Mediating Modernity: Challenges and Trends in the Jewish Encounter with the Modern World

By Lauren B. Strauss

In Mediating Modernity, contemporary Jewish scholars pay tribute to Michael A. Meyer, scholar of German-Jewish history and the history of Reform Judaism, with a collection of essays that highlight growing diversity within the discipline of Jewish studies. The occasion of Meyer’s seventieth birthday has served as motivation for his colleagues Lauren B. Strauss and Michael Brenner to compile this volume, with essays by twenty-four leading academics, representing institutions in five countries.

Mediating Modernity is introduced by an overview of modern Jewish historiography, largely drawing on Meyer’s work in that field, delineating important connections between the writing of history and the environment in which it is written. Meyer’s own areas of specialization are reflected in essays on Moses Mendelssohn, German-Jewish historiography, the religious and social practices of German Jews, Reform Judaism, and various Jewish communities in America. The volume’s field of inquiry is broadened by essays that deal with gender issues, literary analysis, and the historical relationship of Israel and the Palestinians.

Though other volumes have been compiled to honor Jewish historians, Mediating Modernity is unique in the personal and intellectual relationships shared by its contributors and Michael A. Meyer. Scholars of Jewish studies, German history, and religious history will appreciate this timely volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2008
• ISBN: 9780814339930

Lauren B. Strauss

Michael Brenner is professor of Jewish history and culture at the University of Munich. Lauren B. Strauss is a lecturer in modern Jewish history and literature at the George Washington University and the American University in Washington, DC.

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Modernity through the Eyes of Its Chroniclers

The Scholar as Interpreter and Shaper of Modern Jewish Life

LAUREN B. STRAUSS

In Ideas of Jewish History, the landmark collection analyzing the development of modern Jewish historical inquiry through the works of its authors, Michael A. Meyer observed, For modern Jews, a conception of their past is no mere academic matter. It is vital to their self-definition.¹ In this spirit, the essays collected here, written by over twenty respected scholars on three continents, have contributed not only to a dispassionate study of the Jews as a unique social and religious group but also to the evolving self-perception of Jews who seek a greater understanding of their past—often in the interest of shaping their future.

In the same vein, scholars who pioneered the scientific study of Judaism as part of the school of Wissenschaft des Judentums in nineteenth-century Germany are often lauded, appropriately, as the first group to embark on serious critical studies of Jewish history and culture. Their intellectual example has inspired generations of historians to confront the world’s most geographically diverse and durable people with scholarly tools that attempt to transcend partisanship and instead to offer a cogent picture of the Jewish people’s unique experiences. But these historians’ individual stories are in many cases as instructive as their writing, highlighting the degree to which the lives of some scholars have been closely bound up with their intellectual output. For some of the Wissenschaft historians, writes Meyer, their work became their way of being Jewish.² This intensity of feeling toward one’s subject can, in our own time, also be applied to Michael A. Meyer and many of his colleagues, though it is only one of the important ways he and they express their Judaism.

The links between Jewish scholarship and the personal involvement of its practitioners are profoundly illuminated in the present volume. While these articles have been compiled to honor one particular member of the profession, it is in the aggregate of the articles that the relationship of the scholar to his or her material is best illustrated. Here, we include American historians who stand at the helm of modern Jewish religious institutions, Israelis who have come from around the world to realize their lives and careers in the Jewish state, gentile scholars—mostly residing in European countries—who are among the first in the non-Jewish world to study the Jewish experience from a perspective of genuine scholarly interest rather than from antisemitism or philosemitism, and pillars of the growing field of Jewish studies in the American academy who must continually balance their role as scholar with the expectation of being educators and sometimes spokespeople for the contemporary Jewish community.

The connections between these scholars and the community whose history and culture they study are complex, touching on questions of Jewish self-definition and identity in the modern world and the way the latter is bolstered (and sometimes challenged) by historical data and often used for purposes that reach beyond the concerns of the academy. It would be difficult to find a scholar whose life and career more acutely reflect this tension than Michael A. Meyer, who is both fully involved in contemporary concerns of Jewish life and committed to maintaining his scholarly remove.

As Meyer himself argues in Ideas of Jewish History and elsewhere, the work of modern historians of the Jewish experience has often reflected the needs and self-perceptions of the authors and their times almost as much as their subject matter. Thus, for example, Wissenschaft scholars’ romanticization of Jews in Muslim Spain reflected their own desire to find a model of a Jew who both circulated in non-Jewish society at very high levels and was attractive to non-Jews. Salo Baron’s more sociological approach echoed the American values surrounding him, and his anti-lachrymose conception of Jewish history stance reflected his desire that the Jew not be seen as a mere victim. Simon Dubnov’s writing revealed his personal valuing of Diaspora nationalism, Raphael Mahler’s incorporated his own Marxist sympathies, and Zionists like Benzion Dinur gave Israel pride of place in their stories of the Jewish trajectory in modern times. All—no matter how professional and thorough their methods—were undeniably responding to a deeply felt need in their experience of the times.

In Germany, Isaac Marcus Jost was, by all accounts, the first German-Jewish historian to write a comprehensive work of Jewish history. After Jost, German Jewry produced an impressive number of historians who turned to a broad variety of themes of Jewish history, from Leopold Zunz’s studies of liturgy and philology, through Heinrich Graetz’s magisterial History of the Jews, up to Ismar Elbogen’s comprehensive History of the Jews in Germany, published during its waning hours in 1935. Hardly any other community has reflected so profoundly on its own past. Arguably, Michael Meyer, who was born in Berlin two years after the publication of Elbogen’s history, is the last representative of this venerable chain of German-born Jewish historians between the first fruits of enlightenment and the darkening times of destruction.

As with any other historian, the biographical context matters in Meyer’s oeuvre as well. Although a product of prewar German Jewry with its Liberal religious traditions and its deep attachment to German culture, he was raised among the German-Jewish émigré community in Los Angeles and brought up as part of American Jewry. Thus, his work is not only shaped by the tradition of Wissenschaft des Judentums but is an epitaph to this tradition as well. During the last four decades, he has written on almost every aspect of the rich German-Jewish culture. All of the significant predecessors mentioned earlier, from Jost to Elbogen, have been themselves objects of his studies. Like most of them, he too is deeply embedded both in the study of European history and in the Jewish sources themselves. There has been, of course, a key question driving each of these scholars. For Jost it was the issue of legal integration of the Jews in the societies in which they lived; for Zunz it was his near-obsession to rescue the treasures of the Jewish past; and for Graetz it was the idea of Judaism as the purest representation of the monotheistic idea. If there is any continuous element in the writings of Michael Meyer, a century after these luminaries, it is the ever-present connection between Judaism and modernity. How can the two be reconciled?

In his first major publication, Meyer sought the origins of the modern Jew.³ He found them in the period between Moses Mendelssohn and Leopold Zunz, in the Haskalah and in the Wissenschaft des Judentums. But the search for these origins would continue to preoccupy him for many decades, through his landmark essay Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin? up to the fourvolume German-Jewish History in Modern Times, and beyond.⁴ What is Jewish and what is modern, and how do the two come together? These complex questions, to which Michael Meyer has given us some of the most profound answers in the last forty years, remain among the key issues of any occupation with Jewish history. As several contributors to this volume have testified, many of the parameters of questioning and analysis in modern Jewish scholarship—and many of their own ideas—have been inspired by Meyer’s work, in particular his continuing struggle to plumb the depths of the connection between modernity and the Jewish experience. Some of the most incisive essays in this volume, in fact, take their course directly from his famous article that compares prevailing views of when modernity began for the Jews. Elisheva Carlebach sheds new light on the Jewish calendar and the issue of its codification, while David Ruderman takes advantage of Meyer’s question to present his own ground-breaking work here, proposing a scheme of periodization for early modern Jewish history.

Meyer’s early and abiding fascination with the figure of Moses Mendelssohn, and the case he made forty years ago to grant Mendelssohn the title of the world’s first modern Jew, have also found echoes in the scholarship that followed his initial work. Mendelssohn’s oeuvre has been illuminated from almost every angle, but as Shmuel Feiner asks, can one speculate about his dreams and nightmares? What did he expect from the society around him, and to what extent were his expectations fulfilled? Meanwhile, Mendelssohn’s long shadow, which reached far into the twentieth century, forms the subject of Michael Brenner’s inquiry. It is well known that both those who created Reform Judaism and those who created modern Orthodox Judaism claimed him as their ideal hero. Less well known is how Mendelssohn’s heroic shadow faded away even among German Jews in the early twentieth century. His legacy, however, survives in a variety of realms, not the least of which is his example as biblical translator for a modern age. Richard N. Levy derives inspiration from this aspect of Mendelssohn’s tremendous intellect, ruminating on the implications of translation and offering his own forays into this venture.

As with Meyer’s predecessors in Wissenschaft, his interests are also more than purely scholarly ones. Living at the turn of the twentyfirst century, Michael Meyer has continually asked himself not only how previous generations could reconcile Judaism and modernity but also how contemporary Jews can create a kind of Judaism that does not escape from modernity but rather integrates it. Here, the different parts of his biography add up: his German-Jewish birth and American-Jewish upbringing, his dedication to the Hebrew language (whose reemergence is itself one of the great wonders of modern Jewish life), and his adherence to Jewish tradition within the context of Reform Jewish ideology—along with over forty years of teaching at the intellectual center of Reform Judaism, the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). The present collection counts among its essays a contribution by David Ellenson, who brings his perspective as rabbi, historian, and president of HUC-JIR to bear. Ellenson focuses on Meyer’s significant role in clarifying the intent and purpose of Reform Judaism for its adherents and for the rest of the world, pointing both to his personal example and to his scholarship—particularly in his monumental Response to Modernity.⁵ As Ismar Schorsch, former chancellor of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary of America writes here in a personal tribute to his friend and colleague, Meyer has always resided intellectually in a two-storied dwelling, with Reform Judaism on one level and historical research at its foundation.

Other themes that resonate for Meyer as a Zionist and as a Jew who was forced to leave his native land are also sounded by scholars in this volume, as they work from diverse assumptions about Israel, the premises upon which the State was founded, and the role of displacement as it relates to Jews and modern world history. Perhaps the two most divergent essays dealing with these topics are those by Evyatar Friesel and David N. Myers. Friesel, a German-born Israeli, passionately inveighs against those who, through antisemitism or ignorance, would read Israel and the Jewish people out of history, particularly in discussions of Israel’s political realities. Meanwhile, Myers excavates a little-known essay by the late historian Simon Rawidowicz in an effort to better understand both its author and the school of New Israeli Historicism that Rawidowicz anticipated decades before its ascendancy. But the close links between Israel’s culture and its position in the world are even apparent from less political vantage points. Two essays here—by Arnold J. Band, writing in America, and Richard I. Cohen, in Israel—analyze a fictionalized autobiography by Israeli author Amos Oz and ponder the significance of his memories for a generation of Israelis who grew up in the same milieu. These essays emphasize the extent to which a writer like Oz—not constrained by rules of historical research—has highlighted aspects of Israeli history that he felt were most significant for his life, leaving the scholars to extract historical meaning from the novelist’s choices. In Cohen’s farranging and thought-provoking essay, these choices are set in a context of two other Jewish writers—memoirists rather than novelists—who selectively use history as an instrument to channel their nostalgia as they mature and reflect on their past lives.

The conundrums of the Jewish writer as participant in and shaper of his or her own history do not end there. As literary historian Gershon Shaked makes clear in his posthumously published essay, the evolution of modern Hebrew literature and its analysis have followed many of the same cycles of questioning, deconstruction, and return to traditional modes of scholarship as has the study of Jewish history.⁶ It is instructive to note that the connection in this volume between literature and history is by no means limited to writing by Jews or in a Jewish language. As Susannah Heschel demonstrates in her study of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the image of the Jew in literature is powerful even when actual Jews are absent from the society that constructs the image.

Another central aspect of mediating between Judaism and modernity concerns the historian himself or herself. While Meyer’s relationship with the State of Israel and his devotion to the Reform movement may form the spiritual center of his Jewish life, it is his active participation in modern Jewish institutions that perhaps most vividly illustrates his commitment to making Jewish scholarship accessible to the world beyond the university walls. As a founder and past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, the American professional organization for those engaged in academic Jewish scholarship, and as international president of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German Jewry, among many other professional commitments too numerous to mention here, Meyer—along with his peers—has seen the field of Jewish studies expand to include innovative spheres of inquiry and methodologies that consistently break new ground. In that spirit, several of the articles presented here introduce new topics—such as Jonathan D. Sarna’s unusual pairing of colonial American Jews and mysticism, and Michael Stanislawski’s literary-historical inquiry into popular Ashkenazic perspectives on sex and circumcision. Some draw on more recent modes of inquiry as they relate to the study of the Jews; for instance, Paula Hyman evokes postcolonial theory and language about the physicality of the Jewish body to challenge prior perceptions about the place of the Jews in fin de siècle western Europe.

Whatever the methodology and the subject of research, it is still the condition of Jews in their own communities and in relation to the rest of society that reigns as the prevailing concern in this collection, for it is this exquisite tension that is ultimately the central issue posed by modernity. Christhard Hoffmann’s valuable contribution views the oft-discussed German Jews of the nineteenth century through the neglected but essential lens of their most important periodical and its longtime editor Ludwig Philippson. According to Philippson, the key to a positive reconciliation between Jews and the surrounding culture was to accentuate the liberal, or Mosaic, aspects of the religion, and to be open to change. Sometimes the issue explored is that of the Jews’ concern with societal norms—as with the nineteenth-century Cincinnati Jews featured in Karla Goldman’s essay, or Marion Kaplan’s gender-sensitive comparison of young Jewish men and women in imperial Germany and their professional and sexual development. An adjacent era receives a very different treatment at the hand of Steven M. Lowenstein, who explores the opposing agendas of diverse camps in liberal German-Jewish communities during the Weimar period.

At other times, it is the way in which Jews have been perceived by others that proves instructive, from Peter Pulzer’s exposition on German non-Jewish historians and their scholarly treatment of Jews to Avraham Barkai’s discourse on the Jewish religion and capitalism. The Christian discussion of the Jews and their ultimate salvation has usually been seen in isolation from other groups, but as Ernst-Peter Wieckenberg demonstrates here, an understanding of the Jews’ status in Christian society is enhanced by comparing Christian theological reflections on Jews, Muslims, and heathens. German historian Monika Richarz addresses a more recent legacy of Jewish existence in non-Jewish societies, exploring artist Gunter Demnig’s project to memorialize Holocaust victims through inscribed stumbling stones embedded in sidewalks throughout Germany. This takes the study of history to a contemporary, extratextual plane that challenges even as it commemorates.

Often, acts of commemoration—as this volume most certainly is, honoring Michael A. Meyer on his seventieth birthday and on the fortieth year since the publication of his first book—are actually opportunities for the participants to paint a composite picture of themselves at that juncture. So we may see in this venture. While it is a genuine tribute to one historian, a major result of this effort is to recognize trends in Jewish academic scholarship in the current era, and to critically consider the role of the historian in drawing the contours of that inquiry. The topics that have been broached, the critical tools utilized, and the schools of thought that appear—and sometimes clash—on these pages paint a portrait that honors the individual whose career has provided the impetus for the volume. But ultimately, this study of the Jewish encounter with modernity does more than honor an individual or illuminate the scholarly questions that lie at the core of each essay. Because each author necessarily brings his or her own experiences to the interpretation of history, such a study becomes a commentary on the intersection of the personal and the academic—from Germany to America, from the Diaspora to Israel, from nearly a century ago to the present day—reflecting the lives and intellects of those who have written here, as well as those who will read their words.

NOTES

1. Michael A. Meyer, Ideas of Jewish History (New York: Behrman House Press, 1974; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), xi. Citations are to the Wayne State edition.

2. Michael A. Meyer, Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 13.

3. Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 174 9–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967).

4. Michael A. Meyer, Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin? Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought (Summer 1975): 329–38, reprinted in Meyer, Judaism within Modernity, 21–31; Michael A. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 4 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98).

5. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995).

6. Professor Shaked’s essay was written for this volume during the last weeks of his life. A note of tribute precedes his essay here.

1

PERSPECTIVES ON A SCHOLAR OF MODERN JEWISH HISTORY

1

Michael A. Meyer

An Appreciation

ISMAR SCHORSCH

In an academic career spanning some four decades, my friend and colleague Professor Michael A. Meyer has produced an exceptional body of scholarship, which continues to grow apace, in the field of modern Jewish history and thought. Its expanse, I suspect, has everything to do with a rare constancy of institutional affiliation and research agenda. Trained by Hebrew Union College in the sixties, he has remained to grace its faculty in Cincinnati ever since. Concomitantly, his dissertation and first book, The Origins of the Modern Jew, in 1967 evinced a deep interest in the early history of Reform Judaism, which would culminate twenty-one years later in his sweeping and masterful history of Reform, Response to Modernity. In retrospect, HUC seems to have given him not only his tools and focus but also his center of gravity.

Like Moses Mendelssohn, on whom he has frequently written, Meyer has always resided intellectually in a two-storied dwelling. If devotion to Reform makes up the furnishings of his upper floor, allegiance to the canons of historical research furnishes the lower. In a sober essay titled Jewish Political Leadership in Nazi Germany, he gave voice to his professional ethos: This essay . . . neither levels accusations nor offers exculpations but seeks only to arrive at a deepened understanding of motives and actions and the changing milieu in which they found expression.¹ The same can readily be said of his book on Reform, a finely wrought narrative by a consummate historian writing in a spirit of critical empathy rather than blind partisanship.

The historian’s craft calls for spadework to precede synthesis, and Meyer has complied in several important ways. He has read widely in the enormously disordered and contentious history of modern Germany, enabling him always to weigh the effect of the German setting on his Jewish subject. In addition, he has scoured the libraries and archives in the United States, Israel, and Germany in search of obscure printed or unpublished materials pertaining to whatever topic has engaged him at the moment. It is that relentless pursuit of the data beyond our ken that infuses his work time and again with such unexpected richness and authority. The passages he chooses to cite from that inexhaustible trove rarely fail to enhance the immediacy and cogency of his argument.

The spadework not only has prepared Meyer for his history of Reform; it has also advanced him to the forefront of contemporary historians of German-speaking Jewry in the modern era. A few years after the publication of his magnum opus, the Leo Baeck Institute invited him to serve as editor of a multivolume history that would survey and synthesize the state of the field after forty years of pioneering research by the institute and others. Under his firm and expert leadership, a team of ten world-class scholars joined to conceptualize and execute the project in four compact volumes under the title German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Published in German, English, and Hebrew, the history covers the convulsive period from 1600 to 1945. Meyer’s meticulous editorship is largely responsible for the high degree of narrative uniformity and scholarly standards that integrate the panoramic individual volumes into a single majestic canvas, surely the equal of the four-volume history of nineteenth-century Germany by Franz Schnabel before the Second World War or of the three-volume history of modern Germany since the Reformation by Hajo Holborn after the war. The achievement has no parallels in any other area of modern European Jewish history.

Meyer himself authored five of the nine chapters in volume 2, encompassing the years 1780–1871. Though they take up many of the events, issues, and individuals treated by him in his earlier books, these chapters still exude an aura of control, vitality, and elegance that makes them models of scholarly distillation. The canvas is large but uncluttered because it is painted with broad brush strokes. As always, Meyer constructs his narrative tightly and renders it gracefully. Generalizations come along more frequently but are always illustrated with an apposite detail or choice quotation from the most disparate of sources. The equanimity of a mature historian with carefully considered views hovers over its facile prose. In short, Meyer’s preeminence as a German-Jewish historian as well as the acclaimed reception of his history of Reform flow directly from the strong influence of the ground floor of his two-storied residence.

On the second floor and at the heart of Meyer’s scholarly enterprise lies the history of Reform. Even after the completion of his book, we find him returning ever again to facets of the subject worthy of further exploration. No scholar has done more to give the movement its history. In a secular age prone to marginalizing the study of religion or to accounting for it in largely nonreligious terms, Meyer has an abiding interest in Judaism. I doubt if monetary considerations alone were what prompted him as a freshly minted PhD to translate into English the bulk of Gershom Scholem’s essays in The Messianic Idea in Judaism. Nor can his interest be attributed to a rabbinic education, for he is not a rabbi as is his beloved wife, Margie, about whose career he is always ready to preen. Notwithstanding, his command of traditional sources is formidable and amply attested by his scholarship.

More specifically, Jewish identity has been the lodestone of his ceaseless labors. Emancipation, whether partial or complete, shifted the locus of Jewish life from the periphery of the body politic to its center and fractured Jewish identity in its wake. As Jews switched languages, altered and expanded the contents of their education, and exploited new economic opportunities, their sense of self and their sensibilities underwent radical change. Meyer has always understood Reform to be a necessary, authentic, and creative religious response to a crisis that was both personal and communal. It is no accident that a form of the word modernity recurs in the titles of all three of his books on Reform—The Origins of the Modern Jew, Response to Modernity, and Judaism within Modernity. Whatever the phenomenon may entail, it had assuredly eroded a once unitary identity to a mere fragment that had now to compete for psychic space with the allurement of possibilities undreamt of. Reform, Meyer has repeatedly stressed, sought to address the chaos of this inner landscape and not to appease German critics or even advocates of emancipation filled with contempt for traditional Judaism.

Significantly, Meyer dedicated his first book to his parents. Beyond the niceties of the gesture, the tribute suggested more deeply the degree to which his study of identities in flux was piqued by his own experience of dislocation. As a child born in Berlin but raised in Los Angeles, he witnessed and endured the wrenching effects of a change in language, surroundings, and culture on the stability of one’s persona. No matter how inchoate, the experience sensitized him to the fate of the individual in times of turbulence.

In Response to Modernity, Meyer crafted a stunning classic, worldwide in scope and abounding in empathy and impeccable fairness. An unending spate of unpublished data deepens the analysis. Primarily an intellectual historian, he strives to understand the ideas of his main characters, not to judge or manipulate them. He feels himself into their quandaries and works through the genesis, flow, and meaning of their theology and actions. What emerges unfailingly are captivating précis of often complex worldviews that resonate with clarity, coherence, and plausibility.

Meyer is not an apologist for Reform. In his workshop the adversaries of Reform fare as well as its proponents. His tone throughout is dispassionate and judicious rather than defensive or polemical. If there is a bias, it is structural, that is, in his preference for the concept of modernity to frame his study. Modernity was a sea change faced by Christians and Jews alike, and it induced Meyer to understate the extent to which Reform in Germany was directly and deeply influenced by Christian models and emancipation pressures. What shaped the inner life of German Jews was not only the onrush of modernity but also the protracted and infuriating way in which German states equivocated in their extension of full and equal citizenship to their Jewish subjects. Modernity as an analytical concept is simply insufficient to account for the inescapable, deep-seated unease that was the fate of every German Jew by virtue of his or her persistent outsider status. As late as the First World War, long after the unification of Germany and the final legal emancipation of all its Jews, Meyer points out in his later work on Leo Baeck, some thirty rabbis served as Jewish chaplains in the German army without benefit of any official rank or government pay, in sharp contrast to the status and salary accorded Protestant and Catholic chaplains by the military. Their remuneration came instead from the Jewish community.

Had the emancipation struggle, which set German Jews apart from their Christian neighbors, served as Meyer’s overall framework, he might have attributed greater salience to external factors in the emergence of Reform. To be sure, while he recognizes their import on occasion, modernity functions to obscure and dilute the extent to which many innovations were engendered by the desire to eliminate that which Christian intellectuals and bureaucrats found offensive. It is well known, for example, that the sudden upsurge of Reform in the 1840s coincided precisely with a renewed deliberation by a highly conservative Prussian regime on whether to reverse the whole emancipation process. Noticeably, however, the times that Meyer has treated this cascade of Reform initiatives, he has omitted any mention, let alone analysis, of this troubling political context.

If there is one Reform luminary to whom Meyer is particularly drawn it is Leo Baeck. Since 1966 when he devoted one of his earliest published essays to him, Meyer has returned to consider Baeck’s life and thought often, most recently as one of the three editors of the superb six-volume German edition of Baeck’s collected works. The final seven-hundred-page volume of letters, addresses, and essays, the largest of the set, Meyer edited himself with painstaking expertise. While the items selected are encompassing and enthralling, his splendid introductions to the volume and every section and subsection therein constitute the promising synopsis of the integrated, fulllength biography of Baeck that has still to be written. Simultaneously, Meyer worked on an incisive study of Ludwig Meidner, the religiously Orthodox German-Jewish artist who painted portraits of Baeck in 1931 and 1948 and at whose wedding in 1927 Baeck officiated.

Admiration often turns into influence, and the affinities between Meyer and his icon are readily identifiable. As scholars, they are both skillful practitioners of Wilhelm Dilthey’s conception of Geistesgeschichte, which puts a premium on empathy for comprehending ideas as the conscious expression of concrete, lived experience. As Jews, they share a magnanimity of spirit and deep devotion to the totality of the Jewish people that inure them to any animus toward views of Judaism other than their own. And as theologians, they understand Judaism as a set of religious polarities in creative tension. In the spirit of Kant, both give pride of place to the ethical life grounded in a sacred sense of being commanded as the supreme vocation of Judaism.

What Meyer cherishes most about Baeck is that his life became a glorious embodiment of his faith. That consistent concord between word and deed, belief and behavior also distinguishes Meyer’s own life. In a confession of personal faith that he contributed to a Commentary symposium in 1996, Meyer revealed his own antimessianic temperament: "the tendency toward apocalypticism in Judaism is largely neutralized by the performance of mitzvot, of individual religious commandments. Through commitment to a life of mitzvot, whether or not they correspond to the traditional enumeration, we can acknowledge that redemption is not realized suddenly through the fruits of military victory but very gradually, one moral and religious act after another."²

That felt testament is a memorable reformulation of what Baeck meant by classical, as opposed to romantic, religion and offers a stirring glimpse of the religious disposition that permeates Meyer’s home life and family, his lifelong teaching of rabbinical students, and his illustrious career of engaged scholarship with its uninterrupted flow of essays and books of the highest quality.

NOTES

1. Michael A. Meyer, Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 184.

2. Commentary (August 1996): 73.

2

Michael A. Meyer and His Vision of Reform Judaism and the Reform Rabbinate

A Lifetime of Devotion and Concern

DAVID ELLENSON

In conferring the degree of doctor of Hebrew letters honoris causa upon Michael A. Meyer, the Jewish Theological Seminary recognized his prodigious accomplishments in the academic world and concluded their description of him by proclaiming, Above all, you are a proud and passionate Reform Jew, a concerned participant in the movement’s religious welfare and a voice of moderation in determining its future direction. As such you attest again that great scholarship flows from great commitment.

Meyer himself has testified often to his close professional and personal attachment to Reform Judaism.¹ In an interview that appeared in the HUC Chronicle in 2003, Meyer reflected upon the factors that led him to his career in scholarship and service to the Reform movement and attributed these passions, in large measure, to his background. Born in Germany, Meyer arrived in the United States in 1941 at three and one-half years of age. He has observed, "I think my awareness of being one of the nitzolai haShoah—those saved from the Holocaust—has deepened my commitment to things Jewish, and he attributes his origins as a Jewish historian to a combined interest in Judaism and a commitment to Reform Judaism."²

Meyer has principally displayed these attachments and interests to the academy and Reform Judaism through his more than four decades long association with the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). He received his doctorate from HUC-JIR under the direction of Fritz Bamberger and Ellis Rivkin, and he has taught at all four campuses—Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Jerusalem, and New York. Meyer continues to teach medieval and modern Jewish history, Jewish historiography, history of Reform Judaism, and the intellectual history of Zionism at HUC-JIR and feels himself in accord with the school’s goals.³ Indeed, he feels a special satisfaction in teaching rabbinical students, with whom I share values and through whom I can have some influence on the Reform movement and the religious lives of individuals.⁴ Through his lectures and seminars as well as his writings, Meyer has been a preeminent interpreter of the Reform movement for his students, and he has self-consciously attempted to transmit a compelling and authentic vision of modern Judaism for them. It is a vision that recognizes and captures the full complexity of directions that inform the modern Jewish world as well as the full panoply of issues that are involved in the education of Reform rabbis for the contemporary Jewish situation.

Meyer recognizes that societal developments in recent years have meant that the rabbinate has shifted from the rabbi as the one who deals with Jewish issues to the rabbi who is largely a pastoral counselor.⁵ Nevertheless, he continues to challenge his students academically and hold them, in view of his sense of "responsibility as a Jewish historian dedicated to the tradition of Wissenschaft des Judentums—the impartial, scientific study of the Jewish past," to the highest traditions of a modern scholarly rabbinate.⁶ Such knowledge is a prerequisite for their claim to authenticity and authority. Without a significant knowledge of Jewish sources and history, Meyer believes that the modern rabbi has no legitimate claim on the title.

Furthermore, the academic enterprise itself is crucial for Reform rabbis to grasp the role they occupy in the future growth and development of Judaism. Reform, Meyer points out, represents that branch of Judaism that has been the most hospitable to the modern critical temper while still endeavoring to maintain continuity of faith and practice with Jewish religious tradition. He quickly adds, Reform Judaism can scarcely be comprehended by reference only to its current spectrum of beliefs and practices, and an understanding of the dynamic flow of Jewish history and texts is required if the rabbi is to comprehend the dynamic tensions that mark Reform and its approach to Judaism.⁷ The Reform rabbi must grasp how Jewish self-understanding and the reconceptualization of Judaism that has emerged for Jews in the wake of that modern self-understanding has been a response to their new situation, . . . a modernity that, even as it threatens to swallow up the faith of a diminishing minority, also offers the possibility for differentiation, development, and renewal.⁸

At the same time, an emphasis on knowledge and the self-understanding and awareness that scholarship provides is not sufficient to capture the complete dimensions of the tasks Meyer believes confront Reform Judaism and the Reform rabbi. For inasmuch as Meyer sees Reform as a dynamic manifestation of Jewish religious tradition, he envisions Reform as part of a broader and overarching landscape of Jewish fate and solidarity. Meyer naturally applauds the fact that today the Reform Movement is moving in the direction of greater depth in religion and Jewish education than in the past. However, he demands that the movement recapture the awareness of broader Jewish destiny. Reform must cope with new challenges, including the large number of mixed couples in Reform congregations who require a sense of Jewish peoplehood. As a corollary to this, the movement also has to strengthen its relationship to Israel, which, in his view, regrettably has weakened since the 1970s. Meyer therefore concludes, It is up to us on the faculty at HUC-JIR to create a readiness to meet these challenges among our students.⁹

Meyer has promoted this vision to help his students and the leaders of the movement to envision what Reform might become. His vision of Reform Jewish education in general and rabbinical education in particular is a rich and bold attempt to resolve the conflict between the values of modernity with its commitment to critical thought on the one hand and the notion of religious commitment and communal sensibility that is so central to Judaism on the other. In his seminal and provocative essay Reflections on the ‘Educated Jew’ from the Perspective of Reform Judaism, Meyer offers a fuller description of and richer insight into his approach to Reform Judaism. At the outset of this essay, Meyer writes that Judaism is marked by the presence of polarities throughout its history and that Judaism involves living in the tensions they create. In our age, there are values external to Judaism we seek to integrate into our lives, and Judaism seeks to transmit these values along with those of the Jewish heritage to its adherents. The challenge is to live between these two polarities. Consequently, Meyer contends that his Judaism flows from an idea of Judaism that recognizes and affirms the value of modernity, represented especially by personal autonomy, while insisting upon the priority of Jewish religious faith.¹⁰

Meyer continues by casting a critical eye on both Judaism and the certainties of modern life. Jews today live within the multiple tensions of autonomy and obligation, integration and separation, peoplehood and religion, dispassionate knowledge and life-determining commitment. The task is to incorporate personally configured elements of Jewish traditions into individual lives. However, he believes those choices should be influenced by educating toward core Jewish values that create Jewish religious lives that stand under the authority of an obligating God. Reform Judaism believes that truth comes from a multiplicity of sources and believes in universalism. At the same time, it recognizes that an untrammeled universalism can destroy the bonds that unite Jews with one another.¹¹

Meyer expands on the danger this trend poses to contemporary Judaism in general and Reform in particular in a companion essay, Will the Center Hold? which he published in Conservative Judaism. Indeed, this latter essay highlights and illuminates the position Meyer advances in his essay The ‘Educated Jew.’ In Will the Center Hold? Meyer states that American Judaism, until recently, with its strong collective emphasis upon people and community, had resisted the disintegrative forces of extreme individualism. However, he writes that American Judaism today is adapting itself to a greater degree than ever before to an American individualism—at apparent cost to Jewish solidarity.¹² Increasing individualization has given rise to what Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen, in their influential book The Jew Within, have labeled the sovereign self. To be sure, notions of selfhood and autonomy have always been present in Reform. However, Meyer believes, heightened personalism has come at the expense of trans-personal memories and loyalties. For the younger generation of American Jews, the Holocaust and the State of Israel play diminished roles in their self-understanding as Jews. Furthermore, Prophetic Judaism itself is in eclipse. This disturbs Meyer considerably, and he is upset that just 9 percent of the Jews Eisen and Cohen surveyed for their book regarded concern for social justice as essential to being a good Jew.¹³

From this, Meyer concludes that the non-judgmentalism that dominates our culture has a twofold effect on American Jewry: it inhibits Jews from arguing for the greater virtue or higher truth of their own tradition and it makes them reject any attempt, whether by rabbis, relatives, or friends, to subject their own personally chosen form of Judaism to any objective standard. Jews are reluctant to accept external sources of authority, and Meyer cites the Cohen finding that 75 percent of intermarried young people who were brought up in the Conservative movement either leave the movement as adults or do not join themselves as further evidence of the significant test that confronts Reform Judaism and the Reform rabbis who are his students, for these Jews, when they do move on from the Conservative movement and when they do affiliate, do so in overwhelming numbers with the Reform movement.¹⁴ The future of Judaism in America is thus contingent, to a large extent, upon the success Reform rabbis will have in instilling communitarian religious values and commitments in persons who have rejected them in their previous affiliations. The magnitude of this challenge is clearly immense.

Nevertheless, Meyer argues that despite these powerful individualist trends in American society, Jewish religious leadership in general, and the Reform rabbi in particular, must still advocate for the acceptance of divine commandment, not alone in the area of ritual mitzvoth, but also . . . in [the realm] of moral commandments. . . . The encounter with reasserted individualism must result in a gradual process of absorption which does not sacrifice principle or integrity. This process could be free to incorporate the legitimate quest for personal meaning, bringing it under the canopy of unconditional and ongoing commitment to people, faith, and divinely imposed obligation.¹⁵

Meyer thus asserts that while there is always a need to maintain openness in Reform, the task of establishing and upholding a clear sense of [Jewish] self is more difficult than ever. In contemporary American society, Jewish identity is no longer hidden. However, its borders have been rubbed away. Meyer therefore believes that under these circumstances the dominant thrust of Jewish education must be inward, with an emphasis upon particularity. We need Jewishly educated Jews. Reform should be a tradition that aims to direct life, not merely enhance it, and that can only be done when there is an effort to instill in Jews what it is like to live within the circle [of Judaism]. Instilling a sense of identification with the Jewish tradition and Jewish people must be the first task of the rabbi and the prime goal of Jewish education. As Meyer succinctly phrases it, Choice follows [only] after commitment. Meyer thus modifies the previous Reform emphasis upon autonomy as the foundation for Reform Judaism. Instead, he opts to construct a contemporary concept of autonomy upon a more communitarian vision of the self that allows for Jewish commitment to precede choice.¹⁶

To be sure, Meyer states, Historical honesty would require the recognition that, by and large, liberal values have emerged from outside religious traditions, that they are the product of modernity, not religiosity, and he says, yet again, that Reform Judaism recognizes this conflict. However, the assignment of the Reform rabbi is to uphold and instill a communitarian Reform religious ideal of the self—the notion of a Jewish covenantal self—in Reform Jews. Reform rabbis must strive to instill behaviors and commitments to a way of life in modern Jews. As Meyer phrases it, Reform Jewish education must lead to Halakhah, whether that term is understood literally or metaphorically. He understands this to mean the inclusion of recurrent specifically Jewish acts within the routine of personal and family life (Halakhah in a broad sense), and the application of values drawn from Jewish sources to life decisions within both the private and public spheres. The challenge is to make Judaism the primary source of ultimate meanings for the Reform Jew. The teacher, and by extension the rabbi, must be model Jews, and there must be ethnic awareness as well as religious knowledge that complement Jewish behaviors.¹⁷

For all his devotion to the peoplehood component of Judaism, Meyer cautions that a Judaism that rests on the ethnic pillar alone is not viable. In the Diaspora, he observes, ethnic Judaism is speedily being devoured by an absorbent American culture. Furthermore, in Israel it is being transformed from Jewish to Israeli. Meyer therefore concludes that only a Reform Judaism that nurtures religious belief and religious practice can sustain Jewish identity in the long run. The rabbi must be capable of making the texts of the tradition vehicles for conveying religious and ethical messages to a contemporary Jewish audience as he prepares and charges his students to do the same.¹⁸

It is in light of this religious thrust in his thinking that one can properly grasp the central place the State of Israel occupies in Meyer’s Reform Jewish thought. He points out that Reform Judaism in America