EINHORN AND SZOLD: TWO LIBERAL GERMAN
RABBIS IN BALTIMORE
By EITEL WOLF DOBERT
Racial and religious minorities have a tendency to close ranks, to
maintain inflexible dogmas, as long as pressure exists from without. Any
slackening of this pressure automatically relaxes their attitude. The history
of the Jews is a case in point. The fluctuations between the rigid and the
liberal in their customs and religious tenets follow mostly the ups and downs
of the history of freedom itself.
For three centuries the Jewish people were crowded into ghettos. They
led an alien, confined life and spoke a peculiar language. They were, at
least in Central Europe, refused a share in the progress of the outside world,
yet they had nevertheless to suffer the consequences of universal disasters.
During the centuries of oppression Jewish faith and ritual remained essen-
tially unchanged. If a man from the early Middle Ages had visited a
temple in the eighteenth or even in the nineteenth century, he would have
found himself completely at home. This was the only spot where the world
had stood still. The Jewish community had clung to rigid forms as the only
armour against attacks from the Christian world.
In 1779, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote his drama Nathan the Wise.
He invested his Jewish hero with all those virtues of wisdom, goodness and
tolerance which he found so conspicuously wanting in his Christian con-
temporaries. Everyone participating in the intellectual life of Germany at
that time knew that the man portrayed by Lessing was Moses Mendelssohn.
His name had already gained wide respect. All the literary circles discussed
and admired his endeavours to free the Jews from their spiritual ghetto by
explaining German cultural achievements to them. Some Jewish leaders
began to see that their partly imposed, partly voluntary spiritual exile was
leading them to spiritual stagnation.
Enlightened men tried to translate the spirit of tolerance into practical
rules and laws. In 1781, Christian Wilhelm Dohm published his book Über
die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civic Improvement of the
Jews). He advocated complete professional freedom for the Jews, the right
to engage in the arts and sciences and stated courageously that the so-called
Jewish shortcomings were solely the result of their political status. This
work, which became a classic, was widely read and discussed. This was
one of the first steps on the long and tortuous road toward emancipation.
Alexander von Humboldt had publicly demanded unconditional equality
for the Jews. Karl August von Hardenberg, Prussia's Minister for Foreign
Affairs, had stated that he would not vote for any law regarding Jews which
would not contain the four words: equal duties, equal rights. In 1812, King
Frederick William III. of Prussia decreed that the Jews henceforth were
Prussian citizens. After the victorious conclusion of the War of Liberation,
1815, their new social gains were threatened again. This time the attack
came not from the conservative side but from the Burschenschaften, a
German student organisation founded in 1815 with the laudable goal of
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enobling the spirit of German universities and of upholding freedom and the
Christian faith. Soon however its lofty ideals deteriorated. The Burschen-
schaften became imbued with the boisterous spirit of Turnvater Jahn. His
emphasis on the bodily fitness of German youth had certainly been a great
contribution in winning the war against Napoleon, but his narrowminded
nationalism was a sinister influence in the years that followed. The Bur-
schenschaften proclaimed they were upholding Christian ideals while they
ignored Christian kindness and tolerance. The movement was not confined
to students. University professors took the lead in denouncing the Jews as
an alien element in the national body. In Jena, the philosopher Jakob
Friedrich Fries who was closely connected with the organisation, demanded
the extermination of the Jews, "root and branch," because they seemed
to him dangerous to the state. The historian Christian Friederich Rühs, in
Berlin, urged the enactment of restrictions which closely resembled the
Nuremberg laws of ill fame. The Jews of Hamburg, Bremen and Frankfurt
were deprived of their citizenship by a legal trick, Lübeck expelled forty
families and Bremen the entire Jewish population. In 1819 Jews were
openly persecuted in Franconia and Hesse. These are only a few examples
taken at random, but they prove that by 1847 the Jews in many states of
Germany had fewer rights than they had had in 1812.
The events of 1848 brought about a change. Jewish intellectuals fought
side by side with Jung-Deutschland against the numerous Metternichs who,
in the service of their petty princes, tried to outdo their master in Vienna.
The German National Assembly in Frankfurt declared that religious ad-
herence was not a condition or an obstacle to civil rights. This declaration
was adopted by the individual states and made part of the drafts for the
new constitutions. Four members of the Frankfurt Parliament were of the
Jewish faith, a fact resented by many a die-hard Conservative.
When the uprising of 1848 and 1849 failed, Jewish liberals were perse-
cuted mercilessly. Their names appeared with those of Christian liberals on
the various blacklists which were circulated from capital to capital. At that
time, Jewish newspapers openly encouraged the Jews to emigrate to Amer-
ica. The new continent appeared a haven for the oppressed Jews of Central
Europe. In Vienna, Isidor Bush, a printer and publisher, and other promi-
nent men formed a committee to further Jewish emigration. Its activity
however ended abruptly when Bush was forced to flee to the United States
where he later became an outstanding member of the German-American
community in St. Louis.
Meanwhile the Jewish attitude toward the Christian world had changed.
The disappearance of the ghetto, the new concessions, the growing par-
ticipation in German public life and, last but not least, the rationalistic
temper of the times began to undermine Jewish traditional belief. Some
turned to Protestantism. Others, unable to find solace in another faith,
foreswore religion altogether and became freethinkers. Religious Jewish
leaders were alarmed and tried to stop this sudden flight from Judaism
by embarking upon the great task of reform. They attempted in fact to
occidentalize Jewish services. The prayershawl disappeared from many
synagogues, the ark was replaced by the altar, prayers were translated into
German, and German standards of religious music were introduced. Even
the architectural form of the synagogue underwent slight changes. It resem-
bled henceforth a Christian church where people of both sexes sat facing
the pulpit.
In some communities reforms went so far as almost to obliterate the
Jewish character of the religious service. As with all reform movements,
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the pendulum was to swing the other way, but the discussion how far
reforms should go, raged for almost thirty years.
There was a similar development in America. The Jewish ritual had
been translated into English in 1766 with the purpose of extending the
influence of the synagogue to those who were ignorant of Hebrew. Jewish
reformers in Charleston, South Carolina, demanded in 1824 that portions of
the service be read in English. However the real impetus for reform was
brought about by the numerous Jewish immigrants who arrived from Ger-
many in the thirties and forties. In 1840, the Jewish population of Balti-
more, Maryland consisted of two hundred families, mostly immigrants from
Germany. Their rabbi was Abraham Rice, a learned Talmudist who made
Baltimore a stronghold of traditional Judaism. Two years later, in protest
against the rabbi's orthodoxy, several members seceded from the congrega-
tion. They constituted the Har Sinai Verein and founded a reform con-
gregation. The changes in the ritual of this new congregation went even
further than what the boldest reformers had proposed in Germany. Not
only were the services held on Sunday, but the dietary laws were ignored
and the members demanded that the rabbi discuss in his sermons everyday
worldly problems.
After more than a decade of precarious existence the Congregation was
able to afford the services of a permanent rabbi. In 1855 they appealed to
liberal David Einhorn whose synagogue in Budapest had just been closed
by order of an intolerant Austrian government.
Dr. Einhorn was a remarkable man. He was born in Dispeck, Bavaria,
in 1809 and received his rabbinical diploma at the age of seventeen from
the Rabbinical School of Fürth. This school dated from the sixteenth cen-
tury and was known for its extreme orthodoxy. Its teaching staff consisted
almost entirely of Polish rabbis who had to fight for survival in chauvinistic
Poland. They were uncompromising and strongly opposed to modern ideas.
Einhorn, a promising disciple and a protégé of Rabbi Wolf Hamburger
defied his teachers. Forsaking a brilliant career, he studied the classics and
philosophy at the Universities of Erlangen, Würzburg and Munich. Under
the spell of Schelling's idealism, he came to the conclusion that Judaism was
not a "law," but rather a "rule of conduct" which could and should be
altered according to the spiritual needs of the times. The Rabbinate of
Fürth fought back by pointing to the Deuteronomic Law which consigned
heretics to death. Since the death sentence could no more be carried out
physically, Einhorn was condemned to spiritual death unless he conformed.
Einhorn refused to recant.
This was a century of change. Everywhere the minds of men were
questioning traditions sacred for centuries. The very basis of Christianity
was attacked and the venerable institution of monarchy put up for ridicule.
On the other hand there was danger of yielding too much ground to the
floodtide of rationalism. The Frankfurt Jewish Reform Verein had pro-
claimed that Mosaism was capable of unlimited development. The Mosaic
Law, the Talmudic System, even the belief in the coming of the Messiah,
were to be abrogated. Einhorn fought these tendencies as tenaciously as
he had opposed rabbinical orthodoxy. Denying the divine revelation of the
Scriptures was to him reducing them to a mere record of human wisdom.
In 1842, Einhorn was called to the Jewish community in Hoppstädten
in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. A few years later he was elected chief
rabbi of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He continued to take part in the great
controversies which divided German Jewry into two hostile camps, and
defended himself against accusations of disloyalty by pointing out that
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certain parts of the ritual were nothing but the result of centuries of in-
tolerance, that they should be eliminated as unbecoming an age of liberty.
It did not take the German government long to sense danger. The
simple word "reform," from any quarter, had but one ominous meaning:
change of the "God-given-order." If the Jews were dissatisfied with the
beliefs of their forefathers, they had but to embrace Christianity and allow
themselves to be absorbed by the German nation. The Junkers and the
Conservative Party, undoubtedly under the influence of the Christian
church, forced the government to withdraw its protection from the Jewish
Reform Congregation. Thus Orthodox Jews welcomed German reactionaries
as allies in the fight against liberalism in their ranks.
Einhorn decided thereupon to accept a call from the Reform Congrega-
tion of Pesth in Hungary. His predecessor had taken part in the revolu-
tionary uprising and had had to flee for his life. He had been an extreme
reformist and Einhorn tried to lead his community back to positive Juda-
ism, liberal, yet loyal to the past. Even that was too much for the Orthodox
of Pesth. They grew alarmed and voiced no objection when the government
closed the temple. Einhorn remained for some years with friends and set
down his principles of reform in a volume entitled Das Prinzip des Mosais-
mus und dessen Verhältnis zum Heidenthum und Rabbinischen Judenthum,
(The principle of Mosaism and its relationship to Heathenism and Rabbini-
cal Judaism).
This was the man who became rabbi of the Reform Congregation of
Baltimore. He had been tested in the fight against orthodox ideas and yet
had given proof of his courage by standing up against reformist extremes.
He joined the thousands of German Liberals who out of despair or for
reasons of personal safety abandoned Europe for America.
In this country Einhorn continued his feuds with orthodox and reformers
alike. In his opinion some of the latter went too far, others again not far
enough on the road to reform. The Sinai, a monthly paper which he founded
after his arrival in Baltimore contained many a battle rich in words, pon-
derous in style, and showed his opinions regarding the numerous problems
which beset the Jewish communities and congregations at that time. He
attacked, for instance, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the outstanding leader of
moderate reform in America who had published a prayerbook reflecting his
views. Wise retorted by characterizing the Sinai as "a slanderous and false
presentation of Jews and Judaism by an enemy of both." Einhorn in turn
lashed back with long involved German sentences, and another feud would
be carried on for months with no side yielding a single point.
In this, too, he followed closely the habits of the German political refu-
gees, the Forty-eighters, who loved and cultivated their quarrels while their
readers watched with fascination their verbose tournaments. Einhorn's
reform theories, in fact his whole thinking, were deeply rooted in German
culture. Reform Judaism flourished almost entirely in Jewish congregations
whose members either hailed from Germany or were the direct descendants
of German-Jewish immigrants.
"Take away from Reform Judaism the German spirit," Einhorn once
wrote, "or what is the same thing, the German language, and you have
torn away from it the mother soil and it must wither away, the lovely
flower." On another occasion he stated: "Where the German sermon is
banned, there the Reform Movement of Judaism is nothing more than a
brilliant gloss, a decorated doll without heart, without soul, which the
proudest temples and the most splendid theories cannot succeed in infusing
with life." Again and again Einhorn urged his co-religionists to cultivate
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the German language and to study German literature in order to get a
deeper understanding of the human soul. Even Carl Schurz did not plead
more eloquently to preserve the cultural heritage than this Jewish rabbi.
The German influence, and with it the reform movement, lost its
impetus considerably in later years with the arrival of Jewish immigrants
of Eastern Europe. Their extreme poverty and limited knowledge of West-
ern culture made it difficult for them to join the wealthy congregations of
their German co-religionists, moreover they had been schooled in strong
orthodox traditions by the Polish Rabbinate.
David Einhorn, like Carl Schurz, was a born fighter, a man with a mes-
sage and with deep convictions. At the same time he was endowed with the
gift to convince people of the righteousness of his cause. One only needs to
read Einhorn's sermons against slavery and compare them with Schurz'
great speeches for the Union. In slaveholding Baltimore it took courage
to call slavery "the greatest possible crime against God." Whenever he
was reminded that the Mosaic Law sanctioned slavery and that the children
of Israel practiced it in biblical times, he would invariably reply: "what
does it matter, the spirit of the Law condemns it."
In 1861, when the famous riots broke out in Baltimore and the mob
threatened to storm the office of the Wecker, a
liberal German language
newspaper, well known for its antislavery attitude, Einhorn had to flee for
his life.
He was elected rabbi of Philadelphia and five years later, rabbi of the
powerful Adath Jeshuram Congregation in New York. His monthly Sinai
had died in 1863 in the battle against slavery. Even today its pages make
interesting reading. Dr. Einhorn combined theological profundity with
political wisdom, both practical and theoretical, which is more than can
be said of many other political leaders. To the orthodox he remained the
dangerous challenger of traditional ideas questioning the complacent accep-
tance of traditions. He tried not to repeat unthinkingly what the prophets
had said in past ages, but to apply their message to the present.
His prayerbook, the Olath Tamid has been called a "God-sent inter-
preter of the consciousness of the modern Jew." Later it became the basis
of the Union Prayer Book, published by the Central Conference of Ameri-
can rabbis. In 1869, Rabbi Einhorn founded the Jewish Times and con-
tinued to express his ideas. In some ways his views were extremely con-
servative. He opposed marriages between Gentiles and Jews, calling them
"the nail in the coffin of the small Jewish race." He also rejected the theory
of evolution as contrary to biblical revelation. David Einhorn died in 1879
in New York, but his memory lives inextricably with the history of his
people.
As early as 1857 a third schism occurred in Baltimore. Some twenty
members defected from Rabbi Rice's Congregation and from Einhorn's Har
Sinai Synagogue and combined to found the Oheb Shalom Congregation.
They believed in the conservative reforms of Cincinnati's Rabbi Isaak
Mayer Wise. Rabbi Wise himself dedicated the new temple and recom-
mended as rabbi of first rank, a Dr. Lewinsohn of Worms, Germany. Dr.
Lewinsohn first accepted, then declined and proposed instead Dr. Benjamin
Szold.
Born in 1829 in Nemiskert, Hungary,Szold began to read the Bible and
the Talmud at an early age. He studied at the famous Pressburg Yeshibah
and in 1848 took up residence in Vienna for further studies. Soon he had
to leave because of his revolutionary activities. For several years he tutored
children of wealthy Jewish families, attended the University of Breslau
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and officiated as rabbi during the holidays in several towns in Silesia. The
congregation of each of these places wanted to keep him as permanent
rabbi. He was about to accept a call to Stockholm, when Dr. Lewinsohn
persuaded him to go to Baltimore. He arrived in that city in 1858 and
remained for thirty four years rabbi of the Oheb Shalom Congregation,
eventually becoming its rabbi emeritus.
Dr. Szold's interpretation of Judaism steered a middle course between
orthodoxy and reformism. Nevertheless, he was less liberal than Rabbi
Einhorn. Under him the new congregation prospered and increased in
numbers. He succeeded where Dr. Einhorn failed, namely to gain the
confidence of the Polish and Russian immigrants who in the eighties flocked
to his home for financial and spiritual support. He especially endeared him-
self to his fellowmen by defending their rights. He once even went per-
sonally to President Lincoln to plead for the life of a Jewish deserter during
the Civil War.
Rabbi Szold, too, compiled a prayer book, the Abodath Israel which was
adopted by several Jewish congregations throughout the country. Although
not as prolific a writer as Einhorn, Szold wrote a number of religious books
for use in Jewish homes and made scholarly contributions to Jewish litera-
ture and wrote a commentary on Job in the "purest rabbinical Hebrew,"
a treatise which is still read.
His thinking is best studied in the lecture on Moses Mendelssohn which
he delivered to the German Society in Philadelphia in 1879 on the 150th
birthday of the Jewish emancipator. Szold's numerous quotations from
Goethe, Herder and Lessing show his profound knowledge of German
literature. He stressed the deep cleavage which existed in the eighteenth
century between the Jewish and the gentile world. It was in an atmosphere
of mutual intolerance and suspicion that young Mendelssohn grew up. It
was not alone his abject poverty which made his rise so remarkable. The
boy had no teacher to guide him, no environment to stimulate his thoughts.
Out of the darkness of the Middle Ages he had to grope his way, he had
to create everything "aus seiner eigenen Brust": his encyclopaedic knowl-
edge and his philosophy of tolerance and human kindness which charmed his
own contemporaries and won him the admiration of Lessing. It was Lessing
who helped him to gain his first public recognition by secretly bringing out
his work Briefe über die Empfindungen (On the Sensations). It was Lessing
who introduced this timid young Jew into the literary circles of Berlin and
who erected to his friend an eternal monument in the person of the gentle
Nathan. How deeply ingrained the prejudice was against men of Jewish
faith can be seen from the fact that a monarch as tolerant as Frederick the
Great refused to admit Moses Mendelssohn to the Prussian Academy of
Science, in spite of the insistence of many great men in Prussia. He also
expostulated with orthodox Jews who thought that any contact with Chris-
tian culture would sully their religion.
Rabbi Szold thus brought to life one aspect of the period of enlighten-
ment which has often been neglected in cultural histories. He went so far
as to compare Mendelssohn with philosophers like Socrates and Plato, thus
demonstrating his wholehearted admiration for the man and faithfully
guarding his spiritual inheritance in far-away America.
Reform Judaism, as we have seen, was born in Germnay out of an
attempt to meet a challenge to the spiritual existence of the Jewish people.
The disappearance of the ghetto, the slow incorporation of Jews into Ger-
man society threatened to destroy a three thousand year-old tradition.
The Christian faith itself, at that time, represented by the two great creeds,
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Protestantism and Catholicism, was reeling under the savage attack of
rationalism which boldly limited the true and the real to what could be
touched and seen. The balance between the spirit and the mind, rarest
achievement in mankind's history, was in danger of being upset in favor
of reason alone. No wonder that religious leaders became alarmed and
sought to reconcile the claims of modern science with man's spiritual needs.
This reconciliation has certainly been the goal of Reform Judaism and
for that reason men like David Einhorn and Benjamin Szold were attacked
by both Orthodox and those Jewish assimilationists who thought that only
by discarding everything that distinguishes Jews from Gentiles could the
age-old prejudice and the persecutions be stopped and the final deliverance
of the Jewish people be accomplished. Inevitably both were also attacked
by the Christian State which regarded any reform-movement with suspicion
engendered by fear and bad conscience.
Thus Einhorn and Szold followed the great stream of German Liberals
who in the late forties and early fifties sought refuge in free America. Their
beliefs ran the gamut from conservative Liberalism to open Communism of
the hue of a Karl Marx. Some among them were fanatical freethinkers,
rejecting God as a reactionary worse than Prince Metternich himself, some
were God-fearing Protestant ministers whose crime in the eyes of the State
consisted in believing that their faith was a living faith and therefore always
in need of restatement in new historical situations.
It would be too bold to number Einhorn and Szold among those Forty-
eighter revolutionaries whose motives for leaving the Fatherland had
been mostly political, and whose activities had threatened the very founda-
tions of the princely states. Nevertheless it is an undeniable fact that these
two rabbis defeated despair and complacency and worked for that freedom
in America which allowed their people to live and to think according to
their convictions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blum, Isidor, The History of the Jews in Baltimore (Baltimore, 1910).
Hendrick, Burton J., The Jews in America (New York, 1923).
Hirshler, Eric E. (ed.), Jews from Germany in the United States (New York, 1955).
Kohler, Kaufmann (ed.), David Einhorn, Memorial Volume, Selected Sermons and Ad-
dresses (New York, 1911).
Libman, Anita, Jewish Pioneers in America (New York, 1931).
Sell, Friedrich C., Die Tragödie des deutschen Liberalismus (Stuttgart, 1953).
Szold, Benjamin, Moses Mendelssohn, eine Gedenkschrift zu dessen 150. Geburtstagsfeier
(Baltimore, 1879).
The Universal Jewish Encyclopaedia (New York, 1931-1943).
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