Persistence and Flexibility: Anthropological Perspectives on the American Jewish Experience

10. Separatist Orthodoxy's Altitudes Toward Community: The Breuer Community in Germany and America

10 Separatist Orthodoxy's Attitudes Toward Community-The Breuer Community in Germany and America Steven M. Lowenstein In this article, Steven Lowenstein, a social historian, implicitly describes the strategies of identity and acculturation utilized by German Separatist -Orthodox Jews. Lowenstein points out some of the paradoxes in Hirschian orthodoxy. While upholding the Jewish tradition, it did so by proclaiming the rights of individuals to withdraw from the Jewish community in Germany. While sharing the rejection of religious liberalism with Hasidim and other Orthodox Jews, the Hirschians accepted modern secular culture. In their accommodations to pre-Nazi Germany and to the changing conditions in the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, the Hirschians have shown the kind of resilience which Spicer has called a "persistent cultural system." This quality has provided them like their Hasidic co-religionists, with success in New York City neighborhood politics. Samson Raphael Hirsch and his Separatist Orthodox followers have bequeathed two apparently contradictory legacies to later generations . On the one hand, Hirschian Orthodoxy proclaimed a confessionalization of Judaism almost as radical as that of his Reform opponents. For Hirsch, Judaism was primarily a religion, and the national and communitarian elements in Judaism had a justification only insofar as they contributed to their religious purpose. For this reason, Hirsch recognized only communities led by the Orthodox as legitimate and denied the need for all Jews in a particular locality to be members of the same organic kehilla. [Kehilla is the traditional Jewish term for the organic Jewish community. In the pre-modem world, the kehilla combined functions usually associated with a religious body (hiring clergy, upkeep of houses of worship and religious education) and those more commonly associated with local government (taxation, regulation of Jewish commerce, etc.). Every 208 II. Arenas of Jewish Life 209 Jewish community, no matter what the size and number of synagogues , had a single local kehilla]. Yet, the same Hirschian Orthodoxy which denied the supremacy of the organic kehilla over ideological religious differences, produced one of the only successful attempts to transplant the kehilla structure to the United States. This paper will attempt to show the connection between the rejection of the geographically-based kehilla in Germany by the Hirschians and their successful creation of a kehilla in the United States. It will also explore the extent to which Hirschian separatism precludes or permits co-operation with non-Orthodox forces to promote common goals. Orthodox Jewry has had to react to a radical change in the relationship between Jewish tradition and Jewish community in the modern world. Before the great changes which began in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century, the Jewish community had been an autonomous self-governing body with considerable powers of internal discipline. The kehilla had its own communal courts in which the halachic determinations of the official communal rabbinate could be enforced. The community was an important instrument for the enforcement of traditional norms against any who might try to flaunt them. This function of the community began to change in Western Europe (especially in Germany) in the course of the nineteenth century in two important ways. First, the community lost most of its power to make legal decisions in civil matters as well as the right to enforce its decision with fines and excommunication. Second, at a somewhat later date, most large urban communities passed out of the control of traditionalist forces into the hands of laymen who sympathized with the new religious Reform movement. Orthodoxy had to handle a double challenge-first to retain the loyalty of Jews without the use of coercive power and second to come to grips with an official Jewish community in which their point of view no longer predominated . Samson Raphael Hirsch and the Ideology of Separatism The lifework of Samson Raphael Hirsch was devoted at least in part to tackling these twin challenges. Hirsch, through his writings, tried to make traditional Judaism attractive to individual educated German Jews, having given up the idea of using the coercive power of the Jewish community. In attempting to meet the challenge of an official community dominated by Reform, Hirsch also made use of 210 Separatist Orthodoxy's Attitudes Toward Community this new individual approach. Using tactics which marked a sharp break from traditional attempts to use coercion, Hirsch argued that the rights of Orthodoxy were a matter of freedom of conscience (Liberles 1985:208). This new approach was most evident in...