Modern Jewish History - Summary

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Lecture #3 - February 17, 1971 - 45:33 min (mp3)
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One of the results of Jewish acceptance of the terms of emancipation laid down by the state was a change of attitude towards the community itself. A new kind of rabbi emerged, one who preached the love of country and extolled military service and duty. One leader of German Jewry wrote in 1815 that there was only one form of baptism: the baptism of blood in the common battle for liberty and the fatherland. The duty of military service was seen by many Jews and gentiles as the final pinnacle of integration. This idea of patriotism must not be confused with a support for reaction. Gabriel Riesser wrote in an article that the progress of Jewish emancipation was intertwined with the German fight for freedom and unity. Riesser himself is an interesting case study: his ambition was to be the first Jewish state representative. Active citizenship meant for him active involvement in politics. Riesser suffered many humiliations before he finally took a leading role in the Frankfurt Assembly in 1848.

But Riesser was not alone. 1848 (The Revolution of 1848) was a milestone for German Jewish emancipation. Liberal Jews, wealthy lawyers for the most part, sat in the Frankfurt parliament. Another example was Heinrich Marx, Karl’s father, who involved himself as a lawyer in the movement for liberal parliamentary reform in the Rhineland. Their involvement with politics and military service was patriotism, reeducation and their fight for freedom- a continuation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. As Johann Jacoby, another one of those men, said. “Just as I am a Jew and a German, at the same time, so the Jew in me cannot be free without the German, nor the German without the Jew. Our messiah is progressive in time which ever more shakes the bond of old prejudice.” His attitude was an obvious continuation of the Enlightenment. As Boerne claimed: “Because I was born a bondsman, I love liberty more than you.” These quotations go to the essence of the process of emancipation.

Yet these rather wealthy Jews were not typical for all of Jewish society. Jewish bankers and those in commerce attempted political neutrality, while Orthodoxy was hostile to liberalism and linked itself to the reaction. But without people like Jacobi and Riesser, emancipation would not have advanced. They were leaders in their community. (Mosse reminds us that there was as yet no real separation between Judaism and Jews. If one was a Jew, one had to come to terms with Judaism.) But with the changing cultural climate of Europe, a new kind of Christian revival became the hallmark of civilized people that was different from Mendelssohn’s time. To be sure, if the Christian revival had happened earlier, there would have been neither emancipation, nor belief in progress and reeducation. Instead, Revivalists regarded the Enlightenment ambivalently. Typical of that trend was Schleiermacher, who revived Christianity as a non-theological romantic religion. “There is a peculiar danger in the Enlightenment”, he stated. “It might lead to a common Jewish-Christian religion of reason.” In this case, according to Schleiermacher, the idea of Christian salvation would be undermined from within and Christianity would relapse into Judaism. The Enlightenment was condemned as anti-Christian. Judaism, regarded as a legalistic religion with a vengeful God, was taken to be the opposite of Romanticism, of the true emotion and pathology of souls. Therefore, the true religion of the spirit could not flourish. For Hegel, Christianity was the mediating synthesis, the true spirituality. He and Schleiermacher stressed the gospel of St. John, which treated Judaism as a foreign, atavistic religion. The latter is important for the later history of anti-Semitism.

St. Paul was a Jew who changed his name and established Christianity. It was Paul the Jew who perverted Christianity into a legalistic religion. The group condemnation of Judaism by Christians is carried on in Romanticism and deepened: what is bad in Christianity is now blamed on the Jews. Kant shared this attitude. For him, Judaism and the categorical imperative are mutually exclusive; the Jewish faith typified mere statutory law upon which a state was founded. Therefore, Judaism was no religion, but a community living under a law. In fact, it is a state within a state. The concept that the Jewish question is a question of ethics began now. Naturally, this called for a response on the part of the Jews: in response to the accusations of the Romantics, changes  occurred in the Jewish community. The word for the Jewish service is important in our context: the “Judenschule” (Jew school). Mosse reads a definition from a dictionary of 1808: Jewish Service: a Jew school, where disorder, gesticulation and chaos reigns.” The word “Judenschule” became a part of the European vocabulary, a virtual synonym for chaos. It can be found in dictionaries to this very day. Jewish religious service, which allegedly had no dignity or spirituality, was linked to the general condemnation of Judaism. A response was the famous order for religious service of 1810 in the Jewish consistory of Westphalia, calling for order and solemnity. Whereas there are no priests necessary in an orthodox service-everyone participates, leading the service was now given over to a cantor, though German was not yet mandated. Also, the reading of the scroll of Esther was abolished. Exclusivist thought, and messianic hopes for a return to Zion in the liturgy were altered. This was the beginning of the Jewish reform movement.

 The implementation of the Jewish Reform Movement in Germany was given over to the wealthy bourgeoisie-bankers and merchants. It was inspired by the rationalism of Mendelssohn, but also by Romanticism. The rabbi now becomes in effect a minister and a social worker. Stress is put on ethics as taught by the prophets. The standard reply to anti-Semitism was now not only grounded in rationalism, but in ethics. A second kind of reform was conservative, the neo-Orthodoxy reform founded by Samson Raphael Hirsch. It was centered on the torah and corresponded to Protestant biblicism. A national interpretation of scripture was rejected by all reform movements and replaced with the notion of a “Jewish mission” to demonstrate ethical monotheism. Mendelssohn defended Jews not as the chosen people of God, but as custodians of rationalism in the world. This rationalism is ethical monotheism. (This stress on the mission of Jews will remain; the greatest Jewish philosopher of the 20th century, Hermann Cohen, would restate it). Nationhood was a transitory state in Israel’s history that had nothing to do with the mission of Israel. If Jews talked about nationhood, they meant a spiritual conception. When Hirsch, in his “Nineteen Letters” of 1836 claims that we must support the state, he meant the ethical state. But if this was Judaism, then it was in fact just another confession of belief in the state.

Neo-Orthodoxy was triumphant, while the old orthodoxy was kept alive only by immigration from the east. On the other, more radical side of Reform stood Abraham Geiger. Geiger stressed the need to “break with the age of darkness” that lasted from the bible to the age of Mendelssohn. The ceremonial law was definitely dropped in favor of an emphasis on the ethics of the prophets. Geiger’s prayer book of 1854 is the basis fpr all Reform. It omits all references to Zion, to a personal messiah, and to sacrifice. Mosse points out that as we look at this reform, we see in it the reaction to assimilation, a transformation of the conception of Judaism as it had existed up to that time. This attitude made another important contribution: the need for separation, for aloofness, was changed into it’s very opposite. The service, centered on ethics, was in form a Protestant service. But Jews who wanted identification needed a stronger background. This raised the problem of tradition in a very important way and was solved in the same way the Romantics solved theirs:  through emotionality, by going to history. Part of this change in the Jewish community was a new sense of history that paralleled that of the Romantics. Indeed, the new idea of the history of the Jews comes from Hegel and his students. The form it took, namely, the Science of Judaism, has been controversial. In a way, it was one of the solutions with which Reform responded to the problems of Judaism and therefore difficult from a Zionist point of view. Finally, Mosse asks his students to put themselves in the position of that generation; a generation that had still lived in the ghetto and wanted to get away from it. The attraction of the high standards of European civilization exerted a great pull for everyone. The “Promised Land” was philosophy, history, literature, and culture, first that of the Enlightenment, then that of Romanticism. Out of that, we must understand the modifications that took place. (What Mosse has tried to explain in this lecture was, first, why Jews accepted the conditions of emancipation, and secondly, that emancipation coincided with a change of European opinion from Enlightenment to Romanticism that brought about a new attitude towards the Jews.)

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