Introduction

Introduction BY ROBERT WELTSCH Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article/8/1/IX/938684 by guest on 27 September 2021 No greater discrepancy can be imagined than that between the three men with whom we begin the present volume of the Year Book. It is almost a reflection of what, since Sir Charles Snow's famous lecture, has become the current formula of "The Two Cultures". Ismar Elbogen devoted his whole life to Jewish scholarship, he was a true representative of the humanities. Fritz Haber on the other hand was a great scientist, though his biographer, doctor and friend, is eager to point out that at his time the two cultures were not yet so far apart, and that Haber was devoted to poets like Goethe and himself made verses. But what about our third man? For his sake, we may be tempted to add to the array a "Third Culture", the world of Mammon, seen not from the aspect of greed, but, in this special case, to be linked in a unique way with active work for the good of fellow-men — in philanthropy of a magnitude which has very few parallels in the history of all nations. There is little that we could add, in the way of introduction, to the story of Baron Hirsch as told by Mr. Adler-Rudel. Among the Jewish public it is not always remembered that the man was a German Jew, a descendant of a Bavarian family of court bankers who acquired the castle of Gereuth. Owing to the early transfer of his residence to Brussels and later to Paris, and perhaps also due to his collaboration with the Alliance Israelite Universelle, Hirsch is in the mind of the uninformed public often associated with French Jewry. Furthermore, his foundation, the ICA, was an English Company registered in London. Hirsch was an inter- national Jew in the true sense and his work extended beyond national boundaries. He became a legend in his lifetime when he spent millions with ease, but still more after his death when he left his immense fortune to the Jewish people. Perhaps one day a scholarly, objective and critical history of the ICA will reveal the difficulties arising out of the administration of such a bequest. What was dedicated by the warm heart of a single person (or perhaps one should say, a couple, as Clara Hirsch was no less dedicated to this work than her husband) necessarily assumes an impersonal character when it passes into the hands of an inevitably bureaucratical administration, and not all of the hopes of the original sponsor are fulfilled. Hirsch had the fantastic idea that one man single- handed could cope with the destiny of a whole people. It was typical of the pre-democratic age, but bound to collide with the growing desire for self-emancipation among Eastern Jews. Some of Hirsch's plans, as when alone he wanted to finance an emigration of 100,000 people yearly from IX X Robert Weltsch Russia and their resettlement in the Argentine, had necessarily to end in disappointment. In the context of this Year Book (which is confined to the history of German Jewry) we cannot deal exhaustively with the activities of ICA which were on a world-wide scale and transcend parochial restrictions. This most important enquiry we have to leave to others: but the personality of Baron Hirsch does belong to German-Jewish history. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article/8/1/IX/938684 by guest on 27 September 2021 It is the fascinating case of an adventurous man of great skill and wide outlook who, in a certain period of European development, attained a commanding position in finance, and who never deserted the Jewish people, and cared for the poor with exemplary generosity. His great foundations survived two world wars and are an instrument of Jewish aid and reconstruction up to the present day. True, his financial transactions were sometimes criticized, as happens almost always with millionaires who — in Europe or America — amassed vast fortunes which they later dedicated to public purposes. Such inquiries we have to leave to objective historians of economics. It is astonishing that Hirsch has not yet found a biographer. The material collected for the essay in this Year Book may, in the words of the author Mr. Adler-Rudel, be regarded as Prolegomena to a future full biography. Ismar Elbogen, who died 20 years ago and would have reached the age of 90 next year, was for more than 30 years for many people in the world, and particularly for students of Judaism, the central figure of German Jewry, mainly in the intellectual and organisational field. Foreign Jews often came to Berlin from abroad with nothing but an introduction to Elbogen. He was known for his readiness to give help and advice; he was in constant touch with Jewish scholars in many parts of the world, with whom he exchanged letters. Part of this correspondence is now stored in the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and although these are only letters which he received and none of his own, they give an impression of his world-wide connections. Elbogen was the last pillar of the specific brand of Wissenschaft des Judentums that had developed in Germany since the idea first issued from the Culturverein of 1822 in which the leading figure was Leopold Zunz — the man who afterwards became the very founder of this Wis- senschaft.1 Some of our readers may object to this generalisation, pointing out that Elbogen and his Hochschule — for he was the Hochschule, as Dr. Rosenthal rightly says — represented only one section of the Jews, though numerically the largest. Orthodox Jewry did not accept the Hochschule as the authoritative place of learning. In pre-Hitler Berlin there were also other Jewish trends and other schools, whose influence !On Zunz cf. A. Altmann in Year Book VI, pp. 3-59; also Nahum Glatzer in Year Book V, pp. 122-139, a.o. — The correspondence of Zunz is now edited by professor Glatzer. The first volume has been published by the LBI (London 1958), the second will follow shortly. Introduction XI on their adherents in the outside world was not less effective. We mention only the famous Hildesheimer Seminary which produced a whole school of orthodox Jewish learning. We hope we shall be able to do justice to these institutions on some future occasion. We also take the opportunity to record with satisfaction that a Memo- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article/8/1/IX/938684 by guest on 27 September 2021 rial Volume in honour of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau has just been published. Originally planned on the occasion of the cen- tenary of the famous institution in 1954, it tells the comprehensive story of the development of the Seminary in essays reprinted from earlier publications or contributed by living authors.2 In the Appendix, Ismar Elbogen is listed as a student at the Seminary from 1893 to 1899, and the volume contains a reprint of his essay "From Graetz to Dubnov — Fifty Years of Jewish Historiography", which is also discussed by Dr. Rosenthal in this Year Book. As to the Hochschule, we have evaluated in earlier volumes of this Year Book the work of some of its leading teachers like Leo Baeck, Julius Guttmann, Eugen Taubler. But no picture of the Hochschule and of the last phase of Jewish scholarship in Germany could be complete without an appreciation of Elbogen. Dr. Erwin Rosenthal had to concentrate his study on this aspect, leaving Elbogen's communal activities to a later biographer. Fritz Haber was a great scientist and bearer of a Nobel Prize, but, from the Jewish point of view, it might easily appear that a man who as a student converted to Christianity in the eighteen-nineties, has no claim to a place in Jewish history. Yet that would be a simplification of a complicated issue. As a matter of fact, the Jewish higher middle class, and especially the great majority of the educated academicians, were at the turn of the nineteenth century completely alienated from Judaism in all its aspects. Religion meant nothing to them — especially to the new generation of scientists in the age of Darwinism and of Haeckel's monism — in a wholly secularized society. Culturally they felt no other bond than the German one, and they were anxious, as Dr. Stern observes, to follow Theodor Mommsen's advice to complete their assimilation by joining the official church of the state. Mommsen, whose attitude Profes- sor Liebeschiitz discussed in Year Book VII,3 was certainly not an anti- semite. In an enquete conducted by the Austrian writer Hermann Bahr in 1893 Mommsen said he considered antisemitism to be "the attitude of scoundrels" (,,die Gesinnung der Kanaille").4 His idea was to end dis- *Das Breslauer Seminar. Judisch-Theologisches Seminar (Fraenckelscher Stiftung) in Breslau 1854-1938. Gedachtnisschrift. Herausgegeben von Guido Kisch. J.C.B. Mohr Tubingen 1963. 442 pp. •Year Book VII, p. 177. *See Olga Schnitzler, Spiegelbild der Freundschaft, Residenz-Verlag, Salzburg 1962, p. 104. (This fascinating book provides real insight into the turn of century great literary XII Robert Weltsch crimination by abolishing a difference which seemed a mere formality. On the Jewish side there were often few intellectual or moral scruples about conversion. These men indulged without inhibition or reservation in the cult of German classical literature, ignoring the fact that the German people themselves had changed since the era of Humanitdt and that the image of the Jew in the German mind was, anyhow, quite different Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article/8/1/IX/938684 by guest on 27 September 2021 from that which educated Jews would have liked it to be.

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