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paul mendes-flohr 5 Leah’s Hope The Legacy of German-Jewish Humanism in America T he last time I saw Leah was at the sukkah of her in-laws. She sat across from me, gently embracing her young daughter Aderet. Leah ’s vibrant eyes sparkled with the joy of motherhood.Indeed,most vividly etched in my memory of Leah are her soft eyes, ever glistening with a disarming innocence,affirming all that is pure and decent.Appropriately,she spoke that evening of what the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit called, in a volume she was then reading, The Decent Society1 —that is, a society that actively seeks to enhance human dignity by minimizing the humiliation that its members may suffer from the scourge of poverty, disabilities, and invidious prejudices. With restrained passion she accordingly appealed to us in the midst of celebrating the holiday to remain compassionately alert to the anguish of all those who are degraded by misfortune and social injustice.Imperceptibly the conversation eventually broached our shared interest in German Jewry and its legacy of religious humanism. It is this legacy that Leah had hoped to honor through her scholarship. She was drawn,undoubtedly by both intellectual affinity and personal disposition , to the German-Jewish ethic of Bildung, which when wedded to Jewish commitments yielded the concept of ethical monotheism. Coined apparently by nineteenth-century Protestant biblical scholars, this concept was quickly assimilated into the German-Jewish lexicon.2 Across the denominational spectrum, from Reform to Neo-Orthodoxy, German Jews highlighted the prophetic ethical message of Judaism, according to which the one universal God enjoins all human beings to share in the divine work of ensuring that goodness and justice will reign in the world. In fulfilling this task as God’s elect, Israel is to serve as an ethical exemplar. German Jews transplanted this conception of Judaism to America, where it found a strong resonance in the ideals of the republic as a tolerant and inclusive democracy that secures the 124 / Paul Mendes-Flohr “inalienable rights” of its citizens in constitutional law. They thus found in America fertile ground for what Ralph Dahrendorf has felicitously called “applied Enlightenment.”3 The fusion of the liberal, humanistic ethos of America with the GermanJewish conception of ethical monotheism was given a learned and eloquent formulation by Rabbi Emil Gustav Hirsch (1851–1923), a graduate of the first class of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums,4 founded in 1872 in Berlin by Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) to promote the academic study of Judaism and the training of Liberal rabbis.5 Upon completing in 1876 his rabbinic studies,while earning a PhD from the University of Leipzig,6 Hirsch assumed pulpits at various Reform congregations in the United States; from 1880 until his death he served as the rabbi at Chicago’s Temple Sinai, the bastion of radical Reform Judaism in America. He was also one of the consulting editors of The Jewish Encyclopedia, which appeared from 1901 to 1906 in twelve volumes and brought the fruits of German Wissenschaft des Judentums to the English-reading public.7 Among the many entries Hirsch wrote for the Encyclopedia was an article on “modern” Jewish ethics, which may be read as a scholarly affirmation of ethical monotheism, but with a distinctly American twist. Noting that according to biblical faith God granted human beings “stewardship” of the world for one’s personal benefit and for that of one’s fellow human beings, Hirsch observes: On this basis [of human stewardship] Jewish ethics rests its doctrines on duty and virtue. Whatever increases the capacity of man’s stewardship is ethical. Whatever use of time,talent,or treasure augments one’s possibilities of human service is ethically consecrated. Judaism, therefore, inculcates as ethical the ambition to develop physical and mental powers, [for the] enlargement of service is dependent upon the measure or the increase of man’s power.Wealth is not immoral, poverty not moral. The desire to increase one’s stores of power is moral provided it is under the consecration of the recognized responsibility for larger service. The weak are entitled to the protection of the strong. Property entails duties, which establish its rights. Charity is not a voluntary concession on the part of the well situated. It is a right to which the less fortunate are entitled in justice (tzedakah). The main concern of Jewish ethics is personality. Every human being is a person, not a...

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