European Judaism

Amongst many commemorations of the start of the First World War, Professor Marc Saperstein organized a unique international one-day conference on Rabbis and the Great War, sponsored by Leo Baeck College with the Jewish Historical Society of England. Four other partners in the project were London synagogues: West London, New North London, North Western Reform (Alyth Gardens) and Belsize Square, all of which were the beneficiaries, directly or indirectly, of the arrival in the UK of refugee rabbis from Germany during the prelude to the second great European war. The conference was funded by the Ruth Ivor Foundation, Inc. of New York, named after one of the daughters of Rabbi Bruno Italiener, who served as a chaplain in the German army during the war, came to London as a refugee in 1939 and served as Associate Minister of the West London Synagogue from 1941 to 1951.

The impact of the 1914–1918 conflict was so great as to constitute a crisis in Jewish life and thought. One important outcome of this crisis was the collision of history and memory as languages through which Jews ascribed meaning to the violence of the First World War. Consequently, the celebrated distinction between history and memory, advanced by Yerushalmi thirty years ago, is in need of revision. Surveying the centripetal and the centrifugal effects of war on the Jewish world in Europe, Palestine and North America, alongside the efflorescence of Jewish philanthropy, this article shows how, already during the war and in its immediate aftermath, writers and scholars, among them Ansky and Dubnow, created an amalgam of history and memory in their reflections on the upheaval of war. I have termed this practice 'historical remembrance'.

In office, from the 'New' rather than the 'Old' World, indeed the first ordinand of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Joseph Herman Hertz moved among kings and grandees, ministering to two communities, different religiously, culturally and socially. One, an established 'West End' community, was assimilated and integrated; the other was a newer, larger, faster-growing, immigrant 'East End' community. He had to be a bridge between these two communities. Within a year of taking office, this American Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire was thrust into a world conflict that confronted him with tensions and challenges to his patriotism, his authority and his faith. Ultimately his period of office would be 'bracketed' by two world wars.

A graduate of Jews' College, Morris Joseph became the leading spokesman for British Reform Judaism as spiritual leader of the West London Synagogue. Though not a pacifist, he was one of the founders of the Jewish Peace Society in 1913. Unlike French and German colleagues who emphasized their patriotic loyalty to their ruler, love of their fatherland and bonds with their fellow citizens in fighting an evil adversary, Joseph expressed deep dismay in his first sermons following the outbreak of war in August 1914. His subsequent sermons – some printed the following Friday in the Jewish Chronicle, others eventually published in his third and final book of sermons – were delivered on various occasions: on ordinary Sabbaths and holidays, on National Days of Prayer and Intercession, at funeral services for members of his congregation killed in action, and at Confirmation services for students who might be joining the army a few years later. Central themes include the theological issues about God's role in the war, and the effort to define a coherent position, personally repudiating the pacifist refusal to serve in the struggle, while condemning any glorification of war and insisting that peace was an ultimate value of his Judaism.

Like their German colleagues the French rabbis enthusiastically supported the war effort. They even seemed to move away from the French style of patriotism, concerned with reason and universalism, to associate themselves with the prevalent nationalism by acknowledging in their sermons the tones of Maurice Barrès, the apostle of anti-Semitism, who, for the first time, included the Jews amongst the great French families. Contrary to the 'barbarians' from across the Rhine, who made obeisance to their new Pharaoh, the French Jews found themselves summoned to sacrifice themselves for the fatherland. The death of Rabbi Abraham Bloch, the report of which affirms that he was killed while bringing a crucifix to a dying Catholic soldier, symbolizes this now supposedly permanent unity of the religions.

This article examines in depth sermons of Rabbi Julius Jelski of the Reform Gemeinde in Berlin, Rabbi Samuel Korb of Nantes and Rabbi Israel Mattuck of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue (LJS) in London, preached on Rosh Hashanah 1914. Through consideration of the language and structure of their sermons, the extent to which the war is a motif in the sermons, their use of national literature, mottoes and ideas and their use of Biblical and rabbinic literature it develops an analysis of how the rabbis situated themselves and their communities in their countries of residence, and of their ideas on the morality of war and of this particular war. While all three rabbis appeal to Jewish texts and moral principles, the continental rabbis reach significantly different conclusions from those reached by Mattuck.

During the First World War Austrian rabbis played a major role in constructing a meaningful justification for the war that enabled both soldiers and those on the home front to endure the bloody conflict. Because Austria's main enemy in the first two years of the war was Russia, the 'evil empire' that persecuted its Jews, Austrian Jews, and rabbis in particular, saw the war as a just and holy war to liberate the Jews of Austrian Galicia, occupied by the Russian army at the beginning of the war, and also those of Russia itself. The war thus was a war of revenge for Kishinev; that is, for the pogroms in Russia. Such a definition of the war meant that Jews could fight both as loyal, patriotic citizens of Austria and also for a specific Jewish cause at the same time. In their sermons and writings, rabbis cogently expressed this wartime ideology, which persisted even after the Central Powers defeated Russia. Then rabbis, indeed Jewish spokesmen in general, understood the war in terms of guaranteeing the survival of the Habsburg Monarchy which protected the Jews from anti-Semitism and the dangers of nationalism.

The article analyses the conflicting attitudes towards the First World War as reflected in the sermons of three Italian rabbis of the period, representing different rabbinical schools. Regardless of their rabbinical formation all three rabbis share a profound preoccupation with the devastating assimilation to Italian non-Jewish culture of Italian Jews after, and as a result of, the emancipation. Yet, while condemning the assimilation tendencies of the Jewish Italian population, they all remain faithful to the ideals of Italian Risorgimento emancipation values. As Italian emancipated Jews, the Rabbis identify themselves with the Italian political shift from liberal and socialist ideals towards national, patriotic war. Not without difficulty they give up prewar previous pacifist attitudes in favour of a patriotic loyalty to the new Italian state and its royal family, inviting their audience to be loyal to what seem to be the needs of their fatherland. Towards the end of the war, however, a significant part of the rabbinical leadership shifted towards a Zionist patriotism, investing their energies in constructing a new religious identity through Zionist, all-compassing, national Jewish identity. These tensions between Italian Risorgimento ideals and Jewish religious and cultural continuity on the one hand, and an Italian versus Zionist national solution to post-war crisis on the other, are analysed and exemplified by the sermons of the three rabbis in this micro-study of Italian Jewish identity before and after the First World War.

For more than four years during the First World War Belgium was almost completely occupied. In response to the brutal occupation of the country, while many Belgian Jews were in the army, some played a more or less important role by various kinds of effective or spiritual resistance. A few others collaborated with the enemy. 'The soul of the moral resistance' was Chief Rabbi Armand Bloch (1861–1923), a man who was quiet by nature, but who put himself in danger; among other things, he delivered a sermon on the first day of Passover 1916 that would bring him, in May, in front of the War Council, which sentenced him 'for insult' to a six-month prison term. By describing his career and analysing his published works, this article will try to understand his reasons for resistance.

The article analyses the main issues that appeared in the Hungarian Israel, the journal of the National Rabbinical Association of the Neolog and Status Quo Ante rabbis of Hungary, about the Great War. In the first years of the war, it concerned itself with the legitimization of the war from the Hungarian-Jewish point of view. Then, when the war did not end quickly, it focused on a professional issue: the functioning of the institution of the army chaplains. However, crucial topics that concerned Jews and non-Jews at the time did not come up in the journal. The topics avoided included popular anti-Semitic accusations that Jews evaded conscription, and that those who served were usually not front-soldiers but army contractors in the safety of the hinterland.

This article examines Jewish religious life and rabbinic leadership in the city of Vilna (Vilnius) during the First World War by focusing on three figures: Rabbi Hayim Ozer Grodzienski, Rabbi Isaac Rubinstein and Ester Rubinstein (the wife of the latter). Humanitarian and social crisis, together with political change, disrupted religious life in Vilna, leading to a retrenchment of Orthodoxy, as it ceased to be the way of the establishment and became one Jewish movement among many. New schools and new communal institutions were formed, while rabbis reformulated the traditional lay–rabbinic division of labour. While the Rubinsteins used the war to further a religious-Zionist model that made compromises with modernity, Grodzienski favoured a more traditionalist stance. These differences led to a postwar split between religious Zionism and ultra-Orthodoxy.

Joseph Krauskopf immigrated from his native Prussia to the United States at the age of fourteen, and was ordained with the first class of students at the newly established Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Quickly establishing a reputation for his spellbinding oratory, he became rabbi of Knesseth Israel in Philadelphia, one of the largest Reform congregations in the United States, with a membership composed predominantly of congregants with German background. Although he was a strong supporter of US military action during the Spanish-American War, the First World War caused him considerable anguish, as he remained attached to his roots in German culture throughout his career. In a series of Sunday morning discourses and holiday sermons beginning on Rosh Hashanah 1914, Krauskopf expressed horror at the widespread suffering caused by the war, strongly supported the initial US policy of neutrality, and vehemently criticized expressions of growing support for the Entente Cordiale. While upholding the US war effort after America's entry into combat, as the end drew near he continued to excoriate policies that would humiliate and impoverish Germany, with prescient warnings of future disasters.

A series of random, chance and synchronous events between 10:00 A.M. and 11:00 A.M. on 28 June 1914 catalysed the world into a war, the reverberations of which are still with us. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his young wife by a Bosnian Serb unfolded through a sequence of unpredictable events, the absence of any one of which would have led history off into another direction. Although history is often thought about as if what actually happened had to happen – what Henri Bergson termed 'the illusions of retrospective determinism' – the events of that sunny June day belie that view. When in the Torah (Numbers 20) Moses strikes the rock, rather than speaking to it, there is a mystery involved as to why he acted as he did. But that moment sealed his fate. Acts which might seem insignificant at the time can have consequences, for us, our society, our world, that can never be imagined at the time – for good and for bad.

With great sadness we record the passing of Rabbi Sheila Shulman z’l shortly after the celebrations marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of her ordination by Leo Baeck College. (The lecture at that event, which similarly marked the ordination of Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah, was given by Rachel Adler and will appear in a forthcoming issue of European Judaism.)

I first met Martin Gilbert in May 2000, when he was given an honorary degree at the graduation ceremonies of The George Washington University, where I was Professor of History and chairman of the Program in Judaic Studies. But I felt that I had known him long before that, through his books.

Curthoys, Ned, The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation, New York/Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2013, 238 pp., ISBN 978-1-78238-007-8 (hbk).

Kaplan, Rabbi Dana Evan, The New Reform Judaism: Challenges and Reflections, Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society, 2013, 367 pp., ISBN 978-0-8276-0934-1 (hardback)

Appelbaum, Peter C. (with introduction by Professor Michael Meyer and foreword by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg), Loyalty Betrayed: Jewish Chaplains in the German Army during the First World War, London/ Portland (Oregon), Valentine Mitchell, 2014.

Break of Day in the Trenches by Isaac Rosenberg

How to Die by Siegfried Sassoon