Samson Raphael Hirsch: Conditional Co-existence

Moses, confronted with his mission, asked “Who am I?” The modern Jew uses the same words but asks a different question. For Moses the doubt was about personal worthiness. For the modern Jew the doubt is about personal identity. Whatever else was fragile about premodern Jewish existence, religious self-definition was not. The Jew had his selfhood established by the community in which he lived, fleshed out by the norms of practice and belief in which he moved, confirmed by the Christian or Moslem culture by which he was surrounded. The premodern literature asks questions about faith and reason, history and destiny, mind and cosmos, but not about what it is to be a Jew.

Modernity thus forced upon Jews the question of identity, in particular in terms of their relationship to secular culture and citizenship. Orthodoxy, which maintained a sense of unbroken continuity with the Judaism of the talmudic age and the Torah of Moses, was the least inclined of any of the Jewish responses of the nineteenth century, to see the need for redefinition. But no thinker could fail to see that the context of Jewish existence had radically changed, even if its content remained the same. Orthodoxy developed its own responses to ­modernity, and in this study we examine four of them: those of Samson Raphael Hirsch, Abraham Isaac Kook, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Moses Sofer. Seen schematically, as alternative models rather than as individuals set in unique social and historical circumstances, they map out the broad range of options available to Orthodoxy in an age unsympathetic to its commitments. Analysing their impact, we arrive at a paradoxical conclusion. But first, what were the problems they confronted?

SECULARISATION First was the process which threatened to marginalise all religious systems: secularisation. By this is generally meant the transfer of territory, property and more generally, society’s institutions and culture from ecclesiastic to lay power. Modernity is marked by the fact that religion ceases to dominate the way society organises itself, or the way individuals explain their decisions. Rational methods of scientific inquiry, the bureaucratic organisation of states and large organisations, the transformation of ethics from a code of duty to a system of producing beneficial results: all these effectively displace traditional systems of religious meaning. “Probably for the first time in history, the religious legitimations of the world have lost their plausibility not only for a few intellectuals and other marginal individuals but for broad masses of entire societies.”¹, New York: Doubleday, 1967, 125.

footnotes: ¹ Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion

Peter Berger, in his classic study of secularisation, notes that this does not constitute a terminal threat to organised religion. Contrary to the expectations of the more radical figures of the Enlightenment, religions have proved surprisingly tenacious in the modern world. What it does mean, however, is a relocation of the religious domain. Whereas the premodern individual found his religious meanings embedded in his vision of society and the cosmos, in a secular society:

Religion manifests itself in its peculiarly modern form, that is, as a legitimating complex voluntarily adopted by an uncoerced clientele. As such it is located in the private sphere of everyday social life and is marked by the very peculiar traits of this sphere in modern society. One of the essential traits is that of “individualisation.” This means that privatised religion is a matter of the “choice” or “preference” of the individual or the nuclear family, ipso facto lacking in common, binding quality. Such private religiosity, however “real” it may be to the individuals who adopt it, cannot any longer fulfil the classic task of religion, that of constructing a common world within which all of social life receives ultimate meaning binding on everyone.²

footnotes: ² Ibid., 132–133.

At first, this privatisation of religion – its metamorphosis from the political and coercive to the personal and freely chosen – was welcomed by Jews as providing the very basis for their equal entry into civil emancipation. This was the burden of Moses Mendelssohn’s tract Jerusalem (1783), in which he argued against the right of the state, or indeed of religious institutions, to coerce the individual conscience. Judaism, for Mendelssohn, is rational, nondogmatic, and since the destruction of the second Temple, essentially voluntary. As citizens, Jews share with others a set of beliefs and morals that are rational and universal. Their religious distinctiveness belongs to the private domain. His prescription for the modern Jew is: “Adapt yourselves to the morals and the constitution of the land to which you have been removed; but hold fast to the religion of your fathers too.”³, translated by Allan Arkush, University Press of New England, 1983, 133. See also Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study, University of Alabama Press, 1973.

footnotes: ³ Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem

Mendelssohn’s Judaism, though formally a mere restatement of tradition in heavily Maimonidean terms, is a perfect example of Berger’s thesis. In the world of the premodern Jew, Judaism was not a “religion” in the sense of a private confession or a voluntarily adopted set of domestic rituals. It was the substance of an enveloping culture, the content of the traditional educational curriculum and the legislative norm of the self-governing kehillah (community). Mendelssohn, unaware of the magnitude of the change he was proposing, had transferred Judaism from the public to the private domain.

EMANCIPATION The process of Emancipation, extending through Europe during the nineteenth century, brought about the changes Mendelssohn foresaw. Judaism’s public domain was effectively dismantled. The autonomous powers of the kehillah were gradually abdicated. Traditional schools (yeshivot) were replaced, either by Jewish schools which were modelled on their non-Jewish counterparts, or by the public schools themselves to which Jewish parents sent their children to be socialised. Jews felt bound to master the language and adopt the clothes and manners of the wider society. There was internal and external pressure to abandon the marks of Jewish distinctiveness.⁴, New York: Schocken Books, 1978; Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation, Jewish Publication Society, 1986.

footnotes: ⁴ See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation 1770–1870

This was not a neutral process, for Judaism in its classic expressions was marked precisely by what Emancipation rules out ab initio: community, self-government by Jewish law, and a precise set of deliberately distinctive practices It does not lend itself to privatisation. The promise of civil equality was at the same time a threat to Jewish continuity. It was, as Samuel Heilman has described it, “a new version of the age-old Christian efforts to convert Jews. Now instead of demanding conversion to Christianity, the Christians were demanding a Jewish conversion to secular citizenship.”⁵ 2:1 (February 1982), 23–24.

footnotes: ⁵ Samuel Heilman, “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy,” Modern Judaism

Some did indeed convert to Christianity. They were significant not so much by their numbers as by their visibility, for they included a number of highly prominent Jews, including some of Mendelssohn’s own children, and David Drach, son-in-law of the Chief Rabbi of France. Reforming tendencies appeared in the religious life especially of German Jews, directed at reducing those elements of Jewish faith and practice that were seen as impeding the move towards Jewish integration: kashrut, for example, or the hope for a return to a Jewish homeland. These were given intellectual weight by the scholars of the “Science of Judaism,” who both spiritualised the Jewish vocation and distanced the Jewish past as history rather than living tradition.⁶, 304–313. This has been challenged by Eliezer Schweid, Judaism and Mysticism according to Gershom Scholem, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985, 145–163. Reform theologians such as Samuel Hirsch, Solomon Formstecher and Salomon Steinheim, contributed to an evolutionary view of Judaism as the progressive self-realisation of the spirit.⁷, 3–19. Against these powerful social and intellectual pressures, Jewish tradition seemed to offer little but the mores and superstitions of a benighted medieval past.

footnotes: ⁶ I echo here the famous critical judgement of Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism ⁷ Katz, Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation

German Orthodoxy, however, had produced a series of distinguished rabbis who possessed both talmudic depth and a secular education, and who were able to speak with the accents of modernity. They included Isaac Bernays, Jacob Ettlinger, Seligmann Baer Bamberger, Azriel Hildesheimer and David Zvi Hoffman.⁸, London: The Mitre Press, 1950. The figure who left the most lasting impression, as the one who directly and systematically confronted the situation of Orthodoxy in an emancipated Europe, was Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888).

footnotes: ⁸ See Heilman, op. cit.; Hermann Schwab, The History of Orthodox Jewry in Germany

HIRSCH’S VIEW OF EMANCIPATION Hirsch⁹, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976; Robert Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838–1877, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985; see also Dayan Dr. I Grunfeld, Three Generations: The Influence of Samson Raphael Hirsch on Jewish Life and Thought, London: Jewish Post Publications, 1958, and his Introduction to Samson Raphael Hirsch, Judaism Eternal, vol. 1, London: Soncino, 1959. was born in Hamburg into a family which he was later to describe as “enlightened-religious.”¹⁰ Some measure of the “enlightenment” of his parents may be gauged by the fact that they sent him to be educated at the local non-Jewish grammar school, “in those days an extraordinary thing for pious Jewish parents to do.”¹¹, vol. 1, xxiii. The Hamburg of Hirsch’s youth contained a striking role model for a new kind of Orthodox leadership, Isaac Bernays (1792–1849), a student of the talmudist Abraham Bing and a graduate of Wurzburg University. No less a figure than Sigmund Freud described the impression Bernays made on his contemporaries: “This man educated us all.… Religion was no longer treated as rigid dogma, it became an object of reflection for the satisfaction of cultivated artistic taste and of intensified logical efforts, and the teacher of Hamburg [Bernays] recommended it finally not because it happened to exist and had been declared holy, but because he was pleased by the deeper meaning which he found in it or which he projected into it.”¹², New York: 1960, 17–22; quoted in Heilman, 37.

footnotes: ⁹ On Hirsch see Noah H. Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform: The Religious Philosophy of Samson Raphael Hirsch ¹⁰ Rosenbloom, 44. ¹¹ Grunfeld, Judaism Eternal ¹² E. Freud (ed.), Collected Letters of Sigmund Freud

At the age of twenty Hirsch went to study under Jacob Ettlinger (1798–1871), another university-educated rabbi and a distinguished Talmud commentator and responsa writer, and from there to the University of Bonn where he became friendly with the man who was later to be the target of some of his most severe criticisms, the future Reform leader Abraham Geiger (1810–1874). In 1830 he succeeded Nathan Marcus Adler as rabbi of Oldenburg, Moravia, where he quickly established himself as a moderniser, in form if not in content. He wore the then-new rabbinical gown with white bands – a break with traditional rabbinic dress – preached in German, introduced a choir, and abolished the recitation of the Kol Nidre prayer on Yom Kippur.¹³ It was there that he began his prolific writing career, and in 1836 published his Nineteen Letters on Judaism.

footnotes: ¹³ Rosenbloom, 66–69.

Its impact was immediate and dramatic. Orthodoxy had acquired a new voice. No longer was it on the defensive, resisting the new cultural conditions. Instead Hirsch had launched a counter-offensive. Here was an opportunity for the renewal of Judaism. “I bless emancipation,” he wrote, quickly adding the proviso, “I bless it, if Israel does not regard emancipation as the goal of its vocation, but only as a new condition of its mission.… We must become Jews, Jews in the true sense of the word, imbued with the spirit of the law, accepting it as the fountain of spiritual and ethical life. Then Judaism will gladly welcome emancipation as affording a greater opportunity for the fulfilment of its task, the realisation of a noble and ideal life.”¹⁴, prepared by Jacob Breuer, translated by Bernard Drachman, New York: Feldheim, 1960, 109–111.

footnotes: ¹⁴ Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters on Judaism

In retrospect it is difficult to capture the sense of revelation and revolution this conveyed at the time Perhaps the most impressive testimony comes from the diary of the then nineteen-year-old Heinrich Graetz, later to become a great historian of the Science of Judaism school. “With avidity I devoured every word. Disloyal though I had been to the Talmud, this book reconciled me with it. I returned to it as to a mistress deemed faithless and proved true, and determined to use my utmost effort to pierce to its depths.…”¹⁵

footnotes: ¹⁵ Cited in Rosenbloom, 71.

What, then, was the programme revealed in the Nineteen Letters? Part of the book’s power lies in the directness with which Hirsch addressed the doubts of a young, half-assimilated generation, resentful of their Jewish heritage. It begins with the letter of a young man to his friend, a rabbi to whom he confesses his reservations. Judaism, he says, has brought nothing but misery to its adherents. The Torah is an impediment to the enjoyment of life. It isolates the Jew and thus creates suspicion and animosity on the part of others. It encourages submissiveness and discourages the arts and free thought. It neglects noble moral ideals in favour of insignificant details.¹⁶, 23–26.

footnotes: ¹⁶ Nineteen Letters

To this comprehensive litany of objections, Hirsch replies in a sympathetic spirit. He concedes that the long exile has distorted Jewish existence. It “drove Israel away from a normal life, limited the free development of its noble character, and compelled many individuals to enter, for the sake of self-preservation, upon paths which they were too weak to refuse to enter.”¹⁷ There are those who practise the commandments as a mechanical habit, failing to understand their inner meaning. Jewish texts are taught without regard for the philosophy they embody. Reform therefore is called for, but a reform not of Jewish law but of Jewish education. Hirsch is pointed in his criticism of what he sees as the inauthenticity of those who would introduce substantive reform into Jewish law: “To take a standpoint somewhere outside of Judaism, to accept a conception derived from strangers, of the purposes of human life, and the object of liberty, and then to cut, curtail and obliterate the tenets and ordinances of Judaism – is that the Reform we need?”¹⁸

footnotes: ¹⁷ Ibid., 109. ¹⁸ Ibid., 114.

Hirsch sees in emancipation a significant opportunity to reconstruct Jewish education, and to renew the Jewish mission as a “people in the midst of the peoples” leading an exemplary life of obedience to the Divine will. He ethicises the commandments – taking strong objection to Maimonides’ historical approach to the reasons for the commands¹⁹ – seeing them as timeless embodiments of the values of justice, love and moral-spiritual education. Particularly striking is his interpretation of the chukkim, statutes, which some had seen as non-rational, and which Maimonides had tended to interpret as part of the Torah’s struggle against idolatry.²⁰, III, 26, 29–32. Saadia had seen chukkim as non-rational, commanded to confer reward for obedience (Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, III); but see Marvin Fox, “On the Rational Commandments in Saadia’s Philosophy: A reexamination,” Marvin Fox (ed.) Modern Jewish Ethics, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1975, 174–187. Hirsch, by contrast, sees them as symbolising “Justice toward the earth, plants and animals” and towards one’s own property and body.²¹, 75, 78–79.

footnotes: ¹⁹ Ibid., 117–126. ²⁰ Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed ²¹ Nineteen Letters

Emancipation therefore leads to conflict only if Jews internalise values antithetical to their mission, by wishing to assimilate, by interpreting Judaism through external categories (as he accused Mendelssohn of doing), or by adopting an autonomous ethic which sees man as the only judge of right and wrong. This last point is Hirsch’s implicit criticism of Kantian ethics.²² 19 (Winter 1984/5), 107–117. The pursuit of human ends is inevitably self-defeating and tends to unhappiness and corruption. Instead man must voluntarily submit to the will of God, but in so doing he will achieve a way of life which fulfils humanist ideals and will be universally recognised as such: Picture every son of Israel a respected and influential priest of righteousness and love, disseminating among the nations not specific Judaism – for proselytism is forbidden – but pure humanity.”²³, 108. This is the idyllic vision which allows Hirsch to find positive meaning in the Jewish entry into European society. By being an authentic Jew he will ipso facto be both a good citizen and an inspiring religious example.

footnotes: ²² See Eliezer Schweid, “Two Neo-Orthodox Responses to Secularization,” Immanuel ²³ Nineteen Letters

CULTURAL CO-EXISTENCE Hirsch was profoundly convinced of the compatibility between Judaism and secular culture. Science, properly understood, would reveal the Divine law operating in nature.²⁴, vol. I, 183; vol. II, 253–259. History, correctly studied, would deepen the sense of Jewish mission and Divine purpose.²⁵ This had been his own experience, and it was to provide the programme for his great educational experiment, the Jewish school which he opened in Frankfurt in 1853.

footnotes: ²⁴ Judaism Eternal ²⁵ Ibid., vol. I, 208; vol. II, 259–273.

He invoked the rabbinic maxim, Torah im Derekh Eretz, in the sense attributed to it by Naftali Hartwig Wessely (1725–1805),²⁶ namely, the joint study and harmonisation of Jewish and secular disciplines. A secular education was needed, he argued, for three reasons: first, so that Jews would be capable of handling the challenges raised by their contacts with a wider society; second, as a necessary preparation for a career; third – and this he argued most passionately – it was in itself a religious duty, regardless of the exigencies of the moment.²⁷ as a mere hora’at sha’ah (temporary concession to the needs of the moment) as some of his latter-day interpreters have maintained. Hirsch specifically counters the view of those who “might sanction such a sacrifice [of time to secular study] as a necessary concession to the spirit of the age”; Judaism Eternal, vol. I, 203. The debate is surveyed in Grunfeld, Three Generations, 111–133; Sir Immanuel Jakobovits, “Torah im Derekh Eretz Today,” L’Eylah 20 (New Year 5746), 36–41. Judaism encouraged a love of knowledge from whatever source. It contained a special blessing for the wise of the nations of the world.²⁸ vol. I, 203–220. That secular studies had not been part of the traditional curriculum was an aberration, not an ideal: “If in recent centuries German Jews remained more or less aloof from European civilisation the fault lay not in their religion but in the tyranny which confined them by force within the walls of their ghettoes and denied them intercourse with the outside world.”²⁹

footnotes: ²⁶ Rosenbloom, 46, 72. ²⁷ It is clear that Hirsch himself did not intend his doctrine of Torah im Derekh Eretz ²⁸ Judaism Eternal, ²⁹ Ibid., vol. II, 235.

It would be wrong, however, to regard Torah im Derekh Eretz as a form of synthesis. Despite Hirsch’s unquenchable optimism about the compatibility of the two cultures, there were severe limits to the encounter. They did not meet on equal terms. Speaking of his Reform opponents he said: “For them, religion is valid only to the extent that it does not interfere with progress; for us, progress is valid only to the extent that it does not interfere with religion.”³⁰ Although he believed that there would be no such conflict, he asserted: “We declare before heaven and earth that if our religion demanded that we should renounce what is called civilisation and progress we would obey unquestioningly, because our religion is for us truly religion, the word of God before which every other consideration has to give way.”³¹

footnotes: ³⁰ Ibid., vol. II, 237. ³¹ Ibid., vol. II, 235.

From this unshakeable base, Hirsch was able to mount effective critiques of the Science of Judaism,³² the reformers of his day,³³ and an autonomous secular ethic.³⁴ to Genesis 2:9, 18:19. In retrospect, these judgements have grown considerably in stature, and have been echoed a century later by those who in no way sympathise with Hirsch’s Orthodoxy.³⁵, London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1967, 50–51. His critique of Reform was tacitly acknowledged by the Reform movement itself, in the marked shift of positions from the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 (“today we accept as binding only its [Judaism’s] moral laws”), to the Columbus Platform of 1937 to the statement of Principles of the Central Conference of American Rabbis of 1976 (CCAR Yearbook, vol. LXXXVI), with its admission that “The past century has taught us that the claims made upon us may begin with our ethical obligations but they extend to many other aspects of Jewish living.…” A post-Holocaust critique of Kantian ethics is to be found in Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World, New York: Schocken, 1982, 266–273: “It is true that Kant’s belief in humanity could at no time be verified. However, not until the advent of the Holocaust was this belief refuted.” Precisely because his identity was so firmly rooted, he was able to maintain a clear-eyed critical perspective. But for the same reason, his stance towards ­modernity was in no way an open one. The Jew, he contended, “has to taste everything by the unimpeachable touchstone of his divine law; whatever does not stand this test for him does not exist.”³⁶, vol. II, 223. In fact, “From the very beginning, God placed Judaism and with it its adherents in opposition to the age.”³⁷ It was merely fortuitous – or rather, for Hirsch, the evolutionary effect of Jewish influence on civilisation – that the nineteenth century was one in which Jews could find themselves welcoming rather than doing battle with the surrounding culture.

footnotes: ³² Ibid., vol. II, 285. ³³ Ibid., vol. II, 213–244. ³⁴ See Hirsch’s Commentary ³⁵ Hirsch’s criticism of the Science of Judaism was echoed by Ahad Ha-am, Chayyim Nachman Bialik and Gershom Scholem; see also Arthur A. Cohen, The Natural and Supernatural Jew ³⁶ Judaism Eternal ³⁷ Ibid., vol. II, 217.

Hirsch’s Torah im Derekh Eretz was therefore not a synthesis nor a true dialogue,³⁸, New York: Ktav, 1971, 69–81; Arthur A. Cohen, The Natural and Supernatural Jew, 50–54. but a guarded and relatively precarious form of co-existence, at any time capable of turning into a fierce opposition. Despite its appearance at the time as a revolutionary welcoming of modernity, in retrospect it seems far more like an energetic restatement of a highly guarded stance. The Jew must develop his own positive identity through an intense education in the Jewish sources. Self-understanding must proceed out of Judaism alone. The fault of Maimonides and Mendelssohn was that in their different ways they came to Judaism from the outside, through alien concepts and categories. The Jew who is thoroughly grounded in his own sources will possess norms and values which are invulnerable to criticism, for in the last analysis they are accepted not because they accord with the spirit of the time or the dictates of autonomous conscience but because they are the revealed will of God to which one must submit oneself uncritically.³⁹, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981, 133–159). Hirsch’s own conviction was that “Jewish Science” should not be a response to external criticism, but rather an autonomous development, an attempt to “construct a science of Jewish ideas of nature and history, and, in the light of these truths which have been handed down by Judaism, to judge from the Jewish standpoint the events of the present, and the struggles and expectations of the peoples, along with the principles and views which guide them” (Judaism Eternal, vol. II, 285).

footnotes: ³⁸ See Norman Lamm, Faith and Doubt ³⁹ Mordecai Kaplan was particularly critical of Hirsch’s failure to engage in the kind of scholarly debate with critical attacks on Orthodoxy undertaken by David Zvi Hoffman and Isaac Halevy in relation to biblical criticism and the history of the Oral Law, respectively (Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization

From this position of absolutely secure commitment, the modern Jew need neither be overly defensive towards secular culture, nor apologetic about Jewish tradition. The Jew would be able to accept all that is “good and true”⁴⁰, vol. I, 194, 207. in the civilisation around him, while being critical of its failings. He would be able to take an active role in the enterprises of society, not as an alternative mode of being, but rather as an extension of the Jewish mission to be exemplary citizens and living models of Divine peoplehood.

footnotes: ⁴⁰ Judaism Eternal

THE RELIGIOUS DOMAIN Hirsch was explicit about how the Orthodox Jew could accept only part of modernity. He was less explicit about how modernity – as it presented itself in Germany – could accept only part of traditional Judaism. Hirsch’s Mensch-Jissroel (“Man-Israel,” his term for the ­combination of the worldly and religious roles),⁴¹. See Rosenbloom, 351–368. at once faithful Jew and exemplary secular citizen, was not identical with the integrated Jew of premodernity. This is evident in the way Hirsch downplays certain motifs which were to re-emerge as central to other Orthodox philosophies.

footnotes: ⁴¹ The concept is developed throughout the Nineteen Letters

Jewish nationalism takes a low profile in his teachings. The Jewish people is constituted by its religious laws rather than by any national aspirations. “This spiritual unity [conferred by Torah]…is the only communal bond we possess, or ever expect to possess, until that great day shall arrive when the Almighty shall see fit in His inscrutable wisdom to unite again His scattered servants in one land.… For this future…we hope and pray, but actively to accelerate its coming is prohibited to us.”⁴², 107–108. Exile is given a positive interpretation. It makes Israel realise that the nation-state is only a means, not an end. Indeed Israel had “accomplished its task better in exile than in the full possession of prosperity.”⁴³ Not only did exile remove the temptation to identify religion with power and material welfare; it also scattered Israel among the nations, the better “to show themselves everywhere on earth as the glorious priests of God and pure humanity.”⁴⁴ Thus “Dispersion opened a new, great and widespread field for the fulfilment of its mission.”⁴⁵

footnotes: ⁴² Nineteen Letters ⁴³ Ibid., 64. ⁴⁴ Ibid., 65. ⁴⁵ Ibid., 63.

Nor did Hirsch lament the loss of judicial autonomy involved in the collapse of the old structures of the kehillah. The public domain is no longer parochially Jewish but universal: “We are ourselves fortunate enough to live in a time which we can regard as the dawn of a new era of justice in human affairs, in which the members of the Jewish people also will be invited to take an active part in all humane, social and political activities among the nations.”⁴⁶, vol. I, 210. This provided the grounds for Mordecai Kaplan’s⁴⁷. Rosenzweig spoke of “Hirsch’s orthodoxy” as “a rigid and narrow structure, unbeautiful despite its magnificence,” and complained that it had created a division of life into Jewish and extra-Jewish spheres. See J. R. Marcus and A. J. Peck (eds.), The American Rabbinate: A Century of Continuity and Change 1993–1983, Hoboken: Ktav, 1985, 32, 39, 80–81. most trenchant critique of Hirsch’s neo-Orthodoxy, that it “accepts with equanimity the elimination of the whole civil code of Jewish law, and is content to confine the scope of Jewish law to ritual observance.”⁴⁸ 157.

footnotes: ⁴⁶ Judaism Eternal ⁴⁷ Kaplan, though he became the most radical theologian of the Conservative movement, advocating his own philosophy of “Reconstructionism,” was originally an Orthodox rabbi, serving as assistant to the highly traditional Rabbi Moses Zebulum Margolies (Ramaz) in the Kehillat Yeshurun synagogue. The problem he raised, that of “compartmentalisation” between Jewish and secular spheres, had been anticipated in 1923 by Franz Rosenzweig in his essay, The Builders ⁴⁸ Judaism as a Civilization,

This judgement was more recently echoed by the historian Ismar Schorsch: “Like the spokesmen for reform, Hirsch dropped all demands for judicial autonomy and continuance of Jewish civil law. He insisted upon the wholly religious character of Judaism, reduced the significance of the periods of Jewish national independence, and divested the messianic concept of political overtones.”⁴⁹, Columbia University Press, 1972, 10. Endorsing Schorsch’s remarks, the sociologist Charles Liebman notes that Hirsch tacitly accepted ­modern society’s allocation of the place of religion at the margins of public life: “Areas which remained under the dictates of halakhah were those which nineteenth century German society viewed as falling within the prerogatives of religion.”⁵⁰, University of Chicago Press, 1983, 157.

footnotes: ⁴⁹ Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914 ⁵⁰ Charles Liebman, “Religion and the Chaos of Modernity,” in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Take Judaism, for Example

In short, the model Hirsch projected for the co-existence of Orthodoxy and modernity involved the recognition, tacit or explicit, of limits in both directions. On the one hand, there was to be no genuine encounter on equal terms. The faithful Jew had to accept as Divinely given certain truths and standards such that, if secular culture postulated alternatives, secularity had to be criticised and rejected. Judaism was to be expounded in the language of humanism – this was the great project of Hirsch’s Bible commentary and his analysis of the commands in the Nineteen Letters and Horeb⁵¹, translated by Dayan Dr. I. Grunfeld, London: Soncino, 1972. – but it was not to be judged by humanist premisses. The communication was strictly one- directional.

footnotes: ⁵¹ Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horeb: A Philosophy of Jewish Laws and Observances

On the other hand, Judaism itself was to be confined to “religious” rather than “national” motifs. There is no incipient political Zionism in Hirsch’s writings – a fact that was to become more prominent in subsequent generations of Hirsch’s followers⁵² – nor is there a recognition that emancipation had enforced a contraction of Judaism’s traditional domain. It was Hirsch’s particular genius to see that such a “religionised” Judaism need concede nothing to the substantive demands of Reform. Orthodoxy might need to change its clothes, its outer forms, but not its halakhic standards nor its code of beliefs. Orthodoxy could survive the “ordeal of civility”⁵³, New York: Basic Books, 1974. See also George L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (eds.), The Jewish Response to German Culture, University Press of New England, 1985, 1–16. without compromising its inner essence. This, in retrospect, was no small achievement.

footnotes: ⁵² Hirsch’s son-in-law and successor, Solomon Breuer (1850–1926), was a prominent member of the non-Zionist Agudat Yisrael. Solomon’s son Isaac Breuer (1883–1946) became a leading theoretician of the movement, strongly opposed to Zionism as an attempt to impose collective secularisation on the Jewish people. ⁵³ The phrase is that of John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity

But the very tensions and limitations of this meeting with modernity suggested that an alternative model was available, one which was driven by larger aspirations and a more expansive view of the relation between Torah and reality. It is to this model, provided by Abraham Isaac haKohen Kook, that we now turn.