Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau by David Heywood Jones

Author:David Heywood Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030462352
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Cultural Imposition or Beneficent Transformation?

Despite these new theses on Jewish “corruption,” the 1790 regulations were limited to beginning a process of cultural and corporate convergence by imposing change on the Jewish corporate and administrative systems. Even if they did not go as far as Goßler recommends, the regulations nonetheless presented a radical departure from hitherto state policy.

In respect of preventing infighting and corruption within Jewish corporate administration, the state prescribed changes to the political structure of the Jewish community.63 The new structure democratised the system of elections to the main representative bodies as well as limiting terms of office for the leader of the community to three years. The Silesian historian Marcus Brann believed the laws had a genuine philanthropic intention. He claims the changes created the fundamentals of the Jewish corporate structure that was later integrated into the Prussian system. Brann read the 1790s legislation as providing an important stepping stone towards the normalisation of the Jewish community.64

The regulations further decreed the appointment of two electable non-executive observant members to the board of the [chevra kadisha .65 The chevra kadisha received a large amount of community funds as it was not only responsible for burials and the Jewish cemetery but was also in charge of the Jewish hospital and other charitable organisations which supported widows, orphans, midwives and post-partum mothers. The aim of these edicts was to change what ordinary Jews presumably perceived to be nepotistic corporate structures in which the elders and religious leaders could act against individual Jews or enrich themselves.66

The regulations further confirmed in §10 that Jews were subject to the city court’s jurisdiction and not the opaque rulings of rabbinical courts in all legal matters apart from marriage.67 This was not uncontroversial because the rabbinical courts made binding decisions on inheritance and property rights as well as familial matters. Decisions involving trade were increasingly being made by state or city courts instead of the rabbinical courts. Jewish religious leaders claimed that these rulings were not considered halachic, thus non-binding, by religious Jews. Three community leaders, including Zacharias Kuh, unsuccessfully appealed to the state authorities to allow Jewish courts in Breslau rule on matters relating to inheritance or property disputes between “married couples, parents, children, siblings as well as their in-laws.”68 The elders argued, using the Talmud as their source of authority,69 that the use of non-Jewish tribunals on matters of inheritance was preventing “rich, foreign Jews” from marrying their children to Breslau Jews. The city was therefore losing “capital.”70

Ratifying a recommendation first made by Dohm in 1781, the community’s books were to be written in German rather than Yiddish or Hebrew and non-Jewish officials had to sign off on all accounts and accounting books for the community (§12).71 Other infringements on Jewish autonomy included the insistence that all Jews take a permanent surname within four weeks, thus abandoning the patronymic system practised by Jews (and all Scandinavians) at the time (§11). The authorities also gave the permission in §14 for the community to build a

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