Intimacy and Exclusion by Dagmar Herzog

Author:Dagmar Herzog [Herzog, Dagmar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781351511698
Google: nTgrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T04:58:38+00:00

The Reform Jewish Response

Scholl's and Struve's reflections on Jewish-Christian relations can be better understood when placed in the context of contemporaneous debates within German Jewry. A wide range of Jewish journalists and activists addressed the dilemmas of Jewish-Gentile integration in the 1840s. In pamphlets, and in newspapers such as the well-established Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthmus, Der Orient, the Zeitschrift für die religiösen In- teressen des Judenthums, and Der Israelit des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, as well as more short-lived efforts such as Die Reform des Judenthums, Reform-Zeitung, Der Jude in Deutschlands Gegenwart, and Der Phönix, they debated amongst themselves and reported on and responded to gentile treatment of Jews. These debates intensified after 1845. One reason was that German Jewry was experiencing a theological polarization parallel to the growing polarization of German Christians. For example, one newspaper analyzed the situation of Badenese Jewry thus: "For some time now already . . . a vital active interest in efforts to reform the synagogue is unmistakable," but at the same time, "the stable party, hostile to all innovation . . . has likewise awakened from its deep sleep, has been jolted out of its indolence."104 Another reason was that religious matters of all sorts had become increasingly hot political topics. In part this was because of the emergence of Christian dissent. But it was also due to a more general interpenetration of religious and political matters—as the relationship between the states and the Catholic church became more combative, political bodies like parliaments and cabinets debated religious matters, the political press addressed religious topics, and the outcomes of elections, petition campaigns, political demonstrations, and other forms of popular political life were in part determined by religious hostilities.

Just as the 1840s saw serious: contests over the content of Christianity, so also it was in the 1840s that Reform, Conservative, and Neo-Orthodox Judaism defined themselves in relation to each other. Already since the 1810s, reformers had sought to change Jewish worship services in keeping with the spirit of the times. The purpose was not only to meet Christian observers' objections to the purported unseemliness of Jewish services—the accusation that the synagogue was, in J. H. Campe's words, a place where people are "unruly" and "mumble in an unlovely manner."105 The goal was also to revitalize Judaism, to combat the growing estrangement from traditional Judaism that many educated Jews in particular were feeling. Strict decorum, an abbreviated liturgy and edifying sermon, prayers in German, and choral music thus replaced the traditional chanting and exposition of the Torah. Rabbis interested in religious, reform gathered at conferences repeatedly in the 1840s (at Brunswick in 1844, Frankfurt in 1845, and Rresiau in 1846) in order to consult with one another and to formalize Reform's precepts. Alarmed by too many departures from inherited practice and a zeal for acculturation that could not but offend the still incompletely assimilated overwhelming majority of German Jews, Rabbi Zecharias Frankel broke from the Reform project he too had been involved in in 1845, advocating instead a "positive-historical Judaism" (which would ultimately become known as Conservative Judaism).

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