Ortodoksia ba-Olam he-Hadash: Rabbanim ve-Darshanut be-America, 1881-1924 (review)

Hundreds of rabbis, most of them young, Lithuanian, and products of that province's famous yeshivot, came to the United States during the decades of the great east European Jewish immigration. They had been cautioned against emigrating to that notoriously irreligious land, but, suffering from the same decrees as ordinary Jews, they too felt pressed to leave. Besides, the young rabbis saw the local communities that employed some of them, and others that might have employed them, shrinking owing to massive emigration. Meanwhile—we speak of the 1880s and 1890s—a huge new aggregation, hardly a community yet, of east European immigrants was growing in America. The influential rabbi of Kovno (Kaunas today), Isaac Elhanan Spektor, recommended for positions in the new country many of the young rabbis studying in his advanced academy (kollel) or serving in the declining Lithuanian communities.

Surprises, not always agreeable ones, lay in store for the immigrant rabbis. When they came to their positions in America, they found that their congregations did not desire discourses (drashot) on halakhah, Talmudic law, the subject the men had labored at through years of study. Even pious audiences markedly preferred to hear discourses on Agada, the non-halakic portions of the Talmud with their tales, moral aphorisms, and words of comfort. The rabbis came to realize that their audiences worked to exhaustion all week and even on the Sabbath lacked the mental stamina needed for halakhah. However, the emphasis on Agada led some of the rabbis to feel their rabbinic qualifications demeaned before their watchful colleagues in eastern Europe. The immigrant rabbis also had to develop rhetorical skill, which many could not. Above all, there was the overwhelming fact that the rabbis' supreme values of God-fearing piety and devotion to sacred study practically vanished in America. The transition to America, difficult for all immigrants, was thus uniquely hard for east European rabbis.

There is first-hand evidence of the immigrant rabbis' difficulties from their own spoken and written words, of course from their perspective. Kimmy Caplan's Hebrew University dissertation, published as the present book, gathers and interprets them with exemplary diligence and imagination. His painstaking study, supported by vast documentation, pays particular attention to six rabbis, Moses S. Sivitz of Pittsburgh, Simon J. Finkelstein of Brooklyn, Abraham Galanti of the Bronx, Abraham Yudelevitz of Manchester (England), Boston and New York, Gedalya Silverstone of Washington, D.C., and Zalman Friederman of Boston. They published extensive sermonic writings and consequently receive much of the author's attention, while other rabbis, who could have been their equals in scholarly reputation, are passed by because they published little or nothing. By traditional standards of learning and piety the immigrant rabbis matched those who remained in Russia and Poland.

We reach the question, how much they were influenced by America itself in their lives? Caplan does not discuss this, but in their sermons' content the rabbis held fast to east European Orthodoxy. Yet we know of the not too private heresy of Rabbi Solomon Scheinfeld of Milwaukee, not mentioned in Caplan's text, and there could have been others. There were also less problematic examples of American influence. Rabbi Sivitz, a notable as well as sometimes witty scholar, referred to the American industrial environment that surrounded him in Pittsburgh, while Rabbi Levin of Detroit invented adding machines. Perhaps the most revealing example of American influences is the rabbis' own families. Few, if any, of their children became Orthodox rabbis, and those who made the rabbinate their career became mainly Conservative rabbis. Many of their children became lawyers and businessmen.

The rabbis cited by Caplan adopted a generally negative attitude to the American experience. The religious freedom and separation of church and state in America, which...