The Second Great Awakening was almost a century later, in the first decades of the 1800s. It echoed the first, spreading spiritual values throughout the newly independent nation, especially in the frontier states and territories. This epoch delivered two divergent pressures and influences on Jews. On the one hand, Jews felt threatened as emotional Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and other Protestant denominations held rallies that went on for days with preaching and prayers, confession, and repentance, and with worshippers jumping, shouting, and moaning to do battle against Satan. Calls for conversions—targeted at Catholics, African Americans, and Indians as well as Jews—were a regular part of these “come to Jesus” revival sessions. The fervor represented what the historian Gordon S. Wood says may have been “the greatest explosion of Christian religiosity since the seventeenth century or even the Reformation.” The deism and secularism of the American founders such as Jefferson and Madison were swept aside in the frenzy, replaced by a dominant belief in an ever-present God with whom people sought a direct relationship.4 As in South Carolina, Jews integrating into American life found themselves subjected to conversion crusades. Indeed, as Jews assured Christians that theirs was just another religion similar to Christianity, traditionalist Christians wondered why Jews did not take one further small step and accept Jesus Christ as their savior. Many evangelicals started to embrace the idea of restoring Jews to their homeland in Palestine as a prelude to the “ingathering” of Jews and their being converted in the Second Coming of Jesus.
Whatever the intention, the implication of Christians endorsing the ancient Jewish prayers for returning to Palestine reinforced the unwanted perception that American Jews had divided loyalties. Intellectuals admired the Jews’ survival throughout history, but there was a body of literature holding that the arrival of Jews in American society meant they would disappear eventually. In the summer of 1852, for example, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited Newport, Rhode Island, on a vacation and became entranced by an old Jewish cemetery protected by an iron fence, not far from the pounding surf. The cemetery had been established in 1677, but the Jews of the town had long since died out or left for other communities. Longfellow wrote a poem, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” that evoked the graveyard as a metaphor for the Jews as they faced assimilation and oblivion.
The cause of proselytizing Jews was often taken up by those crusading against various sins, including intemperance—alcoholism was epidemic in some communities—gambling, public obscenity, and profanity. Religious organizations also drove reforms for the treatment of criminals and the mentally ill, and they sought improved higher education standards, the expansion of women’s rights (the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls took place in 1848), and the abolition of slavery.5 But in cities where Jews lived, various missionary organizations and Bible societies had a familiar goal: bringing nonbelievers into their fold. Some Christians even visited Jewish charity hospitals to seek deathbed conversions. In cities with substantial Jewish populations, conversion efforts spread to public education, even in places where Jewish women were becoming public school teachers. In New York, Jews allied themselves with Catholics in the 1840s to oppose Bible reading and mandatory prayers in schools.
There was a second aspect to the Second Great Awakening that had a subtler influence on Jewish lives. As Protestants splintered into different denominations with their own practices, beliefs, and doctrines, they compelled state governments to loosen their last vestiges of established religions—to “disestablish” religion in their communities. These steps benefited the Jews. In what the historian Sydney Ahlstrom calls “the great tradition of the American churches,” denominations in this period established five basic rights to religion: religious freedom, separation of church and state, the right of various denominations to adhere to their own practices, free choice of individuals, and religion infused by patriotic devotion to the United States. In this atmosphere it became easier for Jews to see themselves as one of many threads in the multicolored tapestry of religion in America. It was something they had no ability to do in Europe, where they had lived apart under their own rules for many centuries.6
Mainstream Protestantism in this period was also growing more hospitable to commingling with Jews. As America prospered, American Protestants could focus less on the afterlife and more on how to live in the new world they were creating. They embraced the idea that just as reason guided humankind to freedom, culminating in the American experiment, reason could guide humankind to God without requiring belief in miracles recounted in Scripture. Jonathan Edwards’s older, bleak vision of mankind as destined to eternal damnation unless saved by divine grace—“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” as his most famous sermon put it—yielded to a more optimistic, benevolent depiction of a God of love, and an emphasis on the importance of individual dignity, self-improvement, and man-made progress in the temporal world. As one proponent of this new view, the Reverend William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) rejected Edwards’s doctrine of atoning for original sin as equivalent to the idea of the Creator erecting gallows upon which to execute humankind. If life was not merely a preparation for the hereafter, it must follow that life should be cherished for its own beauty and value. After all, the founding father John Adams declared in 1755 that the great principles such as loving your neighbor as yourself were available to all persons of reason, not just to Christians, because they were universal truths understood by everyone.
Elite Protestants especially believed in the power of reason, an inheritance of Enlightenment thinking in Britain and France, and so held that science and rational analysis (in the tradition of Kant) were the paramount vehicles for understanding religion and ethics, even if the masses of less educated people still needed to believe in divine revelation as the foundation of truth for understanding God and morality.7
The implication of such views is that while one could well believe that God had created the universe, one could also believe that it was up to humans to carry out God’s work and protect his creation. Going further, Unitarians held that Jesus was mortal and the founder of a great religion but not the son of God. Man, according to these teachings, was by nature good, and since God was merciful and loving, not vindictive, each person must search the Scripture for his or her own truth. These doctrines also helped perpetuate tolerance of different faiths, especially Judaism.
Even before the American Revolution, a strong strain of anticlerical thinking ran through Protestant teachings, mirroring the overthrow of the Crown. These anticlerical attitudes also affected Jewish communities. “I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy,” Thomas Paine declared in The Age of Reason, adding that churches were “human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.”8 He further described the Bible as replete with “obscene stories . . . voluptuous debaucheries . . . cruel and torturous executions [and] unrelenting vindictiveness.”9 The hero of Ticonderoga, Ethan Allen, had argued in The Only Oracle of Man (1784) that “natural religion” was achievable without the Bible and “priestcraft,” so much so that he was attacked as anti-Christian. The “deists” of the Revolution—Paine, Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—had all doubted the divinity of Jesus, the concept of the Trinity, and even the status of the Bible as a product of divine revelation. Their central argument was that although God created the universe, it was up to humans to shape its future.
NOT ONE BUT MANY JUDAISMS
At least eleven rabbis came to the United States in the divided religious environment of the 1840s. Four of them brought both secular and rabbinical degrees, attesting to their training in areas beyond the Talmud. Others came with questionable and likely embellished credentials. But the rabbis who had trained in Europe and earned university degrees generally arrived better educated and more culturally attuned than the Jews they were coming to serve. That situation hardly
made their jobs easier. In fact, their educated status probably opened a difficult divide between them and their congregations.
At the same time, the American anticlerical environment of the Second Great Awakening contributed to the willingness of Jews to question their own doctrines as handed down by rabbis. The fights among rabbis, and between rabbis and their congregations, focused on how much Hebrew to include in the service, which prayers to eliminate, and whether to permit men and women to sit together. In some cases, practical considerations were paramount—as when Jewish worshippers looking for houses of worship had to acquire or purchase old church buildings, which had no balconies or separate sections where women could sit. Seated as equals among their family members, women increasingly took charge of religious schools, and the increasing role of women forced adjustments in the traditional rules against women participating in official Jewish religious ceremonies.
In Europe there had been chief rabbis in cities who established clerical authority among synagogues, but no such hierarchical structure was recognized in the United States. No synagogue could lord its practices over others. Writes the historian Jacob Rader Marcus: “There were almost as many Judaisms as there were individuals.” It was ironic that so many of the new synagogue congregations adopted the word shalom (“peace”) as part of their names, since at the time, peace and brotherly love were often more aspirations than realities. Attempts by rabbis to dictate practices as they had in Europe were doomed to failure. Nearly all the first generation of rabbis experienced rejection and dismissal. It was not unusual for rabbis to be hired and fired in rapid succession, migrating from synagogue to synagogue to satisfy their congregations. In Cincinnati, Congregation Bene Yeshurun had five spiritual leaders in five years. Rabbi Bernard Illowy (1814–1871) served six pulpits in sixteen years. Rabbi Isidor Kalisch served in eight pulpits in twenty-five years. Generally speaking, rabbis instituting reforms followed the wishes of their congregations, not the other way around.10
The first ordained rabbi on record to settle in America was Abraham Rice (originally Reiss), who arrived in 1840 from Gochsheim, Bavaria. Fervently Orthodox, he had difficulty getting a job in New York and so ended up in Nidchei Yisroel (The Dispersed of Israel) in Baltimore, a congregation established in 1830 that was still holding services above a local grocery. Moving to new quarters in 1845, the congregation changed its name to Baltimore Hebrew Congregation.
At Baltimore Hebrew, Rice stood firm in favor of observing the Sabbath and against intermarriage, deviation from kosher laws, and the shortening of prayers, especially some of the more esoteric ones handed down over the centuries, known as piyyutim. (A general term for liturgical poems, piyyutim derives from Greek, and the same root as poietes, “poet.”) He also never mastered English, a refusal that nettled at least some in his congregation. Many Jews in that congregation and elsewhere had advocated such changes to make the service more palatable—and comprehensible—only to be rebuffed by Rice. As a result, he never felt completely at home in his adopted country.
Rice insisted that violators of the Sabbath not be permitted to read from the Torah at Sabbath services, which led to an early dispute with his congregation. He also lashed out at the “heathenish rites” he said were being performed at funerals, evidently referring to secularized rituals taken from Masons and Odd Fellows. In protest, several members of the congregation resigned and formed Har Sinai Verein (Mount Sinai Association) in 1842, holding services that were close to Orthodox in nature, but with modifications. They met in a private home until 1849, when they obtained their own building on High Street in Baltimore and became Har Sinai Congregation, now considered the oldest congregation in the United States that has been affiliated with the Reform movement since its inception.
An irony of the protests against Rice at Baltimore Hebrew was that the rabbi actually wanted to adjust some of the ritual practices. For example, he attempted to accommodate the modernists by eliminating some prayers regarded as overly obscure. But that move drew counter-objections from traditionalists, some of whom were flexible on other matters. The rabbi was frustrated by the congregation’s inconsistent approach of enforcing Jewish law in the congregation but permitting latitude among its members in their private behavior. Writing to his friend in Germany, Rice declared, “I dwell in complete darkness, without a teacher or a companion. . . . I am tired of my life. . . . I often think of leaving and going to Paris and put my trust in the good Lord.” Eventually his congregation grew dissatisfied, and Rice had to resign in 1849. He tried to establish another more orthodox synagogue but was forced to support himself by opening stores selling dry goods and groceries; he died in 1862.11
The second emigrant rabbi to settle in America is generally agreed to have been Rabbi Leo Merzbacher, also a Bavarian native. He is often identified as the first official “reform” rabbi in America. But like Rice, he encountered a turbulent series of setbacks. Merzbacher’s own biographical profile referred to his university and rabbinic degrees, but some scholars say the evidence is lacking. After arriving in New York in 1841, Merzbacher took up teaching at Congregation Rodeph Sholom in New York. In 1843, he became preacher at Congregation Ansche Chesed, which had broken from B’nai Jeshurun in 1829. But when Merzbacher delivered a sermon criticizing the practice of women covering their hair, as demanded by Orthodox tradition, his contract was not renewed. Instead he went to Temple Emanu-El (God is with us), a new congregation in New York established by thirty-three German Jews in 1845, after they had earlier started a Cultus-Verein (worship association) to attract young people. They held their first services in a second-floor loft on the Lower East Side and later moved to successive new synagogues uptown.
Even at Emanu-El, Merzbacher engaged in disputes with his lay leadership over various practices. At one point the board members told him they were tired of his pursuits and “did not wish to receive further protests, admonitions and rebukes and would feel themselves necessitated to leave them unanswered.” The board went further, advertising for an assistant who could speak English. No assistant was found by the time Merzbacher collapsed and died while walking home from the synagogue in 1856. He was succeeded by Rabbi Samuel Adler, a renowned scholar in both Jewish and secular studies and son of a prominent rabbi in Germany, who was persuaded to emigrate from the Rhineland town of Alzey to take up the post.12
Another important figure from the era was Rabbi Max Lilienthal (1815–1882), who had served as a director of a network of state-sponsored Jewish schools in the Pale of Settlement in western Russia, where Jews were confined under the decree of Catherine the Great and her successors. Fearing an eventual plan by Russia to turn his schools into instruments of conversion to Christianity, Lilienthal fled to the United States at age thirty. Famous for his courage and pioneering efforts in Russia, Lilienthal was warmly welcomed and recruited to serve simultaneously at three different synagogues, including Ansche Chesed. Many began referring to him as New York City’s “chief rabbi.”
Lilienthal advocated several changes in Jewish practices while in New York City, including adoption of a ceremony allowing the widow of a deceased man to release his brother from the ancient biblical obligation to marry her. He also tried to set up a beit din, or rabbinic court, to rule on religious law for all congregations, but the effort never got off the ground because of resistance among New York’s Jews to any obligation to answer to one overarching authority. Eventually, Lilenthal’s efforts to serve three different congregations fell into a familiar pattern of mutual recrimination. When a member of Ansche Chesed asked Lilienthal to help form a minyan for blessing a sick child, the rabbi sent word that he was unavailable. For that rebuff, he was brought before the board, whereupon he refused to cooperate and left in a huff. The board suspended him for insulting them. Lilienthal later went into business for himself, establishing a private Jewish day school before heading off to Cincinnati to Congregation Bene Israel. While continuing to serve as a rabbi, he joined Hebrew Union College’s faculty in 1875.13
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Still another outspoken and consequential émigré was David Einhorn (1809–1879), a brilliant, passionate follower of German Jewish enlightenment figures, such as Abraham Geiger, under whom he had studied. In 1855, Einhorn was recruited to serve as the first rabbi of the Har Sinai Congregation in Baltimore. There he produced his own prayer book for reformers that became a model for the Union Prayer Book toward the end of the century. Einhorn later took up duties in Philadelphia during the Civil War.
At Har Sinai Verein, Einhorn used the Hamburg Temple prayer book for Rosh Hashanah, and its members went so far as to question whether Jews needed to observe Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in ancient times. Einhorn was influenced by the concern among some Jews that Christians would conclude that Jewish desires to return to Jerusalem would open them to charges of disloyalty. Like other reformers, Einhorn belittled the idea of such a return, declaring: “The one temple in Jerusalem sank into the dust, in order that countless temples might arise to thy honor and glory.”14
Not only was Baltimore the location of the first congregation to officially identify itself as “reform,” but it also established the American paradigm for what later became the three principal branches of Judaism. In the antebellum era, Baltimore had synagogues representing each. On the left was Einhorn and his flock. On the right was the traditionalist, Rabbi Rice. In the middle, but to the right of Har Sinai, was Congregation Oheb Shalom (Lovers of Peace), established in 1853, which in trying to find a middle ground served as a precursor to the denomination later known as Conservative Judaism. Benjamin Szold, its rabbi, composed a prayer book, Abodath Israel, which was used by congregations of reform and conservative leanings in later years. The existence of three rabbis in Baltimore, each with a different prayer book, augured the paths that Judaism would develop later in the nineteenth century.15
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