“THIS SYNAGOGUE IS OUR TEMPLE”
Whatever the role of precedent in Prague and Hamburg, it was only a matter of time before reform-minded Jews in America became less interested in invoking rabbinic interpretations of the past and determined to abandon the authority of such interpretations altogether. That was the case in Charleston, where there were few precedents at the time of the organ controversy. (In Savannah, Congregation Mickve Israel dedicated a synagogue in 1820 at a ceremony that included an organ played by the musical director of the city’s Independent Presbyterian Church as the Torah scrolls were carried into the new building. But it was not clear how continuously the practice was kept up. A fire destroyed the synagogue in 1829, and it was rebuilt in 1838, but no mention of an organ was recorded again. Mickve Israel’s Torah scrolls, both dating from the fifteenth century, are thought to be the oldest in the United States. One was brought from England in 1733 by the original group of 42 Jews that came to Savannah and the other was sent later from London’s Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1737.) 12
The petitioners in favor of an organ at Beth Elohim, many of them former members of the Reform Society, said they merely wanted to use every “laudable and sacred mode by which the rising generation may be made to conform to, and attend our holy worship.” But to traditionalists, the request marked a recrudescence of the demands from the Reformed Society. The board ruled against the idea four to one in 1840. But Poznanski’s sentiments in favor of the organ were becoming increasingly clear, as were the sentiments of the broader membership of the congregation itself, especially at a congregation meeting in July 1840, when a congregant, Jacob Simon Jacobs, was censured for using “improper & unbecoming language” toward the hazan. So contentious was that session that it opened with a dispute over whether Poznanski should even be allowed to speak. The vote was fifty-six to thirty-one in favor.
Abraham Moïse, a respected elder, proposed that voluntary funds be raised for the organ, declaring that music was “the universal language of the soul.” Nathan Hart, the president, at first declared the resolution out of order, but his ruling was overturned, and the members approved the motion by a close vote. A separate resolution thanked Hart for the “dignified manner and impartial conduct” of the meeting. But the die was cast for a fight that would be anything but dignified.
Traditionalists at the congregation, incensed over their defeat, quit the synagogue and organized a new congregation, Shearith Israel, sometime after the vote. Then, following the death in 1840 of two traditionalist leaders at Beth Elohim, Hart and H. M. Hertz, the tide turned more decisively there. A new reform-oriented congregation president, Abraham Ottolengui, a businessman born in Charleston and educated in England, took office, speeding the eclipse of traditionalist rule. Since many traditionalists had quit, the new and younger rump congregation amended the 1836 constitution, increasing the board to seven to make it easier to ram through changes. There would be even more English in the service, and the decision was made to place the Ten Commandments and Articles of Faith on synagogue walls, eliminating—with Poznanski’s approval—the part of Maimonides regarding the coming of a messiah, the resurrection of the dead, and the restoration of the Temple under the “House of David.”
The organ finally arrived at the synagogue and was placed on the gallery at the western end. On March 19, 1841, as an overflow crowd attended, the hazan sounded the shofar four times, and Penina Moïse’s hymn was sung. A speech by Poznanski made it clear, as the dissidents had earlier feared, that the organ was only the start of a campaign of liberalization of Jewish law and practice that might be even more intolerable to the dissidents.
Poznanski, for example, praised “the restoration of instrumental music” in the synagogue, declaring that it “was beautiful and salutary as well as scripturally proper in praising God with strong instruments and an organ.” He further praised the expansion of English “instead of a tongue unintelligible” to most members. His speech won plaudits from the Charleston Courier newspaper, which declared that “the dark clouds of sectarian prejudice and religious intolerance seem every where to be fast fading away, before the widely spreading lights of right, reason and philosophy.” The paper praised “the introduction of instrumental music in a Jewish synagogue, contributing much by its sweet and majestic harmony to hallow the ceremonies of the occasion.”13
Finally, standing thousands of years of doctrine on its head, Poznanski proudly and boldly embraced the concept that Jewish worshippers were meeting in a temple, making it clear that it was a substitute for the destroyed Temple of Jerusalem, discarding by implication the prayers for restoration of the old structure. “This synagogue is our temple,” Poznanski declared, “this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city, and that land, so will their sons defend this temple, this city, and this land.”
These quotations came from an account in a local newspaper, because Poznanski declined to publish his talk, perhaps realizing how heretical it would appear.14 Whether his motive was to abandon an ancient tenet of Judaism or simply to win acceptance by the many Christians in the audience, his comments no doubt reflected the sentiments of most Beth Elohim members. But subsequently the congregation met again and, while endorsing the organ, decreed that future changes in the service, including more use of English, required its approval. They were effectively warning the board not to go further with radical change.
Beth Elohim’s changes, meanwhile, were being noticed elsewhere. Isaac Leeser, the leading traditionalist who was based in Philadelphia, called on Jewish leaders throughout the United States to create a national organization of synagogues, presumably to enforce a traditionalist line. Leeser’s call was rebuffed, inevitably, by Beth Elohim’s trustees, for important reasons. The board charged that any effort to create such an authority, with its implied coercive tendencies, was “alien to the spirit and genius of the age in which we live” and “wholly inconsistent with the spirit of American Liberty.” The congregation followed suit, informing Leeser through Abraham Moïse, a trustee, that he regarded his invitation as hostile to reformers in Charleston and indeed the rest of the South. Moïse added for good measure that Leeser was behaving like the Catholic Church in its efforts to oppose Martin Luther. Some historians see Beth Elohim’s defiance of Leeser as a precursor to South Carolina’s growing disenchantment with dictates from the North.
Dissident traditionalist Jews were not about to let the matter rest. Several resorted to a scurrilous charge: a challenge to the legitimacy of Poznanski’s birth. This early South Carolinian “birther” movement directed the hazan to petition his ancestral town of Storchnest for his birth certificate. Word came back a few months later with the reassurance that Poznanski’s father had indeed married “a virtuous Jewish virgin” and that all the children were indeed legitimate.15 Not surprisingly, their efforts only emboldened Poznanski. He now became a well-known leader of the reform movement. On the other hand, to save money, Beth Elohim and Shearith Israel agreed to cooperate on the appointment of a kosher butcher.
Yet less than a year after the new Beth Elohim synagogue reopened, the balance of authority on its board began to shift. With changes in the membership, a majority now formed to oppose the reforms championed by Poznanski and the president, Abraham Ottolengui. Tellingly, an early dispute flared over a tradition at the synagogue to hold a remembrance ceremony to mourn the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and call for its restoration. Despite Poznanski’s earlier admonition about Beth Elohim being “our temple,” the ceremony was retained, perhaps because alcoholic drinks were part of the tradition. Other debates erupted over a request for an English-only Sabbath service on Saturday afternoons.
Into this combustible atmosphere Poznanski moved to light another fuse. In a Passover sermon in 1843, he proposed that Beth Elohim celebrate holy days like Passover for only one day, not the traditional two days. Two-day celebrations, he said, were a relic of the ancient past, when ca
lendars were uncertain, a concern he said was made obsolete by “the progress of astronomical science.” The board, now dominated by conservatives, revolted and denounced Poznanski’s proposal as “calculated to create discord & anarchy in a religious body when there should always be peace & harmony.”
Poznanski responded at first in conciliatory fashion. He worried that he had underestimated the alarm he would cause, and he asked permission to stop delivering sermons in English if that was what the board wanted. It was a passive-aggressive approach, and it worked. The board backed down and resolved to continue the use of English. But a question arose: who should decide such grave matters of reinterpretation—the congregation or the new board? At the next general meeting, attended by only fifty-one members, a motion to adhere to rabbinic traditions was narrowly defeated.
Suddenly realizing that they could turn the tide if they could recruit more members, the traditionalists began a campaign to bring some of the secessionist members back from Shearith Israel into the Beth Elohim fold. If they succeeded, they could restore the rule of rabbinic law, install a ritual bath, and effectively fire Poznanski, who by now had reaped the enmity of traditionalists even as he inspired the reformers on to increasingly progressive steps.
To bring the traditionalists back to the congregation, the four conservative members of the board moved to vote them in. They called on Ottolengui to convene a board meeting to do so. Seeing the threat, Ottolengui called a meeting of the entire congregation rather than the board to block the dissidents’ membership campaign. Meeting soon thereafter, the congregation asserted that it—not the board—had the right to determine service procedures. But the congregants continued to worry that the board would try to pack the membership with secessionist conservatives. The members then amended the constitution to require that any new voting members would have to be approved by the congregation, not the board.
Escalating the fight and refusing to admit defeat, the four traditionalists on the board defiantly convened their own meeting and promptly admitted forty-two Shearith Israel members to the congregation. Now the congregation, newly packed with traditionalists, voted to “adhere rigidly to our sacred and ancient forms and customs” and to stop the “great and growing evil” of reformers. And with little sense of irony, they also declared that their purpose was “to restore concord and harmony.”
These actions cleared the way for the traditionalists to rescind the earlier changes in the constitution and ban instrumental music as “obnoxious to the consciences of many Israelites.” They then ordered Poznanski to return certain materials in his possession. He refused and resigned. The board resolved to meet again, but when its members arrived at the synagogue, the gates were locked. The traditionalists broke in and selected a new hazan. When the organist refused to stop playing at services they fired him too, or tried to.
The records of this later period of turmoil are scant, but it appears that the two sides established a modus vivendi in which it was acknowledged that Beth Elohim consisted of an “Organ Congregation” and the “Remnants,” alternating the use of the sanctuary each week.
Even so, the two sides went to court. The Reform faction filed suit against the Orthodox holdouts in 1843 in a case destined to become a landmark in the annals of the relationship between Jews and the government.16
I’LL SEE YOU IN COURT
Officially, the dispute over the organ at Beth Elohim in Charleston came to be known as The State of South Carolina ex relatione Abraham Ottolengui et al., vs. G. V. Ancker et al. Each side enlisted teams of prominent, talented, and expensive lawyers whose roles in the case attested to the connections enjoyed by the Jewish community. The reformist plaintiffs, for example, employed Henry Bailey, South Carolina’s attorney general, and the traditionalist defendants brought in Christopher G. Memminger, who was many years later to become the hapless Treasury secretary of the Confederacy as it spiraled into insolvency.
The traditionalists first advanced a wide argument, offering testimony that the organ and Poznanski’s teachings about the Messiah were contrary to Jewish practice and law. The judge quickly found that approach irrelevant.17 After a four-day trial, the jury ruled in favor of the “organ congregation,” holding that the anti-organ faction had resigned as members and not been legally readmitted. Rejecting the outcome, the anti-organ dissidents appealed, claiming that they had not actually resigned from Beth Elohim in the first place, despite the fact that they had stopped paying dues and going to meetings. They took their case to the South Carolina Court of Appeals, the state’s highest appellate court, where Judge A. P. Butler upheld the lower court decision in 1846.
The Butler ruling was historic, not because of its attitudes toward reform, or even an organ. Its significance lay in its making clear that religious laws were not enforceable by civil courts in the United States, as they had been in Europe. “There should be great caution observed in cases like the present,” Butler said, noting that judges must avoid “questions of theological doctrine, depending on speculative faith, or ecclesiastical rites.” Were a synagogue to decide to become a mosque, the issue of its public charter as a corporation might arise, he said, but that was not the case here.
But Judge Butler’s decision is also interesting because it revealed a bias toward reform animating the congregation members at Beth Elohim. It noted, for example, that religious institutions “cannot withstand the agitations of free, active and progressive opinion.” Religious laws are products of human beings, he said, and “cannot be subjected to Procrustean limitations.” Going further, and showing that he had become quite educated over obscure aspects of Judaism, he noted that the prayer book at Beth Elohim was of Spanish origin and was different from a prayer book from Poland, and that “religious rituals” would inevitably be “modified to some extent, by the influence of the political institutions of the countries in which they are practiced.” He was thus accurately describing, perhaps without realizing it, the evolving condition of the Jewish experience as it adjusted to American culture.
As for the contention that the organ’s introduction violated the synagogue charter, the judge said that no charter could be written to outlaw changes in ritual and society over time. Turning to matters of faith and heresy, he noted that the pro-organ faction was not disavowing its faith in Judaism, and that it was impossible for the court to rule on their sincerity. Suppose that the court had even tried to ascertain whose faith was authentic? Would he have taken testimony from them, or from Jews in other parts of the world—in Palestine, Germany, England, or other parts of the United States? To do so would be entering into “the labyrinth of curious and recondite learning, without a clue by which he could escape from its bewildering perplexities.”
Why did such a pathbreaking rebellion occur in South Carolina, of all places? No consensus prevails among scholars on the social and other factors that led the Jews of Charleston, many of their leaders following Sephardic tradition, to foment a revolution in American Judaism. (The majority of Jews in Charleston and the United States in this period were Ashkenazim, however.) A fascinating debate among the experts over the role of local factors, as opposed to influences from abroad, continues to enliven Jewish journals and publications.
The most obvious explanation for the Charleston rebellion was that it was inspired by the spirit of the American Revolution. In their history of Charleston Jews published in 1950, Charles Reznikoff and Uriah Z. Engelman wrote that the city’s Jews were “intellectuals, cultured and worldly-wise,” and influenced by the Declaration of Independence.18 The problem with this “spirit of the age” argument is that it does not explain why it happened in Charleston and not in Philadelphia or New York. Jacob Rader Marcus argues that it was a case of leadership in Charleston, who he said were unusually radical for their time. “Change was the spirit of the times,” writes James Hagy, endorsing Marcus’s point of view. “Individuals in Charleston had been affected by the ideas of John Locke, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the United St
ates Constitution, the French Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson (who ran for president in 1824), Romanticism, the Protestants, and the residents of Charleston.” Charleston’s Jews were “Americans first and Jews second,” he writes. They wrote books, read newspapers, went to see plays, practiced law, and engaged in other secular pursuits. And they also “wanted to look good in the eyes of their Protestant neighbors.”19 South Carolina, of course, would go on to champion the doctrine of nullification against laws enacted by Congress, and later its seizure of Fort Sumter became the spark that started the Civil War. These disparate events attested to the spirit of rebelliousness among its people generally.
Still another factor in the evolution of Reform is the one cited in part by Isaac Harby—fear of Jews being delegitimized as reflected in the battle over the Maryland “Jew Bill,” which allowed Jews to hold public office in the 1820s but only after overcoming fierce opposition. The Jews of South Carolina also plainly feared that an overly zealous adherence to ancient ceremonies and laws made them more vulnerable to discrimination.20
The Charleston congregation split on generational lines, with the younger worshippers rebelling against foreign-born elders still wedded to tradition. The elders were more prosperous in jobs as accountants, storekeepers, merchants, and brokers. A couple were plantation owners. Most were comfortable with their status—and with the status quo. By contrast, the reformers were in their thirties, American-born, with more modest occupations, such as clerk, jailer, deputy marshal, printer, blacksmith, author, teacher, and painter.
Some insight into the restless spirit of the younger members of the congregation can be gleaned from the diary of Joseph Lyons, who graduated from South Carolina College in 1832 and apparently at some point entertained the ambition of becoming hazan. He dutifully fasted on Yom Kippur and observed the Sabbath but was put off by the chanting in a “guttural harsh barbarous tongue.” Deciding that life as a chanter of Hebrew was not for him, he moved to Paris, where he died at the age of twenty-four of “consumption.”21
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