European Judaism

The major part of this issue is taken up by four articles organised by Cornelia Wilhelm on the theme of ‘The Synagogue and the Legacies of the Holocaust: The German Refugee Rabbis and Cantors’. It is a continuation of Professor Wilhelm's research on the fate of refugee rabbis who escaped from Nazi Germany. The topic was previously considered in our issue (Volume 45, No. 2, September 2012) which published the proceedings of a conference organised by Professor Wilhelm and Tobias Grill in Tutzing on 1 October 2009 on ‘German Rabbis Abroad’. Here, Professor Wilhelm introduces the four articles and provides an overview of the topics covered.

During the night of 9 November 1938, the persecution of the Jewish communities in Germany reached a new level with the systematic and physical destruction of property, the elimination of intellectual and business leadership, and the demolition of safe havens such as community and synagogue buildings, as well as the aid networks that spun around the synagogue. The atrocities not only destroyed important communal spaces and strongholds for Jewish communities, but also targeted German Jewry's spiritual leadership, including rabbis and other functionaries around the synagogue such as cantors, a group whose fate during these days has hence found little attention in the research into these events.

This article uses an innovative digital humanities database and generational history in order to analyse the lives and careers of German refugee rabbis in the United States. It identifies the cohort among the refugee rabbis who were part of a communitisation process and defined themselves as ‘the last generation of the German rabbinate’, and illuminates how and why they could continue their careers in the United States better than elsewhere. It also examines their late returns to the country of their birth and analyses how they made sense of their own history by exchanges with the Germans. This was part of the transnational knowledge transfer that presented them as the last rabbis in the German-Jewish tradition, but also allowed them to successfully relaunch the establishment of modern Jewish seminaries for rabbinical training on the European continent and achieve symbolic continuity, eighty years after their destruction by Nazism.

By using the example of Jewish immigration to São Paulo in the 1930s and 1940s and analysing the history of the Congregação Israelita Paulista (CIP) under the leadership of Fritz Pinkuss, this article shows how emotions were used in different ways. Such an approach gives new insight into the complexity of migration history. The Brazilian government under Gétulio Vargas openly embraced emotional mobilisation against ‘Semites’ and ‘foreigners’, and in so doing wanted to introduce a new understanding of the nation and secure their political influence. At the same time, Pinkuss also used emotions in his communal policies to establish a new religious union, a new form of inclusion and solidarity in the Jewish community. By transferring German Jewish traditions to Brazil and emphasising their flexibility, Pinkuss not only created a new emotional bond, but also laid the ground for integration of the émigré community into Brazilian society.

In the aftermath of the November pogrom of 1938, thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. After being released, around one hundred rabbis were able to leave Germany for Great Britain. But escaping Germany was not the end of their personal hardship. Once respected community leaders, rabbis arrived destitute and depended on charitable organisations for their livelihoods. Some would be classified as enemy aliens and faced with internment once again. The refugee rabbis would not to be discouraged, however, and they began, at first just a small circle, to reclaim their place in Jewish life once again. In a new country, a new context, and in the midst of around eighty thousand refugees, the rabbis were able to reignite their work and embarked on a great number of initiatives and projects. They were able to place the German Jewish heritage into Anglo-Jewry, where it continues to live on today.

In this article, I explore the role that Austrian-born musicologist/composer Eric Werner (1901–1988) cultivated as a representative of musical Wissenschaft des Judenthums in postwar America. I focus here on the diary that Werner kept between 1955 and 1957 – a heretofore untapped resource – which chronicles his efforts to build intellectual refugee networks while simultaneously helping to restart an international network of Jewish music discourse spanning America, Europe and Israel. Music, in Werner's view, required a scientific basis for study from which authentic practices could be rebuilt. Thus, while Werner relied on revitalising cantors as vessels of Jewish music, he viewed musicology as the core discipline from which Jewish music ‘tradition’ could arise.

The International Jewish Christian Bible Week, which is dedicated mainly to the study of the Hebrew Scriptures, includes two sessions called ‘Texts in Dialogue’, usually devoted to reflection by a Jew and a Christian on a New Testament text, or texts from both the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. In 2017, when the conference text was Proverbs, Mark Solomon and Veronika Bachmann chose, for the first time, to turn to a deuterocanonical book, the Wisdom of Ben Sira, both as an outgrowth of the Biblical Wisdom books, and a bridge between the testaments.

This article examines the theopoetic (re-)imagination of Wisdom at the centre of the Book of Jesus Ben Sira (chapter 24) and brings it into a dialogue with the prologue of the Gospel of John, where not Torah, but Jesus of Nazareth as logos is related to traditional concepts of Wisdom.

The second of two short papers, this article responds to Bachmann, and focuses on the metaphor of water as a symbol of Wisdom in Ben Sira 24. Having enumerated six biblical rivers of wisdom, Ben Sira conceives himself as the seventh river, beginning as a tiny channel and swelling into a mighty river of instruction, eventually joining the sea of Wisdom. The symbolism looks back to the prophetic association of living waters with Messianic redemption, and forwards to the Rabbis’ use of water as a symbol of Torah, which they identify both with biblical Wisdom and with the divine Logos. Both Christian and Jewish traditions see the Logos, whether incarnate in Christ or embodied in the Torah, as the vehicle for God's purifying, redeeming activity. In both cases, the universal redemption flows from the particular.

Most Jews have heard about Kol Isha, the proscription against women raising their voices in song. But discussions about the voice of a woman were broader than whether or not she could sing and in what context, and in whose presence. The discomfort men had about women, not just singing but also speaking, has never been simply an issue of a voice, but rather of a voice embodied in a particular body, a female body, whose physical presence has traditionally presented a problem for Jewish men. These days, this is not solely an uncomfortable problem within the Orthodox Jewish world, but also within the progressive Jewish world, where women's voices and women's presence are still challenging and discomfiting to people. Nor does it remain solely a source of Jewish anxiety; women and their voices affect women in all aspects of secular life as well.

This article examines selected stories of Ruth's conversion in order to find out whether the belief in God was an explicit conversion requirement in rabbinic Judaism. This examination aims to establish whether there are rabbinic sources that could support the decision to convert non-believers to Progressive Judaism. First, the article examines the story of Ruth's conversion in bYevamot 47a–b in the context of rabbinic conversion requirements delineated in bYevamot 46a–48b. It proposes that Yevamot 47a–b treats the belief in God as an implicitly necessary requirement for conversion. Second, the article analyses the story of Ruth's conversion found in Targum Ruth, which includes the description of Ruth's belief in the World-to-Come but focuses on pious observance of the commandments. Finally, the article posits that the absence of explicit references to faith in God among rabbinic conversion requirements calls for Progressive communal and liturgical openness to contemporary Jewish struggles with belief.

Between Aristotle and Hegel, none of the major Western philosophers were married. Is abstract thinking, at its highest, incompatible with the messiness of everyday life? At the age of nineteen, Isaiah Berlin said he was ‘vowed to eternal celibacy’. Was there a connection between his sexual abstinence and his choice of analytical philosophy as a career? During World War II he fell in love with the gentile Patricia de Bendern; this frustrating affair coincided with Berlin's shift from abstract logic to the history of ideas. In 1956 he took a Jewish bride, Aline Halban. His personal history reflects difficulties in choosing between endogamy and exogamy, Zionism and the diaspora, negative and positive liberty.

Eric Friedland was born in New York City in 1941. Soon after birth it was found he had defective hearing and his mother faced hardship as his father left home six months later. His mother moved to Boston to be near relatives. She made the decision that Eric would not learn sign language as she said this would destine him to move largely among deaf people. Instead he became proficient in lip reading. Initially he did go to a school for the hearing impaired, but his life took off when he moved to Hebrew Teachers College in Boston. Here was founded his deep and wide Jewish knowledge, as all lessons were taught in Hebrew. He graduated from Brookline High School in 1957 and from Boston University in 1960.

There was a huge outpouring of grief when Rabbi Neil Kraft passed away a week before his retirement was due. A spokesperson for the synagogue described Neil as the ‘People's Rabbi’. Neil was very popular and many expressed their sense of personal loss. A large number of individuals and families used similar adjectives to describe his warmth and humour, care and kindness. He was a man of integrity and kept his word. He was deeply faithful both in his religious life and in his relations with others.

Rabbi Ungar was born in Budapest to Bela and Frederika Ungar. The family lived in hiding with false identity papers from 1944 under the German occupation.¹ After the war, a scholarship brought him to the UK where he studied at Jews’ College, then part of University College, and subsequently studied philosophy. Feeling uncomfortable within Orthodoxy, he met with Rabbi Harold Reinhart and Rabbi Leo Baeck and eventually became an assistant rabbi at West London Synagogue. In 1954 he obtained his doctorate in philosophy and was ordained as a rabbi through a programme that preceded the formal creation of Leo Baeck College in 1956. In 1955 he was appointed as rabbi at the progressive congregation in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Very soon his fiery anti-Apartheid sermons were condemned in the Afrikaans newspapers and received mixed reactions from the Jewish community. In December 1956 he was served with a deportation order and was forced to leave the country.

Jonathan Romain and David Mitchell, Inclusive Judaism: The Changing Face of an Ancient Faith, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2020, $19.95

Keith Kahn-Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity, Repeater Books, 2019, £10.99

A.C. Jacobs, Nameless Country: Selected Poems, edited by Merle Bachman and Anthony Rudolf, Carcanet Press Ltd, 2018, £12.99