The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  But first it is important to understand the nature and history of the dispute over that most important Jewish doctrine.

  “EVEN THOUGH HE TARRIES . . . I AWAIT HIS COMING”

  “With some exaggeration, we may say that Judaism’s messianic belief makes it unique among world religions,” writes the Reform Jewish scholar and theologian Eugene Borowitz. He notes further that while other religions project a vision of eventual redemption, none holds out the vision of a specific redeemer as instrumental to its identity.4

  The role of Maimonides in enshrining the doctrine of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead as essential principles of Judaism has long been recognized as historically important, along with Maimonides’s other innovative teachings. In his great work The Guide for the Perplexed, for example, Maimonides said that the stories of the Bible were to be understood as parables or allegories written to illustrate the existence of God, whose precise identity was beyond human comprehension. But it was Maimonides’s exaltation of a messiah in his “Thirteen Principles” of Jewish faith that proved especially pivotal for American Jews in the nineteenth century. To anyone doubting the centrality of the Messiah, Borowitz evokes the heartbreaking spectacle of Jewish martyrs in the Holocaust singing a refrain that alluded to Maimonides on their way to the gas chambers: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah and even though he tarries, I daily await his coming.”

  Some scholars, on the other hand, have discerned a distinct ambiguity over the prospect of the Messiah going back many centuries. Leon Wieseltier, the author and essayist, notes that throughout history, some rabbis—including Moses ben Nahman, the thirteenth-century sage known as Nachmanides—had mixed feelings about the return of a king who would restore the House of David, as the prophets seem to have predicted. Some rabbis were concerned that if Jews were to fall into the belief that the Messiah had indeed come, some Jews would no longer feel obliged to perform God’s commandments; indeed, they might be lured by imposters into such a belief. “For the Jews, the history of messianism is the history of false messianism,” Wieseltier writes. “More often than not, the longing for salvation is to be mastered rather than fulfilled.”5

  Yet the historic and scholarly record shows that what one historian calls the “self-contradictions” of messianic belief—praying for a return to the Holy Land just as Jews were becoming more successful and settled in Europe—emerged in the seventeenth century and perhaps even earlier. It was then that principles embraced for two thousand years began showing the effects of the rise of Jewish status—economic if not political—and the parallel rise of rational thought when it came to their religion. These trends began in Holland, then England, and eventually in France and Germany.6

  The word messiah derives from the Hebrew mashiah· (literally, “the anointed one”), which came into usage as an elegant synonym for king. While Jews were living under the thumb of a series of conquerors—Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman—they started yearning toward the end of the biblical period for a reversal of their misfortunes. A belief arose that the time was at hand for God at last to restore his people to their former greatness. That heavenly restoration would revive the long-defunct Davidic monarchy in the person of a divinely sent and anointed king. Such a mashiah· might singlehandedly lead God’s people to the military, political, and religious dominance that they had enjoyed (or believed they had enjoyed) under King David a thousand years earlier. The nations of the world would, in turn, recognize that Israel’s God was the one, true deity, and the coming of this mashiah· would open a period of unparalleled well-being for Israel and the world in general.

  As the hope for such a messiah grew in strength, a number of potential candidates presented themselves. Most notably, many of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth believed him to be the long-awaited one, and his crucifixion—a particularly cruel and humiliating form of punishment practiced by Israel’s Roman overlords—only strengthened the belief of some Jews that Jesus was indeed the fulfillment of the messianic dream. (The word for messiah in Greek is “Christos.”) Other Jews continued to look elsewhere. In the early second century CE, the leader of an abortive revolt against Rome, Simon bar Kokhba, was proclaimed by his followers to be the Messiah. But after some initial success, his revolt floundered, and with it the hope for an immediate upturn in the life of Israel. When, by the end of the fourth century CE, Palestine itself came to be a difficult place for Jews to inhabit, its population gradually migrated to more favorable sites: eastward to Babylon and other parts of the ancient Near East, or westward to Europe. Later, a second westward move took place, so that for several centuries a great percentage of world Jewry lived in Iberia and its environs. But after their final expulsion from Spain in 1492, those Jews joined their brethren in North Africa, Italy, Turkey, and other communities on the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. New pretenders to the messianic title arose, but none succeeded long in winning over the hearts of their coreligionists.7

  Throughout their historic travails and travels, many Jews continued to believe that the Messiah would come if Jews could only adhere to their strictures laid down by the ancient rabbis, and indeed that their devotion to these laws and traditions could hasten the coming of the Messiah. No doubt these beliefs helped keep Judaism alive in the face of cultural and political pressures.

  A new frenzy for the coming of the Messiah grew out of the mystical movement known as Kabbalah, which spread throughout Europe as early as the medieval period, culminating in the seventeenth century. But this fervor led to some disasters as well. Among these was the apostate Sabbatai Zevi, who emerged in Anatolia in the 1600s to proclaim himself the Messiah, and later Jacob Frank in Poland, claiming to be Sabbatai’s successor. Sabbatai’s following was vast, spreading throughout the Jewish world. But it came to a bad end, with his imprisonment by the Ottoman Turks and apparent conversion to Islam to avoid death. Yet the mystical attraction of Kabbalah and messianism lived on. It was reborn in the extreme piety embodied by Hasidism in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, and kept alive by Hasidic Jews of the modern era.

  “Suffice it to say that we Jews believe we will know the Messiah when we see ‘him,’ ” writes Borowitz. For more than two thousand years, as Borowitz says, this fundamental argument about the identity of the Messiah—especially the one between Christians and Jews over whether Jesus was the Messiah—has continued in religious circles. One aspect of this debate concerns the Messiah’s lineage. Certain passages in the Bible clearly suggest that the future Messiah was to be a direct descendant of King David. Early Christians struggled to reconcile this claim with the tradition of Jesus’s immaculate (i.e., divine) conception. Christian teachings resolved the matter by holding that Jesus was in fact a descendant of David, via the union of Ruth, a Moabite, and Boaz.8

  The biblical texts referring to the Messiah also speak of a messianic epoch, or political era, as well as an individual: “A sprout will come forth from the trunk of Jesse [King David’s father]. . . . With righteousness he will judge the poor / And bring justice to the little people of the land. . . . The wolf will live with the lamb / The leopard lie down with the kid. . . .” Other passages alluding to a messianic era, from both Isaiah and Micah, refer to the day when nations will beat their swords into plowshares and abandon war, and that in this epoch everyone will sit under his own vine and fig tree “and no one will make them afraid.” The importance of the prophets’ vision of the future is not that an individual will one day come to save humanity, but that one day there will be an era of justice and mercy for which humans must pray.

  Thus, for some centuries, some Jews held that the Messiah would be a king of flesh and blood, an altogether mortal if remarkable monarch whose ascension to the throne would herald the beginning of better times. At the same time, other Jews saw in the Messiah a worker of miracles whose appearance would inaugurate a new Golden Age, “the messianic era,” leading to the resurrection of the dead in the World to Come.

&n
bsp; The varying interpretations about who and what a messiah represented made it possible for Jewish scholars of the Haskalah era to jettison the idea of a “personal” messiah in favor of a coming Messianic Age, as the prayer book for the Hamburg Temple did in 1841. It was further possible for the reformers to discard the accompanying messianic idea of the dead being resurrected as a creation of ancient rabbis not found in the Bible. Indeed, they noted that many passages of the Bible suggest that death is permanent. The Haskalah-era rabbis thus embraced what was becoming an accepted alternative idea—that the soul is immortal in some undefined way and would be “redeemed” in some future era, but not through a specific revival of the dead.

  But what to make of the many passages from the Bible suggesting that God had “chosen” the Jews to carry out His commandments? The Haskalah reformers pioneered the concept that the Jews themselves were a messianic people designated by God to guide the world to its eventual redemption. This, the reformers said, was Israel’s priestly “mission,” in keeping with God’s words to the Israelites in the Torah: “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Judaism for these Jews was a religion with a universal priestly message but a particular assignment from God. If Jews were “chosen,” it was to carry out this goal.

  The Jewish reformers of the nineteenth century were happy to compare what they saw as rabbinic Judaism’s sometimes far-fetched interpretations with what they also argued was the Christian misreading of prophetic passages in the Hebrew Bible. For example, Christian scholars translated a crucial passage of Isaiah as: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Holding that the Hebrew Bible conveys the word of God, these scholars have pointed to this passage, and many others, as literally prophetic—predicting the coming of Jesus. The normal Jewish translation of the passage, however, is simply that a “young woman” will conceive a restorer to the Davidic line. Reforming Jews of the nineteenth century regarded the supposed foretelling of the coming of Jesus in Isaiah, as asserted by Christian theologians, as precisely the sort of tortured and fallacious interpretation that Talmudic rabbis were sometimes guilty of applying.

  How exactly did the overthrowing of belief in a “personal” messiah take root in the nineteenth century? A crucial reason, as the historian Jacob Katz writes, was that the granting of rights as citizens in Germany, France, and elsewhere broke “the spell” of a messiah delivering Jews as a nation back to the Holy Land: “Accepting citizenship in a non-Jewish state was regarded both by the Jews and by their emancipators as incompatible with the messianic belief that was an uncontested article of Jewish faith.”9

  Borowitz cites two additional factors. First, Jews (and Christians) schooled in science and reason could no longer believe in the literal truth of the miracles of the Bible, especially the magical idea of a king returning them to a Jewish state in Jerusalem. Second and still more important, Jews in self-governing states felt that Scripture had given too much importance to God intervening in the world and too little to the power of human beings to seek social justice on earth. If the concept of a messiah grew as well out of Jewish despair over foreign domination, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and Israel’s subsequent persecution and exile, then it was time in the modern era to recognize that Jewish redemption must likewise be the work of human hands, and not a deus ex machina sent from heaven. “Instead of God sending an ideal king, they foresaw all humankind working together and by social reconstruction producing a perfected world,” Borowitz writes. “In place of people being relatively passive, performing their religious duties but relying on God to redeem history, they would become activists, applying their reason and conscience to effect their salvation.”10

  These are the factors—coupled with similar trends under way among Christians in the Second Great Awakening—that crested in the fateful dispute in South Carolina in 1850 attended by Isaac Mayer Wise.

  “A LOUD AND DECISIVE NO”

  At least initially, Wise appears to have thought that any debate involving the traditionalist Rabbi Raphall over the existence of a personal messiah would not be serious. As a skeptic, he was also characteristically disdainful of the debaters themselves. A table, he recalled, was set up for the two to do battle—Raphall “a rotund little man with a black velvet skullcap” and Gustavus Poznanski “in full dress, stiff, cold and self-satisfied.” Each had brought a claque of supporters, and Wise sat with the Poznanski group. “The whole affair seemed to me most laughable and ridiculous,” he wrote later.

  Poznanski began by citing the reinterpretation of the Messiah concept in the writings of a litany of German reform Jews: Isaak Markus Jost of Frankfurt (author of many volumes of Jewish history and interpretation), Abraham Geiger, Leopold Zunz, Samuel Holdheim, and many others. According to Wise, Raphall ignored these latter-day German scholars and even seemed unfamiliar with them, citing instead the work of Maimonides and other thinkers in the ancient and medieval tradition.

  “When he began to murder Talmudical passages, I began to grow angry,” Wise said of Raphall. “But I held my peace.” Not for long, however. Wise clearly felt that Poznanski was the better debater and was winning the argument, much to Raphall’s irritation. “Finally, Raphall grew angry, and glowed with holy zeal,” Wise recalled. “Instead of arguing, he began to catechize. He asked the public, and finally myself personally: ‘Do you believe in the personal Messiah?’ ‘Do you believe in bodily resurrection?’ I have never refused to answer a direct question; therefore, I answered Raphall’s question with a loud and decisive No! This ended the drama. Raphall seized his books, rushed angrily out of the hall, followed by his whole party. He had apparently given up the fight.”

  But the fight did not end. In fact, it only began and grew. In his published Reminiscences, Wise recalled that he told Raphall that “we will see within ten or twenty years what will be left in America of Jewish orthodoxy.”

  Wise’s version was corroborated by other witnesses, including leaders of other congregations who wrote a letter to Louis Spanier, president of Wise’s Albany congregation, that his rabbi was running amok. After preaching in Charleston for a week after the debate, Wise returned to New York by steamer. Soon the Charleston congregation decided to offer Wise a position as its rabbi. Wise accepted, writing a letter in The Asmonean that he was resigning his position in Albany to return to Charleston in the spring. But then he changed his mind and re-upped with the Albany congregation, to the chagrin of the Charleston group, which demanded that he return the money they had spent to bring him there to discuss their job offer. (Wise refused, and the Albany congregation also refused to compensate Charleston.)

  Wise’s new three-year contract required him not to change any rituals without the trustees’ approval. “The joy was great; feasts of reconciliation were celebrated,” Wise wrote. “I was overwhelmed with costly gifts; the heavens were without cloud.”11

  The reconciliation was not to last, neither in Albany nor in Charleston. After Wise rejected the offer at Beth Elohim, the synagogue selected a rabbi named Julius Eckman to succeed Poznanski, who stayed on as a member of the congregation. But the succession only renewed tensions within as Eckman sought to rescind some of Beth Elohim’s reforms while keeping the organ and some of the English in the sermons and prayers. Once again, the issue was Poznanski’s placement of the abridged version of Maimonides’s creed on the wall, the one omitting references to the Messiah, restoration of Jews to Palestine, and the resurrection of the dead. Reformers called on Eckman to resign over his decision to remove the abridged creed. In an apparent artful compromise, the board yielded to the protests, accepted Eckman’s resignation—but then removed the creed, replacing it with the simple Shema.12

  In Albany, meanwhile, it soon became apparent that Wise’s Charleston idyll had poisoned the atmosphere. Concern remained that he was in breach of his promise not to change the synagogue’s traditions without the approval of its lay leadership. It was only a matter of ti
me before these ill feelings caught up with him. Wise’s reputation was battered, and he wrote to the newspaper Asmonean in April citing a supposedly anonymous letter as praising him for advocating “reform” but responding that while he felt bad about jilting Congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston, he was obliged to not abandon his efforts in Albany. He said his main calling was to save Judaism from extinction and that he would be ready to preach anywhere to do so—“to the Pole, or to the Equator, to Ethiopia, or to Patagonia.”13

  What is striking about these comments is Wise’s implication that Albany seemed to agree with him. He had earlier repeatedly disavowed attempts to seek radical change. In this interval, he wrote, the Albany congregation “must know” his position on adjusting key traditions and laws to modern times, since he had many times publicly identified himself as an advocate for change. “Did I ever hesitate to pronounce my inmost conviction?” he wrote. “Or did my congregation ever oppose my views? They did not; and they gave me the best proof of their agreement with my views by the re-election of my humble self.”14