third generation Reform Jews of Hirsch’s day were, he argued, to be held in the same respect that Maimonides had prescribed for the Karaites of his time. They came within the category of tinok shenishba, individuals who were in error but not culpably so since they held their views as a result of their upbringing and not on the basis of conscious rebellion against tradition. Secession, said Hirsch, was “not intended as a separation of individuals from one another, a severance of personal relationships with brethren who hold religious views different from our own.” A divided community should not stand in the way of personal friendships. Reading the documents of the controversy, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, had circumstances in Frankfurt been slightly different, each of the two men might have found himself on the other side of the argument.

Ultimately, though, there was a genuine “argument for the sake of heaven” and it endured. Hirsch took the view that any formal association of Jews in the context of the modern nation-state had religious implications. Jews were now organised simply and solely as a religious group. In all other respects they were citizens of their respective countries. As a result, there could be no religiously neutral Jewish endeavours. This led Hirsch to criticise the participation of Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer in the Alliance Israelite Universelle, a French-led charitable organisation which included among its leaders non-Orthodox Jews. “I fail to see,” he wrote, “how a man imbued with proper Jewish thought can attach himself to a group founded for a Jewish task when its founder and head are completely removed from genuine religious Judaism.”

For Hirsch, participation in any Jewish organisation was inevitably an act of recognition. If it was led by non-traditional Jews, then a religious Jew could not in good conscience belong. This view was to have profound consequences, not only for Jewish communal life in Central Europe but also for the history of Zionism. Some of Hirsch’s followers were non- or anti-Zionists. Others, like his grandson Isaac Breuer, took a more positive view of the return to Zion. But they shared a refusal to take part in the organised Zionist movement, led as it was by non-religious Jews. Breuer was active in creating the pan-European Agudat Yisrael, a movement which brought together the Orthodox leadership of East and West Europe in their opposition to secular Zionism.

The division between Agudat Yisrael and Mizrachi, a religious Zionist movement led by Rabbi Isaac Reines, mirrored the split between secessionist and community Orthodoxy. The issue always at stake was whether Orthodox Jews could work with others, Reform or secular, on matters which did not touch directly on religious difference: welfare, or Zionism, or the fight against antisemitism. The separatists believed – and this flowed directly from Hirsch’s political philosophy – that Jews were a religious entity only, so that there could be no Jewish activity in which questions of religious principle did not arise. In a religiously divided Jewry, Orthodoxy would have to go on its way alone.

Those who took the opposite view spoke of peace, harmony, unity and the importance of working together in a common cause. Fifty years after secession, an Orthodox member of the Frankfurt community still felt strongly enough to write, “May the notion of two Judaisms, propagated by the Secession communities, never gain ground. Who would have the heart to cast out a brother member because he has not yet reached a stage when he can fulfil all the commandments? The highest degree of piety lies in toleration.” More significantly, though, they believed that there was religiously neutral ground in Jewish life. Implicit in the positions of both Bamberger and Hildesheimer was the idea that not every Jewish association implied recognition of the religious stance of those involved. Provided that there was no blurring of the boundaries when it came to matters of Jewish law and faith, Jews could work together on matters of welfare or defence.

The depth and drama of the argument about secession lay in the fact that it lay along the line of greatest tension in Jewish identity. It exposed the growing rift between am and edah, the Jewish people as a community of fate or of faith. For those who chose the path of Communal Orthodoxy and Mizrachi, the Jewish people was still an am. Even though it was acutely divided on religious principle and practice, it was still held together by bonds of common ancestry, history and interest and on that basis it could still meet and work together. Admittedly, the Orthodox rabbis who took this view were deeply committed to the idea of the Jewish people as an edah. They were no less resolute in their defence of Orthodoxy than Hirsch. But they felt that even in the absence of religious agreement, something still remained of the idea of Jewish peoplehood, a kinship born of long historical experience and accentuated in the modern world by the persistence of antisemitism and Jewish distinctiveness. They could not sever their links with other Jews, however deeply they were pained by their abandonment of traditional Judaism. They remained bound together in a community of fate, as subsequent events in Europe were tragically to prove.

Hirsch for his part knew that Jews had historically formed, and were called on to be, an am. On the phrase “And I will take you to Me as a people” (Exodus 6:7), Hirsch writes in his commentary, “As a nation, not merely a religion, is Israel His.” In Judaism, he adds, God did not establish “a church but a people; a total ethnic life was to be created out of Judaism.” Nonetheless, Hirsch also maintained that only by belonging to God is Israel a people. Neither the possession of a land nor political organisation turn it into a nation, only its collective acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God. If Jews are not an edah, they cannot be an am.

Mordechai Breuer, a recent historian of German Orthodoxy and himself a member of the Hirsch family, uses a telling phrase in describing the Hirschian approach to community. He calls it the “flight into denomination.” As he rightly points out, this was not only Hirsch’s position. It was generally held in German Jewry at the time and was shared by his liberal Jewish opponents. Anxious to downplay the national or ethnic dimensions of Judaism, they repeatedly spoke of it as an exclusively religious association, or as Hirsch put it, a “union of people who had the Jewish denomination in common.”

In his independent Orthodox congregation, and by seceding from the wider Jewish community, Hirsch had created an edah that was no longer coextensive with an am. In sociological terms he had formed a sect. Sectarian religious organisations tend to be exclusive and demanding. They insist on high standards of behaviour from their members. They frown on multiple allegiances. Usually they are formed as protest against the perceived wayward drift of existing institutions, as Hirsch’s congregation was against the Reform takeover of the Gemeinde. Significantly, the Hebrew name of the Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft was Adath Yisrael. It was consciously and deliberately an edah, a fellowship of believers, rather than Knesset Yisrael, an embodiment of the Jewish people in its totality, righteous and unrighteous alike gathered together in the service of God. It was, as Breuer says, “a chosen elite, small in number but select, and of a particular, unique quality.”

The gain in terms of religious integrity was great. But the price was high. Orthodoxy in Germany, according to Breuer’s estimate, stabilised by the end of the nineteenth century at between 10 and 20 percent of the Jewish population. There had been a time in the 1840s at which a complete collapse seemed possible. It is a measure of Hirsch’s success that it did not take place. Independent Orthodoxy grew in both strength and numbers. But its influence was confined to its own members, and it won few adherents from outside. The historian Heinrich Graetz was briefly attracted to Hirsch’s teachings in the 1830s after the publication of The Nineteen Letters, but the two eventually drifted apart. In the early twentieth century, when there was a movement of religious return amongst assimilated Jews – among them such figures as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig and Nathan Birnbaum – it was the traditionalism of East European Jewry that inspired them, not Hirschian Orthodoxy.

Hirsch showed that it was possible to construct a vigorous and self-sustaining Orthodox community on the basis of a close interaction between synagogue and school. Jews did not have to segregate themselves from secular culture or active participation in the wider society. To the contrary, Torah im derekh eretz was precisely the fusion of the two. But they did, in his view, have formally to distance themselves from other Jews, even at the cost of forfeiting leadership and influence within the Jewish community as a whole. Independent Orthodoxy was minority Orthodoxy, the faith of an elite.

That is what did not happen in Anglo-Jewry, and its significance is immense. The difference between Frankfurt and London in the nineteenth century undoubtedly owes less to the respective characters of Hirsch and Adler than to the circumstances in which they found themselves. The course of Jewish emancipation ran more smoothly in Britain than in Germany. At no time were Jews directly challenged to change their practices and beliefs. British society was in any case less intellectually inclined, less ideologically riven than its German counterpart, and its traditionalism and pragmatism helped maintain the cohesiveness of the Jewish community. Reform made little headway in Britain throughout the nineteenth century, despite the early formation of a Reform congregation in London in 1841. By then the Anglo-Jewish community had already developed institutions such as the Board of Deputies and the Chief Rabbinate which were able to respond to new social and political challenges, preempting internal fragmentation.

The result was that whilst in Germany Orthodoxy was reduced to a minority, internally strong but weak in its influence on the community as a whole, in Britain it remained the leading presence and the prevailing norm. As the social historian Robert Liberles notes, unlike the situation in Germany, “in England and France the Jewish establishment responded to emancipation in time to avoid serious religious schism. This meant that until the arrival of East European immigrants around the turn of the century, the religious institutions of England and France represented neither Neo-Orthodoxy nor old Orthodoxy, but simply Jews and Judaism.” Given the new social realities of the nineteenth century and the inherently fissile nature of Jewish communal life, this was a remarkable outcome. Whether it testifies to the tolerance of British society or to the wisdom of Anglo-Jewish leadership, it remains in retrospect one of the great achievements of modern Jewry.