The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Oysters, on the other hand, were harvested up and down the East and Gulf Coasts and were no doubt enjoyed by Jews throughout the United States. “By analogy, it might be said that oysters were for nineteenth-century American Jews what Chinese food became for their twentieth-century descendants,” Sussman writes, a reference to the well-known Jewish habit of going to Chinese resturants on Christmas.

  A footnote to history: three years after the Trefa Banquet, a kosher meat business was established in Cincinnati, and became one of the leading suppliers in the United States.

  THE SCHISM DEEPENS

  The seeds of a counterrevolution among American Jews dismayed over the excesses of the reform movement were planted well before the Trefa Banquet. But the fiasco in Cincinnati helped bring the emerging schism to a head.

  The focus was a storied debate in the 1880s between two prominent rabbis and research scholars, Alexander Kohut on the traditional side and Kaufmann Kohler of the reformers. Their long-running dispute, embodied by a series of competing sermons published in the American Hebrew journal in 1885, exposed what was becoming obvious: American Judaism was evolving into two warring denominations—traditional and change-oriented, with the potential for traditionalists later splitting themselves into Orthodox and Conservative.3

  The conservative backlash against reform had been a long time in coming, going back to the orthodox exemplar Isaac Leeser, who died shortly after the Civil War. A little more than a decade after his death, a group of traditionalist Jewish leaders met in Philadelphia in 1879 to discuss their alarm over the fraying discipline and self-serving revisions of doctrine by Jews in their community. They called their group Keyam Dishmaya, the “divine covenant,” and pledged to bring Jews back “to the ancient faith” and to “re-create the ancient Hebrew Sabbath” at a time when Jewish observance of the day of rest was falling by the wayside under the enormous pressures of business and a desire to fit in with the rest of the world.4

  A revealing example of their approach lay in their determination to revitalize Hanukkah as a holiday. Hanukkah, the Jewish “festival of lights,” had since Talmudic times been relegated to a minor status. Reformers were comfortable ignoring the holiday as well because of its obsolete (in their view) association with the importance of restoring the ancient Temple in Jerusalem by the Maccabees. The Maccabees were fiercely traditionalist religious zealots opposed to the Hellenic and pagan influence on Judaism during Judea’s occupation by the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties, which ruled Judea from Egypt and Syria respectively following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE.

  Maccabean warriors took control of Jerusalem and established a new Jewish dynasty, the Hasmoneans, who ruled from 164 to 63 BCE. Their triumph is today depicted in Jewish storytelling as a victory of freedom of religion and liberation from Greek persecution and tyranny. The eight-day festival of lights—celebrated by the lighting of candles on a Hanukkah menorah—is associated with the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem and the miracle of its lamp oil lasting eight days.

  As a revolt against anything Hellenistic, however, the Maccabean conquest was mostly a failure. The Hasmoneans soon proved to be every bit as Hellenizing as the rulers they displaced. The period during and after the rule of Alexander the Great and his successors was one in which the Jews were divided. Many lovingly embraced Greek secular culture in literature, the arts, and sport; they ate pork and even worse, some went along with idol worship as they tried to assimilate Greek ideas and practices. Such accommodations might have been benign, like having a Christmas tree or celebrating Halloween in today’s world. But their conduct set an example of Jews, not for the first or last time, seeking to integrate themselves in the majority culture, to end their isolation, and to avoid persecution based on the Jews’ supposed long-standing desire to identify themselves as “the other.” Some Jews went so far as to abandon circumcision out of a desire not to be embarrassed in the Greek-style gymnasium, where young men competed naked in sporting events along with non-Jews and homosexuality was not unusual. And also not for the first or last time, traditionalists vehemently objected to all such practices, warning that they would bring down the wrath of God and perhaps spell the end of Judaism’s covenant with the Almighty.

  In popular culture, the Maccabean revolt is now depicted in Hanukkah as against the Greeks. But a close examination of the record by scholars has demonstrated that it was sparked by internal discord over the supposed apostasies of these “Hellenized” Jews. (Indeed, Orthodox Jews in Israel today still use the term “Hellenic” to deplore secularized Jews.) As the scholar of Hellenistic Judaism Elias Bickerman states: “The Maccabean movement was primarily a civil war, a religious battle between the orthodox and the reformers.”5

  Thus, the traditionalists meeting in Philadelphia saw the reestablishment of Hanukkah as an echo of what the Maccabees were trying to do: saving Judaism and even monotheism. They wanted the holiday to celebrate not only the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem and religious freedom, but also to remind Jews to pray for the restoration of the Temple as part of their adherence to Talmudic commandments, the very practice that reformers were discarding. Reviving Hanukkah, in other words, was a way for conservatives to revive the hope of the people of Israel to return to their ancient birthright in the Promised Land. The implicit goal of tradition-bound Jews was thus to restate Jewish “nationhood” and its roots in Jerusalem, just as Reform Jews had moved away from their identity as a nation, people, or tribe yearning for the restoration of power in the Holy Land.

  Of course, Hanukkah was also a way of counteracting the increasing appeal of the Christmas holiday among Jews. The 1879 Hanukkah festival held by traditionalist Jews was declared a success in fulfilling their objective. “Every worker in the cause of a revived Judaism must have felt the inspiration exuded from the enthusiastic interest evinced by such a mass of Israel’s people,” an organizer wrote afterward.6

  The traditional Jews also started a newspaper in New York called the American Hebrew edited by young activists, two of them rabbis, who tried to retain the principles of Orthodoxy while adjusting it to a modern context, including the respect for a more elevated role for women. The magazine, according to one adherent, would be edited by “a group of young American Jews who, while not inordinately addicted to Orthodoxy as a rigid standardization of thought and conduct, was yet opposed to the wholesale and reckless discarding of everything that was Jewish simply because it was inconvenient, oriental, or was not in conformity with Episcopalian custom.”7 It was in the American Hebrew that the dispute between Kohut and Kohler played out in 1885, in a series of published sermons.

  Another pillar of the new traditionalist organization was Cyrus L. Sulzberger, a prosperous cotton goods merchant and patriarch of the Sulzberger family, which had emigrated from Bavaria earlier in the century. As president and director of several Jewish philanthropic organizations, he sided with conservative Judaism in one important respect, as an advocate of reestablishing Jewish identity as a people seeking to return eventually to the land of Israel. (Sulzberger’s son, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, much later became a foe of Zionism after World War II. Back in 1917, Arthur Hays Sulzberger had married Iphigene Ochs, daughter of Adolph Ochs, who had bought the New York Times in 1896 and was himself married to Effie Wise, the daughter of Isaac Mayer Wise. After succeeding Ochs as publisher of the New York Times, Sulzberger became the progenitor of the Sulzbergers, the family that continues to control the newspaper.)

  The traditionalists in Philadelphia were among the forerunners of what would later become known as Zionism, the movement that supported establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The movement was getting increasing support in the 1880s from the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia. New Jewish news organizations and journals began to take note of the early trend, calling it a “revival” or “renaissance” of tradition.

  The reestablishment of the Jewish Publication Society in 1888 also led to a proliferation of Jewish-oriented histo
ries, novels, scholarly works, and organizations determined to educate Jews about their own faith and traditions. These organizations included Gratz College in Philadelphia, which trained women to teach Jewish studies in school; the Jewish Chautauqua Society; and the National Council of Jewish Women. The increasing participation of women infused American Judaism in the late nineteenth century with a new energy and determination to preserve a distinctly American identity, combining tradition with indigenous culture and even literature. (Among the leading female literary figures was Emma Lazarus, whose 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus”—“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . .”—was written to raise funds for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and is now inscribed on a plaque at its base.)

  The 1885 Kohut-Kohler dispute pivoted around two of the biggest issues vexing Jews in the latter part of the nineteenth century: the God-driven primacy and authority of Jewish law and the emerging field of biblical criticism holding that Scripture was not handed down by God through revelation, but written by human beings and thus susceptible to reinterpretation or revision.

  Alexander Kohut (1842–1894) was a distinguished rabbinical scholar, author of a Talmudic dictionary, and advocate of tradition with some adjustments allowing for contemporary demands. Descended from a long line of rabbis in Hungary and Palestine, he was unable to attend Hebrew school at a young age because his family was poor. While selling tarts to make ends meet for his family, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, an odd and extraordinary episode occurred: He was briefly abducted by gypsies—“because of his extraordinary beauty.” No further elaboration is offered.8

  Returned to his family, young Alexander started studying Talmud and came up with the idea of producing a lexicon of Talmudic words and terms. He went on to get a PhD from the University of Leipzig in Germany and was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, an institution devoted to following a middle ground between radicalism and orthodoxy. Famous as an orator in Hungary, he drew crowds from distant parts of the country and was invited to speak to the Hungarian parliament as a representative of the Jews. Kohut largely devoted his scholarly labors to his early project of producing a Talmudic lexicon. The result was a Hebrew Dictionary of the Talmud, much of it copied by hand, which took twenty-five years to complete and is widely considered a major achievement in Hebrew and Jewish scholarly literature.

  Having studied, preached, and led congregations in Budapest and other parts of his native land, Kohut took over as rabbi at Congregation Ahawath Chesed (Love of Mercy) in New York in 1885, succeeding its founding rabbi, Adolph Huebsch, a Bohemian émigré who had helped establish Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Kohut determined to move the congregation back to an approach that was more conservative than the one taught by Huebsch. (The congregation, housed in a grandly Moorish building crowned by two minarets, on Lexington Avenue, years later merged with Shaar Hashomayim Congregation and became Central Synagogue.) At his new place of worship, Kohut’s lectures—which he called “Ethics of the Fathers” in reference to the compilation of ethical teachings of the ancient rabbis—were famous for challenging the revolution wrought by reformers: “A Reform which seeks to progress without the Mosaic-rabbinical tradition is a deformity—a skeleton without flesh and sinew, without spirit and heart. It is a suicide; and suicide is not reform.”9

  Though he was an exemplar of conservatism and tradition, Kohut said he favored “conservative progress” against “nerveless indifference” and “glowing fanaticism.”10 Ahawath Chesed had mixed male-and-female seating and other trappings of Reform, but Kohut was determined to take his flock back to tradition, or what he called a “healthy golden mean” between Orthodox and Reform. On the one hand, he spoke of the Jews’ “priestly vocation” and argued that American Judaism was the equivalent of a new Zion, as Reformers had begun to articulate. On the other hand, he stood by the tradition of rabbinic Judaism codifying the Oral Law as believed to be given to Moses, and argued that it embodied divine authority.11

  Bringing a historical perspective to the argument, Kohut liked to cite heresies of the past as a dangerous precedent for the Reformers of the present. There was, for example, the ancient sect known as Sadducees, a Jewish faction that flourished at the time of the Roman occupation of Judea and the period of Jesus. The Sadducees opposed the authority of the emerging corpus of Oral Laws endorsed by their rival sect, the Pharisees. (The Pharisees ultimately gained dominance and served as the founders of rabbinic Judaism—that is, the form of Judaism that, in one way or another, is represented in all the various traditional branches of Judaism practiced today.)

  But rabbinic Judaism did not continue unchallenged. As Kohut noted, a later movement, the Karaites, also arose to dispute rabbinic Judaism with what historians say was the most serious revolt against its authority in medieval times. The antirabbinic Karaite insurgency emerged in Baghdad in the eighth century CE, led by a charismatic if mysterious figure and seer named Anan ben David, and it also sought to liberate Jews from many ancient practices. Reacting to the challenge of Islam, which denied both the written Torah and the later oral traditions of rabbinic Judaism, the Karaites tried to save the former at the expense of the latter. The sect thus held that the source of divine guidance for Judaism was to be found in the words of the Torah itself, but not in the altogether human Oral Law. The Torah alone contained God’s divine commandments, they said, and these should be interpreted in strict, literal ways without relying on the elaborate, often highly imaginative, inferences of their rabbinical opponents. Karaitism was a major movement that existed in Spain, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and other places, and its full extent and collected writings are only being properly assessed by scholars today.12

  The rivalries between Sadducees and Pharisees, and between the Karaites and the Rabbinites, as their opponents were called, in many ways prefigured the battle between traditionalist and reformist elements in Judaism in the modern era. No doubt, as with any religious practices in any tradition, Jewish law was not always followed by individuals and communities down to the letter in practice, and in any case, practices and customs varied widely across the Jewish world.

  Kohut’s condemnation of the reform movement of his day as an unwelcome throwback to the ancient heresies of Karaism and the Sadducees was intended as the ultimate insult. In effect, he was questioning the entire body of literary examination of the Bible holding that human writers, and not God, were the authors of the Torah. Kohut’s view was that the concept of revelation and the divine authority of biblical and Talmudic texts were essential to Judaism.

  At Congregation Ahawath Chesed, Kohut gave lectures that were as popular as his sermons back in Hungary, with crowds lining up to hear him. He saw as particularly dangerous biblical criticism undertaken by Lutherans and others in Germany. A bête noire was the German biblical scholar and Protestant theologian Julius Wellhausen, who pioneered in the historical interpretation of the Bible as written by many authors and not bearing the imprint directly of God. Kohut argued that such criticism, undertaken by Protestants in Germany, had poisoned Judaism when it took root in the so-called Jewish enlightenment and “scientific” study of Jewish texts carried out by Geiger and others in Germany. These studies, he charged, not only undermined the authority of the Bible’s moral teachings but also diminished the standing and special status of Jews. “The views of non-Jewish Biblical critics must be banished from the camp of Israel, when they endanger its holy treasures,” Kohut wrote. “The results of Wellhausen’s researches belong as little to the Jewish pulpit as the religious beliefs of Unitarianism.”

  As for the authority of the Mishna, the Talmud, and later formulations of Jewish observance, Kohut maintained that the teachings of rabbinical interpreters, as passed on from generation to generation in these works, was nothing less than the essence of Judaism. “Whoever denies this; denies this on principle, disclaims his connection with the bond of the community of the house of Israel,” he declare
d. He noted that this was the belief even of those Jews who did not carry out the practices themselves. While acknowledging that not all of the traditional practices were still in force, and that the status of Jews had changed in America, he declared that a Jew who abandoned the law “has banished himself from the camp of Israel; writes his own epitaph: ‘I am no Jew; no adherent to the faith of my fathers.’ ” In another passage, he wrote: “No, we cannot maintain Judaism without the tradition as it has been orally bequeathed to us from the time of Moses.”13

  KOHLER PICKS UP KOHUT’S GAUNTLET

  The task of defending reform against attacks by Kohut and others was eagerly seized by Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926), another German émigré and protégé of Abraham Geiger and exponent of Geiger’s studies of biblical criticism. Like Kohut, Kohler was descended from a family of rabbis in his birthplace of Fürth, Bavaria. He got his rabbinical training under Samson Raphael Hirsch, a strict traditionalist who nonetheless affirmed the importance of secular culture and modernization, as well as Geiger. In 1869, Kohler moved to America, first to Detroit and then to Chicago, and in 1879 he succeeded his father-in-law, David Einhorn, as rabbi of Temple Beth-El, in New York City. (Beth-El merged with Temple Emanu-El many years later, in 1927.) In 1903, three years after the death of Isaac M. Wise, Kohler became president of Hebrew Union College, in Cincinnati.14