The Anglo-Jewish Achievement

We are now in a position to appreciate the significance of what occurred, or more precisely what did not occur, in Anglo-Jewry. The same crises that shattered the religious unity of German and American Jewry struck Britain too. The Reform movement appeared in London in 1841, at roughly the same time that it was taking shape in America and less than a quarter of a century after its beginnings in Germany. As in the United States and Germany, there was a wave of immigration from the East which overwhelmed and altered the composition of the Jewish community. All three communities were preoccupied throughout the nineteenth century with the social and political challenges of emancipation. Jews sought to integrate in the wider society, and this placed a strain on their religious observance. But the fateful development which took place in German and American Jewry had no substantive echo in Britain. There was no communal divorce between am and edah. Anglo-Jewry remained, at least in its public and institutional expressions, a religious community loyal to its ancestral faith.

This was, and deserves to be seen as, an astonishing achievement. Until the Second World War, some 90 percent of the community was affiliated to Orthodox synagogues. Even today, despite a considerable waning of habitual behaviour patterns, that figure is still in the region of 70 percent. Four in every five synagogue marriages take place under Orthodox auspices. In Germany, as we have already noted, Orthodoxy had declined to between 10 and 20 percent of the Jewish population, a figure that remained more or less stable from the turn of the century until Hitler’s rise to power. In the United States, likewise, Orthodoxy was reduced to a small minority by 1880, and again by the 1960s by the time the grandchildren of the Eastern European immigrants had reached maturity. On the latest estimates it represents a mere 10 percent of the Jewish community, slightly higher in New York, lower elsewhere.

In both communities, after an initial period of devastation, Orthodoxy recovered. In Germany this took place in the second half of the nineteenth century under the commanding influence of Hirsch and Hildesheimer. It did not happen in the United States until a century later when a series of outstanding religious leaders, many of them refugees from Nazi Europe, made their way there and for the first time provided American Jewry with a powerful traditional rabbinic presence. Hasidic leaders like the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneersohn, together with yeshivah heads of the calibre of Rabbis Joseph Soloveitchik, Aaron Kotler and Isaac Hutner, gave American Orthodoxy a poise and presence it had hitherto lacked. They built yeshivot and schools, set new standards of spirituality and scholarship, and succeeded in laying the foundations for the renaissance of Torah Judaism in a country which had previously been seen as a trefa medine, an “unclean land.”

The history of German Jewry after the 1850s and American Jewry after the 1950s proved one thing: that traditional Judaism is not an inevitable casualty of the open society. Given time to prepare its defences, it is perfectly capable of holding its own, and indeed of emerging with renewed vigour. The tragedy of both communities is that the traditional leadership was not prepared for the challenge in the early and most critical years. By the time it had reasserted itself, a whole generation had been lost. Orthodoxy was reduced to a minority and had forfeited the leadership of the Jewish community as a whole. The position in both cases was unrecoverable. Orthodoxy was left to strengthen its own most immediate constituency and had no choice other than to construct itself as a series of edot, enclosed and separatist congregations.

There was an alternative approach in both countries. In Germany it took the form of Gemeinde Orthodoxy. In America it became known as Modern or Centrist Orthodoxy. Like the members of Mizrachi within the Zionist movement, those who chose this path were willing to work with others in broader communal endeavours. They were driven by a sense of the centrality of peoplehood in Judaism. They feared the damaging effects of schism. They sensed that without their participation, Jewish life would become more, and more rapidly, detraditionalised. They believed that collective Jewish activity should not proceed in the absence of a voice from tradition, and they believed that they could exercise a moderating influence, if not controlling authority, from within. But they had forfeited their most compelling argument. They could no longer claim to be building a community-wide kehillah on traditional lines. As a minority, they could only lay claim to small and intangible gains, a concession here, a softening of hostility there. Meanwhile the price they had to pay was large and always visible. They were co-operating with, and apparently lending their sanction to, groups who opposed everything they held most dear. They could not but appear to the separatists as diluters of the faith, appeasers playing a game already lost. At the most critical period, Orthodoxy had sacrificed its position of leadership in German and American Jewry, and in the Zionist movement as well.

What made Anglo-Jewry different is that, by the time crisis occurred, strong communal leadership was already in place. At least the structures were in position. The Board of Deputies had been in existence since 1760. It had functioned for years in only the most intermittent way. But when the time came in the 1830s for a more active representation of the Jewish community, the framework was in place and could be strengthened. The Chief Rabbinate, or at least the de facto recognition of the Rabbi of the Great Synagogue as leader of the community, had been a feature of Anglo-Jewish life since the early days of the Ashkenazi settlement. Since the time of Aaron Hart in the early eighteenth century, provincial communities had turned to the Great Synagogue for guidance. Solomon Hirschell, who took up office in 1802, was already known in non-Jewish circles as the “High Priest” of British Jews, and his authority extended as far as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. By the time Nathan Marcus Adler became Chief Rabbi in 1845, the prestige of the office was already well established, and he was able to embark immediately on a far-reaching and comprehensive reorganisation of the community.

Structures matter. They make the difference between community and chaos. Anglo-Jewry was unlike both Germany and the United States. In Germany, the organisational framework of Jewry was partially dictated by the State. This meant that the struggle for emancipation was played out in the form of bitter battles within the Jewish community on which the civil authorities were often called to adjudicate. Internal and external politics were inextricable, to the detriment of communal unity. In Britain, by contrast, the Jewish community was from the outset organised along voluntary lines. There could be individual differences of approach towards emancipation without these necessarily leading to the creation of factions within the community.

The fact that Anglo-Jewry had to finance its services, recruit its members, and maintain cohesiveness, without access to government-sanctioned coercion led it to develop its own ethic of leadership and governance. Ultimately this proved beneficial, at least to its powers of organisation. In the nineteenth century, the great patrician families – the Rothschilds, Goldsmids, Samuels and Montefiores, the so-called “Cousinhood” – were drawn into the service of the Jewish community. Aristocratic and autocratic though they sometimes were, they had skill and judgment and they lent Jewry as a whole a dignity and self-respect that stood in stark contrast to the more traumatic reactions of Jews in Germany. In the twentieth century, as the more established Jews were outnumbered by the new immigrants, the community slowly evolved towards more democratic and religiously intensive forms. Like the British constitution, Anglo-Jewish governance was at times eccentric, depending as much on unwritten conventions and personal relationships as on formal rules, but by and large it worked.

American Jewry, by contrast, failed to evolve a communal framework. It was as old as Anglo-Jewry, and it too was organised on a voluntary basis. But the early settlers failed to lay the foundations of a kehillah, and by the time it became urgent it was already too late. Religious divisions were too deep. The principle of congregational autonomy was already entrenched. In 1855, an attempt by the Orthodox rabbi Isaac Leeser and the Reform leader Isaac Mayer Wise to heal the breach ended in acrimony. By the time national Jewish organisations were formed, from the 1870s onward, the community was irreparably split into three, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform, and the divisions were to multiply over time.

Even the attempt to organise the Orthodox community along European lines ended in abysmal failure. In 1888 a group of New York synagogues joined to form the Association of the American Hebrew Congregations. They invited a distinguished rabbinic scholar from Vilna, Rabbi Jacob Joseph, to become their Chief Rabbi. One of his first acts was to attempt to bring order to kashrut in the city. Pandemonium ensued. Jewish radicals resented the imposition of authority. So too did the slaughterers and butchers. Hungarian and Galician Jews, antagonised by the prospect of Lithuanian dominance, counter-attacked by appointing their own Chief Rabbi, Joshua Segal. Not to be outdone, a group of Hasidic communities gathered under a third leader, Rabbi Hayim Vidrowitz from Moscow, outside whose headquarters hung a sign, “Chief Rabbi of America.” When asked who had conferred this title on him, he is reported to have replied, “The sign painter.” Rivalry intensified. The original Association declined. Rabbi Jacob Joseph was reduced to sickness and poverty. It was an American-Jewish tragedy and proved to all concerned that *kehillah-*wide structures were now beyond reach.

The existence of a Chief Rabbinate in Britain was a vital force for restraint in a period when, throughout most of Europe and America, the citadels of tradition had been overrun by radical secularism or reform. No one recognised this more acutely than the American Reform leader, Isaac Mayer Wise. He had already been opposed by the traditionalists in his own congregation in Albany, New York. There had been a fistfight between himself and the synagogue’s president on the pulpit on Yom Kippur in 1849. Wise did not want to be checked in his development of a new American Judaism, to which he gave the name Minhag America. Arthur Hertzberg reports of him that “he hated the old-school lay leaders, the parnassim, who continued to direct the Jewish communities in Europe” and “thanked God that ‘in America, there were no petty tyrants, like the chief rabbis of England and Germany,’ to rule over less well-placed Jewish clerics.” From his perspective he was right. Had there been in America some communal authority he would have been less free to rewrite the script of Judaism. When Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler died on 21 January 1890 the Jewish Chronicle, not always a sympathetic voice, was moved to acknowledge that “Had a man of smaller ability and with a less commanding personality occupied the Rabbinical chair, it is probable that the wholesale reforms and the undesirable extravagances that characterise American Judaism would have found their way into our community.”

As this tribute implies, personalities counted as well as structures. Anglo-Jewry was fortunate in being led by a figure of the stature of Adler. Five years older than Hirsch, he brought to his leadership not only the unimpeachable authority of his scholarship but also a robust and far-sighted approach to communal organisation. From his earliest initiatives – the survey of congregations throughout the country and his 1847 Regulations for the conduct of synagogues under his aegis – he displayed a firm grasp of the needs of the community. As Bill Williams notes in his study of Manchester Jewry, Adler’s concentration of power within his office was the result of careful reflection on the condition of the community. “A ‘well-regulated’ decentralised rabbinical structure had been possible in Germany, he believed, because it had evolved over centuries, but in England a rabbinical tradition was lacking, except at the centre, and this central control had become necessary to the survival of an Orthodox framework of Jewish life.” The laxity of religious observance and the weakness of Jewish education that he found on his arrival led him to the conclusion that leaving congregations to go their own way would be opening the door to the growth of Reform.

At the same time, he understood that mere reliance on authority would be futile. One of the most vociferous points of contention in early Victorian Jewry was the aesthetics of the synagogue service. Complaints had been heard throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, and concern for more decorous worship had been to the fore among those who broke away to form the first Reform congregation, the West London Synagogue, in 1841. The response of the communal leadership at the time had been to issue what was formally styled a “caution” but which was virtually a ban of excommunication against its members.

Adler’s approach was different. To the greatest extent possible within Jewish law, he encouraged a new approach to decorum within his own congregations. He banned very young children from attending services. He discouraged the sale of mitzvot and the announcement of monetary offerings. He forbade congregants to chatter or leave their places during the prayers. He encouraged the introduction of all-male choirs. In response to a request from a West End congregation, he permitted Shabbat and festival morning services to be divided with a break in the middle. The result, as Cecil Roth has said, was that “without the slightest deviation from Orthodox requirements, a considerable part of what had been the demands of the Reformers was met, in fact if not in form.” It was an important gesture. Not only did it address a widely felt need. It served to convince the community that their spiritual leader understood their concerns and was prepared to act when it was possible for him to do so. This gave all the more force to the occasions on which he had to say no. Even his critics were forced to acknowledge that the concessions he refused to make were unavailable to him within the terms of the halakhah.

No less important was the example set by Anglo-Jewry’s leading lay representative during this period, Sir Moses Montefiore. Whatever the successes or failures of his long presidency of the Board of Deputies and his many trips abroad on behalf of world Jewry, he presented Anglo-Jewry with a remarkable role-model. Here was a successful businessman, related by marriage to the Rothschilds, held in high regard by non-Jewish society and knighted by Queen Victoria, who was nonetheless steadfast in his religious observance, a man who would rise at six on a Shabbat morning to walk the long distance from his home in Park Lane to the Bevis Marks synagogue in the City, and who in later life would take his own shohet with him on his travels to ensure the kashrut of his food.

Mordechai Breuer, reflecting on the success of Samson Raphael Hirsch’s programme of Jewish education, argues that it had little to do with the theory of Torah im derekh eretz expounded in his writings. It had far more to do with the living examples of synthesis represented by the teachers at his school. Role-models were more powerful than ideology, and this surely is Montefiore’s significance. At a time when it was being argued elsewhere that social acceptance and traditional Judaism were incompatible, he stood as a living embodiment of both, a man to whom The Times devoted long and glowing editorials on his ninety-ninth and hundredth birthdays, commending him as one who had shown throughout his life “that fervent Judaism and patriotic citizenship are absolutely consistent with one another.” It was just this kind of life that had been set forth as a possibility in Hirsch’s The Nineteen Letters. German Jewry had the book. Anglo-Jewry had the person.

Needless to say, the Jewish community in Britain had its conflicts and failures. Recent historians have presented a quite different picture to the conventional image of Anglo-Jewry as placid and untroubled. There were deep resentments at the dominance of the “Cousinhood” and the seemingly absolute power wielded by Chief Rabbis. There were rifts. New Reform congregations were started in Manchester and Bradford even in Nathan Marcus Adler’s day. The United Synagogue failed to respond quickly and sensitively enough to the needs of East European, East London Jewry in the 1880s, and so the rival Federation of Synagogues was born. A fierce argument over shehitah in the 1890s led to a damaging conflict between Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler and the leadership of the Machzikei Hadath congregation, in which leading rabbinic authorities abroad were involved. In 1910 a group of thirty immigrant rabbis met in Leeds to express their disquiet at the drift in religious standards throughout the community. In 1911, after Hermann Adler’s death, the view was publicly expressed that “the Chief Rabbinate...has gone to pieces.” It took the considerable gifts and indefatigable energies of the new Chief Rabbi, Joseph Hertz, to restore the situation.

Anglo-Jewry had many failings. Its levels of religious observance were low. Its reservoirs of scholarship were meagre. It had neither the rabbinic traditions of Germany nor the sheer numbers of American Jewry. It produced no new systems, ideologies or philosophies. Despite the intense prompting of Nathan Marcus Adler, for almost a century it refused to regard Jewish education as a priority other than to Anglicise the children of the immigrants and render them fit for employment. Adler himself complained bitterly about the “gentlemen who tremble at the idea of an exclusive Jewish school and think it injurious to our present or future social position.” Visitors to Anglo-Jewry were caustic about its complacency, its anti-intellectualism and its indifference to matters of the spirit. Chaim Weizmann, arriving in Manchester in 1904, declared, “Materialist, commercial England has succeeded in burning out everything exalted in our Jews, so that the creation of a Jewish intelligentsia here has become an impossible task.” Ahad Ha-am described the Anglo-Jewish community “a cemetery with pretty gravestones.” Those who were used to the internal wars of other communities and the heat they engendered found Anglo-Jewry at best lukewarm.

Behind this, though, lay one reality whose impressiveness grows with the passing of the years. Without being by any standards exceptionally religious, Anglo-Jewry kept faith with the classic religious terms of its heritage. With few exceptions, it did not revolt into secularity. It did not rewrite the rules of Judaism. And it did not redefine itself into a merely ethnic community. The am did not cease to be an edah. Anglo-Jewry remained a community of faith.

Faced with a choice between the paths of Hirsch on the one hand, Schechter and Kaplan on the other, there is no doubt which way Anglo-Jewry’s religious leaders would have turned. They would have chosen the way of Hirsch. They knew that Judaism was, is and can only be a religious faith, and that faith itself – emunah – means fidelity to the covenant accepted at Sinai and transmitted across the generations. Revealingly it was Chief Rabbi Hertz, a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, who most closely resembled Hirsch in his passionate defence of Torah min hashamayim, “Torah from heaven,” when it came under attack. In The New Paths (1926) and his Pentateuch, a brilliant summation of classic commentary and modern scholarship, Hertz defended traditional faith from its critics and made it clear that he rejected any compromise or adaptation. His predecessor Hermann Adler did likewise in the controversy at the Hampstead Synagogue in 1892, as did Sir Israel Brodie when the question arose as to whether the United Synagogue could develop along Conservative lines. They were guardians of the heritage of Sinai, and they held firm.

But so too did other Orthodox leaders elsewhere. Anglo-Jewry’s singular achievement was that it kept faith at the centre of community as the tabernacle had once stood at the centre of the camp. In any other age this would not have been unusual. It is what Jews had always done or tried to do, whether in ancient Israel or exilic Babylon or any of the countries of their dispersion. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became so rare as to be remarkable. Elsewhere there were Reform, Liberal and Conservative Jews, secular Jews in a rainbow variety of shadings, socialist, anarchist, culturalist, autonomist and integrationist, and there were cultural, pragmatic and utopian Zionists, each redrafting the constitution of Jewish life and in the process weakening the solidarity between Jews, their past, their traditions, and one another. Some emphasised am, Jewish peoplehood. Others emphasised edah, Judaism as a faith. But none could deny that the living temple which was the Jewish community lay in ruins. They argued merely over what was to be saved. In Britain, despite the tensions and exceptions, the community as such remained intact.

Too little attention has been paid to this achievement. Historians tend to notice it and then explain it away as the product of external factors. For them it had less to do with Jews, their loyalty and their communal leadership than with British society and its unusual character. This may be part of the explanation, but it cannot be all, for it ignores an important point. Germany and America were utterly different from one another. Yet their respective Jewries developed in strikingly similar ways.

In Germany religion was closely related to the State. In America there was a principled separation of Church and State. In Germany membership of the Jewish community was compulsory. In America it was wholly voluntary. Germany had a strong national culture and a sense of its own history and continuity. America was pluralist from the outset, valuing religious and ethnic diversity and giving it constitutional protection. In Germany Jews had to fight for emancipation. In America they did not. Germany was used to strong central religious institutions. America was a land of freely constructed independent congregations. In Germany Jews had to struggle for the right to secede from the organised Jewish community. In America there was no organised Jewish community from which to secede. In Germany antisemitism played a central part in Jewish-gentile relations. In America it did not.

Whichever factor we regard as crucial, if it was present in Germany it was absent in America and vice versa. Yet in relation to the development of Jewish life the two communities have more in common with one another than they have with Anglo-Jewry. In both countries Orthodoxy was reduced to a minority and there was a predominance of Reform. In Anglo-Jewry the opposite was the case. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that external factors alone were not decisive. Whether it was the structure of the community, or the wisdom of its leaders, or the sheer loyalty of the majority of Jews, the synagogue stood firm in Anglo-Jewry on its ancient religious foundations in a way that it did not elsewhere.

Individual Jews in Britain had their differences with the community. They protested, they left, they disaffiliated, and in extreme cases they converted or married out of the faith or both. They did so, as far as we can tell, not less and not more than Jews elsewhere. But they did so as individuals. They did not do so as a community. When they identified with the community, whatever their private doubts and hesitations, they respected its long history and religious integrity. They did not seek to reform or reconstruct it. When they stood within its precincts they knew that the ground on which they stood was holy. The result was that though individuals left, the community remained as guardian and living embodiment of Jewish faith. The question is, what significance does this have?