The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Reaching out to like-minded clergy upon his arrival in New York, Wise turned to Max Lilienthal, who had arrived in the city only a few years earlier from Riga. Lilienthal appears to have been the one to encourage Wise to become a rabbi and to substitute for him at consecration ceremonies in New Haven, Connecticut, and Syracuse, in upstate New York. On the way there, Wise stopped in Albany, where he preached at Temple Beth El and gave a sermon that he later said did not sit well. The congregation, he later wrote, “aggravated and humiliated” him, though for some reason he got an invitation to come back later for the Jewish New Year and was surprised by the more favorable reaction at that time. Meanwhile, a second synagogue in Albany, Temple Beth El Jacob, also invited him, and that sermon was so successful that policemen had to be stationed to keep the crowds under control, at least in Wise’s recollection. Temple Beth El was now ready to make him an offer. “My fortune was made as far as Albany was concerned,” he wrote in his Reminiscences.8

  Albany was not necessarily a propitious or welcoming place, however. Originally it was part of the Dutch colony controlled by its director general, Peter Stuyvesant, who, as earlier noted, did not welcome Jews. Among his early actions was a rejection of a petition from three Jews seeking permission to trade throughout the colony, including Fort Orange, the tiny settlement on the Hudson River that would later became Albany. Fort Orange was even then an important entrepôt for trade in furs and other goods, which were shipped down the river to the city. The Jews had come from Amsterdam with permission from the Dutch West India Company, but Stuyvesant was uneasy about their presence so soon after the arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam from Brazil the year before. Dutch financiers got Stuyvesant to change his mind, up to a point. Jews were permitted to live and trade in the colony, including in the Hudson River Valley, but they could not hold public service jobs, operate retail shops, or build a synagogue. Instead, they were to worship in their homes as long as these homes were to be “close together in a convenient place.”9

  As traders, the Jews quickly prospered. But their fortunes as a community in Albany faded after the fur trade subsided in the seventeenth century. Individual Jews returned to Albany in the eighteenth century, but no Jewish community emerged until the early nineteenth century as refugees from persecution in Central Europe arrived. By 1838, German Jews established a Jewish society in the city and set up a meeting place in a private home in the city’s South End. A few years later, they bought a small church at 76 Herkimer Street, near the banks of the Hudson River, on a plot of land owned by the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1841, Jews dedicated the building as Beth El Synagogue, the first in the city. Five years later, Wise arrived.

  Wise, displaying a bit of snobbery, was not exactly enamored of his new community of peddlers and small-time merchants with little English and many Old World customs. In his memoirs, he listed their professions—basket peddler (“altogether dumb and homeless”), trunk carrier, and pack carrier (“who carries 100 to 150 pounds upon his back and indulges the thought that he will become a businessman some day”). There was an aristocracy of richer folk—shop owners, owners of wagons pulled by horses, peddlers who graduated to running their own stores. In that group was Louis Spanier, president of the congregation, the wealthiest Jew in the city, whose business interests included owning and operating a schooner that brought lumber from the Great Lakes.10

  An initial irritant and harbinger of difficulties in the future between Wise and his congregation occurred when he was offered the job of teacher and preacher, but not rabbi. It was common for smaller congregations in that period not to have a rabbi. The hazan usually served as the main religious celebrant and in some cases the persons filling that role actually opposed the installation of rivals to serve as rabbis in their synagogues. “If you wish to elect me, you must elect me as a rabbi,” Wise told the congregation of 130 members, however.11 The congregation granted his request, and although his own status was “not brilliant financially,” Wise later wrote, it set him in reasonable comfort. He was paid $250 a year, plus $9 for each student he taught. Wise went on to establish the Jewish Academy of Albany, where students learned English, arithmetic, history, and geography as well as Hebrew and Jewish studies.

  In typical fashion, Wise emanates the soul of reason and the spirit of a revolutionary in recalling his Albany period. “The reforming spirit was innate in me,” he wrote. “It was my foremost characteristic.”12 But at other times he described himself as a cautious moderate and not a rebel at all. Yet his difficulties in persuading others to go along with his initial minor adjustments to Jewish practice and observance were so frustrating that at times he considered abandoning the rabbinate for a legal career, returning to Europe, or at least moving to another congregation in America.

  There appears to be no evidence of a contract between Wise and the synagogue at the outset. In 1849, however, the congregation insisted on establishing a contract for his continued employment. To Wise’s chagrin, the document contained legalistic wording making it clear that Wise could not change any of the temple’s rituals without the congregation’s consent. The contract also stipulated greater control by the trustees over the school set up by Wise. If Wise didn’t obey these strictures, the temple board could meet and declare the contract null and void. In Wise’s account, he tore up the contract and prepared to board a steamer for New York City, where he had earlier been interested in forming a union of congregations. A new contract was agreed to by the spring of 1849 but did not ease the anxieties on both sides.

  It appears that even Wise’s more moderate reforms rankled some in the congregation. One was the introduction of a choir, evidently modeled on those Wise had been familiar with in Germany and Vienna. To find space for the expanded choir, he moved the singers over to the front of the separate women’s seating area. This action provoked protests from the women and other members of the congregation. In his memoirs, Wise acknowledged that the choir was “a thorn in their [his critics’] side,” and that “there were constant bickerings over it.”13 Another major focus of dispute was over piyyutim, the traditional obscure prayers that Wise wanted to eliminate from the service, especially because he disliked those associated with the theme of mourning over the Jews’ exile. But some of these prayers were sentimental and traditional favorites of congregation members. Wise said he wanted to honor the authors of these ancient prayers but preferred not to pick and choose among them, so eliminating all of them seemed like a sensible solution.

  Other upsetting steps by Wise included the introduction of German and English hymns, a confirmation ceremony that replaced the bar mitzvah, and abolition of the sale to congregants of “honors,” such as opening the ark or removing the Torah from it. In another break with precedent, he had the congregation remain seated during the reading of the Torah. Several attempts to repeal these innovations were rebuffed by Wise and his allies.14

  But no doubt problems arose as well from Wise’s overbearing personality and ambitions, too great to be confined in a small congregation on the upper Hudson River. Some members grew suspicious of those ambitions, especially when he expressed interest in joining with Rabbi Lilienthal, who had originally recommended Wise for the Albany post, in creating an American beit din, or rabbinical court. In 1846, Lilienthal announced establishment of such a court and selected Wise as one of four members. The little quartet of rabbis immediately declared larger goals. The court would offer its rulings to American Jews in general, they said. But like other attempts to set up religious bodies to rule across the board in the Jewish community, Lilienthal’s gambit failed. American Jews were not ready to organize themselves under anyone’s authority, let alone his.

  It was in Albany that Wise also nurtured what would be a lifelong dream of creating a uniquely American prayer book, which he wanted to call Minhag America (American Custom). The idea of such a prayer book was not by itself anathema, but inevitably—as with the setting up of a rabbinical court—its execution was going to provoke discord. A Jewish per
iodical established in 1843, The Occident—its founding editor was Isaac Leeser, a lifelong traditionalist and sometime friend and rival of Rabbi Wise—commended the effort but noted the difficulty of a text seeking to unite disparate elements of the Jewish community, coming as they did from different parts of Europe with varied traditions and languages. The problem, said The Occident in 1847, was that “the German will not give way to the Polish, nor he to the English, nor the latter to the Portuguese Jew.” Like Lilienthal’s beit din, the prayer book project foundered in these early years of Wise’s career. But Wise still harbored a dream of unifying Jews in America around something, whether a prayer book or an organization. In 1848, he called for an “association of Israelitish congregations in North America, to produce one grand and sublime end—to defend and maintain our sacred faith, to the glory of God and for the benefit of Israel and all mankind.”15

  The problem to be overcome, as Wise began to see it, was the splintered nature of Judaism in America, which, in his view, left Jewish beliefs to be defined by ignorant laypeople. “Each congregation pursues its own way, has its own customs and mode of worship, its own way of thinking about religious questions, from which cause it then results that one Jew is a stranger in the Synagogue of the other Jew,” he lamented, warning that if Jews did not unite around universal doctrines in the United States, they risked falling by the wayside or even converting to Christianity.16

  To implement his vision, Wise tried to forge an alliance with Leeser, the publisher of The Occident, though it was fated to unravel as Wise moved away from tradition. Leeser had had his own dream of unifying Judaism in America some years earlier, revolving around a more traditional approach. A familiar point of disagreement between them was the role of prayers that called for restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem and the return of animal sacrifices. After Wise gave a lecture declaring that he saw “no reason to pray for the restoration of sacrifices,” word of his views reached The Occident and Leeser, who disagreed vehemently, as he had earlier over such changes in Charleston.17 In response, Wise sought to assure Leeser that he was not trying to impose a radical agenda on his countrymen. He wrote in The Occident in 1849 that although certain changes were inevitable, he was not a revolutionary. The two rabbis then discussed the idea of holding a meeting of Jewish congregations to discuss various matters, but the plan fizzled out. Its failure occurred just as Wise signed another three-year contract with his balky Albany congregation. He turned his attention to writing and to what he found to be the misinformation and denigration of Judaism by Christian preachers and leaders, with whom he had begun to mingle.

  MORE SQUABBLING IN ALBANY

  A family tragedy accelerated Wise’s growing breach with tradition. In 1849, shortly after signing up again in Albany, his two-year-old daughter and second child, Laura, died in a cholera epidemic. At his daughter’s funeral, members of the congregation beseeched Wise to perform a ritual tearing of his garment, in the tradition known as k’riah, as was customary at such occasions. Jewish ritual called for parents, spouse, children, and siblings to make a tear in an article of clothing (usually a shirt or blouse) as an expression of mourning. The supposed biblical precedent is Jacob’s rending of his clothes in mourning over Joseph, his son, whom he believed at the time was dead (Genesis 37:34), but the Bible connects mourning and grieving with rending of clothing in other verses as well. At the time of Wise’s mourning, it was customary for someone else to use a knife, as opposed to scissors, to start the tear on the mourner’s clothes, and then for the mourner to tear it further while reciting a blessing.

  For whatever reason, possibly because the rite seemed barbaric in the presence of his tiny daughter’s body, Wise recoiled for himself and others. “I repelled them and forbade the women to even suggest this observance to my wife,” he later wrote. He also refused to sit on the floor or low bench and remove his shoes, both also customary. These rebuffs were scandalous in the eyes of some of those present, leading to gossip that spread through the streets, shops, and saloons of the Jewish community in Albany. Discouraged and hurt, Wise turned inward and started to give thought to writing books and other pieces that might further the cause of establishing a unified Jewish organization, including essays in a new publication that started in 1849, The Asmonean, based in New York. Though Wise had earlier refused to rend his garment, his writing suggested that he was gifted at dramatic gestures aimed at illustrating what he maintained was a tortured conscience. “I am candid enough, sir, to know, and sufficiently meek to confess publicly, that I myself am cause of the disappointment,” he wrote in The Asmonean in 1849, suggesting that it was his own fault, and perhaps a lack of traditional piety, that led people to suspect him of self-aggrandizement and attention grabbing. The accusations against him were unjust, he said, but he took the blame for insensitivity to the community’s concerns. Nevertheless, Wise vowed to continue his quest for Jewish unity in America—focused, he said, on core principles of Jewish faith and law.18

  Wise’s emotional self-justification was itself attention grabbing. In Philadelphia, Leeser found it overweening. Leeser believed himself to be the author of the drive for Jewish unity. Shortly after Wise’s essay in The Asmonean, The Occident ran an ad from Congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina—the congregation that a few years earlier had divided emotionally and legally over installation of an organ. They were looking for a rabbi. That Wise took an interest in Beth Elohim indicated that he was restless.

  Seven

  A FISTFIGHT IN ALBANY

  Following the organ dispute, Congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston struggled to recover a sense of unity and harmony. Despite the favorable court ruling, Rabbi Poznanski continued as a target of disapproval from conservative circles, in Charleston and elsewhere, for what one critic called “German neologistic [i.e., Reformist] doctrines of faith.” The city’s Jewish traditionalists remained determined to make their breakaway congregation, Charleston’s Shearith Israel, a refuge against radical reform. Its members built a new synagogue on Wentworth Street, not far from Beth Elohim. Jacob Rosenfeld, one of their leaders, promised that the new congregation would worship God “as in the days of yore, in the holy tongue, in which He revealed His divine will to His servants the prophets.” He called the changes back at Beth Elohim “arrogant, baneful, and preposterous” and praised the loyalty of the traditionalists for “bringing back to the fold those who were indifferent or astray.”1

  Poznanski, obviously still bruised from the organ fight at Beth Elohim, resigned in its wake and presided over a committee to find a successor. At around the same time, the conservatives at Shearith Israel invited Rabbi Morris S. Raphall (1798–1868) from New York to speak in Charleston in 1850, setting off the next battle over reform.

  Raphall, a staunch traditionalist, thus became another important emigrant of the 1840s caught up in the arguments over Jewish practices in America. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of a prosperous banker, Raphall was also a renowned speaker—he spoke with a plummy British intonation, having lived in England for some years—who championed an orthodox approach to Jewish practice but with some modernist touches that emphasized preaching, education of the young, and an esthetically pleasing service that still adhered rigorously to tradition. Such was his fame that he commanded the highest salary of any American rabbi of the time: $2,000.2

  Raphall had studied religion at a Jewish grammar school and seminary in Copenhagen and secular subjects in Germany and England, where he had served as a rabbi in Birmingham before emigrating to the United States. At the time of his invitation to Charleston, he was serving at B’nai Jeshurun in New York, the congregation that had earlier broken away from New York’s first congregation, Shearith Israel. Later, on February 1, 1860, Raphall became the first Jew to deliver a prayer at the opening of a session of the United States Congress. Still later, he would play a more notorious role as the most prominent Jewish religious figure in America to defend the institution of slavery. But while in Charleston i
n this antebellum period, slavery was not an issue. Instead, he lectured on “The Poetry of the Hebrew Bible.” In a separate talk, he attacked the reformers at Beth Elohim, mocking them for their belief that as Americans they could forsake the coming of the Messiah. The Messiah, he said, would come one day “without fail.”

  It appears to have been a coincidence that Wise was visiting Charleston at the same time as Raphall’s appearance, apparently to seek the rabbinical post in the wake of Poznanski’s resignation. He may also have wanted to get away after grieving over his daughter’s death. Overworked, depressed, suffering from a cold, and feeling unappreciated, Wise had been advised by doctors to travel to a warmer climate. The synagogue gave him a leave of absence to do so, perhaps without knowing of the job opportunity. In addition, upon learning (at a stopover in Philadelphia) that Raphall was going to be in town, Wise may also have wanted to use the occasion to meet up with him.

  On his way to Charleston, Wise stopped off in Washington, D.C. He was prominent enough in New York’s capital to meet on this visit with Senator William Henry Seward, a former governor of New York and a future political mastermind and member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Even more notably, Seward brought him to meet his fellow Whig, President Zachary Taylor, onetime hero of the Mexican War whose presidency was to last less than a year and a half. Wise also attended sessions of the Senate, met Daniel Webster, and wrote later that it was a powerful experience for him, a recent immigrant, to be welcomed by so many distinguished public servants.

  To one scholar who has examined the events in Charleston, Rabbi Naphtali Rubinger, Wise was clearly motivated by his desire to change jobs, even though he may have wanted his congregation to think he was traveling to Charleston for his health, or for the exclusive purpose of participating in a debate with Raphall.3 Many details of the Wise-Raphall encounter have been lost to history, in part because the records of Congregation Beth Elohim were destroyed during the Civil War. But according to Wise’s autobiography, the two rabbis decided to meet just as Wise arrived in town. As fate would have it, the subject of Raphall’s presentation turned out to be on whether it was appropriate for Jews to still believe in the coming of a “personal” messiah to deliver them back to Palestine. It was this proposition, of course, that Beth Elohim had omitted when it posted only ten of Maimonides’s thirteen principles on the wall of its new synagogue. Raphall was to square off with Poznanski in a kind of smackdown in Charleston. Wise would play a crucial, fateful, and decisive role.