How Vaterlandsliebe Shaped Neo-Orthodox Halacha: The Case of Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann

To use Haym Soloveitchik’s by-now-famous expression, halachic texts can be made to “talk” history;¹ in fact, for over a century and a half now, historians have successfully mined Jewish legal texts in order to draw historical realia from them. While Soloveitchik’s own studies essentially dealt with early medieval Ashkenazi culture, other contributions have notoriously illuminated the social history of more modern Jewish subcultures, including the subject of our own inquiry—post-emancipatory German Jewry.²

Yet such is the richness and complexity of the legal material at hand that, despite the early promises, much still remains to be carried out in this academic subfield. And it would seem that Halacha is even more “talkative” than initially established: it can be used not only to obtain historical information on the world “outside,” but also as primary material on the basis of which to study the inner world of the legal authority crafting the halachic texts—in other words, the mind of the posek. Our article, which will shed some light on the legal writings of Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann, Germany’s preeminent halachic decisor at the end of the nineteenth century, aims at partially filling these two gaps.

Our study will therefore be based on a two-pronged methodological approach, the first half being inductive and the second half deductive: initially, we will draw from a series of studies published in recent years by Benjamin Brown, in which the author coined a concept called “non-deliberate theology.”³ According to Brown, it is often possible to inductively evidence or reconstruct, based on an accumulated body of legal writings, some of the theological, ideational, or social assumptions framing the posek’s inner world of values. In most cases these assumptions are not publicly endorsed or even explicitly formulated by their holder; in fact, they may be completely subconscious and act merely as a hidden factor in the background, even as they shape the legal decisions (and their formal justifications) taken by the decisor.⁴ In a second stage, we will also employ Soloveitchik’s own criterion of “measurable deflection,” an evidentiary tool used to deductively discern whether Jewish law developed immanently, or whether, to the contrary, something extraneous to the halachic system impinged upon the thought of the halachic authority, leading him to unexpected conclusions.⁵

Taking up the question of the relationship between Jews and Christians, the significance of which had become critical in an era during which Jews enjoyed full equality (in law, if not always in fact), this article will focus more specifically on the perception of Bismarckian Germany, its institutions and representatives, in the eyes of neo-Orthodox Jewry.⁶

Our analysis will pursue a double objective: first, we will suggest here that Hoffmann’s teshuvot can serve as a window, giving us a rare, and almost unauthorized, glimpse into his personal Weltanschauung, and we will specifically examine how a number of Hoffmann’s responsa reflected in many ways a generally positive attitude toward the German government of his time. Second, and on a deeper lever, we will illustrate how Hoffmann’s decision-making was, consciously or unconsciously, profoundly influenced by his positive self-identification with the German Fatherland, to the point where his jurisprudence departed from all known precedents on two crucial issues which were presented to him.

A FEW BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REMARKS

Who exactly was Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann?⁷ Born in 1843 in the now-Slovakian little town of Verbó, Hoffmann received his early education in the local Jewish educational settings. A child prodigy, he attended, starting in year 1859, various prestigious Hungarian yeshivot, and received his rabbinical training from Rabbis Moses Schick and Avraham Schreiber in Pressburg (nowadays Bratislava), and from Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer in Eisenstadt.

In this way, Hoffmann became heir to two of the main branches of the then-emerging Jewish Orthodoxy: insular Hungarian Orthodoxy, the bastion of the faith for those following the teachings of Rabbi Moshe Schreiber (the famous “Hatam Sofer”, 1762–1839), and German Neo-Orthodoxy, which Hildesheimer was helping to found...