Out of Breslau Shall Come Forth Torah, and the Word of the Lord from Frankfurt am Main: The Religious Impact of German Judaism on Russian Judaism During the Last Three Decades of the Nineteenth Century

GERMAN JUDAISM AND RUSSIAN JUDAISM

In his story Early Passover,¹ written in the Pale of Settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century, Shalom Aleichem described a typical German Jewish community. He chose to call it Kisslona in Hebrew and Narenberg in Yiddish, both meaning “city of fools,” and he mocked the wisdom and understanding of the community and its rabbi, the “doctor and preacher,” in matters pertaining to Judaism. He portrayed German Jewry as assimilated, kitschy, lacking backbone, pathetic, and with only a farcical connection to its heritage.² This literary image, which is by its very nature a generalization, leaves no room for nuance or historic complexity. It is clear that German Jewry is not all hewn from one block. The same goes for Russian Jewry. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century it was generally accepted that Russian Jewry was far more attached to tradition than was German Jewry, as portrayed by Shalom Aleichem, but this acceptance in itself is not reason enough to negate the Jewish influence and inspiration that actually flowed in the opposite direction—from Germany to Russia. In this article, I will discuss the religious impact of several factions of German Jewry upon segments of Russian Jewry during those decades.

In the fourth section of his book Shalom Al Israel (1873), moderate intellectual Eliezer Zweifel (1815–1888)³ drew a surprising analogy between the three religious streams of German Jewry: liberal, Breslau, and Orthodoxy, and the three prominent groups of Russian Jewry. In his opinion, the difference lay in the fact that in Russia these streams were not institutionalized, “but our observers do not have heads and leaders to support and conduct matters according to the restrictions they require.”⁴ In his opinion, the views of the three religious streams in Germany were opposed by radical intellectuals, moderate intellectuals, and Orthodox Russian Jewry:

But any clear-eyed observer will realize that the vast majority of modern Jews are followers of Geiger. [...] Finally, the spirit of the reformers abroad is speaking from their mouths. We also have fanatic scholars. They read secular books, love wisdom and science, and firmly believe in the sanctity of the Talmud, as does Dr. Hirsch. [...] We also have many men who hold the third view, the view of Rabbi Frankel and Rabbi Graetz. Most of them belong to the old generation, who did not swallow the haskalah whole nor were they choked by it.⁵

Writing against the backdrop of growing conflict between intellectuals and conservatives in the Russian Empire, Zweifel focused on the demands of the intellectuals for change in Jewish employment, the rabbinate, education, and the attitude toward the regime. In the wake of political reforms instituted by Tsar Alexander the Second in the 1860s, and the modernization that was beginning to spread to the Russian Empire from the west after the Crimean War, Jewish society in Russia was also undergoing change. The intellectual factions were expanding, and some of them were becoming more radical. In many communities, the intelligentsia were no longer marginalized but were taking a more central position, while new disputes were springing up in other communities. Moreover, a trend toward Russification was discernible among Russian Jews, following a series of laws that bestowed privileges on Jews who had a secular education and pursued liberal professions. As a result some Jews emigrated from the Pale of Settlement, there was more study of the Russian language, and more and more Jewish youths were enrolling in Russian gymnasia.⁶ The most severe controversy was waged between radical intellectuals and the conservative rabbis, with the conservative intellectuals in the middle, sometimes supporting one side, sometimes siding with the other, and occasionally seeking a compromise. The controversy peaked in the late 1860s and early 1870s when Moshe Leib Lilienblum called for religious reform. Several of his scholarly colleagues responded, including the poet Yehuda Leib Gordon, eliciting from a number of rabbis reactions that appeared...