HASKALAH AND MASKILIM IN GERMANY
What these and other rabbis brought with them was a spirit that had been brewing in Germany among so-called emancipated Jews in a handful of cosmopolitan centers where they were accepted as equals in Christian society. As Jews grew in influence, especially as financiers, secular leaders of Europe turned to them for assistance in raising money for business, government, and military enterprises. It became expedient—and intellectually appealing—for Jews to recognize the legitimacy of the governing authorities in their communities. In Europe, especially Germany, the quid pro quo by which Jews felt welcome if they abandoned their separate identities was an arrangement that would prove tragically doomed to failure. But it set the pattern for a similar if unstated bargain in the United States, where it has been a foundation of Judaism’s development.
Jews in Europe began to prosper as merchants and financiers, first in the Netherlands and England, and later in France and Germany, with the rise of the first nation states after the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century. By 1806, less than two years after declaring himself emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte summoned more than a hundred notable Jews to an assembly in Paris designed to cement their loyalty to French society. In return for recognition as equals, the delegates to what was called a Sanhedrin (evoking the council of Jewish sages in the Roman Empire period) affirmed that they were subject to French law and no longer “a nation within a nation” in France. In doing so, they effectively abandoned the primary goal of praying for the restoration of the Kingdom of David in the Promised Land.16 As Napoleon sent troops eastward, conquering German lands as a prelude to invading Russia, this “emancipation” of Jews became an order of the day in German-speaking territories as well.
The Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) movement and its followers, or maskilim, were an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment generally. The core principle was the elevation of rationalism and individual autonomy as superior to social and religious governing constructs. It became important for all Enlightenment figures to declare that religious beliefs could be derived from reason, irrespective of whether one believed that God revealed himself to those who wrote the Bible. For Jews, such beliefs meant that they could place their religion in a more universal context. Accordingly, for enlightened Jewish educators, it was important to establish curricula that emphasized secular knowledge, philosophy, and modern languages—along with the study of Jewish history and ancient Hebrew—as a means to revive Jewish consciousness. Jewish educators also wanted to convince Christians that Judaism was not an obscurantist cult devoted to arcane rituals and rules but a broadly humanist set of ethical beliefs from which Christianity was descended. Some went so far as to align themselves with the deistic possibility of believing in God while rejecting the idea of God intervening in the daily affairs of humankind, and playing down prayers in religious services for such intervention.
It was thus necessary for Enlightenment Jews to deemphasize their distinctive racial identity as direct heirs of biblical patriarchs. They also downplayed themselves as “chosen” by God to observe certain commandments, yet punished by God with forced exile from Jerusalem. Instead of embracing the goal of reestablishing the Kingdom of David in the Holy Land, Jews defined themselves as having a different sort of “mission”—to convey a message of ethical monotheism to the rest of the world. It was not hard, of course, for traditionalist critics of reformers to see such new doctrines as a cynical—and likely to be futile—ploy to abandon their legacy in exchange for equal status in supposedly secular societies.
Even before Napoleon, Jews had risen sufficiently in standing to produce the circumstances for these ideas to flourish. As Jews in the seventeenth century in Europe rose to become doctors and students of philosophy and the physical sciences, they became increasingly attracted to secular pursuits and learning. The leading forerunner of such thinking in the eighteenth century was Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the son of a scribe, who moved to Berlin at a young age and came to be known as “the founder of modern Jewish thought.”17 Mendelssohn, a contemporary and friend of Immanuel Kant, was a rigorous traditionalist who nonetheless advocated an education in secular subjects and vernacular languages for Jews. Mendelssohn was reformulating the fundamental definitions of traditional Judaism along the lines of a religion of reason. In some of his writings, Mendelssohn spoke respectfully of Spinoza’s contribution to understanding the nature of religion. But unlike Spinoza, Mendelssohn embraced the concept of laws given to Jews on Mount Sinai and the importance and logic of Jewish practices and identity. He saw Jewish ethical precepts as applicable to all humankind, however. Scholars note that it was not as if Mendelssohn was inventing something entirely new. Since Maimonides, Jewish sages had often declared that Judaism and the belief in God could be understood by reason rather than by acceptance of revelation from biblical times.
Perhaps Mendelssohn’s most important historic contribution was his advocacy of the separation of religion from the state. In a secular state, he argued in Jerusalem, published in 1783, Judaism could take its place as an equal of Christianity or any other religion, governed by a regime that did not discriminate between one religion over another. Following Mendelssohn’s death, as prosperity and the status of Jews rose, increasing numbers of Jews in Germany were admitted to universities and other civic institutions. Influenced by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, they accepted the intellectual approach of historicism—applying rationalism to the understanding of evolving historical context—to the history of Judaism itself. In 1819, Jews in Germany established the Society for the Culture and Science of Judaism. These Jews adopted the term Wissenschaft des Judentums (scientific study of Judaism) as their method and accepted the idea that the first five books of the Bible were a product of many authors over time, not the handiwork of God delivered directly to Moses.
Going further, these scholars sought to create a critical and historical understanding of Jewish history and literature. They saw themselves as expressing their allegiance to tradition with scholarship focused on the entirety of Jewish writings. By implication, the “science of Judaism” was a method to break down the barriers that separated Jews from their fellow citizens and inspired mistrust among non-Jews.
The maskilim (adherents of the Jewish Enlightenment) effectively revolutionized the way Jews understood their religious identity. They had set aside the bewildering array of Jewish practices to focus on what they defined as Judaism’s essence, i.e., its moral truths. They contended that just as the rabbis of old reinvented Judaism by emphasizing prayer, readings, and laws after it was no longer possible to carry out animal sacrifices at the Temple of Jerusalem, so Jews of the modern era were adjusting Judaism to contemporary exigencies. They did not see themselves as rejectionists but rather as revisionists. They declared, in fact, that they were adhering to the Talmudic tradition of reinterpreting laws to accommodate circumstances unforeseen when the laws were first codified.
Some of the modern Jewish scholars in Germany became increasingly radical. They included Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) and Nahman Krochmal (1785–1840), who theorized that Jews were like many other nations that go through cycles of change and renewal. Another influential figure was Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), whose multivolume History of the Jews was renowned for its analysis of Jewish political experience in the ancient and modern worlds. Following these teachings, certain Jewish practices were bound to fray. In Westphalia, Jews established their own “consistory” to direct their affairs, instituting decorum and sermons in German. Elsewhere, Jews shortened and modified the liturgy to make it more accessible, and Jewish education, which was until this period focused entirely on the Talmud and Jewish law, expanded into secular subjects. In Cassel, religious services featured hymns and German sermons as well as prayers. A confirmation ceremony was instituted in some cases, replacing or complementing the traditional bar mitzvah, the ceremony commemorating a young man’s first reading of the Torah.
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bsp; Increasingly, Germans called their synagogues “temples.” The term had been in some use in France and Germany, but modernizers in Germany saw the name as more palatable than the foreign-sounding word synagogue, a Greek word meaning “gathering place” or more specifically a gathering place for prayer.18 In Seesen, a town in Lower Saxony in Germany, Israel Jacobson, a Jewish community leader and philanthropist, established a “temple”—one of the first uses of the word—as part of a school he founded in 1810. Its building had Latin inscriptions along with Hebrew, an organ, a choir, and a pulpit facing the congregation, from which German prayers and a sermon were delivered. The original plan for this temple called for a clocktower and bell, clearly designed to resemble a church, but that plan was scrapped in the face of objections from Jewish and non-Jewish authorities. Instead, the temple was topped by a belvedere, or rooftop gallery, and a short bell tower and bells. The building so clearly evoked a church that many Jews in Seesen and elsewhere objected. So did Christians. Other revised practices were carried out in Congregation Adath Jeshurun in Amsterdam in 1796 and the Beer Temple in Berlin in 1815. But historians generally argue that the first completely reform temple was established in 1818 in Hamburg. It featured prayers in German (as opposed to Hebrew) and omitted any references to the coming of a messiah or a return to Zion. More “temples” proliferated in the 1830s, signaling the intent of some reformers to make them serve as a substitute for the destroyed Temple of Jerusalem.19
Another important figure of the period was Abraham Geiger, often called “the spiritual father of the reform movement.”20 Geiger mobilized perhaps the most extensive arguments that the essence of Judaism was its universal tenets of humanism, monotheism, and ethics, whereas the rabbinical rulings of the Talmud were the product of historical conditions confronted by Jews in exile and unsuited to the modern world. “The Talmud must go,” he declared. “The Bible, that collection of mostly so beautiful and exalted—perhaps the most exalted—human books, as a divine work must also go.”21
These were all powerful forces. But reform did not survive as a significant movement in Europe. It suffered from many doctrinal and practical differences, including the role of Hebrew. Rabbis and Jewish intellectuals sought to iron them out at conferences in Brunswick in 1844, Frankfurt in 1845, and Breslaw in 1846. But the movement to reform Judaism could not cope with the recrudescence of anti-Semitism and crackdowns on Jewish citizenship and activities throughout Europe in the mid-century. The Jewish embrace of an identity as equal to others became a fiction, swallowed up by waves of anti-Semitism.
It thus fell to rabbis and Jews in the United States to take what they had seen in Europe and turn Judaism into an American religion. The rabbi most responsible for transforming American Judaism in this era arrived inconspicuously in New York as part of the German influx. He did not see himself as a reformer so much as an Americanizer. But he would profoundly change the character of American Judaism before he was done.
Six
THE TURBULENT ISAAC MAYER WISE
In the summer of 1846, a twenty-seven-year-old rabbi named Isaac Mayer Wise left his home in Bohemia and traveled to the United States aboard the sailing vessel Marie, accompanied by his wife and baby daughter. On board, he and the family endured weeks in lice- and rat-infested steerage and kept kosher by consuming nothing but onions and herring.
One evening late in the trip, the captain of the Marie told Wise that if the wind kept up, they would arrive in just a couple of days in New York City. Alone on the ship’s deck, Wise surrendered to his emotions. “How foolish and daring it is, thought I, to have left home, friends, position, and future prospects in order to emigrate to a strange land without means or expectations!” Wise later recounted. Back in steerage, the emotional traveler fell asleep and lapsed into a nightmare that he later described with characteristic grandiloquence. He dreamt, he said, that his boat had crashed in a storm at the foot of a steep mountain, where an army of “hollow-eyed, ghostly, grinning dwarfs,” “lascivious, ragged goblins,” and “tiny poodles” blocked his path. But in his reverie, Wise “dashed them aside” and reached a beautiful meadow at the summit, a harbinger of his new life in the New World.1
In the Bible, as Wise well understood, dreams sometimes represent prophesies. The rabbi was no doubt using his memoirs to convince readers that he foresaw his future as the embattled hero of Judaism in America. Hero or not, Wise changed the course of Judaism as it settled and integrated itself into the fabric of religious life in America. At his first congregation, in Albany, New York, he was to participate in a fateful conflict and fistfight on Rosh Hashanah over doctrines and practices, particularly the concept of the Messiah—perhaps the most important physical brawl in the annals of American Judaism.
After moving from Albany to Cincinnati, he established the first Jewish seminary to graduate rabbis in America, an important new American Jewish prayer book, an organization of reform American rabbis, and what was to become the largest organization of Jews in the United States, now known as the Union for Reform Judaism. His lifelong goal—to create a single unified American Judaism—failed spectacularly, amid opposition from both modernizers and traditionalists. He was condemned for apostasy by conservatives, and advocates of reform reviled him for not going far enough. He was hardly the only prominent Jew to try to redefine a new American Judaism, and others made possible what he had begun. But he was the pivotal figure in creating a new normal for American Jewish beliefs.
Wise’s early years did not suggest that he would be suited to a life of combat and crusading. Plagued with depression, hypochondria, self-doubt, and death wishes, Wise somehow managed to transmute these handicaps into “a supreme, manic self-confidence that enabled him to face enemies and personal defeats with near equanimity, always certain that eventually he would succeed,” as the historian Michael Meyer puts it.2
Success for Wise was not necessarily “reform.” Rather, his goal was one of uniting all American Jewry under one denomination—to create a distinctly American Judaism commanding the loyalty of all, and not a separate brand of “reform” Judaism that some, but not all, would follow. He lived to see that dream nearly reached and then blown apart by discord over practices, doctrine, and faith. The coup de grâce for that dream at the end of the century was the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia, whose descendants nonetheless over time were bound to be influenced by his legacy.
“To understand Wise, we must see him above all as an Americanizer,” writes Nathan Glazer in his book on American Judaism. “He had a passion for America as the land of freedom. It permitted him to do what he wished without restriction.” But Glazer notes that Wise’s pragmatism made him seem more like an opportunist than a traditionalist or a radical. At times, he was willing to accept the Talmud as legally binding and even of divine origin, but it was doubtful that he really believed such a thing, and more likely that he was only trying to accommodate disparate points of view in his search for unity.3
Instead of unity, Wise’s efforts produced disputes. But even these disagreements defined the history that all American Jews have inherited.
FROM STEINGRUB TO ALBANY
It is not clear that Wise actually came to America with the intention of becoming a rabbi, though his grandson and biographer Max May later recounted that he “came to America with definite plans and purposes,” including the goal of liberating Jews from their “bigoted environment” in order to become respected citizens of their country.4
At the time of his arrival, New York City was an energetic and prosperous community of 370,000 and a major port because of its connection to the West via the Erie Canal. Wise settled at Temple Beth El (House of God) in Albany, the capital of New York State and a gateway of commerce established by the canal, which had opened a couple of decades earlier and connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and to the port of New York.
Born in the village of Steingrub in what later became Czechoslovakia, Wise was the oldest son of a poor Jewish schoolmas
ter. Orphaned at an early age, Wise grew up in poverty. He studied at a yeshiva, or seminary, outside Prague and apparently attended university courses there and in Vienna. But the precise character of his rabbinical training remains obscure. Like his father, he served as a schoolmaster in another village, Radnitz, in Bohemia, where he recalled that he was constantly restless and yearning for larger horizons.5
The evidence is not abundant, but Wise appears to have been influenced by the practitioners of Haskalah, including such figures as Isaac Noah Mannheimer, who in 1863 was one of a group that defended Heinrich Graetz in a court in Vienna after Graetz had challenged the concept of the Messiah. Wise was also acquainted with Salomon Sulzer, a prominent Viennese cantor and composer, whose singing was admired by Schubert and Liszt. (Sulzer incorporated three-quarter waltz time into some of his chants, including the Shema, the central prayer of Jewish liturgy, in a tune that remains a favorite in Reform congregations today.) The record shows that in 1845 Wise attended the rabbinical conference in Frankfurt and read the antiestablishment writings of German Jewish liberals Gabriel Riesser and Samuel Hirsch and other works of Wissenschaft des Judentums.6 Not all his biographers agree on the extent of these influences. But one, James G. Heller, argues that in Frankfurt and elsewhere, Wise absorbed such ideas as introducing decorum into the service, elevating the status of women and other practices circulating in Germany. Wise did not speak much of such influences, however, apparently out of determination to define his calls for change as driven by American rather than European influences. Whatever Wise’s beliefs before he left the Old World, he was evidently frustrated by the constraints of Europe, including the poverty and ignorance of its Jewish peasants, and his poor prospects for improving on his humble place in its firmament.7
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