The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Leeser was not alone in his advocacy of tradition, however. In 1852, Jews from Lithuania and Poland established Beth Hamidrash, “house of study,” New York’s first East European Orthodox synagogue, though it was beset by conflicts and later split into other competing synagogues.2 Though it was less prominent than Reform, Leeser, Abraham Rice, Bernard Illowy, and Moshe Aaronsohn developed a kind of subculture of more traditional and even pietistic Judaism, in which they debated the complexities of Jewish law. Some were quite arcane, such as the debate over whether Muscovy duck was kosher and whether one could use the same false teeth for eating dairy and meat dishes or for Passover, which require a separate set of dishes altogether.

  Illowy, like Leeser, made adjustments to Orthodox practices, such as conducting the service while facing the Congregation (not the Torah) and embracing the confirmation ceremony. Illowy had received his PhD in Budapest and served congregations in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Syracuse, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Cincinnati. Various disputes followed him in many of these places. Despite his conservative bent, he was adamant about enforcing decorum in the service, insisting that there be “no screeching, or shouting” and that everyone pray in unison and not engage in the “indecorous scramble and rush to get out” of the synagogue even before the closing of the service.3 Illowy felt aggrieved by the loss of Jewish discipline in the United States, but he could not avoid his own controversies. He had to leave his post at Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia after a flap over charges (later dismissed) that he had used a razor to shave, failed to wash his hands before praying, failed to cover his head, and even that he had eaten a goose that had not been properly slaughtered. The traditionalist rabbis of this era published books and pamphlets to help guide the perplexed about how to apply Jewish law in the hurly-burly of the modern world. They were not a majority or even sizable part of the American Jewish community, but what they accomplished established a precedent for the waves of Jews who would come later in the century and into the twentieth century.

  ISAAC LEESER’S TRAVAILS

  Leeser was an improbable guardian of tradition in many ways. Twelve years older than Wise, he appears to have suffered from depression and led a life marked by lifelong bachelorhood, family tragedy, isolation, and bitter conflict with lay leaders of his congregation, who failed to appreciate his accomplishments.

  Like Wise, Leeser envisioned a “union” of American Hebrew congregations, though based on conservative principles and practices. But Leeser’s painfully reticent, doctrinaire, and sanctimonious personality was no match for Wise’s self-confidence, rhetorical bluster, and gift for self-promotion. If Wise succumbed to delusions of grandeur, Leeser suffered from an inferiority complex. “He was a difficult person,” Leeser’s biographer Lance Sussman writes. “People were not naturally attracted to him. He was often defensive and argumentative. Similarly, his physical appearance worked against him. He was very short, nearly blind, and badly scarred by smallpox for most of his adult life. Finally, his literary style was far from felicitous and his argumentation often flawed by digression or lack of balance. He basically lived a hard, lonely life. His greatest comfort and his greatest source of tension came from his work, not from close friends or family.”4

  Born in a tiny village in Westphalia, Leeser was the son of a struggling merchant. The early deaths of his father and mother left Isaac orphaned at age fourteen. Raised by a grandparent, he attended school in the town of Dülmen, in North Rhine–Westphalia, where he befriended Rabbi Abraham Sutro, a revered figure among Jews in the region who had battled for civil rights of Jews in the German lands after Napoleon decreed the Jewish people to be emancipated in France. Sutro was also in the forefront of opposing the nascent movement in Germany for Reform Judaism, a harbinger of what Leeser was to face later in life in the New World.

  Invited by an uncle, a dry-goods merchant, the young rabbinically trained scholar traveled to America at age seventeen, settling in Richmond, Virginia. He gained early renown for an essay defending Judaism, written under a pseudonym in response to a critical article published in London. The essay attracted the attention of a Sephardic synagogue in Richmond, Beth Shalom, which recruited him to serve as a cantor and teacher. He later described his time there as unusually welcoming and compatible with his traditionalist inclinations.

  Leeser’s reputation as an outspoken foe of attacks on Jews in Damascus and other far-off lands led him to write a book in 1841, entitled The Claims of the Jews to an Equality of Rights. His expanded prominence soon got him a position as hazan at Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, where he was active on a variety of fronts, writing a primer for the Sunday school he established with Rebecca Gratz. He was also a prolific translator of a range of scholarly works from German, Spanish, French, and Hebrew. His English translation of what became known as the “Leeser Bible” was widely used until later versions supplanted it in the early twentieth century. In his book, The Jews and the Mosaic Law, Leeser argued in 1834 that the Pentateuch was of divine origin and then went on to write many works of sermons, theological analysis, and a ten-volume Discourses on the Jewish Religion. He is generally considered the first Jewish leader to give sermons in the synagogue in English. But perhaps his most lasting achievement in letters was his publication of The Occident, a weekly journal of news and opinion that was read among Jews throughout the country.

  Philosophically, Leeser regarded Talmudic law and restrictions, including those devised by generations of rabbis from antiquity through the Middle Ages, as divinely inspired, thus imbued with divine authority, and not subject to revision or reinterpretation in a secular context. He also believed American Jews could change their outward dress and approach some traditions with flexibility—so long as they did not violate Jewish law and made sure to embrace inward piety and its rules—what the historian Michael Meyer calls “a linguistic, cultural and patriotic adaptation” of observant Judaism to modern circumstances, in some ways akin to the reform practices while broadly rejecting reform principles.5

  But Leeser was also ground down by his quarrels with the lay leadership at Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. The disputes continued, on and off, over Leeser’s sermons, which he delivered in English, rather than German or Hebrew. He preached the importance of Jewish rules but did acknowledge that certain Jewish “superstitions” could be discarded. But there were continuous disputes over the board’s insistence that he clear his sermons ahead of time. In addition, Leeser was constantly forced to ask for salary increases when his contract was renewed, only to be rebuffed in what would be a string of rejections over many years—a not-uncommon situation in synagogues of the time.

  An initial dispute arose in 1831, shortly after he came to Philadelphia, over the board’s vote to excommunicate one of its members, whose crime was insulting a fellow board member. Objecting that the board had no such power, Leeser refused to read the edict in the synagogue, infuriating the lay leadership. They summoned Leeser to explain his defiance, but he refused to attend and was effectively censured by the board. He responded with more confrontation, lecturing congregation members over their factionalism, failure to contribute funds, showing up late, and general lack of observance of standards.

  Just as his hectoring behavior failed to endear him to board members, Leeser’s landlord asked him to move out, concerned that Leeser had taken a romantic interest in one of his daughters. Leeser’s new living quarters was a sublet in a building owned by a Gentile seamstress, a Mrs. Deliah [sic] Nash Cozens. (Leeser maintained that while living there, he adhered to strict kosher rules by eating no meat, but he failed to dispel suspicions of laxity on dietary rules among some of his critics, including Wise.)

  It was in the sublet that he came down with smallpox in 1833. A younger brother, Jacob, came to Philadelphia to look after him, arriving to find his stricken brother in a coma. Jacob then succumbed to the disease himself and died, while Isaac recovered, scarred for the rest of his life by a hideously pockmarked face and guilt over the death of a be
loved sibling who had sacrificed his life to nurse him back to health.

  Leeser’s stormy tenure came to a head with a confrontation in 1849 over yet another renewal of his contract as hazan, in which he asked for terms allowing him to address the congregation on matters of religion without the president’s approval. Their rebuff on this and other demands, without a proper hearing, filled Leeser with despair and anger, he later wrote. “Such an unceremonious act of tyranny, that will listen to no reason, but demands absolute submission, roused my indignation,” he said. Improvidently, he attacked his own board in The Occident, comparing them to “English iron-clad barons.” To which the board responded with its own attack on Leeser in a resolution accusing him of “an absence of the good feeling” toward his superiors.

  The following year, the board adopted a motion of censure over his behavior but offered him a meager salary for ten years. The board further raised the sensitive issue of his status as a renter in a house owned by a Gentile, suggesting he may not have followed proper dietary precautions. The board’s clear intention to force Leeser’s ouster filled him with what his biographer described as a “sense of loss and failure.” Weakened physically, he tried to keep up a good front, but he later wrote that on his last day that September, as he was poised to leave office, he was “too ill to walk to the synagogue” and remained puzzled that so many had turned against him. In an unfeeling gesture, Leeser’s principal tormenter, the congregation president, Abraham Hart, asked him to continue leading the services for the remainder of the high holy days. “I would not do it for a million dollars,” Leeser responded. Instead, he spent Yom Kippur fasting alone in his house, mentally shattered, and for many years refused to set foot back in his old synagogue. The motion of censure was eventually repealed in 1856, but by then Leeser had moved on to a new career of writing, lecturing, and teaching—but not performing in services at any congregation. He continued his influential work as editor of The Occident, however. In his final years, he led another congregation, Beth El Emeth, in West Philadelphia.6

  ISAAC AND ISAAC TRY FOR ENTENTE

  The story of the friendship, rivalry, enmity, recriminations, but eventually mutual respect between the two Isaacs, Leeser and Wise, begins in 1846, with Leeser’s paper The Occident taking note of Wise’s arrival in America as one of a handful of rabbis in the country at the time. The paper referred to him as “a young schoolmaster who also preaches, and is said to possess some Hebrew learning.”7 While in Albany, Wise corresponded frequently with Leeser and chafed under the same conditions that Leeser endured—the requirement that his sermons be approved by the president of the congregation.

  In Albany, Wise’s ambitious drive to organize Jews in America under one umbrella had naturally brought him notice in other parts of the country. The initial step, as earlier mentioned, was to work with New York rabbis to set up a rabbinic court to rule over the city’s many synagogues. Leeser, lacking official rabbinic credentials, was not invited to join the project. But Wise and the others needed to disseminate their plans through The Occident, and it was in a contribution to that paper that Wise proposed his idea for a prayer book Minhag America. Leeser allowed Wise to promote his idea while dissenting from some of Wise’s beliefs, including omission of the traditional Jewish prayers for restoration of the destroyed Temple and reestablishing animal sacrifices.

  At their first meeting in Albany in 1847, shortly after Wise’s arrival there, Wise described Leeser as “a lean pock-marked, clean-shaving little man, clad in black” who was “worthy of respect” because he was “honest and well-meaning in his orthodoxy.” Leeser evidently returned that respect.8 As a result, Leeser overcame his wariness of Wise’s doctrines and allowed him to use The Occident to promote his idea of a national union of American Jews.

  But the Wise-Leeser friendship foundered over the events leading up to and including Wise’s firing in Albany, starting with Wise’s challenge in Charleston to the concept of a personal messiah. Those comments were what led Spanier, the Albany synagogue president, to get Leeser to publish details of the rabbi’s scandalous behavior in The Occident. Wise, Leeser wrote, needed to “look into the matter [of the Messiah] more deeply.” The “glorious doctrine” of the Messiah and resurrection of the dead derived from sacred sources, he added. “Would there be any disgrace in Dr. Wise acknowledging in calmer moments that he was mistaken?” As a conciliatory gesture, Leeser expressed his personal respect for Wise and offered him the opportunity to respond in The Occident, though Wise had already addressed the matter in The Asmonean, claiming that some members had waged a vendetta against him because of his enforcement of Sabbath and kosher laws.9

  A separate source of contention was also revealing. Wise believed in the elimination of scriptural readings calling for murderous vengeance on the Amalekites and other enemies of the Jews depicted in the Bible. While Leeser went along with Wise’s favoring sermons in the services, he could not go as far as Wise on such matters and said so. Yet Wise kept up his challenges to Leeser, saying that Jews, on their own, were already abandoning many of their supposedly outmoded traditions and were in danger of defecting from Judaism altogether. Writing in The Occident, Wise argued that the Bible did not forbid the reforms he advocated and again disputed the textual basis in Scripture for the concepts of a messiah and resurrection. Eventually, Leeser could not tolerate what he saw as Wise’s heresies, saying it pained him to publish what Wise had to say. Wise promptly withdrew as a contributor, telling Leeser: “I pity you, and I hope the day is not far distant when The Occident will advocate the doctrines of reform.” Vowing to remain “an honest friend” of Leeser, he nevertheless bade “a hearty farewell” to the readers of The Occident. Leeser had the last word in his own paper, saying no Jewish “minister” had the right to deny the truth of Jewish teachings. But in a final letter, Wise retorted that the Talmud and its successor laws were written by humans, and humans are fallible and subject to a reconsideration of their conclusions.

  Challenged on the resurrection, Wise added fire to this exchange by indulging in a fanciful case of reductio ad absurdum in still another communication. What if the prediction of a resurrection were true, and all the human beings now dead had suddenly come back to life? Who would feed them? And where would they find places to live? Wise said they could live in a “supernatural” state but asserted that all such speculations were preposterous. He wondered whether, having come back to life, humans would die again eventually. His rejoinder then turned personal, as Wise accused Leeser of turning a philosophical dispute “into personal invectives of the most abusive kind.” Leeser fired back, saying he had no wish to declare Wise a heretic, but that it appeared Wise wanted martyrdom.10

  The irony was that Wise was still determined at this stage to be a compromiser. He also found it useful to dissemble when it came to doctrine, professing unity over radical reform, with his familiar goal of creating an American Judaism around which all Jews could rally. Parting company with some reformers to seek the right balance, he asserted that Judaism had indeed derived in some fashion from divine revelation. He thus consistently maintained that God revealed himself to Moses and that Moses composed the Torah (or most of it). But he was a rationalist and did not believe in magic or miracles such as the parting of the Red Sea, which he said must have occurred because of natural causes. He never accepted the ancient rabbinic traditional view that God imparted hundreds of commandments orally to Moses. But he never doubted the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from God.

  This conviction enabled Wise to argue that all interpretations that came after the revelation were subject to revisiting. He contended that the Bible’s and the Talmud’s condoning of such practices as slavery, bigamy, vengeance and killing of enemies, and a hereditary priesthood, could be discarded as outmoded. But the concept of divine revelation on some level was not disputed. “For all of his reformist stance, there was an undeniable strain of fundamentalism in Wise,” writes the historian Michael Meyer. He could not ab
ide the view of critics that the Pentateuch was written by many authors, because interpreting it that way undercut the existence of one eternal God. He believed that something real and important happened at Sinai. Within the boundaries of these doctrines, Wise maintained what Meyer calls “ambiguous formulations” in which he could maneuver with some latitude. “Consistency, moreover, was simply not his highest value,” Meyer writes delicately. Instead, Wise harbored a “strain of opportunism” and “penchant for self-aggrandizement.” Wise wanted to transform Judaism but understood that he had to show some deference to rabbinic authority if he was to succeed in persuading others to follow him.

  To this end, Wise argued that it was not until sometime after the tenth century that rabbinic interpretations from ancient times ceased to be the sole authority of law. It was then, he said, that new schools of interpretation, using philology and philosophy, took their place and began what he maintained would become a new tradition adjusted to modern demands. His contention was that Maimonides and Moses Mendelssohn were the avatars of this new contemporary Judaism that crested in the “scientific” studies of Judaism in Germany but culminated in America. Wise used the word reform on occasion, but he did not see himself as leading some sort of “Reform” denomination or movement. Instead, he spoke of an Americanized religion. As he put it: “American Judaism, i.e., Judaism reformed and reconstructed by the beneficent influence of political liberty and progressive enlightenment, is the youngest offspring of the ancient and venerable faith of Israel. . . . It is the American phase of Judaism.”11

  For all these differences over orthodoxy, Isaac Mayer Wise and Isaac Leeser did not abandon their hope for common ground. But in 1853 when Leeser proposed in The Occident that a conference be convened of all Jewish clergy in America, Wise opposed it—even though he had long favored the idea in principle. There were too few responsible rabbis in America for such a conference to avoid dictating to others, he asserted. The following year, Wise published his book, The History of the Israelitish Nation:From Abraham to the Present Time. At the time, few if any such histories of the Jewish people, daring to provide a narrative that departed from the miracles in Scripture, existed in English. Drawing on his knowledge of such histories in German, Wise’s work was an attempt to set aside what he viewed as myths and miracles in order to discern an actual history of Jews starting with Abraham. Its purpose was to record only “facts” and not interventions by God, which Wise said could not be verified. Various miracles like the parting of the Red Sea and the descending of darkness as part of the plagues of Egypt could be explained by science, he asserted. Seeking to get his book published, Wise won approval from two New York statesmen of the day, Horace Greeley and William Seward. He also got favorable letters from such other public figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe. Unable to find a publisher, Wise produced the book at his own expense with help from friendly benefactors, prompting a firestorm of conservative criticism, Leeser among them, in some cases calling for his excommunication as a heretic.