Hamburg Temple disputes
A process of acculturation commenced,[1] at a time when rabbinical courts and communal elders imperceptibly lost their means to enforce Jewish law (Halakha), like the ḥerem (excommunication), and legitimacy to wield them.
In Hamburg, the government checked the jurisdiction of the strictly conservative Rabbi Raphael Cohen after repeated complaints from transgressors he punished – people who ate non-kosher food, a Kohen who married a woman forbidden to him via deception and the like – contributing to his decision to resign in 1799.
[3] This sentiment, combined with aversion to beliefs and practices that could no longer be rationalized or fit modern sensitivities, and conviction that the young generation would commit apostasy – as many among the more acculturated were doing – unless religion would be thoroughly refashioned.
The author suggested that Samuel of Nehardea's statement this world differs from the Messianic Era only in respect to the Servitude of Israel to the Nations meant that emancipation was tantamount to divine redemption.
[8] Certain that the lack of decorum drove the young away from synagogue, he abridged the service, introduced both prayers and an edifying sermon in German (very different from the old talmudic discourse in Yiddish), and confirmation for children.
Copying most of Seesen's innovations, it had decorum, vestments for the cantor, confirmation, a choir and an organ playing on the feast day – operated by a gentile, which they assumed was a sufficient measure to avoid desecrating it by work – and the like.
The chief rabbi of Berlin, Meyer Simon Weyl, launched a formal protest to the government, utilizing a legal clause that allowed prayer only in the single recognized synagogue.
[29] The Hamburg rabbinical court, headed by the elderly judge Baruch ben Meir Oser of Prague (the city had no official rabbi since the death of Zebi Hirsch Zamosz in 1807), immediately proclaimed a ban on the new synagogue.
"[28] Already in January 1819, the Italian communities responded to Oser's petitions, severely condemning the reformers, clarifying that most only allowed the organ and other innovations on a theoretical level and that their responses were given in 1816, without being aware of the situation.
His final rulings, sent to Hamburg to bolster that of the local court and endorsed by fourteen communities (including Venice, Ferrara and Florence), forbade any musical accompaniment whatsoever, whether on weekdays or on the Sabbath.
Baruch Mevorach observed that no less than their opponents, the Orthodox, albeit clinging fiercely and dogmatically to the restoration of the sacrifices, return to Zion and every other detail, faced the need to dilute the particularist tinge of the redemption ideal.
The main theme underlying most of the letters sent to Hamburg was not to contend with any specific components of the new worship style, but to deny the Israelite Temple and any attempt to emulate it legitimacy by reinforcing every feature of traditional conduct.
The most unremitting promulgator of this approach was Moses Sofer, who had long since declared that in an era of growing heresy, even the slightest minutiae of tradition had to be relentlessly upheld against those who sought to challenge rabbinic authority.
Mordecai Benet, in his letters to Hamburg, attempted to construe a complex halakhic defence of the exclusive use of Hebrew in prayer, enlisting both intricate mystical claims about the importance of enunciating the holy names and the need to preserve the language.
The contributors to Words of the Covenant served across Central Europe and Italy: from Naphtali Hirsch Katzenellenbogen of Wintzenheim in the west to Yaakov Lorberbaum of Lissa in the east, from Samuel Bernstein of Amsterdam in the north to Solomon Malah of Leghorn in the south.
He also authored a barbed Hebrew satire named A Sword Avenging the Covenant (Herev Nokemet Nakam Brit; Leviticus 26:25), portraying the elderly rabbis as senile and indifferent to religious apathy among the young.
Not only the strictly Orthodox turned against the Israelite Temple: moderate maskil Nachman Berlin of Lissa authored two tracts criticising them severely, and so did Salomon Jacob Cohen, the last editor of HaMeassef.
Ismar Schorsch noted that twenty years after the retirement of his predecessor Raphael Cohen, whose authority was undermined by complaints to the government on the part of nonobservant members, Bernays symbolized the transformation of the rabbinate.
[45] Bernays and his close associate Jacob Ettlinger of Altona are regarded by historians as the founding fathers of "Neo-Orthodoxy", or Torah im Derech Eretz, the ideology which sought to combine traditional religious attitudes with utter modernization.
Determined to preserve unity by accommodating the traditionalists, he introduced in the Viennese Stadttempel a decorous, yet carefully crafted rite, that combined music and abridged liturgy but none of which was condemned in Hamburg.
A similarly restrained aestheticization of prayer forms, with no dogmatic implications or breaching of legalistic constraints, was instituted in the new Spanish Synagogue at Prague by the even more conservative Rabbi Michael Sachs.
Many of its members were steered by the social pressures of a public losing interest in its religion and the intellectual challenge of Judaic studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums), pioneered by Leopold Zunz and his circle.
Subjecting tradition to scientific scrutiny, under the influence of liberal Protestant theologians who had done the same to Christianity, various concepts – like the Resurrection of the Dead, the mentions of Angels in the liturgy and the like – taken for granted were now critically reevaluated, and condemned as alien imports from ancient middle-eastern pagan religions.
The most radical partisan of Wissenschaft was the young Rabbi Abraham Geiger, who launched the irreverent journal Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für Jüdische Theologie, where Judaism was critically analyzed with little concern for received forms or beliefs.
Emulating the Orthodox in 1819, they shortly marshaled twelve responsa from liberal rabbis and preachers that, while not all in favour of the volume, lambasted Bernays for placing a ban and refuting his halakhic arguments.
Rabbi Zecharias Frankel from Dresden, the most prominent of those who occupied the middle position between the Reform and strictly Orthodox, dismissed the ban, demonstrating that the book contained all obligatory prayers.
He opposed the tendency to turn Judaism into a "world religion", universal and devoid of particularism, arguing for the centrality of the notion that the People Israel shall one day regain its own existence at "a small corner of the earth."
He cited the conventional halakhic sources for praying in German; on the matter of the sacrificial cult he quoted Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, where sacrifices were described as a primitive form of worship meant to allow the Israelites contact God in a manner still common and acceptable in ancient, barbaric times.
He was also angered by the fact that in his book, Der Biblische Orient, Bernays did present a model of historical progress in the Jewish prayer rite, wondering why the rabbi will not understand that a reformulation was now necessary due to the same process of change with the times.
In the second one, at Frankfurt – which Frankel left after a day, when it was declared that there was no "objective obligation" to maintain Hebrew in prayer – the majority voted to officially accept that while the Messianic ideal was important, all notions of a Return to Zion and restoration of the sacrificial cult must be excised.
