"Most of My Brethren Find Me Unacceptable": The Controversial Career of Rabbi Samuel Holdheim

During his relatively brief lifetime, Rabbi Samuel Holdheim (1806-60) was arguably one of the most prominent, and certainly the most controversial, of the Jewish religious reformers in Germany, but his legacy has received remarkably little attention. In contrast to his contemporaries, Rabbis Abraham Geiger and Zacharias Frankel, none of his works was fully reprinted or translated in the twentieth century. He has been discussed only within the context of larger subjects, such as the history of the Reform movement or the history of Judaism in Germany. ¹ A fresh look at Holdheim, dwelling on the contradictory images that he presented to his contemporaries, his development from ahistorical iconoclast to advocate of Jewish loyalty, his interpretation by later historians, and his significance in the subsequent history of modern Jewish religion and scholarship, reveals a complex individual of considerable daring, whose concerns and objectives continued to be relevant long after his death. ²

There is probably no personality in German-Jewish history regarding whom the views of contemporaries were so sharply divided. It is as if friends and enemies were not describing the same person. The most prominent among his admirers was Geiger, who developed a deep friendship with Holdheim that lasted for more than a quarter of a century and culminated in two visits, the second of longer duration, during the last months of Holdheim's life. ³ Geiger wrote of Holdheim after his death:

Seldom was a man regarded with so much suspicion and animosity, defamed and treated with such forced disregard as this, my dear departed friend....His whole life was a continuous struggle because his steadfast working toward the future was an eternal protest against the decadence of beatifying the past. ⁴

In Geiger's view, Holdheim's consistent concern was for truth. To Leopold Zunz, Geiger wrote in 1845:

I'll admit it to you, I love Holdheim with all my heart, even if I don't subscribe to all of his claims and can't regard every one of his actions as appropriate. I love him because I recognize in every word the enthusiasm of honest conviction, of an elevated moral outlook. ⁵

Geiger greatly admired Holdheim's daring and uncompromising willingness to accept and act upon conclusions that could only make him enemies within the Jewish community. Like Holdheim a radical in theory, but less so in practice, Geiger may well have seen in his contemporary a consistency that, because of his desire to gain broader support within the Jewish community, Geiger could not himself represent. By contrast, Holdheim pressed forward "to the furthest points of all reform." ⁶ Geiger also recognized not only that Holdheim was more willing to carry ideas to their logical conclusion but that his approach to Jewish tradition differed from Geiger's own. Whereas Geiger described his relation to Judaism as predominantly historical, Holdheim, he claimed, remained dogmatic and dialectical. ⁷

Geiger was not alone in his admiration for Holdheim. A number of his contemporaries were impressed by the radical reformer's lack of fanaticism—that, despite the fervor expressed in his writings, as a person he was mild mannered, even shy. ⁸ Rabbi David Einhorn, himself a radical reformer both in Europe and the United States, called Holdheim "a star of the first magnitude" and a "gadol be-yisrael [a great Jewish scholar]." For him, as for Geiger, Holdheim was an honest seeker after truth and a genuinely religious personality whose lifelong concern was the ennoblement of Judaism. ⁹

An almost totally different image of Holdheim emerges from the moderate reformers, who saw in Holdheim's thinking what they regarded as the disastrous results of a religious reform not held in check by the countervailing force of tradition. Frankel, the founder of the Positive-Historical School, and Heinrich Graetz, the historian at Frankel's seminary in Breslau, could not be content with a refutation...