INTERNAL RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT
The facility with which the Jews attach themselves to changed circumstances stands out characteristically through their whole history. It might, indeed, be said with some show of truth that this pliability is the weak side in the Jewish character. The readiness of the Jew to be almost anything and not simply his own self has been one of the factors producing a certain ill will against him. Disraeli was the most jingo of all imperialists in England; Lasker, the most ardent advocate of the newly constituted German Empire. This pliability is the result of the wandering life he has led and the various civilizations of which he has been a part. He had to find his way into Hellenism in Alexandria, into Moorish culture in Spain, into Slavism in Russia and Poland. When the first wave of the modern spirit commenced to break from France eastward over the whole of Europe, it reached the Jew also. While in France the new spirit was largely political, in Germany it was more spiritual. In its political form as well as in its spiritual form it reacted not only upon the political condition of the Jew, but especially upon his mental attitude. The new spirit was intensely modern, intensely cosmopolitan, intensely Occidental, and intensely inductive. The Jew had preserved to a great degree his deductive, Oriental, particularistic, and ancient mode of thought and aspect of life. The two forces were bound to meet. As a great oak is met by the storm, so was Israel set upon by the fury of this terrible onslaught. It is of interest to see in what manner he emerged from this storm—whether he has been able to bend to its fury, to lose perhaps some of his leaves and even some of his branches, but to change only in such a way as to be able to stand upright again when the storm is past.
This great clash of ideas has produced what is known as the Reform movement. It had its origin in Germany under the spiritual influences of the regeneration of German letters produced by such men as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, and Mendelssohn. It was aided in a large measure by the fact that the government in Germany, although distinctly opposed to anything which militates against the established order of things, mixes itself very seldom in the internal affairs of the Jewish communities. This Reform movement has colored the religious development of Judaism during the three-quarters of the century which is past. The heat of the controversy is now wellnigh spent. Many of those who stood in the front ranks have passed away, so that a more just estimate of its value can be reached. It was a period of tremendous upheavals, of great physical as well as mental pain. Many a congregation was split in twain, many a family disrupted. At one time it looked as if two distinct bodies of Jews would emerge from the struggle, and the union of Israel be destroyed forever. A common enemy—anti-Semitism—joined the two forces together for a common defence; and the danger of such a split is now fairly a thing of the past.
The latter half of the eighteenth century found the Jews of Middle Europe at the lowest intellectual and social point they had up till then reached. The effect of the long Jewish Middle Ages was plainly visible. Few great minds lit up the darkness, and an intellectual torpor seems to have spread its pall over everything. A passive uniformity of practice prevailed in all the communities, whether Sefardic (Spanish and Portuguese) or Ashkenazic (German and Polish); a uniformity, because actual intellectual life had been made to run in one single groove. The Talmud had been the great saving of Judaism in the past. In the intellectual exercise which its study necessitated, the mind of the Jew had been given a field in which it could rove at will. Living apart from the rest of the world, with a wide jurisdiction over his own affairs, Talmudic law in its latest development was still the law supreme for the Jew. The Jewish Ghetto had everywhere the same aspect; the language in common use was, in all the Ashkenazic communities, the Judæo-German in one of its various forms. A certain severity in evaluating those things which were part of the outside world made itself felt. There was ample time and ample occasion for the practice of all those forms and ceremonies with which the Judaism of the Middle Ages had willingly and gladly fenced in the law. There had been little occasion for the practice of the beautiful arts or for the cultivation of letters. Life in the Ghetto was not necessarily gloomy, but it was solemn. The law was not felt as a burden, but it required the whole individual attention of those who bound themselves by it, from early morn till late at night, from the cradle to the grave. There was no place for things that come from outside, because there was no time to devote to them.
But the new European spirit in its French political form was knocking hard at the gates of the Ghetto. Little by little it made its way here and there, into all sorts of nooks and corners. It was bound in time to be heard by some of those living behind these gates. The name of Moses Mendelssohn is indissolubly connected with the history of German Judaism during the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was due to him that a vehicle was found which the new spirit could use. Himself a strictly observant Jew, he felt the pulse of the new era. The friend of Lessing and of Nicolai, he entered fully into the revival which was then making itself felt. Through his translation of the Pentateuch (1778, etc.) into High-German, he prepared the way for the further introduction of German writings to the Jewish masses. This was bound to bring with it a larger culture and a greater freedom of thought. Many of his friends, such as Wessely, Hertz-Homberg, and David Friedlander, stood by his side in this work. With the introduction of the German language and German literature, better and more modern schools were needed in which secular education should go hand in hand with the former one-sided religious training. David Friedlander was the first to found a school in the modern sense of the term; and he was followed by Jacobson in 1801, at Seesen, Westphalia, and at Cassel, and by Johlson, at Frankfort, in 1814. Between the years 1783 and 1807 such modern Jewish schools arose in Germany, Austria, Denmark, France, and even in Poland. Literature was cultivated, and the first Jewish journal (though still in Hebrew) was published in Königsberg, 1783 (Hameassef—the Collector). The Gesellschaft der Freunde, founded in Berlin in 1792, was distinctly intended for the spread of this modern culture; yet Mendelssohn’s own position was quite an untenable one. He was a thoroughly Orthodox Jew in practice, but his mental attitude was that of a modern German. He was and he was not a reformer. He held that it mattered little what philosophical position a Jew held, the Jew must observe all the ceremonies connected with the faith; these were binding upon him by the mere fact of his having been born into the Covenant. It is therefore no wonder that his translation was put under the bann in Hamburg, Altona, Fuerth, Posen, etc. His friend Friedlander wished to make of the synagogue a sort of Ethical Culture Society; and Jacobson’s preaching in Berlin contained very little of what was distinctly Jewish. The salons of Berlin, Königsberg, and Vienna, which were presided over by brilliant women, who were more or less immediate disciples of Mendelssohn, nurtured the cosmopolitan spirit which was bound to be destructive of practical Judaism. That this fruit on the Tree of Knowledge ripened too quickly is seen from the fact that all the descendants of Mendelssohn, Friedlander, and others, led astray by this cosmopolitan spirit and the philosophic presentation of Christianity by Schleiermacher, have all become devoted members of the Lutheran Church and have been completely lost to Judaism.
It was natural that these new influences should influence also the training of the modern rabbis. Secular education had been introduced into primary schools, and in some places—as, for instance, Lombardy, in 1820—the government demanded a certain amount of secular knowledge from the candidates for rabbinical positions. The Jew also desired that his leaders should have the same training as he gave his children, that they should be educated in the same atmosphere in which he himself had grown up. The old rabbinical seminaries, or Yeshibot, in which the instruction was entirely on Talmudic lines, had already run their course; the study had been found insufficient by the pupils themselves, and the schools of Frankfort, Fuerth, Metz, Hamburg, and Halberstadt had all been closed for want of students. The need of a modern seminary was felt quite early during the century; and in 1809, a Lehrer-Seminar was founded in Cassel. The earliest regular seminary for the training of rabbis, however, was founded in Padua in 1829. In Germany attempts had been made in the year 1840, but these attempts were unsuccessful. The first modern seminary was not founded in Germany until the year 1854 (Breslau). Then followed Berlin, in 1872; Cincinnati, in 1873; Budapest, in 1876. Similar institutions exist now in London, Paris, and Vienna.
In the first convulsions of the Mendelssohn period the way was paved for the second period of the Reform movement which covers the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The real issues touched the central point of Jewish life, the synagogue. It is interesting to note that during this period the chief questions were not so much theological as æsthetic. The æsthetic side of life could not be largely cultivated in the Ghetto; and the form of the service had greatly degenerated. In the course of centuries, so many additional prayers and songs and hymns had been added that the ritual was largely overburdened, and often tended rather to stifle than bring out the religious sense they were intended to conserve. Contact with the outside world created and fostered this æsthetic sense, and the influences of the writings of such men as Lessing and Mendelssohn was largely in this direction. As this æsthetic sense made its way into the homes, so also did it carve out its way into the synagogue. Demands were heard for a shorter service; for the organ to accompany the chanting of the reader; for the German language in some of the prayers and for the German sermon. Each point was bitterly contested; for the Orthodox wing had before it the wholesale apostasy of the Salon Jews. In order to introduce the vernacular into the service and into the sermon, private synagogues were opened by small coteries in Cassel (1809), Seesen (1810), Dessau (1812), and Berlin (1815). In Southern Germany the use of the vernacular was introduced between the years 1817 and 1818, also in Hungary through the influence of Abraham Chorin. In some countries the government gave its active aid. In Vienna, in 1820, German was made obligatory, and as early as 1814 Danish in Copenhagen. The greatest changes, however, were made in the Hamburg temple (under Kley and Salomon, 1818), where not only the service was made more æsthetic and the German language introduced, but certain prayers referring to the Messianic time were either omitted or altered. No wonder, then, that the Orthodox rabbis in Germany, with the support of the rabbis in various other countries, protested against such a course. The government even looked askance at these Reform proceedings, and in 1817 and 1823 ordered a number of these private synagogues to be closed. A further cause for displeasure was the introduction in 1814 of the confirmation of children in German, to replace or supplement the old Barmitzvah, a clear imitation of the ceremony in the Protestant Church of Germany. Despite opposition, however, the confirmation found its way into Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Cassel, Copenhagen, etc.
This æsthetic revolution in the synagogue could not, however, long remain the only outward sign of the new life. The great weakness of the Reform movement has been that it has lacked a philosophic basis; and, as in its first beginnings, with the exception of Hamburg, it took little note of the changed point of view from which those who fought for reform looked at the old theological ideas. Æsthetic reform was the work largely of individual persons and individual congregations. No attempt had been made either to formulate the philosophic basis upon which the reform stood, or to provide a body which should regulate the form which the new order of things was to take on. Two attempts were made to remedy these evils, both closely related one to the other.
The first was crystallized in what is now known as the “Science of Judaism”; by which is meant the untrammelled, scientific investigation of the past history of the Jews. The want of this was severely felt just in those centres where reform had taken up its abode; and those who assisted at its birth did so with the avowed purpose of getting at the real kernel of Judaism by such investigation, and of freeing that kernel from the accretions of ages. They saw also that some means had to be found by which the result of these researches could be brought before the people. The Mendelssohn period had also felt this; but its organ had been written in Hebrew, and could not, therefore, appeal to those who wished for the intellectual advancement of the Jews upon modern lines. The Society for Culture and the Science of Judaism in Berlin (founded 1819) started a journal, with L. Zunz as editor. Though it only lived during the years 1822 and 1823, it was the forerunner and the model for many of its kind that followed after. In 1835 appeared Geiger’s Scientific Journal for Jewish Theology, and in 1837 a regular weekly was established by L. Philippson, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums. Around these and other journals which quickly sprang up there gathered a coterie of historians, philologists, and students of literature which in the fifty years between 1830 and 1880 has built up a science which has extended its investigations into every corner of Jewish life in the past, and has followed to their sources the various lines of development which have appeared from time to time. A full estimate of what has been done will be apparent only when the great Jewish Encyclopædia will be ready which is now in course of publication in New York. Zunz, Geiger, Krochmal, Rapoport, Frankel, Löw, Steinschneider, Graetz, Luzzatto, and Reggio are only a few of the names of those who gave up their lives to this work. Most of the early labor of these men was not dry-as-dust investigation pure and simple, but was intended to have a bearing upon the actual life, upon the burning questions which were then agitating Jewish thought. This is clearly seen in the journal of which Zunz was editor, and in his Gottesdienstliche Vortraege, the basis of nearly all the work done after him, but which was evidently written to give the history of preaching in the synagogue in order to justify the shortening of the ritual and the introduction of the German sermon.
The second attempt was to found or create some central body which would remove the purely personal element out of the Reform movement. In 1837 Geiger had called his friends to a conference at Wiesbaden for the purpose of formulating what they considered to be the essence of Judaism. In 1844 a second such rabbinical conference was held in Brunswick, largely at the suggestion of L. Philippson. Similar conferences were held at Frankfort in 1845, and at Breslau in 1846; for in the mean time the Reform Genossenschaft had been created at Berlin, which went beyond all previous attempts and demanded some positive statement of the theological position which it and its friends occupied. The Frankfort assembly not proving satisfactory, the Berlin society went ahead to establish its own synagogue; added a Sunday service (which in a short while became the only service), and under the guidance of S. Holdheim definitely broke with traditional Judaism, removing nearly all the Hebrew from its service, abbreviating the prayer-book still further, and diminishing the number of observances. In Europe this Reform synagogue in Berlin has gone to the furthest extreme; and though it has in a measure kept its members within the pale of Judaism, it has neither been a great power nor has it found imitators. The hope was generally expressed that a more general synod would be held, to which the previous conferences were looked upon as simply preparatory. The year 1848, however, put a stop to all normal development; and it was only after a number of years that the question was again taken up. In 1869 a synod was, indeed, held at Leipsic, attended by eighty-one members; and in 1871 at Augsburg, attended by fifty-two, both under the presidency of Prof. M. Lazarus. These synods dealt, in a spirit of moderate reform, with questions relating to the ritual, synagogue observance, the admission of proselytes, etc. The general stand there taken would to-day be looked upon as conservative; dogmatic questions were hardly touched upon excepting so far as they recognized the principle of development in Judaism both as a religious belief and as a form of religious exercise. It was fondly hoped that these synods would become a court, which would define and regulate whatever questions might arise. But it was not to be. The synod represented only a part of the Jewish world even in Germany. Not only did the large body of the Orthodox stand aside, but even the so-called Conservatives left the conferences, as they could not agree with some of the resolutions accepted there. In addition to this, the Franco-Prussian war diverted the attention of all German citizens; and ten years later the anti-Semitic movement succeeded in driving the Jew back into himself. Jewish religious life in Germany has therefore remained stationary since that time, the Orthodox and Conservative parties being largely in the ascendant, leaving to another land—America—the task of carrying further the work which it had commenced. Yet, in spite of this arrested development, the Reform movement has had a great influence also upon Orthodox Jews in Germany. It produced the so-called historical school, which has the Breslau Theological Seminary for its centre; and it called forth by way of opposition the neo-orthodoxy of S. R. Hirsch, of Frankfort, which seeks rather to understand the depths of the law than simply to follow it in compliant obedience.
The æsthetic movement of the earlier period has also left its traces, and especially in the Conservative congregation has succeeded in introducing a service more in consonance with our modern ideas of worship.
In 1840, under the influence of the movement in Germany, the attempt was made to introduce a certain reform in the service of some of the London synagogues. The measure demanded was exceedingly small—the shortening of a few prayers and the omission of others, which were not supposed to be in consonance with present ideas. The Orthodox party did not, however, see its way to grant these requests; and, when the Reformers protested, established their own synagogue, and issued their own prayer-book, they were immediately placed under the bann both by the Sefardim and the Ashkenazim. This congregation has not been of much importance, and since its inception has made no further changes. Compared with the Reform in America, the English movement would still be classed as thoroughly conservative.
It was in the United States that the Reform movement developed its full capacity and bore its most perfect fruit. In a new land, which was untrammelled by traditions of the past, and where the congregational system became the basis of Jewish communal life, the ideas which the German Reformers had sown had a most fruitful ground in which to grow. It cannot be said that the Reform movement here was actually started by the Germans, for already, in 1825, one of the congregations in Charleston, South Carolina, made up almost entirely of Sefardic Jews, had developed “The Reformed Society of Israelites”; and the formation of the society seems to have been due, not only to the demand for an æsthetic service, but to an attempt to formulate a creed which should omit all reference to the coming of the Messiah, the return to Palestine, and the bodily resurrection. This attempt at formulating a Theistic Church, however, was unsuccessful; and it was not until the advent from Germany in the 50’s and 60’s of rabbis who had been influenced by the movement in Germany that reform commenced to make itself felt here. Merzbacher in New York, Isaac M. Wise in Albany and Cincinnati, S. Hirsch in Philadelphia, David Einhorn in Baltimore, are only a few of the names of those who fought in the thick of the fight. About the year 1843 the first real Reform congregations were established, the Temple Emanu-el in New York and Har Sinai in Baltimore. It cannot be my purpose here to trace the history of the movement in this country; suffice it to say that the untrammelled freedom which existed here very soon played havoc with most of the institutions of the Jewish religion. Each congregation and each minister being a law to itself, shortened the service, excised prayers, and did away with observances as it thought best. Not that the leaders did not try, from time to time, to regulate the measure of reform to be introduced, and to evolve a platform upon which the movement should stand. Rabbinical conferences were held for that purpose in Cleveland (1856), Philadelphia (1869), Cincinnati (1871), and Pittsburg (1885). While in the earlier conferences the attempt was made to find some authoritative statement upon which all parties could agree, in the subsequent ones the attempt was given up. They became more and more meeting-places simply for the advanced Reform wing of the Jewish Church. The position of this wing of the Reformed synagogue may best be seen in the declaration of principles which was published by the Pittsburg conference. It declared that Judaism presents the highest conception of the God idea; that the Bible contains the record of the consecration of the Jewish people; that it is a potent instrument of religious and moral instruction; that it reveals, however, the primitive ideas of its own age; that its moral laws only are binding; and that all ceremonies therein ordained which are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization are to be rejected; that all Mosaic and rabbinical laws regulating diet, priestly functions and dress, are foreign to our present mental state; that the Jews are no longer a nation, and therefore do not expect a return to Palestine; that Judaism is a progressive religion, always striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason; that the belief in bodily resurrection, in the existence of a hell and a paradise, are to be rejected; and that it is the duty of Jews to participate in the great task of modern times to solve on the basis of justice and righteousness the problems presented by the transitions and evils of the present organization of society. Such a platform as this could not fail to arouse intense opposition on the part of the Orthodox Jews, and to lose for the conference even some of its more conservative adherents. As in Charleston, in 1825, a platform of Theism was here postulated, which was bereft of all distinctively Jewish characteristics, and which practically meant a breaking away from historic Judaism. This position of the advanced Reformers is also manifested in the stand which they have taken in regard to the necessity of the Abrahamic covenant. At a meeting of the Central Conference of American (Reformed) Rabbis, held at Baltimore in 1881, a resolution was passed to the effect that no initiatory rite or ceremony was necessary in the case of one desiring to enter the Covenant of Israel, and that such a one had merely to declare his or her intention to worship the one sole and eternal God, to be conscientiously governed in life by God’s laws, and to adhere to the sacred cause and mission of Israel as marked out in Holy Writ.
The service in Reform synagogues in the United States has kept pace with this development of doctrine, or rather with this sloughing-off of so much that is distinctively Jewish. The observance of the second-day festivals has been entirely abolished, as well as the separation of the sexes and the covering of the head in prayer. The ritual has been gradually shortened, the ancient language of prayer (Hebrew) has been pushed further and further into the background, so that in some congregations the service is altogether English; and in a few congregations an additional service on Sunday, intended for those who cannot attend upon the regular Sabbath-day, has been introduced. Only one congregation, Sinai in Chicago, has followed the old Berlin Reform synagogue and has entirely abolished the service on Friday night and Saturday morning. But whatever criticism one might like to offer on the Reform movement in the United States, it deserves great praise for the serious attempt it has made to understand its own position and to square its observance with that position. It has also been most active in its modern institutional development. It has certainly beautified and spiritualized the synagogue service; it has founded a Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and a seminary (Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati). It has published a Union Prayer-book and a Union Hymn-book, and has given great care to the development of the Confirmation and the bettering of the Sunday-school. It has tried to make the synagogue a centre for the religious and spiritual development of its members; and it cannot be denied that the very large mass of educated Jews in this country, in so far as they have any affiliation with the synagogue, belong to the Reform wing. But at the same time, it must not be forgotten that there is a very large body of Orthodox and Conservative Jews, whose number has been greatly increased during the last twenty years through the influx of Russian, Galician, and Roumanian Jews. It would be outside of my province were I to attempt to criticise either the work or the results of Reform Judaism in this country. But it is a question in the minds even of some of the leading Reformers themselves how far success has been attained in developing the religious sentiment of their people in the direction of a pure Theism uncolored by any Jewish, or, as they call it, Oriental observances. They themselves confess that the Sunday-service movement has not developed as they had hoped it would, and a number of them feel that in weakening the hold which specific Jewish observances have always had on the Jewish people, they are doing away with one of the most powerful incentives to the rekindling of the religious flame among the Reformed Jews.
Reform Judaism without some centrifugal force is bound to continue on the road it has once taken. The logical outcome of the principles formulated at the Pittsburg conference is a gradual development into an ethical Theism without any distinctive Jewish coloring. The leader of advanced Reform Judaism in this country has recently said that Judaism must be recast along the lines of a universal ethical religion; that then all distinctive Jewish elements of the synagogue symbolism will pass away, and that such a denationalized Jewish temple will seek a closer alliance with Unitarianism and Theism, and with them, perhaps in a few decades, will form a new Church and a new religion for united humanity. That such a tendency is inherent in Reform Judaism is seen also in the formation of the Society of Ethical Culture in New York. The leader of this movement is the son of a former prominent rabbi of the leading Reform congregation in this country. In seeking to bring out the underlying ethical principles of Judaism, he has gone entirely outside the pale of the ancient faith; and the movement would not concern us here were it not that nearly all the members (at least of the parent society in New York) are Jews, whose evident desire it is not to be recognized as such, at least so far as religious ceremonies and social affiliations are concerned. The society does not even bear the name Jewish, but with a certain leaning towards liberal Christianity tries to find a basis for the morality and ethics of the old synagogue outside the sphere of supernatural religion. While the Ethical Culture Society has been quite a power in certain lines of charitable and educational work, it may reasonably be questioned whether it has any future as a form of Church organization. The inborn longing of man for some hold upon things which are supernatural will lead many of its members to seek satisfaction elsewhere. That they will seek it in the Jewish synagogue is hardly probable, seeing how the racial and other ties have been broken or at least greatly loosened. They or their children will glide rather into some form of the dominant Church, possibly, in the swinging of the pendulum, into some orthodox form of that Church. I cannot help quoting the words of an intelligent outside observer of the Jewish question, the Right Hon. James Bryce, M. P.: “If Judaism becomes merely Theism, there will be little to distinguish its professors from the persons, now pretty numerous, who, while Christian in name, sit loose to Christian doctrine. The children of Jewish theists will be almost as apt as the children of other theists to be caught up by the movement which carries the sons and daughters of evangelical Anglicans and of Nonconformists towards, or all the way to, the Church of Rome.”
Where, then, is this centrifugal force to be found, which will hold together the various elements in Israel, no matter what their theological opinions may be?