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

Preface

Preface N ineteenth-century German Jewry experienced notable departures from the established patterns of the past. The century witnessed a veritable revolution in the legal status, occupational distribution, cultural habits, and religious beliefs and behavior of central and western European Jewry. Under the impact of Enlightenment and emancipation , Judaism underwent a transition-not everywhere uniform in shape and intensity-from European traditionalisms to the modern era of contemporary Judaisms. Modern varieties of Judaism, each a response to the changing time, emerged in Germany during the 1800s. Each deserves study for its attempt to adapt and modify Judaism to this new challenge in Jewish history, as well as for its effort to maintain a link to the past. No group in nineteenth-century Germany is more representative of this effort than modern Orthodoxy. As one apologete, Hermann Schwab, has written, "German-Jewish Orthodoxy was Sinai Judaism ." Yet in talking of German Orthodoxy; even Schwab is forced to concede that "some of its characteristics could be traced to its German surroundings."l The German Orthodox were not one with the antimodernist Hungarian rabbi the Hatam Sofer (1762-1839), who was eager to endorse a total rejection of the contemporary, cosmopolitan world. In Germany, the reaction of such spokesmen as the Frankfurt rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) was to make peace, as far as possible, with many aspects of modernity and the transformations it wrought in Jewish status and culture. Simultaneously , they insisted on the eternality of the Oral Law. Hirsch ix saw Western culture as a positive good and became a master of it, "reformulating" his conception of Orthodoxy to permit himself and his adherents to participate in the modern world and its culture. German-speaking Orthodox Jews faced a similar, if not identical, problem as did their more liberal brethren of the Reform and Positive-Historical schools. In one respect, however, their dilemma was perhaps more acute than that of their liberal peers. For they had to confront the tensions and ambivalences which innovation and change posed to continuity with a past regarded as both sacred and, in the realm of Jewish law, immutable. The tale of the modern Jewish Orthodox response to the changing society of nineteenth-century Germany has most often been told through the life and works of Samson Raphael Hirsch. Yet modern Jewish Orthodoxy had other exponents, men whose visions of modern Orthodoxy diverged from Hirsch's in several ways. Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer (1820-99) of Berlin championed an enterprise Hirsch rejected-Wissenschaft des Judentums, the painstaking academic study of Jewish sources. Hildesheimer was the founder of the Rabbiner -seminar, the first modern Orthodox rabbinical seminary to be established in Germany. In this institution, erected in Berlin in 1873, critical study of Jewish sources was combined with an allegiance to the principle that the Torah, both written and oral, constituted direct revelation "from the mouth of the Almighty." Hildesheimer and Hirsch agreed in discarding such medieval vestiges as traditionally distinctive Jewish garb in favor of conventional Western clothing. But Hildesheimer went further; in the institutions he guided not only was the Hochdeutsch vernacular spoken instead of Yiddish but the academic study of Judaism was assiduously pursued. The former innovation earned him the enmity of traditional conservative elements within the Orthodox camp, and the latter separated him from Hirsch. But like the Hatam Sofer and unlike Hirsch, Hildesheimer called for the reinstitution of the Bet Din, the rabbinic civil court. Hildesheimer was also a master pasek, a Jewish legal authority, who issued hundreds of responsa (Jewish legal decisions) in his lifetime. Hildesheimer attempted to mediate between the pull of tradition and the demands of modernity, Indeed, his efforts make him a paradigmatic practitioner of the dialectical interplay between tradition and change that characterizes modern Jewish Orthodoxy,2 Hildesheimer displayed a rich mixture of tradition and innovation, testifying to the complexity of the evolution of contemporary Jewish rex Preface ligion and society from the traditional patterns of medieval central European Judaism. An examination of Hildesheimer's life and work demonstrates the necessity of focusing on the manifold varieties and variations in the relationship between traditional forms and new institutions and values. His example provides a lens through which to understand the transformations modernity wrought in Judaism and the contemporary development of modem Jewish Orthodoxy. The goals of this book are thus twofold. One is to demonstrate that modem Jewish Orthodoxy, as it emerged in nineteenth-century...