Abraham Geiger's Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. See Michael Meyer, “Rabbi Gedaliah Tiktin and the Orthodox Segment of the Breslau Community, 1845–1854,” Michael: The Diaspora Research Institute of Tel Aviv University 2 (1973), 92–107; Meyer, “Universalism and Jewish Unity in the Thought of Abraham Geiger,” in The Role of Religion in Modern Jewish History, edited by Jacob Katz (Cambridge: Association for Jewish Studies, 1975), 91–104; Meyer, “Abraham Geiger’s Historical Judaism,” in New Perspectives on Abraham Geiger, edited by Jakob Petuchowski (Cincinnati : Hebrew Union College Press, 1975), 3–16; Meyer, “Reform Thinkers and Their German Intellectual Context,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover-London: University Press of New England, 1985), 64–84; Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 89–99; and the collection of essays in Meyer, Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001); Jay Harris, How Do We Know This? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 157–65, 184–90; Jakob Petuchowski, Prayerbook Reform in Europe:The Liturgy of European Liberal and Reform Judaism (New York: The World Union for Progressive Judaism, Ltd., 1968); Petuchowski, ed., New Perspectives on Abraham Geiger (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1975); Petuchowski, “Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim: Their Differences in Germany and Repercussions in America,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 22 (1977), 139–59; Ismar Schorsch, “Emancipation and the Crisis of Religious Authority: The Emergence of the Modern Rabbinate ,” in Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History, edited by Werner Mosse, Arnold Paucker, and Reinhard Rurup (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1981), 205–47; Schorsch, “The Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Modern Judaism,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 28 (1983), 413–37; Schorsch, “Scholarship in the Service of Reform,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 35 (1990), 73–101; Andreas Gotzmann, Jüdisches Recht im kulturellen Prozeß (Jerusalem/Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Leo Baeck Institut, 1997); and Gotzmann, Eigenheit und Einheit (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 2. Ludwig Geiger, Abraham Geiger: Leben und Lebenswerk (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1910). See also Max Wiener, Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism: The Challenge of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962). 3. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2–3. For the notion of “counterhistory,” see Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 36–40; and David 141 Biale, Gershom Scholem:Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). 4. Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 23. 5. Susannah Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy,” New German Critique 77 (1999), 64. 6. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 89. 7. Ismar Schorsch, “Ideology and History in the Age of Emancipation,” in Heinrich Graetz: The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, edited by Ismar Schorsch (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1975), 1–62; see also Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 220. 8. See Geiger’s letter to M. A. Stern (August 1843) in Abraham Geiger, Nachgelassene Schriften V, edited by Ludwig Geiger (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1878), 168. 9. Abraham Geiger, Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte (Breslau: Schletter, 1865), 9–10. All translations are mine and follow closely upon, though at times deviate from, Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Its History in Two Parts (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, Inc., 1985), 21. Hereafter, citations will be noted as Geiger, Judenthum, 9–10; Judaism, 21. The ¤rst six lectures were originally published in Geiger’s journal, Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben 2 (1863). 10. See Arnold Eisen and Steven Cohen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). I will offer further re®ections on Cohen and Eisen’s study in the conclusion to this book. 11. I traverse only summarily here the biographical history that Ludwig Geiger, in his Abraham Geiger: Leben und Lebenswerk, has well documented. For excellent and succinct accounts of Geiger’s life, see Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 23–49; and Meyer, Response to Modernity, 89–99. Note as well Ludwig Geiger, “Abraham Geigers Briefe an J. Derenbourg, 1833–1848,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 60, no. 5 (1896), 52–55. 12. Geiger, Nachgelassene Schriften V, 4. 13. Heschel, Abraham Geiger...