Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy: and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy

2. The Quest for Religious Authority

2 The Quest for Religious Authority I n its quest for authority, religious leadership often has to perform a delicate balancing act. If they want their authority to be viable, religious leaders must adapt to changing situations while nevertheless appearing to retain the sanctions of the past. Only then can they be perceived as authentic. Joseph Blau, in describing this phenomenon, has written: "Not the least of the elements of paradox that enter into the very nature of religion is the necessity that lies upon it, in its organized and institutionalized forms, to change while both seeming changeless and protesting its changelessness."l This was the problem that confronted Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer in his attempt to legitimate Orthodox religious authority in the Jewish community of nineteenth-century Germany. The abrogation of rabbinic civil authority throughout most of the German states in 1811 plunged the rabbinate into an unprecedented crisis of authority .2 Stripped of their political power, the German rabbis of the nineteenth century had virtually lost what sociologists Jerome Carlin and Saul Mendlovitz have labeled "imperative authority." In its place they had to adjust to what Carlin and Mendlovitz have identified as "influential authority."3 For, as Alexander Altmann has noted, the German rabbi "would not give up his claim to authority ."4 To exercise it, however, he now had to persuade others to obey his directives through "the imposition of unorganized diffuse sanctions ."s He could no longer use coercive sanctions to compel others to follow his lead. The rabbi had to strive to establish legitimations that would make his authority appear deserved in the eyes of his 21 followers. Such legitimation enabled the rabbi to exercise effective influential authority. Ismar Schorsch has noted that "a rich and flexible legal tradition served as sole authority ... within the Jewish community [of the Middle Ages]."6 But by the nineteenth century, the supremacy of that legal tradition had become "dethron[ed] ... in broad sections of the community."7 Religious leaders were compelled to acknowledge and deal with novel cultural and religious as well as political developments. As the German Jewish community increasingly internalized Western cultural values and judged Judaism in light of them, the old ideological sanctions that had supported medieval rabbinic authority were either ignored or proved insufficient to maintain the authority of the modem rabbi. Hildesheimer and his Orthodox rabbinical colleagues had to acknowledge the cultural and political discontinuities that distinguished the medieval from the modern era. They could neither base their right to authority on traditional grounds alone nor legitimate their claims to authority solely through the medium of traditional rabbinic literature. To have done so would have condemned Orthodox Judaism to a cultural isolation that would have rendered it uninfluential and thus undermined their efforts to attain authority. Hildesheimer's task, as an Orthodox rabbi, was to compose a response that would take account of the transformations in the community while simultaneously affirming the eternality and unchanging divine nature of halakha. Or, as Schorsch might put it, he had to have the halakha and belief in its divine sanction serve as the foundation for Orthodox religious authority while allowing nineteenthcentury German cultural, social, and academic forms to act as the medium through which that authority could be realized. His response involved a use of both traditional and contemporary justifications in the quest to establish religious authority. His example represents a Modem Orthodox attempt to grapple with one of the greatest challenges presented to Judaism by modernity. Scholars have noted that mid- to late nineteenth-century German Jewish Orthodoxy had three great rabbinical leaders-Samson Raphael Hirsch, Seligman Baer Bamberger, and Hildesheimer.8 Among the three, Hildesheimer was unique. He was neither a traditional rav like Bamberger nor a prototypical nineteenth-century German rabbiner like Hirsch. Instead, Hildesheimer strove to combine, not without tension, stances common to both worlds. His distinctive 22 The Quest for Religious Authority response to the dilemma of religious authority was anchored in the singularity of his position. Bamberger, unlike his two colleagues, received little formal secular education. As a youth he did not know German, and it was only through the tutelage of his wife that he learned to speak it as an adult. He seldom wrote in German. The few German publications he did compose generally appeared in Hebrew characters. He did, however, write traditional rabbinic commentaries and novellae in Hebrew on the Talmud and Jewish codes of law...