The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Kohler and his brother-in-law, Emil G. Hirsch (1851–1923)—they each married a daughter of Einhorn—are considered the giants of what has become known as the era of “classical” Reform Judaism, ardent champions of radical reform, and foes of the old guard. “The gauntlet thrown in our faces must be taken up at once,” Kohler declared. In a series of lectures entitled “Backwards or Forwards,” he asked: “Which are we to espouse, the one that turns the dials of the time backward, or the one that proudly points to the forward move of history?”15

  The debate between Rabbis Kohut and Kohler played out in sermons later published in the summer of 1885 by The American Hebrew, the weekly periodical founded in 1879 by traditionalist Jews. Like the Germans who influenced him, Kohler centered his arguments on scholarship of text and whether it should be seen as a product of direct divine revelation or as a more nuanced document with many authors. If it was the latter, the question was whether the text was inspired by divine authority in some mysterious way, bearing God’s fingerprints without having been directly dictated word by word.

  Kohler had questioned the divine authenticity of text in his doctoral dissertation, published when he was twenty-four. The subject of that study was revealing. It focused on the story of Jacob’s blessing of his twelve sons in Genesis chapter 49, singling out Joseph for exemplary praise and others for more restrained praise mixed with harsh criticism and even condemnation. Literary analysis pointed to a fact that would seem obvious: the poem of Jacob blessing his sons was written many generations after the event could have taken place. The passages were obviously meant to justify the fates of the various twelve tribes of Israel, and in particular to explain the divine choice of Judah’s tribe as the tribe of all future kings. (King David was indeed a Judean, and it thus seemed likely that this passage went back to his own period of rule: Genesis 49 was essentially designed to “grandfather” the choice of David’s tribe back to the time of Jacob—indeed, it was conceivably David himself, or his son Solomon, who commissioned the writing of Genesis 49.) Scholars call such stories “etiological narratives,” which are intended to explain a later reality as the result of far earlier events. (The most well-known and perhaps extreme instance of such interpretation revolves around the contention of some scholars that the biblical story of Moses leading the enslaved Jews out of Egypt to the Promised Land of Israel was an etiological narrative to reinforce Jewish possession of the land as promised by God to Abraham and his descendants. Scholars have had difficulty finding historical evidence in Egyptian or other writings of any kind of slave rebellion from that era.)

  Underlying Kohler’s freethinking dissertation was the German Reform view that no biblical text was to be taken at face value, an idea inherited from Wellhausen and other earlier Christian scholars. His thesis maintained that the blessing was thus not literally something spoken by Jacob but “put into the mouth of Jacob” by later writers, well after the time of the original biblical patriarchs of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jacob’s twelve sons. Yet Kohler sought to be respectful of traditional readings at the same time. He argued that it was important for Jews to know and understand the text and its various interpretations from the rabbinical period to medieval times, and that they owed at least some respect to the scholarly forebears who preserved and refined Judaism in trying times of exile and persecution. But the criticism of his dissertation among conservative rabbinical authorities in Germany evidently contributed to his decision to emigrate to America.16

  Kohler’s brother-in-law Emil G. Hirsch, the son of a German Reformer, Samuel Hirsch, was also an early pioneer in bringing together German secular philosophy and Judaism. Emil Hirsch attended the University of Pennsylvania, but his influence was concentrated in Chicago, where he was a professor of rabbinic literature and philosophy at the University of Chicago, and served as rabbi at Chicago’s Sinai Temple. He also founded a journal, the Reform Advocate.

  “Modern scholarship has spoken, and its voice cannot be hushed,” Hirsch declared. “It has shown that Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch [the first five books of the Bible]; that Sinai is not the cradle of what is highest and best in Biblical Judaism . . . that the whole apparatus of priestly institutionalism is of non-Hebraic origin.” In other words, all the dietary and other laws, including the rules of sacrifices and festivals, are not central to Judaism as the rabbis of millennia maintained.

  The challenge remained over how to define ancient scriptures as worthy of reverence and holy, while still seeing them as a product of variable mortal and well-intentioned writers in a certain time and place. Both Kohler and Hirsch argued that the sacred meaning of scripture lay in moral precepts that can be venerated as if touched by the divine. As Kohler put it: “The Bible is holy not because it is inspired, but because and insofar as it does still, inspire. It is not because God has spoken the word, but because in the truth, the comfort, the hope, the final victory of justice which it holds out, you hear God speak to you in soul stirring strains.” One might argue, he was suggesting, that the Bible looms all the more powerfully precisely because it was the work of many righteous hands whose inspirational moral authority transcended the arbitrary laws of their texts. Kohler was contending in effect that the sacred status of the Bible derived not from the origins of the text but from within the soul of Jewish believers inspired to write it down. 17

  THE INESCAPABLE INFLUENCE OF DARWIN

  Classical reform in Judaism flowered at the apex of influences that started a half century earlier with the Second Great Awakening, discussed earlier. These influences had been significant all along, but toward the end of the nineteenth century they were buttressed by additional scientific discoveries and the increasingly widespread acceptance of Darwinian theories. These theories served to reinforce the legitimacy of the rigorous application of the textual analysis espoused by Kohler, Hirsch, and others.

  Still another influence in this latter period of reform was the broader study of comparative religions, and of the religious practices that were embraced by other occupants of the Middle East. For example, the latest scholarship contended that Jewish practices, which believers felt had been dictated by God, were actually similar to the practices of other early Mesopotamian religions and cults, which worshipped other gods, especially Baal, the god of fertility. Jews were instructed, after all, to worship the God YHWH, who decreed that they must have no other gods before them—an instruction in the Ten Commandments that makes clear that historically speaking, other gods were competing for Jews’ fealty. Hirsch and other revisionists saw the dietary laws as borne of totemic cults in antiquity, just as circumcision was a widely observed rite for initiation into one’s clan and animal sacrifices were carried out by other cults at the time.

  Hirsch also viewed the tefillin, the mezuzah, and the wearing of prayer shawls as fetishistic “talismans” from another primitive time. The irony of these scholarly inferences was that these practices were viewed as discredited in modern times precisely because they were discovered to have existed in ancient times in other non-Jewish contexts and peoples. Judaism, it was increasingly understood, was one of many competing forms of religion from antiquity, affected by a variety of external influences, from Greeks to other Semitic tribes.

  Casting a vast and variable shadow over the debate among religious believers in the late nineteenth century was the figure of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), father of the theory of evolution and “natural selection” of species. Earlier in the century, scientific breakthroughs in cosmology, geology, and paleontology (by Charles Lyell documenting evidence of prehistoric epochs, among others) forced a rethinking of religious assumptions held by Christian and Jews alike. But Darwin’s conclusions shattered these assumptions altogether. His book On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. By the 1870s his theories had generally come to be accepted as fact in educated circles. In 1871, Darwin’s further studies in The Descent of Man applied his theories to human evolution, including the role of psychology, ethics, and differences betw
een human races and sexes.

  Darwin’s findings left scant room for serious consideration of the Bible’s stories, and the notion that the earth was created in six days 6,000 years previously. Christians seeking to reconcile their religious belief with the concept of evolution sought the authority of John Fiske, who set about a pathbreaking approach by arguing that perhaps biological evolution could be understood as part of God’s plan. Other theories were more exotic, if not outright half-baked. A renowned paleontologist and scholar of glaciers, Louis Agassiz, suggested the existence of “special creationism,” holding that God created the world as the Bible recorded but that God also created fossils, ancient rocks, genetic material, and other detritus, perhaps to throw off scientists.

  Sydney Ahlstrom, the historian of American religion, has argued that Darwinism had a far greater impact on religion than simply undercutting the literal truth of the Bible. Evolution more fundamentally challenged the religious view of the universe as a tribute to God’s harmonious and benevolent purpose, in that “the sun and clouds, trees and grass, seeds, cows, dogs, and insects—even manure—were all harmoniously interacting for man’s well-being.” Instead of such a glorious vision, Ahlstrom contends, Darwin depicted life on earth as “a relentless struggle for existence, a war of all against all, with blood dripping from every bough, and man involved in the struggle not only against the locusts, but against other men, even other races of man, with victory for the fittest. . . . Never since the scientific revolution completed by Newton had the humanistic and religious traditions of the West been confronted by a greater need for adjustment and reformulation.”18

  In sociology Darwin’s findings opened new vistas to explain how progress and conflict occurred among human beings, and to explicate the advent of “economic man.” His writings paved the way for the “social Darwinists” William Graham Sumner and Herbert Spencer, who applied the concept of “survival of the fittest” to economic progress as well as to science. On the other hand, seeing the Bible—including the life of Jesus—as a story to be understood for its spiritual lessons rather than the literal truth of the account seemed to reinforce the role of human agency in “repairing the world.” For Christians and Jews, the late nineteenth century was ripe for the belief that addressing issues of economic inequality, poverty, social and racial injustice, worker rights, and an end to war were the best way to implement God’s teachings.

  For many Jews, Darwinism was initially resisted as materialist and hostile to religion. Both Isaac Mayer Wise and David Einhorn charged that Darwin had robbed humans of their dignity, but the next generation of “classical” reformers such as Kohler and Hirsch evolved. Kohler did so in a novel way. He compared biological evolution to the “spiritual progress” embodied by Jewish teachings. Darwinism helped explain the survival of Judaism over the millennia, as “the necessary outcome of the age of evolution.” The “survival of the fittest”—a phrase coined by Spencer, not Darwin—could explain that Jews survived as the morally most fit of human species. Instead of their status as “chosen people,” Jews could see themselves as a product of divine “natural selection.”

  If Jews had evolved in this fashion, Kohler further believed they must evolve further. Just as prayer had replaced animal sacrifices after the fall of the Temple, so too must Jews replace their outmoded doctrines and practices—such as the ban on wearing garments of mixed wool and linens—to embrace the modern world. The influence of Darwin was again apparent. It was the genius of Jews to evolve, so evolve they must yet again! “Can we, or must we believe exactly what our fathers believed concerning revelation and the Law, resurrection, and the Messianic future?” Kohler asked. “Rabbinic-Mosaical Judaism is dead.” Reform Judaism was not a break from tradition; it was in the Jewish tradition to revise and amend as history commanded. “I do not believe in the divine origin of the Mosaic law and tradition as our orthodox brethren do,” he said. “But I do believe in the divine mission of the Jewish people as the martyr priests of pure monotheism with its true ethics.”

  Kohut feared that Kohler was turning Judaism into a kind of Christian religion, but Kohler argued that he was saving Judaism from itself. Kohut said to Kohler once: “You are only an ethical Jew!” It was not a compliment, but Kohler took it as such.19

  In the same period that Kohler was sending incendiary rockets over to Kohut’s traditionalist camp, he was preoccupied with defending his own brand of Judaism against the radical departure of Felix Adler. He thus emerged as the rabbi most publicly identified as an antagonist of the Ethical Culture Society.

  In 1878, Kohler vetoed an invitation to Adler from the Sinai Literary Association to speak at the Chicago Sinai Congregation, where Kohler was serving as rabbi: “Of what benefit to a society of Jewish young people the lecture of a man who has deserted the Jewish flag, and openly professes his disbelief in God and immortality, I really fail to see, unless the eradication of the Jewish faith is the object contemplated.” He further belittled Adler as a figure of no intellectual standing except for being the son of a famous father who happened to have studied under Geiger in Germany.

  Adler ended up speaking to an overflow audience of five hundred at the Standard Club, where he expressed pain over the accusations but also assailed the “immoral conception of the Deity” rewarding virtue and punishing sin. Kohler’s response in the Chicago Daily Tribune was to accuse Adler of sacrilege and plagiarizing the work of a German historian and philosopher. “I am very sorry to state that in this very lecture the professor in calling the God worshipped by Jews and Christians a ‘fetish,’ corroborated anew my charge of blasphemy brought against him.”

  Defenders of Adler denied the plagiarism charge, and commentators in the Jewish press—where the dispute was lavishly covered—attacked and defended both disputants. Unlike his fellow rabbis in New York, Kohler could afford to take his gloves off in the fight; he believed that Jewish intellectuals had a duty to speak out in public and had no concern about offending Adler’s supporters. Standing aloof from the controversy was Felix’s father Samuel, who wrote a letter to a friend after the Chicago furor that, even if he could silence his son, he would refuse to do so. “I am convinced that the aim and purpose of my son’s work is a deeply sacred and religious one,” he said. “If his convictions in some respects are not the same as mine, they are entitled to as much consideration as my own.”20

  Thirteen

  NEW DIVISIONS

  Kohler’s debate with Kohut in 1885, coupled with his principled opposition to the Free Religious Association, gave him confidence to seize the reins of Jewish reform. Thus fortified, he called for yet another conference of Jews—this time at Concordia Hall in Allegheny City, just outside Pittsburgh, on November 16–18, 1885. The result was a watershed of what has come to be called “classical” reform Judaism just as it was about to fracture internally and then be overtaken by events overseas.

  An impetus for the Pittsburgh parley was the continued anxiousness among Jews to define yet again who they were and how they were determined to assimilate within American society. For as comfortable as the Gilded Age was for Jews, there were reminders of the dangers of complacency.

  In a well-publicized episode in 1877, for example, Joseph Seligman, patriarch of one of the most established Jewish families in America and friend of the Vanderbilts and other pillars in New York society, was refused admittance at the Grand Union Hotel in the spa community of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. The incident was widely publicized inside and outside the Jewish community. The Grand Union Hotel owner offered no apologies for his policy of barring Jews from his establishment. Another blow to Jewish self-satisfaction came with an announcement that “Jews as a class” were unwelcome at Coney Island in 1879. The announcement was delivered by Austin Corbin, a prominent railroad mogul and robber baron who had founded the Long Island Rail Road and who owned various resorts in southern Brooklyn. “The highest social element . . . won’t associate with Jews, and that’s all there is about it,” Cor
bin declared. American Jews were increasingly mindful of news demonstrating that anti-Semitism in Europe had hardly died out— far from it. Jews remained confined to their communities and to the Pale of Settlement in vast parts of Eastern Europe, and although many American Jews did not identify with the persecution of Jews they felt were living in backward conditions in the Old Country, they were acutely aware that their conditions were deplorable.

  In pushing ahead for another conference on Reform, Kohler cast a wary eye on his famous rival, Isaac Mayer Wise, whom he cordially despised and distrusted. Like his father-in-law Einhorn, Kohler once accused Wise of trying to establish himself as the head of a new “Jewish Sanhedrin,” a reference to the great Jewish High Court that existed in late biblical times. But he knew it was necessary to consult Wise and win him over to get the conference going. He managed to get Wise’s support for this latest effort to produce a “common platform” for Reform Judaism that “in view of the wide divergence of opinions and the conflict ideas prevailing in Judaism today” would “declare before the world what Judaism is and what Reform Judaism means and aims at.”1 Gone was the idea of unifying everyone under the banner of an American Judaism, replaced by the concept of a Judaism of Reform.

  Wise, meanwhile, understood that by joining Kohler and others on the left, he might lose backing from the conservative members of his Union and his seminary, which still stood at least in principle for a single American Judaism. But he set aside these concerns, perhaps thinking that over time he would be able to influence the Jewish community as more and more numbers of graduates from Hebrew Union College took their place as leaders around the country. For his willingness to compromise, Wise was elected president of the Pittsburgh conference. By all accounts, however, the conclave was Kohler’s show.