The Talmud (24 page)

Mendelssohn was far from convinced by the arguments in the book Lavater had translated and was deeply hurt by the personal attacks hurled at him, which intensified as the argument continued. He realized that, as the Yiddish proverb put it, he could no longer ‘dance with one backside at two weddings’. The Protestant intelligentsia would never fully accept him as an accultured German philosopher whilst he simultaneously remained intellectually wedded to Talmudic tradition. The Jews would always remain suspicious of his loyalties
while he held himself aloof and supped in Berlin’s coffee houses. Mendelssohn knew he had to reconcile his two positions.

His response was twofold. He began to involve himself in the growing calls for the political emancipation of his people, arguing for a pluralistic society, for minorities to have full rights and an equal voice in German society.
25
And he looked for ways to encourage the Jews, who for the main part still lived outside the city in rural, Yiddish-speaking communities, to appreciate the value of secular German culture, to speak its language and absorb its literature.

He wrote a translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, which he based on the Talmud’s interpretations. He wanted to offer Jewish students a literary, German alternative to the rather wooden, Yiddish renderings that they had used up to now, an alternative which was more substantial than the current Christian translations which, by ignoring Talmudic interpretations, failed in his view to draw out the full meaning of the text.
26

Mendelssohn’s Bible translation was based on Talmudic interpretations but was far more than just that. He tried to create a synthesis between traditional, religious faith and modern, scientific reason. He wanted to harmonize contemporary science and philosophy with traditional Talmud and Bible scholarship.
27

His German translation was originally published using Hebrew characters but was very quickly reprinted in German script. It became hugely popular amongst both Lutherans and Jews. Subscribers to the first edition included professors, pastors and nobles. A subscription was even taken out in the name of the King of Denmark. Mendelssohn’s use of Talmudic tradition exposed his German readers to new ways of understanding the Old Testament and it showed his Jewish readers that they had nothing to fear from examining their own heritage in the German language.

Mendelssohn is a key figure in the
Haskalah
, or religious enlightenment movement, an important aspect of which was to integrate traditional Talmudic and religious thought with modernity, as part of a process of cultural fusion and political emancipation. Not everyone approved of it, many traditional scholars railed against what they saw as an assault on their time honoured way of life. Mendelssohn and his colleagues had as many opponents amongst their own people as they had amongst proselytizing Churchmen.

But for every thinker who disapproved of his agenda, there was another who eulogized him. When he died, at the age of fifty six, after a life of ill health, over a thousand people, Christians and Jews, crowded into the tiny cemetery. Shops in Berlin closed out of respect. Newspapers discussed his final illness, his doctor held a press conference, his friends swapped tales about him and quoted his best-known sayings.
28

Friend and foe alike saw him as a giant on the historical stage, either a hero or a villain.
29
He either saved the Jews from medieval obscurity or dangled them over the yawning chasm of secularization and assimilation. It all depended upon your point of view. All his admirers wanted a piece of him; he became, in Shmuel Feiner’s words ‘a pawn to the partisans of various agendas, each waving him like a banner and adopting him for their world view’.
30
Which, if nothing else, must be a testament to his greatness.

Moses Mendelssohn wasn’t Spinoza’s disciple but they do have something in common. They each stand at important crossroads along the same road in the Talmud’s encounter with modernity.

Of the three eighteenth-century figures who brought the Talmud into the modern world, the impact of the
Besht
and the Vilna
Gaon
is readily discernible, even if today the boundaries between their respective groups of followers has become somewhat blurred, at least from the outside. Each in their own way ensured the continuity and vibrancy of Talmudic life. The picture with Moses Mendelssohn is more complex. In many ways he took on a far greater challenge. The
Besht
and the
Gaon
, in their very different ways, inspired their followers. Mendelssohn sought to put in place a huge cultural shift. He didn’t wholly succeed, some of his children converted to Christianity, including his son Abraham, father of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. He became, as David Sorkin put it, a legend in his own lifetime and a symbol thereafter.

Notes

1
Sukkah 52a. The Messiah, son of Joseph, seems to be an early theme which may first occur in the Dead Sea Scrolls (see A Dying and Rising Josephite Messiah in 4Q372, David C. Mitchell,
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha
2009, 18: 18). The idea doesn’t get fully developed until post-Talmudic times and its early origins need further research. The alleged reference in the pseudepigraphic work Testament of the Tribes (Testament of Benjamin 3.8) is almost certainly a later Christian interpolation.

2
Goldish, 2004.

3
Maciejko, 2011.

4
Wacholder, 1982.

5
Maciejko, 2011.

6
Maciejko, 2011.

7
Maciejko, 2011.

8
Scholars now believe that the Baal Shem Tov is credited with founding a movement which already existed (Doktor, 2011). There were small groups of mystical pietists in Poland before the
Besht
but it was his charisma and the legends that grew up around him that propelled Hasidism into a mass movement. It is for this reason that it is reasonable to refer to him as the movement’s founder.

9
One of the most comprehensive and best-told collections of Besht stories is by Yitzhak Buxbaum Buxbaum, 2005.

10
Cited in Wilensky, 1956, p. 147.

11
Iggeret HaKodesh
, printed at the back of
Noam Elimelech
, published 1798 by Elimelech of Lizhensk (1717–86), reprinted and retypeset Jerusalem 1995.

12
Eliach, 1968.

13
Mekor Baruch
Baruch Halevi Epstein, 2:619 cited in
Torah Lishma
, Norman Lamm (Ktav Publishing House, New York, 1989).

14
Stern, 2011.

15
Etkes, 2002.

16
Etkes, 2002.

17
Stern, 2013.

18
Stern, 2013.

19
Stern, 2013.

20
Nefesh Hahayyim
by R. Hayyim of Volozhin, various editions, Chapter 4, Section 1.

21
Halakhot Ketanot
, Venice 1704, Part 1, p. 113, cited in Jacobs, 2004.

22
Sefer
Hahazon
in
Sefer
Ha’Agur
Hashalem
, ed. Yaakov Baruch Landau, reprinted by Menoreh Institute, New York, 1959. The solution to the first problem is that someone with no friends is regarded as dead and the law does not apply to dead people. In the second one, Jacob has a daughter Dinah. Dinah marries David. They have a son, Reuben. David has a daughter, Rachel from a previous marriage. Jacob marries Rachel. They have a son, Simon. Simon is Dinah’s (Reuben’s mother’s) brother. He is therefore Reuben’s uncle. Reuben is Rachel’s (Simon’s mother’s) brother. He is therefore Simon’s uncle.

23
Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine
, Willi Goetschel (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2004).

24
Feiner, 2010.

25
Sorkin, 1994.

26
Stern, 2011.

27
Sorkin, 1992.

28
Feiner, 2010, p. 13.

29
Sorkin, 1994.

30
Feiner, 2010.

14

The problem with emancipation

When we were young we were treated as men, now that we have grown old we are looked upon as babies.
1

Pioneers

The origins of the Jewish community in Charleston, South Carolina date back to 1695. It is the oldest in North America. In the early nineteenth century it was also the largest, the most sophisticated and the most comfortable. Its members lived alongside their neighbours in a state of happy emancipation. The Talmud had never been much on their minds, most of them had probably never even seen a copy. There were no rabbis, as far as anyone knows, in America at this time; it was a country of pioneers, attracting only the most adventurous souls. Traditionalists tended to stay back in Europe, where they were used to the way things were done.
2

But although they weren’t thinking about the Talmud, the inhabitants of Charleston were by no means cut off from their co-religionists in Europe. They had heard about reforming currents that were beginning to circulate in Germany. Continuing emancipation and the new ways of thinking which Moses Mendelssohn had encouraged were bringing fresh ideas to the fore. Traditionalism was under threat in Europe, and post-revolutionary America was certainly no place for musty conservatism, particularly if it stood in the way of social and economic advancement. The old ways were changing and, even though in Charleston the connection to the old ways was already tenuous, a formal commitment to progress felt like a good thing.

In 1824 a group of Charleston Jews established the Reformed Society of Israelites. Their aim was to reform the synagogue service, to make it more intelligible to the English speaker and to expunge ‘the erroneous doctrines of the Rabbins’.
3
They weren’t particularly motivated by a disregard for, or a dislike of, the Talmud; it’s just that they felt that their prayer service was in need of modernization. But their desire to change the prayer service was the practical consequence of an ideological struggle that was taking place back in Europe, particularly in Hamburg, where the seeds of the Charleston campaign had been sown.
4
And in Hamburg, indeed across most of Germany, the Talmud sat at the heart of the conflict.

A time to change

The Reform movement began, as these things do, not as a formal enterprise but as a result of a small number of innovations, largely uncoordinated but all heading in the same general direction. The French and American revolutions of the eighteenth century had created the conditions for the political emancipation of the Jews, a gradual process which unfolded throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth. As part of this process Moses Mendlessohn, despite his steadfast commitment to traditional Jewish practice, had unbarred the gates which had kept the Jews far from world culture and learning. His translation of the Bible into German was a deliberate strategy to encourage the people of the Talmud to learn the language of those amongst whom they lived. It gave them the tools to explore the great literary heritage of Germany, and that in turn had a stirring effect upon their outlook.

From the late eighteenth century there was a growing feeling amongst more worldly, socially accultured Jewish circles that their religious practices were archaic, out of step with the spirit of the age. This was most immediately noticeable in the synagogue service, which was unintelligible to those without a grasp of Hebrew, and which lacked the decorum and musical solemnity of the great churches. Here and there, in Amsterdam, in Seesen and Cassel in
northern Germany, and ultimately in Hamburg, congregations were established which did things differently. The practices they instituted did not conform to the traditions of the Talmud, but nor were they, in the early days, intended as anti-Talmud. Indeed the Reformers aspired to demonstrate the Talmud’s support for their innovations. They even engaged a Talmudic scholar to champion their cause.
5

The Reform movement grew quickly. By the 1840s congregations across Germany, France, Hungary and Austria were experimenting with innovation. They introduced prayers in German into the synagogue service, brought in organs and instituted sermons. They modified stringencies around Sabbath observation and the dietary laws. They appointed a different type of rabbi, men with secular education who had spent little or no time in the
yeshivot
.

At a conference at Brunswick in 1844, Samuel Holdheim, one of the leading intellectual lights of the movement, poured scorn on the earlier attempts in Hamburg to use the Talmud to justify their innovations. The Talmud, he argued, had only enjoyed legitimacy in its own time, these days it was no longer authoritative. A schism was in the making.

A time to refrain from changing

Traditional Talmudists did not sit idly by as the Reform movement grew in popularity. The rabbinic council in Hamburg, traditionalists to a man, wrote to the leading light of their generation, Moses Sofer, asking for his support in their campaign against the innovations in the Hamburg Temple.

Moses Sofer believed passionately in the intrinsic worth of every aspect of Talmudic life. His conservatism was not driven by fear of change. Rather it was a deep commitment to the values of tradition, encapsulated in his motto ‘innovation is forbidden by the Torah’; a pun on the Talmudic injunction that the ‘new [grain harvest] is forbidden by the Torah’, before an offering is brought to the Temple.
6

Sofer applauded the ban that the traditionalists had imposed upon the use of Reform prayer books and musical instruments in the synagogue.
7
He then
embarked on an unrelenting, strategic campaign against the Reform movement and the religious enlightenment. He mustered rabbis of every temperament, not just the most conservative rabbis, to contribute to a collection of letters arguing against Reform.
8
He appealed to the nationalist aspirations of the masses in condemning the Reform movement’s abolition of Hebrew as the language of prayer.
9
He strengthened the traditionalists’ ties with the Hapsburg authorities, established the largest
yeshiva
in Europe in his adopted home town of Pressburg, and whenever a prestigious rabbinic post fell vacant he tried to install one of his best and brightest pupils. In his ethical will he condemned Mendlessohn’s work and warned his students never to yield to the pressure to change their traditional language, clothes or names.

Sofer’s defence of the old Talmudic ways was unyielding. But it didn’t suit everyone in the traditional camp. There were many who were receptive to the changing world, but not to the same extent as the Reformers. They didn’t want to be part of a movement heading towards a rejection of the Talmud. Reform was too radical for them, and Moses Sofer’s traditional Orthodoxy was too unyielding. They didn’t know it yet, but they were waiting for a new champion to come along.

Duelling friends

In 1829 two young men met at the University of Bonn. They’d previously been introduced to each other in Frankfurt. Now they began to strike up a close friendship through their university activities.
10

Both men shared a passion for igniting the religious commitment of those German Jews who were drifting away from their faith, seduced by a new and exciting, modern world. But each man would set about it in a fundamentally different way. The older of the two, Samson Raphael Hirsch dreamed of inspiring new ways of approaching the Talmud that would draw on all the benefits that a secular education could offer. The younger, Abraham Geiger, was convinced that the Talmud simply reflected a moment in history. It was part of the ongoing
development of Jewish law and practice, not an unchanging expression of the will of Heaven.
11

In 1835 Hirsch laid out plans for a book which would interpret the Bible’s teaching on human destiny, and explain the underlying, moral purpose of Talmudic law. One of his friends showed the book’s outline to a German publisher who said that he wasn’t sure there would be a market for such a lofty volume; perhaps the author could try out his ideas in something smaller first. If that sold well then he was sure that he would be able to find a publisher to take on the whole project.

So Hirsch wrote a book in the shape of a fictional correspondence between a student and young rabbi, in which the student set out the religious issues that were troubling him, and the rabbi responded. He wrote it under a pseudonym and called it the
Nineteen Letters.
It was an instant hit. Hirsch had put his finger on exactly the questions that were bothering people, not just religious questions, but social and national issues too. The book struck a chord because Hirsch provided modern, ethical reasons for the things the Talmud expected them to do. He didn’t treat the laws as the outcomes of faded discussions in ancient, oriental academies, but as a means of making sense of life in modern, nineteenth-century Europe.
12

The success of the
Nineteen Letters
enabled Hirsch to write the book that he had originally planned, and over the course of his life, many more besides. By explaining what he saw as the reasons that underpinned religious practice he was able to remove the artificial barriers that time had erected between the Talmud and the wider world. In Hirsch’s system the fully rounded student of Talmud is a student of life, willing and able to investigate and respond to all branches of human knowledge.

Hirsch was not just driven by an ideological passion. He was deliberately trying to stem the tide of reform. His slogan, ‘Torah with worldly involvement’
13
became the motto for generations of secularly educated, culturally assimilated, religiously observant Talmud students.

Hirsch didn’t achieve his goal of eliminating the Reform movement. But he did provide a platform for those who wished to integrate a traditional lifestyle with the modern world. The reason he didn’t halt the Reform movement in its
tracks is due in no small part to Abraham Geiger, the friend of his youth, with whom he was to fall out so badly.

Geiger’s response to the
Nineteen Letters
was severe. He attacked the ‘doglike obedience’ of those who observe the Talmudic commandments, likening it to idolatry.
14
It was the end of his friendship with Hirsch.

Small, with long, straight, shoulder-length hair tucked behind his ears, two-inch sideburns and wire-framed glasses, Abraham Geiger cut a striking pose. He had grown up in a strictly observant household and had delivered a Talmudic discourse at the age of thirteen but, according to one of his biographers, shortly after his father’s death he became ‘utterly disgusted with the Talmud’.
15
Unfortunately the biographer does not speculate on why this may have been and whether it was connected with his father’s passing.

Hirsch was interested in the thought and philosophy that underpinned his faith. Geiger was concerned with its development and history. Intellectually he should have been destined for a university chair but such positions were not open to Jews in nineteenth-century Germany and he was left with little choice other than to become a rabbi. This decision cast him straight into the bear pit of religious conflict; his first application for a rabbinic post was vetoed by traditionalists in Breslau who, aware of his anti-Talmudic leanings, accused him of being a Karaite or Sadducee. His early rabbinic career was dogged by lack of advancement due to the efforts of more traditional colleagues.
16

The Reform movement that Geiger conceived was more than a reaction to overlong, unintelligible synagogue services and seemingly petty restrictions. He strove to develop a coherent theology of Reform. He argued that centuries of studying the Talmud in enclosed, monastic, ghetto communities had led to an excessive legalism in Jewish practice. The only way to rediscover the ethical underpinnings of the faith was to return to a time before the Talmud, to the liberalizing, democratic spirit of the early Pharisees.

But, at this stage in his life Geiger worked as a rabbi, not an as academic. And like all men of the cloth, he wasn’t able to spend enough time on intellectual pursuits. Real life gets in the way. In Abraham Geiger’s case real life was an event
half a world away, in a city he had never visited. It threw him off his guard, just as he was taking up his first rabbinic post.

The Damascus Affair

In 1840 Padre Tommaso, an elderly Italian monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. He had visited the Jewish quarter of the city on the day he vanished. Rumours began to spread in the Christian district that he had been ritually murdered by the Jews.

The authorities arrested twelve Jews and tortured them to gain a confession. Four suspects died as a result of the torture, one converted to Islam and the remainder were incarcerated, awaiting execution.

The case was unusual for several reasons. Accusations of ritual murder against the Jews in Muslim countries were relatively rare. Even on those few occasions when Christians in the Ottoman Empire had stirred up the old blood libel charge against the Jews, the authorities refused to pursue it.
17
But Syria was no ordinary Ottoman country. Its government was in revolt against the Empire and was manoeuvring to win European allies, particularly France, through the support of its Christian subjects.

The French consul got involved and the affair was picked up by the European media. It became something of a cause célèbre. It dominated the headlines in Europe for weeks. In a show of solidarity with the captives, the Jewish communities of England and France sent Sir Moses Montefiore and Adolphe Crémieux, two high-profile, well-connected, community leaders to Syria. Meetings were held and within a month the surviving Jewish prisoners were released. Neither Padre Tommaso, his servant, nor their abductors were ever found.