The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  But the dream of binding the disparate Jewish communities in the United States refused to go away. Both Isaacs agreed that it had to be undertaken without the hierarchy associated with Jewish communities in Europe, where “chief rabbis” of individual cities and countries were the norm. Wise, at least, was influenced no doubt by the phenomenon of rabbinical conferences in Europe earlier in the 1800s, including the group of Jewish notables who had met with Napoleon and declared themselves to be French citizens. Later parleys to discuss reforms in Judaism took place in Germany, particularly one in Wiesbaden in 1837 (called by Abraham Geiger, an early advocate of a modernized reading of Jewish tradition), Brunswick in 1844, Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1845, and Breslau in 1846.

  By 1854, Wise had transplanted himself to a new perch in Cincinnati, following the debacle and change of congregations in Albany. Wise took over as rabbi at B’nai Yeshurun, a leading synagogue in one of the United States’ largest and most prosperous Jewish communities. Cincinnati, a booming Ohio River commercial center and entrepôt known as the “Queen City of the West,” swelled in population in mid-century, especially with an influx of German immigrants. With his powerful reputation, Wise had been able to dictate many of his own terms to the congregation, avoiding certain customs (such as “antiquated chanting” of the Torah) as beneath his dignity. Over the objections of some in the congregation, he introduced a choir and abolished the wearing of prayer shawls. Again, as in Albany, he discarded several obscure prayers in the liturgy and decreed that the Torah did not need to be read in its entirety throughout the year. Instead, the Torah was to be read in a cycle of three years.

  The year he arrived in Cincinnati, Wise began publishing a newspaper, The Israelite, in 1854, with the expectation that it would compete with Leeser’s Occident. Its masthead modestly proclaimed: “Let there be Light.” He found time in his work to write a few forgettable and unsuccessful novels and engage in verbal combat with adversaries, Jew and non-Jew, mobilizing what his biographer calls “a rough, uncultivated voice” that “snorts or bellows” when getting its point across. Though The Israelite lost money, Wise went on to establish a German companion newspaper, Die Deborah, aimed at women, another signal of the rising importance of women in Jewish daily life. He also persisted in his plans to produce a prayer book worthy of his goal of Jewish unity. He was determined to build on an idea introduced in 1847 by his friend, Rabbi Max Lilienthal of Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York, who set up an advisory committee authorizing Wise to submit a prayer book manuscript for eventual use by all congregations in the United States.

  In the pages of The Israelite, Wise also called for a national parley of rabbis in 1855, scheduled to take place in Cleveland. In an ecumenical gesture, invitations went out to Orthodox as well as Reform congregations. Nine accepted the summons by August, and the conference planners set an agenda of establishing a common liturgy (including his Minhag America) and a proposal to expand Jewish education. The planning got off to a rocky start when three of the original Orthodox signatories to the summons of the conference pulled out. But other Orthodox rabbis showed up, along with lay representatives from several cities, setting up potential obstacles to reaching agreement.

  As the conference began in October, the attendees elected Wise as president. He immediately sought again to mediate between radical reformers and conservatives, who distrusted each other so much that they refused to sit together and instead scowled at one another throughout the session.12 To overcome their differences, Wise, Leeser, and Rabbi Leo Merzbacher worked all night to hammer out a compromise. The next day the conference adopted a call for a synod based on two major principles: the divine origin of the Bible and the authority of rabbinic traditions as derived from “the traditional, legal, and logical exposition of the biblical laws which must be expounded and practiced according to the comments of the Talmud.”13 The language fell short of the Orthodox belief in the outright divine nature of the Talmud’s authority. But upon hearing this presentation, Leeser got up from his seat in the back of the hall and walked to the front, declaring at the podium that it had eased his fears. His statement may have been a reflection of hope rather than conviction.

  The adopted platform at Cleveland clearly went further than Wise might have preferred in making concessions to conservatives. But Wise knew that compromise was necessary to fulfill his dream. In The Israelite, Wise recalled that Leeser “beamed with delight” over the declaration, and that the other orthodox delegates were surprised and nonplussed.14 The conference also set up a committee with Wise as a member to set up a common liturgy and then to report on its progress at the next conference, to be held in Philadelphia the next year, in 1856.

  But in the end, Wise’s efforts to compromise backfired. Leeser was vilified by some of his Orthodox brethren for reaching out to Wise. And on the other side of the spectrum, vehement objections to Wise’s gesture erupted. The most heated dissent came from Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore, who had rejected the Talmud’s divinely inspired authority. Einhorn, in his attack, also accused Wise of reprinting one of his own sermons in a mangled form in the Israelite and omitting passages that conflicted with the Cleveland meeting’s conclusions. The Cleveland platform abandoned Jews who did not consider the Talmud as binding, Einhorn declared, and in so doing, it condemned Judaism itself to “perpetual stagnation” and obscurantism.

  In raising these objections, Einhorn started on his path to becoming the most passionate and doctrinaire reformer in the United States. He was destined over time to wield enormous influence on the transformation of American Judaism. Like the careers of other rabbis, Einhorn’s journey was a mixture of European and American intellectual and social trends. Born in Dispeck, Bavaria, in 1809, Einhorn had attended a traditional yeshiva in Furth, earning a rabbinical diploma at age seventeen. He later studied at various universities in Erlangen, Würzburg, and Munich, where his religious views turned increasingly radical. After several rabbinical posts, he succeeded Samuel Holdheim, a champion of Jewish rights and of the view that Jews were adherents to a religion and not a nation, as chief rabbi of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

  Einhorn was part of the noisy group of followers of the enlightenment figure Abraham Geiger. In his book, The Principles of Mosaism, published in 1854, Einhorn elaborated on the well-known German enlightenment argument, for which Geiger was the leading exponent, that reason, not revelation from thousands of years in the past, must serve as the foundation of Judaism. Even Moses, in this view, perceived God not externally telling him to seek freedom for the slaves in Egypt but from within himself. By extension, the Sinai revelation was not a onetime event but a moment of comprehension in a continuous process that each new generation can experience. The Talmud may have played a progressive role in the past, he said, but it was not owed deference as divine in and of itself.

  “Judaism in its essence is older than the Israelites,” Einhorn wrote. “As pure humanity, as the emanation of the inborn divine spirit, it is as old as the human race. . . . It was not a religion, but a religious people, that was newly created at Sinai, a priest people called upon, first of all, to impress the ancient divine teaching more deeply upon itself and then to bring it to universal dominion.”

  In 1855, when Einhorn immigrated to Baltimore and Har Sinai Congregation, he continued to press his liberal views, although he also defended the peoplehood aspect of Judaism by opposing intermarriage. These views aligned with his opposition to slavery and his view that while the Bible condones slavery if interpreted narrowly and literally, its underlying moral principles dating from antiquity oppose it, if one is to look at such precepts broadly and dispassionately. Equally deserving of his wrath was the treatment of poor people and what he called an excessive pursuit of wealth in America. In part because of his taste for ostentatious displays of material possessions in America, Einhorn could thus not help but remain a Germanophile, seeing scholarship in Germany as exemplary for Jews and the language of German bringing Reform to life. (As late as 1874, mos
t American congregations continued to use German as the main language, including for sermons.) “As proud as I am of my adopted citizenship,” Einhorn said, “I will never forget that the old home is the land of thinkers, presently the foremost land of culture, and above all the land of Mendelssohn, the birthplace of Reform Judaism.”15

  Einhorn’s attack on Wise after the Cleveland conference was carried out in the name of the president of his synagogue, Har Sinai Verein, and others in the congregation, though they were unnamed. The Cleveland compromise, their criticism said, was not a healing gesture but rather “demoralizing” and backward, singling out its acceptance of the law requiring the widow of a man who dies before they have children to marry the man’s brother (a practice called levirate marriage). Einhorn declared that he honored the desire of Jews to accommodate one another’s traditions, but in this case, it had gone too far, keeping Jews in chains and raising the prospect of such servitude being enshrined in the universal liturgy that Wise was seeking. More specifically, Einhorn warned against any plan to install any hierarchy of authority among Jews, effectively accusing Wise of trying to establish himself as a Jewish American Pope. “It is not difficult to sum up the difference between Wise and Einhorn,” writes Temkin, Wise’s biographer. “Wise was fighting for union, Einhorn for reform.” And the breach that opened up would last for another twenty-five years. 16

  Defending himself against the criticism, Wise accused Einhorn and his cohorts of atheism and even suggested they should abandon Judaism altogether. Coming to Wise’s defense was, of all people, Leeser, who praised the Cleveland platform. “Were these not welcome words?” Leeser asked. “Were they too little compensation for travelling seven hundred miles while laboring under a severe indisposition, in not the most pleasant season of the year? Indeed they were; and we should have travelled farther yet, and labored much to have been sure that this would have been the result of all the contests in which we have been engaged.” But Leeser’s praise was far from welcome for Wise, who later backtracked and maintained that the Cleveland principles were guidelines, not rules, not intended to dictate to any individuals or congregations. He denied that he had “repented” his ways and was “a traitor to the cause of reform and progress.” 17

  Writing in The Israelite after Leeser’s double-edged praise, Wise saw himself as a victim of a multitude of foes. This was the Wise who later in his memoirs recalled his prophetic dream on board the Marie sailing to New York, in which he was attacked by enemies on all sides. Recalling that he had struggled all his life “when he had scarcely bread to eat, or the means to support his family,” Wise (speaking of himself in the third person) forswore any ambition for wealth and fame but only for “the sacred cause of Israel.” In an astonishing display of self-love, Wise reminded his readers that he, Wise, had become the most famous rabbi in the country, looked upon with “profound respect” by one and all. “What, please tell, what can make a traitor of a man who cares not for money, wealth, reputation or position? What can silence him who fears none, dreads none, and regards but the cause for which he labors?” Wise asked. Reformers who accused him of treachery were themselves frivolous and deceitful. He concluded with a rhetorical flourish, asking whether it was right or wrong in Cleveland to have sought unity among the Jewish people of America. “The opposition waste in vain their words and their paper,” he declared. “Truth will triumph.”

  EXIT LEESER, WISE ASCENDS, AND THE BATTLE OF PRAYER BOOKS BEGINS

  The discord of Cleveland subsided temporarily after the conference. Ordinary Jews may well have been oblivious to the doctrinal and self-serving thunderbolts that religious factions had hurled at each other. Instead, each congregation in the 1850s preferred to set its own course. But Wise seemed to know that the great leap forward toward Jewish unity remained distant. In his German-language publication Die Deborah, Wise wrote with resignation that while living in an immense and disputatious America, Jews would also inevitably split into warring camps and accuse each other of betrayal. Jews, Wise observed, were simply too busy and preoccupied with the daily business of making a living to pay attention to their Judaism. He depicted a world in which most American Jews had become so sophisticated that they had no need of Judaism, whereas the traditionalists among them had become enslaved to their ancient ways. Wise portrayed himself, on the other hand, as a “rational Jew” standing between extremes, both hero and victim of his own farsighted and magnanimous quest—again, as foretold in his dream aboard the Marie ten years earlier.18

  Yet Wise refused to set aside his effort to write a shared liturgy, a “book of common prayer” for American Jews, Minhag America, even in the absence of a mandate to produce it. Jewish prayers needed to be revised, he believed, “because the belief in the coming of a personal Messiah descended from the house of David had disappeared from among the people.” A new universal prayer book, or siddur, could perhaps strengthen the cause of unity among Jews. Accordingly, for all its departure from orthodoxy, Minhag America was written to retain the basic structure of Jewish prayers while eliminating the passages that Wise found objectionable in the hopes of appealing to a broad consensus in the middle.

  Nevertheless, despite his gratitude after Cleveland, Leeser objected to the book, asserting that the Cleveland Conference had not authorized such an effort. Wise, writing in The Asmonean (and trying to be polite), praised Leeser as “a theologian of the first class” but asserted that he had every right to proceed with it. On the other side of the spectrum, Rabbi Einhorn’s monthly publication, Sinai, excoriated plans for Minhag America as excessively compromised. In its place, Einhorn promoted his own prayer book entitled (in German) Prayerbook for Israelite Reform Congregations, later called Olat Tamid (“perpetual offering,” as a tribute to ritual and the role of worshippers to serve God). Drawn from liturgy in Frankfurt and Berlin and from the scientific Jewish studies of Leopold Zunz, a German founder of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Einhorn’s book repeatedly emphasized the priestly and messianic role of the people of Israel among all nations. Olat Tamid also effectively transformed the concept of resurrection of the dead (“who revives the dead”) into immortality of the soul (“who plants within us eternal life”). On one hand, it eliminated the symbols of the palm frond and citron associated with the Sukkot (harvest thanksgiving) festival as having no modern meaning. Yet it also embodied a certain traditional and spiritual approach to the legacy of Judaism appealing to those who did not want to abandon tradition altogether.

  Wise’s Minhag America was finally published in 1857, in a first edition. Like Einhorn’s book, it eliminated references to the Messiah and the return of Jews to Zion and restoration of sacrifices at the Temple. Its service was shortened, though not as much as Einhorn’s. But Wise, in keeping with his attempt to moderate between factions, included a large number of Hebrew texts and rubrics. The prayer for resurrection of the dead that is part of the Eighteen Blessings, known as the Shemoneh Esreh (or Amidah) that is the central prayer of Judaism, recited three times each day in traditional Judaism, was deemed too central to tradition to discard outright. But Wise kept it only in Hebrew, not in English. Once again, it was clear that Wise was seeking to appeal to the broadest array of congregations, at the expense of consistent or uniform ideology on these controversial matters.19

  In the competition between these two prayer books, history declared Wise the winner, despite the fact that many members of Reform congregations found it overly traditional. Minhag America was adopted in many congregations, thanks in part to Wise’s travels and proselytizing, especially in the South and Midwest. (Wise later claimed that as many as one hundred congregations used it at its peak of popularity.)

  Wise’s views about the nature of his faith were also outlined in a book The Essence of Judaism, published in 1861, fleshing out his contention that the understanding of God derives from nature, history, and reason, as well as an acceptance of God’s revelation contained in Scripture. Jews also believe in progress, he wrote in the book, and progress mus
t be driven not by miracles or God’s intervention but by human beings themselves. He embraced those biblical precepts found in the work of prophets, and related to the carrying out of justice. Rabbis, he said again, had never hesitated to change practices and laws in the religion to conform with their times, as they did after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem.

  Realizing that his reputation for idol breaking had extended to the non-Jewish world, Wise also began to speak out more directly in challenging the miracles in the story of Jesus and the origins of Christianity, as if to say that these stories were no more and no less credible than the ones in the Hebrew Bible. It is easier, he implied, for Jews to question such supernatural deeds of Jesus, such as his walking on water, turning wine into water, and raising Lazarus from the dead, if one was equally skeptical about miracles in the Old Testament. Like Jewish scholars throughout the centuries, Wise felt compelled to dispute the widely embraced and promoted libel among Christians that the Jews killed Jesus. (The historian Stephen Prothero has found that American Jews were reluctant to fully recognize even the existence of Jesus as a historical figure until the twentieth century.20) Wise’s purpose was twofold: to rebut missionaries seeking to convert Jews and overturn claims dating from the colonial era that America was a Christian nation. Like other Jewish leaders, in 1858–59, he took up the cause of Edgardo Mortara, the Jewish child in Rome who was forcibly abducted and baptized. But in these disputes, Wise “preferred to fight alone than to fight as a member of a team of which he was not the captain,” writes Temkin, his biographer. He thus declined to join the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, an Orthodox-led movement in New York to press for greater rights for Jews after the Mortara case. In his antipathy toward traditionalists, he refused to support the establishment of Maimonides College as the first Jewish seminary in America, which chose Leeser as president but which foundered quickly thereafter.