The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) » The age
of the tannaim (135–c. 200) » The role of the rabbis
After the defeat of Bar Kokhba and the ensuing collapse of active Jewish
resistance to Roman rule (135–136), politically moderate and quietist
rabbinic elements remained the only cohesive group in Jewish society.
With Jerusalem off-limits to the Jews, rabbinic ideology and practice,
which were not dependent on the Temple, priesthood, or political
independence for their vitality, provided a viable program for
autonomous community life and thus filled the vacuum created by the
suppression of all other Jewish leadership. The Romans, confident that
the will for insurrection had been shattered, soon relaxed the Hadrianic
prohibitions of Jewish ordination, public assembly, and regulation of
the calendar and permitted rabbis who had fled the country to return and
reestablish an academy in the town of Usha in Galilee.
The strength of the rabbinate lay in its ability to represent
simultaneously the interests of the Jews and the Romans, whose religious
and political needs, respectively, now chanced to coincide. The rabbis
were regarded favourably by the Romans as a politically submissive
class, which, with its wide influence over the Jewish masses, could
translate the Pax Romana (the peace imposed by Roman rule) into Jewish
religious precepts. To the Jews, on the other hand, the rabbinic
ideology gave the appearance of continuity to Jewish self-rule and
freedom from alien interference. The rabbinic program fashioned by
Johanan ben Zakkai and his circle replaced sacrifice and pilgrimage to
the Temple with the study of Scripture, prayer, and works of piety, thus
eliminating the need for a central sanctuary (in Jerusalem) and making
Judaism a religion capable of practice anywhere. Judaism was now, for
all intents and purposes, a Diaspora religion, even on its home soil.
Any sense of real break with the past was mitigated by continued
adherence to purity laws (dietary and bodily) and by assiduous study of
Scripture, including the legal elements that historical developments had
now made inoperable. The reward held out for scrupulous study and
fulfillment was the promise of messianic deliverance—i.e., the divine
restoration of all those institutions that had become central in Jewish
notions of national independence, including the Davidic monarchy, Temple
service, and the ingathering of Diaspora Jewry. Above all these rewards
was the assurance of personal resurrection and participation in the
national rebirth.
Apart from the right to teach Scripture publicly, the most pressing
need felt by the surviving rabbis was for the reorganization of a body
that would revive the functions of the former Sanhedrin and pass
judgment on disputed questions of law and dogma. Accordingly, a high
court was organized under the leadership of Simeon ben Gamaliel (reigned
c. 135–c. 175), the son of the previous patriarch (the Roman term for
the head of the Palestinian Jewish community) of the house of Hillel, in
association with rabbis representing other schools and interests. In the
ensuing struggle for power, Gamaliel managed to concentrate all communal
authority in his office. The reign of Gamaliel’s son and successor,
Judah the Prince, marked the climax of this period of rabbinic activity,
otherwise known as the “age of the tannaim” (teachers). Armed with
wealth, Roman backing, and dynastic legitimacy (which the patriarch now
traced to the house of David), Judah sought to standardize Jewish
practice through a corpus of legal norms that would reflect accepted
views of the rabbinate on every aspect of life. The Mishna that soon
emerged became the primary reference work in all rabbinic schools and
constituted the core around which the Talmud was later compiled (see
Talmud and Midrash). It thus remains the best single introduction to the
complex of rabbinic values and practices as they evolved in Roman
Palestine.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) » The
age of the tannaim (135–c. 200) » The making of the Mishna
Although the promulgation of an official corpus represented a break with
rabbinic precedent, Judah’s Mishna did have antecedents. During the 1st
and 2nd centuries ce, rabbinic schools had compiled for their own use
collections of Midrashim (singular Midrash, meaning “investigation” or
“interpretation”), in which the results of their exegesis and
application of Scripture to problematic situations were recorded in
terse legal form. By 200 ce several such compilations were circulating
in Jewish schools and were being utilized by judges. While adhering to
the structural form of these earlier collections, Judah compiled a new
one in which universally accepted views were recorded alongside those
still in dispute, thereby largely reducing the margin for individual
discretion in the interpretation of the law. Although his action aroused
opposition and some rabbis continued to invoke their own collections,
the authority of his office and the obvious advantages of a unified
system of law soon outweighed centrifugal tendencies, and his Mishna
attained quasi-canonical status, becoming known as “The Mishna” or “Our
Mishna.” Yet, for all its clarity and comprehensiveness, its phraseology
was often obscure or too terse to satisfy all needs, and a companion
work known as the Tosefta (“Additions”), in which omitted traditions and
explanatory notes were recorded, was compiled shortly thereafter.
Neither compilation elucidated the processes by which decisions had been
elicited, and various authorities therefore set about collecting the
Midrashic discussions of their schools and recording them in the order
of the verses of Scripture. During the 3rd and 4th centuries, Midrashim
on the Pentateuch were compiled and introduced as school texts.
Fundamentally legal in character, this literature regulated every
aspect of life; the six divisions of the Mishna—on agriculture,
festivals, family life, civil law, sacrificial and dietary laws, and
purity—encompass virtually every area of Jewish experience. Accordingly,
the Mishna also recorded the principal Pharisaic and rabbinic
definitions and goals of the religious life. One tract, Pirqe Avot
(“Sayings of the Fathers”), treated the meaning and posture of a life
according to the Torah, while other passages made reference to the
mystical studies into which only the most advanced and religiously
worthy were initiated—e.g., the activities of the Merkava, or divine
“Chariot,” and the doctrines of creation. The rabbinic program of a life
dedicated to study and fulfillment of the will of God was thus a graded
structure in which the canons of morality and piety were attainable on
various levels, from the popular and practical to the esoteric and
metaphysical. Innumerable sermons and homilies preserved in the
Midrashic collections, liturgical compositions for daily and festival
services, and mystical tracts circulated among initiates all testify to
the deep spirituality that informed Rabbinic Judaism.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) » The age
of the amoraim: the making of the Talmuds (3rd–6th century) » Palestine
(c. 220–c. 400)
The promulgation of the Mishna initiated the period of the amoraim
(lecturers or interpreters), teachers who made the Mishna the basic text
of legal exegesis. The curriculum now centred on the elucidation of the
text of the standard compilation, harmonization of its decisions with
extra-Mishnaic traditions recorded in other collections, and the
application of its principles to new situations. Amoraic studies have
been preserved in two running commentaries on the Mishna, known as the
Palestinian (or Jerusalem) Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, reflecting
the study and legislation of the academies of the two principal Jewish
centres in the Roman and Persian empires. (Talmud is also the
comprehensive term for the whole collections, Palestinian and
Babylonian, containing Mishna, commentaries, and other matter.)
The schools were the primary agencies through which the rabbinic way
of life and literature was communicated to the masses. The types of
schools ranged from the primary school to the advanced “house of study”
and more formal academy (yeshiva), the synagogue, and the Jewish court.
Primary schools had long been available in the villages and cities of
Palestine, and tannaitic law made education of male children a religious
duty. Introduced at the age of five or six to Scripture, the student
advanced at the age of 10 to Mishna and finally in midadolescence to
Talmud, or the processes of legal reasoning. Regular reading of
Scripture in the synagogue on Mondays, Thursdays, Sabbaths, and
festivals, coupled with concurrent translations into the Aramaic
vernacular and frequent sermons, provided for lifelong instruction in
the literature and the various teachings elicited from it. The amoraic
emphasis on the moral and spiritual aims of Scripture and its ritual is
reflected in their Midrashic collections, which are predominantly
homileticalrather than legal in character.
An amoraic sermon conceded that, of every 1,000 beginners in primary
school, only one would be expected to continue as far as Talmud. In the
4th century, however, there were enough advanced students to warrant
academies in Lydda, Caesarea, Sepphoris, and Tiberias (in Palestine),
where leading scholars trained disciples for communal service as
teachers and judges. In Caesarea—the principal port and seat of the
Roman administration of Palestine, where pagans, Christians, and
Samaritans maintained renowned cultural institutions—the Jews too
established an academy that was singularly free of patriarchal control.
The outstanding rabbinic scholar there, Abbahu (c. 279–320), wielded
great influence with the Roman authorities. Because he combined learning
with personal wealth and political power, he attracted some of the most
gifted students of the day to the city. About 350 the studies and
decisions of the authorities in Caesarea were compiled as a tract on the
civil law of the Mishna. Half a century later, the academy of Tiberias
issued a similar collection on other tracts of the Mishna, and this
compilation, in conjunction with the Caesarean material, constituted the
Palestinian Talmud.
Despite increasing tensions between some rabbinic circles and the
patriarch, his office was the agency that provided a basic unity to the
Jews of the Roman Empire. Officially recognized as a Roman prefect, the
patriarch at the same time sent representatives to Jewish communities to
inform them of the Jewish calendar and other decisions of general
concern and to collect an annual tax of a half shekel, paid by male Jews
for his treasury. As titular head of the Jewish community of Palestine
and as a vestigial heir of the Davidic monarchy, the patriarch was a
reminder of a glorious past and a symbol of hope for a brighter future.
How enduring these hopes were may be seen from the efforts to gain
permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Although reconstruction
of the Temple was authorized by the emperor Julian (reigned 361–363), it
came to naught because of a disastrous fire on the sacred site and the
emperor’s subsequent death.
The adoption of Christianity as the religion of the empire had no
direct effect on the religious freedom of the Jews. The ever-mounting
hostility between the two religions, however, resulted in severe
curtailment of Jewish disciplinary rights over their coreligionists,
interference in the collection of patriarchal taxes, restriction of the
right to build synagogues, and, finally, upon the death of the patriarch
Gamaliel VI about 425, the abolition of the patriarchate and the
diversion of the Jewish tax to the imperial treasury. Mediterranean
Jewry was now fragmented into disjointed communities and synagogues. But
the principles of the regulation of the Jewish calendar had been
committed to writing in approximately 359 by the patriarch Hillel II,
and this, coupled with the widespread presence of rabbis, ensured the
continuity of Jewish adherence. Even the restrictions on synagogal
worship and preaching imposed by the Eastern emperor Justinian I
(reigned 527–565) apparently had no devastating effect. A new genre of
liturgical poetry, combining ecstatic prayer with didactic motifs,
developed in this period of political decline and won acceptance in
synagogues in Asia Minor as well as beyond the Euphrates.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) » The
age of the amoraim: the making of the Talmuds (3rd–6th century) »
Babylonia (200–650)
In the increasingly unfriendly climate of Christendom, Jews were
consoled by the knowledge that in nearby Babylonia (then under Persian
rule) a vast population of Jews lived under a network of effective and
autonomous Jewish institutions and officials. Steadily worsening
conditions in Palestine drew many Jews to Persian domains, where
economic opportunities and the Jewish communal structure enabled them to
gain a better livelihood while living in accordance with their ancestral
traditions. To regulate internal Jewish affairs and ensure the steady
flow of taxes, the Parthian, or Arsacid, rulers (247 bce–224 ce) had
appointed in approximately 100 ce an exilarch, or “head of the [Jews in]
exile”—who claimed more direct Davidic descent than the Palestinian
patriarch—to rule over the Jews as a quasi-prince. About 220, two
Babylonian disciples of Judah ha-Nasi, Abba Arika (known as Rav) and
Samuel bar Abba, began to propagate the Mishna and related tannaitic
literature as normative standards. As heads of the academies at Sura and
Nehardea, respectively, Rav and Samuel cultivated a native Babylonian
rabbinate, which increasingly provided the manpower for local Jewish
courts and other communal services. While the usual tensions between
temporal and religious arms frequently existed in Babylonia, the
symbiosis of exilarchate and rabbinate endured until the middle of the
11th century.
Paradoxically, Babylonian rabbinism derived its theological and
political strength from its fundamentally unoriginal character. As a
transplant of Palestinian Judaism, it asserted its historical legitimacy
to the Sāsānian dynasty (224–651), who protected Jewish practices
against interference from fanatical Magian priests, and to native Jewish
officials, who argued for the validity of indigenous Babylonian
deviations from Palestinian norms. But ultimately the historical
importance of this transplantation lay in Babylonia’s serving as the
proving ground for the adaptability of Palestinian Judaism to a Diaspora
situation. Legal and theological adaptations generated by the new locale
and the needs of the times inevitably produced changes in the religious
tradition. The laws of agriculture, purity, and sacrifices all of
necessity fell into disuse. The principles embodied in these laws,
however, and the core of the legal and theological system—consisting of
faith in the revelation and election of Israel, the requirement that the
individual live by the canons of Jewish civil and family law, and the
network of communal institutions modeled on those of Palestinian
Judaism—remained intact, thereby ensuring a basic continuity and
uniformity among rabbinically oriented communities everywhere. Because
historical circumstances made Babylonia the mediator of this tradition
to all Jewish communities in the High Middle Ages (9th–12th centuries),
the Babylonian version of Jewish religion became synonymous with
normative Judaism and the measure of Judaic authenticity everywhere.
“The law of the [Gentile] government is binding”—the principle
formulated by Samuel (died 254), head of the academy at
Nehardea—summarizes the essential novelty in rabbinic reorientation to
life on foreign soil. Whereas Palestinian rabbis had complied with
imperial decrees of taxation as legitimate de facto—and this was all
that Samuel had in mind—Babylonian teachers now rationalized
governmental authority in this respect as legitimate de jure, thus
enjoining upon the Jews political quietism and submissiveness as part of
their religious doctrine. In all other areas of civil law, the Jews were
instructed by their rabbis to file suit in Jewish courts and thus to
conduct their businesses as well as their family lives by rabbinic law.
While the rabbis could impose their discipline more effectively in
matters of public law than in private religious practice, the density of
the Jewish population in many areas of Parthia (northeastern Iran) and
Babylonia facilitated the application of moral and disciplinary
pressures. The most effective vehicle for the dissemination of their
teachings was the academies, where judges and communal teachers were
trained; among these institutions, those of Sura and Pumbedita remained
preeminent. Frequent public lectures in the synagogues of the academies
on Sabbaths and festivals were capped by public kalla (study-course)
assemblies for alumni of the schools during the two months, Adar
(February–March) and Elul (August–September), when the lull in
agricultural work freed many to attend semiannual refresher instruction.
These meetings were followed by regular popular lectures during the
festival seasons that soon followed. Thus, while rabbis constituted a
distinct class within the community, their efforts were oriented toward
making as much of the community as possible members of a learned and
religious elite. The harmonious relations that obtained with but few
interruptions over the centuries between the Sāsānian rulers and their
Jewish subjects gave the Jewish population the air of a quasi-state,
which the Jewish leadership frequently extolled as superior to the
Jewish community of Palestine.
The dissemination of the Palestinian Talmud probably stimulated the
Babylonians to follow suit by collecting and arranging the records of
study and decisions of their own academies and courts. The Babylonian
Talmud, which apparently underwent several stages of redaction (c.
500–650) on the basis of the proto-Talmuds—the early collections of
commentaries on the Mishna used in the academies—accordingly became the
standard of reference for judicial precedent and theological doctrine
for all of Babylonian Jewry and all those communities under its
influence. Some scholars have postulated a group of anonymous editors of
these earlier materials, calling them stammaim (“anonymous ones”). As
had been the case with the Mishna, the redaction of the Babylonian
Talmud was later designated by authorities as marking the end of a
period in Jewish history. The scholars who added the finishing stylistic
touches, known as savoraʾim (“explicators”), were classified as a
transitional stage between the amoraim and the geonim.
The enduring vigour of Jewish faith during these centuries is
graphically demonstrated by the missionary activity of Jews throughout
the ancient Middle East, especially in the Arabian Peninsula. Proud
Jewish tribes living in close proximity to each other in the vicinity of
Yathrib (later Medina, Muhammad’s home city) engaged in agriculture and
commerce and proclaimed the superiority of their monotheistic ethos and
eschatology. In Yemen (southwestern Arabia) the last of the Ḥimyarite
rulers (reigned from c. 2nd century ce), Dhu Nuwas, proclaimed himself a
Jew and finally suffered defeat in approximately 525 as a consequence of
Christian influence on the Abyssinian armies. Jewish missionaries,
however, continued to compete with Christian missionaries and thus
helped to lay the groundwork for the birth of an indigenous Arabic
monotheism—Islam—that was to alter the course of world history.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) » The age
of the geonim (c. 640–1038) » Triumph of the Babylonian rabbinate
The lightning conquests in the Middle East, North Africa, and the
Iberian Peninsula by the armies of Islam (7th–8th century) created a
political framework for the basically uniform (i.e., Babylonian)
character of medieval Judaism. As a “people of the Book” (i.e., of the
Bible), the Jews were permitted by the Muslims to live under the same
autonomous structure that had developed under Arsacid and Sāsānian rule.
The heads of the two principal academies were now formally recognized by
the exilarch, and through him by the Muslim caliphs (the civil and
religious heads of the Muslim state), as the official arbiters of all
questions of religious law and as the religious heads of all Jewish
communities that came under Muslim sway. Known as geonim (plural of
gaon, “excellency”), they conducted high courts manned by scholars of
graded ranks, and they received financial support from Jewish
communities assigned to them by the exilarch. Religious questions and
contributions were solicited from all Jewish communities, and these,
along with formal gaonic replies (responsa), were regularly publicized
at the semiannual kalla convocations. Under the strong leadership of
Yehudai, gaon of Sura (presided 760–763), the Babylonian rabbinate made
vigorous efforts to replace Palestinian usage wherever it was still in
vogue—including the study of Palestinian amoraic legal literature—with
Babylonian practice and texts, thus making the Babylonian Talmud the
unrivalled standard of Jewish norms. The campaign’s success is indicated
by the usage of the term Talmud, which, when unqualified, has ever since
meant the Babylonian Talmud. Indeed, even in Palestine the Babylonian
corpus displaced its older rival and caused the study of Palestinian
Talmudic literature to be confined to circles of legal specialists.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) » The
age of the geonim (c. 640–1038) » Anti-rabbinic reactions
The firm—and occasionally oppressive—tactics of exilarchs and geonim
generated anti-rabbinic reactions in the form of sectarian and messianic
revolts, especially in outlying areas where enforcement was difficult.
Inspired in part by ancient Palestinian sectarian doctrines and in part
by Muslim usage, the sects were by and large quickly and forcefully
suppressed. In the 8th century, according to the traditional Rabbinite
account, Anan ben David, a disaffected member of the exilarchic family,
founded a dissident sect, the Ananites, later known as the Karaites
(Scripturalists). The exact relationship between the followers of Anan
and the later Karaites, however, remains unclear. The term itself first
appeared in the 9th century, when various dissident groups coalesced and
ultimately adopted Anan as their founder, though they rejected several
of his teachings. The new sect advocated a threefold program of
rejection of rabbinic law as a human fabrication and therefore as an
unwarranted, unauthoritative addition to Scripture; a return to
Palestine to hasten the messianic redemption; and a reexamination of
Scripture to retrieve authentic law and doctrine. Under the leadership
of Daniel al-Qumisi (c. 850?), a Karaite settlement prospered in the
Holy Land, from which it spread as far as northwestern Africa and
Christian Spain. A barrage of Karaite treatises presenting new views of
scriptural exegesis stimulated renewed study of the Bible and the Hebrew
language in Rabbinite circles as well. The most momentous consequence of
these new studies was the invention of several systems of vocalization
for the text of the Hebrew Bible in Babylonia and Tiberias in the 9th
and 10th centuries. The annotation of the Masoretic (traditional, or
authorized) text of the Bible with vocalic, musical, and grammatical
accents in the Tiberian schools of the 10th-century scholars Ben Naftali
and Ben Asher fixed the Masoretic text permanently and, through it, the
morphology of the Hebrew language for Karaites as well as Rabbinites.
In the face of sectarian challenges, the geonim intensified their
efforts against any deviation from Rabbinite norms. They began to issue
handbooks of Jewish law that set forth in concise and unequivocal terms
the standards for correct practice. A number of these codes, notably the
Halakhot gedolot (“Great Laws”), Siddur Rav Amram Gaon (“The Prayer Book
of Rav Amram Gaon”; on liturgical practice), and Sheʾeltot
(“Disquisitions”) by Aḥa of Shabḥa (c. 680–c. 752), attained
authoritative status in local schools and further unified medieval
Judaism.
The geonim, however, were powerless to halt several social
developments in the 9th century that progressively undermined their hold
even on Rabbinite communities. A renaissance of Greek philosophy and
sciences in Arabic translation, coupled with the progressive
urbanization of the upper classes of all religious and ethnic groups in
the centres of political, commercial, and cultural activity, generated a
new intelligentsia that cut across religious and ethnic lines.
Widespread skepticism concerning basic doctrines of faith such as
creation, revelation, and retribution was most poignantly represented by
latitudinarianism (the tendency to be flexible and tolerant about
deviations from orthodox beliefs and doctrines) and by antinomian
gnostic groups that denied divine providence and omniscience (see
antinomianism). Ḥiwi al-Balkhī, a 9th-century skeptical Jewish
pamphleteer, scandalized the faithful by openly attacking the morality
of Scripture and by issuing for schools an expurgated edition of the
Bible that omitted “offensive” material (e.g., alleged stories of God
acting dishonestly). A mystifying Hebrew tract titled Sefer yetzira
(“Book of Creation”) posited in terse and enigmatic epigrams a novel
theory of creation that betrayed Neoplatonic influence. Karaites joined
philosophically oriented intellectuals in heaping scorn on popular
Rabbinite customs that smacked of superstition and, above all, on
Talmudic homilies that referred to God in anthropomorphic terms.
Gaonic difficulties were compounded by the rise in North Africa and
Spain of populous and wealthy Jewish communities that, thanks to the
development of their own local schools and talent, ignored the
Babylonian academies or favoured one over the other with religious
queries and, in consequence, with financial contributions. To the
delight of dissidents and the chagrin of the faithful, competition
between the Babylonian academies turned to internecine hostility.
Occasional revolts against exilarchic taxation and administration in
outlying areas of Persia had to be quelled with armed force. The
Palestinian Rabbinites had revived their own academies, and their
presidents now not only appealed for support in other Diaspora lands but
challenged the authority of the Babylonians to serve as final arbiters
on matters of public import, such as the regulation of the calendar. By
900 the Rabbinite community of Babylonia was in a state of chaos and
dissolution.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) » The
age of the geonim (c. 640–1038) » The gaonate of Saʿadia ben Joseph
In a bold effort to restore discipline and respect for the gaonate, the
exilarch David ben Zakkai (916/917–940) bypassed the families from whom
the geonim had traditionally been selected and in 928 appointed Saʿadia
ben Joseph (882–942) to head the academy of Sura. Of Egyptian birth,
Saʿadia had gained wide acclaim for his scholarly retorts to Karaites,
heretics, and Palestinian Rabbinites. Politically, Saʿadia’s brief
presidency was a fiasco and aggravated the chaos by a communal civil
war. His gaonate, however, gave an official stamp to his many works,
which responded to the ideological challenges to Rabbinism by restating
traditional Judaism in intellectually cogent terms. Saʿadia thus became
the pioneer of a Judeo-Arabic culture that would blossom fully in
Andalusian Spain a century later. His translation of the Bible into
Arabic and his Arabic commentaries on Scripture made the rabbinic
understanding of the Bible accessible to masses of Jews. His poetic
compositions for liturgical use provided the stimulus for the revival of
Hebrew poetry. Above all, his rationalist commentary on the puzzling
Sefer yetzira and his brilliant treatise on philosophical theology, The
Book of Beliefs and Opinions, synthesized the Torah (understood as the
divine law in the Five Books of Moses together with the rabbinic
understanding of this revelation) and “Greek wisdom” in accordance with
the dominant Muslim philosophical school of kalām. His efforts made
Judaism philosophically respectable and the study of philosophy a
religiously acceptable pursuit.
Far from tightening the gaonic hold over the Jewish communities of
the Arabic world, Saʿadia’s works actually provided the wherewithal for
ever-greater intellectual and religious self-sufficiency. While
economic, political, and military upheavals progressively weakened
various institutions in the Middle East, concurrent prosperity and
consolidation in the West stimulated the maturation of indigenous
leadership in Egypt, Al-Qayrawān (Kairouan; in present-day Tunisia), and
Muslim Spain. To be sure, able geonim such as Sherira and his son Hai
(939–1038) exercised enormous influence over the Judeo-Arabic world
through hundreds of legal responsa issued in the course of their
successive terms (968–1038) at Pumbedita. Circumstances beyond anyone’s
control, however, were gradually undermining the effectiveness of
exilarchate and gaonate. But by 1038, the year of Hai’s death, the
consequences of four centuries of gaonic activity had become indelible:
the Babylonian Talmud had become the agent of basic Jewish uniformity;
the synthesis of philosophy and tradition had become the hallmark of the
Jewish intelligentsia; and the Hebrew classics of the past had become
the texts of study in Jewish schools everywhere.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) » Medieval
European Judaism (950–1750) » The two major branches
Despite the fundamental uniformity of medieval Jewish culture,
distinctive Jewish subcultures were shaped by the cultural and political
divisions within the Mediterranean basin, in which Arabic Muslim and
Latin Christian civilizations coexisted as discrete and self-contained
societies. Two major branches of rabbinic civilization developed in
Europe: the Ashkenazic, or Franco-German, and the Sephardic, or
Andalusian-Spanish. Distinguished most conspicuously by their varying
pronunciation of Hebrew, the numerous differences between them in
religious orientation and practice derived, in the first instance, from
the geographical fountainheads of their culture—the Ashkenazim (plural
of Ashkenazi) tracing their cultural filiation to Italy and Palestine
and the Sephardim (plural of Sephardi) to Babylonia—and from the
influences of their respective immediate milieus. While the Jews of
Christian Europe wrote for internal use almost exclusively in Hebrew,
those of Muslim areas regularly employed Arabic for prose works and
Hebrew for poetic composition. Whereas the literature of Jews in Latin
areas was overwhelmingly religious in content, that of the Jews of Spain
was well endowed with secular poetry and scientific works inspired by
the cultural tastes of the Arabic literati. Most significantly, the two
forms of European Judaism differed in their approaches to the identical
rabbinic base that they had inherited from the East and in their
attitudes to Gentile culture and politics.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) »
Medieval European Judaism (950–1750) » Sephardic developments
In Muslim Spain, Jews frequently served the government in official
capacities and, therefore, not only took an active interest in political
affairs but engaged in considerable social and intellectual intercourse
with influential circles of the Muslim population. Since the support of
letters and scholarship was part of state policy in Muslim Spain, and
since Muslim savants traced the source of Muslim power to the vitality
of the Arabic language, scripture, and poetry, Jews looked at Arabic
culture with undisguised admiration and unabashedly attempted to adapt
themselves to its canons of scholarship and good taste. The cultured Jew
accordingly demonstrated command of Arabic style and the ability to
display the beauty of his own heritage through a philological mastery of
the text of the Hebrew Bible and through the composition of Hebrew
verse, now set to an Arabic metre. Since Arabic philosophers and
scientists promulgated the compatibility of Greek philosophy with the
revelation to Muhammad, rationalist study of the Jewish classics and
defense of rabbinic faith in philosophical terms became dominant motifs
in the Andalusian Jewish schools (in southern Spain).
The period of feverish literary creativity in classical Jewish
disciplines as well as in the sciences in Spain has been called the
golden age of Hebrew literature (c. 1000–1148). Jewish culture of this
age was distinguished by the supreme literary merit of its Hebrew
poetry, the new spirit of relatively free and rationalist examination of
hallowed texts and doctrines, and the extension of Jewish cultural
perspectives to totally new horizons—mathematics, astronomy, medicine,
philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, and belles-lettres. Noteworthy
too was the frequent overlapping of the Sephardic religious leadership
with the new Jewish courtier class. The unprecedented heights that the
latter attained—Ḥisdai ibn Shaprut (c. 915–975) as counsellor to the
caliphs of Córdoba; the Ibn Nagrelas as viziers of Granada; the Ibn
Ezras (Moses ibn Ezra, c. 1060–1139; and Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, c.
1092–1167), the Ibn Megashs, and the Ibn Albalias as high officials in
Granada and Sevilla (Seville)—and the distinctions of these men and
their protégés in Jewish and worldly letters restored the ancient
integration of culture and practical life and expressed the
identification of the Jewish elite with the biblical age of Jewish power
and artistic creativity. The effort to recapture the vitality and beauty
of biblical poetry stimulated comparative philological and fresh
exegetical research that yielded new insights into the morphology of the
Hebrew language and into the historical soil of biblical prophecy. Judah
ibn Ḥayyuj and Abū al-Walīd Marwān ibn Janāḥ produced manuals on
biblical grammar that applied the results of Arabic philology to their
own tongue and provided the principles of Hebrew grammatical study down
to modern times. The anticipations of modern higher biblical criticism
by Judah ibn Balaʿam and Moses ibn Gikatilla (11th century) were
popularized in Hebrew a few generations later by Abraham ibn Ezra. In
the revival of Hebrew poetry, liturgical as well as secular, that
translated the new preoccupation with language and beauty into art,
Andalusian Jewry saw its greatest achievements. Solomon ibn Gabirol (c.
1022–c. 1058), Moses ibn Ezra, and Judah ha-Levi (c. 1075–1141) were the
acknowledged supreme geniuses of a form of expression that became a
passion with thousands the length and breadth of Spain. But the most
enduring consequence of the new temper was the redefinition of religious
faith in the light of Greco-Arabic philosophical theories. The
exposition of faith in Neoplatonic terms by Solomon ibn Gabirol, the
defense of Rabbinism using Aristotelian categories by Abraham ibn Daud
(c. 1110–c. 1180), the attack on the religious inadequacy of philosophy
by Judah ha-Levi, and the epoch-making Aristotelian philosophical
theology by Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) fixed philosophical inquiry as
an enduring subject on the agenda of rabbinic concerns. Beginning in the
13th century, a new class of philosophers sponsored the translation of
Arabic literature into Hebrew and of Hebrew and Arabic literature into
Latin; they brought Jews and their thought into the mainstream of
Western philosophy and gained for them the position of middlemen of
culture between East and West.
The salient trends of Sephardic Judaism did not imply relegation of
the rabbinic class to a secondary role. Rather, they shaped a fresh
approach to rabbinic texts that paralleled in many respects those
adopted in biblical exegesis. Strict adherence to consistency,
systematization, and philological exactitude yielded new codes that
often diverged from gaonic judgments. A digest of Talmudic law by Isaac
Alfasi (1013–1103) placed the Sephardic rabbinate on a self-reliant
footing and epitomized its method of getting at the essentials of
Talmudic law by sidestepping contingent discussions. In this area too,
it was Moses Maimonides who brought the Sephardic principles of
comprehensiveness, lucidity, and logical arrangement to their apex
through his code of Jewish law, Mishne Torah. Written in Mishnaic
Hebrew, the work remains the only comprehensive treatment of all of
Jewish law, including those fields that are not applicable in the
Diaspora (agriculture, purity, sacrifices, Temple procedure).
With Maimonides, however, the pure Sephardic tradition came to an
end, for the Almohad (Amazigh [Berber] Muslim reformers) invasion of
Spain in 1147–48 wiped out the Jewish communities of Andalusia and drove
thousands to northern Spain and Provence (a province of southeastern
France) or, as in the case of Maimonides’ family, to North Africa and
Egypt. Sephardic Jewry suddenly encountered a discrete, mature, Jewish
culture that for centuries had been developing independently and along
quite different lines.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) »
Medieval European Judaism (950–1750) » Ashkenazic developments
The Ashkenazic Jewry, into whose communities the Sephardim had been
thrust by political events, regarded their own heritage and the
Christian world in which they lived from a perspective shaped
exclusively by rabbinic categories. They drew their school texts and the
values that determined their judgments from the Talmud and the Midrash.
Sensing no intellectual challenge in Christian faith, which they
regarded with thinly concealed contempt, they constituted for the most
part a merchant class that lived in urban centres under the protection
of ecclesiastical and temporal rulers but also under their own complex
of laws and institutions. Except for mercantile relations, Christian
society was closed to them, thanks largely to age-old ecclesiastical
prohibitions forbidding all social intercourse with Jews. With the Arab
conquest of Spain and the rise of the Carolingians (the dynasty that
ruled western Europe in the 8th and 9th centuries), the 12-decade
interlude of suppression by the Visigoths (589–711) came to an end, and
the Roman precedent of toleration and autonomy again became the rule.
Merchants and rabbis moved from Italy to France and the Rhineland and
infused new energies into the Jewish communities there. An indigenous
religious leadership began to emerge at the very time that Andalusian
Jewry was entering its golden age. The First Crusade (1096–99) unleashed
a tide of hatred, periodic violence, and progressive restrictions on
Jewish activities in the Rhineland, but the communities affected had
attained sufficient resilience to reestablish their communal
institutions shortly afterward and to continue the cultivation of their
deeply ingrained traditions.
By 1150 Ashkenazic Jewry had established a culture of its own, with
an indigenous literature that ranged from the popular homily to the
esoteric tract on the nature of the divine glory. Study of the Bible and
the Talmud was oriented toward a mystical pietism in which prayer and
contemplation of the secrets embedded in the liturgy were to lead to
religious experience. Significantly, the fathers of the Ashkenazic
tradition were remembered as liturgical poets and initiates into divine
mysteries, and the early codes of the Franco-German schools were heavily
weighted with discussions of liturgical usage. After the Second Crusade
(1147–49), the German Jewish mystics (also called Hasidim, or pietists)
placed heavy emphasis on the merits of asceticism, martyrdom, and
penitence, thus adapting to a Jewish idiom the features of saintliness
then current in Christian Europe. For the masses of Jews, the cultural
fare consisted principally of biblical tales and instruction as
interpreted by rabbinic Midrash, the lives of scholars and saints, and
liturgical poetry reaffirming the election of Israel and faith in
messianic redemption. The chief vehicle of popular instruction consisted
of anthologies from the rabbinic writings and commentaries on Scripture,
of which the most popular was that of Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes
(1040–1105), known as Rashi, the acronym formed from the initials of his
name in Hebrew. For the more advanced student, Rashi composed a succinct
commentary on the Talmud that achieved an authority approaching that of
the text itself.
As living sources of law and values, the Bible and the Talmud had an
impact on public and private, as well as secular and religious, affairs.
Taking their cue from Talmudic precedent and from Christian
ecclesiastical procedures of their own times, the Ashkenazic rabbis
occasionally gathered in regional synods to enact legislation on
problems of a general nature for which there was no adequate precedent
in the literature. Among the most enduring of these measures were the
prohibition of bigamy and arbitrary divorce and severe economic
penalties for abandonment of wives. Of far more immediate concern to the
average Jew were the circumvention of Talmudic prohibitions against
usury, relaxation of prohibitions regarding traffic with Gentiles in
wines, and adoption of severe disciplinary measures, such as
excommunication, against informers or those appealing, in cases
involving Jews, to the Gentile authorities.
A new religious trend began in Provence in the 13th century with the
introduction into the Talmudic academies of a novel form of mystical
study known as Kabbala (literally, “tradition”), which soon spread to
northern Spain. Expressing gnostic doctrines in rabbinic guise, the
devotees of Kabbala devised an esoteric vocabulary that reinterpreted
the Bible and rabbinic law as allegories of the various modes in which
God is manifested in a spiritual universe, access to which was reserved
for initiates. The most renowned literary product of this new circle was
the Zohar (“The Book of Splendour”), a vast mystical commentary on the
Pentateuch by Moses de León (c. 1250–1305); with later additions it
became the Bible of Jewish mystics everywhere. Although some of the
theological notions of the Kabbalists deviated from basic postulates of
Jewish monotheism, the insistence of the mystics on unflagging ritual
orthodoxy and on a nominal acceptance of the biblical text as divine
revelation helped them avert the suspicions aroused by Jewish
Aristotelians and Averroists—followers of the 12th-century Arabic
Aristotelian philosopher Averroës (1126–98)—and, in time, even won for
them the status of a rabbinic elite. Indeed, in the early 13th century
some of the mystics lent their support to a campaign that condemned the
study of philosophy as generating skepticism, latitudinarianism, and
disrespect for traditional literature.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) »
Medieval European Judaism (950–1750) » Marginalization and expulsion
Developments within the two major Jewish communities of medieval Europe
were complicated by their uncertain relationship with the Christian
community surrounding them. By all accounts, Christians and Jews had
been on relatively good terms until the 11th century. In the early
Middle Ages there were frequent contacts between Christians and Jews,
who intermarried and shared language and culture. In the Carolingian era
some bishops even complained that the Jews were favoured too much by
Carolingian rulers. The situation became more complicated after about
the year 1000, as Christian society began a process of reorganization
that contributed to the marginalization of the Jews and other groups.
Although the Jews did not endure unrelenting persecution and even
enjoyed a cultural renaissance in the 12th century that paralleled a
Christian one, they faced an increasingly hostile community that created
a new theological image of the Jews and undermined the place of the Jews
in society.
In the opening decade of the 11th century, Jews in various parts of
Europe faced violent attacks and forced conversions that led some,
according to one account, to commit suicide rather than accept baptism.
Attacks against the Jews and full-scale massacres of Jews would occur
throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, most notably at Mainz in the
Rhineland in 1096, in England in 1198–90, in Franconia in 1298, and in
France in 1320. The image of the Jews among Christians worsened, and
numerous anti-Semitic stereotypes appeared in the 12th century. The most
notorious example of these was the blood libel, which alleged that the
Jews killed Christian boys and used their blood to make unleavened
bread.
Meanwhile, official legislation of the church confirmed the declining
position of the Jews. Pope Innocent III issued a decretal declaring the
Jews to be in perpetual servitude for the killing of Christ, and at the
fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the Jews were ordered to wear distinctive
clothing, forbidden to hold public office, and prohibited from appearing
in public during the last three days of the Easter season. With the
discovery and burning of the Talmud by Christians in the 13th century,
the church’s view of the Jews worsened, because the church thus became
aware that contemporary Jews were different from biblical Jews. The
acceptance of the Talmud by the Jews was understood as heretical by the
church, which had already launched a Crusade and the Inquisition against
Christian heretics. The Jews’ failure to live up to the Christian
understanding of them undermined the contemporary theological
justification for their continued existence (i.e., until the end of
time, as witness to the truth of Christian revelation).
Challenges also emerged in the economic and social order as economic
opportunities were increasingly restricted. Although there were Jewish
merchants, artisans, and viticulturists throughout much of the Middle
Ages, by the 12th and 13th centuries the Jews were limited to the
occupation of money lending, which brought some of them great wealth but
also great animosity from borrowers. Moreover, the Jews were often an
important source of capital for the monarchs of Europe. As an important
source of revenue, the Jews provided a valuable service to the kings and
thus received special protection in the law. This relationship, however,
had an ominous side, as the Jews came to be defined in the law as the
personal property of the king, to be exploited as he saw fit. Jews also
lost their status as individuals and were secure only as long as they
were of utility to their lords.
The declining economic usefulness of the Jews and the related
deterioration of their social and religious status led to their
expulsion from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. Jews were also
expelled from the Holy Roman Empire and, most notoriously, from Spain in
1492. In Spain, anti-Jewish riots in the late 14th century had led to
the conversion of large numbers of Jews, the so-called conversos.
Spanish Christians, however, remained distrustful of the conversos, who
were thought to maintain contact with uncoverted Jews and to practice
the Jewish faith secretly. An inquisition established to deal with the
conversos led to local expulsions in the 1480s. By 1492, however, the
king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, and their inquisitors decided
that the only real solution to the problem was the permanent separation
of the conversos and the Jews. The Jews were compelled to choose between
baptism and exile, and ultimately some 40,000 (estimates range as high
as 800,000) departed Spain, never to return. They settled in Navarre
(then outside the kingdom of Spain), North Africa, and Portugal. Many of
those in Portugal, however, accepted Christianity as a result of an
order of expulsion or conversion there in 1497.
The history of Judaism » Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century) »
Medieval European Judaism (950–1750) » Conflicts and new movements
The conflict between philosophers and anti-philosophers in Provence and
northern Spain represented a clash between two mature Jewish subcultures
of diverse geographic origins, the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic, each of
which had in the course of centuries developed different esoteric
doctrines to transcend the legalistic formalism and confining dogmas of
normative Judaism. Both forms of speculation sought salvation for
exceptional individuals through knowledge and thus provided an immediate
substitute for messianic deliverance from exile and servitude. Each
group charged the other with distortion of tradition, and each issued
apologias and excommunications characteristic of medieval doctrinal
controversy. While the rifts between them reached bitter proportions,
the common threat posed by ecclesiastical attacks on the Talmud in
public disputations and by the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1306
prevented open rupture or resolution of the conflict. Ever since that
time, two strands of orthodoxy representing the two forms of medieval
metaphysical speculation have lived side by side in an uneasy truce.
Most rabbinic circles of the 14th and 15th centuries displayed a
progressive dogmatism and insistence on uniformity of practice. The
great legal code of Jacob ben Asher of Toledo (c. 1269–c. 1340), Arbaʿa
ṭurim (c. 1335; “Four Rows”), which sought to level differences in usage
between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, signified the dominant trend of the
rabbinate. The increasing hardening of ideological lines, however, did
not eliminate independent thinking. Isaac Albalag (13th century)
propounded an Averroist (rationalistic) interpretation of the Bible
predicated on a theory of double truth (of reason and revelation), while
Gersonides (Levi ben Gershom; 1288–1344), gave Jewish Aristotelianism a
new and comprehensive formulation. In Muslim areas, the Maimonidean
regimen of philosophical contemplation was extended by Maimonides’ son
Abraham to a quest for pietist ecstasy that seemed to have much in
common with Sufism (Islamic mysticism).
The anti-Jewish riots in Spain and their consequences stimulated the
anti-intellectualism of the rabbinate. Hasdai Crescas (1340–1410), while
conceding the philosophical untenability of traditional belief in free
will (see also determinism), launched a scathing attack on Aristotelian
approaches to religion, and his disciple Joseph Albo (c. 1380–c. 1444)
issued a compendium on dogma that reaffirmed the traditional postulates
of divine creation, revelation, and retribution as axioms of Judaism.
But these reassertions of traditional faith could not overcome the
ideological and social fragmentation that had split the Spanish
communities, often leaving them in open conflict with each other.
Widespread marranism (ostensible conversion to Christianity) polarized
the community and left residues of bitterness toward those returning to
the fold (see Marrano). The expulsions from Spain and Portugal drove the
leadership into intensified pursuits of mystical escape from, and
rationalization of, the endless calamities that befell their flocks. In
Italy and the Ottoman Empire (Asia Minor, northeastern Africa, and
southeastern Europe)—the two principal centres of refuge for the exiles
of the Iberian Peninsula—legalistic Kabbalism, which insisted on strict
observance of the law as a precondition of mystical practice and study,
became the dominant form of rabbinic leadership. Despite the terrible
circumstances, the rabbinate continued to produce works of encyclopaedic
proportions and staggering erudition in every field of Jewish learning.
Inspired by the Jewish tradition that the coming of the messiah would
be preceded by horrendous catastrophes, a group of rabbis established a
community in Ẕefat (Safed), Palestine, where, in anticipation of the new
dawn, every aspect of life was conducted on principles of saintliness
and mystical contemplation. Under the leadership of Jacob Berab, the
ancient practice of ordination (semikha) was reinstituted in 1538 to
form the nucleus of a revived Sanhedrin that would administer ritual
procedures requiring fully ordained authorities. Although the effort
failed because of rabbinic opposition, it reflected the temper of the
times and further fanned messianic hopes sparked shortly before by the
campaigns of Solomon Molkho (c. 1500–32) and David Reubeni (died after
1532) in Italy; Molkho was burned at the stake by the Christian
authorities, and Reubeni died in prison. In Ẕefat itself, Kabbalism soon
entered a new phase under the inspiration of Isaac Luria (1534–72) and
Ḥayyim Vital (1543–1620), who confided to their disciples that the
calamities of Israel were but a mirror of the captivity into which many
sparks of the Godhead itself had fallen. Liturgical innovations and a
novel mystical theology were formulated to redeem the imprisoned
elements of divinity and thus restore creation to the harmony intended
for it.
That the Almighty himself was not quite omnipotent, at least with
respect to the fate of his chosen people, was cautiously hinted in a
Hebrew work of history (1550) by Solomon ibn Verga (1460–1554), who
regarded the Jewish problem as a sociopolitical one to which theological
answers were futile. Such guarded rationalism was entertained by a
number of courageous thinkers in 16th-century Italy, where, despite the
policy of ghettoization (the segregation of the Jewish community in a
restricted quarter) begun by Venice in 1516 and soon extended to all
major Italian cities, the spirit of the Renaissance and the passion for
historical criticism had captivated many Jews. Catholic scholars and
prelates occasionally employed rabbis to instruct them in the Hebrew
language and in the secrets of the Kabbala, which some Christians
believed actually verified the postulates of their own faith. Contacts
with Christian scholars in turn introduced Jews such as Azariah dei
Rossi (c. 1513–78), whose Meor ʿenayim (“Enlightenment of the Eyes”)
inaugurated critical textual study of rabbinical texts, to new bodies of
literature that had been lost to the Jewish community, such as the works
of Philo and Josephus.
Such phenomena, however, were comparatively rare and isolated. The
spread of dogmatic Kabbalism eventually led to the widespread acceptance
of the views of the pseudo-messiah Shabbetai Tzevi (1626–76). Most of
European and Ottoman Jewry was swept into near hysteria in the belief
that the end was now finally at hand. When Shabbetai converted to Islam
after being apprehended by the Ottoman government, all but his most
faithful followers were despondent, though some tried to explain the
apostasy of the pseudo-messiah as a form of voluntary crucifixion for
the sake of the Jews. A witch hunt on the part of traditionalists to
uncover the remaining cells of heresy unsettled Jewish communities
everywhere.
The following century (to c. 1750) was the darkest in the history of
Rabbinic Judaism. Scholarship declined and popular religion became
mechanical to an extent that Jews had never before experienced. Polish
Jews suffered terribly during the Deluge, a period of peasant revolts
and war involving Poland, Russia, and Sweden that began in 1648. The
Jews were slaughtered by rebels and professional soldiers during the
war, which was fought mostly on Polish soil, and many survivors were
sold as slaves in Turkey. The massacres and impoverishment of Polish
Jewry after 1648 brought a pall over the growing eastern European
centres of Jewish life. Antinomian eruptions of extreme Shabbetaians
under the leadership of the self-proclaimed messiah and later Catholic
convert Jacob Frank (1726–91) alarmed Gentile authorities almost as much
as they did Jews. But the fossilization referred to above was only
apparent. Beneath the surface many were restlessly searching for new
avenues of faith, and the 18th century saw fresh responses that set the
history of the Jews and of Judaism in new directions and marked the
beginning of a new era.
Gerson D. Cohen
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) » The
new situation
The criteria used to identify dividing points in the history of the Jews
and Judaism are especially notable when it comes to the start of the
modern period. Historians of thought traditionally place this point in
the late 17th century, with the appearance of those who abandoned, in
part or in toto, their inherited Jewish faith but continued to regard
themselves—and to be regarded by others—as Jews. Some Israeli scholars
prefer a date of about 1700, with the first stirrings of the emigration
from the Diaspora to the Holy Land, which culminated in the mid-20th
century in the creation of the State of Israel. Political and social
historians put the start of the modern period in the second half of the
18th century, when the American and French revolutions eventually
resulted in the emancipation of Jews from discriminatory and segregative
laws and customs, their attainment of legal status as citizens, and the
freedom of individual Jews to pursue careers appropriate to their
talents. These varying approaches have one thing in common: the view
that the start of the modern period is marked by the end of the doctrine
of the exile, whereby Jews saw themselves as a people waiting out
centuries of woe in alien lands until the moment of divine redemption.
Jewish modernity for most scholars is characterized by the end of a
passive waiting for the messiah and the beginning of an active pursuit
of personal or national fulfillment on this earth and preferably in
one’s own lifetime.
Although the 18th century Haskala (Enlightenment) among the
Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe is often taken as the starting
point of Jewish modernity, the process of Westernization had begun a
good deal earlier among the Sephardim in western Europe and in Italy.
The Marranos who went to the Jewish communities of Amsterdam and Venice
in the 17th century to declare themselves Jews carried with them the
Western education that they had acquired while living as Christians in
the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the habits of criticism that had kept
them from assimilating into the majority during their Marrano years.
Some, such as Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632–77), a son of Marranos,
applied these skills to all of the biblical tradition, including
especially their own religion. In Italy there was an older Jewish
community that had never been sealed off culturally from the influence
of its environment; some of its figures were influenced by, and
participated in, the main currents of the Renaissance.
Increased contact with Western languages, manners, and customs came
to the Ashkenazim only in the 18th century, when new economic
opportunities created such possibilities. Jewish bankers and brokers in
various German principalities, army provisioners in most European
countries, capitalists who were permitted to live in places such as
Berlin because they opened new factories or were otherwise helpful to
the expansion of the economy—all were in increasing contact with Gentile
society, and most of them began to strive for full acceptance. Around
this wealthy element there arose a number of intellectuals who agitated
for the end of ghettoization as a necessary preamble to the emancipation
of the Jews.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) » The
Haskala, or Enlightenment » In central Europe
The most outstanding figure of the 18th-century Jewish Enlightenment was
the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), a devoted adherent of
traditional Judaism who turned away from the historic Jewish
preoccupation with the Talmud and its literature to the intellectual
world of the European Enlightenment. Mendelssohn did not attempt a
philosophical defense of Judaism until pressed to do so by Christians
who questioned how he could remain faithful to what they saw as an
unenlightened religion. In his response, Jerusalem, published in 1783,
Mendelssohn defended the validity of Judaism as the inherited faith of
the Jews by defining it as revealed divine legislation, and he declared
himself at the same time to be a believer in the universal religion of
reason, of which Judaism was but one historical manifestation. Aware
that he was accepted by Gentile society as an “exceptional Jew” who had
embraced Western culture, Mendelssohn’s message to his own community was
to become Westerners, to seek out the culture of the Enlightenment. To
that end he joined with a poet, Naphtali Herz (Hartwig) Wessely
(1725–1805), in translating the Torah into German, combining Hebrew
characters with modern German phonetics in an effort to displace
Yiddish, and wrote a modern biblical commentary in Hebrew, the Beʾur
(“Commentary”). Within a generation, Mendelssohn’s Bible was to be found
in almost every literate Jewish home in central Europe, serving to
introduce its readers to German culture. Through his personal example
and his life’s work, Mendelssohn made it possible for his fellow Jews to
join the Western world without sacrificing their Judaism; indeed, he
convinced them that Judaism is compatible with an intellectual
commitment to universal reason.
Mendelssohn’s work was carried on by the Berlin Haskala, a group of
Jewish intellectuals who had gathered around Mendelssohn during his
lifetime; the Haskala was most active in the 20 years following his
death. In the pages of their Hebrew-language periodical, Ha-Meʾassef
(“The Collector”), they preached the virtues of secular culture and
publicized the need for secular education. In response to the Edict of
Toleration promulgated in 1781 by the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II
(reigned 1765–90), Naphtali Wessely issued an urgent call for the reform
of Jewish education as a prelude to full emancipation. Secular
subjects—mathematics, German, and world history and literature—were to
take precedence over traditional Jewish studies. The study of the Bible,
because it was generally acknowledged to be a fundamental part of
Western culture, was to be emphasized at the expense of the customary
focus on the Talmud. Following this model, modern Jewish schools were
established by Jewish intellectuals and businessmen in several German
cities, among them Frankfurt and Hamburg. As its educational activities
began to bear fruit in the wide dissemination of secular culture, the
Berlin Haskala abandoned the use of Hebrew for German and gradually
disintegrated. Unlike Mendelssohn himself, his immediate intellectual
descendants, including his own children, were unable to strike a balance
between Jewish and secular culture; their Western education undermined
their religious faith, and they saw themselves as Europeans rather than
as Jews.
One of Mendelssohn’s disciples, David Friedlaender, offered to
convert to Christianity without accepting Christian dogma or Christian
rites; he felt that both Judaism and Christianity shared the same
religious truth but that there was no relation at all between that truth
and Judaism’s ceremonial law. The offer was refused because Friedlaender
would not acknowledge the superiority of Christianity and make an
unconditional commitment to it. Unlike Friedlaender, many other
followers of Mendelssohn chose to leave the Jewish faith as the only way
to win full acceptance in European society.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) »
The Haskala, or Enlightenment » In eastern Europe
Thus, the Haskala was quickly played out in central Europe; as an idea,
its further career was to continue in eastern Europe, particularly in
the Russian Empire, where it flourished in the middle third of the 19th
century until, as a result of the pogroms of 1881, Jews lost faith in
the willingness of Russians to accept “enlightened” Jews. It was a tenet
of the Russian Haskala that the tsar was a benevolent leader who would
bestow emancipation upon his Jewish subjects as soon as they proved
themselves worthy of it. A goal of the Russian Haskala, therefore, was
for the Jews to transform themselves into model citizens—enlightened,
unsuperstitious, devoted to secular learning and productive occupations.
Following the example of the Berlin Haskala, a Russian Hebrew-language
writer, Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–1860), published a pamphlet, Teʿuda
be-Yisrael (“Testimony in Israel”), extolling the benefits of secular
education. At the same time, writers such as Joseph Perl (1774–1839) and
Isaac Erter (1792–1851), though traditional Jews themselves, attacked in
virulent satire the superstitious folk customs of the masses, thereby
opening the way to the anticlericalism that became characteristic of the
Russian Haskala.
In the 1840s and ’50s the group’s emphasis shifted from satirical
attacks on the cultural parochialism of the Pale of Settlement (the
regions to which the Jews were restricted) to romanticization of life
outside the Pale, including periods of the Jewish past. Thus, Hebrew
poets and novelists in Russia, such as Micah Judah Lebensohn (1828–52)
and Abraham Mapu (1808–67), contributed to the creation of a modern
Hebrew literature. In the 1860s the Russian Haskala, reflecting the
larger political climate, entered a “positivist” phase, calling for
practical social and economic reforms. Hebrew-language journals were
established, and the Hebrew essay and didactic poetry, calling for
religious and cultural reforms, came into their own, particularly in the
hands of the poet Judah Leib Gordon (1830–92) and the essayist Moses
Leib Lilienblum (1843–1910). Abandoning the original Hebrew and German
orientation of the Russian Haskala, a number of Jewish intellectuals—the
most prominent of whom were Yoachim Tarnopol (1810–1900), Osip
Rabinovich (1817–69), and Lev Levanda (1835–88)—became Russifiers,
founding Russian-language Jewish weeklies devoted to “patriotism,
emancipation, modernism.” Like their contemporary fellow Jews in western
Europe, they declared themselves to be Russians by nationality and Jews
by religious belief alone. In 1863 a group of wealthy Jews in St.
Petersburg and Odessa created the Society for the Promotion of Culture
Among the Jews of Russia for the purpose of educating Russian Jewry into
“readiness for citizenship.” The goal of all segments of the Russian
Haskala in the 1860s and ’70s was to turn Jews into good Russians and to
make their Jewishness a matter of personal choice. But the hopes of the
Haskala were upset by the reaction of Russians following the
assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Several Jewish communities
were destroyed in pogroms, which often received the tacit approval of
the governing authorities. Jewish economic life was severely curtailed,
and quotas for Jewish students were put in place in secular educational
institutions. The bright optimism of Russian-Jewish intellectuals faded.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) »
Religious reform movements
One element of Westernization that the Haskala championed was the reform
of religion. This movement began in western Europe during the Napoleonic
period (1800–15), when certain aspects of Jewish belief and observance
were seen as incompatible with the new position of the Jew in Western
society. Napoleon convoked a Sanhedrin in 1807 to create a modern
definition of Judaism that renounced Jewish nationhood and national
aspirations, asserted that rabbinic authority was purely spiritual, and
recognized the priority of civil over religious authority even in
matters of intermarriage. In countries other than France, the rationale
for reform, at least in its early years, was more aesthetic than
doctrinal. The external aspects of Jewish worship—i.e., the form of the
service—was unacceptable to the newly Westernized members of the Jewish
bourgeoisie in both Germany and the United States, whose cultural
standards had been shaped by the surrounding society and who desired
above all to resemble their Gentile peers. Thus, the short-lived Reform
temple established in Seesen in 1810 by the pioneer German reformer
Israel Jacobson (1768–1828) introduced organ and choir music, allowed
men and women to sit together during worship, delivered the sermon in
German instead of Hebrew, and omitted liturgical references to a
personal messiah and the restoration of Israel. A more radical temple
established in Hamburg in 1818 adopted all of Jacobson’s reforms and
published its own much-abridged prayer book, which deleted almost all
references to the long-awaited restoration of Zion. Reformers in
Charleston, South Carolina, introduced similar changes in the synagogue
ritual in 1824. It was apparent to the reformers that in Western society
Judaism would have to divest itself of its alien customs and conform to
the cultural and intellectual standards of the new “age of reason.”
German Reform in the 1840s became institutionalized, a matter of
organized formal belief and practice. At a series of synods held at
Brunswick (1844), Frankfurt (1845), and Breslau (1846), it created the
first theological rationalization for changes introduced to the faith in
the previous generation. Judaism, it was declared, had always been a
developmental religion that conformed to the demands of the times.
Moreover, the reformers maintained, the Jews were no longer a nation and
therefore were bound not by their religious and political code of law
but only by the dictates of moral law. Rituals that impeded full Jewish
participation in German social and political life were no longer
considered valid expressions of Jewish religious truth. The use of
Hebrew in religious services was limited; practices such as circumcision
and the dietary laws and all national messianic hopes were questioned in
light of the “spirit of the times.” Messianism in Reform Judaism was
transformed into active concern for social welfare in the present, and
the Jewish role in history became Diaspora-centred; some even thought of
it as constituting a mission to the Gentiles.
Although Reform Judaism was initiated in Europe, its success was
limited there because many central European governments would not
recognize more than one form of Judaism in any one locale. Even in areas
where it had taken root, by the middle of the 19th century, European
Reform (now usually called “Liberal Judaism”) lost much of its early
radicalism. Reform was much more successful in the United States, where
it was carried by massive numbers of German Jewish immigrants in the
1840s and where it coalesced with existing American reform movements. By
1880 almost all of the 200 synagogues in the United States (amalgamated
in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873) were Reform. In
1885 a conference of Reform rabbis formulated what was then the most
comprehensive statement of Reform philosophy in the so-called Pittsburgh
Platform. This manifesto announced that Judaism was an evolutionary
faith and no longer a national one, and it declared that the Mosaic and
rabbinical laws regulating diet, purity, and dress were “entirely
foreign to our present mental and spiritual state.” While the
preservation of historical identity was considered beneficial, the
maintenance of tradition was not; the Talmud was to be treated merely as
religious literature, not as legislation. The principles of the
Pittsburgh Platform remained the official philosophy of the American
Reform movement until 1937, when a later generation, seeking to meet
different emotional and intellectual needs, reintroduced the concept of
Jewish personhood into the Columbus Platform; this document also
reemphasized Hebrew and traditional liturgy and practices. After World
War II, Reform in the United States developed along two tracks. It
departed in new ways from traditional Judaism in ordaining women (1972),
allowing patrilineal descent (1983), and sanctifying same-sex marriage
(2000). On the other hand, some Reform Jews began reintegrating
long-discarded rituals into worship services. This neo-ritualism
stimulated greater use of Hebrew in prayer books and a more dynamic
Zionism.
If Reform was a child of Enlightenment rationalism, Conservative
Judaism was a child of historical romanticism. It began in 1845, when
Zacharias Frankel (1801–75) and a group of followers seceded from a
second Reform synod at Frankfurt over the issue of limiting the use of
Hebrew to a small core of prayers. For Frankel, Hebrew represented the
spirit of Judaism and the Jewish people, and Judaism itself was not
merely a theology of ethics but the historical expression of the Jewish
experience; this definition he called “positive-historical Judaism.”
Although Conservative Judaism conceived of Judaism as a developmental
religion, it charted its course through close study of tradition and the
will of the people and thus came to largely traditional conclusions
about religious observance.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) »
Orthodox developments » In western and central Europe
Although affected by the efforts at religious reform, the bulk of the
official Jewish establishment in western and central Europe remained
Orthodox (a term first used by Reform leaders to designate their
traditionalist opponents). Under the leadership of Samson Raphael Hirsch
(1808–88) in Frankfurt, a more modern and militant form of Judaism
arose. Known as Neo-Orthodoxy, the new movement asserted its right to
break with any Jewish community that contained Reform elements. The
teachings of Neo-Orthodoxy were profoundly influential, for they
indicated the possibility of living a ritually and religiously full life
while being totally integrated into Western society. This was
accomplished by positing a theoretical division between religion and
culture: in religion the Jews were to remain Orthodox (though deferring
their messianic aspirations to the unforeseeable future), while in
manners and culture they were to become Western. This form of Orthodoxy,
which became the intellectual model for Western Orthodoxy, continued
into the 21st century in the United States in a variety of religious and
academic institutions (such as the Yeshiva University in New York City
and the bulk of English-speaking Orthodox synagogues), coexisting in
substantial tension with a number of Orthodox groups, most notably the
Lubavitcher and Satmar Hasidim (see Hasidism) and some Talmudic
academies that viewed the Western world as the enemy and chose to
re-create the ghetto.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) »
Orthodox developments » In eastern Europe
By the mid-18th century, Orthodoxy in eastern Europe, having been
convulsed by frantic messianism and stifled by the sterility of
legalistic scholarship, was ripe for revival. In the mid-17th century
the experience of Shabbetaianism, the first messianic movement to excite
virtually all of world Jewry, had revealed the pervasiveness of Jewish
exhaustion with the Exile and fervent longing for messianic redemption.
Later, in the 18th century, the nihilistic sect of Frankists (the
followers of Jacob Frank) transformed that longing into a this-worldly
hysteria. Talmudic piety and study, sunk in excessive pilpul (acute
logical distinctions that often became mere hairsplitting), was
refreshed by the new critical methods of Elijah ben Solomon (1720–97),
the gaon of Vilna. Although essentially a legal rigorist, he was open to
more-scientific methods of textual analysis insofar as they helped him
to elucidate Talmudic texts. Orthodox religious expression also was
raised to a new level with the development of Hasidism (pietism) by
Israel Baʿal Shem Tov (c. 1700–60) in the mid-18th century. Hasidism
contained elements of social protest, being at least in part a movement
of the poor against the wealthy communal leadership and of the unlearned
against the learned—though many of its leaders, among them Rabbi Dov
Baer (1710–72), who was the maggid (“preacher”) of Mezhirich, and Rabbi
Levi Isaac of Berdichev (1740–1810), were well-versed in Talmudic
learning. Nevertheless, it was essentially a non-messianic outcry in the
name of piety, emphasizing prayer and personal religious devotion here
and now. The major innovation that Hasidism introduced into Jewish
religious life was the charismatic leader, the rebbe, who served as
teacher, confessor, wonder-worker, God’s vicar on earth, and,
occasionally, atoning sacrifice. The earliest rebbes were democratically
chosen, but spiritual dynasties formed as the position of leadership
passed to the descendants of the first rebbes on the presumption that
they had inherited their fathers’ charisma. Hasidism spread throughout
eastern Europe and was most successful in Poland.
Hasidism made little headway in Lithuania, where the traditional
rabbinic class, under the leadership of Elijah ben Solomon, was able to
stave off its influence by issuing a ban of excommunication (ḥerem,
“anathema”) against the new movement. The tactic, which involved a
complete boycott and cutting off of communication, was widely embraced
by non-Hasidic rabbis, who were given the title of Mitnaggedim
(“Opponents”) by the Hasidim. In areas where the rabbis had lost the
respect of the masses, however, the ḥerem proved largely ineffective,
and it called forth a round of counter-excommunications by the Hasidic
rebbes. With the passage of time, Hasidim and Mitnaggedim abandoned
their conflict and came to see each other as allies against the threat
to all Orthodox Jewish religion posed by Haskala and secularization. The
impact of Hasidism on eastern European Jewry cannot be overemphasized;
even in Lithuania, where it did not take firm hold, it stimulated the
growth of a homegrown pietism in the Musar (ethicist) movement of the
mid-19th century, and it renewed the Talmudic energies of its opponents.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) »
Developments in scholarship
As the Jews of central Europe moved into mainstream society, a group of
young Jewish intellectuals devoted themselves to Jewish scholarship of a
type far different from traditional Talmudic learning or medieval
philosophy. In 1819 Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) and Moses Moser (1796–1838)
founded the Society for Jewish Culture and Learning. The original group
quickly dissolved, however, and Zunz became the unofficial leader of a
generation of scholars dedicated to the Wissenschaft des Judentums
(“science of Judaism”).
The Wissenschaft movement sought to prove that the Jewish past was
intellectually respectable and worthy of study, and hence that the Jews
deserved an equal place within European societies. Jewish scholarship
was enlisted as a weapon in the battles for change. Thus, Isaac M. Jost
(1793–1860) wrote a general history of the Jews to promote Reform,
Zunz’s Gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt
(1832; “The Worship Sermons of the Jews, Historically Developed”) served
to legitimize the modern innovation of the sermon in the vernacular, and
Abraham Geiger (1810–74), the outstanding leader of German Reform in the
1840s and ’50s, interpreted the Pharisees as the forerunners of the
reformers of his own day. In their work, these intellectuals presented
archetypes of what modern Jews should become. To support their claims of
academic respectability, the Wissenschaft figures highlighted those
aspects of the Jewish past that were closely integrated with general
fields of study. In particular, Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), who
owes his fame to towering achievements in bibliography, was concerned
above all with the contribution of Jews to science, medicine, and
mathematics. These scholars set out to praise Judaism as one of the
cofounders of the Western tradition; they argued that, because the Jews
produced great culture whenever they were not excluded from European
society, they would repeat such accomplishments under conditions of
social and political equality.
The Wissenschaft movement stimulated the critical study of the Jewish
past, and great works of synthesis written from a variety of
perspectives began to appear: the multivolume Geschichte der Juden von
den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1853–76; History of the
Jews), written from a romantic-national point of view by Heinrich Graetz
(1817–91); Dorot ha-rishonim (1897–1932; “The First Generations”), by
Isaac Halevy (1847–1914); Toldot Yisrael (1894; “History of Israel”),
written from an orthodox standpoint by Zeʾev Jawitz; and Die
Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (1925–30; “The World History of the
Jewish People”) by Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), reflecting his belief in
secular, nationalistic communal autonomy. After the 1920s this tradition
of great synthesis was carried on in the United States by Salo W. Baron
(1895–1989), who by the early 1980s had produced 18 volumes of his
Social and Religious History of the Jews (1952–83), and in Israel by
Ben-Zion Dinur (1884–1973), whose chief work was Yisrael ba-gola (3rd
ed., 5 vol., 1961–66; “Israel in the Exile”). Many other first-rank
scholars in Europe, Israel, and the United States have made notable
contributions to the study of Jewish history, rabbinics, and mysticism.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) »
Jewish-Christian relations
Jewish-Christian relations in the 19th century were strained at best and
often broke down during periods of open conflict. The established
Christian churches, particularly Roman Catholicism, were staunch
upholders of the old order; they identified the Jews as the major
beneficiaries of the French Revolution and as the carriers of liberal,
secular, anticlerical, and often revolutionary doctrines. Clerical
anti-Semitism allied itself with the anti-Semitism of the traditional
right in France, and both forms contended with movements that supported
the results of the French Revolution in the great convulsion of the
Dreyfus Affair in the last years of the 19th century (see Dreyfus,
Alfred). In Russia the conflict between the Jews and the Orthodox Church
released the most open and virulent manifestation of religious
anti-Semitism. In the view of the church, the Jews were seeking to
undermine Russian Orthodoxy and the tsar, the very foundations of
Russian society. The church and the tsarist authorities condoned—and
even encouraged—violent pogroms against the Jews in 1881–82 and again in
1905.
Russian Orthodoxy was also active in spreading the blood libel, a
superstitious belief in Jewish ritual murder of Christian children whose
blood would be used to make unleavened bread at Passover. The blood
libel first emerged in the 12th century and often led to the persecution
of Jews; it reemerged in Damascus in 1840 (in which instance the French
consul in Syria initiated the accusation) and in Tiszaeszlár, Hungary,
in 1882. In both cases, torture was used to obtain false confessions,
though the accused were ultimately cleared. The most infamous occurrence
of the blood libel in modern times was the case of Mendel Beilis, a
Jewish bookkeeper in Odessa who was accused of ritual murder by the
tsarist government in 1911. Imprisoned for more than two years, he was
eventually acquitted by an all-Christian jury.
From Russian Orthodox circles too arose the Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion, a fraudulent documentation of an alleged international
Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world by subverting the social order
through liberalism, Freemasonry, and other modern movements. The
concoction appeared about the turn of the 20th century and was proved to
be a forgery by 1921. Despite this demonstration, the Protocols was
widely used in anti-Semitic propaganda in Europe, the United States, and
the Arab world into the 21st century.
In the 20th century, Jews and Christians moved toward mutual
understanding. Although many Christians continued to hold irrational and
hostile attitudes toward Jews, some liberal Christian voices were raised
against anti-Semitism in the early decades of the century. In the United
States the National Conference of Christians and Jews was founded in
1928 in response to the virulent anti-Semitism propagated in Henry
Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Some Christian leaders spoke
out during the 1930s against the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but the
majority of Christian leaders in Europe remained silent, even during the
Holocaust. In 1946, however, the World Council of Churches denounced
anti-Semitism, and in 1965 the Second Vatican Council of the Roman
Catholic Church adopted the schema on the Jews and other non-Christian
religions, which formally revised the church’s traditional attitude
toward the Jews as the killers of Christ. A growing feeling of ecumenism
was shared between Jews and Christians; indeed, Pope John Paul II made
improved relations between Catholics and Jews a hallmark of his papacy.
Although there remain many difficulties related to the question of the
place that Zionism and the State of Israel hold within Judaism, the
older forms of official church anti-Semitism have been radically
diminished.
The history of Judaism » Modern
Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) » Zionism
The most striking of the new phenomena in Jewish life was Zionism,
which, insofar as it focused on the return to Zion (the poetic term for
the Holy Land), recalled older religious themes. Because it stressed the
establishment of a secular state, however, Zionism was yet another
example of the secularization of Jewish life and of Jewish messianism.
In its secular aspects, Zionism attempted to complete the emancipation
of the Jews by transforming them into a nation like all other nations.
Although it drew upon the general currents of 19th-century European
nationalism, its major impetus came from the revival of a virulent form
of racist anti-Semitism in the last decades of the 19th century, as
noted above. Zionism reacted to anti-Semitic contentions that the Jews
were aliens in European society and could never hope to be integrated
into it in significant numbers; it transformed this charge into a basic
premise of a program of national regeneration and resettlement. Zionism
has come to occupy roughly the same place in Jewish life as the Social
Gospel did in Christian life. Involvement in Israel as the new centre of
Jewish energies, creativity, and renewal served as a kind of secular
religion for many Diaspora Jews.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) »
American Judaism
The history of Judaism in the United States is the story of several
fresh beginnings. In the colonial period the character of the tiny
American Jewish community was shaped by the earliest Sephardic
immigrants. The community was officially Orthodox but, unlike European
Jewish communities, was voluntaristic, and by the early 19th century
much of the younger generation had moved away from the faith. By the
mid-19th century a new wave of central European immigrants revived the
declining community and remade it to serve their own needs. Primarily
small shopkeepers and traders, the new immigrants migrated westward,
founding new Jewish centres that were almost entirely controlled by
laymen.
Life on the frontier in an open society
created a predisposition for religious reform, and it is significant
that the greatest American Reform Jewish leader of the 19th century,
Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900), was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Wise sought
to unite all of American Jewry in the new nontraditional institutions
that he founded: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873),
Hebrew Union College (1875), and the Central Conference of American
Rabbis (1889); but his ever more radical reforming spirit ultimately
drove traditionalist elements into opposition.
The head of the traditionalists was
Isaac Leeser (1806–68), a native of Germany, who had attempted to create
an indigenous American community along the lines of a modernized
traditionalism. After his death, Conservative forces became
disorganized, but, in reaction to Reform, they defined themselves by
their attachment to the Sabbath, the dietary laws, and especially to
Hebrew as the language of prayer. Under the leadership of Sabato Morais
(1823–97), a traditional Sephardic Jew of Italian birth, Conservative
circles in 1886 founded a rabbinic seminary of their own, the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America.
The eastern European immigrants who
moved in large numbers to American shores from 1881 to 1914 were
profoundly different in culture and manners from the older elements of
the American Jewish community, and they and their descendants have made
American Judaism what it is today. The bridge between the existing
Jewish community led by German Jews of Reform persuasion and the new
immigrant masses was the traditionalist element among the older
settlers. A traditionalist, Cyrus Adler (1863–1940), cooperated with the
German Reform circle of Jacob Schiff (1847–1920) in reorganizing the
Jewish Theological Seminary (1902) and other institutions for the
purpose of Americanizing the eastern European immigrants. Enough eastern
European rabbis and scholars had immigrated, however, to create their
own synagogues, which reproduced the customs of the Old World. In 1880
almost all of the 200 Jewish congregations in the United States were
Reform, but by 1890 there were 533 synagogues, and most of the new ones
founded by immigrant groups were Orthodox. The Union of Orthodox Jewish
Congregations, which was established in 1898 by elements associated with
the Jewish Theological Seminary, was soon taken over by Yiddish-speaking
recent immigrants for whom the seminary was much too liberal. In 1902
immigrant rabbis also formed their own body, the Union of Orthodox
Rabbis of the United States and Canada (the Agudath ha-Rabbanim), which
fostered the creation of yeshivas (rabbinic academies) of the old type.
In 1915 two small yeshivas, Etz Chaim and Rabbi Isaac Elhanan
Theological Seminary, merged and undertook a program of further growth,
adding Yeshiva College of secular studies in 1928 and becoming Yeshiva
University in 1945. The eastern European Orthodox elements concentrated
primarily on Jewish education, and it was they who introduced the
movement for Jewish day schools, analogous to Christian parochial
schools. Gradually, an American version of Orthodoxy developed on the
Neo-Orthodox model of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), which combined
institutional separatism with a certain openness to general culture.
The immigrants and their children had
three desires: to advance socially by joining older congregations or
forming their own in an Americanized image, to affirm an unideological
commitment to Jewish life, and to maintain their ties to the overseas
Jewish communities of their origin. With their strong sense of Jewish
personhood, they introduced Zionism into American Jewish life and
accepted the basic ideas of the Reconstructionism of Mordecai Kaplan
(1881–1983), which was committed to Zionism. A small group of
anti-Zionists remained a significant force in the 1930s and ’40s, but
their central organization, the American Council for Judaism,
represented the descendants of earlier German Jewish immigrants. The
later immigrants took over all the earlier institutions of the Jewish
community and imbued them with their own spirit.
American Jewish religious life is a
continuum, from the most traditional Orthodoxy to the most radical
Reconstructionism. In theory, all Orthodox groups agree on the revealed
nature of all of Jewish law. For Reform groups, the moral doctrine of
Judaism is divine and its ritual law is man-made; Conservatives see
Judaism as the working out in both areas of a divine revelation that is
incarnate in a slowly changing human history; and the Reconstructionists
(who also include some Conservative and Reform Jews) view Judaism as the
evolving civilization created by the Jewish people in the light of its
highest conscience. The role of the rabbi is substantially the same in
all three groups: no longer a Talmudic scholar but a preacher, pastor,
and administrator, a cross between a parish priest and the leader of an
ethnic group. Religious life for the three major Jewish
denominations—Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative—revolves around the
individual synagogue and the denomination to which it belongs. As
religious identification has become increasingly respectable in American
life, the Jews have followed the American norm, affiliating in greater
numbers with synagogues, though often for ethnic or social rather than
religious reasons.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) »
Judaism in other lands
Modernity came first to the Jewish people of Europe. It was
therefore within the European context that representatives of important
non-Ashkenazi communities—such as the proto-Zionist Sephardi Judah ben
Solomon Ḥai Alkalai (1798–1878) of Sarajevo and the Luzzatto family and
Elijah Benamozegh (1822–1900) in Italy—participated in variations of
Jewish modernity. In England and France more so than in Germany or
Russia, the central focus of Jewish experience was Wissenschaft des
Judentums, with its Enlightenment ideology; there the “republic of
scholarship” became the synagogue of the Jewish intelligentsia. In
neither country did Reform Judaism gain a major foothold, for the
Orthodox establishment liberalized its synagogue practice while
retaining its essentially conservative outlook. In Anglo-Jewish life in
the last decades of the 19th century, the two most pronounced modernist
tendencies were the moderate, romantic traditionalism of Solomon
Schechter (1847–1915) and the “renewed Karaism” of Claude Joseph
Goldsmid Montefiore (1858–1938), whose version of religious reform was
“back to the Bible.”
In South America and Canada, Jewish
modernity appeared late, for European Jewry arrived in those places even
later than in the United States, attaining significant numbers only in
the 20th century. These communities were dependent on immigrant scholars
and intellectuals for serious Jewish thought. Jews in the Arab lands in
North Africa and the Middle East, living in traditional societies,
entered modernity even later than those on the peripheries of Europe.
Many of them received their first introduction to the Western world in
schools set up by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (a Jewish defense
organization centred in Paris), which combined Jewish education with the
language and values of French civilization. Yet most of these
communities remained traditionalist almost up to the moment when they
were expelled or felt compelled to relocate, beginning in 1948, when the
State of Israel was created. The ferment of modernity in all its forms
is now being felt in their ranks. In Israel, which has received a large
segment of Sephardic Jewry, the attention of these communities has
turned to gaining equality with the more advanced Ashkenazim rather than
to developing forms of modern Jewish thought.
Other groups that may be described as
regional or ethnic include the Bene Israel, descendants of Jewish
settlers in the Bombay region of India, whose deviation in some Halakhic
matters from the present Orthodox consensus has raised problems for
those among them who have migrated to Israel; the Falashas of Ethiopia,
whose development has been almost entirely outside the mainstream
described in this article; and the Black Jews of the United States,
whose place in and relation to the rest of the community remains
unclear.
The history of Judaism » Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present) »
Contemporary Judaism
As a result of the Holocaust, Judaism has become a non-European
religion; its three major centres, which together include more than
three-fourths of world Jewry, are Israel, the Slavic region of the
former Soviet Union, and the United States. Although Jews constitute
only a small fraction of the population of the United States, Judaism
plays an important role in American life; with Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism it is regarded as one of the major American faiths.
Similarly, in the international realm of Western religion, Judaism has
been welcomed as a partner able to deal with other major religions as an
equal on issues such as anti-Semitism, human rights, and world peace.
Within its own community, Jewry is
faced with the increasing secularization of Jewish identity in its three
major centres, each in its own way. In the United States the open
society and the “melting pot” ideologies of past generations have
fostered among many Jews a sense of Jewish identity increasingly devoid
of concrete religious, national, or historical content; in the former
Soviet Union, government policy from the 1930s had banned the teaching
of Judaism and Jewish culture to the young and had severely discouraged
any manifestation of Jewish identity as a sign of the political
disloyalty of “rootless cosmopolitans”; and in Israel a secular
nationalism has taken root, raising questions about the role that
Judaism plays in the identity of the average Israeli.
Nonetheless, underneath the external
secularization there are signs of a deep and persisting religious
fervour, in which the sense of history, community, and personal
authenticity figure as the intertwined strands of Jewish religious life,
especially as it has been affected by the State of Israel. Some of the
rituals of the Jewish tradition, especially the rites of passage at the
crucial stages of individual existence, are almost universally observed;
in the United States, for example, more than 80 percent of Jewish
children receive some formal religious training. Among Jewish youth
there is, in some circles, a quest for tradition. In the United States,
Jewish communes have been established that seek new forms of Jewish
expression; in Israel, groups such as Mevaqshe Derekh (“Seekers of the
Way”) have tried to bridge secular Israeli culture and Jewish tradition
and to maintain traditional Jewish ethical standards even in wartime; in
Russia, thousands of young people gather on several occasions of the
year to dance and sing and express solidarity in front of the synagogues
in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, signs of major weaknesses persist.
The rate of intermarriage among Jews in the Diaspora has increased,
while regular synagogue attendance, at the very highest 20 percent in
the United States, remains far below church attendance.
Despite their lack of traditional
piety, there is a general sense among Jews that they remain Jews not
because of the force of anti-Semitism but because of the attractiveness
of their tradition and their sense of a common history and destiny.
Although in 1945 the world Jewish community, decimated and horrified by
the Holocaust, felt in danger of disappearing, there appeared to be no
such despair in the last quarter of the century, when there was an
expectation that Jewish communal feeling would remain strong—especially,
for many or most Jews, in light of the existence of the State of Israel.
Judaism enjoyed a heightened dignity in the eyes of the world, not only
because of the creation of the State of Israel but also because of
Judaism’s close relations with other world religions. Although the
recurring phenomenon of the alienation of young Jews from their
tradition was troubling, it was no more so than in recent past
generations. Along with other major religions, Judaism’s most disturbing
problem was how to deal with secular ideologies and the growth of
secularism within its own ranks. Thus, at the beginning of the 21st
century, it appeared that Judaism would have to contend with as many
problems as the other major religions did, but it would face them with
no less confidence—and with more confidence than it had felt at the
start of the previous century.
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg
Encyclopaedia Britannica
