The 19th-century rabbi who shaped a modern Orthodox community in bridging
traditional practice and Enlightenment thinking.
By Louis Jacobs
Reprinted with
permission from The
Jewish Religion: A Companion, published by Oxford University Press
Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-88) [was a] German rabbi and
religious thinker. Hirsch was born in Hamburg where he received a general as well
as a traditional Jewish education. His teacher in Hamburg was Isaac Bernays and
in Manheim, Rabbi Jakob Ettlinger, the most distinguished Talmudist in German
Jewry. Both these teachers were men of a comparatively broad outlook.
Influenced by them, Hirsch saw his life's task as being to demonstrate that
traditional Judaism is fully compatible with Western culture.
Hirsch studied classical languages, history, and philosophy
for a short time at the University of Bonn but he did not take a university
degree. Abraham Geiger was a fellow student of Hirsch at Bonn but later their
paths diverged, Geiger becoming leader of the Reform movement to which Hirsch
was relentlessly opposed.
In 1830, Hirsch was appointed Rabbi of Oldenburg and in
1846, he was appointed District Rabbi of Moravia, living in the town of
Nikolsburg. A small number of Orthodox families in Frankfurt-on-Main, disturbed
by the assimilated tendencies of the general Jewish community, invited Hirsch
to be their rabbi in1851. This new Orthodox community flourished under Hirsch's
guidance.
Establishing Neo-Orthodoxy
Hirsch believed that the only way to preserve the Orthodoxy
of his community was to obtain permission from the German authorities to
establish a separatist organization. To further this aim, Hirsch argued that
the differences between Orthodox and Reform were akin to those between
Catholicism and Protestantism in Christianity: two religious attitudes that
could not exist side by side.
Hirsch's community soon became the model for communities
strict in adherence to Orthodox practices, hence the term neo-Orthodoxy by
which this tendency is known. In a real sense, Hirsch was a child of the
Haskalah, but his enlightenment had a far greater thrust in the direction of
Orthodox Jewish beliefs and observances. In his early work, The Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel,
Hirsch typically remarked that it would have been better for the Jews not to
have been emancipated if the price they had to pay was assimilation.
Hirsch's Nineteen
Letters was written while he was Rabbi in Oldenburg. The work made a great
impression in wide circles of German Jewry and beyond. The historian Graetz,
then a young man, was so impressed that he came to Oldenburg to study under
Hirsch for three years, but later Hirsch and Graetz came to differ widely in
their views, chiefly on the historical approach to Judaism, an approach for
which Hirsch had no sympathy because it tended to produce a relativistic
attitude towards the Torah.
At Oldenberg, Hirsch also wrote his Horeb: Essays on Israel's Duties in the Diaspora, in which he set
out all the precepts of the Torah in a way that would commend itself to the
cultured Jews of his time. Among Hirsch's other writings is his commentary on
the Pentateuch, published in Frankfurt-on-Main in 1867-68.
Hirsch's Philosophy of Judaism: Torah
im Derekh Eretz
The statement in Ethics of the Fathers (2:2) of Rabbi
Gamaliel III: "Torah is good together with derekh eretz" formed the basis of Hirsch's understanding of
Judaism for modern Jews. In the context derekh
eretz (literally, "the way of the earth") refers to a worldly
occupation. But Hirsch developed the concept to embrace Western culture. This
is the "way of the world" which has to be combined with the study and
the practice of the Torah. Hirsch states that derekh eretz refers to not only ways of earning a living but also
to the social order that prevails on earth, the mores and considerations of
courtesy and propriety arising form social living and things pertinent to good
breeding and general education.
Hence Hirsch speaks of the ideal Jews as the
"Israel-man", that is, the Jew who is proudly Jewish, a believer in
the eternal values and precepts of the Torah as divinely ordained, and is, at
the same time, a cultured "man", a human being belonging to the
modern world.
Cultured Jews Reading Jewish Sources
Hirsch certainly does not avoid the problem facing the
modern Jew when he makes his imaginary protagonist remark in the first of the Nineteen Letters: "How can anyone
who is able to enjoy the beauties of a Virgil, a Tasso, a Shakespeare, who can
follow the logical conclusions of a Liebnitz and Kant--how can such a one find
pleasure in the Old Testament, so deficient in form and taste, and in the
senseless writings of the Talmud?" Before Hirsch, no Orthodox Jew had ever
expressed such sentiments, even as a prelude to their rebuttal.
Hirsch seeks to demonstrate in all his writings that the
combination of Torah and derekh eretz
is not only possible but essential if Judaism is to come to grips with the
challenge of modern life. Basically, his approach is to see the divinely
revealed Torah as the means for the ennoblement of the human spirit by bringing
it closer to the divine will for the Jews and, through them, to the whole of
mankind. The Jewish people have a divinely ordained role to play in the world,
one that can only be realized when the Jew belongs to the world and is, in the
best sense, a man of the world.
Hirsch on "The Spirit of the Age"
This is not to say that Hirsch tolerates any watering down
of the full Jewish tradition. He fought Reform in his belief that this movement
pandered to the Zeitgeist, "the spirit of the age." Hirsch wrote in
the Nineteen Letters:
"Was Judaism ever 'in
accordance with the times?' Did Judaism ever correspond with the views of
dominant contemporaries? Was it ever convenient to be a Jew or a Jewess?…Was
that Judaism in accordance with the times, for which, during the centuries
following the Dispersion, our fathers suffered in all lands, through all the
various periods, the most degrading oppression, the most biting contempt, and a
thousand-fold death and persecution? And yet we would make it the aim and scope
of Judaism to be always 'in accordance with the times!'"
There is no doubt that Hirsch was highly successful in
winning over more than one generation of German Jews to a deeper appreciation
of the meaning of Judaism for modern man. In Hirsch's congregation in Frankfurt
and elsewhere there were to be found cultured men and women, bankers,
university professors, physicians, artists, scientists, and men of letters,
thoroughly at home in Western society and yet observant in their daily lives.
These men demonstrated that Hirsch's philosophy was viable. To the present day,
neo-Orthodoxy is an acceptable Jewish way of life, and for this most of the
credit goes to Hirsch and his vision.
Louis Jacobs, founding
rabbi of the New London Synagogue, is a renowned scholar and lecturer.
c. Louis Jacobs, 1995.
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