The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Why did Wise embrace the platform after opposing many of its more radical doctrines for years? There is no evidence that Wise was abandoning his belief in the divine status of scripture, which the platform seemed to reject. Normally voluble about everything that crossed his mind, Wise also never produced a thorough rationale for the teachings of the Pittsburgh document. One answer to the question is that he was confident that he would be able to influence the future of Judaism through the members and alumni of the institutions he was creating. In addition, his earlier skepticism of radical adjustment to Judaism was fading. Having forbidden “biblical criticism” at Hebrew Union College, specifically rejecting the “documentary hypothesis” that the Torah was the product of at least four separate writers, as Wellhausen and others concluded, Wise came to embrace the underlying assumption of such analysis. On the other hand, Wise never abandoned his belief in the divine status of the Bible or even the historicity of the revelation on Mount Sinai.

  The main answer to Wise’s embrace of these radical doctrines was that he continued to be animated by the same spirit favoring unity that compelled him at previous rabbinical conferences. He also did not want to be left behind. Under fire from more traditionalist reformers who felt that Pittsburgh had gone too far, Wise asserted to colleagues that “nothing practical had been done at Pittsburgh” and that another rabbinical conference would soon adopt a more practical platform—a prediction never fulfilled. Despite himself, Wise thus came to be identified with the very reforms that he felt may have gone too far. In the wake of Pittsburgh, many congregations, especially in the east, demanded that he resign as president of Hebrew Union College. He was able to ignore those demands, popular as ever in Cincinnati. He had beaten back some of the more radical moves being discussed by reformers. In the end, Wise termed the “Declaration of Principles” hammered out in Pittsburgh as a “Declaration of Independence” for American Jews, adding in the American Israelite: “It declares that we, the much abused reformers, radicals, decried, defamed and debased by the men of the minority who usurped for themselves the titles of conservative and orthodox, or rather the Jews par excellence—We are the orthodox Jews in America, and they were the orthodoxy of former days and other countries. . . . You are an anachronism, strangers in this country, and to your own brethren. . . . We must proceed without you to perform our duties to our God, and our country, and our religion, for We are the orthodox Jews in America.”9

  But the reality was that Wise’s dream of a unified liberal Judaism in America was definitively shattered at Pittsburgh. Instead of the high-water mark of Jews speaking in one voice, the charter hammered out at Pittsburgh proved the impossibility of such a goal. Instead of a Declaration of Independence, the Pittsburgh Platform was a declaration of war.

  CHALLENGES TO “CLASSICAL” REFORM

  The decade of the adoption of the Pittsburgh Platform had begun with a seismic event in Jewish American history—as historically significant, by some lights, as the forced dispersal of Jews following destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE or the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. But the event was not in America. It occurred as Czar Alexander II of Russia was riding through the central streets of St. Petersburg, near the Winter Palace.10

  Czar Alexander had undertaken many reforms, including liberation of the nation’s serfs, after succeeding his father, Nicholas I, and ascending to the Russian imperial throne in 1855. But he had been unable to suppress the angry revolutionary spirit spreading through his country. Radicals exacted their revenge by planting a bomb on the czar’s route on March 13, 1881, mortally wounding its imperial passenger. Alexander’s death a few hours later ignited a conflagration of pogroms against Jews throughout Russia, a culmination of rising anti-Semitic attacks building in much of Europe over previous decades.

  Russia was hardly a stranger to anti-Semitic violence. But this time a Jewish woman, Gesya Gelfman, was accused in the assassination plot. Along with others, she was later tried and convicted, and she died in prison before she could be executed. There followed a sweeping crackdown on Jews and a wave of oppressive laws barring or limiting them from certain jobs and educational opportunities. These “May Laws”—so-called because they were imposed May 15, 1882—were also accompanied by the forced resettlement of Jews out of cities and back into the rural parts of the so-called Pale of Settlement, a vast western region of Imperial Russia, established in 1791 for the permanent residency of Jews.11

  From these frightful events ensued one of the largest and most dramatic migrations in Jewish history, as two million Jews from Russia, Romania, and Austria-Hungary fled to American shores from 1881 to 1914. This great migration transformed the face of American Jewry, along with its doctrines, practices, customs, and culture. Many of the Jewish immigrants wore the caftans and fur hats characteristic of the Polish gentry in the eighteenth century, when Hasidic Judaism first began in Europe, in part as a protest against adherents of German-style Orthodoxy who sometimes dressed like their fellow Germans.

  The Jewish migration overwhelmed the existing population of 250,000 American Jews, most of whom were of Central European heritage, with an entirely different culture rooted in the Yiddishkeit practices of the Old World.

  Not that the Eastern European Jews were homogeneous, either. Mixed in with the many devout believers in traditional Judaism was an agglomeration of renegades, agnostics, socialists, communists, anarchists, Zionists, and others not necessarily devoted to deeply Orthodox practices. Many Reform Jews saw the new immigrants as uncouth and an embarrassing throwback to a world they left behind. Some were shocked by the revival of practices they had sought to discard, and there were efforts to “Americanize” the newly arrived coreligionists. But to their credit, American Jews resisted any temptation to limit immigration. To assist the new immigrants, they set up a remarkable array of social welfare organizations. Jews who had kept to traditional practices during the Reform period, however, were among those who sought most to reach out to the new immigrants.

  Reform Jews like Rabbi Wise did not at first see any kind of threat to his efforts to modernize and Americanize Judaism. “There is no danger that the Russian Jews settling down in this country will abide very long in their inherited orthodoxy, which quite a number of them had deserted before they came to this country,” he wrote in 1884. But within a few years he deplored the “half-civilized orthodoxy” of the newcomers. “We are Americans, and they are not,” he declared, dismissing them as less than liberal, especially in their opposition to emancipation for women. “We appeal to reason and they appeal to their grandparent’s habits. We are Israelites of the nineteenth century and a free country, and they gnaw the dead bones of past centuries.”12

  The counterrevolution against the reforms pressed by Wise, Kohler, and others was already beginning. A few months after adoption of the Pittsburgh Platform, a small gathering of Orthodox rabbis met on January 31, 1886, at New York’s Spanish Portuguese Synagogue, Shearith Israel. The oldest synagogue congregation in America continued to relish its status as an aristocratic redoubt of traditional Judaism, proudly located in a majestic Palladian-style house of worship with a high octagonal dome and Ionic and Corinthian columns at Nineteenth Street just west of Fifth Avenue.

  In attendance were Rabbis Sabato Morais, who had succeeded Isaac Leeser at Mikveh Israel Synagogue of Philadelphia after emigrating from Italy in 1851; Abraham Pereira Mendes of Newport; Henry Schneeberger of Baltimore; Bernard Drachman of New York; and the host, Shearith Israel’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Henry Pereira Mendes. The Pittsburgh Platform, adopted the previous year, alarmed these rabbis over the prospect that Hebrew Union College, with its liberal bent, would overwhelm and suffocate Orthodox Judaism if allowed to continue unchallenged. This small group was later joined by Rabbis Kohut, Aaron Wise, Henry S. Jacobs, Marcus Jastrow, and Aaron Bettelheim—many of them not necessarily adhering to strict Orthodox teachings but nonetheless still alarmed by the apostasy if not outright heresies at Pittsburgh.

 
The gathering effectively marked the birth of Conservative Judaism in nineteenth-century America, though the term was not in general use at that time. Their cooperation led to the establishment of the Jewish Theological Seminary that same year. The seminary held its first classes the next year in the vestry at the Spanish Portuguese building. Morais, the first president, prayed that the new seminary would preserve “Historical and Traditional Judaism . . . by educating, training and inspiring teachers-rabbis who would stand for the ‘Torah and Testimony.’ ” Graduates would use “their knowledge of Jewish learning, literature, history, ideals and Jewish Science” to achieve “human uplift” and “world civilization.”13

  Significantly, and as if to express continuity with the narrative of American Judaism, the Seminary and Morais paid tribute at its founding to Isaac Leeser as one of its progenitors. Rabbi Morais, as an equally important conciliatory gesture, declared that it was both dangerous and impossible for Judaism to reject Reform Judaism’s significance, which “well meaning and unwise orthodoxy” advised them to do. “Isolation is an impossibility,” he said. “It would be inadvisable if it were possible.”14

  The forerunner of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York had been the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslaw, led by Rabbi Zacharias Frankel, who is also considered a founder of modern Conservative Judaism. It was Frankel who sought to reconcile and harmonize modern concepts of humanity and scholarship with traditional Judaism, but without undermining the institutions and practices of the latter. Frankel’s signature philosophy—what he called a “positive-historical” approach—was that textual interpretation and reason must form the basis of changes in Jewish practices and norms, not the demands of ordinary Jews themselves. To that end, he argued, Judaism must be studied historically because it had always been influenced by its exposure to social, political, and economic conditions, and that these changes should be seen as positive. He had called for some changes in services and prayers based on a reinterpretation of texts, over the objection of both German Enlightenment reformers and also traditionalists. He did not hesitate to criticize Geiger and others for what he charged was shoddy scholarship. But he also defended some changes in practice, such as the use of choirs in the service. His teachings influenced Morais and other founders of the conservative movement in America.

  Much more traditionally oriented Jews were also trying to find their way on a more conservative path from the Reformers’ or even the founders of Jewish Theological Seminary’s. A year after JTS was established on the Lower East Side, a separate group of representatives of what was called the Association of American Orthodox Hebrew Congregations met at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol (Great Study House), in a former Baptist church on East Broadway. There these ultra-traditionalist Jews, many of them part of the new wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, sought consensus on a leader who could arrest the “open and flagrant desecration of the Sabbath, the neglect of dietary laws, and the formation of various shades of Orthodoxy and Reform.” Their hope was to find an Orthodox sage of such stature that he could organize and defend Orthodoxy as it was besieged by heresy and disbelief in America. Turning to the Old Country, and the seat of some of Europe’s leading Jewish intellectuals, they recruited Rabbi Jacob Joseph (1840–1902) of Vilna as their rescuer.

  The disparate organizers and rabbis called themselves “Orthodox” Jews, using a term increasingly in vogue and borrowed from usage in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But they were deeply divided among themselves over tradition and doctrine. Rabbi Joseph, fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish, looked like a likely savior, having been educated at yeshivas and having achieved a record of scholarship while still in his forties. He arrived in 1888 to become chief rabbi of the Association of American Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, with the ultimate objective of uniting the Orthodox community under his leadership as chief rabbi. It was an effort that eventually failed. The Orthodox community, like the reformers, was split between Sephardim, who were accustomed to interacting with non-Jewish communities around them and also with Jewish Reformers, and Ashkenizim, often from European ghettos, where their experience was untouched by the religious dissent fermenting in Germany and the United States. Formal arguments over doctrine and customs masked the simple fact of fierce ethnic resentments based on loyalties to disparate parts of Jewry in Europe. Rabbi Joseph, a Lithuanian, spoke Yiddish but not German or English, and his overconfident claim to be serving as “chief rabbi” in the city was, inevitably, poorly received among many other Jewish communities.

  Despite his reputation as a learned man back in Lithuania, Rabbi Joseph faced ridicule over his speeches in Yiddish, even by many observant Jews, who saw them as an absurd throwback. He stirred special controversy over his feckless efforts to impose order on the notoriously corrupt and unruly kosher meat business in New York, in which a variety of butchers claiming to be kosher had long enlisted their own rabbis to bless their practices, often with kickbacks involved. Joseph and the association tried to institute a uniform tax to obtain its seal of approval, but the move ignited protests among butchers and consumers alike, who viewed it as a shakedown. Eventually, the association fell apart, and Rabbi Joseph died in poverty on the Lower East Side. At his funeral in 1902, thousands followed his cortege through the city streets, but a riot erupted between the mourners and a group of Irish factory workers (the grievance beyond the disruption in their neighborhood is obscure) while the police stood by, watching many Jews get beaten.

  The issue of how much disparate Jewish groups could work together for the common good remained salient. The founders of Jewish Theological Seminary, while disagreeing vehemently with Reform Jews on important matters, had no problem working with them to defend the right of Jews to be free from efforts by missionaries to indoctrinate and convert their coreligionists. Rabbi Joseph, by contrast, had no interest in working with the dissidents. “From his European background, he knew of but one expression of Judaism, and it was to help save the faith from America that he had come to this country,” writes Jeffrey S. Gurock, a historian at Yeshiva University. The Lithuanian rabbi’s goal was to rescue Judaism from the disarray in the fields of observing the Sabbath, keeping kosher, and educating young people in the proper way.15

  While Rabbi Joseph’s efforts to revive orthodoxy on Old World lines failed, the Orthodox modernizers pushed ahead, led by Rabbi Bernard Drachman, who became president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, known as the Orthodox Union (or “the OU”), which was established in 1898 and devoted to modernizing education by including instruction in English. In effect, Rabbi Drachman and other pioneers were seeking to Americanize orthodox Judaism, in the tradition of Isaac Leeser. Drachman, son of immigrants from Galicia and Bavaria, studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau and the University of Heidelberg. He was a founder of the Park East Synagogue, sheltered in a grandly Moorish building on New York’s Upper East Side. He and other “modern” Orthodox figures argued that the traditionalists like Rabbi Joseph were less than helpful in their efforts to persuade American Jews to turn their backs on modernization. Their purpose, they declared, was to mediate between the modern world and Jewish tradition.

  The efforts of Drachman and others included the establishment of an Orthodox Jewish Sabbath Alliance, which sought to get Jewish shopkeepers to close on Saturday. They also petitioned state legislators to repeal blue laws that required closing shops on Sunday, which prevented Jews from opening on a day they did not observe as Sabbath. The disagreement was played out in a matter of emphasis. Rabbi Joseph had beseeched Jews to observe the Sabbath. Rabbi Drachman, by contrast, sought to change laws to help Jews adjust. He and others also sought to lift Jewish education out of the sterile pedagogy that they inherited from Europe. Gurock explains that their differences in the late nineteenth century set in motion the division in Jewish Orthodoxy between “resisters” and “accommodators.” The resisters disdained Reform and other breakaway Jews. The accommodators were comfortable wi
th alliances for certain causes.

  It was more than ironic, and indeed it was predictable, that the Orthodox factions would split apart much as the Reformers had many decades earlier over the issue of various folk practices from the Old Country and what some called noisy and undignified behavior at services. Acknowledging that such practices were comforting to new immigrant Jews, the Orthodox Union argued that American Judaism had to move beyond its immigrant past and find a new identity rooted in contemporary society. The Jewish Endeavor Society, an initiative that sought to retain the involvement of youth in Orthodox Jewish practice, was founded in 1901 by some students of Drachman. This society called for “dignified services” designed to “recall indifferent Jewry back to their ancestral faith.” These services retained traditional prayers and separation of the sexes but also instituted English language prayers and sermons. The “downtown,” more traditional establishment was suspicious of them for consorting with Reform rabbis and “deviationists.”

  THE NEW CENTURY: EMERGENCE OF THREE MAIN BRANCHES OF JUDAISM

  Amid the proliferation of these different groups, it was still possible to say at the dawn of the twentieth century that American Judaism was split into two basic camps, Orthodox and Reform, with the reformers still predominant, at least organizationally. The term Conservative was in use but still relatively undefined, even though many applied it to those Jews involved in the establishment of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The name Conservative derived in part from rabbis in Germany who, like their counterparts in America, wanted to adjust Jewish law and orthodox practices to contemporary demands, but who also thought reformers had gone too far. Their aim was to conserve what they thought was most valuable in traditional Judaism while accepting certain accommodations to modernity legitimized by their reading of the ancient texts.