Notes from Limmud 2015

Are We All Yekkes Now?

David Reuben

[Standard disclaimer: All views not in square brackets are those of the speaker, not myself. Accuracy of transcription is not guaranteed.]

Two years ago, Adas Yeshurun in Washington Heights celebrated the 200th anniversary of [the founder of Modern Orthodoxy] Shimshon Raphael Hirsch. But the congregation's rabbi denounced תּוֹרָה עִם דֶרֶךְ אֶרֶץ and told them to just obey the ultra-Orthodox rabbis. The chairman of the congregation, a lawyer and great-great-grandson of R. Hirsch walked out. The rabbi said he didn't care; the future of the Jewish people would be determined by rabbis, not lawyers.

"Yekke" [the term for the Jews of the old German community] was used as an insult by the Russian and Polish Jews; they were riduculed in Israel for their principles. There have been very few yekkes in the Knesset. (One example is Yossef Burg, former head of the National Religious Party.) Part of the problem in Israel atm is that the judges are yekkes and the politicians Middle-Eastern. This is why there are so many inquiries.

All the communal structures and ground-rules for dealing with non-Jews and the state authorities and different parts of the Jewish communities were set down in nineteenth century Germany.

Where did the yekkes live?

There were probably never more than five hundred thousand yekkes. Why then were they so influential? The answer is because of the Enlightenment. Also, because the Jews in the UK were not a political force (with a few counterexamples, such as the Jew Bill which went horribly wrong in the 1850s). They fell under the radar: there was little antisemitism.

In Poland and Russia there was no Enlightenment, and there was antisemitism. In the UK, the government tried to help the Jews, allowing them to open shops on Sunday for example.

In Germany, the Emancipation happened slowly. In France, the Emancipation and Enlightenment happened at the same time; there was state-sponsored Judaism, and by 1900 there were virtually no Orthodox Jews left in France (except in Alsace).

The yekkes started to become more different from other Ashkenazi Jews than for example the degree of difference between Litvaks and Polish Jews in the mid-eighteenth century. In other countries, the Jews lived in semiautonomous commuinities defined by traditional practice. Although not completely separated from the dominant culture, they [lacuna].

The first battleground after the Emancipation was Germany, and many of the paradigms of modern Judaism were set down there: Reform Judaism, Modern Orthodoxy, assimilation and the emergence of Zionism. The Enlightenment challenged the ideas of previous generations.

The German officials did not give the Jews emancipation all at once; it took seventy-five years or so. The idea was strong that Jews should consider themselves worthy of emancipation; many states granted some rights without others, or rights would be revoked, and Jews would move to a different state where they had more rights, only for that state to be conquered by another one where the rights were worse. Rights were expected as educative; the Jews were expected to [lacuna, presumably: promulgate the civic values they exemplarised].

The Enlightenment brought new issues for the Jews: They had to consider which parts of Jewish law were to be retained, and which were national [i.e. civic in nature, intended for the governance of a semiautonomous community, rather than religious in nature], and had to be conte[nt... lacuna]

[lacuna, presumably: [As???] in Russia, Jews were forced to be] cantonists and conscripted for twenty-five years, which led to questions of how a Jew in the army is to deal with Sabbath and kosher laws.

According to the government curriculum, Jews were forbidden from using Yiddish or Hebrew in their ledgers but had to use German everywhere.

What made the Germans different from other Ashkenazim?

How orthodox were the Orthodox? In the 1850s, the German Jewish community was similar to ours today: 15-20% Orthodox, 30% traditional, 50% non-observant. [Wot no value for Reform adherence?] There were a lot of Jewish tradesmen: It was generally accepted that people were paid on Friday evening, and if you didn't have your shop open on Saturday, they wouldn't make any money. People would even open their shops after shul on Shabbos. There are responsa mentioning this: people who did so, but whose wives would keep Shabbos, so their house was kosher. The rabbis were generally sympathetic to this. (Later it became different, with the advent of the Reform and a more political situation, but the Orthodox were not originally extreme.)

The Reformers in Germany were not as extreme as the stereotype. Many of the Reformers who emigrated to the US did indeed spend their time eating pork sandwiches and singing Christmas carols, but in Germany the moderate spirit prevailed.

Many of the assimilationists in the late eighteenth century thought of Jduasim as a living corpse, but by the early nineteenth they thought it could be saved with a few changes: sermons in German [not Yiddish], not auctioning off aliyos. They wanted to bring non-Jewish friends to shul and for it to look less like a bear pit.

Most of the German Jews were traditional [i.e. identifying as Orthodox but not very observant], but the idea of rabbis changing halacha was anathema: The passengers must drink but the coachman must remain sober.

(At Orthodox funerals women were allowed, but at non-Jewish funerals they were not (e.g. Jane Austen at her father's). It was a Reform innovation to forbid it, but now Adass are proud of it!)

The idea among both communities was the Wissenschaft des Judentums: By teaching scientifically, you can come to a rational way of dealing with Judaism. In the rabbinical academy in Berlin, scholars would be taught a modern way of dealing with the original of the Tenach.

Willi Rothschild as a financial backer in Frankfurt.

תּוֹרָה עִם דֶרֶךְ אֶרֶץ stood for a combination of the understanding of the outside world, and the Lithuanian outlook, which was Torah only. It was promulgated in Frankfurt mostly: by concentrating on producing erudite householders rather than just a few yeshiva bochurs, they had a low attrition rate. Many people indeed came out of the yeshivos secular!

Shimshon Raphael Hirsch looked to reason with those he considered doubters rather than denouncing them as heretics, as in eastern Europe.

Community entrance requirements: In late seventeeth-century London, the Sephardi community had a rule forbidding anyone else setting up a community within five miles of Bevis Marks. When the Ashkenazim did, people complained to the Ḥaḥam in Amsterdam, who replied it's more important that you have a functioning orthodox community. This was taken as a precedent when people started kicking people out of communities for being insufficiently religious later on.

Akiva Eger [lacuna]

The Ḥatam Sofer, not by any stretch of the imagination liberal: As he famously said, "Anything which is new is forbidden from the Torah." But actually many statements he made included ones that were revolutionary. For example people stomping grapes on Friday night; is the wine not kosher, then? The Ḥatam Sofer said it's okay, because you can't make wine without doing this, the grapes would go off; so the reason they're doing this is not to show contempt for Jewish law. If they're not doing it publically, it's okay.

He wrote similarly about people going around clean-shaven. The Ḥatam Sofer said: there is not a halachic requirement to have beards. Once upon a time there was no technology to get rid of them without breaking halacha. Now there is, so we don't persecute people for being clean-shaven; we assume they're not breaking halacha to shave.

A similar case involved a mohel who turned out to be non-observant. The Rema had said you can't use such a mohel. What about those who had been circumcised by him; do they have to have a repeat? Akiva Eger said: no, to be a real heretic, you have to do it in front of ten observant people. (Eger's view is not taken by the London Beth Din today; they prefer you to wait until you can find a shomer Shabbos mohel.)

The German community, therefore, was more tolerant than we think: they were trying to keep the community together. But things started changing with the emergence of the Reform, in particular, the Frankfurt circumcision controversy in 1843, involving Solomon Trier, chief rabbi of Frankfurt. People came to him to sign [things], and he refused because they hadn't circumcised their children, because the Reform movement no longer required it. They said that's unfair; we're still Jews. Trier sent letters off to various rabbis; who said this is beyond the line: Because the community is already split, we don't need to be worried about it splitting further.

But in eastern Europe, Elchonon Spektor, in Kovno, wrote back saying "Maybe later they'll still have some kind of Jewish life, or maybe get circumcised if they meet someone Jewish later."

The issue came to a head in the 1860s when Hesse was taken over by Prussia. Now Prussian rules applied, and registration with the religious community became voluntary. The Prussian Jews were the first Jews by choice, as regards practice. The community could not enforce anything upon people.

Shimshon Raphael Hirsch said in that case, I'm setting up my own community, which will have nothing to do with Reform. It will have its own institutions: the Großgemeinde had representatives from the Reform as well as the Orthodox. Hirsch's supporters wrote to the Würzburger Rav who said no, they're being reasonable: stick with them.

In Bavaria there was no intellectual life, and they thought Hirsch was too clever for his own good, and an intellectual snob. They fell out badly. [Audience comment: The concept of German Jewry was a very brief phenomenon: before German unification in the 1870s, the Jewry in the different states were very different.]

R. Hildesheimer set up his rabbinical academy, and things went well for the next fifty years.

By the twentieth century, a large part of the community was pretty secular. A good example is Franz Rosenzweig, who was considering converting to Christianity, but wanted to have a last daven, and went to his local shtiebl, and decided he couldn't. But he also wanted to convert as a knowledgeable Jew, so he set up the Lehrhaus, an equivalent of Limmud.

The German community was of course later wiped out, but a substantial portion of them escaped, particularly the ones affiliated with communities, who had a better idea that bad things would happen to them. It was the ones who thought they had successfully assimilated who did not. The graduates of the rabbinic schools came out to the US and UK, and the German ethic lives on in what they taught there; also in Johannesburg and Washington Heights, and Munk's [Synagogue] in London.

They're now losing very much of their yekkish approach. The Chorev school in Rechavia is becoming just national religious.

Is there a future for yekkes? The speaker thinks that at a time of refusal to accept the others, the yekkish model does provide a way forward. For example in Munk's, before they got the new rabbi (who moved the shul in a generally Chareidi direction), used to say you could have any two of wine, women and song.

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