The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

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?

ANTI-SEMITISM

Before attempting to answer this question, a word must be said in regard to the anti-Semitic movement, the recrudescence of which has so profoundly affected the Jewish people during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. A word only, because the facts are of too recent date to need a detailed statement here. The great master-mind, Zunz, writing in Germany in 1832, believed that persecution for religious belief could not withstand the onslaughts of the new era. Theodore Reinach, some fifty years later, asserted that anti-Semitism was impossible in France. How sadly has a démenti been given to the hopes thus expressed, especially in these two countries!

I pass over the outbreaks against the Jews during the early years of the nineteenth century, even the Damascus blood-accusation in 1840, and the forcible baptism of little Edgar Mortara in 1858; they were believed to belong to the old order of things, with which the new, at least in that direction, had nothing in common. I confine myself simply to the modern form of anti-Judaism, which has been dignified with the name of anti-Semitism. It is hard for a Jew to speak of these things with composure or with the judicial mind of a mere chronicler of events. Neither emancipation from without nor Reform from within has been able to stay the hand of the destroyer of Israel’s peace. It has been contended that in most countries the Jews were not ready to be emancipated; that in some the non-Jewish population was not sufficiently advanced to make emancipation effective. The first may be true in regard to the Algerian Jews; the second, in regard to those in Roumania; but it is not true of the other nations on the European continent. Starting in Germany, perhaps as a political move on the part of Bismarck, it spread into Russia, Galicia, Austria, Roumania, and France. In most of these countries it not only found expression in the exclusion of the Jews from all social intercourse with their fellows, but in Russia produced the riots of 1881 and 1882; in Austria and Bohemia the turbulent scene in the Reichstag, and even the pillaging of Jewish houses and Jewish synagogues; in Roumania it received the active support of the government and reduced the Jews there to practical penury; while in France it showed itself in accusations against the Jews which for barbarity could match any that were brought against them in the Middle Ages. The charges against the Jews are varied in their character. In Germany they have been blamed for exploiting the agricultural class and for serving the interests of the Liberal party, forgetting that Leo and Stahl, the founders of the Orthodox party in Prussia, were themselves Jews, and that Disraeli in England was born of the same race. The most foolish accusations on almost every conceivable subject have been lodged against them by such men as Ahlwart, Stöcker, Lueger, and Drumont; and in late years the old and foolish charge that the Jews use the blood of Christian children in the making of Passover bread has been revived, in order to infuriate the populace; despite the fact that popes, ecclesiastics, and hosts of Christian professors have declared the accusation to be purely imaginary and malignant. The false charge that a Jewish officer in France had betrayed secrets of his government was sufficient to unloosen the most savage attacks upon the Jews which the modern world has seen.