Rabbinic Judaism in the Making

The Halakhah from Ezra to Judah I

Alexander Guttmann

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780814344019
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Through the ages, theology in Judaism has played roles of varying importance. But the role of theology is minor compared with that of law and observance. This book is devoted to a study of the evolution of normative Judaism from the time of Ezra (ca. 400 B.C.) to Judah I, the Prince (ca. 200 A.D.). Its focus on law represents a realistic approach to the history of applied Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism in the Making is the first study in English to trace the evolution of Rabbinic Law and Rabbinic Judaism. A concise history of post-biblical normative Judaism in antiquity, Mr. Guttmann's book concentrates on the crucial inter-testamental period, and should be valuable to students of ancient history, and both Christian and Jewish theologians, ministers, and rabbis.

I

AMERICAN ZIONISM AND THE EXTERNAL THREAT, 1933–1936

AMERICAN ZIONISM ON THE EVE OF THE THIRD REICH

The Zionist quest began in 1896, when Theodor Herzl published his classic political manifesto, The Jewish State. Herzl, born in Budapest in 1860, grew up in an assimilated Jewish home and received his education in Vienna, where he became a prominent journalist and aspiring playwright. A devout believer in the liberal credo, the young Herzl optimistically expected that the advance of progress in Europe would completely emancipate Jewry from discrimination and persecution.

Herzl’s optimism did not survive several personal encounters with anti-Semitism, including the Dreyfus affair, which he covered as a correspondent for the Viennese Neue Freie Presse. By 1896, as The Jewish State demonstrates, Herzl had undergone a conversion experience. He no longer believed that Christians could be “educated” to tolerate Jews, no matter how assimilated they became. Rather, he maintained that Christians would always perceive of Jews as strangers and that anti-Semitism would increase as the concentration of Jews in a given territory grew. That being the case, it made no sense for Jews to respond to anti-Semitism by emigrating to a more “tolerant” land, since Jew hatred in their new homes would surely increase as a result of their arrival.

Having determined that anti-Semitism could not be escaped through either assimilation or emigration, Herzl proposed a radical solution: Jewish statehood. In their own country, he wrote, Jews would escape their minority status and would be free to develop and progress like the great nations of Europe. He thought that most of the world’s Jews would eventually settle in the Jewish state, and predicted that anti-Semitism would decline as the number of Jews in the Diaspora decreased.1

Herzl was not the first writer to suggest a national solution to the Jewish problem. In 1882, Leo Pinsker, a Russian Jewish intellectual, had published his pamphlet Autoemancipation, which in many respects foreshadowed Herzl’s later work.2 However, if Herzl was not an entirely original or critical thinker, he was a magnificent politician. Shortly after completing The Jewish State, he began to plan the formation of a political movement that would seek to establish an independent Jewish nation. Herzl’s work culminated in the First Zionist Congress, which held its opening session in Basel, Switzerland, on August 29, 1897. The 197 delegates who attended the Congress came to hail Herzl and to form the World Zionist Organization.3

Even before the close of the Basel Congress it became apparent that Zionists were divided on a number of significant issues. Herzl’s conversion to Jewish nationalism had not been accompaneid by a corresponding growth in his interest in and commitment to Jewish culture and tradition. The Jewish state he intended to build would be liberal, secular, and bourgeois, and would be located in whatever territory Jews might acquire through negotiations with European imperial powers. The East European Jews who quickly became the backbone of the Zionist movement held a very different vision. They wanted to recreate a Jewish state in Palestine, the ancient and unforgotten homeland of the Jews. Many of the East Europeans were attracted to the ideas of Ahad Ha-Am, a Russian Jewish scholar and Zionist, who believed that a Jewish homeland would not only answer the problem of anti-Semitism, but would also provide the environment in which a new vibrant Jewish culture could evolve. Other East European Jews attempted to fuse Jewish orthodoxy and Zionism. They organized the Mizrachi Zionist Organization in 1902, which was dedicated to the establishment of a religious Jewish state in a Palestine whose legal system and culture would be built on the foundation of Torah and Talmud.4

While the Mizrachi looked to the Jewish holy books for guidance, other East European Zionists read Karl Marx. Like Herzl, the socialists planned to build a secular Jewish state, but based on socialist principles. Greatly influenced by Russian populism, the socialist Zionist organizations of Europe, including the Poale Zion (1907), specialized in dispatching small groups of Jewish “pioneer” youth to Palestine to “return” to the soil and live as laborers and farmers. These young people established the kibbutzim (communal agricultural settlements) and became the dominant force in the Palestinian Jewish community (the Yishuv) until the creation of Israel in 1948.5

Zionist organizations in the United States reflected the ideological splits of the world movement. Orthodox religious Zionists formed the Mizrachi Organization of America in 1912, whose principal goal was the “Rehabilitation of Palestine in the spirit of Jewish Torah and Tradition” and which was affiliated with the international Mizrachi Movement. The American Mizrachi, which claimed to have twenty thousand members on the eve of the depression, had a limited constituency in the United States. The Mizrachi tended to find its best audiences in the immigrant communities of New York, but its recruitment efforts suffered as a result of restrictive American immigration quotas, which almost totally eliminated the influx of East European Jews into the United States after 1921.6

Socialist Zionism in the United States shared many of the problems of the Mizrachi. It too found it difficult to sink roots deep into the American Jewish community; in 1929 the Poale Zion, the most important socialist Zionist group in America, claimed to have only five thousand members. Generally hostile to the Soviet Union and the American Communist Party, which branded Zionism a form of bourgeois nationalism, the Poale Zion supported the organizing efforts of Jewish workers in Palestine and the United States. Perhaps one of the most important contributions of the American socialist Zionists was the publication of their journal, Jewish Frontier, which first appeared in 1933. Edited by Hayim Greenberg, a talented writer and humanitarian, Jewish Frontier’s substantive and thoughtful articles attracted the attention of many American Jews who never joined a socialist Zionist organization.7

Both the Mirachi and Poale Zion were loyal participants in the World Zionist Organization. On the eve of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, members of both organizations, like most Zionists, believed that they would probably never live to see the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This, the final stage of Zionism, would have to wait until the Jews of Palestine, who in 1931 made up only 17 percent of the country’s population, achieved majority status. In the meantime, the first priority of Zionists was to carefully nurture the social and economic development of the Yishuv, preparing it for eventual independence. The patience of the Mizrachi and the Poale Zion generally reflected their essential trust of Great Britain, the Mandatory Power in Palestine. While both organizations criticized specific British policies in Palestine, neither doubted that London remained committed to the spirit of Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour’s 1917 declaration that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”8

Revisionist Zionists did not share these views. Vladimir Jabotinsky, who established the Revisionist party in 1925, was a powerful orator (his opponents called him a demagogue) and a charismatic leader. The movement he established seemed to many to be uncomfortably similar to Mussolini’s fascist organization. Revisionists were passionately anti-socialist and seemed to be fascinated with military-like discipline and rituals. By 1930, Jabotinsky was angrily attacking other Zionist leaders for their failure to recognize that Great Britain was deserting them. He was particularly upset by the Zionist movement’s failure to prevent Great Britain’s establishment of the Arab kingdom of Transjordan in the territory west of the Jordan River, which had originally been included within the Palestine Mandate. Jabotinsky’s anti-British stance finally forced him and the Revisionist movement to break from the World Zionist Organization in 1931.9

Revisionism did not win many adherents in the United States and existed only on the fringes of the American Zionist community. The Zionist Revisionist Organization of America (which later changed its name to the New Zionist Organization), whose goal was to establish a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, did not even come close to approaching the numerical strength of Poale Zion.10

The Zionist Organization of American (ZOA) and Hadassah were the most important American Zionist organizations between the end of World War I and the establishment of Israel in 1948. Hadassah, the largest organization of Zionist women in the world, theoretically was affiliated with the Zionist Organization of America, but actually exercised total autonomy. The organization concentrated its efforts on practical programs and its financial backing was vital in the construction of Palestine’s impressive health care system. Both Hadassah and the ZOA prided themselves on being the only American Zionist bodies solely committed to reestablishing the Jewish nation in Palestine. Like the Poale Zion and Mizrachi, the ZOA and Hadassah were part of the World Zionist Organization, but they criticized their Zionist competitors for diluting their Jewish nationalism with other ideologies and philosophies. Generally, Hadassah and ZOA members saw their mission as providing the pioneers in Palestine with financial and, when necessary, political support. Few actually intended to settle in Palestine themselves. Most supported the kibbutzim and the powerful Jewish labor organization in Palestine, although they were not socialists, and a great many were also concerned with furthering and ecouraging the growth of Jewish culture in the United States, although few were Orthodox.11

During World War I, under the leadership of Louis Brandeis, the ZOA was able to boast of a membership of two hundred thousand, which included prominent young Jews like Felix Frankfurter who joined the Zionist ranks at Brandeis’s request. After the war, however, American Zionism went into a period of steady decline, largely because Zionists lacked an issue with which to capture the attention and loyalty of American Jews. During the world conflict, the starvation, dislocation, and persecution of East European Jewry stimulated American Jewish concern and propelled large numbers into the Zionist ranks. With the return of peace, the condition of Jews on the continent significantly improved and American interest in Zionism dwindled. Many American Jews also seemed to believe that the Zionist movement had already achieved its goal when the British government in 1917 expressed support for a Palestinian Jewish homeland in the famous Balfour Declaration. This commitment was reaffirmed by the League of Nations when it awarded the Palestine Mandate to Great Britain. Finally, a bitter struggle for the leadership of the world Zionist movement between Louis Brandeis and Chaim Weizmann, the Russian-born Zionist who had been principally responsible for winning Britain’s support for Zionism, further sapped Jewish nationalist strength in the immediate postwar years. Weizmann’s supporters within the ZOA, who resented the assimilated Brandeis’s lack of concern with Jewish culture, defeated the forces of the Supreme Court justice, but only at the expense of membership and prestige. On the eve of the stock market crash, the ZOA and Hadassah claimed a combined membership of sixty-five thousand. In 1929, Zionists did not and could not claim to speak for the more than four million Jews of the United States.12

The stock market crash of 1929 and the depression that followed struck a severe blow at the already weak Zionist body politic, as the fear and actuality of unemployment turned the attention of American Jewry inward. The reestablishment of a Jewish state in the distant future seemed a trivial matter when compared to the urgency of unpaid rent and grocery bills. In a time of economic emergency even many Zionist veterans concluded that membership dues were a luxury that had to be sacrificed.13

At many National Board meetings in the early 1930s, Hadassah’s leaders heard reports describing the organization’s declining membership.14 Hadassah leaders tried to slow the rate of desertion by allowing members to forgo paying their four dollar annual dues for two years before striking their names from the movement’s mailing list.15 In August 1932, officials declared that the continued loss of membership threatened the whole Hadassah framework, and in November, when they learned that over one thousand members had left the organization during the preceding year, they immediately decided to hire a professional publicity worker to oversee a coordinated recruitment drive.16

The aggressive campaign to attract women to Hadassah seemed to achieve quick success. At the end of December 1932, board members learned that “for the first time in three years reports indicated a temporary increase in membership.” By February 1933, 2,096 new members had joined the Zionist ranks, making Hadassah leaders believe that their own personal depression was over. Reports in March indicated, however, that while over two thousand women had entered the movement, a greater number of veterans had failed to renew their Hadassah membership. By July it was clear that the success of the campaign had been an illusion. Almost five thousand women had left Hadassah since the drive began, and the extraordinary efforts of the organization’s leaders couldn’t attract even half that many new women into the movement.17

JEWISH REFUGEES AND AMERICAN IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION

As American Zionist organizations struggled to survive, Adolf Hitler began the long process that would result in European Jewry’s near-extinction. While no plans existed for the physical annihilation of German Jewry in 1933, Hitler certainly intended to segregate and impoverish the Jewish population to the point where they would be forced to flee. The Nazis quickly organized large-scale, anti-Jewish demonstrations, dismissed Jews from government positions, urged “good” Germans to boycott Jewish professionals and businessmen, and used all the resources of the German state to spread the anti-Semitic virus throughout the German populace.18

Hitler’s persecution of German Jewry horrifed American Jewish leaders, but it also had an unintended benefit. At its 1933 annual convention, ZOA president Morris Rothenberg declared that “the calamity that had overtaken the 600,000 Jews in Germany has cast a shadow over everything else in Jewish life.”19 Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, one of American Jewry’s most respected ...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER I: AMERICAN ZIONISM AND THE EXTERNAL THREAT, 1933–1936
• CHAPTER II: A REORDERING OF PRIORITIES: THE HOMELAND UNDER SIEGE
• CHAPTER III: WAR AND STATEHOOD
• CHAPTER IV: AMERICAN ZIONISM AND THE HOLOCAUST
• CHAPTER V: THE AMERICAN ZIONIST LOBBY, 1943–1945: A SUMMARY AND A CASE STUDY
• CHAPTER VI: THE TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN ZIONISM
• CONCLUSIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX