European Judaism

This issue is largely given over to the proceedings of a conference on the history of the German Rabbinate Abroad organised by Tobias Grill and Cornelia Wilhelm in Tutzing, Germany in October 2009. Part of the theme was inevitably the fate of German rabbis who were forced to flee during the Nazi period, but the new model of the nineteenth-century, university- and seminary-educated rabbi was successfully exported beyond its European birthplace. The programme organisers edited the contents of this issue and their introduction follows.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment movement, emerged in Germany to reconcile science and rationalism with Judaism. Such a programme was considered a prerequisite for a rapprochement between Jews and Gentiles. The Maskilim, the Jewish Enlighteners, regarded it as absolutely necessary to adapt Jewish life to modernity, in order to preserve Judaism. One of the main goals of the Haskalah programme, which portended a renunciation of the traditional dominance of religious education, was the acquisition and dissemination of secular knowledge. German Jews increasingly attended common schools or established their own modern educational institutions where secular knowledge was imparted, while the teaching of religious subjects had lost much of its earlier significance. Consequently, religion ceased to dominate all spheres of life and became merely a part of it.

The paper investigates the role Rabbi Nathan Adler played in the institutionalisation of the English Chief Rabbinate. It focuses on his appointment to Chief Rabbi and on his activities in instituting the various roles of Chief Rabbi in the post-emancipation Anglo-Jewish community. Rabbi Adler's complicated relations with early Reform Judaism in England are also dealt with. When Rabbi Adler came to London he had an image of Reform Judaism as he knew it in Hanover, where he came from. In a short period he understood the uniqueness of the English Reform Movement, and adjusted his politics towards it accordingly. Continuing the dominance of German Rabbis heading the English Chief Rabbinate, Rabbi Adler brought with him to England a new mode of modern German Rabbinate, established in the mid nineteenth century. Rabbi Adler adapted, with considerable success, the German model to the British reality. Rabbi Adler was a very close associate of Sir Moses Montefiore. Their close relationship was an important factor in Rabbi Adler's success in the formulation of the Chief Rabbinate in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom.

For a long period Australia was a British colonial offshoot and its Jewish community followed the dictates of the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Nathan Marcus Adler, who, with his son and successor Hermann Adler, brought the German rabbinic outlook to his religious leadership. Over the decades many Australian ministers (not all were fully qualified rabbis) were German or trained in the German rabbinic style, though there was often an anti-German reaction on the part of Eastern European rabbis and laymen. Though many of the ministers were quintessentially British, they were mostly trained under German Jewish scholars at Jews' College in London and displayed the German synthesis of Jewish and Western culture. Since the Second World War Australian Jewry has changed radically both as a result of post-Holocaust immigration and because of the growing diversity of the community. There is a strong Eastern European flavour and the British chief rabbinate is no longer the community's automatic authority.

Amongst the people from Europe immigrating to North America in the nineteenth century many Jews from Germany came to the New World trying to begin a new life. Their religious experience in Europe and Germany, and ideas of organising (religious) education shaped to a large extent Jewish religious life and education in North America, especially in the emerging United States. Marcus M. Jastrow (1829-1903) was amongst these Jewish immigrants. He came to America in 1866, and only when he took over the rabbinate of the Rodeph Shalom congregation in Philadelphia (Pa.) did the external conditions of his life settle down. Yet two cities - Berlin and Warsaw - and the encounter with distinguished scholars of the Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) and their beliefs remained most formative in Jastrow's life and legacy in America. Through this article I aim to trace back the elements of Jastrow's education and experience in Germany and Poland and identify and measure the impact of it in his life and epistemology in America.

One of the more central German-American rabbis, Kaufmann Kohler played a prominent role in shaping American Jewish communal, religious and intellectual life at the turn of the twentieth century. Kohler served as a link between the German-Jewish religious and intellectual environment and that of the United States, where he emigrated in 1869. Like a number of Reform rabbis in Germany, Kohler saw his work as a rabbi, a Reform leader, theologian, initiator of scholarship, and a writer on Jewish and Christian history, as inseparably intertwined. The article points to Kohler's role as a scholar-rabbi who brought with him from Germany certain academic standards and a belief in the power of scholarship and ideas to shape public life, as well as a Reform theological agenda. The thoughts, initiatives and travails of Kohler tells us a great deal about the role of intellectual German-Jewish immigrant rabbis in America, their effect on the course of American Judaism and the manner in which they negotiated a role and identity for themselves and their community in America, trying to change, among other things, the manner the Protestant majority related to Judaism and Jews.

The German Rabbinate became a special role model for modern Judaism since the early nineteenth century and developed a unique capacity to negotiate and mediate group identity between group and society. Nazism destroyed German-Jewish life in central Europe, however the German Rabbinate continued to exist in refugee communities abroad, where it preserved its legacy. For the rabbinate and scholars of Judaism the United States was the most desired destination. The article will explore the conditions of the emigration process, resettlement of German refugee rabbis in the United States and explore how and where they found a place in American Judaism. It will also try to evaluate the impact this emigration has had on American Judaism and on American society.

This article focuses on the role German rabbis such as Adolf Kober and Max Gruenewald played within the founding history of the Leo Baeck Institute. I will concentrate on the creation of the institute's branch in America, where the first initiatives for a German-Jewish research enterprise had their origin. The article tries to explain the intentions behind the various projects that eventually led to the foundation of the Leo Baeck Institute in 1955, and asks in what ways the founders meant to preserve and transmit a German-Jewish legacy. Since this process was embedded in the negotiations of German-Jewish émigré groups with Jewish world organizations such as Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and Claims Conference for the necessary funds, I will view the founding history of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York as a history of conflicts. My contention is that the long-lasting struggle for a preservation and transmission of a German-Jewish legacy in America reflected to a considerable extent the deeper conflict between Eastern European and German Jewry, between tradition and modernity, and was ultimately an expression of a German-Jewish identity that the refugee rabbis defended vehemently against their ideological opponents.

The two 'progressive' Jewish movements in the UK, the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain (now the Movement for Reform Judaism) and the Union of Liberal and Progressive Judaism (now Liberal Judaism) grew considerably in the interwar years helped by the influx of refugee rabbis from Germany. Already in the 1940s unsuccessful plans were considered for transferring the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums to the UK. It was not until 1956 that what was to be called the Jewish Theological College of London was inaugurated by the Reform movement with two students, to be renamed Leo Baeck College in his honour on his death shortly afterwards. The prime mover and first director of studies was Rabbi Dr Werner van der Zyl, himself a graduate of the Hochschule and a rabbi in Berlin till his emigration to the UK. While serving as minister at North Western Reform Synagogue and the West London Synagogue, he oversaw the creation of the College and the subsequent additional sponsorship by the Liberal Movement. He brought to the task the open-minded scholarship and pluralism of the Hochschule and the sophistication of Berlin.

In 1948, when the first non-sectarian Jewish-sponsored university was founded in a suburb of Boston, Jewish studies was integral to the curriculum, and three scholars - all of whom had been German-trained - became the pivotal figures in what became the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. Nahum Glatzer, Simon Rawidowicz and Alexander Altmann personified German learning at its most formidable, in their range, in their erudition, in their authoritativeness. They transmitted and perpetuated German and Jewish scholarship to a new post-war site, and in a sense revived Weimar culture in Waltham, Massachusetts.

During the Nazi period approximately 281 German Jewish rabbis emigrated, of which only very few returned to their former home country: One of them was Dr Robert Raphael Geis (1906-1972). By focusing on Geis's biography this article will portray the history of one German-Jewish emigrant, who despite the general difficulties associated with the opposition to Jewish return to post-war Germany, re-migrated to his country of birth where he had received his education and started working as a rabbi in the 1930s. This article will discuss not only Geis's individual experience before emigration and in his place of refuge, but will analyse his process of return to illustrate the personal dimension of 'brilliance and burden' in Geis's biography. In this context three central aspects will be addressed as key to understanding Geis's decision to return to post-war Germany and critically participate in the public and religious, as well as the academic discourses, first as community rabbi, later as an independent scholar. Arguing that Geis's experience is representative of the fate of many other German Jews, who were fortunate enough to escape Germany, but oftentimes struggled for years to adjust to their place of refuge, this article will ultimately offer insight to an oftentimes underrepresented theme in academic research, if, for no other reason, caused by a noticeable lack of source material.

Today's popular image of Cornwall has largely been shaped by Rosamund Pilcher's novels, especially in Germany. Her view is built on romantic clichés including love, passion and an aristocratic way of life set in a rugged coastal landscape. However, the reality is very different. A closer look at England's extreme south-west reveals a complex region with an exciting history which in parts has been written by a small Jewish population. Academic research began to focus on this long-neglected historical chapter at the end of the last century. In 2000 came the exhibition The Jews of Devon and Cornwall curated by Evelyn Friedlander and Helen Fry. It was first shown in Penzance, followed by other venues in Devon and Cornwall. Ten years later I met with Evelyn Friedlander, now the director of London's Czech Memorial Scrolls Museum, in Truro. Together we visited the Jewish sites of Falmouth and Penzance and talked about the past, present and future of Cornish Jewry.

In recent years the usage of a goblet filled with water called cos miryam (Miriam's cup) during the Passover Seder has increased. This article shows that this custom had its origins in an evening in a Sukkah in Boston, was then soon used regularly at Havdalah ceremonies and finally found its way into the Seder. In recent years this new custom spread throughout Europe. The article depicts this development and also shows the different places and usages documented in published Haggadot of different denominations, and interprets these usages. As the origins and development of this new custom could be researched from its beginnings, this new Jewish ritual of Miriam's cup can serves as an example for the development of rituals in ritual studies in general.

Miriam’s Well (from Talmudic sources)

I have been asked to say something about the ‘overall goal’ of teaching/ reading the open-ended and growing body of texts so awkwardly collected under the rubric of ‘Theology, Philosophy, History’. That body of texts might more reasonably be called Post-Classical Jewish Studies, since it encompasses everything outside of what is usually understood as ‘Rabbinic Literature’, yet it is as much a part of our ‘textual tradition’ as the Bavli and the great collections of Midrashim. I can only speak to, and for, what I am closest to: the Jewish texts of ‘modernity’, ‘post-modernity’, and, by now, what might need to be called ‘post-post-modernity’. Of course, many (most?) of these texts exist in a loving, intimate, though often conflictual ‘dialogue’ with their textual predecessors, even when they appear to be in rebellion or repudiation.

Roman Halter: Born Chodecz, Poland 7 July 1927. Died London, 30 January 2012

Molly Tuby: Born Alexandria, 27 March 1917. Died London, 28 March 2011

The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Shmuel Feiner, translated by Chaya Naor. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, 330 pp.

Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, David Biale, Princeton University Press, 2011, 228 pp.ISBN 0812242734

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea?: French Jewry and the Problem of Church and State, Zvi Jonathan Kaplan, Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 2009. 148 pp. ISBN 1930675615

Rediscovering Traces of Memory: The Jewish Heritage of Polish Galicia, Jonathan Webber, and Chris Schwarz, Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009.200 pages ISBN 1906764034

Secret Judaism and the Spanish Inquisition, Michael Alpert, Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2008.ISBN: 1905512295, 262 pages

Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Israel: ‘Finding their Voice’, Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005.

The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice, Yaacob Dweck, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, 280 pp. £?? ISBN 978–0–691–14508–2.

A Death-Camp Passion

Momento

In Good Stead

Zinnias

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) [With Muse (Dream), Oil on canvas, 1918, Private collection]