Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago by Tobias Brinkmann (review)

This is an intelligent and important book, much more sweeping and significant than its title might suggest. It is not just about Sunday services, though this part of the book is done superbly, and it is not really a history of Sinai Temple, as there is little insight into anything beyond the rabbis and the board members, especially the nuts and bolts of synagogue life outside of the night of the monthly board meeting and the Sunday sermon. It is, rather, a huge panorama of the role of a major synagogue in the life of a major city, Chicago, especially from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the 1920s (the narrative extends, in a final excellent chapter, another few decades). It should fascinate anyone interested in American religion, American urban life, the American rabbinate, the emergence of an American Jewish women's movement, a hundred years of Chicago's history, and the conjunction of a liberal religious congregation and social justice.

The major part of this book concentrates on the more than forty years of rabbinic leadership Emil G. Hirsch gave to Sinai, less to his theology/philosophy than to his relationships with members of the board, organized labor, leading Protestants, African Americans, Progressives, academics, and even Zionist leaders. And when one realizes there are no Emil G. Hirsch papers, the accomplishment is extraordinary. Daily and weekly newspapers and the archives of the synagogue—complemented broadly and deeply with appropriate secondary histories—dominate the notes, and these sources are analyzed with the same breadth and depth the author brought to assembling raw materials.

Rabbinic biography predominates in this study. Astute comments about Hirsch's predecessors (Bernhard Felsenthal, 1861-1864; Isaac Loeb Chronik, 1865-1871; and Kaufmann Kohler, 1871-1879) lead us to the immigrant twenty-eight year old rabbi deeply steeped in German culture who became, arguably, the most famous congregational Reform rabbi in America during the four decades he served Sinai as a public intellectual and social reformer commenting on nearly every important issue of the day. The Chicago Tribune extensively covered his discourses, largely on social, economic, and political issues.

Brinkmann masterfully narrates multiple pericopes in the rabbinic career of Hirsch at Chicago Sinai: his criticism of unrestrained capitalism despite the dominance of Sinai leaders in the Chicago textile industry; his role in moving Sinai toward opening the large Sinai Social Center (1912), with its basketball court and swimming pool, and steadily replacing the founding generation of wealthy immigrant Jews with a much broader group of American-born Jews; his fervent non-Zionism alongside his ability to engage positively with Zionism and Zionist leaders; his proficiency in Semitic languages, commitment to serious biblical criticism, and deep education in theology; his concurrent success in drawing a packed sanctuary to lectures that made him one of the most popular preachers in America; his deep desire to build ties to leading Christian thinkers and theologians in Chicago; his accomplishment in gaining the respect and gratitude of numerous members of the massive influx of immigrant Jews for his vigorous attacks on capitalist exploitation, notwithstanding the presence of many of those capitalists in his congregation's leadership and his almost total disregard of all ceremonies, customs, observances, and rituals associated with traditional Judaism; and the refusal of this most eccentric rabbi to reflect publicly on his conduct.

Hirsch's Radical Reform (later called Classical Reform) would seem to have marginalized him and Sinai, as the board eliminated the Saturday service and donated the Torah to the University of Chicago Semitic Library, as it had lost its sacredness for Rabbi Hirsch and was no longer used. Fewer than twenty Reform congregations in the late nineteenth century held Sunday services, and very few of these conducted no Saturday services at all. Yet the congregation and its Radical Reform agenda had to be taken seriously, and Hirsch's influence on American Judaism, despite Sinai's refusal to join the Union of American...