European Judaism

Editing a journal like European Judaism is a mixture of planning, intuition and chance. The Editorial Board maps out the general outline of a number of issues and seeks appropriate contributions; other possible articles arise out of lectures given within the various activities of Leo Baeck College, and yet others come unsolicited for our consideration. Therefore, every issue is a compromise between an original concept and the fascinating juxtapositions of available materials as deadlines draw near.

Solomon Schechter departed England in the spring of 1902 to become president of the reorganised Jewish Theological Seminary of America. His post as Reader in Rabbinic and Talmudic Literature at Cambridge University was taken up by 44-year-old Israel Abrahams who remained at the post until his demise at age sixty-seven. Israel Abrahams hailed from a distinguished pedigree. His father Barnett Abrahams served as a Principal of Jews’ College but died from rheumatic fever before his thirty-third birthday. Israel’s mother, born Jane Rodrigues Brandon, traced her family tree to fugitives from the Spanish Inquisition

Claude Montefiore was a member of what Chaim Bermant has aptly called ‘The Cousinhood’ – in other words, the Anglo-Jewish aristocracy. Montefiore was born in 1858, the year in which Lionel Rothschild became the first Jew to take his seat in the House of Commons. Montefiore’s father was a nephew of Moses Montefiore and his mother a daughter of Isaac Goldsmid, one of the founders of the non-sectarian University College, London and also of the West London Reform Synagogue.

Half a century has now elapsed since the first publication in 1950 of André Neher’s Amos, contribution à l’étude du prophétisme. Born in Obernai (Alsace) in 1914 and deceased in Jerusalem in 1988, André Neher was one of the great thinkers of contemporary Judaism. His initial career as a secondary-school German teacher was interrupted by the Second World War, which he spent exiled in the ‘Free Zone’ engaged in intensive Jewish study together with his father and brother.

The word ‘Rabbi’ means teacher. Yet the great Jewish teachers of the twentieth century were not always rabbis; universities were filled with outstanding Jewish figures, from Morris Raphael Cohen in the USA to Isaiah Berlin and George Steiner in Great Britain or Jean Améry in Belgium. Still, when we come to examine the great reservoir of Jewish learning which was German Jewry in the twentieth century, it is the three great disciples of Hermann Cohen who come to mind: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Leo Baeck.

Hannah Arendt is so modern that one of the academic disputes about her at present is whether she should be classified amongst the moderns or the ‘postmoderns’, an issue which probably puts her at the borderline of our knowledge and understanding, or rather, beyond it.1 She was not a religiously practising Jew: the first letter she wrote to an old Jewish friend, Gertrud Jaspers, after the war, speaks about sending some bacon, with detailed instructions on how to cook it – and somewhat significantly, she adds ‘I’ve forgotten the German word for it, the hell with it’.

Spinoza has been regarded as a philosophical outsider, ‘at odds with what became the philosophical mainstream . . . [and] to read him is to glimpse unrealised possibilities . . . and alternative ways of thinking of minds and bodies . . . agency and responsibility, of the relation between human beings and the rest of nature, between reason and the passions.’ and also of freedom. Today, the controversial philosophy of Spinoza’s Ethics is often described as all-encompassing and celebrated as ‘one of the most remarkable metaphysical systems in the entire history of philosophy’.

It is perhaps because the greatest unifier of Jews during the past half-century has been the idea that Israel is the Jewish homeland, that one of the least doubted notions is that the State and the land are integrally tied up with Jewishness. Jewish attachment to Israel is based on two themes: the physical need for a country – which is indisputable so will not be discussed here – and a literal reading of Scripture that, although it seems to reflect the plain meaning of the text reasonably enough, may well be a misreading and require careful reconsideration. This paper describes how one early rabbinic author critically analyses the effects of mistaking the ideas associated with Zion and the Holy Land with the places to which the names refer. For him these names refer to internal spaces rather than real locations, and he argues that confusing ideas with geography is profoundly damaging to religious life and no less than idolatrous. This paper outlines his views and their background.

The supremacy of Chayyim Nachman Bialik’s poetry derives from the nature and life of the poet himself. Born into a very traditional, large and impoverished family, Bialik sought a more comprehensive and secular education outside the discipline of talmudic studies. He read Russian poetry and European literature and while still studying in a Lithuanian yeshiva, joined a secret orthodox Zionist student society, Netzach Yisrael. In 1891 he left Volozhin and went to Odessa, the centre of modern Jewish culture in Southern Russia and became part of a literary circle around Ahad Ha-am until his return to the family home where he found his grandfather and brother both dying.

On 10 November 1904, the then twenty-six year-old medical student Alfred Döblin wrote a highly instructive and, in two senses, confessional letter from Freiburg to Else Lasker–Schüler.

I first met Nick Carter in July 1974 when I assumed the position of rabbi in the Wimbledon and District Synagogue of which he was a devoted member. Already a veteran speaker and writer in the fields of animal welfare and environmental care, I was used to meeting polite indifference in my fellow Jews whenever I claimed that Judaism demanded positive action in response to any abuse of animals or of the environment. Not only was Nick far from indifferent but he had worked professionally in these fields for many years.

In the Bible, God commands Noah to enter the ark. The Hebrew word for ‘ark’ is teivah. The Hebrew word for the letters of the alphabet is also teivah. The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, taught that in prayer and in study, a person must enter the letters. The letters of holy words are each like a door.

In the autumn of 1999, Jews all over the world began to receive an e-mail message stating two pieces of blatant disinformation.

Informal Jewish educational settings are places that both affect Jewish Identity and transmit Jewish knowledge (Chazan, 1991). For instance, Jewish youth movements provide young people with social, cultural, and informal educational Jewish experiences outside of the classroom setting (Reisman, 1991). Chazan (1991) explained informal education as ‘an activity that is freely chosen by a person and that is very dependent on that person’s active involvement and positive motivation. It is not effected in any special place, but may happen in a variety of settings and venues’. Hence, informal education is not based on the fixed curriculum or grading systems which are characteristic of schools, although, it should reflect a well-defined set of goals, contents, and programmes (Chazan, 1991).

After so many years you would think that my mother’s demons would have been put to rest. But at ninety two she lay in a hospital bed pleading a case to her own supreme being. No, not God, she never called on Him. She went directly to the source of all her troubles. The Malahamuvis, the Angel of Death, and the Konahorra, the Evil Eye! I held her frail hand and listened as she switched languages in an effort to communicate with her archenemies.

Celestial events

Jewish museum, Berlin In Winter

Writer’s cramp

1939 By Lisa Beatman

Memorial Day

The Death Poems

My Own Alicia

Book Review

I am proud of having been listed among the contributors of your recent and remarkable issue (‘The exile of Jerusalem which is in Sepharad’). Yet, I should make clear that my contribution is quite modest. My work simply consisted in editing – in offering an article-size synthesis of – Igal Bursztyn’s book Face as a Battlefield. I hope that my summary of this book was a faithful one, respecting both the thinking and the style of Bursztyn who is not only a noted director, but a writer