Orthodoxy and Jewish Peoplehood

Two issues, the historical and cultural dimensions of emancipation, divided Orthodoxy. But have they fragmented it? To answer this we must confront a third dilemma of modernity. It concerns the concept of the covenantal community. In traditional Jewish thought, the bearer of the covenant was keneset Yisrael, the Jewish people in its totality – past, present, and future. The Jewish community was linked not merely by faith but also by birth. It was a biological family.¹ (Minneapolis, MN: Seabury Press, 1983). The commands of the Torah were not addressed universally to mankind, nor restrictively to Jews who voluntarily chose the life of faith, but to a particular people. Judaism was therefore particularist in its concept of a chosen people,² (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983). and at the same time inclusivist in its attitudes towards the members of that people. The Jew who sins remains a Jew.

footnotes: ¹ On this concept see Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election ² On the stresses to which this concept has been subject in modernity see Arnold Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology

What was the fate of Jewish peoplehood in modernity? On the one hand Judaism is too deeply predicated on such an idea for it to have been jettisoned by any Orthodox thinker. On the other, the Jewish people was itself disintegrating at an alarming pace, divided into non-Orthodox readings of Judaism as religion, and secular interpretations of Judaism as a national, ethnic, cultural, or political entity. How did Orthodoxy respond to this process? On the first two issues, as we have seen, the great figures of Hungarian and German Orthodoxy, Moses Sofer and Samson Raphael Hirsch, adopted different approaches. On this third issue they took the same approach, while Orthodoxy elsewhere took other directions.

ENGLISH AND FRENCH MODELS OF EMANCIPATION It is striking, in retrospect, how the great arguments over Orthodoxy were shaped in Germany and Hungary, two communities that were in many respects atypical. It was there, and subsequently in America, that Orthodoxy was forced into self-definition by the presence of a powerful and aggressive Reform movement, whereas Reform made no headway in Eastern Europe and was a relatively marginal factor in the Jewish communities of nineteenth-century France, Italy, and England.

In England, emancipation took place both earlier and more smoothly than in Germany.³ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); David Cesarani (ed.), The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Anne and Roger Cowen, Victorian Jews through British Eyes (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Littman Library, 1987); Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England (Philadelphia: JPS, 1979); id., Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990); Vivian Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain since 1858 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990); Bill Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, 1740–1875 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976). As early as the end of the eighteenth century, Jews had become considerably integrated into English society. At the top end of the social scale, wealthy Jewish bankers and businessmen had made their entry into London social life and had acquired the dress and manners of their non-Jewish peers. In the summer of 1755 the famous Rabbi Chayyim Yosef Azulai visited London to collect funds for his yeshiva in Hebron. He found that the leading Jews were not there: they had left for their country houses. Jews had been admitted to Masonic lodges and elected as Fellows of the Royal Society. At the lower levels, too, the Jewish street-traders became part of their urban environment and quickly adopted its way of life.⁴

footnotes: ³ For useful studies of Anglo-Jewish history see Eugene C. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1880–1920 ⁴ See Endelman, “The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England.”

The result was that there was little pressure for reform of Jewish faith or practice. England was altogether a less intellectual and ideological society than Germany. Jews themselves quickly acquired this trait. Their route to social acceptance did not lie through education and ideas, but through trade, finance, wealth, and the accoutrements of rank and civic responsibility. Political life, too, was free of the sharp demands made on Jews in some other European countries. “Emancipation in England was unique in modern Jewish history: it was not conditional. Parliament did not expect Jews to reform any of their beliefs or practices as a prerequisite to full political equality; in fact Parliament had little interest in what Jews thought or prayed or how they acted in their shops and synagogues.”⁵ English society also lacked a focused and politically powerful strand of antisemitism of the kind that periodically surfaced in Germany.

footnotes: ⁵ Ibid., 242.

There was, notwithstanding, a discreet social pressure for religious life to be more decorous and to divest itself of those traditional customs that sat awkwardly with English notions of ecclesiastical etiquette. But these were cosmetic changes, and were undertaken by the Orthodox congregations themselves. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Great Synagogue introduced the wearing of canonicals – gown and bands – by the chazan. In the 1840s Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler (1803–90) banned conversation during services, forbade very young children to attend synagogue, ended the sale of synagogue honours, and encouraged the creation of all-male choirs.

As a result, until the 1930s there was no serious movement of Reform. A Reform congregation, the West London synagogue, had been founded in 1840, but it lacked the radical thrust of its counterparts in Germany and Hungary. Only two others were created in the nineteenth century. The necessary accommodations had already been made by Orthodoxy, which became overwhelmingly the voice of the religious establishment.

In France, the Jewish experience was altogether different.⁶ (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1986), 31–60; Dominique Schnapper, “The Jews and Political Modernity in France,” in S. N. Eisenstadt (ed.), Patterns of Modernity, vol. i: The West (London: Frances Pinter, 1987), 157–71; Graetz, “The History of an Estrangement.” The issue of emancipation had been raised by the Revolution, and Jews became citizens of the new state in 1790–1. Napoleon, however, had a clearly articulated programme for the integration and assimilation of Jews into French life. This proceeded through a series of highly formal stages: the Assembly of Jewish Notables in 1806, the convening of a “Sanhedrin” in 1807, and the establishment of a consistorial system for the governance of Jewish life in 1808. The rabbinate and the direction of Judaism itself were thus brought into the ambit of the state.

footnotes: ⁶ For recent studies see Ilan Greilshammer, “Challenges to the Institutions of the Jewish Community of France during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Stuart Cohen and Eliezer Don-Yehiya (eds.), Conflict and Consensus in Jewish Political Life

Undoubtedly the consistorial structure had the effect of hastening the process of assimilation, with occasionally tragic results. Both the son and son-in-law of Rabbi Emanuel Deutz (1763–1842), grand rabbin de France, converted to Christianity. But it also, paradoxically, restored to French Jewry a rough equivalent of the kehillah or community-wide government that had been lost in other countries. French Jewry remained unified and, as in England, Reform made no headway during the nineteenth century. To be sure, there were periodic attempts to make the synagogue conform more closely to non-Jewish models. In 1856 the accommodationists succeeded in establishing a number of reforms. The number of piyutim (liturgical poems) was to be reduced. Greater use was to be made of the sermon as a vehicle of edification. Clerical robes were to be worn. The length of services was to be reduced, and services themselves were to be conducted with greater decorum. But the instigator of these changes, grand rabbin Ullmann, whom Michael Graetz describes as “the most progressive and most inclined towards reform of the rabbis to have entered the Central Consistory,”⁷ was none the less emphatic that no change was to be contemplated that could not be justified by halakhah.

footnotes: ⁷ Graetz, “The History of an Estrangement,” 165.

English and French Jewry, in their different ways, thus succeeded in confronting modernity without the sharp ideological wars that marked the communities of Germany and Hungary in the nineteenth century. This is not to deny that there was a continuing Anglo-Jewish debate during the nineteenth century about the demands and price of emancipation, that non-Jews occasionally questioned whether Jews could ever become fully integrated, and that Jews questioned whether they wished to be. But for the most part the debate was mild, and most Anglo-Jews were untouched by it.⁸, 20 (1964), 113–43; id., Post-Emancipation Jewry: The Anglo-Jewish Experience, The Seventh Sacks Lecture (Oxford: Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, 1980). The Orthodox programme of aesthetic modifications alongside a loyal adherence to halakhah – innovation in style but not in substance – was strikingly similar to that undertaken by Samson Raphael Hirsch in his early years. Hirsch himself had been a candidate for the English chief rabbinate in 1844, and the man who was appointed, Nathan Marcus Adler, had been his predecessor at Oldenburg. But the social environment was different. In England and France, Jewish institutions were not fragmented by the struggle for emancipation. The pressures which in Germany gave birth to radical Reform were here less sharp and less disruptive of religious continuity.

footnotes: ⁸ See Israel Finestein, “Anglo-Jewish Opinion during the Struggle for Emancipation,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England

Adjectival Judaism, the division of the community into denominations, was for the most part avoided. The necessary adjustments could be made within the boundaries of halakhah by Orthodoxy itself. As Robert Liberles summarizes it, “the Jewish establishment responded to emancipation in time to avoid a 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.”⁹, 230.

footnotes: ⁹ Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context

EASTERN EUROPE In Eastern Europe Reform made no significant progress, but for quite different reasons. The processes of enlightenment and emancipation were there much slower in making their mark. More importantly, the East European intellectual climate was more collectivist in character. West European liberalism envisaged the modern state as the neutral arena of competing interests, and saw religion as a function of private life. The central thrust of early Reform was the transformation of Judaism into a religion in this narrow sense, by eliminating its collectivist, national dimension. This held no resonance for the Jews of Eastern Europe, whose revolutionary modernity took the form of secularism – cultural, socialist, or Zionist – which stressed the national at the expense of the religious.

Ironically, it was the German socialist Moses Hess who, in the 1860s, gave the earliest formulation of this Eastern orientation.¹⁰ (New York: New York University Press, 1985). He was deeply critical of Western Reform as the attempt to deny Judaism’s national component. It sought “to separate the political from the religious element in Judaism.”¹¹, trans. Bloom, Foreword. In so doing it hoped to reduce antisemitism and provide a religious basis for social integration. But it was based on several miscalculations. First, it underestimated the deep roots of German antisemitism. “Because of the Jew-hatred which surrounds him, the German Jew is only too eager to cast aside everything Jewish and to deny his race.” But “even baptism itself does not save him from the nightmare of German Jew-hatred.”¹² Second, it was a self-deception which robbed Jews of national pride and was seen as such by non-Jews. “It is not the old Orthodox Jew, who would rather have his tongue cut out than betray his nationality – but the modern Jew, who denies his nationality, who is being despised.”¹³, trans. from Avineri, Moses Hess, 194. Third, it misconceived the very basis of Jewish identity. Judaism is a matter of birth more than faith. The apostate Jew remains a Jew. When Jews pray they do so collectively, on behalf of the entire people. Jewish law functioned to preserve the identity of the people in its dispersions. “First and foremost, Judaism is a nationality.”

footnotes: ¹⁰ For a recent study see Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism ¹¹ In Hess, Rome and Jerusalem ¹² Ibid., 25. ¹³ Hess, Rome and Jerusalem

This cluster of ideas – later to become the basis of much collectivist Jewish thought, from Achad Ha’am’s secular Zionism to Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionism – was revolutionary for its day. It led to clear conclusions that ran directly counter to the assumptions of the West. Judaism as religion without peoplehood held no future. “The Jew who does not believe in the national rebirth of his people can only work for the liquidation of his religion.”¹⁴ Precisely because of its national dimension, however, Judaism had a future to which even Christianity could not aspire. The prevailing Christian wisdom was that Judaism was an anachronism, long since superseded by Christianity. Hess argued the opposite: that because Christianity was purely a faith while Judaism was the code of a people, the former was threatened by secularization while the latter was not. Faith might be in danger, but peoples survived.

footnotes: ¹⁴ Ibid., 58.

Hess’s analysis led directly to Zionism. But he was also acute enough to see that the real roots of collective Jewish sentiment lay in the East, not the West to which he belonged. In Russia, Poland, Prussia, Galicia, and Turkey, the mass of Jews “devoutly pray day and night to the God of their ancestors for the restoration of the Jewish realm. They have preserved the living kernel of Judaism – I mean Jewish nationality – in much more authentic fashion than their Western brethren, who wanted to revive everything in the beliefs of our ancestors – except the hope for the re-establishment of the Jewish nation.” He added, “Our cultured Western Jews, living in opulent luxury, have no idea with what deep longing the great Jewish popular masses of the East await their final deliverance from an exile lasting two thousand years.”¹⁵

footnotes: ¹⁵ Ibid., 186.

Hess was ahead of his time. It was not until the Russian pogroms of 1881–3 and the Dreyfus case of the mid-1890s had energized Pinsker and Herzl into formulating their programmes that the Zionist movement gained critical momentum. In the previous chapter we considered the complex pattern of Orthodox responses to Zionism. But Hess spoke to something more profound than the specifics of the Jewish return to the land. He identified a component of peoplehood that lay at the heart of Jewish religiosity. It was precisely this that was most at risk in West European Jewish accommodations to emancipation. Hess singled out for praise the group of Jews most derided by the enlightened: the Hasidim. It was they, he argued, not Reform, who had managed the transition to modernity without losing “the living Jewish spirit.” They retained Jewish collectivism (or as Hess put it, the “socialist life”) as against the individualism of Western Jews which was so damaging to the deep structures of Judaism.

In one sense, of course, Hess’s hope was unfulfilled. The secularizing ambitions of the post-Herzl Zionists led to the estrangement of most of Eastern Europe’s religious leaders from the cause, Hasidim among them. But the collectivist strand remained prominent in their thought, despite their often bitter battles with the maskilim, proponents of Enlightenment. The great Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (1817–93; known as the Netziv), for example, head of the Volozhin yeshiva, was an active supporter of the Chibbat Zion movement in its early years and urged Orthodox Jews to support settlement in Israel despite the fact that many of the settlers were irreligious Jews.¹⁶ (Jerusalem: Artscroll, 1988). His conception of the Jewish people as “one union” also led him strongly to oppose setting up separatist Orthodox communities – a tendency which he considered “as painful as a dagger in the body of the nation.”¹⁷, i. 42.

footnotes: ¹⁶ Rabbi Barukh Halevi Epstein’s biography (1928) has been translated into English by Moshe Dombey, My Uncle, the Netziv ¹⁷ Meshiv Davar

Two alumni of the Volozhin yeshiva, Rabbi Isaac Reines and Rabbi Abraham Hacohen Kook, went on to develop the implications of peoplehood in different directions. Reines saw the emergent Zionist movement as a practical solution to several of the most pressing Jewish needs.¹⁸ (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1985). See also Hayyim Z. Reines, “Isaac Jacob Reines,” in Leo Jung (ed.), Jewish Leaders (1750–1940) (New York: Bloch, 1953), 275–93. In the light of the Russian persecutions of the 1880s it was clear that Jews needed a safe haven away from Europe. A Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel would also be the most effective safeguard against assimilation. And the Zionist movement itself both encouraged and expressed national identity. Peoplehood and Judaism, he argued, were inseparable. “Peoplehood is the main foundation of the faith of Israel. Even when they were dispersed among the nations, Jews were identified as a specific people because of their hope to return to their land. The combination of a specific people with a specific religion is conceivable only when it has a land or the hope of a return to it.”¹⁹, v. 9; quoted in Bat-Yehudah, Ish Hame’orot, 87.

footnotes: ¹⁸ For a recent study of Reines, see Geulah Bat-Yehudah, Ish Hame’orot ¹⁹ Isaac Reines, Or Chadash

Reines radically distinguished the Zionist programme from the metahistorical religious framework of redemption and the messianic age. For that reason, Orthodoxy could have no ground for opposing it as an attempt to bring redemption by human activity, a secularization of the messianic idea. On the contrary, he argued, it was a pragmatic solution to a practical problem. For that reason he was deeply supportive of Herzl’s political Zionism and critical of the attempt to give Zionism a cultural dimension. He went so far as to support Herzl’s abortive “Uganda scheme,” a plan to establish a Jewish colony in British East Africa as an immediate place of refuge. Nor could the movement be delegitimized on the grounds that it was led by secular Jews. Religious intention, he argued, is necessary for commandments between man and God. But Zionism was about the saving of Jewish lives – a commandment between man and man, to be measured by its results, not its motivation.

Reines was also one of the few Eastern Europeans to attempt an educational synthesis along the lines of Samson Raphael Hirsch’s torah im derekh eretz. He opened a yeshiva in Sventsyany which combined secular with talmudic studies. The project aroused fierce local opposition and had to be abandoned. Twenty years later he revived it in the form of the Torah Veda’at yeshiva in Lida (1905). It was aimed at producing two groups of alumni: rabbis and educated laymen. The former needed sufficient secular education and training in the art of homiletics to command respect in congregations. The latter needed basic secular skills to be qualified for a livelihood, together with deep talmudic grounding. It was an effort to heal the growing rift between the maskilim (Jewish advocates of enlightenment) and the religious, and it eventually succeeded in attracting a large student body and a distinguished reputation.²⁰, 25–28.

footnotes: ²⁰ On this project see Lamm, Torah Umadda

Reines was a pragmatist; Kook was a mystic.²¹. For him, Jewish unity was more than an ethical commitment and a practical concern. It lay at the heart of his vision of the universe. All things radiated a divine light. Existence in its totality is holy. Evil and error arise only when a part is detached from the whole. All secularly proceeds from the idea of independence; all holiness discloses the sense of interdependence. For a Jew, to be united with God is to be united with the Jewish people. When the Jewish people is united with God, humanity itself is united. The concepts of unity and harmony are thus the axes on which his whole philosophy turns.

footnotes: ²¹ On Kook see Yaron, Mishnato shel Harav Kook

For Kook, secularization and the divisions within the Jewish world were intimately related. Both stemmed from exile, and both would be cured by a return of Jews to their land. If there was something profoundly wrong about secular Zionism, for Kook it was the error of taking the part for the whole, in this case seeing nationalism as an end in itself. But there was also a saving dimension. The Zionist movement was an expression of collective as opposed to individual Jewish identity. And this for Kook was a constitutive element of Jewish spirituality. Criticizing secular Zionism, he added: “Nevertheless it cannot be denied that, with all this, we have here also a great positive force, a deep love for our people, a firm dedication to extend the practical work of rebuilding Eretz Yisrael, to direct the spirit of our generation to draw closer to the land and the nation, in keeping with the historic character of our people.”²² (3 vols.; Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1962), ii, no. 427, 79–80.

footnotes: ²² Abraham Isaac Kook, Igerot Harayah

A central theme in the work of Rabbi Kook is that of teshuvah, return, understood in its full range of biblical and rabbinic resonances: spiritual return to Torah, geographical return to Eretz Yisrael, and affective return to the Jewish people. “The basic step in teshuvah is to attach oneself again to the soul of the people.”²³ (Jerusalem: Yeshivat Or Etzion, 1966), iv, no. 7. In this remark of Kook there is something evocative of the sentence with which Moses Hess began his Rome and Jerusalem, the work which marked his conversion from communism to Zionism: “Here I stand again in the midst of my people, after being estranged from it for twenty years, and actively participate in its feasts and fasts, in its memories and hopes, in its inner spiritual struggles and its contacts with the civilized nations of the world.”²⁴, 13. The awakening sense of identification with peoplehood seemed, to Kook, to presage not only a return to the land but ultimately a return to Jewish spirituality.

footnotes: ²³ Id., Orot Hateshuvah ²⁴ Hess, Rome and Jerusalem

The prevailing attitudes of secularism and atheism were, he argued, a natural reaction against a Judaism that had become overly spiritualized by prolonged exile. They were part of a dialectical process that would eventually restore to the Jewish soul a plenitude it had lost. In exile Judaism had gradually become confined to the study of texts and the observance of prescribed religious acts. It had lost its contact with nature, work, society, and culture, with the fullness of human experience. Secular Zionism, socialism, and even atheism were not to be understood simply as destructive forces, but as protests against the atrophy of Judaism. Zionism would restore to Judaism its link with peoplehood and land, socialism its dimension of social justice, and atheism its realization that the divine cannot be compassed by concepts or finite human understanding.

These were more positive evaluations of Jewish rebellion than had ever been seen before in the rabbinic literature, and could be justified only by Kook’s mysticism and his sense of the dynamic of modern Jewish history. Rebellion was a passing phenomenon, part of the “pangs of cleansing”²⁵ (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1963), 124. that must precede redemption. Eventually it would be absorbed into the renaissance of religious creativity that a return to the holy land would set in motion. “The sounds of song, the majesty of the holy tongue, the beauty of our precious land, which was chosen by God, the ecstasy of heroism and holiness, will return to the mountains of Zion.”²⁶

footnotes: ²⁵ Abraham Isaac Kook, Orot ²⁶ Ibid., 134.

EAST EUROPEAN ECHOES For Reines and Kook, the theme of peoplehood was primarily linked to the efforts of Jews to re-establish a Jewish settlement in Zion. But it had other dimensions and could be taken in different directions. One of these lay in the mysticism of the group of Hasidim known as Lubavitch or Chabad. Its first leader or rebbe, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady (1745–1813), had developed the mystical implications of the command “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” In the physical domain there was division; in the spirit there was unity. Jews were distinct as bodies, but they had a collective soul. “Your neighbour” was, in this sense, “yourself.” Jews were therefore bound by a mutual love that underlay the apparently confrontational commands to rebuke the wrongdoer and hate evil. Jewish unity was a counterpart of, and embraced by, the unity of God.²⁷, i. 32.

footnotes: ²⁷ Tanya

These themes were developed by the rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, into a practical programme of worldwide outreach to alienated Jews.²⁸, 139–60. Jews are, for Chabad as for Judah Halevi in the Middle Ages, qualitatively different from non- Jews.²⁹, i. I; Judah Halevi, Kuzari, i. 103, 115. The difference lies not so much in what Jews do, or what they are called on to do, as in what they are. Their souls have a different structure. This has immediate practical implications. Even the most estranged Jew possesses an intrinsic holiness. The Jewish imperative is to disclose this holiness by removing the “husks” which conceal it. Chabad can therefore regard the non- or anti-religious lifestyle of alienated Jews as a superficial phenomenon, unrelated to the essence of character. Using the early Hasidic metaphor that the souls of Jews are like the letters of a Torah scroll (and a Torah scroll which has a letter missing or erased is invalid), it sees its task as restoring all Jews to their religious heritage so that the congregation of Israel once again regains its essential completeness.

footnotes: ²⁸ For a study of Lubavitch’s work among one particular group of estranged Jews – Israeli emigrants living in New York – see Shokeid, Children of Circumstances ²⁹ Tanya

This is an apolitical religious programme³⁰ which has made Chabad unique in the modern Jewish world in the intensity and scope of its efforts to bring about religious return. The State of Israel as such does not figure centrally in its thought, which explains the apparent contradiction between its positive commitment to Israel as a Jewish home – something that has aroused the violent opposition of the anti-Zionist Hasidic group, Satmar – and its denial of redemptive significance to the state. At one time, indeed, Chabad – in the form of its fifth rebbe, Rabbi Shalom Baer Schneersohn (1866–1920) – expressed strong opposition to the secularizing aims of the Zionist movement, a critique shared by most of the East European Torah leadership of the early twentieth century.³¹ (London: Hamadfis, 1958), 179–244. Chabad shares with Rabbi Reines the clear distinction between the political and pragmatic forces that shape the Jewish presence in Israel and the quite different spiritual forces that govern the dynamic from exile to redemption. Unlike Reines, its primary concern is with the latter.

footnotes: ³⁰ To be sure, in recent years the Lubavitch movement has been actively and controversially involved in Israeli politics. This involvement dismayed many of its supporters, and has been followed by the more usual pattern of detachment. ³¹ See I. Domb, The Transformation: The Case of the Neturei Karta

A quite different approach to peoplehood characterized the thought of Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn (1857–1935).³² (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978). Hirschensohn was the son of an East European rabbi who had been, with Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Rabbi Elijah Guttmacher, one of the early supporters of the movement for Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel. He had moved to Safed in 1848, where Chaim was born. Chaim’s sympathetic involvement with secular aspects of Zionist renewal brought him – as it did his contemporary, Rabbi Kook – into conflict with the traditionalists of the old yishuv, and in 1904 he left for America, where he served as a rabbi.

footnotes: ³² On Hirschensohn see Eliezer Schweid, Demokratiah Vehalakhah

Initially he had shared the assumption of both Reines and Kook that the secular rebellion was a passing phase in Jewish history. On arrival in America he discovered that the abandonment of Judaism had gone further and deeper than he had suspected, and the situation was not about to be reversed. More than any other Orthodox thinker of his time, he confronted the implications of secularization for Judaism generally and halakhah specifically.

He noted a fundamental asymmetry between the outlook of the religious and non-religious Jew. For the former, he argued, religion was inseparable from peoplehood. But for the latter, peoplehood was separable from religion. The religious must therefore work for the promotion of Torah within the Jewish people, but they must recognize that the sense of peoplehood itself – even secularized – was a positive value. That sense persisted in all Jews who had not deliberately abandoned their identity or totally assimilated. “The religion of Israel is national, but the nationality of Israel is not exclusively religious.”³³ (6 vols.; St. Louis, MO: Moirester Printing Co., 1919–28), iv. 244. Rabbi Hirschensohn draws from the prophetic literature, in the spirit of Maimonides’ moving Epistle on Martyrdom, to argue that even when the majority of Israel were idolaters, they were still called “the people of God”: a sinning nation, but a nation none the less. The Jewish people without Judaism was impoverished, living a spiritual death, but it remained the Jewish people. And since Judaism was essentially national, religion must drive the Jew to identify with his people, even if identifying with his people did not drive the Jew to Judaism.

footnotes: ³³ Chayyim Hirschensohn, Malki Bakodesh.

Central to his thought is the idea of the covenant at Sinai as the voluntary undertaking of mutual obligations by God and Israel. Halakhah must once again be sovereign among the Jewish people, but this could not be achieved by coercion. Jewish law in the present must be informed by a clear sense of history and of the profound differences between the traditional and modern situation of the Jew in society. Hirschensohn was not a Conservative thinker, admitting historical development in the halakhah. Halakhah, as he put it once, is not to be judged by history; history is to be judged by halakhah.³⁴ But this halakhic view of history would immediately reveal that whereas in pre-modern times rabbis had the power to enforce adherence by restrictive legislation, gezerot, a similar approach today would have the opposite result and increase defections. Utterly opposed to Reform, which he saw as the abandonment of halakhah, he believed that Jewish law itself contained both the resources and the imperative to confront changing social circumstance.³⁵ No Orthodox thinker so stressed the values of democracy, individual freedom, and the need of halakhah to reckon with the reality of a non-religious Jewish majority.

footnotes: ³⁴ Ibid., 196. ³⁵ Ibid., ii. 7–8.

Rabbi Hirschensohn, who died in the same year as Rabbi Kook, did not live to see the creation of a secular Jewish state. The half-century since their death has vastly deepened the historical consciousness of peoplehood through two momentous events. The Holocaust was not only the most grievous human tragedy in the long Jewish scroll of tears. It was also the intended destruction of a people considered as such. Jews were to be extinguished not for what they believed or did, but for what they were. The State of Israel, too, has become a focus of Jewish identity, transcending religious divisions, not so much through its inception in 1948 as by its isolation prior to the 1967 Six Day War and since. Jews in Israel and outside shared the feeling that they were each other’s only support.

The clearest theological definition of this mood was given by Rabbi Joseph Baer Soloveitchik in his essay “Kol Dodi Dofek.”³⁶, 9–56. Jews are, he argues, united by two covenants, the berit goral and the berit ye’ud, respectively the covenants of history and of destiny. The former was born in the shared historical experience of the exodus from Egypt. The latter was forged in the revelation of Torah at Sinai. The berit goral has four components: the sense Jews have of sharing a history; their collective emotional involvement in Jewish suffering; their mutual responsibility; and their collective action to improve the material situation of Jews. The concept of a berit goral, which has some affinities with Rabbi Hirschensohn’s idea of a national covenant, is an attempt to give religious dignity to the secular fact of peoplehood as it has emerged in twentieth-century Jewish history.

footnotes: ³⁶ Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut Veha’arakhah

Joseph Soloveitchik is, in this respect, a distinctively East European figure, drawing both on his memories of his grandfather, Rabbi Chayyim Soloveichik of Brisk,³⁷, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: JPS, 1983), 90. and on ideas borrowed from Chabad mysticism. Like Kook and Hirschensohn before him, Soloveitchik is pained by the phenomenon of an Orthodoxy in which the idea of kinship with all Jews is in eclipse. He tells of the moment in his youth when he first became aware of it, when “a famous German rabbi, fully observant, let slip the remark...that he had more in common with a German than he had with an irreligious Polish Jew.”³⁸ (Jerusalem: Tal Orot, 1974), 94. Such an attitude, he argues, at its most basic level is contradicted by history. What the rabbi and the irreligious Polish Jew had in common was Hitler’s hatred. But it is not history alone that enforces the berit goral. Faith in keneset Yisrael, the collective entity of Israel, is an essential component of Jewish belief, dramatically symbolized in Jewish law by the sacrifice brought by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement which atones collectively for the whole people. Accordingly, “a Jew who has lost faith in keneset Yisrael, even though he may personally sanctify and purify himself by being strict in his observance of the precepts and by assuming prohibitions upon himself – such a Jew is incorrigible and is totally unfit to join in the Day of Atonement which encompasses the whole of keneset Yisrael, in all its components and all its generations.”³⁹, ed. P. Peli (Jerusalem: WZO, 1974), 98.

footnotes: ³⁷ See id., Halakhic Man ³⁸ Id., Chamesh Derashot ³⁹ Id., Al Hateshuvah

THE HUNGARIAN AND GERMAN EXPERIENCE So while English and French Jewry preserved a framework of unity institutionally, East European Jewry – or at least many of its key thinkers – did so ideologically. The contrast between them was great. England and France had strong Jewish institutions, but no explicit ideology. No major thinkers emerged from either community during the nineteenth century. Eastern Europe had strong ideologies, but no institutional base into which they were translated. The yeshiva was, of course, the institutional home of Orthodoxy, but not of a collective Jewish voice.

Initially the Zionist movement seemed the appropriate vehicle. Rabbi Hirschensohn, Rabbi Soloveitchik, and Rabbi Naftali Berlin’s son, Meir Bar-Ilan, found a home in the Mizrachi movement, which had been founded by Rabbi Reines in 1902. The name Mizrachi stood for merkaz ruchani, Israel as the “spiritual centre” of the Jewish people. But Zionism itself, as we have seen, soon became a major source of dissension. At the tenth Zionist Congress (1911) the secularists insisted on including cultural as well as political objectives within the movement. A year later, Orthodox leaders from East and West joined to create Agudat Israel, as a secession from secular Zionism. Mizrachi was left to fight an increasingly difficult battle to maintain dialogue with both sides.

What the two Jewries had in common was the absence of a strong movement of Reform. It was in Hungary and Germany that the Reform movement made its greatest initial impact. Accordingly, it was in those two communities that a quite different ideology and strategy emerged: Orthodox secession.

The movement for Reform – or Neology, as it was then called – was initially less radical in Hungary than in Germany, but it precipitated an earlier crisis. Slow to make a substantive break with halakhah, the pace of reform accelerated rapidly at the time of the Hungarian revolution in 1848. In 1868 the government convened a General Jewish Congress to determine the basis of Jewish communal organization. The Neologists by then were in a majority: 126 to the 94 Orthodox representatives. They refused to accept the binding force of the Shulchan Arukh in determining the parameters of community regulation, at which point a section of the Orthodox group left the Congress. It petitioned parliament for the right to be exempt from the regulations, and in 1870 it succeeded. Hungarian Orthodoxy was thereafter divided into three groups: those who remained within the Congress; those who availed themselves of the 1870 law and organized themselves into separate communities; and the so-called “status quo” congregations, who allied themselves to neither Congress nor the separatists but retained their traditional regulations.

A similar process occurred throughout Germany.⁴⁰; Schwab, The History of Orthodox Jewry in Germany. As in Hungary, the initial impetus for Jewish communal unity came from outside, as a governmental administrative convenience. In Frankfurt, for example, the senate passed a law in 1864 removing all extant limitations on the political rights of its Jewish citizens, with one exception: that Jews were still required to hold membership in the Jewish community, which bore the responsibility for providing for their health-care, education, and religious facilities. The problem arose where Reform was in a majority on the community council and insisted on imposing halakhically unacceptable innovations on the Orthodox minority.

footnotes: ⁴⁰ On secession in German Jewry see Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context

In 1869, twenty-five Orthodox members of the Baden community broke away from the community board, the Oberrat, after the majority had voted to introduce organ music into the Sabbath services. The government upheld the legality of the action. Samson Raphael Hirsch, in Frankfurt, was quick to defend the secessionists against the charge of divisiveness. “Religious unity,” he wrote, “has not existed for some time and wherever it is missing, the enforced unity of the community...is nothing but an empty, meaningless form.”⁴¹, 202. It was clear that he was preparing to take similar action himself in Frankfurt.

footnotes: ⁴¹ Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context

Actual secession often proved unnecessary. In a number of German communities, Orthodoxy effectively used the threat of seceding to secure provisions in keeping with their requirements. But Hirsch was determined to make the break regardless. In 1876, the Prussian parliament passed a law of secession, after some years of struggle led by Hirsch. He now asked the members of his congregation to join him in withdrawing from the Frankfurt community. In fact only a small minority – some 80 of the 360 members – did so. A more traditional rabbi in Frankfurt, Moses Mainz, opposed the breach and negotiated an arrangement whereby Orthodox members would be exempt from contributing to the Reform school and synagogue, and Orthodox institutions, including a new synagogue and mikveh, would be supported by communal funds.

Hirsch remained implacable, and Germany’s leading talmudist, Rabbi Seligmann Baer Bamberger (the Würzburger Rav, 1807–78), was invited to give his opinion. Initially Bamberger had been inclined to support Hirsch, but on visiting the community was satisfied with the compromise solution and ruled that if the necessary guarantees were given, “it could no longer be deemed necessary to secede from the Reform community.” Hirsch rejected Bamberger’s verdict in two fierce open letters.

Frankfurt, like Hungarian Orthodoxy, was now divided in two. The rabbi of the new non-separatist Orthodox community was a distinguished talmudist, Rabbi Marcus Horovitz (1844–1910).⁴², 261–72. Hirsch’s own position, initially opposed to that of Rabbi Sofer in Hungary, was now launched on a path of convergence. As we saw in the last chapter, this occurred in the next generation in the person of Rabbi Solomon Breuer, Hirsch’s son-in-law and successor and a student of Rabbi Abraham Sofer. Breuer was a participant in the formation of Agudat Yisrael, which in bringing together Orthodox rabbinic leadership from across Europe sought at the same time to exclude non-secessionist (Gemeinde) rabbis and those associated with Mizrachi.

footnotes: ⁴² On Horovitz see Isaac Heinemann, “Marcus Horovitz,” in Jung (ed.), Jewish Leaders

The issue of secession had been, except for Samson Raphael Hirsch, a matter not of principle but of practical politics. Seligmann Bamberger, who opposed secession in Frankfurt, supported it in Karlsruhe, Vienna, and Wiesbaden. Another leader of German Orthodoxy, Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, said of it, “It has caused me many sleepless nights in which I have shed many tears.”⁴³ (New York: Bloch, 1958), 227. It arose when two factors were present: a government attempt to impose a unified Jewish communal structure, and an intransigent Reform majority. For the most part, Orthodox leaders of the nineteenth century in principle preferred communal unity, and abandoned it only when halakhic integrity made it impossible in practice. But a half-century later, largely through the efforts of Isaac Breuer, Solomon’s son, it had been elevated to the status of a fundamental shibboleth. Orthodoxy was now divided between those for whom concerted action sanctioned working with Jews who did not share their views, and those for whom such joint efforts represented a fundamental compromise of halakhic integrity.

footnotes: ⁴³ I. Unna, “Esriel Hildesheimer,” in Leo Jung (ed.), Guardians of our Faith

As with the debates over Zionism and torah im derekh eretz, the ground shared by all sides of the argument was substantial. All agreed on the non-negotiability of halakhah in any collective undertaking. All agreed that Reform on the one hand, secular Zionism on the other, were categorical breaches with traditional Judaism on which no legitimation could be conferred. The pain we discern in the writings of Kook at the conduct of the rebels he undertook to defend is no less than that of Moses Sofer or Samson Raphael Hirsch, who chose the path of disassociation. Nor was there, among the secessionists, a retreat from the principle of Jewish unity. The question was in part strategic, in part empirical, in part a matter of priority. Did isolation or communal involvement better promise the achievement of Torah goals? Was Jewish unity obtainable or irretrievably lost? And which took priority: the strengthening of Orthodoxy as a group or the Jewish people as a whole? In part, too, one can sense a difference of temperaments between Rabbi Kook, the poet and peacemaker, and Samson Raphael Hirsch, who had identified, as a child, with the figures of Pinchas and Elijah, the two biblical zealots who had fought to defend the faith.⁴⁴, 124–33.

footnotes: ⁴⁴ See Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context

CONSEQUENCES OF SECESSION Secession revealed, in paradoxical ways, the impact of secularization on Orthodoxy. The opening shot in the Jewish campaign for emancipation had been fired by Moses Mendelssohn. In his Jerusalem (1783) he had argued for freedom of religious conscience as the hallmark of the liberal state. Religious affiliation should be the private and voluntary choice of the individual. Mendelssohn’s two severest critics had been Rabbi Moses Sofer and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Sofer had carried on an unceasing battle against the Mendelssohnian projects of translating the Torah into German and developing a philosophical understanding of Judaism.⁴⁵, ed. J. N. Stern (Klausenberg: Friedman and Weinstein, 1929), i. 81a, 113b, 142b. Hirsch, in the Nineteen Letters, had accused Mendelssohn of approaching Judaism from outside, through metaphysics and aesthetics, rather than from within its own categories.⁴⁶, 123–25. Yet both Hirsch and the followers of Sofer relied on the Mendelssohnian argument of freedom of conscience in proposing secession. To be forced to associate with a non-traditional Jewish community, they contended, infringed the very liberties on which the modern state was based. Hirsch entitled one of his secessionist pamphlets “The Principle of Freedom of Conscience.”⁴⁷, 68.

footnotes: ⁴⁵ Moses Sofer, Derashot ⁴⁶ Hirsch, Nineteen Letters ⁴⁷ See Schwab, The History of Orthodox Jewry in Germany

The privatization of religion and its voluntariness, the two hallmarks of modernity, were seen by Hirsch and Sofer in their different ways as offering a genuine opportunity to safeguard tradition. Orthodoxy could now be detached from the constraints of communal unity and flourish on its own. Within the enclosure of the Pressburg yeshiva or the Frankfurt school and synagogue, a subcommunity of like-minded individuals could develop an environment in which Jewish values took on an intensity sufficient to counteract any cultural influences from outside. Hitherto Judaism had been marked by its inclusivity: it represented keneset Yisrael, the organic body of all Jews. Now Orthodoxy, both Hirsch’s and Sofer’s, was to be marked by its exclusivity. It was an elite. To be sure, it understood itself essentially as a defence of tradition. But it was tradition in a form unknown for eighteen hundred years, namely, tradition as maintained by a self-conscious, defiant minority within Jewry.

In an earlier chapter we spoke of two broad patterns of response to secularization: accommodation and resistance. Accommodation generally leads to pluralism and the denomination. Resistance leads, so Peter Berger has argued, to sectarian forms of religious organization, marked by their exclusivity and strong internal authority. The sect demands higher standards of behaviour and belief from its members than is the norm outside. It sees itself as a religious elite, often in a confrontational stance towards contemporary culture and less strenuous forms of religiosity. In applying this terminology to Judaism we must be careful to distinguish ideology from organization. Ideologically, Judaism does not sanction sectarianism. The ideas of inclusivity, the unity of the Jewish people, and the collective entity of Israel are deeply embedded in its beliefs, liturgy, and practice. But organizationally, sectarianism was always a possibility, though the communal structure of kehillah militated against it. This then was the significance of secession, and why Isaac Breuer was not wrong to see it as a fundamental principle. It meant the clear identification of tradition-in-modernity as a movement of resistance. Organizationally, it meant the sectarianization of Orthodoxy.

Sectarianism has consequences. We have already traced them. The two secessionist Orthodoxies, of Sofer and Hirsch, initially at variance on Zionism and secular culture, began to converge. Torah im derekh eretz, once seen as a principle to be embraced, rapidly came to be seen as a temporary concession of no lasting validity. The ardent longing of Rabbi Moses Sofer for a return to Israel was neutralized by Agudat Yisrael’s disengagement from the Zionist movement. Why was it that a negative view of Zionism and secular culture prevailed, rather than the reverse? The reason is that both, by the beginning of the twentieth century, had become stances of resistance. The alternatives – participation in secular culture and secular Zionism – involved accommodation. The debate over Jewish peoplehood and unity was thus the most profound of the three we have considered, for it had consequences for the other two. Those who emphasized peoplehood were driven towards a positive evaluation of derekh eretz and Zionism. Those who preferred Orthodox separatism were ineluctably driven to take a neutral and sceptical view of both.

But though sectarianism tends to produce a convergence of attitudes, it does not militate in favour of co-operation. Over the course of the twentieth century, a striking similarity developed between three kinds of Orthodoxy that had initially been vastly different: German Neo-Orthodoxy, Hungarian and East European traditionalism, and the various Hasidic groups. Most developed a preference for the Lithuanian yeshiva as the educational model. Most evolved a structure of authority on the Hasidic paradigm, with the rosh yeshivah (yeshiva head) emerging as a figure of comparable charisma to the rebbe in Hasidic life, and with a corresponding loss of authority to the congregational rabbinate. Most borrowed from German Orthodoxy its political activism. But the conflicts and clashes between them remain as heated as ever and show no signs of diminution. Sectarianism encourages a worldview which does not allow room for rival interpretations or pragmatic compromise. The difficulty encountered by separatist groups in agreeing on joint action is a direct result of separatism itself. In the modern situation, the price of intensity is disunity.

But secularization presses remorselessly towards the sect as the vehicle of religious continuity. The history of the great inclusivist visions of Orthodoxy in the twentieth century has been one of disillusionment. Secular culture, the Reform movement, and secular Zionism turned out to be less hospitable to tradition than the optimists had hoped. One of the seminal documents of modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Soloveitchik’s “The Lonely Man of Faith,” is written out of the depths of this tragic awareness. It begins by describing the double nature of the religious personality. On the one hand he is active, majestic, mastering creation; on the other he is passive, covenantal, serving creation. The two aspects are brought together in Judaism: both are part of the divine mandate to mankind. But in the closing pages of the essay this unity is suddenly split asunder. All this was in the past; in contemporary culture, Soloveitchik argues, majestic man has tried to absorb covenantal man. Secularity has invaded the sanctuary. The implication is clear, and is an exact reversal of Rabbi Kook’s. For Kook the holy would absorb and transform the secular. For Soloveitchik, it is the secular that threatens to absorb and profane the holy. The essay ends with the man of faith retreating into solitude. It is the psychological equivalent of the social processes that led Hirsch into secession.

Increasingly, then, the secessionist pattern that emerged in Hungary and Germany as a response to immediate political crisis has come to dominate Orthodoxy in Israel and America. Separatism was Orthodoxy’s reaction of self-preservation in a situation where it was a minority. As the Jewish world continues to secularize, Orthodoxy’s sense of minority standing deepens. As religion and society drift apart, the projects of torah im derekh eretz, religious Zionism, and communally involved Orthodoxy – all three of them efforts to hold religion and society together – come to seem less and less plausible. Secessionist Orthodoxy tacitly accedes to the secularization of the public domain and builds its strongholds elsewhere.

Thus is Orthodoxy not merely divided but fragmented. Secessionist Orthodoxy, miraculously rebuilding itself after the ravages of the Holocaust, has proved the power of separatism as a survival strategy in a deeply secularized pluralist society. Pluralism acts to its advantage, shifting the weight of identity-shaping culture to the “intermediate structures” – in this case, the Jewish day school, yeshiva, synagogue, and family – that are its particular strength. After the Holocaust, accommodation has ceased to be a self-conscious Jewish ideology. Indeed pluralization has meant that it is no longer a necessary strategy. Less and less is there a common public culture to accommodate to. Increasingly, even Jewish groups far removed from Orthodoxy are embracing its sociological insights and turning towards particularism, community, tradition, and authority and away from universalism, social action, liberalism, and autonomy.

In this environment, the three programmes through which Orthodoxy sought to bring together what social forces were driving apart – Torah and secular culture, Judaism and Zionism, and the Jewish people as a collective entity – run directly against the sociological tide. Charting the history of each of these three tendencies, we witness the dream of synthesis giving way to the reality of disintegration. Thus, with the exception of those Jewries that still maintain the English or French model of establishment Orthodoxy, they are presently in retreat.

CONTRARY FORCES The analysis would end there were it not for three powerful forces operating in the opposite direction. The first is the deep contradiction between contemporary social reality and Jewish belief. Ideologically, Judaism recognizes neither denominations nor sects. Sociologically, it is currently organized into just those forms. Ideologically, Judaism is inclusive of all Jews. Sociologically, exclusivist attitudes prevail in just those sectors of Orthodoxy that most strive to maintain continuity with the past. Jewish unity and peoplehood are too constitutive of Judaism to be abandoned. They are endorsed as values by almost every sector of the Jewish world. The fragmentation of peoplehood, brought about by modernity, cannot simply be acceded to without deep conflict with inescapable Jewish values.

Secondly, the Holocaust and the State of Israel have immeasurably deepened the sense of berit goral, the shared Jewish covenant of history. The ideological divisions of the nineteenth century were intense and substantive. They involved fundamental differences of opinion as to whether the Jewish future lay in European integration, enclosed Jewish communities, or a new settlement in Eretz Israel. The events of the twentieth century have greatly closed the gap between these alternatives. They have taught that Jewish destinies are interlinked. The institutional forms of the nineteenth century have persisted, but are now acutely dysfunctional. They prevent inter-Jewish reconciliation at the very time when it is sensed to be most necessary.

Thirdly, Jewish destiny is a sustained defiance of history. Nietzsche, a fierce and fateful critic of Judaism, saw the point clearly: “The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred, with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price.… They defined themselves counter to all those conditions under which a nation was previously able to live, was permitted to live – they made of themselves an antithesis to natural conditions.”⁴⁸ and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingxdale (London: Penguin, 1968), 134. A century later, having witnessed the consequences of a Nietzschean ethos that placed nature above morality, that Jewish vision remains undimmed. Judaism does not lightly resign itself to historical processes. But the fragmentation of Jewish peoplehood is the result of just such a resignation. It grew out of a shared conviction that in the modern world, Jewish tradition would survive only among a minority of Jews. The non-Orthodox preferred the path of the majority. Orthodoxy chose the way of the minority. But a resignation towards the future is profoundly out of key with traditional Jewish attitudes. Judaism radically distinguishes between fact and value. That secularization is a fact does not entail that it is to be embraced as a value. If it leads to denominationalism and sectarianism, that may itself be a reason to resist the process.

footnotes: ⁴⁸ Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

So we must reopen the question that history seemed to have closed. Is the recovery of Jewish peoplehood a possibility? Can we begin to undo the impact of secularization on Jewish consciousness? Can we learn to think of ourselves again as non-adjectival Jews?