From Frankfurt to Jerusalem: Isaac Breuer and the History of the Secession Dispute in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 552–555 MATTHIAS MORGENSTERN, From Frankfurt to Jerusalem: Isaac Breuer and the History of the Secession Dispute in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. Studies In European Judaism 6. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002. Pp. xiv Ⳮ 384. Originally published in 1995 in German, Morgenstern’s work on Isaac Breuer and the history of Frankfurt Jewry makes a valuable contribution to the study of modern Orthodoxy. The topics are thoroughly researched and rely on a wide variety of archival and printed material. The author is wholly in command of the secondary scholarship in all the relevant languages , and admirably cognizant of recent works in the field. The work divides into three parts. The first, and least original, sets the scene by detailing the fragmentation of Orthodoxy into Agudas Yisroel, Mizrah .i, and ‘‘independent Orthodoxy.’’ Morgenstern correctly considers secessionist Orthodoxy a pejorative term but occasionally sins in the opposite direction, as when he opposes ‘‘reconstituted Orthodoxy’’ to ‘‘compromise Orthodoxy’’ (p. 7). Fortunately the terms ‘‘separatist Orthodoxy ’’ or ‘‘independent Orthodoxy’’—the least weighted—are the most frequently employed. Quite a bit of this ground has been covered before. Ehud Luz, Parallels Meet (Philadelphia,1988), also chronicles the development of Orthodox politicization and fragmentation, but Morgenstern ’s geographic focus enables the reader to see the scene from the eyes of Mitteleuropa rather than the Pale, Luz’s principal vantage point. (See, for instance, Morgenstern’s useful discussion of Hungarian and Viennese conflicts between Reformers and Traditionalists as precedents for developments in Frankfurt am Main, pp. 118–19). Mordechai Breuer’s Jüdische Orthodoxie in Deutschen Reich, 1871–1918: Die Sozialgeschichte einer religiösen Minderheit (Frankfurt, 1986) offers the definitive picture of German Orthodoxy in the Kaiserreich; not surprisingly, given the family connections , Breuer’s depiction of his great-grandfather’s Frankfurt community is particularly striking. But Breuer’s is a self-consciously social history, and the ideological and political currents deserve the treatment that Morgenstern accords them. The second part of this work focuses on Frankfurt am Main, most specifically on what Morgenstern calls ‘‘the Frankfurt narrative.’’ Morgenstern demolishes a series of misjudgments about the towering figure The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. MORGENSTERN, FRANKFURT TO JERUSALEM—LEVENSON 553 of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) (pp. 108–11). He recapitulates the development of the legend of the founding of the Israelitische Religions Gesellschaft (IRG) with greater detail than is found in Robert Liberles’s Religious Conflict in a Social Context (Westport, 1985). Morgenstern’s relationship to Liberles’s work is conflicted—on the one hand, Morgenstern accepts Liberles’s view that traditionalism was not oppressed by liberalism until the 1830s, and that the myth of the eleven founders of the IRG was mainly Hirsch’s ex post facto dramatization of events that occurred before Hirsch arrived in Frankfurt in 1851. On the other hand, Morgenstern rejects many of Liberles’s reasonable inferences about the contemporary events to which Hirsch’s Torah commentary alludes (p. 146, n. 151), ‘‘corrects’’ Liberles on debatable items (p. 157, n.6), and makes mountains out of molehills regarding some of Liberles’s chronologies (p. 166). This reviewer got the impression that Morgenstern sympathizes with Orthodox myth making far more than did Liberles. (By way of myth making, Morgenstern refers to Hirsch as a university graduate, although Hirsch left Bonn in 1830 for the rabbinate. To my knowledge, Hirsch was university-trained but not university-graduated, unlike his famous rival Abraham Geiger [p. 159]). While the Hirsch-led departure of the IRG community from the mainstream Frankfurt community stands as his most controversial political act, Hirsch’s formula of Torah-Im-Derekh-Eretz (TDE) has been his most controversial principle. Perhaps other readers will be surprised to learn that the phrase TDE appears in neither Nineteen Letters nor Horeb. Hirsch was prolific, yet Morgenstern notes that nowhere does Hirsch devote an entire essay to this concept—its formulation and interpretation must remain provisional. Morgenstern explicitly follows Mordechai Breuer’s interpretation (pp. 168–87) that TDE in Hirsch...