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Ph.D., 2008

Matthew Alexander LaGrone

University of Toronto

This thesis is concerned with the emergence and development of what I am calling

"centrist religion" in Judaism and Christianity from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War. My thesis will argue that what will become Conservative

Judaism, on the one hand, and Victorian Anglicanism, on the other, self-consciously placed themselves in the middle position of their respective traditions. Although the direct points of contact between the two were few, they were accessing common concepts.

Religious centrism was possible only in contexts where government regulation of religion was absent (the United States) or waning (England). Religious centrism arose at a time when both Jews and Christians were re-setting their identities as established religious authority with coercive power was breaking down. Only with a variety of denominational responses to the exigencies of modernity can centrism emerge as feasible alternative between two or more perceived extremes. Denominationalism helped redraw the lines of the perceptions of normative

Judaism and Christianity. Now there was active and largely unregulated competition in the traditions themselves. And those places denominationalism flourished, centrism thrived.

The dissertation is outlined as follows:

1. "Schechter's Umbrella" considers the influence of Anglican thought and practice on

Solomon Schechter and early organized Conservative Judaism. I argue that Schechter's

ii experience in England helped shape the distinctive centrist outlook of the later

Conservative movement.

2. "The Ecclesiology of Matthew Arnold" places Arnold in the context of centrist Anglican

thought in the nineteenth century. I argue that Arnold sees the Church of England as a

unique national institution that acts as a guarantor for moderation in religious and

political life.

3. "The Creation of Conservative Judaism" traces the early development of religious

centrism in the United States, using the public dispute between Alexander Kohut and

Kaufmann Kohler as a prism to understand the formation of a centrist philosophy.

4. "Centrist Fiction or Centrist Fictions?" examines the work of two Victorian authors:

Grace Aguilar and J. Henry Shorthouse. This chapter focuses on the intersections and

interactions of religion, history and literature in the Victorian period.

in Acknowledgments

I want first to thank David Novak for his tireless efforts to improve both my dissertation and my knowledge of the sources of traditional and modern Jewish religious thought. I could not have asked for a better advisor. He and his wife, Melva, have extended to my family many undeserved kindnesses. I can best express my gratitude towards Prof. Novak by quoting from a passage about Alexander Kohut: "In commending scholars to the consideration of others, he was often exuberant in his expression of praise and many a scholar of mediocre attainment he called a Talmid Haham."

I also want to thank the rest of my committee for their close review of each chapter over these last three years:

Karen Weisman sharpened my understanding of the intersections of religion, literature and history. I want in particular to thank her for helping repair the Aguilar section of chapter 4.

David Neelands guided me through the history of the Church of England, especially in its Victorian and contemporary manifestations. Like the other members of my committee, he was always generous with his time and indulgent in answering my often frightfully naive questions.

I was greatly honored to have Jonathan Sarna sit as the external examiner. His comments improved significantly the practical and theoretical considerations of the dissertation.

I want to extend special thanks to my fried Rabbi (and soon, Dr.) Jonathan Crane for his friendship and advice.

I also want to thank Martin Kavka, Ken Green, Todd Endelman and David Starr for their assistance.

Last in the queue, but first in my heart and thoughts, I thank my wife, Danielle Lefebvre, for her love and understanding as I toiled away at this dissertation for the past three years.

v Dedication

This modest offering is dedicated to my daughter, Alyce Mary LaGrone (Chana bat Chava v'Avraham). Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. Schechter's Umbrella: England and the Church of England in the Life and Imagination of Solomon Schechter... 16

Chapter 2. The Ecclesiology of Matthew Arnold 69

Chapter 3. The Kohut-Kohler Debate of 1885 120

Chapter 4. Centrist Fiction or Centrist Fictions?: Religious Centrism in Grace Aguilar and J.H. Shorthouse 198

Conclusion 247

Bibliography 259

Vll Introduction

Rabbi Judah: "If one walks alongside the flames, he will be scorched by the flames; and if he walks alongside the snow, he will be frostbitten. What then is he to do? Let him walk between them and take care of himself in order not to be scorched by the flames and not to be frostbitten."1

The above citation from Avot de-Rabbi Natan (c. 800 CE) articulates a sentiment common in some religious and political circles: avoid the extremes, seek the center, locate the "golden mean" between unpalatable extremes. It is fitting that Solomon Schechter, the driving force behind the growth of Conservative Judaism in the United States, compiled the scholarly edition of this rabbinic work. Crucial to Schechter's thought was the idea that the resources of Judaism can yield a "big tent" movement that can embrace the majority of divided Israel. This goal could be reached by joining ritual conformity and diversity of thought together. This dissertation seeks to unpack the self-definition of early Conservative Judaism (from its earliest stirrings to

Schechter's death in 1915) as a "centrist" group, fitting itself between Reform and "exclusivist"

Ashkenazi Orthodoxy.2 Conservative Judaism did not at this time represent a distinct denomination, but was a merger of traditionalist Reformers and liberal Orthodox. It can be defined as liberal traditionalism, progressive conservatism, inclusivist Orthodoxy, among other terms. This dissertation will use these terms to distinguish what will become Conservative

1 The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, trans. Judah Goldin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 118; see Schechter's Hebrew edition, Aboth de-Rabbi Natan (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1967), 86. 2 For "exclusivist Orthodoxy" see Moshe Shokeid, "Cultural Ethnicity in Israel: The Case of Middle Eastern Jews' Religiosity" AJS Review 9.2 (Autumn 1984), 270; and Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 183-84. 1 Judaism from conventional Orthodoxy and Reform; the lines were often fluid, even into the twentieth-century.

Although what will later be called the Conservative movement (which began as part of traditional or Orthodox Judaism in the late 19 c.) supplies my core focus here, I consider it in comparison with the Church of England in the nineteenth century. Conservative Jews and

Anglicans in this period understood their movements as explicitly centrist: the former as the midpoint between Radical Reform and East European Orthodoxy, and the latter falling between continental Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The socio-historical contexts for each group are starkly different, of course: the Anglican Church received special privileges as the national church of England, while Conservative Judaism struggled to break into a religious market unconstrained by government regulation. Despite the very real cultural, financial and social power differential between the two, this dissertation aims to show that on significant points of self-perception the groups were comparable. I am not making a normative claim that either the

Church of England or Conservative Judaism form the actual religious center of their respective traditions, but I am arguing that they shared a self-understanding of themselves as filling in the religious middle.4 An unambiguously centrist attitude emerged at this time, and this dissertation considers the component elements of that attitude.

The historical study of religious liberalism5 and conservatism6 has been well-served, but little attention has been devoted to religious centrism. The reason for this omission may rest in

3 See Jeffrey Gurock, "From Fluidity to Rigidity: The Religious Worlds of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in Twentieth Century America" (Ann Arbor: Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, The University of Michigan, 1998) 4 Nor am I claiming that all reflective members of each group considered their positions as centrist. This is especially true of Anglicanism: many of its public figures maintained that the Church of England was Protestant in both name and reality. I am interested in the emergent group that rejected that position in the nineteenth century. 5 See Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006); Mark Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology: Religion and Cultural Synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.); Mark Hulsether, Building a Protestant Left: Christianity and Crisis Magazine, 1941-1993 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); Lawrence Rigal and Rosita Rosenberg, Liberal Judaism: the First Hundred Years (London: Liberal Judaism, 2004); 2 the elusiveness inherent in an arrangement that holds in fragile balance views that their opponents claim lack complementarity. Therefore, the course of moderate religion appears distinctly ambiguous: is it a union of opposites, a poorly cobbled together synthesis, or a movement with its own integrity and comprehensiveness? A mainstream Conservative Jewish historian confirms this uncertainty: "[I]deological ambiguity,' writes Ismar Schorsch, 'is the hallmark of Conservative Judaism." The same can be said for Anglicanism. Perhaps centrism does not effortlessly arouse the same passion, religious and political, that liberalism and conservatism afford. But that absence has left a gap in our understanding of how third-way, moderate religious movements emerged, developed and interacted internally with their co­ religionists and externally with the broader culture beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. This dissertation proposes, however imperfectly, to diminish that scholarly gap.

This work also contributes to various academic fields and sub-fields: religion and literature, American Jewish history, transatlantic history, Conservative Judaism, Jewish-

Christian relations, state-church interaction and Anglican intellectual history. Although the four chapters here are diverse in content and purpose, they are linked together by religious centrism, which I argue is a phenomenon of the voluntarism, denominationalism and pluralism of the nineteenth-century. I believe this feature represents the original aspect of my thesis. Religious centrism was possible only in contexts where government regulation of religion was absent (the

United States) or waning (England). Religious centrism arose at a time when both Jews and

Christians were re-setting their identities as established religious authority with coercive power was breaking down. Only with a variety of denominational responses to the exigencies of

Anne Kershen, Tradition and Change: a History of Reform Judaism in Britain, 1840-1995 (London : Vallentine Mitchell, 1995). 6 See James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London: LB. Tauris, 2004). 7 Schorsch, Ismar, From Text to Context: the turn to history in modern Judaism (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 255. For ambiguity in Anglicanism, see Stephen Syke's The Integrity of Anglicanism. (London: Mowbrays, 1978), passim. 3 modernity can centrism emerge as feasible alternative between two or more perceived extremes.

Denominationalism helped redraw the lines of the perceptions of normative Judaism and

Christianity. Now there was active and largely unregulated competition in the traditions themselves. And those places denominationalism flourished, centrism thrived.

Religious centrism does not encompass an inclusive doctrine, but rather a range of parallel attitudes. Centrism is, in the Anglican lexis, comprehensive: what will become

Conservative Judaism, on the one hand, reasoned that it could be the Judaism of all Jews because it endeavored to locate a balance between Reform's emphasis on the personal and the rational and the Orthodox allegiance to the communal and the legal. Solomon Schechter, the leading light of the early Conservative movement, loathed divisiveness and sought a Judaism

"without adjectives" that would appeal broadly to the greatest majority of American Jews. This

Judaism he termed "Catholic Israel." The same model applies to the Anglican situation: the

Church of England devised a settlement—a settlement on paper, it is true—that strove to merge what they saw as the truths of Catholicism and the continental Reformation. From this, an authentically "catholic" church would emerge, although exceptionally suited to English circumstances. The doctrine of comprehensiveness allowed for a broad scope, and therefore permitted groups from Evangelicals to Anglo-Catholics to exist within the same institutional structures, if often with clenched teeth. Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism were not, I will argue, movements of mere compromise, but arrangements with their own integrity.

There has been to date no fully dressed account of centrist self-understanding and how it shaped the arc of development for these groups, although substantial research material is available for just such an account. Moreover, there has been little comparative work on religious centrism despite the fact that a number of scholars such as Jonathan Sarna8 and Norman

See Sarna, American Judaism: a History. 4 Bentwich, and theologians such as James Pike and Robert Gordis10 have remarked upon the affinities between Anglicanism and Conservative Judaism. Although the direct points of contact between the two were few—I will argue, however, that the influence of Anglicanism on

Conservative Judaism was considerable, although largely underappreciated—they were accessing common concepts.

The following ideas chart some of their fundamental resemblances: a tendency to refuse systematic thinking; to seek unity even at the price of sacrificing ideological purity; to press for uniformity in ritual life and to permit diversity in theological speculation and moral reasoning; to appeal to the authority of history rather than direct divine revelation or individual conscience; to confirm at the same time both the continuity of doctrine and its development; and to aspire

"to keep the mean between two extremes."11

As the foregoing suggests, I believe this dissertation can add to the general fund of knowledge by its comparativist perspective, highlighting characteristics familiar both to

Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism. These traits also throw into relief great differences, politically and religiously. A comparative history of centrist religion opens an unexplored vein of research, and will, I hope, augment our understanding of Judaism and Christianity. Peter

Baldwin's words get to the core of my purpose: ".. .good comparative histories should give insights into each particular case that would have remained unrevealed had they had been studied in isolation."

Chapter Summary

9 See Bentwich, Solomon Schechter: a Biography (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1938). 10 See Gordis, "Process and Pluralism in Conservative Judaism" Judaism 37.1 (1988): 48-59. An American Episcopal bishop, James Pike (1913-1969), is quoted in Gordis' article. 11 Preface to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. 12 Peter Baldwin, "Comparing and Generalizing: Why All History is Comparative, yet no History is Sociology," in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, eds. Deborah Cohen and Maura O'Connor (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 11.

5 The first essay, "Schechter's Umbrella," considers the influence of Anglicanism on

Solomon Schechter and early organized Conservative Judaism. (Schechter and those associated with what will later be called the Conservative movement did not consider themselves to be a movement separate from traditional Orthodox Judaism, although progress towards denominationalism was evident.) Schechter spent two decades in England (1882-1902) before coming to New York as the first president of the reconstituted Jewish Theological Seminary. As president of JTS, Schechter mapped out the course of the Seminary in its religious practice, theological understanding and institutional formation. Only in recent decades has the movement begun moving away from Schechter's outline. And this outline was formed in large part by his lived experience in England. English intellectual and religious life colored Schechter's thought: he referenced English literature, theology and history extensively in his writings.

In England, Schechter saw a national church that was traditional in ritual practice and worship service but open to assimilating many of the new cultural currents of modernity. This balance of tradition and modernity appealed to Schechter's heart and intellect. He saw a parallel in the Church of England to his vision of a Judaism that would incorporate klalyisrael, or what he would famously term "Catholic Israel." The Anglican Church presumed—and this presumption was obsolete in practice if not yet in theory by 1882, the year Claude Montefiore brought Schechter to England as a tutor—that it would be the Church of all British Christians. It was suited to the Sitz im Leben of the people, and it was broad enough to include those with

Catholic or Protestant preferences. Like the Anglican Church, Schechter's vision of Judaism sought to bridge a growing divide. For liberal traditionalists, the divergent paths marked out by radical reformers and obdurate traditionalists were undermining an already gossamer-thin

Jewish unity. If Conservative Judaism could be the Judaism of American Jews, then that unity could be brought closer to reality. Schechter, however, was not accustomed to the voluntarism

6 of American religious life. The Anglican Church did not succeed as a model for American

Judaism, but not for lack of imagination or effort. Conservative Judaism maintained the structural outlook that Schechter brought over from England, but it would in the twentieth century become one movement among others rather than the principal form of American

Judaism.

This chapter considers the centrist parallels between Schechter and Anglican thinkers as diverse as Matthew Arnold, Frederick Denison Maurice and (the pre-Roman Catholic) John

Henry Newman. We can find in each of these Anglican authors patterns of centrist thinking that would later surface in Schechter's centrist designs. These patterns suggest that there are two ways to be centrist: via media and comprehensiveness. The origins of both can be traced back to the beginnings of the Henrician Church. The via media presented itself as the middle path between two extremes. Not merely a compromise between two extremes, the via media, as a religious truth with its own integrity, kept faith the early Church: the Protestants lost the corporate sense of the Church universal, while Catholics remained sunk in medievalism, but the

Church of England was continuous with the faith of the Church Fathers. Anglican comprehensiveness meant that the Church of England embraced the full truths of Christianity that Protestants and Catholics held partially. What Protestants and Catholics affirmed was true, but their rejections—of the link with the past by Protestants and the denial of Christian freedom by Catholics—were false. This chapter also considers Schechter's reasons for utilizing the

Church of England as a model rather than the native Anglo-Jewish community among whom he worshipped. This choice is significant as many of the institutions and ideals of Anglo-Jewry drew upon the example of Anglicanism.

The second essay, "The Ecclesiology of Matthew Arnold," is an attempt to place Arnold in the context of Anglican thought in the nineteenth century. Overviews of general religious

7 thought and feeling in the Victorian era give an appropriate nod to Arnold, but the institutional histories of the Anglican Church have not acknowledged his contributions to defining Anglican identity. In many ways, this is quite understandable: Arnold broke with much of traditional

Christian doctrine. But, and just as significant, he never left the Church of England, and in fact he was an apologist for the Church at a time when even part of the clergy seemed alienated. Like other religious liberals of his day, Arnold believed that the old way of doing religion was no longer tenable. New foundations had to be built. But he suggested that the materials of a new faith must be formed on old grounds, especially in matters of ritual and liturgy. Liberal substance in conservative form: a common way to mint a centrist. Like his father, the educational reformer Thomas Arnold, Matthew sought to expand the parameters of permitted religious opinion (the nineteenth-century century witnesses a remarkable cognitive change: belief becomes opinion) to include the largest number of English Christians in the warm embrace of the national Church. The Church was to be enlarged, and only a national institution could do it: the dissenters were narrow in culture and misunderstood the Bible, whereas the

Catholic Church was overlaid with fusty medieval encrustations, the true beliefs of historical

Christianity buried under a gathering of dogma. Unlike his father, Arnold wanted to include

Roman Catholics in the Church of England: moved by Newman and the Oxford Movement, he was impressed by the Catholic roots of the Church of England's ritual and aesthetic life. Of the two centrist options available to him, Arnold adopted comprehensiveness to contemporary

Anglicanism but identified the via media as the historical or vertical direction of the Church.

The third essay, "The Kohut-Kohler Debate," uses the public dispute between Alexander

Kohut and Kaufmann Kohler as a prism to understand the formation of later Conservative

Judaism. This philosophy would show how the denominational pie could be sliced into three:

8 the Reformers on the left, the Orthodox on the right, and the Conservatives in the middle.

Kohut was the first thinker on American soil to elaborate a mature, sophisticated version of what it meant to be a centrist in the midst of a religious free market.

The United States was a vast laboratory of voluntarist religious experimentation. And even though there was periodic persecution of religious minorities (Mormons, Roman Catholics and Quakers were commonly subject to political and social discrimination), such persecution was not part of the over-arching American narrative; in fact, it was the opposite: America was considered a land of religious liberty. Centrism flourishes best where the interference of government in religious affairs is minimal. In the United States, there was a historical allergy to state churches. In the flurry of American denominationalism (clearly drawing on local Protestant models), Kohut tried to find a middle path between Reform, which was in its Radical phase, and immigrant Orthodoxy, which had nominal influence outside its limited sphere. He was a traditional, but not opposed cosmetic reforms. Kohut wished to find a golden mean for

American Judaism yet all the while denying that he was helping to create a distinct movement within Judaism. Comprehensiveness was his desired centrist option, but in the American religious context unity was unrealistic because of the voluntary nature of the community. He would have to be a centrist through the via media. The dispute between Kohut and Kohler is examined through their respective stances on biblical criticism, religious development/progress and the nature of Jewish law.

This chapter considers three factors that would later make Conservative Judaism possible, factors unique to the American environment: voluntarism, denominationalism and pluralism. American Jews freely chose to join or not to join their local Jewish community, and

13 Others have sliced the pie differently: for instance, some Reformers saw their movement as a path between assimilation and orthodoxy, or Ethical Culture and traditionalism. Modern Orthodoxy also seeks to claim the Jewish center as its own between ultra-Orthodoxy and liberal Judaism. See Arnold Eisen, "American Judaism: Changing Patterns in Denominational Self-Definition" Studies in Contemporary Jewry 8 (1992). 40.

9 this choice had a cascade effect: because individuals were free agents, they could arrange a

Judaism most amenable to their religious sensitivities. The denominationalism of American

Judaism (and Christianity, for that matter) resulted from the voluntaristic grounds established by the U.S. Constitution, and pluralism is an inevitable outcome of denominationalism. Neither the

Reformers nor the traditionalists were pluralist in the sense of considering the pluralities of

Jewish expression as an intrinsic good, but they recognized pluralism as a fact. These three factors lead to religious competition among Jews, and competition would lead to more (and perhaps better) religion.

The final chapter, "Centrist Fiction or Centrist Fictions?," examines the work of two

Victorian authors: Grace Aguilar and J. Henry Shorthouse. This chapter focuses on the interrelationship of religion and literature in the Victorian period, and how scholars can tease out through literature an appreciation of the growth and development of religious centrism. Both

Aguilar and Shorthouse were fiction writers whose main theme was religious life. They also wrote non-fiction works on theological topics.

Aguilar, despite her short life, was the most significant Anglo-Jewish author of the first half of the nineteenth-century. She was also an able polemicist and apologist for a reformed though still tradition-minded Judaism. Popular in her day among Jews and Christians, her work was largely forgotten until revived by feminist scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Aguilar's writings are important for the study of women in Anglo-Jewry, Jewish-Christian relations and the question of authority in traditional religion. I argue that Aguilar balances respect for the

Jewish past (it maintains a veto) with the desire to explore the resources of the tradition to open new ways to religious expression. As Schechter would often describe his Judaism with reference to Anglicanism, Aguilar often couched her Judaism in Christian terms.

10 Shorthouse, a Quaker turned Anglican, authored John Inglesant, a "philosophical romance" and novel of ideas that attempted to confirm the Church of England as the midpoint between two extremes, the embodiment of culture set against fanaticism. Sympathetic to the aesthetics of Rome and the Puritan emphasis on the existential relationship of the believer before

God, Shorthouse nevertheless censures both traditions as too narrow: the first limits freedom of conscience while the latter denies a corporate sense of the Church as the body of Christ. John

Inglesant is set during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. This period was clearly a proxy for Shorthouse's own: would the English Church return to communion with the Catholic

Church, would it follow the path of the Puritans, or would it mark out its own destiny distinct from Rome and Geneva? Shorthouse believed that the Anglican Church opted to go its own way as the only traditional body to keep continuity with early Christianity. Shorthouse presents a robust and theologically sensitive understanding of Anglicanism as a middle point between two apparent extremes. His model for this kind of Anglican was F.D. Maurice (himself a convert to

Anglicanism), who I argue in an earlier chapter is the archetypal Anglican centrist.

These authors integrated contemporary religious ideas and debates into their fiction.

While their works are not part of the standard canon of Victorian fiction, the ideas expressed in their novels, short stories and non-fiction grant the reader real insight into the divergent contexts of Victorian religion. Fiction might not seem an immediate site to discover a developing centrist attitude, yet the writers under consideration in this chapter situate their characters into the broad stream of English religious life. Although Shorthouse's John Inglesant is set in the English Civil

War, he intentionally read contemporary socio-religious issues into his novel.

The conclusion reflects on the history of centrism in the nineteenth century and considers how the centrist attitude has had to adapt to changing circumstances. I argue in the preceding chapters that there exist material parallels between Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism. In

11 the conclusion, I contend that such parallels continue. Consider the issues of women's ordination and same-sex marriage: Anglicans and Conservative Jews confronted (and continue to confront) these questions at the same time, and in the case of women's ordination groups broke off from the larger denomination.14 This section focuses on the complexities of being a centrist today.

Theoretical Considerations

The theoretical muscle of the dissertation, especially in the long third chapter, is underpinned by the economics of religion. The economics of religion is relatively new field, although its origins can be traced to forgotten sections of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

This field examines the human side of religion through the prism of economic models. The economics of religion ask questions such as: how does a free market or a regulated market affect the development of religious institutions? Why does the absence of a national church—which privileges members of that church and burdens non-conformists economically and politically— seem to make a country more religious? Why do strict groups flourish (at the start) and liberal groups decline?15 And, conversely, how does a national church, by acting as a branch of

14 The relevant groups here are the Continuing Anglican movement (est. 1977) and the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism (today known as the Union for Traditional Judaism, est. 1984). These "right-wing" centrists removed a not insignificant portion of the more observant laity (and some clergy) from mainstream Anglicanism and Conservative Judaism. On the issue of same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy, the Anglican Church and Conservative Judaism are also in a similar place. North American and British Anglicans are largely, though not completely, in favor of same-sex marriage and ordination, while African Anglicans (and Nigerian Anglicans now outnumber British Anglicans—a delicious irony of colonialism) are largely, though not completely, opposed. Conservative Judaism recently permitted the ordination of openly gay and lesbian clergy, and this was done with the approval of the majority of its members. In Israel, however, the Conservative movement (known as Masorti) opposes the ordination of openly gays and lesbians and will not perform same-sex marriages. The situation in Canada falls between these two positions: the older Conservative synagogues, especially in Toronto, follow the Israeli model, where the newer synagogues in the Canadian West, especially Vancouver, support the American model. 15 Although outside of the scope of this essay, I am fascinated by this question. I am fascinated because contemporary Reform Judaism appears to go against this trend. Reform is thriving when its parallel mainstream liberal Christian counterparts are leaking members like a sieve. I believe the reason for Reform's revival (and Conservative Judaism's numerical decline) is the Reform co-opting of the language of tradition. This trend has been going on since the 1970s when traditional Jewish categories such as mitzvah (commandment) began re-entering the Reform lexicon. Contemporary Reform has succeeded by borrowing from the warm glow of tradition but removing 12 government, seem to make a country less religious on the whole? Why does the supply side of religion matter as much as the demand side? These questions are explored especially in the context of the growth of Conservative Judaism in the United States.

The economic model is an especially good one to examine the development of centrism.

Centrism, as mentioned earlier, appears only with the outbreak of voluntarism, denominationalism and pluralism, otherwise there is no "center" to be claimed. The conceptual language of economics, then, is particularly apt here because of my focus on denominational striving and self-definition. The denominations of each tradition competed against each other, and with the relaxing of governmental constraint on religion in England and its effective absence in the United States religious groups would win or lose based on merit and effort.16 The absence of a monopoly power and the regulatory liabilities that attend to its maintenance allowed for greater innovation in Jewish and Christian religious life: the supply side could now meet the demand side. Individual Jews and Christians were resetting the lines of their beliefs and practices, and new suppliers filled a growing centrist niche. The low barriers to entry in a pluralistic environment made the conditions for Conservative Judaism possible.

My proposal is also greatly indebted to David Sorkin's work on the religious

1 7

Enlightenment. In a series of articles, Sorkin reflects on what he calls, inter alia, "heroic moderation," "enlightened orthodoxy," or "middle way." He discerns these ideas and ideals as fundamental to our appreciation of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was not, in his understanding, an anti-religious movement, but instead an encounter of religion with the new the underlying theology. While the beliefs that underpin rabbinic Judaism do not appeal to most Reform Jews, traditionalism is now a viable option within Reform. 161 take the language of "winners" and "losers" from Stark and Finke's The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 17 See Sorkin, "Geneva's 'Enlightened Orthodoxy': the Middle Way of Jacob Vernet (1698-1789)" Church History 74.2 (June 2005), 286-305; '"A Wise, Enlightened and Reliable Piety:' The Religious Enlightenment in Central and Western Europe, 1689-1789" Parkes Institute Pamphlet no. 1 (University of Southampton, 2002); "Reclaiming Theology for the Enlightenment: the Case of Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706-1757)" Central European History 36.4 (2003), 503-30; "William Warburton: The Middle Way of "Heroic Moderation'", Dutch Review of Church History 82:2 (2002), 262-300. 13 science and the historical approach. And religious Jews and Christians fruitfully rethought their faith within the new language emerging from those fields of learning. Many struck out a middle course: religious doctrine and practice would be confirmed by historical examination, and the core truths of revelation would not diverge from reason and science but would be independent of them. Their religious approach would pursue a path between deism (or unbelief) and

"enthusiasm."

Important as well to the method employed here is Hayden White's reminder that many narrative histories are constructions, or what he terms "emplotments," of an historian's approach. White maintains that historians craft totalizing narratives where only disconnected fragments in fact exist. The history nurtured in a professor's study is not the history that actually happens. The past, because it is ephemeral, cannot be captured; true knowledge of what went before is unattainable.

While keeping White's attitude in mind, I think that his assessment of historical practice, and the possibility of real knowledge, is too pessimistic. Mary Fulbrook, in her work Historical

Theory, prudently observes that "the past can, it is freely admitted, never be 'really known': what we know of it is a reconstruction based on its traces, on evidence which has survived to the present. And that evidence is not imaginary, not merely a figment of discourse; it is real."19

Diverging from White, she concludes that "the death of metanarrative does not necessarily entail a view of history as fiction... [and that there is] a clear distinction between the (teleological) imposition of a single 'plot' to the whole of human history, and the construction of subsidiary, specific theses about selected aspects of historical change." My attempt to construct a reality of religious centrism establishes itself on very real data. The evidence is there, and it will be the

18 See Hayden White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 19 Fulbrook, Mary, Historical Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 24. 20 Ibid., 53, 59-60 14 task of other scholars to judge whether my interpretations and conclusions are rationally persuasive.

Since I follow the historical method in the intellectual history of religions, I concur with

Bruce Lincoln's judgment that "to practice the history of religions in a fashion consistent with the discipline's claim of title is to insist on discussing the temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human, and material dimensions of those discourses, practices, and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual, and divine."21 Thus, my theological commitments are bracketed during historical research and writing.

Finally, my aim in writing about several case studies is not to unsettle a common consensus, but rather to point to a new vein of research, one that asks us to reconsider the sometimes frozen lines of liberalism and conservatism, or radicalism and reaction. I believe that the concept of religious centrism can only add to a sophisticated understanding of religious definition and self-definition.

21 Lincoln, Bruce. "Theses on Method" Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (2005) 17:8.

15 Chapter One

Schechter's Umbrella:1 England and the Church of England in the Life and Imagination of Solomon Schechter

Introduction

Scholars of Conservative Judaism commonly locate the movement's fitful birth in

Germany and its maturity in the United States.2 In this paper, I will suggest a third place of development: England. While its intellectual seed was planted in Germany, many of the core ideas and ideals of early Conservative Judaism grew ripe in England. Solomon Schechter, the first president of the reorganized Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), lived in England for two decades prior to taking up his post in New York. England's influence, and especially that of the

Church of England, has been largely underappreciated in the narrative of Schechter and, by extension, Conservative Judaism. I will argue that part of the "pre-history" of institutional

Conservative Judaism was written in England.

The foregoing is not meant to suggest that England has been overlooked entirely.

Schechter's first biographer, Norman Bentwich, detailed broadly if not deeply the weight of

English theology and literature on the progress of Schechter's thought.3 Abraham Karp notes that "he had learned as a resident in England the need for standards in congregational affairs and

1 There is an anecdote, repeated many places, that Schechter, while president of JTS, carried an umbrella on the Sabbath, as Englishmen, including acculturated Anglo-Jews, were accustomed to doing. Opening an umbrella was considered an act of constructive building (boneh), and thus was a transgression of Sabbath law. See Mel Scult, "Schechter's Seminary" in Tradition Renewed, ed. J. Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997), 1:60. 2 See Moshe Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism : the Historical School in 19th century America (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1965), passim; Neil Gillman, Conservative Judaism: The New Century (West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House, 1993), passim; Abraham Karp, "A Century of Conservative Judaism" in Jewish Continuity in America: Creative Survival in a Free Society. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 205ff. 3 Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter: A Biography (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1938), especially chapters 3 and 4. Bentwich, whose father, Herbert, helped support Schechter financially, was a British Jew well acquainted with the trends in Victorian Anglicanism. 16 dignity in worship."4 Jonathan Sarna, in his magisterial history of American Judaism, observes that during Schechter's presidency, "the hierarchic British model of Judaism, heavily influenced by Anglicanism, proved deeply alluring to the seminary's leaders."5 Schechter in fact termed the synagogue arm of the Conservative movement, the United Synagogue, after the designation for the synagogues of the British Empire. We will see the irony of this decision later: in England, he scorned the institutional structure and enervated religious life of British Judaism; he was motivated instead by the vigorous intellectual robustness of Victorian Anglicanism instead.

David Starr also affirms that English religious thought underpins much of Schechter's theology.6

Starr's research describes most completely his career in England, and indicates a real, material connection between Schechter's later ideas and his experience among Anglican Christianity. But expanding upon this connection is not central to his work.7

Others have noted a broader correlation between certain trends in Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism. Some telling evidence can be culled from an anecdote offered by Robert

Gordis. Gordis, who was a professor of Bible and the philosophy of religion at JTS, tells of an exchange with James A. Pike, an Episcopal Bishop. Pike inquired after Gordis' personal understanding of Judaism. After he answered, Pike responded, "I see that Episcopalianism occupies the center position in Christianity that Conservatism occupies in the Jewish spectrum."8 In this brief observation rests a deep truth: Conservative Jewish and Anglican self- understanding has consistently and self-consciously installed itself in the middle of their respective traditions. Conservative Judaism situates itself between Orthodox and Reform, and

4 Karp, "A Century of Conservative Judaism," 215 5 Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 239. 6 See David Starr, "Catholic Israel: Solomon Schechter, Unity and Fragmentation in Modern Jewish Life," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, chapter 2. 7 It was not only Schechter who was influenced by England, but Cyrus Adler, who assumed the presidency of JTS after Schechter's death, and the Reform leader Kaufman Kohler, the president of Hebrew Union College during Schechter's years in America. See Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The Publication of'Th e Jewish Encyclopedia (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1991), 11. 8 Robert Gordis, "Process and Pluralism in Conservative Judaism" Conservative Judaism 37, no.l (1988): 57 17 Anglicanism places itself between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Their centrism expresses itself in two ways: one, as a via media, a third option between theological extremes; and secondly, as the articulation of the historical and continuous synagogue or church, which comprehends what it deems the best elements found in the extremes.9

Although this short review intimates a far-reaching relationship, there has been to date neither extensive research published on England in general and Anglicanism in particular as a formative stimulus for Schechter nor scholarship on the lines of affiliation between Conservative

Judaism and Anglicanism. This paper will explore the sources of his thought, and argue that an accounting of Schechter is incomplete absent an appreciation of the religious context in which his ideas matured. My aim is to put right this lacuna. However, I am not arguing that England ought to replace the United States or Germany in the hierarchy of Conservative Jewish history.

It is decidedly third; it did not grow institutions or produce native leaders for the Conservative movement, no matter how great England's shaping guidance on Schechter and Sabato Morais, the leader of the original Seminary.10 But what it did do was enhance the identity formation of this branch of modern Judaism.

This paper is organized around four themes: the Anglican context during Schechter's residence; what Schechter learned in and from England; the influence of Anglican theology and history on his understanding of centrism, which was, and indeed is, a controlling idea in

Conservative Judaism; and, lastly, why Schechter received intellectual succor from English

Christians and not English Jews.

For example, early Conservative Judaism accepted the historical method, adopted also by the Reformers, as the proper way to study most sacred texts, but believed that that method would show continuity with the past, not discontinuity—a liberal means to a conservative end. 10 See Arthur Kiron, "Golden Ages, Promised Lands: The Victorian Rabbinic Humanism of Sabato Morais," Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1999. 18 The Anglican Situation in Schechter's England

In the wake of the dislocations of the Reformation, England emerged neither Roman

Catholic nor Lutheran nor Calvinist. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I did not imagine that they were establishing a new church. In fact, they believed that they were reinvigorating the Catholic

Church with the principle of national sovereignty. This Church was to be free of papal intrusions and other medieval encrustations, but free as well of the anarchy of sola scriptura, scripture unmediated by tradition, as championed by the Reformers.11 Elizabeth was determined to settle religious controversy in her nation, between those Catholics who desired a minimum of reform and those persuaded by Luther and especially Calvin to push religious and political reform even

19 further. The church that arose subsequently was "reformed and reforming but not of the

Reformation." The Church of England maintained the traditional three-fold ministry of bishop, deacon and priest but refused the authority of the Pope; it called itself Catholic but not Roman; it nurtured the use of English as the language of prayer and ritual life, but denied private judgment in matters of doctrine and order as the Reformers had pressed. It was sacramental and evangelical, Catholic and Protestant, not combining them, but believing that the true elements of each were antecedently present in the English church. The Church of England was, in the words of 1662 Book of Common Prayer, "the mean between two extremes."14

Not all English Christians accepted this arrangement, of course, and intra-Christian sectarianism was a persistent irritant as long as Anglicanism represented both the Established

11 See Keith Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Moscow, Id.: Canon Press, 2001). 12 See Charles Hardwick's A History of the Articles of Religion (Cambridge: J. Deighton, 1851) for a discussion of how the Thirty-Nine Articles shaped the arc of the Church of England's distinctive path. Article 34 explicitly rejects the private judgment of sola scriptura. 13 Theodore A. McConnell, "The Via Media as Theological Method" in The Anglican Moral Choice, ed. Paul Elmen (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1983), 159. The location of the Church of England in the Reformation was been, and continues to be, highly contentious. Some scholars hold to Anglican exceptionalism, while others believe that the Church of England was a piece with the Reformation as a whole. 14 "Preface" in The Book of Common Prayer: The 1662 Version (London: David Campbell, 1999). 19 Church and the government. And while there were very real disagreements among Anglicans themselves, a consensus fidelium developed broadly enough that most felt that they could conform. It would not be until the middle third of the nineteenth-century that sectarianism would openly gash the Church, though some might argue the narrowing of the Anglican consensus began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century with the rise of Wesley and the

Evangelical revival, or perhaps project sectarianism back to the religious battles of the seventeenth-century that led to the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the

Commonwealth (1649). Sectarianism among Anglicans in the Victorian era was threatening the model of unity supposed by the Church of England just as the widening fissure between Reform and Orthodoxy was exposing the disunity among Jews in Britain and elsewhere. During

Schechter's time, Anglicans were divided roughly among High, Low and Broad Church

Anglicans.

The High Church, to which Schechter compared his vision of the synagogue,15 emphasized its Catholic heritage and its traditions, even while many of its members were energetically anti-Roman Catholic. It also stressed continuity with the historic, undivided church of the first centuries and the authority of the bishops. Central to the Anglican retrieval of its

Catholic inheritance was the Oxford Movement, which was initially informed by men with High

Church sympathies. Newman, however, had been reared as an Evangelical. They called upon the

Church to accept only the doctrines of the Apostles, and thus reclaim the true and original

Catholic faith. Catholicity was a key term in nineteenth-century religious thought; it would motivate Schechter as well. Its ritual and liturgical life was ordered and elaborate. High Church ecclesiology valued the corporate constitution of the Church. Theologically, it accentuated the

Solomon Schechter, "Introduction" in Studies in Judaism: First Series (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917), xii. 20 aspect of divine transcendence, the abysmal difference between God and human beings. Its

Christocentrism fixed upon the Incarnation.

The Broad Church was less an organized part of the established Church than it was a cluster of liberal clerics and laypersons who sought to invigorate the Church by encouraging the integration of historical criticism into Anglican understanding. It cheered the findings of science and sought to reconcile them with devotion to traditional religion. It numbered among its leading members Thomas Arnold, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Frederick Denison Maurice.16

The Broad Church's greatest public success (or scandal, according to the conservatives) was the publication of Essays and Reviews, which introduced a cautious and open-minded biblical criticism to the educated public.17 They permitted a wide berth of conformity to the Church. The

Broad Churchman Arthur Stanley, for instance, spoke of the amplification of the Church, one that could comprehend Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals and those who accepted the conclusions of biblical criticism and sought to prod the Church to adjust itself to the new intellectual climate.

Stanley underscored adaptability in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the classic statement of Anglican conviction to which clerics had to subscribe, that he hoped would allow for the national church to flourish without acrimony.

The Low Church underlined the Protestant aspects of Anglicanism, especially the need for personal, existential conversion and the singular authority of inerrant scripture. This arm of

Anglicanism brooded about individual transgression and its ripple effect on the divine economy.

The sacrificial nature of the crucifixion was judged indispensable for escape from sin; Low

Churchmen consequently laid a greater emphasis on atonement than Incarnation. Its liturgical

Maurice is a more complicated case. He is often numbered among the Broad Churchmen, but he was their critic as well. Maurice's liberalism was of a piece with the Broad Church, but his theology broke at significant points from Arnold and others. 17 See Shea and Whitla's masterful edition of Essays and Reviews: the 1860 Text and its Reading (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); also, the most relevant recent scholarship is Altholz's Anatomy of a Controversy: the Debate over Essays and Reviews, 1860-1864 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1994). 21 life owed as much to the ex tempore stylings as it did to the Book of Common Prayer. The Low

1 Q

Church represented the evangelical wing of the Church of England.

The religious divisions of England and the desire to restore unity would greatly impact

Schechter's thinking. The situation in England was reflected by an analogous situation among

Anglo- and American Jews. But let us first look at some of the more general ideas that Schechter took from his experience of England.

The Lessons of England

Schechter was brought to England from Berlin in 1882 by Claude Goldsmid Montefiore, later a founder of Liberal Judaism. In the 1880s he tutored Montefiore in Talmud and wrote occasional articles for the Jewish press. Most of his time was devoted to reading and editing some of the extensive Hebrew manuscript holdings at the British Museum and the Bodleian

Library, slowly encouraging a reputation as the finest Judaica scholar in England.1 In 1890 he was appointed lecturer and then Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge. Schechter would later be named professor of Hebrew at University College, London. It would be in England that he would flourish as a scholar. And it would be in England that he would confront a non-Jewish atmosphere to which he warmed.

This section will refer to three key yet distinct themes that repeat throughout Schechter's work in terms of his relationship to England and Anglican thought: the use of analogy; his appreciation of British liberalism; and his writing style. Each theme points to the depth and breadth of his English influences.

The conventional starting point for the study of Anglican division is W.J. Conybeare, "Church Parties" in From Cranmer to Davidson: A Church of England Miscellany, ed. Stephen Taylor (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell Press, 1999), 213-386. The article was originally published in 1853. 19 See Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 50ff. 20 While in America Schechter did continue to deliver public lectures and teach at the Seminary, the greater part of his time was allotted to the flatness of administrative work. 22 Schechter often couched his Judaism in analogies indicative of his experience in

England. During a speech at Hebrew Union College, the academic and seminary arm of the

Reform movement, he described the dispute between traditional and Reform Judaism as a conflict parallel to debates in the House of Commons. Arrayed on one side is His Majesty's government, formed by the party occupying the greatest number of seats; opposite them sit His

Majesty's opposition, which, though loyal to crown and country, challenges the policies put forward by the government in power. The latter was only able to contest by virtue of the country's hard won unity. Both government and opposition recognize, though often with clenched teeth, a unity of common purpose. The theme of British unity was overlaid onto

Schechter's concern for Jewish unity, that traditionalists and Reformers "form one large community, working for the welfare of the country and the prosperity of the nation." Each group hewed out its own path and makes a very real contribution to the mutual good of all Jews, according to his generous reading of Jewish history. He would not often be so kind to Reform.

Schechter also extended his analogies into the theological ambit. He habitually imagines the substance of his Judaism in Anglican forms. In the Introduction to the first series of his

Studies in Judaism he claims the name "High Synagogue" to explain his conception of the synagogue; that is, in Schechter's idiom, the corporate, public life of Judaism. The "High

Synagogue" is parallel to the Anglican "High Church."22 Both emphasize an uninterrupted tie with the past, unity in the present and the indivisibility of morality and ritual life. The High

Synagogue and the High Church endorsed restraint in worship, in contradistinction to the undisciplined rites of the East European Orthodox and the Protestant Dissenters. As Schechter wrote: "A minus of decorum does not always mean a plus of devotion; just as little as a

Solomon Schechter, "His Majesty's Opposition" in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers (Westmead, Eng.: Gregg International Publishers, 1969), 240-41. 22 Schechter, Introduction in Studies in Judaism: First Series, xii. 23 maximum of respectability and stiffness are to be taken as signs of true piety." This echoed faintly as well the Reform critique of the services of Eastern European Orthodox Jews.

While temperamentally of the High Synagogue, Schechter was reared "in the Low

Synagogue."24 The Low Synagogue affirmed the centrality of scripture and honored emotional fervor. Scripture and fervor: these were also the keywords of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. Later, in a long review essay on the life and work of Abraham Geiger, he associated

Geiger's theology with that "the species of divinity preached by the Broad Church School."25

Schechter clearly anticipated that his audience recognized the terms High, Low and Broad

Church, and understood how these terms could be translated into a Jewish context. He aided his gentile audience by framing Jewish attitudes against a familiar background.

Recently, David Starr picked up on this theme of translation. For instance, Schechter contrasted his petition for unity, as expressed in the phrase "Catholic Israel," with the separatism of Reform and its accent on personal autonomy. Starr writes: "He placed it in an Anglican model: an established 'United Synagogue' v. Dissenters, with JTS/traditionalism as the former." Schechter did not think like an Anglican, but he thought procedurally in distinctly

Anglican categories. English religious life, then, provided for him a prism through which to see

Anglo and later American Jewish life.

Schechter did not imagine Jewish life through German eyes. Germany's charms were lost on him. This attitude was counter to the outlook of most Jewish thinkers of his era.

Germany was the crucible of higher biblical criticism, which Schechter saw as often little more than disguised anti-Judaism. He also deplored its extreme nationalism. Later in life he wrote to his son, Frank, after the German sack of Louvain (1914): "My next book shall be by Professor

23 Schechter, "The Earliest Jewish Community in Europe" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, 334. 24 Schechter, "Introduction" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, xx. 25 Schechter, "Abraham Geiger" in Studies in Judaism: Third Series (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1924), 58. 26 Starr, "Catholic Israel," 254. 24 Butcher. I won't have them think that I belong to this people of barbarians." He revered

England's political liberalism, its libertarian institutions and its respect for traditional religious life.28 He was an unashamed Anglophile. Schechter's affection for England had an eighteenth- century parallel. The Swiss theologian Jacob Vernet spent several months in England, and

"came away with the abiding impression of England as a model of liberty in government and simplicity and moderation in religion." Vernet also pursued the "the middle way."

The want of conflict between liberalism and tradition was deceptive to some degree, but in no other country was it respectable to be both politically progressive and religiously conservative. Even if religious belief was in slow decline, English Christians knew their Bible

(even "if they know nothing else," Matthew Arnold wrote),30 and there was great interest in the

Hebrew Bible and those who sprung from its pages. In a letter to Isaac Levi, the Chief Rabbi of

Paris, Schechter confessed that "where Christians still read and honor the Old Testament, as they

o 1 do here in England, we shall be allowed to live." Because of their interest in all things biblical, the English middle and upper classes now broadened their attention to post-biblical Judaism.

Prior to Schechter, Emmanuel Deutsch's much-discussed essay on the Talmud introduced the rabbinic tradition to a Christian audience. One response to Deutsch was George Eliot's Daniel

Deronda?2 And Schechter too would make his reputation as an interpreter of rabbinic Judaism to gentiles.

Quoted in Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 225. 28 See general introductions to Anglo-Jewry see Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Israel Finestein's Jewish Society in Victorian England: Collected Essays (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1993) contains some useful essays. 29 David Sorkin, "Geneva's 'Enlightened Orthodoxy': The Middle Way of Jacob Vernet (1698-1789) Church History 74.2 (2005), 290; for the Anglophile temperament generally, see Ian Buruma's delightful Anglomania: A European Love Affair (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). 30 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy, with Friendship's Garland and Some Literary Essays, vol. 5, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 184. 31 Quoted in Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 50. 32 See Mary Kay Temple, "Emanuel Deutsch's Literary Remains: A New Source for George Eliot's Daniel Derondd' South Atlantic Review (1989), 59-73. 25 While there surely was a measure of anti-Semitism in England, English Jews were largely free if not always full participants in public life during Schechter's residence. He spoke repeatedly about the absence of chauvinism among Englishmen and women. There were few active attempts to circumscribe Jewish life. This liberality was contrasted to most of Continental

Europe: ".. .our brethren are either directly persecuted, or allowed to exist only on sufferance everywhere with the exception of England and Italy."33 Schechter was no nationalist: he had little patience for the saber rattling of the Boer War. He was, nonetheless, a patriot. Schechter fretted only that the broad generosity shown to Jews had caused them to mimic English habits and attitudes to a degree that threatened to muddy the distinction between Jew and gentile, and that Judaism would simply be smoothed away to a harmless Unitarianism, denationalized and demoralized. Despite the fear of full absorption by Christian England, Schechter garlanded it with the highest commendation—an ontological kinship: "One learns to admire and love

England after one has seen what the other nations are. If there is a chosen people it is the English nation—and we."34

Not only did Schechter nourish a deep appreciation for British political institutions he also acquired a taste for English theology and literature, which subsequently shaped the development of his thought and writing style. He was accessing ideas cultivated by authors such as Arnold, Eliot, Newman and Thomas Carlyle. His biblical criticism, for example, rejected the scorched earth policy of most German critics; he opted for the measured criticism of Arnold or even the liberal Essays and Reviews. The latter, which introduced some of the less radical results of Continental criticism, agitated the Church of England in the 1860s. It was largely boilerplate biblical criticism adapted for a doubtful English audience.

Solomon Schechter, "Four Epistles to the Jews of England" in Studies in Judaism: Second Series, 198. Letter to Herbert Bentwich, quoted in Starr, "Catholic Israel," 210. 26 Schechter's prose approximates that of the great Victorian essayists: Arnold, Lamb and

Carlyle. The essay was the classic Victorian public expression of ideas. The essayist could cover in depth a subject of general interest; the reader could digest it in one sitting. Printing was cheaper than ever before; books, newspapers, pamphlets and magazines were plentiful.

Schechter's essays show a comfort with English literature, and he assumes wide reading on the part of his audience. He peppered his work with references to English theologians, poets and novelists.

Of Among poets he cited Tennyson and Wordsworth ; quoted approvingly, without direct

J ST reference, Paradise Lost ; and he presented, while president of a Jewish seminary, a line from

Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy"—"thoughts that breathe and words that burn"—as a way to reinforce, on its own merits, the study of Jewish literature! Schechter did this all the time: he would make sharp demarcations between Judaism and Christianity, each referred to their sphere, never spilling into the other's dominion. He would claim a need for a Judaism untouched by foreign concepts, and justify that claim with an appeal to a concept that was not native to Judaism. His thought was shot through with Christian ideas, or at least his ideas emerged as a result of thinking through categories developed by Christians. And as well in the realm of scholarship: the concerns of his work were expressed first by gentiles.

Among novelists Schechter was fond of alluding to Eliot and Thackeray ; he used

Mrs. Humphrey Ward's Robert Elsmere, perhaps the classic Victorian novel of faith and doubt, as part of his charge of indifferentism against Anglo-Jewry: Reform Jews, he wrote, took greater

Schechter, "Four Epistles to the Jews of England" in Studies in Judaism: Series 2, 200. 36 Schechter, "Leopold Zunz" in Studies in Judaism: Third Series (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1924), 90. 37 Schechter, "Nathan Krochmal" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, 46; "Beginnings of Jewish Wissenschaff in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, 179. 38 Schechter, "The Child in Jewish Literature" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, 282; "Four Epistles to the Jews of England" in Studies in Judaism: Second Series, 187. 27 interest in "intellectual relations between Master David Grieve and Reverend Robert Elsmere"39 than in the scholarly and cultural life of Judaism.

Of theologians, Schechter referred to Ward and Keble in an oddly apt comparison with

Samson Raphael Hirsch41; speculated as to why Anglo-Jewry could not yield theologians of the reputation of Wesley, Newman or Liddon42; noted the long train of Anglicans interested in the

Talmud, including Selden, Cudworth and Lightfoot, the latter Schechter's contemporary43; and

Arnold too was a constant presence.44 His knowledge of Anglican theology prompted a contemporary to remark "that he should have written the history of the Church of England, and his wide reading on that theme moulded the form of his presentation of rabbinical theology."45

Schechter candidly expected his Jewish audience to grasp the narrative of Anglican theology, and just as clearly and grimly he did not expect them to have experience with Jewish theology and literature. His presentation of rabbinic thought was not only for Christians.46

While president of JTS, Schechter said that those training for the rabbinate ought to have a "wide acquaintance with the masterpieces of English literature, both in prose and verse. This is the only means of understanding and making ourselves understood by our fellow- countrymen."47 Schechter here echoes the concerns of the Adlers, Nathan and Hermann, who were the Chief Rabbis of England during his residence. They believed that a minister should have the sophistication to present a Judaism that was thoroughly Anglicized to both their

39 Schechter, "Four Epistles to the Jews of England" in Studies in Judaism: Second Series, 188. 40 Jonathan Sarna notes that the impact of Robert Elsmere reached beyond those Anglo-Jews Schechter targets. Sarna, JPS: the Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888-1988 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 40. 41 Schechter, "Introduction" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, xx. 42 Schechter, "Four Epistles to the Jews of England" in Studies in Judaism: Second Series, 187 43 Ibid., "On the Study of the Talmud" in Studies in Judaism: Second Series, 103. 44 Ibid.; "The Study of the Bible," 35; "The Emancipation of Jewish Science" in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, 3. 45 Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 86. 46 Although he was critical of Pentateuchal criticism, Schechter did recognize the value of biblical criticism. He was certainly aware of New Testament scholarship. His English patron, Montefiore, had been a student and disciple of Benjamin Jowett, one of the contributors to Essays and Reviews (1860), which was one of the first popular introductions of biblical criticism in England. 47 Schechter, "The Reconciliation of Israel" in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, 74. 28 congregants and to non-Jews.48 Schechter would have balked at the comparison with Adlers.

Although he liked Hermann Adler personally, he rejected attempts to make Judaism more palatable to the Anglican establishment.49 On this issue, however, they were in concord.

Though he eventually mastered it, English did not come easily to Schechter. As he tutored Montefiore in rabbinics, so Montefiore and Mathilde, Schechter's wife, helped round his early essays into presentable form. He began English language preparation only in the late

1870s50. Within a decade he was the foremost Jewish essayist in England. He was a splendid writer, with a gift for pithy expressions that stuck to the readers' synapses: "Catholic Israel" and the "Higher Anti-Semitism" among the most prominent. In this manner he was akin to Arnold, whose phrases such as "sweet reasonableness"51 and "the Eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness," were repeated throughout Victorian religious discourse.

Time has been kind to Schechter's essays; they warrant re-reading, not solely because of their content, but for the pleasure of his style and arrangement. He alternated between the rolling, ornate sentence construction of Macaulay or Ruskin, and the "conversational speech,"53 the easy, almost flippant manner of a Newman or an Arnold. Certainly Schechter's essays were leavened by what William Madden called the "sermonic" style, where the author attempts to compel by force of "character rather than by argument."54 This quality is most prominent in his biographical sketches. The articles in Studies in Judaism and Some Aspects of Rabbinic

48 See Israel Finestein, "Hermann Adler (1839-1911): Portrait of a Jewish Victorian Extraordinary" in Anglo-Jewry in Changing Times: Studies in Diversity, 1840-1914 (Portland, Ore.: Vallentine Mitchell, 1999), 215-49; also, Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, ch. 4. 49 See Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 55 50 On Mathilde Schechter, see Mel Scult, "The Baale Boste Reconsidered: the Life of Mathilde Roth Schechter" Modern Judaism 7.1 (1987): 1-27. 51 Schechter references "sweet reasonableness" in "The Study of the Bible" in Studies in Judaism: Second Series, 35. 52 Richard Ohmann, "A Linguistic Appraisal of Victorian Style" in The Art of Victorian Prose, eds. G. Levine and W. Madden (London and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968), 296-98. 53 Geoffery Tillotson, "Matthew Arnold's Prose Theory and Practice" in The Art of Victorian Prose, 100. 54 William A. Madden, "Macaulay's Style" in The Art of Victorian Prose, 135. 29 Theology may be counted minor masterpieces of the Victorian long-form essay. Ismar Schorsch observed correctly that Schechter's writings were "models of narrative art."

Arnold was his Victorian exemplary, "one of the foundations of Schechter's English outlook and English style."56 In an article in the Jewish Chronicle, the organ of the Anglo-

Jewish establishment, he argued because of Arnold people are less diverted by Philistine superficiality, more committed to animating their minds and more likely to warm to mature, sophisticated literature. Later, as president of JTS, Schechter remarked that the time when the community was occupied singularly by the construction of the infrastructure of Jewish life had lapsed, that the supremacy of the practical had been surpassed, and intellect was assuming the crown of Jewish life.57 Writing in a Arnolidan tone, Schechter exclaimed, "Thank God we have outgrown this stage and are beginning to be unpractical."58

Schechter's essays would have been familiar to his audience. The chapter titles, for instance, in Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology would not have been out of place in an

Anglican primer. Chapter designations such as "Imputed Righteousness and Imputed Sin," "The

Visible Kingdom" were commonplace for the middle-class reader with theological sensibilities.

He was plainly comfortable using Christian modes of thinking, even if the substance was indisputably Jewish. Aspects and the essays later collected in the two series of Studies in

Judaism (the third was published posthumously) offered for Schechter entry into the privileged world of elite English culture, including an appointment at Cambridge.

55 Ismar Schorsch, "Schechter's Seminary: Polarities in Balance" Conservative Judaism 55.2 (2003), 6. 56 Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 284. 57 Schechter was not the only American Jewish thinker at this time to be influenced by Arnold. The radical Reformer, Emil G. Hirsch cited Arnold's definition of God frequently in his writing, and other Arnoldian influences visibly shaped his understanding of Judaism. See, for instance, My Religion (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 308. Also, Mordecai Kaplan drew on Arnold. One scholar goes so far as to label Kaplan the "Jewish Arnold" for Kaplan's emphasis on the maintenance of ritual and liturgical life without any of the underlying classical theological justifications. See Meir Ben-Horin, "Defining God: Arnoldian Elements in Kaplan's Theology" Jewish Social Studies 433-4 (1981), 193. 58 Schechter, "The Beth Hamidrash" in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, 209. 30 The most enduring English bequest to Schechter's thinking surfaced not as a system, but in the shaping of a temperament that did not come naturally to Schechter. That is the temperament of the religious centrist, of which Schechter is a type. He had to redirect his own passions and volcanic energy to fit himself into the centrist pattern. This notion of a new social type, the religious centrist, will be the theme of the next chapter, but it is important here to trace the advance of centrism in Schechter's own work and especially the Anglican antecedents from whom he learned this temper. Schechter's centrism was part of a pervasive "cultural change.. .the creation of a Jew who turned to the non-Jewish world for his intellectual values..."59 He is a model of a larger reality of negotiation between fidelity to tradition and intellectual assent to secular pursuits. The story of the development of religious centrism is a story of their collision. The following will discuss carefully the place of centrism among three prominent nineteenth-century Anglicans—Newman, Maurice and Arnold—and Schechter himself.

Centrism

Introductory Thoughts

In the animated debate over immigration in the US, President Bush asserted that his position concerning this issue was firmly staked in the "rational middle ground."60 In fact, very few of us would say, "I am an extremist." By claiming the middle ground, one attempts to demonstrate one's views as reasonable, broad in scope and attractive to a wider range of people than the attitudes of those whom they see to their right or left, between the obscurantist and the radical. Many Clinton-era Democrats, to apply another political example, consciously staked claim to the political middle, with notable success.

59 Ellenson, "Jacob Katz and Jewish Modernity" in After Emancipation, 58. 60 Text from the President's speech available at http://usinfo.state,gov/xarchives/display.html?p::=washfile- english&y=2006&m=August&x=2006080S105453AEneerG0.8322565. Accessed January 16, 2007. 31 In matters of religion no traditions have so self-consciously situated themselves in the center as Anglicanism and Conservative Judaism. Anglicanism rejected Rome but did not assent completely to the emergent Protestantism. In this it was unique. It continued many of the

Catholic ceremonies but accepted the principle of national sovereignty. But admitting national sovereignty was not a denial of their claim to catholicity. Although it did not become a distinct denomination in American Judaism until the early twentieth-century, Conservative Judaism claimed that it was heir to rabbinic Judaism—that is, the Judaism of contemporary Jews—yet it also approved of the striving for full civic, political and economic rights in Western Europe and

America; that is to say, being a citizen is compatible with devotion to a tradition different from the tradition of the majority. It declared that in the public square Jews need not deny any element of their faith and that they may participate as citizens in that same public square.

Those to the left and the right of Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism knew who they were, and questions of identity were simply not as pronounced. For Conservative Judaism (by the 1910s) and Anglicanism, centrism is an essential component of their self-definition. Each was, and is, obsessed with self-definition to a degree that Roman Catholics and Protestants,

Orthodox and Reform Jews were not. This obsession may well originate in an absence of ideological coherence common to the centrist outlook. What exactly do they believe, a rival might justly ask. "Holding a centrist position,' Abraham Karp writes, '[Conservative Judaism] has operated as a coalition movement in which agreement is reached through consensus. This posture has made it vulnerable to accusations from both the right (Orthodoxy) and the left

(Reform) that it is a movement lacking in conviction, a halfway house for timid Reformers and compromising Orthodox."61 This is a regular worry: can there be integrity in a system that arises as a result of divergence, as in the case of Conservative Judaism? With the advance of

Reform, and the subsequent organization of Orthodoxy as a reaction to Reform, Conservative

61 Karp, "A Century of Conservative Judaism" in Jewish Continuity in America, 204-5. 32 Judaism sought to affirm itself, on the one hand, as the true recipient of rabbinic Judaism and, on the other hand, as a middle course between Orthodoxy and Reform. Could it profess itself as a movement of intelligibility if its purpose was simply to bridge the difference between Reform and Orthodoxy, or to establish religious attitudes that existed as a midpoint between them? The self-understanding of Conservative Judaism as a centrist ideology was consequently confusing and, at times, confused. This confusion was basic to Anglicanism as well.

As broadness of scope increases there is a proportionate diminution of ideological clarity. And this goes beyond the periodic identity crises endemic to religious traditions and their assorted denominations. Again, the ambiguity of definition, indeed often the muddle or indeterminateness about identity, is core to both Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism. It helps to explain in part their survival and their current state of upheaval. In the contemporary scene we see this imprecision in the controversy regarding gay marriage and ordination (are they traditionalists or liberals, or is there a third term to mediate the difference?), which threatens to pull asunder the Conservative movement and the Anglican Communion.

Notwithstanding the logical and practical difficulties in its external and internal negotiations, the concept of centrism—understood either negatively as hewing a middle path between two extremes or containing positively a compound of the finer principles of those extremes—was the crucial idea that Schechter encountered in England. It prepared him to properly order the ideas and arrange the institutions of Conservative Judaism. What Schechter found in England was a faith that provided for him an example of a lived religion that appealed to his strong traditionalism and his embrace of a comparatively free intellectual inquiry, on the other.62 David Sorkin, who traced the maturation of religious centrism during the eighteenth- century, notes rightly that "the first fully realized example of the religious enlightenment was

'moderation' in the Church of England. Moderation emerged in the wake of the Glorious

62 See Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 61, 86, 284ff. 33 Revolution as a broadly Arminian alternative to Catholicism on the one side and inner light enthusiasm on the other." Many Anglican authorities self-consciously positioned themselves in the center of Christianity, claiming to be neither Roman Catholic nor one of the churches that emerged from the Continental Reformation. It was a bridge church, one willing to sacrifice ideological purity for the sake of national and religious unity. At least on paper the Church of

England claimed to satisfy the needs of all English Christians.64

Schechter desired to make what would become Conservative Judaism in America what the Anglican church was notionally in England: that is, a "big tent" religious arrangement that embraced the entire community. He said that the beliefs and practices of most American Jews, consciously or not, were fastened to the "historical school"65—the school of Zecharias Frankel,

Isaac Hirsch Weiss, Heinrich Graetz, Meir Freidmann, Adolf Jellinek and Schechter himself— and that they did not desire the separation from tradition as pursued by Reform. "If a census should be taken,' he wrote in "The Beginnings of Jewish Wissenschaft" 'of all those who made their mark in any department of Jewish learning by a really original contribution—I am not speaking of dilettanti and journalists—it would be found that at least 90 per cent were either directly opposed to the Reform movement, or ignored its existence altogether."66 He noted elsewhere his conviction, "the majority is with the historical school." His ideal kindled closely to Matthew Arnold, the poet and religious thinker, who remarked that Church of England was

"not a private sect, but a national institution."68

David Sorkin, "A Wise, Enlightened and Reliable Piety:' The Religious Enlightenment in Central and Western Europe, 1689-1789" Parkes Institute Pamphlet no. 1 (University of Southampton, 2002), 9. 64 John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, ed. H.D. Weidner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 14-15, 65 Schechter, "Introduction" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, xx. 66 Schechter, "The Beginnings of Jewish Wissenschaft," Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, 176. 67 Schechter, "Introduction" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, xx. 68 Matthew Arnold, "The Church of England" in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: Essays Religious and Mixed, vol. 8, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 64. 34 Anglican authorities sought to yoke together the nation under one expansive church;

Conservative Jews endeavored to do the same. Only a centrist movement, Schechter thought, could hold together Jews in a land where the twin temptations of assimilation and religious isolation were great. Reform was divisive because of its rejection of much of the ritual law, and

East European Orthodoxy, which was thought to be naturally untenable in America's libertarian bustle, refused to curb the unbuttoned, overwrought production of its services. This was a basic and imperious critique of East (but not Western) European Orthodoxy among Reform and

Conservative Jews: decorum ought to be part of "the Synagogue of the West...free from excesses; though it is not devoid of an enthusiasm of its own finds its outlet in an ardent and self-sacrificing philanthropic activity."69

The next section will consider centrism as it developed in the Church of England and early Conservative Judaism (as it begins to differentiate itself from Orthodoxy.) The broadness of centrism and the centrist concepts of comprehensiveness and via media will be explored through the writings of Newman, Maurice and Arnold and then in the work of Schechter. All of the Anglican works under consideration had been published by the time Schechter arrived in

England. He knew the contours of Anglican theology, and abstracted some of its general principles into his own reasoning. This is most evident in their joint centrist attitude.

Anglican Centrism: Arnold, Maurice and Newman

Broadness

An underlying aspect of religious centrism is its broadness. Broadness supposes a willingness to balance the needs of the hour and the claims of the tradition. In fact it is not so

69 Schechter, "Introduction" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, xi-xii. Jenna Joselit has shown that the "reasonable Orthodoxy" of Western Orthodox Jews attempted to make traditional services more decorous. See New York's Jewish Jews: the Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), 1-25. 35 much a balance of the two but an integration of the needs of the hour into the claims of tradition.

Ideally, exigent circumstances will change or enhance the development of the tradition, but it will not intrude upon what it professes as its foundations, the core of doctrinal and ritual life that stretches back continuously to the Talmud for Jews and the early Church for Christians. Those religious ideas that existed outside the core of invulnerable doctrine could be adjusted. Non- fundamental ideas, in the Anglican lexis, were called adiaphora, a word associated with the theology of Richard Hooker. Hooker was the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century divine conventionally regarded as the architect of the Anglican via media. To be broadly constituted presupposes a measure of liberality in interpretation, but this liberality does not intend that standards of belief or behavior are lowered thereby.

We do not often think of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) as an Anglican thinker. He is a poet, cultural critic and educator. But from the late 1860s forward he turned his mind to religious subjects, and became involved in the agitations of the day. His works display that broadness mentioned in the foregoing paragraph.

For Arnold, broadness is absent among English Protestants. This attitude runs counter to the idea that Protestantism allowed for a wider range of belief. The Dissenting or Nonconformist factions accept the principle of separation, of religious and national disunity, in order to hold resolutely to a few doctrines. Arnold consistently declares that they misconstrue and misapply these religious doctrines. The doctrines of "election, original sin, and justification" have been interpreted too narrowly and literally by most Protestants, and have been a source of division rather than unity. The Anglican church did not emerge because of these doctrines, but the doctrines were incorporated into the Church at an early date. "The historic Church of England,' he writes, 'not existing for special opinions but proceeding by development, has show much greater freedom of mind as regards [these] doctrines of election, original sin, and justification,

36 than the Nonconformists have..." Anglican broadness is consequently possible because of development. That traditions are not static is normative for both liberal and centrist religious understanding. But they draw from this conflicting results: for liberals the broadness intrinsic to the idea of development authorizes conscious change to the tradition, while for centrists development is a method to show a continuing relation with the past, a vehicle for unity, and whatever changes occur will do so as part of a natural progression.

Since part of the constitution of Anglicanism is its devotion to broadness in theological speculation, the clergy's affirmation of Anglican doctrine and rite ought to be restricted to "a

71 general consent to whatever is contained in the Book of Common Prayer." Arnold is here simply repeating classical Anglican theory. The Church of England, at the time of the

Reformation and since, has advanced no single elaborate theology that it has tied itself to, like

Lutheranism or Calvinism, but rather it has lived with the notion of lex orandi est lex credendi; that is, the vocabulary of Anglican worship is the fullest expression of its theology. The

Protestant sects would insist on greater doctrinal conformity.

The theology of the Anglican service was intended to embrace all Christians, as it claimed to be continuous with the Catholic past of the English church. As an instance of this continuity, Arnold points to the Anglican burial ceremony. Funeral rites were subject to a now long-dead controversy in the 1870s concerning services at gravesites. The specifics of the case are of little concern to us, but what remains important is Arnold's position that these Anglican rites were accepted by the Nonconforming churches—those churches that did not accept the religious and political authority of the Church of England—-and that they were suitable for

70 Matthew Arnold, St Paul and Protestantism in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: Dissent and Dogma, vol. 6, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 85. 71 Arnold, "A Psychological Parallel" in Essays Religious and Mixed, 130. 72 See the use of this term in the work of George Tyrell, an Anglican convert to Catholicism. See his Lex Orandi: Prayer and Creed(London: Longmans, Green 1907); see also K.W. Stevenson, "Lex orandi and Lex credendi: Strange Bed-Fellows?: Some Reflections on Worship and Doctrine." Scottish Journal of Theology 39.2 (1986), 225-41. 37 Catholics because the burial service was taken effectively verbatim from the Catholic service surrounding interment. Anglicanism, which I am arguing is the archetypal centrist tradition in

Christianity, thus attempted to gratify the wants of all Christians in England. It aimed at being a home for Catholics and Protestants.

Arnold locates the design of broadness in several places in English history. He points to the Savoy Conference of 1661, where Anglican divines and Puritan (and Presbyterian) ministers gathered to discuss the arrangement of the Book of Common Prayer. Charles II had been freshly restored to the crown, but the Puritans were reluctant to relinquish the gains they had made under Cromwell. What, then, was the prayer book to look like? Ought it to keep with the long­ standing forms, its ceremonies thick with Catholicism, or should it draw nearer to the theological novelties of the Reformers, whose liturgies were gaining wide appeal? The shape of the prayer book would go a long way in determining whether the Church of England would join with the other Protestant churches in making its church national only. Certainly all of the

Anglican authorities accepted national sovereignty but that did not extend to a denial of the

Church's catholicity. This was part of Anglican uniqueness: it maintained that it was both national and catholic simultaneously. The attendees at Savoy elected, with much absence of

Christian charity on each side, to decline the Puritan option. Arnold argues that it the decision to preserve the Catholic form of the Book of Common Prayer is an illustration of Anglican broadness. "It was the Puritans who were for narrowing, it was the Churchmen who were for keeping open." The Puritan scorned what they saw as Anglican "unyieldingness." They sought more rigorous and more unvarnished definitions of "predestination, original sin, and justification..."74

Arnold, "A Last Word on the Burials Bill" in Essays Religious and Mixed, 100. The Anglican marriage service, too, corresponds to the Roman Catholic rite.

38 Throughout his religious writings Arnold petitioned his fellow Christians not to yield to literal-mindedness. The Church of England did not need to define doctrine inflexibly; it was articulated effectively through its ceremonial life. There is an interesting parallel to this in the history of Conservative Judaism. While the Orthodox pointed to medieval statements of faith from Maimonides, Joseph Albo and others as normative Jewish belief, the Reform movement in

America issued several platforms that outlined its values. The Conservative movement, however, avoided a statement of principles until 1988, with the publication of Emet v 'Emunah.

Platforms were considered naturally sectarian, and worked against the notion of broadness.

Comprehensiveness

Allied to the notion of broadness is the more theologically robust concept of comprehensiveness. Comprehensiveness has been a part of Anglican history from its beginnings. It can be defined minimally as the arrangement wherein Catholics and Protestants are comprehended within Anglicanism by reason of its claim to true catholicity. This catholicity is at present preserved independently by the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the

Reformation. Comprehensiveness is not a claim upon all of the doctrines of Christendom, but only those that were part of the early Church or developed out of the Apostolic age. Those who adhere to the minimal standards of the early Church will be in communion, despite differences on non-essential matters (adiaphora). About the fundamentals the Church must, however, insist on conformity.

In the Henrician and Elizabethan Church, comprehensiveness intended what the contemporary Anglican evangelical J.I. Packer calls "calculated inclusion."75 What he means by this is what we have stressed so far, namely, that the Anglican ideal of comprehensiveness was

75 James I. Packer, A Kind of Noah's Ark?: the Anglican Commitment to Comprehensiveness (Oxford: Latimer House, 1981), 19. 39 designed to fold into the Anglican community those Christians who denied the moral and spiritual authority of the pope while rejecting some of the more exaggerated aspects of the

Reformation. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I pursued this path to ensure political stability and religious agreement.

The sixteenth century consensus held until the nineteenth century, although there were hesitant signs of its fragmentation earlier. It was only with positive change in the political fortunes of the Protestant sects in the early nineteenth-century century forward and the internal divisions within the Anglican Church prompted by the Evangelical revival and the Oxford

Movement that concern about the model of comprehensiveness was taken up in the public square. It took the disintegration of Anglican unity, even if that unity was often gossamer-thin, to make unity a foremost worry. The disintegration of union among Anglicans was mirrored in the Anglo-Jewish community; it was Schechter's ambition to curb disunity, and he learned from

Anglicans how to frame the issue of unity historically. The Anglican struggle with external and internal fragmentation gave Schechter a template from which to work.

For the Church of England, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the norms of doctrinal faith, were satisfactory as an affirmation of the catholicity of the Church. Some of the doctrines were conventionally Catholic, while others clearly drew inspiration from the Reformers. Still, as

Packer points out, there was "a great deal undefined," and consequently that indefiniteness sanctioned the acceptance of Catholic and Protestant elements into the Church's doctrinal structure. The Articles were not a via media, because they did not claim an explicit middle position. Rather, Anglican comprehensiveness, for someone like Maurice, was an "integrative practice—that is, the synthesizing in action of apparent theological opposites."77

Ibid., 20 Ibid, 21 40 F.D. Maurice (1805-72) is the Anglican theologian most frequently associated with the concept of comprehensiveness. Though born into a Unitarian family, Maurice took Anglican orders in 1834. He taught at King's College, London, in the 1840s and early 50s, and from 1866 forward he was professor at Cambridge. Maurice was at the centre of several animated theological controversies. One dispute involved the orthodoxy of his Theological Essays (1851); the investigation caused him to be disappointed from his academic position at King's College. In the universe of Anglican church parties, Maurice has commonly been identified with the Broad

Church. (He denied it.) There is good reason why he was categorized as a Broad Churchman, but his thought is far too complex to locate within such nebulous groupings.

Maurice's most recognized work is The Kingdom of Christ (1842). The Kingdom of

Christ laid out his influential version of comprehensiveness. Among the many things that this work attempted to do was to emphasize the shared unity that underlies the apparent dissolution of Christian harmony. And this can best be seen in the Church of England, which maintains that it comprehends the positive elements of the great divisions of Christendom. Comprehensiveness is discovered in the insistence on liturgy rather than a systematic theology as a focus of unity from the time of the English Reformation. This focus was a conscious rejection of sectarianism.

Among Christian groupings Maurice located agreement by their common adherence to the early creeds, the sacrament of the Eucharist and the kingship of Christ.

The supreme religious problem of the nineteenth-century, according to Maurice, was centered on uncovering a way to merge the Protestant stress on a believer's personal faith and the Catholic accent on unity. The Protestant element in Anglicanism, the evangelical or Low

Church, denied the aspiration for unity, while the High Church largely rejected its Protestant inheritance, and the designs of the Broad Church were simply unworkable. Despite the condition of the contemporary Church of England, which for Maurice illustrated the problems with

Christian unity generally, he held that "our consciences, I believe, have told us from time to time 41 that there is something in each of them which we ought not to reject. Let us not reject it. But we may find that there is a divine harmony, of which the living principle in each of these systems forms one note..."

What the competing branches of Anglicanism affirm ought to be preserved. This is their positive element. However, when they inevitably reject something of the fundamental nature of

Christianity it proves that the fullness of truth is not comprehended by any Anglican party, much less any other Christian denomination. For instance, evangelicals insist on direct salvation through Christ, but their sense of salvation is too narrowly Calvinistic. Their belief is right, but its expression unnecessarily excludes many Christians from communion with the Church.

70

Maurice also respects the "truth and power" of evangelical preaching and teaching, in particular the idea that individual faith is not be defined as Dissent. Individual faith was always part of the catholic church, but it was largely in abeyance until the Reformation; it was not an innovation, but rather it awakened a slumbering impulse in the Church.

The positive contribution of the Broad Church consisted of its unfettering of the

Christian mind from outmoded systems of thought. Broad Churchmen were more sympathetic to the larger trends of intellectual advance in the nineteenth-century. They have also taught the

Church that rationality is not to be confused with infidelity, that reason is a divine bestowal, the greatest gift because it permits us to inquire into the sum of God's creation, and pursuing that inquiry to wherever it might lead, regardless of prior judgments. Tradition, accordingly, is a compass by which to direct human beings generally, not an anchor by which to secure them to precedent for all time. The defect in the Broad Church approach resides in its refusal to recognize points of mutual theological agreement, namely, the Book of Common Prayer, the conventional liturgy of the Church of England, and the Thirty-Nine Articles, which define the

78 Frederick Denison Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ, 2nd London Edition (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1843), 546. 79 Ibid., 547. 42 parameters of acceptable belief. Abandoning the traditional forms of consent leaves the Broad

Church tied to "the maxims of our own time."

The High Church, or what Maurice calls the "Catholic"81 component of the Anglican communion, is lauded for having faith "that there is indeed a church in the world, which God himself has established,"82 not seeing it as a human innovation, although it is a human institution. That men and women constitute the Church does not mean the Church was constituted by men and women. God has "not left it to the faith and feelings and notions of men,"83 for human beings are fickle, malleable. The Church is the one human institution of permanence owing to its divine foundation, the human city reflecting, however faintly, the city of God. Praised for its elevated sense of the Church as a corporation, the High Church is censured for negating the Protestantism natural to its constitution and for its excessive sacramentalism. While Maurice thinks approvingly of the emphasis on catholicity among the

High Churchman, he fears overlap with the Roman Catholics and their tendency to submit to earthly authority.

Again, what these branches of the Church of England affirm ought to be comprehended yet their denials are denials of foundational Christian beliefs.84 Because Anglican comprehensiveness claims to involve Catholic and Protestant features and maintains simultaneously that these features are not inconsistent with each other, it represents the way to understand unity and disunity in the Christian communion as a whole. Mauricean Anglicanism searches for the undivided truth that is partially upheld by the divisions of Continental

Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The Church of England contains within itself intimations

80 Ibid., 547. 81 Ibid., 548. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Maurice also stressed that those outside of Anglicanism—Lutherans, Quakers, Calvinists, Unitarians, et al— possessed partial truths because what they affirmed was true but their denials made them theologically defective. 43 of a larger reality, where what had been independently defended by the separate churches would find reunion.

A generation after Maurice, Matthew Arnold again called for a renewal of the classical

Anglican ideal of comprehensiveness, endeavoring to demonstrate in his religious writings that historical Christianity developed most conspicuously through the Church of England, and that the Anglican communion "was meant.. .to satisfy the whole English people and to be accepted by them. It was meant to include both Catholics and Protestants in a compromise between old and new, rejecting Romish corruptions and errors, but retaining from Catholicism all that was

Of sound and truly attaching..." For Arnold, the Roman Catholic Church, while it was a historic church, failed morally and needed to be reformed. Protestantism, on the other hand, neglected the appeal for unity and the catholicity natural to the idea of the Church. The reformers were willing to splinter over matters of doctrine.

Among Anglican thinkers in the post-Tractarian world, and in a country where anti-

Catholic (and anti-Irish) sentiment ran deep, Arnold's appreciation of Catholicism was unique.

He had an intriguing familial relationship with Roman Catholicism that lent personal color to his thoughts on comprehensiveness. His brother, Tom, was a convert to Roman Catholicism, and in fact taught English Literature at Newman's Catholic University (he returned to the Church of

England in 1864, only to re-embrace Rome in 1877). Thomas Arnold, Matthew's father, was considered a founder of the Broad Church movement.86 He advocated for a national church that would comprehend all Protestants. Catholics, because of their assumed Ultra-Montane views, were to be excluded from national union. (His liberalism did not extend to Jews, either. He thought them a foreign entity on Christian soil, whose religion would not permit them to acculturate to the norms of English civic life. They were guests at the sufferance of the state.

85 Arnold, "A Last Word on the Burials Bill" in Essays Religious and Mixed, 95. 86 See Eugene Williamson, The Liberalism of Thomas Arnold: A Study of his Religious and Political Writings (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1964.) 44 Only Christians could be English. Matthew reversed his father's position: he was largely philo-

Semitic.) Like his father before him, Arnold agreed that a union of Protestants in England was practical and that his generation was disposed to it. But, he added, "who cannot see that the power of joint life would be far greater and stronger if it comprehended Roman Catholics

oo too?" Arnold regularly pointed to the catholic elements that shaped Anglicanism, and thus maintained that a Church of England that dismissed the claims of Catholic antiquity upon it was to deny the breadth of Christian truth.

Arnold's poetry embraced the aesthetic charm of Catholicism, while his theological writings insisted on the re-integration of the Catholic imagination into national religious life. He structured this around his conception of truth. With his poetic sensibilities still undamaged he argued that the human institutions of religion are but "approximations to the truth,"89 efforts at discerning the whole while recognizing the necessary partiality of human vision and wisdom.

That is to say, we cannot know more than the sum of accumulated wisdom. Like Maurice,

Arnold believed that Christian reality could be harvested from the affirmations of each group, or what he termed "their good side." The Church of England, then, reflects and assimilates the

"good side" of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Via media

The other common approach to understanding centrism in Conservative Judaism and

Anglicanism is via media, the middle path between two undesired extremes. The via media is realized negatively; it wedges its self-definition between groups perceived to be to their

87 See Israel Finestein, "Matthew Arnold, Jews and Society" in Anglo-Jewry in Changing Times, 196-214; also, Edward Alexander, Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 59-72. 88 Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism, 107. 89Matthew Arnold, "Preface to the Second Edition of Higher Schools and Universities in Germany in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: God and the Bible, vol. 7, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1970), 108.

45 theological left and right, drawing on their judgments in part but creating at the same time a centrist path with its own integrity distinct from both left and right. The via media creates most fully the impression of Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism as middle of the road denominational streams. And while its expression stretches back at least to Aristotle,91 it is given theological sophistication in Anglican self-understanding, and will, I argue, find its way into early Conservative Judaism.

Theodore McConnell affirms that "the via media is by general consent one of the benchmarks of Anglicanism..."92 It received its classic formulation in the works of Richard

Hooker (1554-1600), especially his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. In the nineteenth-century, in a situation where the Church of England was slowly losing its traditional privileges and the common bibliocentric basis of English society was dissolving, John Henry Newman reworked the via media, trying to lay bare the antiquity of Anglicanism, an intellectual inheritance that reached back to the early Church, placing itself between the overindulgences of the Protestant

Reformation and the medieval corruptions of Roman Catholicism. "Virtue lies in a mean,"94 he assures us. Solomon Schechter's assessment and promotion of Conservative Judaism as a traditionalist body navigating between Reform and "hyper-Orthodoxy" will be colored by this trend.

In 1837, prior to his embrace of Roman Catholicism, Newman published an apologia for the Church of England entitled Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church; it was re­ published later as Via Media?5 Newman attempted to show that Anglicanism was a middle path

91 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 2.6.1106a4-5. 92 McConnell, "The Via Media as Theological Method," 141 93 See Lee Gibbs' defense of Hooker as the standard via media thinker: "Richard Hooker's Via Media Doctrine of Justification," Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 2 (1981): 211-220; "Richard Hooker's Via Media Doctrine of Repentance," Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 1 (1991): 59-74; "Richard Hooker's Via Media Doctrine of Scripture and Tradition," Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 2 (2002): 227-235. 94 Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, 91. 95 Two of the Tracts for the Times also discussed the Anglican via media. Tract 38 (July 1834) is entitled "The Mean between Romanism and Popular Protestantism in Church Practice and Doctrine." The Tract delivers on its 46 between Roman Catholicism and popular Protestantism. The very centrism of Anglicanism was inscribed in its definition as a bridge church between the two divided theological bodies, both of which drifted from the course of the Apostolic church. The parting of the ways that happened at the Reformation, and the severance of Eastern and Western Christendom in the eleventh- century, was the knife in the heart of Christian unity, betraying the promise of the undivided

Church. Newman insisted that only the Church of England had yoked together, albeit imperfectly and gropingly, what Roman Catholics and Protestants tried to pull apart: namely, that scripture, tradition and history yielded true catholicity, a Church that would relieve the existential hurt of separation.

Newman was not so historically naive as to suppose that the via media ever received perfect expression in any humanly designed institution, including the Church of England. He was not attempting to find a tangible center between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Rather, his work ended up there because of equal parts desire to maintain continuity with the early fathers and advocate for the organic development of the tradition. "[T]he Via Media,' he writes, 'viewed as an integral system, has never had existence except on paper; it is known, not positively but negatively, in its differences from the rival creeds, not in its own properties; and can only be described as a third system.. .with something of each, cutting between them.. .and boasting to be nearer to Antiquity than either."96 The positive content of the via media, then, is to be discovered in antiquity and its trajectory into the contemporary Church. Here, Newman shows his rejection of the Protestant theology and ecclesiology that appeals to a "back to the

promise: it shows the Anglican Church as retaining some Roman Catholic practices while, like the Reformers, rejecting others. Tract 41 (August 1834) bears the name "Via Media." Tracts for the Times (London: Printed for J.G.F. & J. Rivington & J.H. Parker, 1840-42). The Tracts were initially a response to government's decision to deprive the Church of 10 bishops in Ireland. There were 90 Tracts in total, written by many hands. The clergy who wrote the Tracts were High Church, many holding sympathies with the Roman Catholic Church. The authors urged the Church of England to remove itself from Protestantism, and reclaim the Catholic (though not Roman Catholic) heritage of the early Church. See Owen Chadwick's collection, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

47 scriptures" model; instead, he relies upon the sanction of antiquity to pilot the Church. Similarly,

Schechter will point to tradition—which is parallel to Newman's deference to antiquity and its

07 development, or "the cogency of Ancient Consent or of the testimony of Antiquity" —as the guidepost for contemporary Judaism; the consensus fidelium of historical Israel will check any attempt to sidetrack Judaism from its natural development. The point of Conservative Judaism is to conserve its positive-historical core—that is, Judaism contains a positive law that matures historically, with divinely given mitzvot applied to a humanly enacted halakha.

Newman locates the sources of Anglican disagreement with Roman Catholicism and OR

Protestantism in separate spheres. Roman Catholics and Anglican diverge over facts, the historicity of certain institutions and the proper development of certain theological concepts, while Protestants and Anglicans differ concerning principles of dogma, the foundations of faith.

According to Newman the Roman conception of the Church is defective because it has settled religious authority into the hands of the papacy. The papacy is a late intrusion into Christian history, unwarranted by scripture and tradition; it is a denial of the authority, if not normativity, of the individual Christian conscience. He also rejected the stiff dogmatism of Rome. But at least the Catholics have an appreciation of the Church, no matter how flawed. The Protestants, conversely, abandon altogether a transcendent idea of the Church and the attendant notion of catholicity; the Church and catholicity have the "savour of Rome."99

Nothing so vexes Newman in Via Media as the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura and its subsequent sanction of private judgment. Sola scriptura meant that the index of Christian truth was to be determined by deviation from the scriptural mean. But a problem immediately arises: does this interpretative freedom, loosed from tradition, end in spiritual anarchy, each person his or her own religion? Scripture does not make for easy appraisal, and translations into 97 Ibid., 11 98 Ibid., 90ff. 99 Ibid., 61 48 the vernacular often lose the sense of the original Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. Sola scriptura permitted a Christian theology in part founded upon flawed translation and real world applications of that translation. "It was,' H.D. Weidner writes, 'a principle that allowed revelation to be measured by the recipient rather than by the revealer."100 The various Protestant groups themselves disagree vehemently over the accurate construal of the Bible. Newman does, however, concede that Protestantism affirms the Bible more fully than Catholicism, but he insists that it is not the only doctrinal standard.

And private judgment, a "palladium"101 of Protestantism, is the consequence. Private judgment removes the need for religious authority. Notwithstanding his contempt for private judgment, Newman does not embrace the Roman conviction that the Church—as a corporate body, embodied in the person of the pope, who acts as Christ's vicar on earth—speaks ex cathedra, that it cannot err. He does believe that individual discernment contributes to development; he was too much a Romantic to believe otherwise.102 The Church of England, for

Newman, held steadfastly between them. On essential doctrines of faith, found in the early

Creeds, private judgment ought to gain no traction, for the Creeds record the common consensus of the early Church. Not everything is open to negotiation. Newman maintains that it is the

"historical testimony delivered down from the Apostles" to which a Christian of firm faith must assent. He concludes: "To these definite subjects nothing can be added, unless, indeed, new records of primitive Christianity, or new uninterrupted traditions of its teachings were discoverable."103

100 Ibid., xxxiv. 101 Ibid., 165. 102 See David Goslee, Romanticism and the Anglican Newman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996); David Nicholls, John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1991). 103 Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, 128. 49 Solomon Schechter

Broadness

Conservative Judaism is considered the centrist movement in contemporary Judaism, but there has been little investigation into how this attitude emerged. It can best be discovered in the work of Solomon Schechter. The centrist arrangement, this essay has been arguing, was learned in part in during his experience in England. This section will explore how Schechter's centrism was prepared by his encounter with Anglican thought.

Broadness was a real concept in Schechter's thought as well. He demurred from positional statements such as platforms, and this influenced the movement going forward. For

Schechter, Judaism was fundamentally broad. During a speech at an Indiana synagogue, he declared that Judaism is "as great as the world, and as wide as the universe, and you must avoid every action of a sectarian or of a schismatic nature.. ."104 It is a trans-geographic singularity, catholic by reason of its very particularity. (It might be as wide as the world, but it aches for

Eretz Israel. Schechter's Zionism was central to his thought.105) Broadness, however, was not to be mistaken for a universalism unrooted in any past. Broadness, for the religious centrist, meant something firmer than a "bend but don't break" attitude, although the suppleness of tradition was not to be refused.

As Anglican ecclesiology claims to be expansive enough theologically to incorporate all

Christians in its communion, Schechter believed that his form of Judaism could operate similarly among Jews, or at least set up the intellectual conditions to make it possible for

Schechter's vision to encompass all of Israel. He wrote to H. Pereira Mendes that he—

Schechter—has unfailingly disclaimed "any adjectives to my Judaism, believing that I belong to the main stream of Judaism, which meant an orderly and regular development in accordance

104 Schechter, "Altar Building in America" in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, 87 105 See "Zionism: A Statement" in Ibid., 91-104. 50 with our laws and traditions.. .To that extent, however, I am a Jewish man and not a party man." This letter underscores some of the foremost themes of Schechter's centrism: denial of sectarian intent; a Judaism represents the historical Judaism of the majority; and that development of the tradition, through the historical-critical and philological study of texts, is beneficial and natural to an organic religion. This emphasis on the critical study and reconstruction of texts as a measure for the tradition's development does not at all suggest that

Schechter rejected the established mechanics of development in Judaism, that is, halakhic authority. Halakha and critical study, in his approach, would work like a feedback machine, the one nurturing the other.

Schechter's concern for the historical broadness of Judaism is seen in his thoughts on the type of rabbi he wanted the Seminary to place in pulpits. He wanted to attract "the mystic and the rationalist, the traditional and the critical" to JTS; each would represent a point on the spectrum of Jewish possibility. And the native growth of these Jewish types was feasible only in a religious institution that was "all things to all men, reconciling all parties, and appealing to all sections of the community..." When it came to training future rabbis in the interpretation of the Torah, Schechter insisted that the rabbinical school recognize the very broadness of the

Torah itself, that it can and "should also prove broad enough to harbor the different minds of the present century."109 The Seminary's broadness was founded on the aspiration to move away from the divisions caused by the advance of Reform, which sought to do away with most of the ritual law, and the mushrooming of East European Orthodoxy, which seemed narrow in its

106 Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 211. 107 Scult, "Schechter's Seminary," 58. 108 Schechter, "The Charter of the Seminary" in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, 11. Surely not by conscious design, but Schecter's statement of the Seminary being "all things to all men" immediately calls to mind the original use of this phrase: "To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews; to those under the Law I became as one under the Law—though not being myself under the Law—that I might win those under the Law. To those outside the Law I became as one outside the Law.. .that I might win those outside the Law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some" (1 Cor. 9:20-22). 109 Ibid., 25. 51 aversion to acculturate to American norms. The Seminary imagined itself as largely non- sectarian. (We need not confuse hope for reality. But our concern here is with self- understanding).

In rabbinic and medieval Judaism, there existed multiple ways of imagining God's relationship with the world. Among the Rabbis the term Shechinah was often employed, designating God's presence of earth and that God was with Israel even in her meager post-exilic existence. Later post-Talmudic rabbis preferred the obscure name Metatron.111 Among the medievals favored the term Active Intelligence, which was the medium God used to communicate to prophets and philosophers. Kabbalists famously applied the expression Seflrot, or divine emanations, to understand the divine interaction with human beings. To Schechter, this historical sketch was proof that "Judaism was always broad enough to accommodate itself to these formulae, which for the one may mean the most holy mysteries, and for the other empty

119 and meaningless catchwords." Like Matthew Arnold, he was not tied to one definition of the divine. Both Schechter and Arnold could appeal to the history of their particular faiths to find a reason for the maintenance of the principle of broadness in their contemporary communities.

Comprehensiveness

The concept of comprehensiveness is evident in Schechter's thinking, and clearly indicates an instance of his contact with Anglican thought. As David Starr has shown

113 convincingly, Schechter's primary concern throughout his writings is Jewish unity. The idea of comprehensiveness gave him a means to contemplate the nature of unity as a historical phenomenon. What he wanted to do was to join together what had been separated, for separation

110 See Scult, "Schechter's Seminary," 59. 111 See Daniel Abrams, "The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: the inclusion and exclusion of Metatron in the godhead" Harvard Theological Review 87.3 (1994): 291-321. 112 Schechter, "The Law and Recent Criticism" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, 238. 113 See Starr, "Catholic Israel," chapters 4 and 6. 52 was unnatural. The ties that bind are not ethnic, however; they are historic. Thus, Schechter's vision of Judaism resembled Maurice's theory of comprehensiveness: both wished for their traditions to comprehend all of its estranged members, for each had a partial glimpse of the truth that could only be made complete by union.

If Maurice supposed the Church of England came nearest to grasping comprehensiveness—and he was no uncritical apologist, but a forceful critic of Anglicanism—

Schechter imagined that traditional Judaism, or what would become Conservative Judaism, was the singular path to unity. Maurice was far more likely to be charitable in granting a portion of legitimacy to Protestantism and Catholicism than Schechter was to allow for Reform or

Orthodox Judaism. He did respect certain practical aspects of Reform such as its energetic organizational and management abilities and some features of Orthodox pietism. Schechter assumed that Reform would exhaust itself either by a sluggish assimilation into the wider society or by driving itself to insignificance by its continued rejection of the ceremonies that separated it from Christianity and secular culture, vanishing into a muddle of generic liberal religion.

While he rarely wrote about which denominational features he wanted to marry within traditional Judaism, we do find in a discussion about Jewish literature a hint of how Schechter thought about comprehending the streams of Judaism into its mainstream. He noted first the extent, spatially and temporally, of the writings that Jews have considered authoritative. When the Rabbis determined which books were to form the scriptures of Judaism, they included writings as skeptical and philosophical as Ecclesiastes to exist alongside the Pentateuch. This extended into medieval Judaism as well. The writings of Maimonides and Judah ha-Levi were comparable to the Alfasi's Code. "None of them was declared infallible,' Schechter wrote, 'but also to none of them, as soon as people were convinced of the author's sincerity, was denied the

53 homage due to seekers after truth." Each element organically became part of normative

Jewish thought, or minimally they did not conflict with the fundamentals of the tradition.

Maimonides' works, in particular the Guide for the Perplexed and the first part of the Mishneh

Torah, were burned by some French rabbis in the decades following his death, but today no one would try to read him out of the tradition. Nothing faithfully Jewish was to be cut off from

Jewish people, and this explains why Schechter can appreciate the scholarly and community- building efforts of Kaufman Kohler, the President of the Reform movement's seminary, recognizing in those efforts an attempt to maintain the ethos of Judaism, even if it diverged from

Schechter's conception of tradition. But the Reform Judaism that Schechter encountered was attempting to separate itself from the Pentateuch, trumping it with the prophets. Schechter maintained that separation and exclusion were modern novelties, outside the mainstream. The point was to comprehend.

Via media

The concept of the via media had for Schechter a related responsibility: the reconciliation of divided Israel. And this reconciliation was possible through the study of the past, a study that would bear out the reality of Jewish unity despite all of the surface diversity.

No matter the geographic or contextual dislocations, Jews still celebrated the same Sabbath, marked the same festivals, mourned the same tragedies and worshipped in the same language. If study was to the centrist path to a fuller unity, Schechter noted in a Seminary address, then

"...my colleagues and myself are called to create a theological centre which should be all things to all men..."115 It must attract broadly, balancing piety and culture, eager faith and sober scholarship. Schechter, as David Starr observes, sought to create a middle path, denying "the

114 Schechter, "The Chassidim" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, 13. 115 Schechter, "The Charter of the Seminary" in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, 11. 54 Scylla of Reform efforts to read history Whiggishly and solely through the prism of ethics, and the Carybydis of Orthodox insistence on anti-historicist dependence on Divine authority for customs as well as laws. Schechter invoked God against reformers who sought to argue

Jewishness as ethics; yet against forces of reaction he insisted on appeals to history."116

Starr is right to understand Schechter's thought as seeking always to separate out what he viewed as traditional, rabbinic Judaism from the extremes of left and right. Schechter's writings are shot through with the language of finding a middle path, of reconciling the radical and the reactionary to the moderate stream, for the moderate could experience as deeply the exigencies of the tradition like the Orthodox and the demands of the intellect like the reformer. In an essay on Nathan Krochmal, whom Schechter considers a centrist, he cites a midrash that likens the

Torah "to two paths, the one burning with fire, the other covered with snow. If a man enters on the former path he will die by the heat; if he walks by the latter path he will be frozen by snow.

What, then, must he do? He must walk in the middle, or, as we should say, he must choose the golden mean... [but it is not] a kind of compromise between two opposing views." Schechter will repeat this theme of standing between two meager choices, and of opting for a via media, in his essay on Nachmanides.

Nachmanides was active during the Maimonidean controversy. Maimonides' Guide and part of the Mishneh Torah appeared to find correspondence between Greek wisdom and the

Torah. Such a correspondence was considered heretical by several prominent French rabbis.

Nachmanides, who otherwise considered Maimonides to be his bete noire, tried to negotiate

110 between the disciples of the Rambam and his opponents. Each side defamed the other, tried to place the other beyond the pale of normative Jewish life. Nachmanides, on the other hand,

116 Starr, "Catholic Israel," 136. 117 Schechter, "Nachman Krochmal and the Perplexities of the Time" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, 61-62. 118 See Daniel Jeremy Silver, Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy, 1180-1240 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1965). 55 "stood between two fires." He stood against conflict, and for unity by way of a moderate course. In the end, however, he "was not successful in his effort to moderate the violence of either party.. ."I20 This last statement sounds a little more than autobiographical.

It seems clear to me that there is more going on here than a simple Aristotelian appeal to the golden mean, but rather an awareness on the part of Schechter of the general religious environment in which he was embedded. We witness a remarkable example of this when the ideas of Abraham Geiger, the greatest of the intellectual founders of Reform Judaism, are compared to a central idea of the Reformation. Opposed to Geiger, Schechter tells us, is the developed Jewish tradition, while Geiger and the Reformers held closely to "the right of private judgment, the palladium [emphasis added] of the Protestant Reformation asserted again by

David Fnedrich Strauss who.. .had considerable influence on Geiger." It was Newman in Via

Media who referred to private judgment as a.palladium, and Schechter has evidently absorbed

Newman's work to a degree that unconsciously the writings of that Anglican divine had begun to steal into the essays of a Romanian Jew. This is more than a simple lifting of a word;

Schechter lifted a worldview.

As president of JTS, Schechter also introduced the language of the via media. Thanks to the work of Mel Scult, we know that Cyrus Adler, who followed Schechter as president, asked

Schechter to redraft his inaugural Seminary address because it was "partisan." The original draft spoke of directing the Seminary between the two extreme parties. Adler, Scult writes, "believed that Seminary should represent the contemporary version of traditional Judaism rather than a specific denomination"122 Schechter made the change, emphasizing the comprehensiveness of

JTS in this instance and not that it was home to a movement that arose in reaction to radical

Schechter, "Nachmanides" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, 102. Ibid., 103 Schechter, "Abraham Geiger" in Studies in Judaism: Third Series, 55. Scult, "Schechter's Seminary," 86. 56 Reform. But he will mention elsewhere that JTS is "meant to pursue a middle course" and that it is "...a Conservative school removed alike from both extremes, Radical-Reform and

Hyper-Orthodoxy..."124 (This is not a criticism of Orthodoxy per se, but of a particular inward- looking Orthodoxy.)

While the Seminary would serve as the clerical arm of the Conservative movement, it also placed a small number of its ordainees in Orthodox pulpits into the 1960s. Schechter did not intend to found a new denomination, but by the end of his life he had grow weary of trying to unify American Jewry. In his 1913 speech at the founding of the United Synagogue, Schechter continued to refer to it as an umbrella organization that could comprehend a "Conservative or

Orthodox" synagogue.125 This speech recognized, on the one hand, that the Seminary was not fully identifiable with the emergent Conservative movement, but, on the other hand, that there were real and growing differences between traditional synagogues (Conservative and Orthodox).

Schechter maintains that his purpose is "not to create a new party but to consolidate an old one, which had always existed in this country." He does not wish to further fracture the increasingly divided community, but the reality of the situation was such that the Seminary was becoming an actor in communal disunity. With Hebrew Union College on its left and the Rabbi

Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary on its right, Schechter's Seminary was turning into a denomination school despite his wishes. This reality, of course, conformed fully to the contours of American religious history generally. By the time of this speech, Schechter was employing

Conservative Judaism regularly as a description of the Seminary.127 He acknowledges the instability of sectarian labels ("this Conservative, or if you prefer so to call it, this Orthodoxy

Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 194. 124 Ibid., 192. 125 Solomon Schechter, "The Work of Heaven" in Tradition and Change: the Development of Conservative Judaism, ed., Mordechai Waxman (New York: Burning Bush Press, 1958), 167. 126 Ibid., 163-64. 127 Ibid., 172. 57 tendency"),128 but notwithstanding his wish to establish an "adjective-less" Judaism, the

Seminary and the United Synagogue are visibly, if uncomfortably, beginning to mark out a distinct third movement in American Judaism.129 The Seminary's appeal to the immigrant

Orthodox has not been as successful as he envisioned. Although "very reluctant to denounce any party in existence.. .1 declare unhesitatingly that traditional Judaism will not survive another generation in this country" if vernacular sermons, objective scholarship, and respectable services do not spread to a majority of those identify as Orthodox.130 This speech represents one of

Schechter's few publicly critical comments regarding Orthodoxy.

Schechter and Anglo-Jewry

Certain trends in the Church of England presented a plausible centrism to Schechter. It is intriguing, however, that he did not draw inspiration from the Anglo-Jewish establishment.

Institutions such as the Chief Rabbinate, the United Synagogue and its prayer book emulated the established Church. Part of the reason he left to take the presidency of JTS was his rejection of

Anglo-Jewish culture, a culture he saw as manic for assimilation, ignorant of Jewish life and indifferent to scholarship.

British Jews were appreciably affected by the dominant Anglican environment. The

Chief Rabbi was an Archbishop in miniature: his social status and religious attitudes were often viewed through Anglican categories. It was said that Hermann Adler donned gaiters, in deliberate imitation of Canterbury. Anglo-Jewish ministers wore a clerical collar. The United

Synagogue, the official organization of Anglo-Jewry, was empowered by an act of Parliament in

128 Ibid., 165. 129 This is not to claim, however, that Conservative Judaism could be fully distinguished from Orthodoxy at this time. Numerous examples of boundary-crossing can be adduced: for instance, the Travis family, which bankrolled RIETS, also funded a special course on Talmud and codes at the Seminary. See Jeffrey Gurock, "From Fluidity to Rigidity: The Religious Worlds of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in Twentieth Century America" (Ann Arbor: Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, The University of Michigan, 1998), 24. 130 Schechter, "The Work of Heaven," 172. 131 See Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 55. 58 1870, placing management of Jewish communal and ritual concerns in the hands of the Chief

Rabbi and essentially making the United Synagogue the "established Synagogue." The model clergyman would reproduce the high culture of the Anglican clergy. "The culture of the minister," Arthur Kiron writes "would be an index of the culture of the community, while his position in society would be equivalent to that occupied by the minister of other religious bodies."132 The Adlerian use of Anglican forms involved specific parallels to the Archibishop's role in the maintenance of religious institutions: Hermann Adler claimed, like any bishop, that the right of "visitation of Provincial Synagogues and Schools is exclusively the function and duty of the Chief Rabbi, as is the visitation of a diocese by its Bishop."133 The Chief Rabbinate was, furthermore, a pledge for unity. It was Adler's ambition to telescope the differences between native and immigrant, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, the traditionalist and the reformer. We see this insistence on unity conspicuously in the creation of the Authorised Daily Prayer Book.

In America and continental Europe each denomination produced its own siddur, appropriate to its own beliefs in liturgical matters. However, the Anglo-Jewish prayer book included such diverse contributors as the Chief Rabbi to Claude Montefiore, the founder of Liberal Judaism.

This would have been extraordinary elsewhere at the time and certainly today. Autre temps, autre moeurs.

The Anglo-Jewish middle and upper classes in the circles where Schechter traveled were for the most part unmoved by the calls for large scale reform of Judaism then convulsing communities in America and Germany. The extremes of Reform and separatist Orthodoxy held little appeal. In fact, Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler spoke of locating the "golden mean."134 Their religion, if practiced often in the breach, was notionally Orthodox, and certainly they wanted

132 Kiron, "Golden Ages, Promised Lands," 102. 133 Quoted in Miri Freud-Kandel, Orthodox Judaism in Britain since 1913: An Ideology Forsaken (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), 37. 134 Quoted in Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, 117. 59 their ministers to live blamelessly Orthodox lives. Todd Endelman describes their Orthodoxy as

"accommodationist," craving both respectability and respect. They wished for full civic participation, to be good Englishmen and women. But Jews they would remain.

What changes did occur were unhurried and minimal. The Chief Rabbi had to approve all changes, although he could not exercise discipline for noncompliance. The ability to excommunicate was seen as a tool of division. There was an emergent Reform movement that placed itself outside the Chief Rabbi's ambit. English Reform, however, was conservative compared to the movement in America or on the Continent. The Chief Rabbis did approve some alterations in the choreography of ritual, "designed to enhance the dignity of the service. They addressed the externals of worship rather than its doctrinal content."136 These minor changes were not a wholesale concession to reformist impulse. As Endelman notes, "there was no compelling need to alter the public face of Judaism, that is, its theology and worship service."137

There was, for instance, little concern until the late 19th century to remove liturgical references about the return to Zion. German gentile supporters of Jewish emancipation habitually called for the reform not only of Jews but also of Judaism. The English ruling classes did not make a similar call, whether through indifference or some warmer inclination. Jews need not alter belief or ritual to participate in civic life.

While Schechter was grateful for the relative tolerance he found in England and the sincere interest in his work among gentiles, he did not believe that Judaism would thrive in

England, asphyxiated by the hierarchal structure of Anglo-Jewry and untroubled by the life of the mind. "England is dead and buried under the burden of the Chief Rabbinate, while the better people tend to become Christian,"138 he said despairingly. He appreciated the theological

Ibid., 110-11. Ibid., 115. Quoted in Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 101. 60 sensibilities and seriousness of English Christians, but in this instance Anglo-Jewry did not copy the majority. "[W]e in England still maintain that Judaism has no dogmas as if nothing to the contrary had ever been said."139 Although he fretted over the absence of theological curiosity among British Jews, he was even more vexed by the attempt to collapse the distinctions between

Jewishness and Englishness. In one of his last acts as a British Jew, he created a furor.

Prior to taking his position at JTS, Schechter wrote a series of letters (in 1900-01) to the

Jewish Chronicle to record his dismay at the growing jingoism of the Jewish community produced in part by British success during the Boer War. The letters, provocatively titled "Four

Epistles to the Jews of England," created much ill-will between him and the Anglo-Jewish elite, especially his former benefactor, Claude Goldsmid Montefiore. The "Epistles" are part scold, part cri de coeur and part remedy.

Schechter began by attacking the "sickly platitude" of the expression "Anglo-Saxons or

Englishmen of the Jewish persuasion."140 The first subsumed the second, religious identity being subsidiary to national allegiance. For Schechter this was a distortion of priorities. Citizenship,

Jewish history attested, could be revoked, rights ignored, property confiscated. England had never formally permitted Jews to return (this fact would, ironically, actually ease Jewish acculturation and acceptance). Why believe, despite England's tolerance, that this was a permanent condition? It appeared to him as selling a noble birthright for a mess of porridge, trading off the enduring for the contingent. And, unlike Germany, there were few demands for

Jews to smooth away any of their distinctive features. Schechter insists, "we can thus only be

Jews of the Jewish persuasion." There is nothing radical in his proposition; he simply does not wish Jews to merge with the majority, to remember that chosenness puts one "with the people,

Schechter, "The Dogmas of Judaism" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, 149-50. Schechter, "Four Epistles to the Jews of England" in Studies in Judaism: Second Series, 182. Ibid., 183 61 but not of the people.",14 2 The "Epistles" are a critique of the Reform and Liberal ideal of mission. Schechter accuses Anglo-Jewry of forsaking its ancient inheritance while the Christian

West tries to claim that same inheritance. Jews experience embarrassment about their faith, opting to ape the West "in all things except its admiration for Israel."143 Another aspect of this abandonment is the total absence of true Jewish scholars in England. As such, he is severe with

Anglo-Jewry regarding its intellectual attainments. It is shameful that Christians alone seek to study Jewish scripture. It is not shameful that Christians consider the source of their faith (the study of Hebrew among English Christians "is an object of deep love and affection"144), but shameful that Jews refuse to champion their legacy. The marketplace, according to Schechter, trumps the mind. While the ban of excommunication still spins out a Spinoza, Anglo-Jewry is unable to yield "even a commentator on Spinoza."145 To resolve this situation he suggests— without making any material suggestions—a shift in the mental "religious atmosphere"146 of

Western Jews. This involves fusing Western know-how and the civil glue of its institutions with the excited piety and solemn learning of Eastern Judaism, the Judaism of his youth ideally remembered. They must come together in "communion"—Schechter again employing an

Anglican idiom to express Jewish meaning. Judaism must be reinvigorated by "spirituality."147

But spiritual life among Western Jews has often been unkindly contrasted to adherence to the

Law, which is seen as neglecting the spirit for the letter (the liberal critique of the Law paralleled the critique of Pauline Christianity, Schechter regularly pointed out). Schechter, however, understands that the spirit owes its existence to the letter. According to him, the spirit

142 Ibid., 184. 143 Ibid., 183. 144 Ibid., 194. 145 Ibid., 185. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid., 187. 62 of the Sabbath for much of Anglo-Jewry is expressed in a light dvar "on the merits of the last novel of Hall Caine."148

The antidote to the distress of Western Judaism is not greater "imitation] of the

Establishment."149 Schechter was at ease using English/Anglican forms to describe the content of his Judaism. He did not, however, wish to see the form turn into the substance of Jewish life.

There was something amenable about the structure of Anglicanism that Schechter warmed to (he never denied it), yet he asserted consistently that "Jewish soil is rich enough for all purposes... [with] no need to go begging for an 'over-soul' from Emerson, or for crumbs of a tame pantheism from Wordsworth..."150 The rehabilitation of Judaism will be complete when

"we re-possess ourselves of our scriptures."151 This is the intention of Schechter's life work: the retrieval of Jewish texts, with Jewish commentary buttressed by the latest scientific methods, will renew a flagging Judaism. He did not believe this task could be done in England; it would have to begin in America.

It is instructive to look briefly at two British Jewish theologians, both personally dear to

Schechter at different times, who fell on each side of the divide that he constructed. It will help illuminate the practical reality and context in which Schechter was living and writing at the time of the "Epistles."

Schechter does not mention Claude Goldsmid Montefiore explicitly in the "Epistles," yet it is unmistakable that the former was balking at the latter's theology. After publication of the letters in the Jewish Chronicle, Schechter and Montefiore's relationship would never resume on the same warm terms. Schechter was maintained by Montefiore financially for much of his time in England, but I do not believe that the "Epistles" can be reduced to a psychology of

148 Ibid., 188. 149 Ibid., 196. 150 Ibid., 199-200. 151 Ibid., 200. 63 dependency revenge. Sometimes difference is just difference, and their religious differences were abysmal: it must have stung the "old Adam" in Schechter to witness Montefiore's growing radicalism. That radicalism was surely responsible for some of the more pointed barbs in the "Epistles." Montefiore's Liberal Judaism—a party to the left of conventional Reform— had some points of equivalence with Radical Reform in America and Germany, but was more uncompromising in shedding tradition, more intimate with Christianity. Montefiore accepted root and bark the conclusions of higher criticism; denied the event of revelation; rejected the normativity of tradition (the Oral Law); considered the prophets superior to the Pentateuch ("in some respects, the Prophets stand to us above the Law"153); repackaged the election of Israel as a universalist mission, charging Jews with the task of disseminating ethical monotheism throughout the gentile world; reclaimed the New Testament as part of Jewish scripture; and advocated Jesus as a link in the chain of Jewish prophethood.

Montefiore doubted the religiosity of someone who upheld the laws of kashrut: these laws are the product of old superstitions and taboos, and that the higher sprit and teaching of the

Prophets are out of harmony with them.. .1 do not want to be connected with other Israelites in practises which are not, to my mind, religiously commendable..."154 For Schechter Liberal

Judaism was little more than liberal Christianity dressed up in Hebrew, as "Christianity began with the disparagement of the Torah, playing off the prophets against the Law."155 For

Montefiore the only Law was internal, created and sustained by the individual. He writes: The

Liberal Jew, moreover, just because he is not bound by the Pentateuchal and Rabbinic codes, is bound by something less visible, but no less compelling: he is bound by the Law of his instructed conscience, which reveals itself to his heart and mind as for him the law of God.

152 Schechter, "Introduction" in Studies in Judaism: First Series, xx. 153 Claude Montefiore, "Some Rough Notes About Liberal Judaism." Papers for Jewish People (XXVIII) (London: Jewish Religious Union, 1928), 4. 154 Ibid., 8. 155 Quoted in Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 302. 64 Every Liberal Jew—such is the ideal—carries a Law within him, which he both accepts and makes, and the dictates of which are no less imperious than the dictates of the written code."

This is not a natural law opposed to a revealed law: natural law recognizes a transcendent source as its telos, while Montefiore insists that the law is a design of human making.

Despite Schechter's pessimism he did positively influence many British Jews. He can justly claim Morris Joseph as a disciple. A minister at the West London Synagogue (Reform),

Joseph was a "progressive conservative,"157 adverse to change for the sake of change, but unwilling to give in to a sclerotic Orthodoxy. His Judaism as Life and Creed reads like a primer on the thought of Schechter, who was to have read the manuscript but for his removal to New

York. "To him,' Joseph says of Schechter, 'I owe much of the inspiration that has made this book possible." He writes unambiguously as a centrist, and this detail attests to our claim for

Schechter's centrism. Situated between Orthodoxy and "extreme liberalism," Joseph notes rightly that "thus far no attempt has been made to elucidate systematically the intermediate position, and to give a comprehensive account of Jewish belief and practice as they are conceived by men of moderate views."159 He aims to preserve historic Judaism, the developed tradition that has grown organically over the centuries. Orthodoxy and liberalism are considered historical outliers or interlopers. Orthodoxy reduces Judaism to a theological test, that is, acceptance of the Shulhan Arukh as the mark of piety; liberalism seeks to relax the demands of tradition, to obscure the very real differences between Jews and gentiles. Most notably, Joseph embraces Schechter's ideal of "Catholic Israel," even if he does not adopt the term. "Catholic

Israel" is Schechter's term for the developed and naturally maturing Judaism. He speaks of

Montefiore, "Some Rough Notes About Liberal Judaism," 15. 157 For the use of "progressive conservative," see Freud-Kandel, Orthodox Judaism in Britain since 1913, 52ff. 158 Morris Joseph, Judaism as Life and Creed, 2nd and revised edition (London: Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1910), vii.

65 tradition being "sunk into the consciousness of Catholic Israel," while Joseph writes of

"Jewish consciousness." Like Schechter, Joseph does not appeal to direct, divine revelation of the Torah as the source of its divinity, but rather its acceptance by the Jewish people: the

"reverence and affection of successive ages."162 Neither denied revelation, but marked out a role for human participation in the covenant as well.

Conclusion

This essay has been a study in the development of an attitude, a new turn of temperament; namely, to argue that England and its established church were formative in the realization of Solomon Schechter's thought. Until now there has been no extensive scholarly discussion of the impact of Anglicanism upon Schechter (and early Conservative Judaism), but this inquiry has sought to fill that gap. The point has not been to correct a perception (most scholars are aware that Schechter's time in England made a strong impression upon him), rather to add to our appreciation of the multiple sources of Conservative Jewish self-understanding.

England thus warrants a place at the table in the conversation concerning the origin and advance of Conservative Judaism.

But I hope that the essay has value beyond Schechter. The account of Schechter's sojourn tells us something about Jewish-Christian interaction away from the political or socio­ economic arena. The maturation of Schechter's thinking is an example of intellectual borrowing

(this has a transatlantic aspect as well), of translating the ideas from one tradition into another without violating the integrity of either. He was not trying to make Christians any less Christian, nor Jews any less Jewish.

Schechter, "The Charter of the Seminary" in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, 23. Joseph, Judaism as Life and Creed, vii and 27. Ibid., 12. 66 Schechter's experience in England and among English Christian is also part of the larger narrative of the negotiation of Jewish intellectuals with the mainstream—i.e., Christian— culture. Some assimilated its ideals, others assumed its traditions through conversion and still others ignored it. Schechter, however, acculturated. He was what Paul Mendes-Flohr called a

"cognitive insider,"163 a public intellectual whose work has been formed in conflict and acknowledgement with the ideas and ideals of the ruling cultural norms. Schechter accepted the basic structural ideas of English culture and attempted to superimpose it on Judaism. He was not, however, caught between competing claims like so many nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish intellectuals. Schechter used the model of Anglicanism to reorganize traditional

Judaism along what he considered its genuine historical lines. Accepting some liberalization such as the historical investigation into sacred texts (in particular, rabbinic texts), he did allow for a certain amount of what Peter Berger called "cognitive bargaining.. Just because the pressures of secularity are so strong, not everything can be salvaged once this process [of liberalization] begins."164 But liberalism for Schechter was the way of preserving traditional

Judaism: the study of the past would show an unbroken continuity.

Finally, I hope that the centrism of Schechter's thought, inspired by the Anglican model, has been established. If Anglo-Jewry converted Anglican institutions into Jewish institutions as a form of "protection by mimicry,"165 Schechter sought to use the ideas behind the institutions rather than the institutions themselves. And the controlling idea for him was centrism, and this led to an attraction to the lived experience of the Church of England. In America, Schechter would lack the social controls and internal coercion to make the Conservative movement resemble the Anglican establishment (the Anglo-Jewish elite did attempt this; they succeeded in

163 Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 45. 164 Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979), 100. 165 For use of this term in Japanese studies, see Basil Hall Chamberlain, "The Luchu Islands and Their Inhabitants" The Geographical Journal 5.4 (April 1885), 314. 67 part), but he could translate the substance of centrism as a general principle into traditional

Judaism. The theory of centrism will be the topic of the next chapter.

68 Chapter Two

The Ecclesiology of Matthew Arnold

Introduction

I do not know if Matthew Arnold was a Christian, but I am certain he was an Anglican.

This situation appears to be something of a family tradition. John Henry Newman famously enquired of Thomas Arnold, Matthew's father and a leading liberal Churchman, "But is he a

Christian?" The narrative of Matthew Arnold's religious life and thought was a balancing between the competing intellectual and emotional claims of the legacies of his father and

Newman. The relationship of Thomas Arnold and Newman, already previously strained if icily cordial, broke completely with the former's rebuke of the latter's leadership in what came to be called the Oxford Movement.

The goal of this essay is to write Matthew Arnold into the history of Anglican thought in the Victorian period and explore his contribution to Anglican self-understanding. Historians of

English religion and literary critics acknowledge his significance in general nineteenth-century religious opinion-making,1 but he is usually treated as someone addressing himself singularly to large questions of faith and doubt, the challenge of biblical criticism or the Bible's role in public life and national culture. And while Arnold did devote much of his last two decades to discussing matters of general spiritual import, he also turned repeatedly to issues distressing the

Church of England. One scholar notes, however, that Anglicans ignored his "Broad

Churchmanship...[It] was never properly addressed by the Church of England: both as a liberal

1 See, for example, James Livingston's Arnold andChristianity and Ruth apRoberts' Arnold and God. 69 and as layman he was marginalized and left aside."2 While Arnold could be a scourge to certain trends in Anglican theology, he kindled to the ancient forms of English worship and thought the

Church of England, as settled at the Reformation, to be particularly well-suited to fit the British

genius, a great source of unity in a time of terrible division. I will argue in the following pages that Arnold was exhaustively engaged in the exigent religious deliberations of his age, and that the best way to properly understand his religious writings emerges through his commitment to

Anglicanism, peculiar though that commitment may seem. This involves a reconsideration of his later writings, from Culture and Anarchy (1869) forward. In the Arnold literature, he is often described as a religious thinker and just as often there is little attempt to anchor his ideas in a particular tradition. But there is no view from nowhere.4 Whatever Arnold believed or denied in matters of religion, it must be understood in the wider Anglican context. Anglicanism formed the normative framework for Arnold.

By appreciating Arnold's Anglicanism we can place him with greater conviction in the account of religious centrism. It is true that while his more general religious writings of the

1860s contain centrist elements, and we will have cause to reflect on these writings at some

length, his centrism surfaces most fully in his works of the 1870s and 1880s, as his mind

focused on particular issues within the Church of England and its relations with other Christians, namely, Roman Catholics and the dissenting churches. Arnold's centrism is different from the kind expressed by the Anglican Newman and Frederick Denison Maurice as he did not possess their theological muscle, but his attempt at finding an intermediate position was just as explicit

and indeed more accessible to the reading public: Newman was read but not trusted and Maurice

2 Gerald Parsons, "Reform, Revival and Realignment: the Experience of Victorian Anglicanism" in Religion in Victorian Britain, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 45. 3 Genius, that is, in the original sense of the word: a spirit of the place. 4 See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 70 was loved but obscure.5 Arnold upset both Catholics and Protestants, both within and outside the Church of England, troubling believer and unbeliever, the intransigently orthodox and the fashionably radical. He attempted to find an intermediate point between the claims of the various religious groups and the growing clamour of the non- or anti-religious to find a centrist option that would bring national unity. In this regard, he was like his father. Arnold sought to reconcile the development of intellectual life, which was often a-religious and the demands of tradition. Tradition would need to be reassessed in this new climate, but tradition as represented by the Anglican Church was not to be jettisoned.

Owen Chadwick, in his magisterial work on the Victorian Church, observed that three socio-cultural factors "were driving Christianity to restate doctrine: natural science, historical criticism, moral feeling."6 By means of a centrist idiom, I will argue, Arnold endeavoured to make possible a new kind of belief for a new kind of believer: the scales had fallen from the eyes of his contemporaries, the belief in miracle and plenary inspiration finished, but what

Thomas Carlyle called "new firm lands of Faith beyond"7 had to be discovered, and the new science integrated. Biblical criticism was to be embraced, but Arnold "was a 'higher critic' of a

Q different sort."

Unlike many religious liberals, he sought that new faith in an old tradition. He warmed to the liturgy of the prayer book and did not dismiss the Thirty-Nine Articles. The old forms still had their hold on the people; however, their interpretation and application, and especially their

It is worth noting that the literary critic Nathan Scott, a literary critic of great religious sensitivity, holds that this trio—Newman, Maurice and Arnold—"by reason of the relevance of their legacies to contemporary discussions appear to be genuinely living guides." Nathan Scott, Jr., Poetics of Belief: Studies in Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, Santayana, Stevens, and Heidegger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 39. 6 Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part 1, 3rd edition (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1971), 551. 7 Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling (London: Oxford University Press, 1907). 8 Jerold Savory, "Matthew Arnold and 'The Author of Supernatural Religion'': The Background to God and the Bible" Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 16.4 (Autumn, 1976), 679. 71 hardening into dogma, no longer appealed to many of his countrymen and women. James

Beckford writes: "Religion...is believed to have lost or abandoned its former function of supplying a sense of ultimate values and legitimacy for the entire social system. It is also said to have become less effective as a source of integrating individuals into society and of binding all the social institutions into a coherent whole."9 And this was Arnold's project: to reorient society on a new foundation that in fact reached back to the natural truth of Christianity, a truth that could best be expressed through the traditions of a historical church (the Anglican and Roman

Catholic churches for him were the only two qualified churches).10 Arnold noted that this reorientation of society was a possibility that continental liberals would not countenance, remarking that his Literature and Dogma "provokes a feeling of mingled astonishment and impatience; impatience, that religion should be set on new grounds when they had hoped that religion, the old ground having in the judgment of all rational persons given way, was going to ruin as fast as could be fairly expected; astonishment, that any man of liberal tendencies should not agree with them."11

The next section will focus on Arnold's contribution to religious thought generally. We will begin by looking at his poetry. I believe that there is a continuum between the concerns of

Arnold the poet and Arnold the prose writer. The religious concerns of the poet—the perennial themes of doubt, tradition and change, the existence of God, the staggering multiplicity of religious truth—will be integrated into Arnold's prose, even if his concerns in the 1860s and

1870s are more topical and mundane. Certainly poetry ought not to be confused with discursive prose as it contains its own integral forms, but the ideas first conveyed in poetry will later leach

9 James A. Beckford, Social Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45-46. 10 Maurice, too, holds that only the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church display marks of the historical church. 11 Matthew Arnold, "Preface to Last Essays" in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 8: Essays Religious and Mixed, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 150. 72 into his prose. The difference between his two crafts, according to Ruth apRoberts, is that "the poet Arnold is mainly the diagnostician, while the essayist prescribes the treatment." Topics in this section include Arnold's ideas of development, experience and language in religious life.

We will be examining his thought in large measure through his essays on Spinoza, which represent his first public forays into religious argument as a prose writer. Park Honan acknowledges the importance of Spinoza for Arnold: "His Spinoza essays worked out a rationale for his faith, even if he had not reconciled his understanding of the Spinozan Deity with his own practice of a ritualistic, High Church Anglicanism." Through his writings on

Spinoza we will see Arnold beginning to develop a coherent centrism. However, there is a distinct alteration in his attitudes toward ritual and liturgy from his Spinoza essays to his writings on the Anglican Church. This is an important change, and it will be noted where relevant.

The fourth section will concentrate on a prevailing aspect in his religious writings: the growth of the dissenting churches. From Culture and Anarchy to his final essays, Dissent stalks his work. In the religious and political realm, though the two largely collapsed into each other for Arnold (and in this respect too he was like his father), Dissent represented everything he opposed: individualism, separation for theological opinion, cultural vulgarity, and narrowness.

By understanding Arnold's judgments on Dissent we can better grasp the shape of opinions about the Established Church.

The final part will consider Arnold's position as an Anglican thinker. The Church of

England in this period was undergoing extensive adjustments, as its traditional prerogatives were under attack from dissenters, secularists and some Anglican clergy. We will look at how a

12 Ruth apRoberts, Arnold and God (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 3. 13 Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981), 324. 73 liberal justifies the maintenance of many of the Church of England's privileges; how the Church can be a centrist association for national unity; how the Anglican Church salvaged the best of

Catholicism while avoiding the fanaticism of Puritan Protestantism; and how Arnold felt his work was part of the solution to the new world in which the Church found itself, one described by Chadwick as a "world moved out of an age of toleration, where a single church dominated, into an age of equality where speakers and writers sought to capture the public mind."14 Few authors were better prepared for that challenge than Matthew Arnold.

Centrism

This entire project is devoted to an exploration of a theme common to a particular movement of thought in the last half of the nineteenth-century and the beginning decades of the twentieth. I have termed this unorganized movement of mind, religious centrism. Religious centrism was made possible by the growing religious pluralism and official government tolerance in the trans-Atlantic world, namely, England and the United States. Centrism is unimaginable where public possibilities of religious expression are limited by government intrusion or severe social censure. The United States had always been fairly libertarian in matters of religion, but England was in the Victorian era enduring the fitful birth pangs of religious parity.

The previous chapter focused on Solomon Schechter, the archetypal centrist in modern

Judaism, while comparing the advance of his ideas with Anglicans such as Newman, Maurice and Arnold. Arnold, I believe, is the representative Anglican centrist, although Maurice's religious centrism has become more central to contemporary Anglicanism. Newman's Anglican

14 Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 4. 74 career was too brief and far too fractious to be considered typical, while Maurice's centrism, while pervasive, was explicit mainly in the second half of The Kingdom of Christ. Arnold's religious centrism was unambiguous from his earliest poetry to his first essays on Spinoza and forward to last works. Several Arnold scholars, while not discussing his centrism comprehensively, acknowledge its significance in his work. David DeLaura, in his classic

Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England, notes that "Arnold's own position, characteristically, is mediatorial."15 William Robbins writes that "it is easy to see why Arnold regarded his writing

as 'conservative and religious' as well as 'critical', and himself as a 'reconciling' influence. It is

equally easy to see why he antagonized both the orthodox and the radical."16 Jerold Savory also remarks on Arnold the conciliator and Arnold the man standing flanked by two immoderate

attitudes: "God and the Z?z'6/e...reconcile[s] 'the masses' to the Bible by offering a mediating position between an unimaginative and destructive religious rationalism...and an untenable

orthodox literalism...Neither extreme could offer 'the power of edification'..."17

What all of these scholars recognize is that Arnold persistently sought to find the

religious center. The old approach towards the Bible was expiring and conventional religious

life was merely defensive but Arnold saw opportunity where others saw only crisis. To best

investigate his centrism let us turn to a wide ranging discussion of the core religious themes in

his writings.

General Religious Thought

15 David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), 102. 16 William Robbins, The Ethical Idealism of 'Matthew Arnold(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), 30. 17 Savory, "Matthew Arnold and 'The Author of Supernatural Religion'," 678. 75 In many ways, Matthew Arnold's religious ideas fall along the same continuum as those nineteenth-century liberals such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and David Friedrich Strauss who desired to repackage traditional Christianity in a new form, one that put the Bible in its proper historical context and demoted revelation from a providential act of grace to a human recounting of a human encounter with what humans considered the divine. But, as we shall have cause to remark frequently, Arnold was a not a conventional religious liberal though a religious liberal he was. He had sympathies on multiple sides. He has been accused, and with occasional justice, of coveting the substance of each side without commitment to any position. As Nathan Scott points out, we cannot classify Arnold among the "'left-wing' Hegelians...who had undertaken in various ways to 'naturalize' the Christian mythos, but it [was] Arnold's distinction to have attempted a reinterpretation of the Christian faith that aspired after a systematic consistency with those texts in which that faith finds its classical expression."18 Scott's assessment is spot on:

Arnold employs liberal means—biblical criticism, denial of accrued mythology—towards a more conservative end, that is, a Christianity that reclaims its inherited, sacred works without the old interpretation. The truth of Christian life and belief for him was there all along, just lost amid the welter of unnecessary human addition. He was not just a critic of Christianity, as many conservatives asserted, an amateur enquiring after matters beyond his ken. Rather, Arnold was a belonger if not always a believer, a traditionalist who wanted to kick the bottom out of deadening dogma, wanting to keep the essential core of the faith—and not just the ethical or aesthetic portion as T.S. Eliot maintained.

The estimation of Arnold's religious philosophy has waxed and waned. Lawrence

Mazzeno has sketched out the scholarly critique of his writings on religion, noting that until

Scott, Poetics of Belief, 41. 76 recently most critics have not embraced Arnold's ideas. For instance, an early commentator,

James Main Dixon, found his thought "extraordinarily warped and defective," pagan and Arnold

"a victim of the fallacy that religious beliefs can be stripped of mystery."19 While later readers such as Basil Willey in the 1940s put forth positive judgements of his religious writings, the standard approach to Arnold was formulated by T.S. Eliot in the 1930s, and that approach has just recently begun to be overturned, as scholars such as James Livingston and Ruth apRoberts have taken seriously as important theological statements works such as Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible. Eliot famously charged that Arnold gratuitously trimmed religion to emotional impulse or an adjunct of culture, that religion takes its cue fully from its time rather than religion, culture and society feeding into and forming each other.20 Chesterson took him to task as well: "He sometimes talked of culture almost as if it were a man, or at least a church (for a church has a sort of personality): some may suspect that culture was a man, whose name was

Matthew Arnold."21 Livingston challenges this conventional view by positing Arnold as heir to the religious values of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and analogous to the methodology of twentieth- century theologian Rudolf Bultmann, placing him in the religious center. He writes, "Arnold attempted...to ground Christian belief in a radically empirical or existential basis which would withstand the onslaughts of the scientific Zeitgeist. In this Arnold represents that interesting (and very modern) mixture of conservative and radical temper—intensely conservative about the values and continuities of the tradition but radically sceptical about historical sources and

00 dogma." Much recent scholarship has taken Livingston's lead, as trends in contemporary

Quoted in Lawrence W. Mazzeno, Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), 12-13. 20 See T.S. Eliot, "Arnold and Pater" in Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932). 21 G.K. Chesteron, The Victorian Age in Literature (London: Williams & Northgate, 1913), 74. 22 James C. Livingston, "Matthew Arnold and His Critics on the Truth of Christianity: A Reappraisal for the Centenary ofLiterature and Dogma" Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41.3 (1973), 386. 77 philosophy have permitted a wider angle of vision—and, by extension, a positive evaluation—to consider the general stream of Arnold's religious thought. Let us now weigh up the very substance of his approach to religion.

Poetry

Arnold's earliest religious reflections are found in his poetry. Poems such as "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" and "Dover Beach" are today regarded as foundational Victorian and indeed modern ruminations on the nature of faith and doubt, the pull of religious emotion, the push of religious life and the erosion of tradition into multiplicity. The unique truth claims of

Christianity and the inerrancy of the Bible were challenged; the old beliefs were losing their internal coerciveness, while new beliefs had yet to supplant them. This theme was shot through

Arnold's verse. In fact, an entirely new system of belief would not be a reality, but rather new justifications for the old beliefs, novel reasons to cover established convictions.

"Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" is based in part on Arnold's recollection of his honeymoon visit to a Carthusian monastery—the eponymous Grande Chartreuse—just north of

Grenoble. Unlike his father, he had an abiding appreciation for the aesthetic sensibility of

Catholicism. Most Romantics did: witness Scott's Ivanhoe, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and the renewed interest in cathedrals and gothic architecture in England generally. The faith of the monks he observed was being left behind in an age that witnessed the ascendancy of scientific methods and attitudes. Others remarked that the unobtrusive faith of the monks was "dead time's exploded dream." But Arnold sought solace among the Carthusians, because his

"Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2n edition, ed. Miriam Allott (London and New York: Longman, 1979). 78 "tears"—that is, his emotional capacity—like their "faith," had insignificant berth in a world that seemed hemmed in by science and the rise of higher biblical criticism. He asked the

"cowled" monks to "fence me round,"25 to shelter him in warm support and fellow feeling, even though he had no intention to accept their eroded belief.

More significantly, Arnold shows in "Stanzas" that the liberal religious creed in which he was reared was not sufficient either. Growing up ensconced in his own cloistered world of

Rugby and Balliol, his intellectual horizons as a poet were broadening (let us note here his interest in world religions, Scandinavian sagas, et al.) but he felt his spiritual horizons narrowing. He described the "rigorous teachers [who] seized my youth/And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire," offering in its stead the "high, white star of Truth."26 He imbibed the emphasis on the ethical life and moral feeling in a Broad Church household; learned to appreciate the results of science and biblical criticism; and had absorbed classical learning, believing firmly in the unity of the past as a proper guide for contemporary issues. Nevertheless, he was experiencing spiritual lassitude. Arnold even imagines his teachers calling to him in the dim of the monastery, why are you "in this living tomb"? He assures the voices that he neither denies the truths learned at their tables (although he surely has refused them to a greater or lesser degree) nor does he accept the expiring convictions of the "anchorites" but wishes only to grieve over the loss of his personal faith and their historical faith—and, meaningfully, Arnold links the two losses together. The former world, with all of its folly, error and superstition, but also its

Ibid., 306 Ibid. Ibid., 304 79 reverence, belief in the mind and concern for goodness was gone. However, the new world, as

• 97 promised in the summery optimism of the Broad Church, was "powerless to be born."

In "Stanzas," Arnold saw little in the new or old world that could generate birth of a new faith he could adopt. This image of existing between two worlds is shot through Arnold's poetry. In "Sohrab and Rustum" he speaks of being atop a wave, undecided about which way to fall. Much of Arnold's early poetry is given to this sort of uncertainty, this inability to choose, because the old world is no longer an option and the new world is unappealing. Those marking out novel paths for the spiritually sensitive, whom Arnold calls the "sons," have been unable to 98 uncover those paths, and "the pangs which tortured them [those of the old paths] remain."

But the despair in Arnold's best-known poetry is transmuted into a kind of circumscribed faith or theological rebuilding in some of his lesser-known poems. In "Progress," he speaks of those who want to clear out those "old" paths to make way for the "new roads." Although they—that is, the men and women of science and criticism, the sceptics of the old way—counsel that one "leave, then, the Cross behind as ye have left carved gods," Arnold insists that one

"guard the fire within!" When all external ways to the divine are blocked, turn inward to the soul that is free from external change, a soul not bound to its time.

In "Rugby Chapel," a poem Arnold wrote to defend his father's legacy, he attempts to find another way out of spiritual despair, the doubt that rankles the mind and anaesthetizes the will. The unity of classical Greece is broken (although it never was a reality); its ideal fails to serve as a comprehensive way of life. But the Greek concentration on the lives of great men, worthy of emulation, remains. And this accent on emulation Arnolds finds agreeable to his own

"Dover Beach" in Ibid. Ibid., 308. "Progress" in Ibid., 277. 80 temperament. Like Carlyle, he thought that the biographies of great men could inspire. In

"Rugby Chapel" he says of his father, "I know that there are others like thee...friends and

helpers of mankind." He distinguishes his father's generation from his own, which he derisively

calls "the men of the crowd." The mechanical age makes life "so soulless...hideous, vile." Thus

one way out of the religious crisis of the present is to look to the past. But of greatest interest to

us for the later portions of the essay is Arnold's verse in the poem that refers to his father's

emphasis on religious unity, a unity that both father and son thought possible in and through the

Church of England. He writes, "Factions divide them, their host/Threatens to break, to

dissolve./Ah, keep, keep them combined!"30 Both Arnolds loathed sectarianism.

In the brief "The Divinity" Arnold focuses on the phrase "God's wisdom and God's goodness." Part of the error of developed Christianity was to create a metaphysics which

identified these terms as attributes of God. Instead, since the supernatural is no longer admitted,

Arnold concludes that we must recognize "wisdom and goodness, they are God.'''' This "simpler

lore" is taught by no "Saint" or "Church,"31 but is rather based on moral experience. Arnold will

stress throughout his verse and prose that human language cannot adequately grasp the idea of

God, that all language is figurative. "The Divinity" can therefore be linked to his controversial

definition of God in Literature and Dogma, where the divine is identified as a "power" that is

neither human nor supernatural "that makes for righteousness." God is not, or at least we cannot

responsibly say, that God is a person but rather a force in the world.

Finally, one of Arnold's finest poems, the lengthy "Empedocles on Etna," offers yet

another way to think through the spiritual crisis that harassed Victorian men and women. The

poem is in part about the broken bond between God and the world. The divine is no longer to be

"Rugby Chapel" in Ibid., 489. "The Divinity" in Ibid., 530. 81 sought externally, whether in heaven above or nature below. The truth of religion no longer finds its basis in fact. Religious truth is not of the same kind as scientific truth, for the integrity of religion is doomed if it makes claims for the correspondence of word and fact that science does. Scientific truth must be both empirically verifiable and potentially falsifiable. Religious truth resides in its moral edification; it arises from experience. In "Empedocles," we are told that

Callicles "fables, yet speaks truth."32 This truth is symbolic, internal, not located "out there," as it were.

At the beginning of the essay it was mentioned that Thomas Arnold and John Henry

Newman were the two formative authorities in Arnold's life. His father provided him with love of union and hatred of discord, an aspiration towards comprehension in the religious and political sphere rather than the division that spoiled fellow feeling, and the search for human perfection through culture and its civilizing process, namely, a unified Christianity that rested lightly on the nation's soul. Newman also offered to Arnold another sensibility that he could embrace. Newman taught Arnold about development in Christianity, that evolution was a natural course for all religious forms, especially the intellectual life of Christianity as it meets what

Arnold called the Zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times. Arnold also fostered a deep respect for

Newman's Catholicism, in particular its public character, its claims to universality and its sensuous aestheticism. But to best understand Arnold's early religious thought, it is constructive to look at another influence, Baruch Spinoza.

"Empedocles on Etna" in Ibid., 191. 82 Arnold on Spinoza

While not unknown to Englishmen, Baruch Spinoza's (1632-1677) influence on British religious and intellectual history is scant until the middle of the 19th century, when Arnold helps revive interest in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus during his quarrel with Bishop Colenso.

Prior to Arnold's revival, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614-1687) and the deist John

Toland (1670-1722) had written about Spinoza. The normally level-headed More was quite intemperate in his denunciations, perhaps encouraged by Bayle's shaping attacks on Spinoza's philosophy,34 while Toland's Pantheisticon?5 helped reinforce the sentiment concerning

Spinoza's suspected pantheism. Among the early Romantics, Spinoza's Ethics played a minor role. That their poetry itself betrayed Spinozistic elements should occasion little surprise: the

Romantic poetical vision, at least as conventionally understood, pursued the Whole,36 with its

God's-eye-view of the world, which is a not implausible reading of the Ethics. For the

Romantics, the figure of Spinoza was relevant: he was the outcast, the orphan, the soul without a source, drummed out of his own community and forced back upon his own powers to create himself anew—Romanticism was, above all, about self-creation. The novelist George Eliot began a translation of both the Tractatus and the Ethics, finishing but not publishing the latter in

1856.

But it is Matthew Arnold who first introduced Spinoza as a biblical critic to a wide audience of English readers, principally through a pair of essays, "The Bishop and the

Philosopher" and "Spinoza and the Bible," written in 1863. These essays also represent Arnold's entry into the public discussion of religious matters, which were to occupy his remaining years. I

33 Much of this section of the essay is taken from a paper written for a seminar on Spinoza in 2004 with Prof. David Novak. 34 See Alexander Jacob, Henry More's Refutation of Spinoza (New York: G. Olms, 1991). 35 See Toland, John. Pantheisticon (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976). 36 To see the whole is not to see everything, but rather to grasp comprehensively what one could see. 83 contend that the biblical criticism Arnold absorbed from the Tractatus gives decisive shape to his own subsequent religious thought, aiding him in his cautious reconstruction of Christianity, a kind of Christianity that I am calling centrist. This discussion will help us understand how

Arnold's ecclesiology developed.

To most moderately educated Englishmen of Arnold's time, Spinoza strikes a fearsome figure, "the name of a great heretic, and nothing more...[yet] his name has silently risen in importance, the man and his work have attracted a steadily increasing notice, and bid fair to become soon what they deserve to become,—in the history of modern philosophy the central point of interest," a judgment echoed by contemporary scholars. About the man, Arnold

shared Coleridge's and Eliot's opinion that Spinoza's life—"a life of unbroken diligence, kindliness, and purity" —was one worthy of imitation, a life devoted exclusively, perhaps monkishly, to the philosophical ideal: the pursuit of truth and its bounty, knowledge of God.40

He declined worldly honours: a professorship in Germany, an opportunity to dedicate one of his writings to the Sun King, Louis XIV, among other trappings of minor fame. Arnold quotes

Heine approvingly: "His life was a copy of the life of his divine kinsman, Jesus Christ."41

Arnold's view of the conduct and purpose of biblical criticism is largely simpatico with

Spinoza's. It was to negotiate between an intellectually unacceptable literalism and a culturally unsatisfying skepticism. It is not possible, according to Arnold, "to re-inthrone the Bible as

Arnold, Matthew. "The Bishop and the Philosopher" and "Spinoza and the Bible" in Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 3: Lectures and Essays in Criticism. Edited by R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 50, 159. 38 For example, see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Willi Goetschel, Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); and Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: the Renegade Jew who gave us Modernity (New York: Schocken, 2006). 39 Arnold, "Spinoza and the Bible," 158. 40 Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 2nd edition, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001), 50. 41 Arnold, "Spinoza and the Bible," 182. 84 explained by our current theology...as impossible as to restore the feudal system, or the belief in witches." But this does not mean that the Bible has lost its fundamental position in national culture or moral life.

Biblical criticism begins, in its initial stages, with the educated few alone, and its truths ought to trickle down cautiously to the less prepared. (Coleridge, for one, went so far as to maintain that unorthodox writings that might well disturb society ought to be composed in Latin, like the Ethics and the Tractatus, so that the masses—governed solely by their passions, Spinoza would note43—would not be troubled by them.) Both Arnold and Spinoza see that the Bible has not brought concord and fellowship to Christian nations, but instead discord and enmity, a vehicle of division and not unity.44 How can the word of God yield hatred where it counsels love? This is the great sin of Christians: they "misunderstand their Bible."45 The Bible is not what they claim it to be; it is less and more—less because it is not a direct transcription of a divine monologue, more because its plain teachings are the very sinews of a properly ordered society. And the end (telos) of biblical criticism consists in the straightening of the crooked, which is the springtime promise of reconciliation to the Bible's truth. Each insists that one ought not to affirm anything but the Bible's transparent instruction. "The comments of men, Spinoza said, had been foisted into the Christian religion; the pure teaching of God had been lost sight of."46 Spinoza asserted that Maimonides had done the same in Judaism.47 The proper teaching of the Bible centers not on fantastical metaphysical speculations, but a simple doctrine: belief in

God and a life of virtuous conduct. Tedious reflection on the Incarnation or various other

42 Matthew Arnold, "Preface to the First Edition" ofLiterature and Dogma in Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 7, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 149. 43 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 63. 44 Ibid., 86. 45 Arnold, "Spinoza and the Bible," 160. 46 Ibid., 161. 47 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 13. 85 miracles do not give form to religious life; they were necessary in their historical context, but only the moral law endures. The moral law was perfected, Spinoza and Arnold maintained, in

Jesus of Nazareth. Thus the Bible does not detail scientific knowledge about the natural operations of the world and when it does so, it errs. This is the true revolution of Spinoza's biblical criticism, and its heritage in thinkers such as Arnold: the authors of the Bible are not faultless, but this does not by extension mean that the Bible lacks holiness. But its holiness resides in moral law rather than the communication of fact. Arnold accented this in his poetry as well. And this moral law approximates natural law: it is "universal, written in the heart, and one for all mankind." A prophet's authority, for example, was the "the testimony of a good conscience.. .this, however, was only a moral certitude, not a mathematical; for no man can be perfectly sure of his own goodness."49

Spinoza's signal achievement in biblical criticism, according to Arnold, rests on the fact that his criticism edifies, a point central to Arnold's conception of culture and religion. Criticism without edification is empty; it is merely destructive. But the Tractates is an act of creative destruction; it rebuilds religion after putting it to apparent ruin. What abides after the destruction is the timeless moral law that reason can affirm. And a national church, or for Spinoza, civic religion, is vital to ensure the maintenance of these values. These values can be expressed through formal liturgy and worship. Such creative destruction is absent in destroyers such as

Voltaire and David F. Strauss: "But in Spinoza there is not a trace either of Voltaire's passion for mockery or of Strauss's passion for demolition."50 His criticism loosed men and women from the

Arnold, "Spinoza and the Bible," 163. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 163. Arnold, "Spinoza and the Bible," 179. 86 dismal choices of orthodoxy and atheism, freeing them to reshape the materials of traditional religion, to work back to what they perceived as true faith.

Three broad approaches to biblical criticism presented themselves to Arnold, although there were surely tensions within each approach: 1) it was to be welcomed as the agent that would definitively undercut the foundations of Christianity, and to wrest authority from the heavens and entrust it, rightfully, in the hands of men and women; 2) it was to be rejected as a pernicious attempt of certain men, surely atheistic in their black purpose, to disarm God's word of its power; 3) it was to be used with great care, to savage what one must and salvage what one can in order to reconstruct or bring out the faithful Christian raison d'etre, preserving the Bible as God's intention if not God's word. Arnold chose the third way. Those who took the third approach, those who would suffer neither what they saw as the excesses of unhinged radicalism nor the callowness of dim traditionalism, sought to navigate a middle course, a via media, between the two. Neither orthodox nor secular, these men accepted the findings, for instance, of natural science and the historical-critical approach to the Bible because the intellect demanded it, but they rejected what they saw as the false conclusions drawn from them. Darwin and the

Tubingen critics may well be correct, yet men and women are not merely soft wax to be shaped by the adamantine determinations of science and the historical-critical method. The Bible is the poetry of Western civilization, they maintain, its moral sustainer and guarantor of its survival.

Yet it must be freed from reliance on fact and the scourge of literalism. It is worthwhile to quote

Arnold at length on this matter:

Let him frankly say, that miracle narrated in the Bible is as legendary

as miracle narrated anywhere else, and not more to be taken as having

actually happened...Let him say that we can still use it as poetry, and

that in so using it we use it better than those who use it as matter of 87 fact; but him not leave in any uncertainty that it is as poetry that we

do use it. Let no difficulties be slurred over or eluded. Undoubtedly

a period of transition in religious belief, such as the period in which we

are now living, presents many grave difficulties.51

Arnold admits that biblical criticism will temporarily precipitate a decline in belief because men and women have relied so mightily on literalism. Once they grasp that the Bible is a not direct transcription from the mouth of God, it will be set aside as a childish thing. "For very many,' he writes, 'when it cannot be a thaumaturgy, it will be nothing."52 Arnold suggests, however, that the Bible will once more return to its central place in civilization. "Why? Because they cannot

do without it. Because happiness is our being's end and aim, and happiness belongs to righteousness, and righteousness is revealed in the Bible."53

We will shortly go into greater depth about Arnold's debt to Spinoza's biblical criticism

and its spur to religious centrism. Let us first review briefly the quarrel that drew Arnold into the public discussion of religion, and from which emerged his interest in Spinoza.

The Colenso Controversy

Bishop John William Colenso (1814-1883), whose bishopric was in the South African

backwater of Natal, is mentioned today, when he is mentioned at all, as an early if errant

liberation theologian, whose noble concern for the material well-being of the Zulus he dwelt

among was equal to his expected worry over their souls, a trait rare among missionaries in South

51 Matthew Arnold, Saint Paul and Protestantism (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1870), 164-65. 52 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: an Essay toward a Better Understanding of the Bible (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1873), 196. 53 Ibid., 197. 88 Africa. But in the early 1860s, his book, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically

Examined, put him in the center of a very noisy controversy over the public task of biblical criticism. It also prompted a fevered reply by Matthew Arnold, who used the occasion to compare the Bishop's excessively rationalistic and exceedingly tedious biblical criticism—

Colenso's book came in at a sigh-inducing 3500 pages—unfavorably with that of a then fairly obscure 17th century Amsterdam Jew, Baruch Spinoza.

In his book, Colenso rightly noted that certain numbers in the Torah did not tally or were humanly impossible to believe, even if a man were of firm, but intellectually coherent, faith.

One example: "Numbers iii.43 reports that there were 22,273 first-born males among the

Israelites. Looking again at the benchmark of 603, 550 males aged twenty and over, then each family would have to have had about forty-two boys, each married woman would have had to give birth to an average of fifteen sons and fifteen daughters, and only 10 per cent of the men could have a wife or daughter at all...," and so on.54 Because of his views concerning the nature of the Bible's historical veracity, Colenso was recalled to England, but refused to appear. A rival bishop was installed, but Colenso retained his living as a bishop. Victorian literary luminaries such as Swinburne, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, and even the Italian patriot Garibaldi, supported his cause.55 There is much more to this story, but it need not detain us any further.56

Suffice it to note that Colenso's work is the model of biblical criticism that so aroused Arnold's ire, and caused him to pick up his pen in defence of a moderate criticism.

If the authority of the Bible hinged upon the consistency of its statements or the mathematical certainty of its numbers, then its advocates would do well to capitulate to critics

54 Quoted in David S. Katz, God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 250-51. 55 Ibid., 253. Many Anglican clergy were also sympathetic. 56 For information on the Colenso case, see Timothy Larsen, Contested Christianity: the Political and Social contexts of Victorian theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004), 59-78. 89 such as Colenso. Arnold surely had the following line from Spinoza in the back of his mind: "So those who attempt to prove Scripture's authority by demonstrations of a mathematical order go far astray..."57 Those who reject literalism and radical criticism, therefore, ask themselves about

such criticism: "There are errors and contradictions in Scripture; and the question which the general culture of Europe, well aware of this, asks with real interest is: 'What then? What change is it, if true, to produce in the relations of mankind to the Christian religion? If the old theory of

Scripture inspiration is to be abandoned, what place is the Bible to hold among books? What is the new Christianity to be like? How are governments to deal with National Churches founded to maintain a very different conception of Christianity? Spinoza addresses himself to these

questions."58 And Spinoza's answers satisfy Arnold's appreciation of Christianity in a way that

Colenso's did not. The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined failed in the

charge to "edify the little-instructed, or by further informing the much-instructed,"59 which is

Arnold's severe definition of the public duty of cultured men. This pedantic work would only

cause the masses to doubt Christianity root and bark and marks no advance in general knowledge. Spinoza remarked, in much the same manner of his Victorian champion, about the religious situation in his homeland that "the very temple became a theatre where, instead of

Church teachers, orators held forth, none of them actuated by a desire to instruct the people..."60

The Tractatus, in contradistinction to Colenso's work, avoids the masses altogether—Arnold

shares Spinoza's elitist disdain for hoipolloi61—and sets out a positive case for a non-

fundamentalist Christianity, one at the same time progressive and fiercely traditional. In

Arnold's words, "the author of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is not more unorthodox than

57 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 170. 58 Arnold, "Spinoza and the Bible," 170. 59 Arnold, "The Bishop and the Philosopher," 43. 60 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 4. 61 "The Bishop and the Philosopher," 43-44 and Theological-Political Treatise, 8. 90 [Colenso]..., and he is far more edifying. If the English clergy must err, let them learn from this outcast of Israel to err nobly! Along with the weak trifling of the Bishop of Natal, let it be lawful to cast into the huge caldron, out of which the new world is to be born, the strong thought of

Spinoza!"62

Spinoza's Biblical Criticism and Arnold's Religion

Spinoza taught Arnold how to read the Bible again, with new eyes and in a new spirit, one that befits a man of letters. "I consciously resolved to examine Scripture afresh, conscientiously and freely,' Spinoza wrote in the Tractatus, 'and to admit nothing as its teaching except which I did not most clearly derive from it." The truth of the Bible unfolds slowly throughout history, each generation in its context draws deep from its wellsprings of truth, but extracts conclusions often at variance with prior generations. Bishop Butler and Cardinal

Newman also taught Arnold this,64 but Spinoza showed him how it could be done while keeping one's intellectual probity undamaged.65 That is, the Bible had to be read as any other work of literature—"allowing no...study of its contents except those can be gathered only from Scripture itself'66—which means that biblical criticism falls under and follows the canons of literary criticism.67 Literary criticism is the manner in which we become "conversant with the best that has been thought and said in the world,"68 and avoid "unravelling absurdities while ignoring other things of value."69

62 Ibid., 55. 63 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 5. 64 Arnold, Saint Paul and Protestantism, 97-99. 65 See the Tractatus' discussion of context and the evolutionary understanding of the Bible, page 90. 66 Theological-Political Treatise, 87 67 See Benjamin Jowett's influential contribution to Essays and Reviews where he outlines how the Bible can be studied as literature. Jowett's commentary, "On the Interpretation of Scripture," can be found in Essays and Reviews: the 1860 text and its Reading, eds. Victor Shea and William Whitla (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 477-594. 68 Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 39. 69 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 86-87. 91 The remainder of this chapter shall be occupied with showing the material influence of the Tractatus on the progress of Arnold's religious thought. Three central themes will be reviewed: the interpretation of miracles; the character of biblical language; and lastly, the relationship of morality with religion.

Miracles

"Happy indeed would be our age,' Spinoza writes, 'if we were to see religion freed again

70 from superstition." Freed again from the reliance on what Arnold called Aberglaube (literally,

"extra-beliefs"), which is a kind of superstition, those opinions extraneous to the simple doctrines of pure faith, a faith wherein men and women could pursue that which crowns the moral life as the supreme good possible for the greatest number. And it is the belief in miracles as the sustainer of faith that keeps superstition vigorous, impeding the re-introduction of righteousness as the central, perhaps unique, religious value.

For the greater part of human history, the belief in miracle has been harmless enough, and surely understandable where promotion of science is secondary and reason checked by an aggressive supernaturalism. But a time will come when this belief will weaken, when the dual blessings of science and biblical criticism will help re-adjust the understanding of miracle, as either a natural occurrence poorly apprehended at the time or as a symbolic event. Arnold sensed and hoped earnestly that his age was to be first in this matter.71 The imaginative belief in miracle, especially through prophetic speculation, "does not of its own nature carry certainty with it."72 Drawing on Spinoza, Arnold seconds this conclusion: "The time comes when he

Ibid., 144. Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 85, 96. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 21. 92 discovers that is not certain; and then the whole certainty of religion seems discredited..." This

is the problem with divines such as William Paley who seek out "evidences" of Christianity through a dubious natural theology.74 Reports about miracle indeed prove nothing; divine power

ought not be equated with divine love.75 And Spinoza reminds us that in Deuteronomy 13 miracles can be realized by false prophets, and therefore Moses declares that such a man should be put to death. Spinoza and Arnold insist that religious life, at its finest, is the ethical life, and,

as a result, miracles cannot be but distractions from the straight path of righteousness. The

ethical life, as we will see later, had to be coupled with a commitment to public religious

ceremony and liturgy like the devotions of the Church of England, which Arnold thought

exceptionally well-suited to that task. The assurance that men and women can rightfully derive

from the Bible's instruction is "not a mathematical certainty, but only a moral certainty."76

Arnold does see the belief in miracle fitfully expiring in his time, and that conditions are

ripe for its demise. On the other hand, Spinoza groused that most men "had no other criterion of

a miracle,"77 for the science of his day rarely challenged established belief in public fora. Belief

in miracle, one can say from Spinoza's and Arnold's biblical criticism, was due to the

no

"influences of their [men and women of the Bible] time and condition," and it was the category

error of later Christian generations to mistake the contingent for the absolute. The mind has been

long inured to take miracles as confirmation of the supernatural origin and truth of Christianity,

and "religion...has been, and is still, held in connexion with a reliance upon miracles,"79 but the

Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 80-81. 74 See William Paley, The Evidences of Christianity (London: Ward, Lock, 1878). 75 Spinoza reminds us that in Deuteronomy 13 miracles can be realized by false prophets, and therefore Moses declares that such a man should be put to death. See Theological-Political Treatise, 76-77. 76 Ibid., 22. 77 Ibid., 74. 78 See both Literature and Dogma, 101 and Theological-Political Treatise, 81. 79 Literature and Dogma, 96. 93 mind will perceive, "as its experience widens, how they arise." Reason will instruct them that the significance of miracle is wholly natural: that they have either a scientific explanation or they serve as a symbol to a truth deeper than the miracle itself. What miracles teach is fundamental to religion: in the Hebrew Bible, righteousness, and in the New Testament, the life of perfection revealed by Jesus.81 The Incarnation, for example, abides no more as a miracle than Joshua commanding the sun to cease its motions. Its merit arises from its symbolic force, which is the insistence on pureness, and the higher but improbable goal of chastity in Christian life. Arnold writes that both the authors of the Gospels and its later adherents assumed the virgin birth a miracle, because in their context "science [was] not a power, and the preternatural is daily and familiarly admitted... Such a legend is the people's genuine construing of the fact of his unique pureness."82 Jesus' uniqueness could be accepted, and the consequence of sexual purity and faithfulness better grasped, if it took the form of virgin birth. Nevertheless, the miracle itself is only the husk of religious life; the exigencies of morality, the kernel.

Language and Uncertainty

The most important lesson Arnold took from his reading of Spinoza rested on the claim that religion counsels a simple doctrine based on obedience and righteousness, broadly constituted and rather indulgent in permitting great latitude in matters of belief. In this attitude,

Arnold was keeping with the Broad Church heritage of his father. This concluding section will analyze this central topic. Closely allied to this notion, and perhaps necessary for its understanding, is Arnold's emphasis on the unfixed nature of biblical language, which by

1U1U. 1 Ibid., 100. 2 Arnold, Saint Paul and Protestantism, 153. 94 extension means the unsettled nature of biblical purpose. Therefore, deriving a metaphysics— about the unchanged and unchanging properties of God, divine attributes, the origins of the world, etc.—from the Bible is not simply unprofitable, it is also in error, for philosophy or metaphysics are separate from religion. When the fog of metaphysics lifts from a reader's eyes, he or she shall see that the Bible's language "is literary, not scientific...[for] the language of figure and feeling will satisfy us better about it, will cover more of what we seek to express, than the language of literal fact and science. The language of science about it will be below what we feel to be the truth."84 So, for Arnold and Spinoza the Bible does not communicate fact, and was never meant for the task. "Scripture's aim was not to impart scientific knowledge," Spinoza emphasized.

The history of Western philosophical and popular theology, for the Arnold of this period, is the story of superadding to the trim and delicate doctrine of right conduct (obedience and righteousness). Arnold contrasts this unfavorably with the ancient Jewish "sense of the inadequacy of language"86 when approaching the holy. Only God exists in the sphere of holiness, and there is but one fundamental separation: God and nature, and humankind is fully part of the latter. The language of poetry befits God more completely than the dreariness of science. The soaring grandeur of Psalms surely speaks more immediately to experience of the divine than the natural theologian's appeal to an apathetic clockmaker. Moral suasion, again, is the key to Moses' prophecy, not his familiarity with the rigors of "logic."87 The authors of the

Torah and the New Testament can and do err, their speculations about the natural workings of

83 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 6. 84 Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 30-31. Arnold also quotes favourably the dictum, found in Maimonides and elsewhere in medieval Jewish philosophy and exegesis, that the Torah speaks in the language of men. See Maimonides' Guide 1:26. 85 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 154. 86 Literature and Dogma, 29. 87 Theological-Political Treatise, 140. 95 the world and metaphysics uninformed and their grasp of the true message of the Bible often wanting. But here is the upshot: the true message of the Bible emerges in that righteousness (the truth of the Hebrew Bible) and Jesus' perfection (the truth of the New Testament) exist apart from the errors of the authors, their misuse of language, their under-developed comprehension.

About Gospel authors' appreciation of Jesus, Arnold writes that "the depth of their misunderstanding is really a kind of measure of the height of his superiority."88

Even the powerful word "God" ought not to be reducible to scientific terms, like a butterfly's wings pinned to a mounting board. The word "God" resounds due to its flexibility, the

80 capaciousness of its possibilities. Unlike "line or angle," the name of God is fluid. Spinoza, like Arnold, insisted that the Bible lacks a fixed definition of God.90 Because it does not conform to the orders of science, "mankind mean different things by it [God] as their consciousness differs."91 The weary theorizing of metaphysicians adds nothing to our knowledge of a God who is known through experience and right conduct. By keeping our sense of God vague enough to inspire, the name of God remains holy. Once science grasps God in its crushing talons, Arnold and Spinoza seem to say, "then that which before was sacred will 09 become unclean and profane." While the austere philosophical understanding of God may be diminished, the sense of moral seriousness, to which we often give the name "God," is heightened. And it is to the moral dimension of the religious life that we now turn.

The Role of Morality

Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 111. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 8. Ibid., 88, 156. Literature and Dogma, 9. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 146. 96 The reduction of much of religion to moral conduct does not begin with Immanuel Kant;

it commences with Spinoza. And despite the feverish moralizing attitude of much of Victorian

religious literature, not even the broadest of Broad Churchmen would give such wide berth and

signal position to morality within the sphere of religion as Arnold did in his early essays. Ritual

structures—and Arnold was no vulgar anti-ritualist, to be sure—remained firm in Protestant and,

of course, Catholic life in England. There was surely no private religion, and ritual was the

outward, public manifestation of the internal doctrines of the Church. The one nurtured the other, like a feedback mechanism. But Spinoza and Arnold recognized that the accretions of ritual, while necessary in the proper ordering of religious life, were historical and therefore

contingent. They speak of ritual in the past tense, and morality in the present: the ethical is what

endures, the one thing needful.93 It is the universal moral law, outside of historical particularity,

and that underwrites the best in religion. Kant also set apart these two forms of religion: one is a

"religion of rogation (of mere cult)" and the other "moral religion, i.e., the religion of good life-

conduct."94 This distinction surely applies to the thought of Spinoza and Arnold as well. The

Bible does not communicate fact and it does not expect the cultic life of ancient Israel to be transplanted to the synagogues or churches of Amsterdam or London.95 Rather, the prevailing teleology of religion is what the Israelites termed "righteousness," or what we could call

"conduct." "Keep judgement and do righteousness!" (Psalms 4:5) is the simple doctrine of the

Hebrew Bible, and "the object of Bible-religion,"96 Arnold writes. Spinoza stresses equally that

"the authority of the prophets carries weight only in matters concerning morality and true

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 96ff. 94 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans, and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 71. 95 See Literature and Dogma, 6 Iff. and Theological-Political Treatise, 48ff. 96 Ibid., 14. 97 virtue," their speculations about physics or metaphysics immaterial to an upright life. Had biblical Israel kept to the severe but straight path of righteousness, religious strife would be impossible. Spinoza, and Arnold too, argues that in matters of morality "there has never been

no any real difference of opinion." Difference is introduced only through ritual and dogma, a product, each maintains, of the Hebrew Bible. Men and women are ungovernable in their disagreements about ritual and dogma, while agreeing for the most part about the content of morality. This explains why Spinoza in the Tractatus" and Arnold in Culture and Anarchy insist that the state should be tolerant of a diversity of religious practice, because it is unconnected to conduct, while endorsing general conformity to what we may cautiously call natural law.100 However, and this is of critical relevance, Arnold will argue in the 1870s that public ritual must be common, otherwise dissent flourishes and religio-political unity is denied.

The New Testament, too, counsels righteousness, but righteousness perfected in the person of Jesus. Spinoza and Arnold both accent Jesus' humanity, a hallmark of moderate and liberal biblical criticism. They attempt to curb, however, any orthodox Christian notion of Jesus as both divine and human. Arnold condenses the teaching of the New Testament into one verse:

"Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity!"101 temptations of a sinful life could be moderated by the emulation of Jesus' example, not worship of him: this is the true and plain doctrine of religion. Unlike Moses, according to Spinoza, Jesus was unconcerned about the cultic action of the people, those desperate, superficial actions that intend no higher

Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 5. 98 Ibid., 92. 99 Ibid., 144. 100 Perhaps we need not be so cautious, for Spinoza himself remarks that the moral laws of the Bible are "uncorrupted, inasmuch as they quite clearly follow fromthi s universal basis...None of these, I say, could have been corrupted by human malice or destroyed by time's decay..." (151). This appears to be a statement of natural law, even if one does not immediately associate Spinoza with that principle. 101 Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 14. 98 truth. Instead, Jesus "was intent on improving men's minds"102 by what Arnold calls epieikeia, which he translates as "sweet reasonableness."103 His way of speaking to both Jews and gentiles revealed the reasons for conduct, and "the meaning of what had been mere matter of blind rule, flashed upon him,"104 an echo of Spinoza's belief that Jesus communicated "mind to mind"105 with God. Loosed from the fetters of the old law, Jesus wrote the natural law on the hearts of all mankind,106 for what he preached was "infinitely reasonable and natural."107 Spinoza tells us that

Jesus brought humanity a "spiritual reward"108 that emerged from moral doctrine, but fails to inform us of the content of that doctrine. Picking up on this, Arnold advises that "self- examination, self-renouncement, and mildness, were, therefore, the great means by which Jesus

Christ renewed righteousness and religion...and made with God a second covenant."109 Arnold here supplements Spinoza's insight with substantive content.

The foregoing review of Arnold's broad religious thought allowed us to see the contours of his developing sense of the possibilities of belief in an era when the old theories of revelation and church establishment were falling out of favour. Through his poetry and early attempts at religious argument, he laid out a template for faith in general. But what interests us in this essay most of all is how Arnold moved from wide-ranging discussions of significant philosophical and socio-historical questions pertaining to religion to a more complicated set of issues facing the

Church of both his youth and his choice. He was fully aware of the Church of England's loss of national prestige, most of it self-inflicted, yet he sought vigorously to mark out a new direction

102 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 91. 103 Literature and Dogma, 66. 104 Ibid. 105 Theological-Political Treatise, 14. 106 Ibid., 54-55. 107 Literature and Dogma, 67. 108 Theological-Political Treatise, 60. 109 Literature and Dogma, 68-69. 99 for both Church and State under a fundamentally new arrangement of circumstances. The terms of this new arrangement were set partly by the dissenting churches which were impatiently pulling down the fixed relationship between the Church of England and the state. To understand

Arnold's ecclesiology we must start with an understanding his attitude towards dissent.

Dissent

Concern about religious unity manifests itself only when that unity is threatened. The internal Anglican consensus, however fragile, had been broken by the Oxford Movement in the

1830s and 40s and by the growth of "theological liberalism"110 in the 1850s and 60s. The loss of

Anglican unity prompted Thomas Arnold and later his son, Matthew, to consider the broader context of Christian unity in England. Both were liberals who fought for the preservation of the

Established Church when many religious liberals disclaimed it, and they sought not only concord among the various Anglican factions but among all English Christians. Thomas looked more kindly upon the Dissenting churches than his son, but each longed for the Church of

England to be fully comprehensive. But comprehensiveness is a two-way street: it would require the consent of the dissenters, and their understandable absence of enthusiasm for such an arrangement moved Matthew Arnold to reflect on the nature of religious unity and the role of the Church going forward. He attempted through his writings to persuade dissenters to leave behind their separatist affinities and embrace the Anglican way, a way that had developed naturally and was particularly amenable to English sensibilities and temperament.

Deviation from religious normativity may often present a dilemma for the majority or

"normative" tradition, but it also creates an opportunity for refining self-definition. And Dissent

Parsons, "Reform, Revival and Realignment," 38. 100 provided that opportunity for Arnold as the final section of the essay will demonstrate. The dissenting churches, it must be noted, did not agree on religious matters among themselves, but they were in concord in attempting to contract the political and cultural scope of the Church of

England. The political maturity of Dissent and the embrace of the religious convictions of

Puritan Protestantism prompted Arnold and others to reflect on the character of Anglicanism.

For many Anglicans, Dissent was, in the phrase of the sociologist Kai Erikson, a "boundary crisis."111 Although Erikson's focus was on how Puritans in North America dealt with various agitations in the seventeenth-century, his model fits the Anglican-Dissent dispute as well: a boundary crisis is about the flexibility of a tradition. Every tradition must at the same time be flexible and inflexible, redefining its borders as the needs of the hour dictate. With the domestic

Anglican house in disorder, the Church of England and its advocates such as Arnold had to define itself against further blurring at the margins. Arnold's observations on what he considers the errors of Dissent are on best display in his St. Paul and Protestantism and Culture and

Anarchy.

One of the common dissenter critiques of the Church of England was that it never entirely embraced the aims of the Protestant Reformation. Although its services were in English and the priests could marry, its ceremonies looked Roman, its archbishops acted like popes and the Church was "a mere lump of sacerdotalism and ritualism."112 While Arnold personally had warm feelings toward the Catholic elements of Anglican ritual, he asserted that the "Puritans"113 could not justly complain of these elements because they opted to separate from the Church of

England. If they wished to have a seat at the table, they would have to enter into the broad

111 See Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Wiley, 1966). 112 Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism in Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. VI: Dissent and Dogma, 120. 113 Ibid. 101 Anglican embrace, which notionally allowed both Catholic and Protestant to worship together.

The Church of England, after all, was a "national Church."

It is a national Church because it does not form itself around theological opinion, which is naturally divisive. The Church of England at the Reformation, according to Arnold's reading of English political and religious history, insisted on common rites and liturgy, but allowed real differences in matters of metaphysical speculation. And not just common rites and liturgy,

"moral practice"115 as well united the faithful: this emphasis on a shared ethical life is on a continuum with his poetry and his essays on Spinoza. "Moral practice" is often the linchpin in the integrity of Arnold's religious thought. But separation as a result of differing religious views

Arnold would not countenance. In fact, he argues that the Church of England did not separate from the Roman Catholic Church over issues of national sovereignty, the use of the vernacular or "the doctrine of purgatory" but "on plain points of morals... [such as] the sale of indulgences."116 Unlike the radical reforms in Geneva and parts of Germany, the English Church

117

"made in her at the Reformation.. .the very least change which was absolutely necessary."

Arnold recognizes that the Church of England in part creates dissent or non-conformity.

Through mandatory clerical subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Church defines itself 1 1 Q too narrowly. But even the Articles are "large and loose" compared with the "strict" prescriptions of the dissenters. The formulations of the dissenters naturally exclude a larger group than the more liberal Anglican standards. Dissent consciously secedes from common purposes. Arnold's arguments against separatism are akin to the twentieth-century theologian H.

Richard Niebuhr's case against the fractures of Christian disunity in his Social Sources of 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid., 97. 116 Ibid., 98. 117 Ibid., 99. 118 Ibid., 77. 102 Denominationalism: he, like Arnold, considered religious division an "ethical failure." All of the practical and moral advantages for human perfection lay in union, not in sectarianism. And

Arnold, in St. Paul and Protestantism, imagined that in his day "the union of Protestants"120 was possible, although he did not judge the Church of England a Protestant group and wished to include Roman Catholics as well. Yet this suggested union, he writes, will gain no traction without dissenters abandoning "Scriptural Protestantism" the kind of Protestantism that assumes that the basis of Christian unity, theoretical though it may be, rests in a body of defined doctrine. This body of defined doctrine, according to Arnold, is based on an acutely defective understanding of Paul's conceptions concerning dogmas such as justification.

Arnold's most significant statements about Dissent appear in Culture and Anarchy.

Dissenting churches were challenging the privileges of the Anglican Church in Ireland and elsewhere. He asserts that they in fact are not aiming for the common good, but rather the same narrow self-interest they see as pursued by the Church of England. The broad scope in matters of theology permitted by the national Church allows for the flourishing of human perfection, because it encourages the full development of human beings whereas Dissent or Nonconformity have a partial view of human need, of the whole human person. The whole person, according to

Arnold, aspires to perfectibility, and all historical religions must have an ideal of human perfectibility. So he assures his readers that he is no adversary of the "Nonconformists; for, on the contrary, what we aim at is their perfection."122 While he focuses on their perfection (a service no doubt warmly received by the Nonconformists, who were surely unaware of their

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1987), first chapter. 120 Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism, 107. 121 Ibid. 122 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy in Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 5, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 235. 103 prior imperfection), he does not judge it possible that that perfection can be arrived at through

nonconformity to the normative tradition: "but do not let us fail to see clearly that their idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate, and that the Dissidence of Dissent and the

Protestantism of the Protestant religion will never bring humanity to its true goal." And the

true goal of humanity is perfection, and this can only take place in a national institution such as

an established Church (Arnold allows that Roman Catholicism and Judaism, though not

national, are exceptions to the rule).124 The state and its appendages, including the Church, pursue common goals, while separatists deem that deviance from accepted and classically

defined norms is permissible on account of minor theological differences.

In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold sets out his well-known classification of Hellenism and

Hebraism as the two opposite but not opposing, complementary elements of human nature. He

accuses dissenters of cultivating the Hebraic side without giving attention to Hellenism. The two

feed into each other, and the appropriate balance of the two—it need not always be an even

division—prepares the conditions for the possibility of perfection. The end of the combination

of these two elements is perfection, which Arnold at times identifies with salvation.

Hellenism is about effortlessness, mental clarity and openness to the currents of the time

whereas Hebraism concerns itself with fidelity and self-denial. Contemporary England

hebraizes, concerned with submission to narrow theological speculation rather than the free play

of the mind, which Arnold associates with Periclean Athens. English religion, especially that of

123 Ibid, 103. 124 Ibid., 238. Arnold's Anglicanism tilted High Church and was colored by his appreciation of Roman Catholic's exuberant aestheticism. His appreciation of Judaism was historical and personal. Judaism had antiquity on its side, and it had developed naturally. Arnold's work as a school inspector brought him into contact with Anglo-Jewish grandees such as the Montefiores. 125 By such identification, it is easy to understand why so many critics have accused Arnold of trying to save the sacred by secularizing and then calling it sacred. This criticism runs from F.H. Bradley to T.S. Eliot and today to James Wood. In particular, see Wood's The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999). 104 the dissenters, nurtures only the moral side of men and women, and thus unable to promote an integrated personality. Puritans, dissenters, nonconformists, by whatever name attaches itself to them, focus on doing and not thinking. Their biblical interpretation, on the Pauline writings particularly, are naive and unthinking, unwilling to see development in doctrine and moral life.

Hellenism, on the other hand, stresses reason, aesthetic discrimination and comprehensiveness in religious life. And his contemporaries are in need of a large measure of Hellenism, just as

England needed a greater portion of Hebraism at the time of the Reformation. It is not the fault of the dissenter, Arnold writes loftily: "He is, I say, a victim of Hebraism, of the tendency to cultivate strictness of conscience rather than spontaneity of consciousness." The dissenter must attend to all "other points at which his nature must come to its best, besides the points which he himself knows and thinks of."126 Dissent, then, is in reality defective, according to Arnold.

Defective in the literal sense: dissent is naturally imperfect and does not contain within itself the possibility of perfection.

But Arnold does seek their salvation, a salvation that would require them to join the national Church whose privileges they scorn. Rather than calling for their removal from society

(very unlikely, in any case), Arnold "downgrades" them, marginalizes their position, instead of attempting to "outcast" them. In Mary Douglas' words, what Arnold would thus be setting up is a "hierarchy" and not an "enclave."127 The former allows for pluralism if not equality; the latter countenances no deviance. Adam Fertziger, in a study of nineteenth-century Orthodox attitudes to Reform Judaism, notes that the Orthodox pursued two apparently conflicting aims:

"constantly creating boundaries in order to preserve their own unique identity.. .while at the

Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 180. 127 The terms are Mary Douglas's. Quoted in Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 12. 105 10H same time finding ways for the deviants to remain within the fold." Arnold, I would argue, engages in a similar project: he delimits the parameters of Anglican, and thus positively normative, identity against Dissent while endeavouring to persuade dissenters of their deficient religious understandings and how those deficiencies can be repaired. I concur and conclude with the view of David Ward who maintains that "Arnold could conceive of Dissenters having full standing as citizens and Churchmen in the Victorian nation—provided they stopped thinking and acting like Dissenters.. .The price of acceptance was the loss of identity... [It is] a rhetoric of assimilation." One of the central elements in Arnold's religious prose generally and his specifically Anglican writings is the emphasis on unity, and his sense of unity did not allow for pluralism and certainly not equality. He saw the established Church as both a way, part of the way, to perfection and a centrist force holding at bay anarchy and sectarianism.

Arnold's Anglican Ecclesiology

The Church of England in Arnold's era was very publicly losing its influence in government, in homes and in churches. Peter Marsh writes that from the beginning of Victoria's reign to 1868—significantly, the year before Culture and Anarchy was published—represents the Church's "last comparatively secure period of national strength."130 Many of the trappings of establishment were removed, and in some substantive ways the Church of England's status moved from atop the religious hierarchy to the first among equals. Its position may not have been secure, but its moral and political pull was still considerable, even if less than before. The objective of Arnold, then, was not to re-create the Anglican Church of the past but to ensure its

128 Ibid., 13. 129 David A. Ward, "Transformed Religion: Matthew Arnold and the refining of Dissent" Renascence 53 (Winter 2001), 108-09. 130 Peter T. Marsh, The Victorian Church in Decline: Archibald Tait and the Church of England, 1868-1882 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 1. 106 continued place in national culture and by extension to reduce the influence of nonconformity or dissent in public life. The Church of England had to change in order to keep up with the renewed earthy, vigorous vitality of the Protestant churches and the intellectual revival of a formerly moribund English Catholicism. Marsh again gets at the heart of the issue for the

Church in this period: "The Church was then defensive and hesitant in intellectual controversy...had been dethroned in the old universities...Popular opinion was both repelled by ritualism in the Church and disdainful of the bishops' attempts to crush it. Parliament usually ignored the Church..."132 Old avenues to preserving the status of the Church in national life were slowly being choked off. Arnold, as we shall see, had left to him only one weapon in his armamentarium: persuasion through moral and historical argument.

Although to bias a paper too much towards biography often results in crude psychologising, I believe there is little doubt that in issues relating to the Church of England

Arnold drew heavily upon the work of his father, notwithstanding their very real differences in religious matters. Thomas Arnold called for Church reform, was a liberal in religion and politics and would not seem to be a natural ally of a frequently hidebound Tory apologetic for the safeguarding of the Church's privileges. Yet Thomas Arnold went as far as any Tory churchman to support the political, religious and emotional claims of the Church upon English Christians.

He sought, as his son would seek, a Church that comprehended on a broad basis all Christians, that the radicalism engendered by dissent could be tempered through the doctrinal pluralism of the established Church.

In his work The Principles of Church Reform, Arnold outlined the minimal set of beliefs necessary for an Anglican: "belief in God, in Christ as Saviour, in the scriptures as containing

131 See Ibid., Iff. 132 Ibid., 9. 107 the revelation of God's will to man, in notions of right and wrong."133 Assent to these few doctrines would, or ought to, occasion little dissension: they could be found in almost all

Christian denominations. A Roman Catholic, however, could not allow this arrangement to trump his or her allegiance to the Church's magisterium, the official body of Church teaching.

Unitarians and Quakers, Chadwick adds, could not consent to the arrangement either.134 But most Protestant denominations theoretically could, and Arnold earnestly hoped they would, otherwise "the establishment is gone...marriage will become a private ceremony, universities will cease to control religious education."135 The absence of Christian unity caused Arnold very real and very existential pain: "I groan over the divisions of the Church, of all our evils."136

This arrangement would mean that the Church was an appendage of the state. The notion of a truly national Church and of complete Church-state alliance was allowed to lie fallow.

Thomas Arnold, "the unusual Whig, assumed it as an axiom. The church is not a corporation separate from the state but the state in its religious aspect."137 This idea would later be repeated by his son: "the Church of England,' Matthew maintained, 'is not a private sect but a national institution." The path to the fulfillment of the Christian mission on earth was through a state regulated church. The Church at the Reformation serendipitously "stumbled" upon the idea of the king as the political head of the Church, the clergy as ministers of and for the state in its collective identity: "I can understand no perfect Church, or perfect State, without their blending

133 Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 44. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 45. 136 See Ward, "Transformed Religion," 100. 137 Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 45. 138 Arnold, "The Church of England" in Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 8: Essays Religious and Mixed, 64. 108 into one in this ultimate form." Citizens of England needed instruction in the proper ethical life, and only a respected and public institution, funded by that state, could perform such a role.

The Church required the state in enforcing the good and the right through public persuasion and, if need be, through judicial warrant or legislative action.140 The aims of church and state, in

Thomas Arnold's design, dovetailed perfectly. Much of the substance of his ecclesiology would be replicated by his son.

What makes the idea of an explicitly Anglican ecclesiology in the thought of Matthew

Arnold peculiar is that he wrote "a good deal which is at variance with the body of theological doctrine commonly received in the Church of England..."141 Despite this peculiarity, he recommends himself as an ally of the Anglican clergy and their institutions. Non-Anglicans have counselled Arnold that he is in fact "one of the worst enemies that the Church has."142 He denies the charge: he declares that whatever divergences in religious opinion he may have with

Anglican divines, he has affection for the liturgy and ritual of the Church and, most importantly, he encourages what he considers to be the mission of the established tradition, that is, to be "a society for the promotion of what is commonly called goodness..."143 He believed the mission of this society to be menaced on three sides: by Dissent, by the prevailing Anglican attitudes towards the Bible and biblical criticism, and a certain kind of religious liberalism that seemed resigned to or even pleased by the reduction of status in public life for the Church of England.

Arnold's advocacy for the Church of England extents to a willingness to spurn his own writings critical of the Church and its approach to the Bible. He declared that if he were forced to decide

139 Arthur Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold: Late Headmaster of Rugby School, and Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. 4*6(1. (London: B. Fellowes, 1845), II: 187. 140 See Desmond Bowen, The Idea of the Victorian Church: A Study of the Church of England, 1833-1889 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1968), 358. 141 Arnold, "Puritanism and the Church of England" in St. Paul and Protestantism, 65. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid. 109 between his "writings which seek to put a new construction on much in the Bible" and his works that encourage the promotion of goodness, he would choose the latter because biblical criticism

"or the demolition of the systems of theologians, will never avail to teach men their duty or to assist them in the discharge of it."144 Thus, he offered his talents for a defence of the established

Church.

The Church of England, if it ever did, no longer maintained a monopoly. The religious circumstance that Matthew Arnold confronted is best described as pluralist. Peter Berger tells us that "ex-monopolies can no longer take for granted the allegiance of client populations... As a result, the religious tradition...now has to be marketed. It must be 'sold' to a clientele no longer constrained to 'buy.'"145 In order to convince dissenters and other non-Anglicans to join or at minimum accept an established Church, he would have to present persuasive arguments for why this Church's purpose was only to introduce the right and the good rather than enforce religious discipline by theological tests as practiced by dissenters and Roman Catholics. What Berger calls "plausibility structures" began failing the Church of England, and its supporters such as

Arnold had to construct new "legitimations"146 because of the novel situation. The plausibility of

Anglican privilege in a pluralist environment was weakened by the emergent plausibility of other Christian denominations. These denominations could claim a rough numerical parity with the Church of England, and in a market situation, common to democracies, numbers matter politically. Thus the Church was going through a crisis of plausibility: "The less firm the

Ibid., 66. Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 137. Ibid., 47. 110 plausibility structure becomes, the more acute will be the need for world-maintaining legitimations," writes Berger.

Arnold attempts to carry out various "world-maintaining legitimations." Anglicanism was specially designed to fit the needs and desires of the English people, according to him. It contained the Protestant principle of national sovereignty (of course, the English church prior to the Reformation was largely independent of Rome's reach) and carried over Catholic elements and sentiments, in particular the liturgy and ritual of the Catholic church. Arnold's point is that the Church of England maintains historic continuity with the developed traditions of

Christianity. It is neither a historical novum, an intrusion into the natural order of things, like

Protestantism nor a tradition unwilling to admit development like Roman Catholicism. "The

Church of England,' he writes, 'existed before Protestantism, and contains much besides

Protestantism." The schismatic, separatist inclinations of Puritan Protestantism never overtook the "church-order" of Anglicanism. For all of its errors, the Church of England refused to separate due to theological differences over doctrines such as "election and justification."

Arnold admits that these doctrines exist within Anglican theology, but the institution of the

Church itself did not originate from the doctrines. English Protestantism, on the other hand, has attached itself to a fixed understanding of election and justification. By doing so, and assuming that understanding does not change through development and incremental enlightenment, the dissenters and nonconformists must maintain a subsequent commitment to those doctrines in the face of transformations in the discernment of religious truth. So it is that the Church of England,

Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism, 6. Ill often characterized as narrow, is considered by Arnold to be "more serviceable than Puritanism to religious progress."

What cheers Arnold about the Church of England in contrast to the dissenting churches is its public character. If, as he asserts, the goal of religion is the promotion of goodness and that nothing commands the attention of women and men as goodness does, then "it is in human nature that what interests men very much they should not leave to private and chance handling, but should give to it a public institution."150 The Church acts as a gatekeeper for public morality.

There is nothing meanly authoritarian behind what Arnold says, as he does not wish the Church to have any legislative or judicial power; it would instruct by "its powers of attractiveness."151

The model here is economic: public goods and the public good are corporate matters, involving all citizens, unlike "art and literature" which are best left to individual discretion. Only an established Church has the moral capital to persuade men and women about goodness. And if goodness is the aim of the state, then that state would be wise in retaining a moderate national

Church that could provide the ritual and liturgical forms for the expression of goodness.

Theological opinion, however, is to be left to personal opinion: two people might disagree about the nature of Christ on a Thursday yet on Sunday morning they are seated in the same Church pew. Arnold's centrism accordingly embraces two models: the cathedral and the bazaar. The cathedral is the Catholic top-down model which claims exclusive access to truth, whereas the bazaar is like Protestant nonconformity with its multitude of small businesses clamouring for a greater market share. Arnold's ecclesiology endeavours to join the two together: the Church of

IUJU., U / . 150 Arnold, "The Church of England," 67. 151 Ibid., 86. 152 Ibid., 67 112 England will have all the privileges of an exclusive and dominant Church but will encourage a diversity of religious viewpoints.

Part of the Church's moral capital, and thus its claims upon English Christians, is based on its "religious moderation."154 Here Arnold unambiguously defends the Church of England as centrist, "a reasonable Establishment."155 Like the centrism we saw with Solomon Schechter and Conservative Judaism, the Anglican centrism of Matthew Arnold finds its expressions in its public form, which allows for a large measure of diversity in theological understanding but insists that public worship be consistent with the developed tradition. As a member of an institution of "religious moderation" an Anglican "instead of battling for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man takes those which have commended themselves most to the religious notions of his nation."156 While intellectual contemplation is an individual endeavour, religious ceremony cannot be private, as the private, in Arnold's understanding, is a literal deprivation157: "The consecration of common consent, antiquity...is everything for religious worship...[and] should be as much a common and public act...Man worships best, therefore, with the community; he philosophises best alone." Arnold does not maintain that public ritual life is directly revealed by divine will but only that the religious traditions of the English Church have developed along historical lines and by the silent

1531 came across the image of the cathedral and bazaar in a famous discussion by Eric S. Raymond regarding computer code and open source software. See his Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2001). 154 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 239. 155 Arnold, "The Church of England," 80. 156 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 239. 137 From the Latin privare, to deprive. 158 Culture and Anarchy, 197. In this emphasis on the public character of worship, Arnold is similar to the French- Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim who asserted that "religion is an eminently social thing. Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rites are ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups." Arnold, however, would have rejected Durkheim's reductionism, as the former believed that religious impulses did not originate only from a desire to maintain social order. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 9. 113 consensus of the faithful. (In the Jewish tradition, Schechter would call this type of religious moderation "Catholic Israel.") Because the individual Anglican comes to the Church with the forms of religious life already established, he has more time to devote to cultivate "other sides of his nature."159

As we saw in his writings on Spinoza, Arnold admires intellectual and linguistic humility towards that which our immediate experience cannot define. Attempts at a thorough and settled definition of dogmas such as election and justification are pointless. Let us admit that direct familiarity with these dogmas is not possible in human experience: they may be true or not, and they are surely not valueless. What matters, Arnold quotes Bishop Butler, is to observe that

"things are what they are...why, then, should we desire to be deceived?"160 Consequently, the

Church of England because of its moderation and its humility—Arnold was surely speaking of the Church's aspirations and not its reality—sought "to get at the real truth"161 in a manner unknown to other churches, especially the dissenting denominations. Getting at the truth so far as we can know it requires public institutions, institutions that are subject to state control and responsibility. During Arnold's time the calls for disestablishment were growing, even within his own church, but he went against the current of his fellow liberals by persevering in his belief that the body public gains nothing and in fact loses much by dismantling the Church of

England's state support. While he was a pluralist in religious opinion, Arnold desired

"comprehension and union"162 and not disestablishment.

Arnold's defence of the Church of England was more than theoretical. As part of the push for disestablishment, dissenters understandably wanted to be able to bury their dead with

159 Ibid., 239. 160 Arnold, "The Church of England," 80. 161 Ibid., 81. 162 Ibid., 86. 114 their own rites and with their own ministers. Up to this time, only Anglican ministers and

Anglican rites were permitted in public burial grounds. Arnold defended the established practice, although he believed that the state should respect the practices of Scottish Presbyterians and Roman Catholics. He attempted to legitimate it by arguing that its public character removed it from private concern. Religiously and aesthetically a public act of a ritual sort needed to be

"done and said worthily." The state in its religious form promotes goodness and culture, and these cannot be properly administered through private rite and liturgy. The state, in Arnold's understanding, cannot tolerate a plurality of approaches to goodness and culture. Public acts can be trusted because of their communal and transparent nature, "and worship and devotion is eminently a public matter."164 Moreover, these acts have historical continuity with the English

Church. For Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, "The State is of the religion of all its citizens, without the fanaticism of any of them."165 National institutions are occupied with broader concerns than sectarians focused on a handful of issues rather than the common good: sectarians have no corporate sense of the larger whole, and their narrowness passes away into an anarchic individualism. The Church of England calls for a maximum of ritual and liturgical conformity with a minimum of doctrinal conformity. As Chesterton wrote perceptively, "while Arnold would loosen the theological bonds of the Church, he would not loosen the bonds of the State.

You must not disestablish the Church: you must not even leave the Church: you must stop inside it and think what you choose."166

Arnold, "A Last Word on the Burials Bill" in Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 8, 90. 164 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 197. 165 Ibid., 193. 166 Chesteron, The Victorian Age in Literature, 76-77. He suggested a darker implication of Arnold's embrace of state religion: "he was trying to restore Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without much belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may have thought that he was building an altar to the Unknown God; but he was really building it to Divus Caesar." 115 Arnold asserts that he is an optimist: although the common Englishman or

Englishwoman effortlessly stumbles into "vulgarity"—and Arnold persistently identifies Dissent with coarseness—"no people has shown more attachment than the English to old and dignified forms calculated to save us from it."167 Vulgarity is equated with the private and separate in religious life, and the vulgar has no public authority. The "community" insists on the established forms, and communal privileges trump an individual's wishes in the use of land designated for public use. That is to say, the Anglican burial-rite was considered satisfactory by the people; they did not as a majority plump for the burial services of the dissenters.

And this is part of Arnold's larger argument concerning the exceptional character of the

English Church. Whereas many European states have dominant ecclesiastical institutions, whether Catholic or Protestant, they were not built upon the same template as the Church of

England. In the sixteenth-century, according to Arnold's reading of the history, those with

Catholic tendencies and those with Lutheran or Calvinist leanings buried their differences to establish a Church that would be satisfactory to the majority of English Christians. This Church, the one defended so ably by Hooker and Butler, 9 would be comprehensive; it would on paper fall in the theological middle between Rome and Wittenberg/Geneva. Because the national

Church of England was intended to agree with the religious sensibilities of the English people, and to lay to rest theological and political difference to the greatest extent possible, "therefore to no Church can dissent be so mortifying...because dissent is the denial, not only of her profession

167 Arnold, "A Last Word on the Burials Bill," 90. 168 Ibid., 91. 169 See Arnold's "Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeisf in Last Essays in Religion; see also, Blackburn, William. "Bishop Butler and the Design of Arnold's Literature and Dogma" Modern Language Quarterly (1948) and Terry Harris, "Matthew Arnold, Bishop Joseph Butler, and the Foundation of Religious Faith," Victorian Studies 31 (Winter 1988). DeLaura notes that Butler is the theologian most regularly cited by Arnold. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England, 81. 116 of the truth, but also of her success in her direct design."170 As with Solomon Schechter so for

Matthew Arnold: religious unity in the present and continuity with the past are the vital aspects

171 of centrism, and "a need of human nature."

But Arnold is not a High Church Tory apologist for the Anglican Church. He does not consider the Thirty-nine Articles, the basic theological schema of the Church, to be at the level 1 T) of verifiable truth. It is, above all, not "science." As we have seen in some of his more general religious works, to mix religious truth with scientific truth for Arnold is a category error.

Science rests below poetry, and religion is poetry. In his vision of a reconstituted and reinvigorated Church of England, resting on firmer grounds, Arnold suggests that rather than a theological test of an ordinand's belief, all that should be obliged is "a general consent"173 to the

Articles and the liturgy of the Church. He admits and even embraces the idea of change within the Church itself and, by extension, its self-definition. However, these changes ought not to extend to change in the language of liturgy, for example, but instead our understanding of the meaning and intention of that liturgy. Anglicans have been reared on the forms of the Book of

Common Prayer: do not alter its content, its public face, alter instead its presentation. It is not science, but poetry, playing on sentiment and holding close to experience. The religious expressions that the authors of the Prayer Book were attempted to articulate are "what we honour also."174

The ecclesiology of Matthew Arnold was a theory of the Church in changed times. Like his father, Arnold hitched a Broad Church liberalism in matters of theological doctrine to a High

Church understanding of the corporate nature of the Church. In its liberalism, the Anglican fold 170 Ibid., 96. 171 Ibid., 110. 172 Arnold, "A Psychological Parallel," in Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 8, 130. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid., 135. 117 was to comprehend all English Christians who accepted its minimal demands. In its

conservatism or continuity with the past, the Church of England was to maintain its traditional privileges and retain its status as the established, national Church.

Conclusion

The purpose of this chapter was to establish Matthew Arnold as an Anglican thinker.

Although not part of the ordained clergy, Arnold contributed to the advance of Anglican self-

understanding and definition at a time when Anglican boundaries were being radically redefined

politically, religiously and culturally. Politically, the Church of England's status as the

established national Church was being challenged on a large scale for the first time; culturally,

the slow growth of secularism as an intellectual alternative disputed the "plausibility structure"

of the Church as the best path to defining reality; and religiously, Anglicanism was pressed by

the swift growth of the dissenting churches and the concomitant loss of congregants.

The Church of England was leaking like a sieve, and Matthew Arnold resolved to put

forward a solution that would allow it to meet the adversities of the present while preparing for

an unsure future. I think we can therefore confidently place Arnold among the important

Anglican thinkers, although he "can be called Christian only insofar as one allows

nonsupernatural Christianity as possible."175 As for the on the ground success of Arnold's

strategies I think we may safely say that little of his specific ecclesiology made it into the self-

definition of the Church, but much of his more general religious thoughts was filtered into

Anglicanism: contemporary liberal Anglicanism (thus excluding Anglican evangelicalism), has

accepted Arnold's diminution of the supernatural into the natural while emphasizing the ethical

apRoberts, Arnold and God, 200. 118 and experiential aspects of Christianity. This process has been necessary to a great extent because of the rise of and need to compete with other credible intellectual structures, from other traditions both inside and outside of Christianity. "Probably for the first time in history,' writes

Peter Berger, 'the religious legitimations of the world have lost their plausibility not only for a few intellectuals and other marginal individuals but for broad masses of entire societies."176

Arnold's adjustments to classical Christian doctrine and belief were a form of religious legitimation in changed circumstances, but a moderately conservative adjustment: he did not wish to dispense with the traditional imagery, liturgy or symbolism of the English Church but he did undertake to fundamentally rethink the recognized meanings given to those doctrines and beliefs.

At the beginning of the essay I asserted that Arnold's Anglicanism is more secure than his Christianity. The sociologist Grace Davie, in a discussion of contemporary patterns of religious belief in Europe, has described a phenomenon called "believing without belonging."177

In her theory, traditional Christian ideals have not been lost but rather have been transmuted into a more diffuse religiosity or spirituality without the moral authority of institutions such as churches.

This is Arnold's situation, but reversed: he belonged without believing. He was an

Anglican first and a Christian incidentally. In his Anglican ecclesiology Arnold did present a plausible centrist option for an uncertain future. One imagines that the Anglican present would be quite different had the Church of England assumed his ideas, although one cannot say that it would have provided a better present, but surely different.

Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, 125. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 119 Chapter Three

The Creation of Conservative Judaism: The Kohut-Kohler Controversy of 1885

Introduction

The intellectual roots of Conservative Judaism were nourished in nineteenth-century

Germany, principally through the efforts of Zecharias Frankel (1801-1875). The ideas of Frankel and others found an agreeable home in the person of Solomon Schechter, who added his lived experience of English religious life to the scholarly ballast of Frankel's "positive-historical"

Judaism.1 Upon his arrival in New York to head the Jewish Theological Seminary, Schechter revived and strengthened the fortunes of a liberal-minded traditional Judaism in America. This is the standard narrative of the movement's history.

But there is a lesser known "pre-narrative" of Conservative Jewish history in America.

This period takes place from 1885, the year of the Kohut-Kohler dispute, to 1902, the coming of

Schechter. This chapter will enquire into the Kohut-Kohler dispute and its aftermath. The controversy between Alexander Kohut, an early advocate of what would later be called

Conservative Judaism, and Kaufmann Kohler, the dynamic intellectual force behind Reform

Judaism in the United States, led to the formation of an articulate traditionalist response that could compete with and potentially thwart the growing radicalism of American Reform. It also compelled Kohler and other Reform advocates to craft a response to Kohut and the emergent

1 See Moshe Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism : the Historical School in 19th century America (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1965). 120 liberal traditionalists; the Pittsburgh Platform was their reply.2 Prior to this debate, there were individual rabbis and communal leaders who broadly supported the "positive-historical" strategy, but no attempt to coalesce as something larger had emerged. The Kohut-Kohler controversy was the spur to create a movement built upon a merger of liberal Sephardic

Orthodoxy and traditionalist Ashkenazi Reformers. These two group would later join together the developed Jewish tradition and the constructive bases of modernity, a movement distinct alike from "radical" Reform and immigrant Orthodoxy. Exclusivist East European Orthodoxy, however, was not considered a competitor for the loyalties of American Jews: both Reformers and conservatives (they labelled themselves as such, though conservative was often used interchangeably with Orthodox in this period) thought it a dead letter, at least in the United

States. The intention of this chapter is to integrate this dispute into the larger account of

Conservative Judaism and to use it as a case study in religious centrism. I want to lengthen the history of the Conservative movement and broaden the description of religious centrism through a study of this cultural moment. Many of the features of the common religious centrism that began emerging in the nineteenth-century, both in Judaism and Christianity, surface in Kohut's writings during the summer of 1885.

What do this dispute and the subsequent formation of Conservative Judaism tell us about religious centrism? First, it gives us an anchor in history. There were centrists in American

Judaism prior to Kohut: Isaac Leeser, Sabato Morais, Solomon Solis-Cohen and Benjamin Szold among the most prominent centrist contemporaries of Kohut. So, there was no explicit centrist movement and no coherent philosophy in American Judaism to which a potential centrist movement could attach itself. Kohut's articles in The American Hebrew, a publication which

2 See Robert F. Southard, "The Theologian of the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform" in Platforms and Prayer Books: Theological and Liturgical Perspectives on Reform Judaism, ed. Dana Kaplan (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2002), 68. 121 would prove itself amenable to the nascent movement, placed before the Jewish public a new contender for their allegiance. Second, Kohut expressed the central elements of the conservative or liberal Orthodox vision: most importantly, commitment to traditional rabbinic— that is, halakhic—Judaism with a willingness to adapt the adiaphora (non-essentials) of ritual and belief to the realities of America without losing continuity with the Jewish past or abandoning what they considered fundamental and unchangeable in matters of ritual and belief.

Deciding what to continue and what to adapt would be the responsibility of a scholarship alive to new methods but sensitive to the past.

The foregoing points to the nature of authority in a centrist movement. The Reformers placed authority, in theory if not in practice, on the autonomous individual Jew, while the

Orthodox located it singularly, again in theory if not always in reality, in rabbinic authorization.

Early conservative or inclusivist Orthodox thinkers such as Kohut believed they could unite rabbinic authority and individual choice seamlessly. The character of authority in this

"conservative tendency" was, and indeed remains, uncertain: where does one find authority, who can legitimately exercise it and why ought anyone to follow that authority. These were key questions that Kohut sought to unpack and answer. If he could answer the question of authority compellingly, then the centrist movement could advance with a greater sense of legitimacy.

According to Ismar Schorsch, the complications of balancing respect for rabbinic authority, the

Jewish past and individual principles led to an "ideological ambiguity [that] is the hallmark of

Conservative Judaism...In part, at least, the fault inheres in occupying the center. Extremes lend themselves to dogmatic clarity, if not cogent thinking. As perceived from the middle, the

3 See Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: a History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 266. 122 complexity of reality is hardly susceptible to explanation in terms of a single principle."

Schorsch should know: he recently stepped down from the chancellorship of the Seminary.

Conservative Judaism in its early years as today would be censured by left and right alike for its

apparent lack of principles, of guiding standards, of an ideal above a temporizing pragmatism .

The Kohut-Kohler controversy also tells us something about denominationalism that is

missing in some discussions about the growth of the modern branches of Judaism. Although

denominationalism in both Judaism and Christianity is in part about the grudging, fitful

acceptance of pluralism, this does not tell the whole story. What is missing in the account of

denominationalism and pluralism is that no one was at this time a pluralist, at least in the case

under investigation in this chapter. Pluralism was a fact; it was not embraced. This chapter will

return to this point frequently: both the Reformers and the conservatives (and the East European

Orthodox as well, though they are given scant attention) tried to define a normative Judaism

appropriate to their American context. For conservative Judaism, in the elite version,6 what was

normative was devotion to the law and commitment to the continuous Jewish tradition that

employed secular research methods to prove the continuity of Judaism. For Reform Judaism,

again in the elite version, what was normative was expressed through "prophetism" and set

against "Mosaism,"7 and the need for change, even extreme change, due to the freer, more

libertarian ethos of America. Each group was trying to answer definitively an ultimate question, namely, what is Judaism and what makes a good Jew? To be a centrist did not mean to be by

inclination a pluralist.

4 Ismar Schorsch, "Zacharias Frankel and the European Origins of Conservative Judaism" in From Text to Context: the Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 255. 5 For criticisms from the right, see Jeffrey Gurock, "How 'Frum' was Rabbi Jacob Joseph's Court?" Jewish History 8.1-2(1994), 1-14. 6 For "elite" religion, see Stephen Sharot, A Comparative Sociology of World Religions: Virtuosos, Priests, and Popular Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2001), chapters 1, 3 and 8. 7 For criticism of "Mosaism," see Kohler's comments in American Hebrew, June 5, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 4: pg. 3. 123 This pattern of aspiring to be normative in the midst of pluralism has appeared at many other points in religious history. In his book on the controversies in the Jacobean church,

Charles Prior takes measure of the competing ecclesiologies of the "conformists" (the High

Church Laudians) and the "reformers" (the Calvinists). Each group attempted to secure its position as continuous with the early Church, and therefore part of the natural development of

Christian life and history. The conformists believed that the community of English Christians ought to be comprehended under one church that had both temporal and spiritual duties

"founded on a mingling of doctrine and law...it was a reformed continuation of the Apostolic

ft church, which retained ceremonial practices and episcopal governance." The reformists developed their arguments out of this tradition as well, but contended that the English church

"had not proceeded far enough along the path of reform."9 Prior notes that their disagreement was based on "a contested history...always firmly rooted within a vast and complex historiographical tradition."10 Each side claimed the right to mark out the norms of belief, practice and the proper relationship of church and state. In the words of Conrad Russell, they were "rival claimants to the title of orthodox... [with] rival criteria of orthodoxy."

Denominational pluralism, which is a sine qua non for a coherent centrism, may also be viewed in a market framework. This period of both American religious history and American

Jewish history was a time of great inter- and intra-religious competition. The religious choices of American Jews were broader than any Jewish community in history: there were no temporal penalties assessed for choosing one option over another. An American Jew did not have to join another religious community to see his or her religious wants fulfilled: apostasy or assimilation 8 Charles W.A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4. 9 Ibid., 5. 10 Ibid., 3-4 11 Conrad Russell, The Cause of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 84. The quotation from Russell is also cited by Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church, 1. 124 were not the only alternatives. There were now alternatives within Judaism. In fact, all of the denominations of contemporary Judaism from Reconstructionism to haredi Orthodoxy are creations of modernity. Different religious desires prompted the creation of different responses from denominational leaders, as American Judaism had moved largely from a religion based on obligation to one based on personal preference (including the individual preference to recognize obligation). American Jews are Jews by choice as much as by birth: they could be part of another religious community, or more commonly, none at all. Usually, marginal groups were forced either to be in high tension with the majority or assimilate to it. Jews were no longer marginal.

The theoretical underpinnings of this essay draw on the insights of rational choice theory as applied to religion. More properly, this is called the "economics of religion." The work of

Rodney Stark, William Bainbridge, Roger Finke and Laurence Iannaccone has been slowly integrated into many historical, theological and sociological readings of religion. The most public and prolific of the rational choice theorists is Stark. Like rational choice theorists in other fields, he assumes that people have reasons for making the choices that they do, and that the choices are made freely. He writes: "The economic approach.. .takes a 'normal' view of demand and assumes that religious behavior can be as reasonable as any other form of human activity."13

The reasons for the choices made and the choices themselves may be blind, foolish, dim, reasonable, honest or any other kind of virtue, but the choices are rational. In generic economic

12 This statement does not deny very real social discriminations at all levels of society. Discrimination, of course, can be rectified by law, and such rectification shows a change at the hearts and minds level. But Jews were not a marginal group, if we define marginality as Gist and Wright do. They limit marginal identity to those who "do not ordinarily qualify for admission into another group with which, over varying lengths of time, it is more or less closely associated; when these groups differ significantly in the nature of their cultural or racial heritage; and between which there is limited cultural interchange or social interaction." Noel P. Gist and Roy D. Wright, Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially Mixed Minority in India (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973), 21. 13 Rodney Stark, "An Economics of Religion" in The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. Alan Segal (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006), 48. 125 terms, the individual, who is inevitably part of a movement, sect or church, wants to maximize

gain and minimize loss, that is, he or she responds to positive or negative incentives. And this has nothing to do with money. What the rational choice theorist is measuring is behaviour, or

more appropriately, human choice and action in the world. For a believer, maximizing gain might be to recognize external obligation while reducing anxiety about the possible anarchic or

anomic14 features of the world, especially a deeply pluralistic world.

Also central to this chapter is the turning back of the "secularization thesis,"15 which argued that the economic and cultural forces of modernity depress both the need and desire for religion, particularly in its more "orthodox" varieties. Stark and his colleagues have attempted to overturn this long-held notion. Certainly the secularization thesis has held more firm when the case study is from continental Europe,16 but it breaks down when applied to North America.

What Stark discovered was that "secularization exists, to be sure, but is found in all religious economics, not only, or necessarily, in modern ones. Secularization moreover is part of an ongoing cycle; as secularization takes hold in any given society, it stimulates two countervailing processes: revival and religious innovation." And religious centrism was an innovation of a religious world newly and publicly pluralistic that was caught up in certain currents of secularization. But it was secularization, along with pluralism, that secures the conditions for the possibility of religious centrism; it does not guarantee it.

Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1984). See Steven Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 16 The sociologist Grace Davie, however, has shown that the secularization thesis and its application to religion in Europe have to be readjusted with the surprising survival of religion, even if often non-institutional, on the continent. See Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Religion in Modern Europe: a Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003). 17 Grace Davie, The Sociology of Religion (London: Sage, 2007), 71. 126 Although this chapter is principally concerned with the consequences of the controversy between Kohut and Kohler, some global and local background to their dispute is necessary. In addition, the long term significance of the controversy will be discussed. The chapter begins with a discussion of modernity and secularization and their combined effect on Jewish religious understanding. Next, in order to give historical context for the quarrel between the Reformers and Conservatives, the rise and development of each denomination will be explored, along with the key figures of this chapter, Kohut and Kohler. After that, the central themes of the chapter, the actual substance of the controversy, will be accounted for and explained at some length.

Issues such as the present function of Jewish law, biblical criticism, the nature of historical development and the development of denominationalism will be central. Finally, this chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the two major consequences of the dispute: the publication of the Pittsburgh Platform and the creation of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Modernity

Emancipation made modernity and all that attends to that loaded term possible for Jews and Judaism. Emancipation meant, in principle if not always in practice, civil and legal equality for Jews in European states. (The advance of emancipation was not necessary in America as what legal disabilities Jews encountered were local, partial and poorly enforced. Anti-Jewish sentiment was present, but its slights were usually social rather than political.) The public square was not to be religiously neutral, but only not to favour one religion over the other.18 The quasi- autonomous kehillot (the communal institutions that oversaw the religious and civil functioning of Jewish life) of the pre-modern state lost their role; the secular arm took over its functions, as all citizens, Jews and gentiles, were to live under a common legal system. The disappearance of

18 David Novak, In Defense of Religious Liberty (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI, 2008, in press). 127 the kehillot was the greatest change in and disruption of Jewish religious life since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Jews were now permitted into any number of previously restricted occupations; options, occupational and otherwise, proliferated. For newly emancipated Jews, multiple mentalities heretofore unknown or constrained by external circumstance were made available. Because boundaries in the definition of normative religious, social and legal life had begun to slowly break down, a new pluralism emerged. This may be the most durable legacy of modernity.

The pluralism activated by modernity and emancipation, Michael Meyer writes, "would also severely call into question the viability of Judaism and undermine Jewish solidarity...an outcome that a few Jews welcomed, others resisted, and many greeted with deep-seated ambivalence."19 Meyer is right to assert that few Jews divested themselves fully of their Jewish identity or their attachments, however minimal, to their native religious community. On the other hand, many embraced the novel capacity to make alternative Jewish identities. These identities usually aimed at greater integration into and acculturation to the broader culture:

Jewish separateness was taken for clannishness. The Jewish past was thought to be the location of these alternatives, adjusted of course to the new socio-cultural climate. The diversities of the past would yield their treasures by means of scholarship, or what would be termed Wissenschaft des Judentums (the science of Judaism).

Louis Ginzberg, one of the great scholars brought into the Conservative movement by

Schechter, judged Wissenschaft des Judentums to be the "most striking gift of the nineteenth century to Jews and Judaism." Its origins are found in the first decades of the nineteenth-

19 Michael A. Meyer, "Modernity as a Crisis for the Jews" Modern Judaism 9 (1989), 151. 20 Louis Ginzberg, "Zechariah Frankel" In: Students, Scholars and Saints (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1928), 195. Ginzberg's assessment is not shared by contemporary scholars, but it does point up the pride of place it once had, extending even into the twentieth century. 128 century in Germany, with a circle of Jewish scholars who sought by means of scientific scholarship to place the history of Jews and Judaism on an equal basis with other national histories. The attempt to place Jewish history on equivalent footing with the historical narratives of other peoples had a socio-political function: to normalize Jews and show them as good citizens. The attenuation of the magic aura that often surrounded Jews, whether through fear or outright disdain, in European Christian culture was a major purpose of the science of Judaism.21

The study of the past in modernity with its emphasis on dispassionate research and objective results might reveal continuity gaps, outside borrowings and morally knotty beliefs. If

Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars such as Leopold Zunz and Heinrich Graetz achieved in part their goal of Jewish emancipation—they did live to see great change at the political level, and much less change at the hearts and minds level—they did not necessarily expect that it would create a certain alienation to the past. If you demonstrate that cherished Jewish practices were first nurtured in pagan societies, that many ideas and ideals once considered unique to

Judaism were in fact shared by much of the civilized world and that, most radically of all, the

Torah might not be of divine origin, then affiliation with traditional Judaism would seem an anachronism. Certainly some of these scholars sought only to give Judaism a decent interment yet most of the scholars thought they were extending Judaism's flagging life, reviving it, giving it new breath in a political landscape wholly novel to Jewish experience. And it was not just

Jews as individuals who needed "to be integrated into modern European political life...Jewish religion must be integrated into modern European intellectual life as well."

21 There was no parallel science of Judaism in America, for two reasons: there was no political need for it, and American Judaism at this time had yielded no great scholars. 22 Neil Gillman, "Inside or Outside: Emancipation and the Dilemmas of Conservative Judaism." Judaism 38.4 (1989), 409. 129 Abraham Geiger, a Wissenschaft scholar and the intellectual father of the Reform movement in Europe, employed Jewish history precisely to these ends. He wanted to fold a narrative of Jewish universalism, recorded first by the Prophets, into a wider account of

European religious history. The goals of this universalism were twofold: one, to present Judaism as embracing the highest ethical standards uncorrupted by elaborate theological doctrine or narrow legalism, and two, to link the Jewish mission in the world as a light to the nations to a progressive pan-religious ethical monotheism. Geiger wanted to find a usable Jewish past23 to achieve the goal of the present: that is, recognition of a reformed Judaism as ethically equal to

Christianity, and an appreciation of the universal mission of the Jew as similar in aim if not procedure as the mission of Christianity in the world. Jews would more closely resemble gentiles in cultural matters; Christians would mimic Jews in ethical concern. To bring this project to fruition, Geiger believed that he and likeminded European Jews had to drop distinctive rituals that separated them from their liberal minded Christian countrymen. He would attempt this by a "use of Jewish historiography to undermine the acceptability of prevalent religious norms."24

Like the Reformation from which it took its name, Reform Judaism was a "back to the

Bible" movement.25 Geiger and his colleagues tried to strip Judaism of the medieval encrustations—the codification and routinization of halakha, for instance—that had been wrongly conceived as core religious actions or beliefs. The Zeitgeist in conjunction with an objective reading of the Jewish past determined the Jewish present for Geiger and other moderns

23 For the concept of a "usable past" see David Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999). 24 Michael Meyer, Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 50. 25 Back to the ethical teachings of the Prophets, that is; the Pentateuch, especially the priestly laws and laws relating to the Temple, had to go. Even Genesis was not spared: Geiger wanted to do away with circumcision; he thought it cruel, an obsolescence. Despite this rejection of the most widely observed commandment, German Reform was never as radical as nineteenth century Reform in the United States. 130 in the Wissenschaft movement. In this respect, he was like Matthew Arnold; but Arnold was a religious centrist, more amenable to conserving the past for the future than liberating the present from the past. As will be repeated with Kaufmann Kohler, Geiger rummaged for notions of development in the Jewish past in order to make development a normative possibility for emancipated Jews.

The great challenge of the science of Judaism to Reform and Conservative Judaism,

Meyer writes elsewhere, is that "it gave a new elite the right to interpret texts, sometimes

9R radically, on the basis of external historical knowledge." Although Louis Ginzberg argued that

Wissenschaft could be discovered within the internal resources of Jewish life and history,29 it clearly overlaid models of social-scientific methods that it found elsewhere and followed conclusions to what they perceived to be their logical end. This pursuit of truth with non-Jewish tools of research led to two different conclusions: for Reform, the science of Judaism proved the remarkable adaptability of Judaism in time, that Judaism and its scriptures were historical creations and the robust legacy of that creation was its ethics not its ceremonies; for the conservatives, the science of Judaism established the astonishing continuity of Jewish practice and belief, although they were certainly aware of local, regional and national variations within

Judaism along with visible changes in the halakha throughout time: but development was organic, and the past was of a piece with the present and looked forward to the future.

26 See Fraser Neiman, "The Zeitgeist of Matthew Arnold" PMLA 72.5 (1957), 977-996. 27 For Geiger, see Das Judentum und seine Geschicte (Breslau: W. Jacobsen, 1910); Ken Koltun-Fromm, Abraham Geiger's Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006); Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and, especially, the collected papers in New Perspectives on Abraham Geiger: an HUC-JIR symposium, ed. Jakob Petuchowski (New York: Ktav, 1975). 28 Michael A. Meyer, "Two Persistent Tensions within Wissenschaft des Judentums" Modern Judaism 24.2 (2004), 110. 29 Ginzberg, "Zechariah Frankel," 198. 131 Reform Judaism

Reform Judaism was supposed to be the end of Judaism in Francis Fukuyama's sense, drawing on Hegel, that we had reached the end of history.30 Judaism had not come to end, but rather to a terminal point, the highest fulfillment of the spirit of Judaism as it moved through history: it need develop no further. Progressively liberated and liberating from obsolete practices and medieval beliefs while retaining the undying ethical core of precepts found in the Ten

Commandments and the prophets, the draftsmen of Reform Judaism in its early stages in

Germany and the United States judged that the vitality of traditional Judaism had drawn to a close, that it was not equipped to buffer Judaism from the revolutionary changes going on outside its ambit. The Reformers—Abraham Geiger, Samuel Holdheim, Kaufmann Kohler, among others—firmly believed that Judaism must look towards the future with new eyes and a new approach. If the gentile world was to treat Jews and Judaism with equality, then Jews must narrow but not eliminate their differences with gentiles. Reform was to be the Judaism for moderns.

The foundations of Reform, as with Conservative and Modern Orthodox Judaism, are in

•J 1

Germany. The first Reform temple was opened in Hamburg in 1818 . The first sustained stirrings of Reform in the United States were in Charleston, South Carolina. The southern and midwestern states were the major centers of Reform influence: where there were few Jews in the first place, Reform flourished. In the early nineteenth-century, there were Reform Jews and

Reform temples but no real self-definition other than desiring to escape medieval Judaism. The

30 See Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 31 Reform Judaism used "Temple" to designate places of worship. As Jonathan Sarna notes, the application of "Temple," the introduction of mixed seating, the use of an organ, et al., "underscored Reform Judaism's break with the past, its renunciation of any hope for messianic redemption. Rather than wait for the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, local Jews (Sarna is writing about the Plum St. Temple in Cincinnati) now declared that their synagogue was to be a temple unto itself." Sarna, American Judaism, 125. 132 1840s witnesses the beginnings of a sophisticated understanding of Reform. The Frankfurt

Reformfreunde was a circle of intelligent and concerned laymen who issued a set of principles that allow us to understand the thinking of early Reform. The Reformfreunde had little real world impact, but they described Reform principles that would endure well into the twentieth century. They defined Reform thusly: "We recognize in Mosaism [that is, traditional Judaism based on a directly revealed divine law] the possibility of an unlimited further development. The collection called the Talmud, as well as all the rabbinic writings and statutes that rest upon it, possess no binding force for us either in dogma or in practice. We neither expect nor desire a messiah who is to lead the Israelites back to the land of Palestine; we recognize no fatherland other than that to which we belong by birth or civil status."32

The most important figure in early Reform was Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), who was at one time a friend of Samson Raphael Hirsch, the force behind the distinctive modern German

Orthodoxy. Although much of his work appears on the surface to be destructive, he considered his writings to be those of creative destruction.33 Geiger attempted to bulldoze the foundations of medieval Judaism; he did so to secure modern Judaism on firmer ground. And this firmer ground would be uncovered through historical scholarship. History would reveal that Judaism up to the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud was full of adjustments, readjustments and reforms: from the redaction of the Talmud to Moses Mendelssohn, the great enlightener,

Judaism was one long unbroken chain of dismal medievalism. There was no normative Judaism, only a Judaism of the moment.

Michael A. Meyer, "Alienated Intellectuals in the Camp of Religious Reform: the Frankfurt Reformfreunde" AJS Review 6 (1981), 63. 33 The term is Joseph Schumpeter's. See Thomas McCraw's marvellous new biography, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007). 133 The scriptures of Judaism, for Geiger, had human fingerprints upon them, and therefore the Torah was not of divine origin; research, the higher criticism he admired, demonstrated this.

And if the Torah was not divine, then neither was its law. Geiger did believe in progressive revelation, that God reveals, albeit not directly, his will to the world generally though not to

Israel exclusively. He was withering in his criticism of "legalism." Adherence to the Mosaic law led to at least some physical separation from the general culture: because of dietary restrictions, a Jew could rarely eat in the home of a gentile, though the history of this particular restriction is more complicated than I can get into in here. Fellowship means to invite company (derived from the Latin cumpanis: with bread), and this was not possible with the social segregation, supported by both communities, of Jews and gentiles. This issue confronted Paul of Tarsus: how could gentiles enter verus Israel if you could not eat in their homes?34 Declare clean that which had been previously decreed unclean. Geiger agreed in spirit if not intention.35 The actual rituals in the ritual law (issurei) were symbols of ideas, and when the idea encapsulated in the ritual becomes immaterial, the ritual should expire. By dispensing with the majority of developed

Jewish law, Geiger hoped to integrate Jews and Judaism into their greater prophetic mission of social justice. The particularistic dross would go, the better to feather oneself in universalism.

To rid itself of particularism was not a negative. It would in fact allow Jews to reclaim their true heritage of creativity that comes along with a universalism that necessarily reinvents itself in every era.

34 The locus classicus is Romans 14. Paul declares that "there is nothing unclean of itself (14:14). God does not discriminate between clean and unclean foods: what is unclean is a matter of belief not ritual action. Sin meant lack of faith, not consuming forbidden foods. There is a sociological and practical reason Paul removed the laws of kashrut: dietary restrictions hindered conversion efforts. 35 The parallels of the critiques of the Jewish-Christian community on Pharisaic Judaism and Reform on rabbinic Judaism are sometimes quite startling: in addition to the issue of permitted food, the question of Jewish ethnicity was answered in the same way. Paul of Tarsus and Geiger both denied that the Jews were a people; they had beliefs and a religion. There was no national component to Judaism. One ought not to push the similarities too far; the contexts and purposes of each were different, but the similarities are there nonetheless and are of more than incidental interest. 134 While Reform began in Germany it never took on the fully dressed radical form it did in

America beginning in the 1880s. Michael Meyer, in his magisterial history of the Reform movement, noted that "the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth witnessed the widest swing of the Reform pendulum away from traditional Jewish belief and practice." The American libertarian ethos encouraged intrepid religious leaders to imagine American religious life as a vast laboratory to test new ways of seeing old faiths. For instance, German reformers did not as a group reject the resurrection of the dead, a core principle of developed Judaism from the Talmudic era forward.37 In America, most Reform rabbis did deny literal resurrection, although Isaac Mayer Wise, the father of institutional

Reform Judaism in the United States, was a notable holdout for a while, though he later removed the traditional blessing from his Minhag America. The social consequences of rejecting traditional doctrines in America were practically non-existent: there was no chief rabbi, umbrella organization or vestige of the kehilla system. The American government did not get involved in internal Jewish disputes as the German government did on occasion.39

The event that (somewhat unfairly) encapsulates the representation of radical Reform in the United States occurred at the inaugural ordination of rabbis at Hebrew Union College in

Cincinnati, the seminary arm of the Reform movement. At this time, Reform was more

Meyer, Response to Modernity, 264. 37 The question, stemming from the writings of Maimonides, of whether resurrection of the dead was a dogma of Judaism is fascinating one, but the limits of time and space do allow for a fuller discussion here. See Menachem Kellner, Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought: Maimonides to Abravanel (Oxford: Published for the Littman Library by Oxford University Press, 1986) and Marc Shapiro, The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides' Thirteen Principles Reappraised(Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004). 38 Jacob Petuchowski, '"Immortality—Yes; Resurrection—No!': Nineteenth Century Judaism Struggles with a Traditional Belief Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 50 (1983),133-34. A consequence of the return to liturgical tradition among some of the younger Reform rabbis, the blessing for the resurrection of the dead has returned in the most recent Reform prayer book, Mishkan T'filah. 39 Note especially the famous Austrittsgesetz of 1876 where Samson Raphael Hirsch attempted to use the levers of state power to allow for a part of the Jewish community to secede from another part of the community—in this case, the growing Reform community in Frankfurt. See Robert Liberies, Religious Conflict in Social Context: the Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838-1877 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985). 135 comprehensive than it would become: it contained many traditionalists who sympathized with the aims of the College. A dinner followed. The menu yielded some surprising choices: clams, shrimp, crab, and ice cream as dessert. Clams, shrimp and crab are forbidden by Mosaic law and tradition and by rabbinic fiat dairy dishes could not follow immediately after meat dishes: depending on local custom, one to six hours needed to pass before dairy could be eaten again.

The so-called "trefah banquet"40 exposed a real and deep chasm in the practices between

Reformers and conservatives. Those in the latter group at times identified with Reform and at times with Orthodox—they would eventually make possible the theological and institutional conditions for a third movement in American Judaism to emerge.

Conservative Judaism

The "trefah banquet" made viable the conditions for the possibility of a Conservative reaction to emergent radical tendencies in Reform. Forty years earlier, the kernel of "positive- historical" Judaism was planted in another Reform setting. Zecharias Frankel, the intellectual force behind "positive-historical" Judaism, had sympathies with certain elements of the Reform program: he appreciated its utilization of history as a source of revelation and religious practice, its recognition that development has occurred in Judaism and that not all ritual and doctrine are of the same sanctity and antiquity. At a Reform rabbinic conference in 1845 in Frankfurt, the rabbis present voted to allow, although they did not necessarily endorse in practice, languages other than Hebrew as the language of a synagogue. Jewish law permits prayer in any language, but Frankel was frustrated by the absence of concern for continuity with the Jewish past, which he saw as the only way to ensure the Jewish future. To nurture Hebrew as the language of

40 See John Appel, "The Trefa Banquet" Commentary (February, 1966) and Lance Sussman, "The Myth of the Trefah Banquet: American Culinary Culture and the Radicalization of Food Policy in American Reform Judaism" American Jewish Archives 53.1-2 (2005), 29-52 136 worship was to link all of dispersed Catholic or knesset Israel together trans-temporally and trans-geographically; to nurture the vernacular, no matter how transparently practical, was to cut away the national element of the Jewish people. Jews would be, as the old saying has it,

Englishmen or Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.

Frankel did not lead an organized branch of Judaism, and it is somewhat dubious even to call "positive-historical" Judaism a movement. But it was minimally a movement of mind among a growing number of fretting traditionalists who could neither accept what was beginning to be called Orthodoxy nor the logical implications of much of Reform thought and practice. This movement of mind "quickly gained the religious center."41 The ideas of Frankel would be replicated almost root and bark in the work of Alexander Kohut.

Frankel began his rabbinic career as the Chief Rabbi of Dresden, and his experience there gave him ample scope to see that the maintenance of tradition was vital. Like his Reform antagonist Geiger, he believed the contemporary practices of the community were normative;42 unlike Geiger, Frankel judged that the community wanted to preserve custom even if custom often failed at the unforgiving criteria of reason. With the financial backing of Jonas Franckel, he established (1854) the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, the institution from which the Seminary in New York would take its name, inspiration and aims. Geiger was bitter: he thought himself a better candidate to run a modern seminary.43

Frankel sought to reconcile scholarship and traditional practice at the Seminary, or rather he did not consider the one at odds with the other. He deemed ritual conformity necessary for the preservation of tradition but tolerated divergent theological opinions as freedom of open

41 Meyer, "Modernity as a Crisis for the Jews," 160. 42 There is a famous Talmudic passage for this reliance on the lived practice of the observant community: rabbis were counselled to go out and see what the people were doing and judge accordingly. See B. Talmud: Eruvin 14b. 43 "Modern" in the sense that rabbinic candidates had to have a secular education as well. 137 research and conscience dictated. Jewish law, which governs practice, "is far more fundamental in Judaism than haggadah, for ideas are volatile, but practices endure. If Jewish practice goes, virtually nothing remains."44 This would later be a core Conservative attitude, reproduced by

Kohut and Schechter. At Breslau, a "middle-of-the road" Seminary, the science of Judaism "was affirmed wholeheartedly, even if critical study of the Pentateuch was deemed out of bounds and history was linked closely to theology."45

If criticism of the Torah was not accepted, Frankel both personally and publicly concluded that the Oral Law was open to critical judgment. His Darkhei ha-Mishnah (Ways of the Mishnah) showed that the Oral Law was a product of time, an example of Jewish resourcefulness in response to novel situations. This claim offended the Orthodox and bored the

Reformers.46 The Oral Law remained obligatory because it had been accepted by the people and consecrated by time. The Oral Law was fully of this world but hallowed at the same time: this apparent contradiction would seem to be why Frankel was willing to change or dispense with rabbinic norms as he was largely unwilling to do with biblical commandments.47 (There is a parallel here between Frankel and the sixteenth-century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, whose thought is still so central to the arc of the Church of England. In his Laws of

Robert Gordis, "Authority in Jewish Law" in Conservative Judaism and Jewish Law, edited by Seymour Siegal (New York: KTAV, 1977) 51. Gordis was a professor at the Seminary from 1940-1992. He represents the center of this explicitly centrist movement. In this period, the Seminary was at its most visible and influential, with great scholars such as Saul Lieberman, the greatest talmudist of the twentieth century, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Gordis himself. It has never recaptured that glory, in the main because Jewish studies positions have sprouted up in many public and private colleges and universities in North America. 45 Meyer, "Two Persistent Tensions within Wissenschaft des Judentums," 106. In the Reform movement, Wise also did not allow the critical study of the Pentateuch at Hebrew Union College; Kohler, who succeeded Wise, did. It was not until the 1970s that the Jewish Theological Seminary regularly offered critical courses in the Pentateuch. That change occurred in part because the Seminary, which had previously been headed by Talmudists, was now led by historians—from the sacred to the secular. 4 Geiger considered Darkhei ha-Mishnah "the work of a deeply ambivalent scholar, half critical and half Orthodox." One of the disciples of Hirsch thought Frankel's book "deserved to be titled Darkhei ha-meshaneh, the ways of the changer." This is how a centrist is made, smacked by left and right alike. Schorsch, "Zacharias Frankel and the European Origins of Conservative Judaism," 262. 47 See Andreas Bramer, "The Dilemmas of Moderate Reform: Some Reflections on the Development of Conservative Judaism in Germany, 1840-1880'' Jewish Studies Quarterly 10.1 (2003): 73-87. 138 Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker made the case that the Anglican Church was unique, a via media between Rome and Geneva. He defends custom as Frankel defended the Oral law: both are marked by human design, but are no less divine for that. Hooker, for instance, argues that the names for the months derive from paganism but the early Church maintained them nonetheless,

"without hurt or scandal to any." Unless compelled by exigent need (rather than conscious, voluntary choice), "customs once established and confirmed by long use" should be preserved.

This echoes Frankel's argument that the very antiquity of the Oral traditions hallow those traditions. No human court can take away what the people have judged sacred. This was

Frankel's critique of Reform, and Hooker's critique of Calvinism.)48 Adapting Jewish law to the post-Emancipation world was therefore the great issue for centrists. As Schorsch points out,

Frankel "was prepared to allow autopsies under certain conditions, to delay burial, to modernize the procedure for circumcision, to introduce a program of religious education for girls, to make changes in the prayer book, and even to study the possibility of dropping the second day of the three pilgrimage festivals (yom tov sheni)."49

If the process for the repeal of rabbinic law, which was the creation of human hands and of human time, had been smoothed by Frankel, what good, in the market sense, will fill its partially vacated niche? Schorsch convincingly argues that history is that good. He notes that

Frankel did not leave the Reform conference in Frankfurt, with its curtailing of the significance of Hebrew, over a detail of Jewish law. He writes: "Frankel [felt] that the weight of history dictated retaining Hebrew on objective grounds and not for merely sentimental reasons...Ancient custom, nourished by continuous practice and often sanctified by martyrdom, constituting a commanding voice. The past was a source of values, inspiration, and commitment. Though a

48 Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, vol. 1, ed. Georges Edelen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 12.4. 49 Schorsch, "Zacharias Frankel and the European Origins of Conservative Judaism," 257. 139 secular category, history obligated no less than did halakhah, and both thwart the revolutionary and levelling path of reason." So, history does not take the place of halakha but complements it and more importantly supplements it: the limits of halakha, which is different from the divinely revealed commandments (mitzvof), are exposed when it fails to maintain its hold upon the people. History, then, rather than developed Jewish law can provide the ballast for the maintenance of custom.

But the use of history by Conservative Jews, taking their cue from Frankel, has led to a methodological challenge. The "positive" in "positive-historical" Judaism represents the legal dimension of Judaism. Halakha is substantive; it does not wait to be discovered. Judgments are issued, and are accepted, rejected or adjusted. One approaches the "positive" aspect of Judaism therefore with something material with which to work. It is a different matter with history. As

Neil Gillman has written, "history itself is mute; it must be 'read,' and it can be read as manifesting either a conservative or a liberating impulse. In its conservative voice, history teaches us about continuities, about what has persisted despite the change in eras and, by implication, it determines what must be maintained today despite all of the pressures for change.

In its liberating voices, history teaches us about the discontinuities, the breaks with the past, the pattern of constant change or development and, again by implication, it legitimizes breaks in the present."51 Gillman gets at the heart of the problem in the Conservative historical project. If halakha is normative, trumping other competitors such as historical research, then it sets the terms. One is of course free to refuse the authority of a particular posek (religious judge) or psak

50 Ibid., 258. 51 Gillman, "Inside or Outside: Emancipation and the Dilemmas of Conservative Judaism," 411. Gillman, noting the work of Yosef Yerushalmi, asserts as well that the study of history generally and the science of Judaism in particular is "radical repudiation of all classical attempts to understand Judaism." A professor of philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Gillman recently admitted that indeed classical understandings of Judaism have a diminished role in Conservative Judaism today: Jewish law no longer motivates and consequently no longer obligates. Motivation precedes obligation unless a sense of obligation spurs motivation: a chicken and egg problem. See http://www.theiewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=11773. Accessed September 25,2007. 140 din (a specific decision), but then one is rejecting an identifiable authority or law. One has to justify the rejection of something direct and real; reasons are given because one did not establish the terms. On the other hand, history, or more properly the study of history, is a self-selected object: the scholar investigates what he or she wants and then the scholar sets the scope of that investigation. There is no value prior to that history. Moreover, the scholar raises or tries to raise his or her claims and terms above partisan religious concern. A daunting multiplicity is introduced: why ought one plausible reading of history trump another ostensibly plausible reading? Although reason differentiates good thinking from bad, shoddy scholarship from sober, the possibility of several credible yet exclusive renderings of the history of Judaism is hard to overlook.

But Frankel assumed, as the early leaders of the Conservative movement in the United

States assumed, that the reading of history might yield a certain amount of diversity, of local habit and the occasional eccentricity,52 but behind all of the teeming pluralism lay ritual and liturgical unity, "a conserving force, a generator of commitment." Reformers were wrong when they removed what they considered an offending or indecorous custom. Meyer argues that for Frankel, "no Jewish theologian or conference of rabbis ever had the right to abolish a custom or ceremony held sacred by the people...The observances of the community were self-justifying simply because they were the observances of the community."54 The people (Volk) were

Catholic Israel and their will, though often inarticulate, was part of revelation.55

52 For instance: In the Middle Ages, while Jews lived quasi-autonomously in Christian Europe they did not have the power of capital punishment. That was reserved to the state. However, we know of instances of Jewish authorities punishing capital crimes in Northern Spain and North Africa in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This was without involving the Spanish crown, and therefore obviously with the crown's blessing or at least benign indifference towards how the Jewish community disciplined its criminals—just make sure the taxes get to the king and everything will be fine. 53 Schorsch, "Zacharias Frankel and the European Origins of Conservative Judaism," 263. 54 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 33. 55 Ibid., 34. 141 The intellectual and religious concerns of Frankel were reproduced in America in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. In the United States, however, the barriers to entry were low and the social costs of a new movement or sect within an established religion were correspondingly nominal as well. The differences in the German and American contexts allowed multiple versions of Judaism to flourish. There were no associations, federations or councils in the United States to arbitrate the doctrinal, liturgical and ritual life of a community; membership was voluntary. There was neither national church nor any culturally thick experience with a specific church.56 A grudging pluralism was the norm, accepted in fact if not in desire. The

American religious scene as liberal/inclusive Orthodox Judaism slowly enters is a free market, with different branches of Judaism bidding for the affiliation of Jewish families, especially as the first major wave of immigration from Eastern Europe in the 1880s is just beginning.57

The name "Conservative Judaism" had been used prior to the Kohut-Kohler dispute, but it did not enter the daily lexicon of American religion until the early 1880s when some traditionalist Reformers perceived a widening gap between their aims and the aims of rabbis such as Kaufmann Kohler. Even after the Conservative movement officially began the use of

"Conservative Judaism" was not consistent: some members, such as Sabato Morais, a scion of

Italian Orthodox Jewry, preferred to call the movement and later its seminary, Orthodox. Jacob

Rader Marcus is correct then in noting that "from the 1850's until the turn of the century the word 'Conservative' was used by Orthodox and moderates to express their desire to conserve or preserve Judaism against the inroads of the Reformers; indeed the word 'Conservative' was

For the idea of cultural "thickness" see Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-30. 57 See Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910 (New York: Arno Press, 1969). 142 often but another synonym for Orthodox." Before turning to the dispute that helped facilitate the rise of Conservative Judaism I will first present short vignettes of the two men who figure most centrally here.

Kaufmann Kohler

Kaufmann Kohler (1843-1926) shepherded Reform Judaism through its most radical phase. He was, in the words of Meyer, "a lifelong religious zealot. Though he passed from the strict orthodoxy of his youth to the radical theology of classical Reform, he never became a liberal. Fervently and intolerantly, he fought what he loved to call 'the battles of the Lord,' assailing those forces which he believed stood in the way of an occidentalizaed and universalized, but firmly theistic modern Judaism."59 Kohler was reared in a traditional home, but forsook orthodox Judaism when confronted by the challenge of higher biblical criticism.

With great honesty, he compared his relocation from Orthodoxy to Reform to eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: "I proceeded in my studies, but did not come back to where I started from. I only felt that having eaten of the thus long forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, my eyes opened and I was driven out of the paradise of my childhood."60 Kohler did not become an atheist, but his Judaism became almost like a funhouse mirror of the faith of his early years. A funhouse mirror is not an inversion, but instead a reordering of what one sees.

Kohler learned from Geiger, and his dissertation on the blessing of Jacob (Der Segen Jacobs) from the University of Erlangan in 1867 shows the latter's influence. The scholarly views expressed in this dissertation, according to David Philipson, a disciple of Kohler and an

58 Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776-1985. Volume III: The Germanic Period, Part 2 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 121. 59 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 271. 60 Kaufmann Kohler, Studies, Addresses and Personal Papers (New York: The Alumni Association of the Hebrew Union College, 1931), 475. 143 important Reform rabbi in his own right, excluded "him as a beginner in the German Jewish pulpit, for a reactionary movement had set in in Germany and the Jewish congregations with very few exceptions were conservative to a degree."61

Kohler moved to the United States in 1869 to take up a pulpit in Detroit. Starting his rabbinical career in what was then a western outpost certainly allowed Kohler to nurture the progress of Reform even further: no one was watching him, and he could freely institute change.

In 1871, he accepted a coveted pulpit in Chicago at the Sinai Temple. Sinai was then as today proud of its reputation as one of the most enthusiastically liberal congregations in America.

They still have Sunday services once a month (there are no services on Saturday morning)62 at the portentous 11 o'clock hour: that is the church hour for many Protestants.

Meyer admits that Kohler was not an "original thinker."64 Neither was Kohut. But their conventionality and lack of uniqueness make them important for a case study such as this: outliers are not representative, and most thought regresses to a mean: they were the middle point for their respective groups. What Kohler and a small cadre of Reform rabbis such as Emil G.

Hirsch and David Einhorn65 did "was to translate the ideas of Geiger and the other Germans into the popular thought of American Reform."66

61 This is of course a highly tendentious account of the situation in Germany, but I think Philipson is probably correct about the unlikelihood of Kohler landing a pulpit there. Philipson, "Kaufmann Kohler as Reformer" in Studies in Jewish Literature: Issued in Honor of Professor Kaufmann Kohler...on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1913), 13. 62 Services on the traditional Sabbath morning were not commonplace in many Reform synagogues in this period; the situation is quite different today. However, the central service, the one that still draws the most worshippers, is the late Friday evening service. 63 For the Sunday-Sabbath in American Judaism generally, see Kerry M. Olitzky, "The Sunday-Sabbath Movement in American Reform Judaism: Strategy or Evolution?" American Jewish Archives 32 (April 1982). 64 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 272. 65 Kohler and Emil Hirsch each married a daughter of Einhorn. Small world and all that. Hirsch's thought like Schechter's was influenced by Matthew Arnold, the former taking him as a religious radical and the latter considering Arnold a moderate. 66 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 272. 144 Kohler was the first American Jewish thinker to take seriously and incorporate the findings of biblical criticism into his religious worldview. The controlling idea of the first generations of biblical critics was that the Hebrew Bible was composed by many hands for diverse purposes and was consequently a product of its time. Kohler found this approach liberating. The Bible might be tinged with sanctity, but that sanctity was derived from the message of the Bible not its origins. If the Bible showed variety and development, then by extension contemporary Jewish life could do the same; it had a mandate and antecedent. That same variety and development would allow one to prefer some parts of the Bible over others.

Surely traditional Judaism had done that as well. (In a very real way, denominationalism is about what biblical concepts one wants to emphasize. If denominationalism is, as I have claimed, a competition for what is Jewishly normative, then the Bible and its interpretation is a large part of that.) Parts of the Bible, especially the last three books of the Pentateuch, reflected a primitive, perhaps semi-barbarous, reality: how could that preening sacerdotalism and sacrificial system have any contemporary resonance? Extract what you can and move on.

Religion is about progress: Conservative and Modern Orthodox Judaism shared this attitude more than they would have cared to admit. And the kernel extracted from the husk was the eternal, universal moral law best expressed through the Ten Commandments and the Prophets. 6

Although this law could be found in other religions, it came closest to perfection in the Bible and the variegated historical experience of Judaism in exile.

Alexander Kohut (1842-1894)

67 Emil Hirsch for a time replaced the Torah scrolls in the or on kodesh (the holy ark that contains the books of the Pentateuch read during the week—Monday and Thursday—and the Sabbath) with the books of the Prophets. Such boldness, however, was rarely repeated. See Dana Evan Kaplan, American Reform Judaism: An Introduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 30. 145 There was a great deal of worldview overlap between Kohler and Kohut: the latter shared the belief that the moral law was best expressed through Jewish scriptures and Jewish history, and that Judaism represented religion in its purest and therefore highest form. But

Kohut departed significantly from Kohler on many points of belief and practice. He supported cautious reform, but felt that Kohler steered Judaism into distinctly un-Jewish ways and by non-

Jewish methods. The approach of a Moses Schrieber (HaTam Safer)69 might fail to adequately negotiate boundary disputes between Judaism and the gentile world, but the program of radical

Reform was similarly unappealing, pushing too far in the opposite direction as Kohler and his colleagues wanted to further collapse the distinctions between Jews and non-Jews.70 A happy medium could be discovered, not as a novum in Jewish history but, by Kohut's understanding, discovered in the textual sources and lived historical reality of the Jewish people.

68 There is a history of Jewish triumphalism in non-Orthodox Judaism that is largely unknown. The commentary on the Pentateuch by Joseph Hertz, the chief rabbi of England from 1913-1946, is the most representative example of this triumphalism. Although his chumash is still used in some Orthodox synagogues, he was trained at the first Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He was its first ordinant in 1894, and Kohut was one of his teachers. See Pentateuch andHaftorahs. 5 vols., ed. Joseph Hertz (London: Soncino Press, 1938); Miri J. Freud-Kandel, Orthodox Judaism in Britain since 1913: An Ideology Forsaken (London: Vallentine-Mitchell, 2006); and Howard Meirovich, A Vindication of Judaism: The Polemics of the Hertz Pentateuch (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1998). For triumphalism in Reform Judaism, see Benny Kraut's Kraut, Benny. "Judaism Triumphant: Isaac Meyer Wise on Unitarianism and Liberal Christianity." AJS Review 7-8 (1982-1983). 69 Schreiber (1762-1839), better known as the HaTaM Sofer, was the great early opponent of Reform. He is best known for saying that the Torah forbids anything new. This statement has been often misunderstood, with Schreiber portrayed as a petulant traditionalist who refused to allow adjustments in Judaism. He did permit alterations, but only when justified through traditional Talmudic methods. See Shapiro, Marc B. "Aspects of Rabbi Moses Sofer's Intellectual Profile" in Be'erot Yitzhak: Studies in Memory oflsadore Twersky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 285-310; Jacob Katz, "Towards a Biography of the Hatam Sofer" in From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750-1870, ed. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 223-266. 70 But only so far: some of the early Reformers actively discouraged conversion of non-Jews to Judaism. A W.E. Todd inquired into conversion, and aspired to the Reform rabbinate. The rabbi with whom Todd sought to convert, Edward Calisch, corresponded with several leading Reformers, seeking guidance in this matter. Emil G. Hirsch wrote to Calisch: "My advice to your friendwoul d be to the Unitarian or Liberal Christian ministry...[because] it will be impossible for him to procure a position in a Jewish congregation...Theory in our congregations is, as you know, one thing, practice another. We are liberals, until a non-Jew believes us to be in earnest." Reform tried to jettison the ethnic/national aspects of Judaism, but the tensions remained. Hirsch quote from Kaplan, American Reform Judaism, 17. 146 Born into a pious home in Hungary, Kohut made his first scholarly mark in his early teens when conceived of and began collecting material for his Arukh Completum. It was a

77 dictionary of difficult Talmudic words, and a model of scholarship. It is still used today. In

1867, Kohut received rabbinic ordination from Breslau's Jewish Theological Seminary. Kohut 7' also took delivery of a doctorate, from the University of Leipzig in Oriental languages in 1864. *

The Seminary demanded full observance of the law while promoting secular research into the

Jewish past. As its name implies, the Breslau institution was the archetype of the eponymous

New York seminary. He would come to the United States in 1885 to become the rabbi at the

Reform synagogue Ahavath Chesed.74

Moshe Davis, in his standard history of the early Conservative movement (he preferred the term "historical school" to describe Kohut's era), noted that Kohut was "the architect who could build a coherent structure of thought for the school...In his first address from the pulpit of

Ahavath Chesed, Kohut expressed the point of view of the Historical School as a cohesive doctrine."75 It was his ability to differentiate clearly and publicly the differences between traditionalists who advocated for a measure of reform and those who saw reform as a good in and of itself that lent the mantle of leadership to Kohut. Kohut presented the differences simply:

Conservatism was for tradition, Reform was for change, the former conformed to the ancient Howard Lupovitch makes the compelling case that Kohut's upbringing in Hungary made his transition to the United States smoother. Hungarian Jews did not encounter governmental interference into internal religious matters, as was the case in Germany. What Hungarian authorities wanted from its Jewish citizens paralleled what American leaders wanted from Jewish Americans. Neither country was interested in the "particular affiliation" of individual Jews. They sought support for Magyarization and Americanization; that is, patriotism and the use of the national language. Lupovitch, "Navigating Rough Waters: Alexander Kohut and the Hungarian Roots of Conservative Judaism" AJS Review 32.1 (April 2008), 58. 72 See Alexander Kohut 'Arukh ha-shalem 8 vols. (Vienna, 1878-1892); and Bernard Felsenthal, "Kohut's 'Arukh Completum' Hebraica 9.1/2 (1892): 125-128. Kohut's Arukh was an update of Yehiel of Rome's late 11* century Talmudic dictionary. 73 Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism, 345. 74 Ahavath Chesed is today the Central Synagogue, and remains one of the crowns of the Reform movement. One of the rabbis who followed Kohut into the synagogue's pulpit was Jonah Wise, son of Isaac Mayer Wise, the father of institutional Reform Judaism in the United States. 75 Ibid., 222. 147 law, the latter threw off its yoke. What Kohut saw as the line in the sand between the groups was their respective positions on Jewish law. He supported its full retention with some changes at the margins: at Ahavath Chesed, for instance, men and women sat together.76

The early conservatives were often uncharitable in ascribing to Reformers a devotion to ritual change for the sake of change or change because of gentile reaction to Jewish custom. The

Reformers were considered reckless, with no rider driving the cart. But some of the public actions of Reformers like Kohler did provide fodder for conservatives such as Kohut to present them as antinomians or gentiles in waiting. Reform Jews were not antinomians (not in the hard definition at least), but consciously broke from traditional Judaism, remaining Jews all the while and not wishing to become gentiles. Nonetheless, Kohut made clear that a Judaism between

Kohler and Einhorn on the one hand and Hirsch and Moses Schreiber on the other was possible.

As Meyer puts it, he "clearly established an intermediate position between Reform and

Orthodoxy...'a Judaism of the healthy golden mean'."77

The first report we have of Kohut in the United States appears in a tradition-minded

Jewish weekly, The American Hebrew. The American Hebrew would carry the standard over the next decades for the nascent conservatives or inclusive Orthodox. The weekly took note of another paper, the Sabbath Visitor, which was not so sanguine about the arrival of Kohut: "J.V., in the Sabbath Visitor, does not think that Dr. Kohut is going to be so very important an acquisition after all; which is very ungenerous of J.V."78 The American Hebrew urges patience in deciding the merit of Kohut. Other Jewish papers weighed in with their opinions on his possible effect, including the influential American Israelite. The American Israelite was started by Isaac Mayer Wise in 1854, and was the main forum for Reform views on Jewish and

76 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 267. 77 Ibid. 78 The American Hebrew, March 20, 1885. Vol. 22, no. 6: pg. 1. 148 American life and thought. The "New York Letter" from "Excelsior" stated that Kohut "is rapidly making hosts of friends...The Doctor is certainly a manly specimen of a Jewish rabbi...He is an acquisition to the American Jewish clergy and the Ahawath Chesed

Congregation may well feel proud of the successor to the lamented Dr. Huebsch."79 Wise and his newspaper would rarely again speak of Kohut so warmly, and with good reason. But during Kohut's initial weeks in America, the Jewish community believed that he was someone who could drag American Judaism out of its ignorance.

We seem to be hardwired to believe that those in the past were more pious, more observant than ourselves. This belief is by no means limited to Judaism. It is to be a stimulus to greater performance of one's religious obligations to God, who is also the God of our fathers and mothers. The historical record teaches something else. To give some idea of the level of observance, or rather non-observance, in New York in the first months of Kohut's arrival at

Ahavath Chesed, consider this notice in The American Hebrew: "Dr. Kohut...was invited to preach a sermon before the congregation of the Rivington street synagogue, on the second day of Shebuoth but declined because of the long distance he would be required to walk, and ride he would not, even on the second day of Shebuoth." The weekly expresses surprise, a happy surprise to be sure, that the rabbi would observe the second day of Shavuot. The point is obvious: no one observed the second day outside some of the Orthodox community. Ignorance

7 The American Israelite, May 29, 1885. Vol. 31., no. 48: pg. 6. 80 David Philipson, a major Reform presence during this period and during Schechter's era, later commented with far less enthusiasm that "the conservative and orthodox wings chortled with glee and hailed him as their leader." He failed to remember that Reform welcomed Schechter favourably as well. Time plus hard feelings: a distortion of historical memory. David Philipson, "The Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference" Central Conference of American Rabbis 45 (1935): 193. 81 The American Hebrew, May 29, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 3: pg. 6. 149 and indifference are not new, and I would argue that the religious situation for Kohut was worse than if today a rabbi from another country were plunked down in contemporary Manhattan.

The American Hebrew believed that the appearance of Kohut in New York augured good things for an embryonic traditional Judaism that was not insular. The paper observed that "with a strong conservative bias, trained to look upon tradition as something to be reverenced instead of scorned, and preserved by his already matured intelligence from the delusive and fascinating fashions of what is called 'liberality in thought,' ultra-radicals will find they have now a severe critic and an able one...who is desirous of shivering many a lance in defence of respected

Traditional Judaism."83 There was a growing though often unspoken sentiment and support for a moderate Reform, one willing to alter certain forms of religious observance but only to make observance more respectable and acceptable. It was expected in non-Orthodox and inclusivist

Orthodox synagogues that the rabbi would have some familiarity with Western literature, science, history and art. A knowledgeable rabbi would be an honour to the congregation. An

Orthodox rabbi was expected to know and decide Jewish law, not to read Tennyson, Darwin or

Macaulay. What made Kohut distinct from an immigrant Orthodox rabbi was, for instance, a willingness to cite trends and issues of concern to all Americans as when he made mention of "a recent sermon by Henry Ward Beecher." The American Hebrew also made reference to

Beecher's sermon on the relationship of evolution and religion. The paper also encouraged

Of

Kohut to continue to improve his English: the native-born American Jewish condescension to

Jewish immigrants was not only limited to the poor. He originally gave his sermons in German, 82 The "information asymmetry" may be worse today—the gap in knowledge between the group that knows the most and that which knows the least—but a larger percentage know something. 83 American Hebrew, May 29, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 3: pg. 2. 84 The American Israelite, June 5, 1885. Vol. 31, no. 49: pg. 6. 85 "If the doctor will master the language with the speed and thoroughness with which he places himself in sympathy with the moral and religious institutions of the country, he will soon be a master of English." American Hebrew, June 5, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 4: pg. 1. In the same number: "His voice is the one element that stands in need of modulation and control. Altogether his delivery is natural, forcible and earnest." Vol. 23, no. 4: pg. 2. 150 and was considered a stirring speaker. Kohler was not: he was a fine polemicist and able administrator, not an orator.

It was recognized early and explicitly that Kohut fit into neither the Reform nor the conventional Orthodox camp, but rather as one who "accepted] the old doctrines, but not quite in the old way."86 He himself acknowledged that some commentators branded him as Orthodox and others marked him as Reform. He denied these characterizations. Howard Lupovitch describes Kohut's vision of Judaism as decidedly non-denominational: sects are "improper deviations from an authentic, pre-existing Jewish traditionalism."87 One observer in the

American Hebrew declared that "his [Kohut's] chief aim was to become a competent gardener in the Lord's vineyard, planting the wholesome seed of reform upon the fertile soil of conservatism, as recommended by the Scriptures, revised by the Talmud."88 Religious centrism was a gathering and growing attitude: newspapers confirm rather than consolidate opinion. At first greeted as part of the global Reform movement, Kohut was soon considered too traditional to co-exist within the ambit of American Reform.89 The American Hebrew tried to paint him "as a worthy champion of unpartisan, unsectarian, Mosaic-rabbinical Judaism."90 As we saw in the first chapter, Schechter would view himself in a similar mold, that is, someone whose thought and practice naturally pulled toward the religious center. They both also sought to reconcile the divided parts of the community. A later reviewer, Jacob Kohn, offered the opinion of Barnett

Elzas that Kohut "was in fact a conservative Reformer, offering the old and the new in happily blended union...he sought neither 'the way of fire' nor 'the way of snow,' to walk in either of

86 Maurice Harris, "An Estimate of Dr. Alexander Kohut's Place in American Judaism," in Kohut, The Ethics of the Fathers (New York: n.p., 1920), lxxxi. 87 Lupovitch, "Navigating Rough Waters: Alexander Kohut and the Hungarian Roots of Conservative Judaism," 50. 88 American Hebrew, June 5, 1885.Vol. 23, no. 4: pg. 9. 89 This was also the experience of Schechter. At first embraced by the community at large, he was later repulsed by those to his left and right. 90 American Hebrew, September 9, 1885. Vol. 24, no. 5: pg. 2. 151 which, according to the parable of the ancients, meant death. He sought 'the middle way,' to walk in which meant life." And "mapping the middle ground,' the path of religious centrism described in this thesis, for Kohut emerged in his series of sermons on the much loved tractate of the Mishnah, popularly called PirkeiAvot (Sayings of the Fathers). These sermons would spark the debate between Kohut and Kohler in the summer of 1885, and it is to that controversy proper that we now turn.

The Kohut-Kohler Dispute

Alexander Kohut's prooftext for the maintenance of Jewish law in the present time was the only fully aggadic (that is, non-legal) tractate of the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot. And it is appropriate that he employed this tractate during the summer, as Pirkei Avot has traditionally been read on Sabbath afternoons during this season. Kohut read contemporary concerns into the ethical maxims, moral suasion and narrative theology of the tractate. Pirkei Avot was for him a model for being Jewish in the world, hitching derekh eretz (the general customs of the country) to a strong Jewish identity. Traditional Judaism, based on Mosaic Law and belief in revelation, fell within the scope of the tractate, while Reform landed outside its parameters, according to

Kohut. His sermons, or what he called a "cycle of religious discourses,"93 would mark out those parameters. Jacob Kohn pointed out the same thing but added that Kohut guarded his left flank against Orthodoxy as well, noting that "these sermons constituted a first attempt on the part of the eminent scholar to give a popular exposition of his standpoint regarding the great

91 Jacob Kohn, Review of "The Ethics of the Fathers by Alexander Kohut" Jewish Quarterly Review 12.2 (1921), 253. 92 Lupovitch, "Navigating Rough Waters: Alexander Kohut and the Hungarian Roots of Conservative Judaism," 52. 93 American Hebrew, June 5, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 4: pg. 2; also, The Ethics of the Fathers (New York: n.p., 1920), 2. Kohut's sermons were translated from the German and privately printed in 1920. The 1920 version is better translated, but the 1885 weekly translations were the ones read by the local and national Jewish community. The chapter will note variations where appropriate. 152 controversy between orthodoxy and reform which was then raging." Reform was the immediate and public opponent, but Kohut also positioned his stance against what he considered to be the right wing of the Jewish community. Lupovitch succinctly sums up importance of the debate for Kohut in the context of American Judaism: "In challenging Kohler, Kohut expressed a sharp disdain for ideologically supersaturated, extremist sentiments in any direction. He impugned Kohler's utter dismissal of halakhic authority, no less than Orthodoxy's wholesale rejection of halakhic mutability, as parallel threats to Jewish unity. Instead, Kohut championed a traditional Judaism that was unshackled by the vociferous conflicts between Orthodoxy and

Reform and unaltered by the ideologically driven factionalism that had overwhelmed central

European Jewry during the nineteenth century and had begun to divide American Jewry during the 1880s."95

Although other Jewish weeklies were involved in the print dispute, the American

Hebrew was the main forum for the fairly civil debate between the two rabbis. The paper published the sermons of both rabbis. The American Hebrew began printing in 1879, quickly developing into an important force in the Americanizing of the United States growing immigrant

Jewish population. It had the earnestness of other American Victorian publications, seeking the moral elevation of their community specifically and American society in general. The tone of the paper strikes us today as honest and sober but dull and with a remarkable lack of irony. The editorial board, overseen by publisher Philip Cowen, saw itself as charged with the mission to remind their co-religionists of their moral and ceremonial obligations, and always put those obligations in their American context. The American Hebrew wanted Jews to be good

Americans, and unlike in some parts of post-Emancipation Europe, to be a good citizen meant

94 Kohn, Review of "The Ethics of the Fathers by Alexander Kohut," 252. 95 Lupovitch, "Navigating Rough Waters: Alexander Kohut and the Hungarian Roots of Conservative Judaism," 51. 153 for the paper to be first a good Jew. Cowen, however, admitted that he wanted his "paper to be sought by the best classes of non-Jews." This could be done through contrivances such as the dignified sermons of Alexander Kohut.97

Other Jewish publications quickly picked up on the significance of the controversy.

"Excelsior" in The American Israelite, a Reform advocate, remarked in June 1885 that Reform

Judaism had been confronted by a traditionalist opponent in a very public manner. Kohut, as will be discussed later, had rather recklessly declared that a Jew who does not accept Jewish law as it has developed and been passed down was to be cut off from the people Israel; he was no better than a Karaite, a Sadducee, a denier of the Oral Law. "Excelsior" observes that rabbinic

Judaism was not the normative Judaism of the American Jewish community: the majority do not follow Jewish law in its in ceremonial aspects.98 The traditionalists were minorities now. The

Charles Wyszkowski, A Community in Conflict: American Jewry during the Great European Immigration (New York: University Press of America, 1991), xiii. The paper has gone through several iterations, changes in ownership and names. It has evolved into The Jewish Week, which serves New York City and surrounding communities. 97 The sermons were good for the American Hebrew's bottom line, as it trumpeted proudly. The paper gathered the sermons into a small edition and published them, an event that "is anticipated with eagerness, if we may judge by the advance orders which we are receiving, and which will shortly exhaust the entire limited edition." The point: Buy now! 98 "Excelsior" was surely correct, as most American Jews were not observant. But that was not Kohut's point. He was declaring, albeit far too harshly, that one who did not accept that the obligations of the law devolve upon him- or herself was not to be considered Jewish. To acknowledge the obligation, not to carry out the commandments, was the point, although the performance of the commandments was the purpose. The American Israelite June 19, 1885. Vol. 31, no. 51: pg. 6. Kohler made note of this comparison of Reform with Karaism a week earlier in his opening salvo against Kohut and "rigid conservatism." He also complains that the press treats him and his movement unjustly, as the New York Jewish weeklies are an "exclusively conservative local press." He was right; New York was not a "Reform city" at the time. See American Hebrew, June 12, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 5: pg. 2. Early Orthodox leaders also linked Reform to the medieval Karaite movement. Moses Sofer, the first Orthodox rabbi to come to terms with the radical religious and politico-cultural transformations brought about through emancipation, warned his fellow traditionalists not to allow "our sons to marry their daughters, so as not to be drawn after them, and their sect would be like that of Zadoq and Boethus, Anan and Saul..." Anan was Anan ben David, the founder of the Karaite sect, more accurately called the Ananites in its early years. But the world was now different, and Sofer knew it: "This is only in theory but not in practice, for without the permission of the king...my words have no authority." David Ellenson, "Jacob Katz and Jewish Modernity" in After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press), 67. Gordis calls Reform—I think he has in mind its nineteenth century iterations in America—"a type of Karaism in reverse—Karaism had begun by challenging the authority of the Talmud, and cleaving to the text of Scripture, but soon found it necessary, in order to make Biblical law function, to create its own Oral Law. Reform began in an anti-Talmudic spirit, and declared itself to be 'Mosaic,' but it quickly surrendered the binding authority of Biblical law as well." Gordis, "Authority in Jewish Law," 53. 154 same paper tells us a week later that crowds were lining up at Ahavat Chesed, Kohut's synagogue, to hear his sermons, and, one imagines, especially his remarks on Reform Judaism.

The observer notes in passing that Kohut does not partake of biblically or rabbinically forbidden foods, something "almost obsolete in this country."99 He goes on further to comment that because of Kohut, "all in all, there is an invisible—because indirect—warfare raging between reform and orthodox Judaism."100

The intellectual history of Judaism in America in the period immediately prior to this controversy can most charitably be described as somnolent. The dispute between the most articulate advocate of an already established Reform movement and the leader of a new brand of traditional Judaism helped renew flagging interest in religious and cultural ideas and ideals. This is best expressed in a letter from correspondent "Am haarez" (a rustic, non-urban dweller; in modern Hebrew, a ignoramus)101 who testifies that the debate playing out in the pages of the

American Hebrew "has no doubt revived an interest in questions affecting American Judaism, which for the past few years had been discarded largely from the mind of our Jews."102

Denominational pluralism, far from reflecting a lack of concern about the truth of religious ideas and ideals, stimulates curiosity.

Several months after the formal conclusion of the Kohut-Kohler controversy, a

Philadelphia paper, the American, noted that the proximate cause of the Pittsburgh Platform and the establishment of the Jewish Theological Seminary was the sermons of Kohut and the response of Kohler. Thus, the institutional and philosophical etiologies of both movements were

The American Israelite, June 26, 1885. Vol. 31., no. 52: pg. 1. 100 Ibid. 101 For the varied uses of Am haaretz in rabbinic literature, see Sotah 22a, Berakhot 47b, Pesahim 49a, Gittin 61a. See also Aharon Oppenheimer, The 'am ha-Aretz: A Study in the Social History of the Jewish People in the Hellenistic-Roman Period (Leiden : E.J. Brill, 1977). 102 The American Hebrew, July 17, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 10: pg. 5. 155 nurtured in a brief controversy over well-trodden issues. What then were the issues that so divided the two rabbis and their respective communities, and which would later lead to a breach so irreconcilable that two competing denominations would be formed out of it? Let us now turn to those issues.

Development

Judaism developed in time. It has a history that can be measured by scholarship. There were changes in Jewish religious life as it encountered foreign religious and philosophical concepts, some of which threatened Judaism and others that were adapted to it. The truth of development was shared by Kohut and Kohler. They disagreed, however, about its meaning. For

Kohler, that Judaism has developed and therefore does not resemble biblical or rabbinic Judaism justifies conscious change, even change outside what had been the normative Jewish methodologies for instituting change. Robert Southard, on the other hand, argues that Kohler supported change "as long as it always stayed in continuity with prior Jewish ideas and practice."1041 believe Kohler, especially in the period under discussion, was more radical than that, and was willing to unhinge Jewish legal processes from their traditional moorings. In a

"Sherman putting Atlanta to the torch" moment, Kohler appeared to suggest development was not necessary: the whole of the developed past had to go, as "we [have] dwelt too long upon the rubbish of the past."105 He argued in calmer moments that he had encouragement from Jewish history for changes that he desired to institute. But he meant change in general, not the specific modifications he wanted to introduce. Development was intrinsic to Judaism. In fact, breaking with the past was a connection to the past: the medievals had broken from the Talmudic past as

103 See The American Hebrew, April 23, 1886. Vol. 26, no., 11: pg. 6. 104 Southard, "The Theologian of the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform," 69. 105 American Hebrew, June 26, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 7: pg. 9. 156 Jews of Talmudic times had broken from the biblical past. Revelation, as Kohler defined it, was process not event, something that discloses itself in discrete historical periods rather than a one- off episode. The implications are obvious. If revelation is progressive, then one cannot be tied to the past, although respect for it must always be shown. Yet it is clear at the same time that

Jewish history as revelation does not merely evolve but has an intended trajectory, namely, the loosening of the particularistic Mosaic law, which served its purpose for its time, and the gathering and developing sense of universal brotherhood under the canopy of ethical monotheism, a theology best communicated to humanity by way of the prophets. Kohler saw

Reform then as the rational consequence of the internal development of Judaism. One was powerless, perhaps foolish, to obstruct progress.

For Kohut, development was plain fact, a historical truth not to be countenanced by any conventional Orthodox insistence on religious stasis. As Michael Meyer writes, "traditional

Judaism is nonhistorical. It knows no idea of development. God's will for Jews was revealed at

Sinai, to be reinterpreted, but never fundamentally changed, by succeeding generations...Until

Geiger, almost no one had given any serious attention to the possibility that Judaism might have undergone a process of transformation prompted by changing external circumstances as well as by inner spiritual development."106 Judaism has shown great variety, alteration and adaptation.

Underlying this diversity is a continuity built upon belief in revelation, the mission of the chosen people and the final redemption of humankind in a far distant eschatological horizon. The pluralism of attitudes and practice, for both rabbis, was a net positive. Diversity of thought and practice stimulated reflection and a need to justify one's own thoughts and practices in the face of other valid options. Even among the Orthodox such multiplicity was granted: "In the realm of biblical exegesis (parshanuf) and Jewish thought (hashkafah), diversity of opinion and of

106 Michael Meyer, "Geiger's Historical Judaism" in New Perspectives on Abraham Geiger, 4-5. 157 interpretation is pervasive and the perception of its legitimacy is widely acknowledged."

Pluralism was embraced but bounded by rules for Kohut, and this separated him from Kohler.

And, in any case, the former concluded that his community's "religious guide is ntra rmn the

1 AQ law of Moses interpreted and applied in the light of Tradition," while the latter stressed the autonomy of individual conscience.

The question of development troubled the intellectual patriarch of the Conservative movement, Zacharias Frankel. He recognized, as Kohut and other religious centrists would, that

"maintaining the integrity of Judaism simultaneously with progress, this is the essential problem of the present. Can we deny the difficulty of a satisfactory solution? Where is the point where the two apparent contraries can meet?"109 This quandary is the centrist dilemma. The religious

"left" acknowledged development as a warrant for conscious change while the religious "right," at least publicly, claimed that the tradition was in content the same as that originally given to

Moses at Mt. Sinai. The centrist, to claim the name or be claimed by the name, had to join an admission of obvious development with attachment to tradition, an attachment that could not be based on nostalgia but on the belief in the truth claims of revelation. No easy task there.

That development had occurred in the history of the Jews did not worry Kohut as much as the implications of development did. Development was judged positively by the Reformers, many of whom wished to do away with a normative past. The past was not corrupt, but simply not authoritative. It instructs, but does not command. Kohut, however, insisted that "in relation to religious ideas the past centuries must be considered.. .especially as for so many centuries they have served as staff and support; sure guide, solace and comfort for a whole nation in its

107 Michael Rosenzweig, "Eilu ve-Eilu Divrei Elohim Hayyim" in Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy, ed. Moshe Sokol (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1989), 96. 108 American Hebrew, July 17, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 10: pg. 4. 109 Zacharias Frankel, "On Changes in Judaism" in Tradition and Change: the Development of Conservative Judaism, ed. Mordecai Waxman (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1958), 44. 158 dispersion... If we would burn the bridges behind us; break off the communications which unite the past with the present.. .and rather pursue the untrodden tracks.. .that lead to religious chaos, then could the sages well say of us: 'Some paths please some although the end of the paths is death; that is, results in moral, religious, death.'"110 Remove the talmudic quotation and Kohler would answer "yes" to the above: the past has its voice, but the spirit of the age and its full development are stronger and more central to the concerns of the day; after the Enlightenment, the idea of the past as a prop and guarantor for the present is an idea for children; there is no essential historical unity in Judaism outside the devotion to the moral law; and the untried path of Reform must be followed for Judaism to survive and flourish in a radically new political and cultural arrangement, that is, a place where religious affiliation or non-affiliation is voluntary.

From fate to choice, as Peter Berger noted.111

In the matter of the maintenance of the rabbinate, Kohut rejected the Reform notion of an unlimited development. He based his discussion of the premodern and modern rabbinate on the passage in PirkeiAvot attributed to R. Joshua ben Perachyah concerning the requirement to

"appoint a teacher." For Reformers such as Kohler, the rabbi is "he who only teaches from the point of view of easy performance, who never threatens with the staff of rebuke." How could he? The Reform rabbi can preach out of the sources of Judaism but cannot speak of obligation from those same sources. Reform rabbis, like other rabbis, worried over the moral conditions of their congregations, but the Reform rabbi could not legitimately make demands upon the congregation because of the logic of personal autonomy. Reform rabbis did not have and did not

110 American Hebrew, July 17, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 10: pg. 4. In the 1920 edition: "If we would burn the bridges behind us which unite the present with the past, deserting the beaten paths which our fathers have made for us..." (page 48). 111 Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press, 1979), 11. 112 American Hebrew, July 17, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 10: pg. 4. 1920 variation: "who makes Religion of easy performance" (50). 159 see themselves as having the traditional warrant to act as a legal authority. Of course, even in the most traditional circles rabbinic authority was constrained by the people's acceptance of that authority. They knew a bully when they saw one, and could always run him out of town.

Kohut recognized that development was necessary in the appointment of a rabbi. He acknowledges, cautiously, that attention must be accorded "for the exigencies of the times, for the refined aesthetic taste, and what may be discarded without altering the nature and character

1 1 "2 of the foundations of faith.""J This view is closer to Kohler's than Kohut would have comfortably admitted. He concedes that contemporary mores being what they are, the local rabbi now must weigh the risk and the reward of keeping the old faith intact. Kohut wished to consciously change Jewish observance at the margins, that is, at the level of outward appearance: make the service more respectable, more decorous and install rabbis that are informed about the events of the day. Of course, it is difficult to find that Archimedean point where one can say "this far and no further." It is not that allowing for minimal change is a slippery slope, but that once change is seen as a value in itself, no matter how minor the practical changes suggested, the option of change is therefore broached and open. Drawing limits around the advisability of change is particularly knotty in a denomination known for its lack of philosophical coherence; that is to say, what are the rational justifications for limiting change or for promoting change? Whatever the case may be, Kohut defined a space for organic development in Judaism. The rabbi was sensibly bound to "the circumstances of time and place"—no two eras or communities have exactly similar needs and desires—but, and here is root of his argument, once a community has selected its authority it cedes to this teacher

"authoritative power, and [the right] to be guided by his teachings whether they be difficult or

American Hebrew, July 17, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 10: pg. 4. 160 convenient in nature." He helps bind the community to tradition and law, and is not bound by the community to its shifting "whims." But the dilemma remains: how does a rabbi in a land where religious liberty is held as an a priori right and not as an entitlement from the state,116 where religious choice is fully voluntary, how does he balance these facts with traditional authority? In the end, Kohut resolves this through his own optimism. He believes people want religious authority, that they need guidance in religious life and that they will accept a teacher

(rabbi) who fulfills their desire for authority.

Both rabbis admitted that there was development in the Bible. The change from animal sacrifice to prayer, for instance, is commonly cited as a revolutionary transformation from one form of religious consciousness to another. Offer lips not bulls, said Hosea. So, Reform and conservative Judaism begin from a common starting-point. They will end up in different locations.

The quality of justice, of fairness, is considered to the finest quality of Moses, the greatest of prophets. For Reform Jews such as Kohler, the legislative powers of Moses are restricted to his time. Moses stamped out idolatry, and the idolatries of the present do not resemble those of the past. The legal authority of the Mosaic law, in particular its ritual specifications, no longer obtains. They were true for Moses' time, and the people were right to follow that law. But the conditions in which the Mosaic Law was formulated no longer exist.

The Reformers were not calling for a second law, but rather to winnow down traditional Jewish

115 Ibid. Kohut maintains that some rabbis are fancied because they permit the congregation to slack, to be lax in ritual observance: "he surrenders himself to the will of the people, letting the crooked be straight, the straight crooked." 116 See Novak, In Defense of Religious Liberty (Wilmington, DE: ISI, in press). 161 law to its core element, which is its ethical content. But Kohut charges the Reformers with beginning at a false presupposition and consequently deriving "false conclusions." He insists that the Torah as it has come to us cannot be changed: that we trust what Moses reported as true,

"his teaching is true, and we who rebel against it, are in error."119 Judaism, he seems to say, has its magisterium, or normative teaching authority; it is the Torah and, more importantly, its transmission.120 That does not mean that parts of the Bible do not show the work of human hands or that liturgical and ritual life have been passed down without alteration from Sinai. The commandment to wear tefillin is direct. What the teflllin look like and how they are to be worn are subject to legitimate debate. Therefore, Kohut writes, authorities can "make concessions on such matters as do not compose the vital principles of Judaism...the Thora [sic] admitfs] of no accommodation or adjustment...but injudicial interpretation adjustment may be utilized"121

Kohler would agree wholeheartedly. It is a matter of where to draw the limits of what constitutes normative Judaism. Kohut wished to acknowledge organic development and then circumscribe it by "reconcil[ing] differences." He presented a centrist justification: "that we reconcile ourselves at the juncture of the two ages, that the departure of the modern from ancient finds some

In contrast to early Christianity which saw its law—lodged in the personhood and divinity of Jesus of Nazareth—as superseding that of the Mosaic law. The early Christians, too, kept the universal moral content of the Mosaic law. 118 American Hebrew, Sept. 18, 1885. Vol. 24, no. 6: pg. 3. 1920 variation: "we must insist that the premises are false and the conclusion necessarily false also" (page 120). 119 Ibid. 120 The transmission of the Torah is central to PirkeiAvot. It established the rabbis as authoritative in matters of Jewish law. The famous first chapter of the tractate states that the Torah was handed down in an uninterrupted chain, from one authority to authority, beginning with Moses to Joshua to the Elders, then the Prophets and then to the Men of the Great Assembly. The latter had functions similar to those of the rabbis of the Talmud. It has been traditionally understood that this tractate confirms the antiquity of the Oral Law, which was said to have been given to Moses at Sinai. 121 Ibid, pg. 3-4. Change is to be permitted according to Kohut for mipnei darkhei shalom; the purposes of keeping the peace among the people Israel. (In Talmudic literature the phrase mipnei darkhei shalom [for the paths of peace] applies to Jewish-gentile relations rather than intra-Jewish matters. See B. Gittin 61a). Change, then, is possible with halakha, the humanly governed system of Jewish law. Halakha is the human specification of the divinely revealed mitzvot (commandments). The former is subject to revision, the latter is not. 1920 variation: "but in the non-essentials, 'interpretation' may be invoked and modification of established rules permitted. Opinions alter and manners change; we must take account of altered conditions" (pages 121-22). 162 moderating of the difficulties for our times without violating the fundamental principles of

Judaism... With broader culture, more refined taste, and widening of the aesthetic consciousness, our ideas of the world and of men, and of our relations to the universe, change and are sensibly modified."122 This passage shows Kohut prepared to remove many of the historical accretions in the outward forms of religious life (he surely had in mind East European Orthodoxy and its decidedly and unashamedly unaesthetic services) for the sake of uniting as much of the observant Jewish community as possible.123 Hence, his support for a uniform prayer book: in this, Kohut wanted traditional Judaism to resemble the hierarchical but seemingly unified

Anglo-Jewish community, which itself was modelled on the Church of England and its clear liturgical uniformity. "A uniform prayer-book would at one stroke close the congregational strife and put an end to the contentions which now distracts us," Kohut maintains.124 One appreciates his optimism; it runs counter to the history of religious denominationalism in

America. Kohler, on the other hand, was willing to sacrifice Jewish unity for the purpose of what he saw as the truth of Judaism; he didn't need to reconcile anything.

Biblical Criticism

Except for the right-wing Orthodox, all Jewish groups accept biblical criticism to greater and lesser degrees. As might be imagined, what became Conservative Judaism was reluctant to admit the validity of some of the more radical results of criticism, in particular the results of

122 Ibid. 123 And not just outward forms. Reform Judaism from its beginnings encouraged Jewish women to learn about the sources of their tradition. Kohut also applauded this very real change in Jewish tradition. In traditional circles, few women had access to learning, blocked by social attitudes and talmudic rulings which (usually) prohibited Jewish women from learning the Hebrew Bible and especially the Talmud. Kohut writes: "I cannot sufficiently praise the education of the female sex in this country, in which the religious training of girls is on an equality with that of boys, in fact excelling the latter in results." American Hebrew, Sept. 23, 1885. Vol. 24, no. 7: pg. 3. Kohut unequivocally rejects R. Eliezer's opinion that the father who teaches his daughter Torah is in error. 124 Ibid. 163 those critics who found discrepancies in the accounts of the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch was composed by different hands, at different times and for different purposes. This is the major finding of the JEDP hypothesis, made famous by Wellhausen's Prolegomena}25

Traditionalist liberal Jews such as Kohut, Morais and, later, Schechter, acknowledge the accuracy of the criticism that touched upon the dating and authorship of Psalms, for instance.

They knew that Judaism would not be undermined if the people did not believe that King David was not its author, as had been the traditional attribution. The Talmud, too, was open to scholarly inquiry. The point of such inquiry was not to show that the Talmud's creation was a human endeavour, though surely it was, but to demonstrate the continuity of tradition. In any case, it was far easier to show the Talmud as a human document. Frankel's Darkhei ha-Mishnah had shown that. But the Pentateuch was off limits. The same attitude held for Kohut.

For the Reformers of the nineteenth-century, higher biblical criticism was of a piece with its worldview. In fact, Reform would certainly have developed differently in the absence of such criticism. (Isaac Meyer Wise, however, parted company with many of his Reform colleagues on the issue of Pentateuchal criticism. Like those who founded the Seminary, he prevented such criticism from being part of the curriculum at Hebrew Union College. When Kohler took over as

President of the College, he integrated Pentateuchal criticism into the curriculum). Part of the novelty of Reform, then, was its denial of the actual revelation of the Torah to Moses and the desire of that Reform group to remain Jewish, to not join another religious community. Until the nineteenth-century, one of the few dogmas that rabbinic Jews, with few exceptions, agreed on trans-geographically and trans-temporally was the truth of revelation. The exact nature of how

125 See Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), Wellhausen popularized some of the findings of higher biblical criticism, especially that the Pentateuch was a fully human document with all of the biases and contradictions of any human work. He posited four sources for the five books of Moses: J (Yahwist), E (Elohist), D (Deutronomist) and P (Priestly). 164 the Torah was revealed was an open issue, but its truth was assumed. Thus, for the first time in

Jewish history, a Jewish group emerged that denied the event of revelation. Denial of the divinity of the Oral Law was not uncommon in Jewish history, but a conscious rejection of the divine origin of the Hebrew Bible was new, although individual Jews such as Baruch Spinoza had denied it previously. Such individuals were considered heretics, but they were acting as individuals. Now a publicly Jewish group with no desire to loosen its attachments to Judaism or the Jewish people acknowledged that the sources of that religion, which also was the narrative of that people, were not true in a historical sense. As Kohler wrote in the American Hebrew, "I do not believe in the divine origin of the Mosaic law and tradition as our orthodox brethren do, but

I do believe in the divine mission of the Jewish people as the martyr priests of pure monotheism with its true ethics."126 What Kohler wanted Jews to know about the Bible was not its factual accuracy but its moral persuasiveness: "The Bible is holy not because it is inspired, but because and insofar as it does still, inspire. It is not true because God has spoken the word, but because in the truth, the comfort, the hope, the final victory of justice which it holds out, you hear God speak to you in soul stirring strains."127 The Bible that Kohler wanted was Jeffersonian in its vision, "purified from all its offensive and obnoxious elements for religious forms and practices which elevate heart and soul" and that can command reason's allegiance. What was revealed to human consciousness was the spirit and not the word of God. The consequences of this revolution in religious consciousness were far-reaching. Rather than permitting biblical criticism

American Hebrew, July 9, 1886. 127 Quoted in Meyer, Response to Modernity, 273. Prof. David Neelands pointed out to me several intriguing parallels between Kohler's idea of revelation and F.D. Maurice's. Maurice, like Kohler, argues that the historical event of revelation is not what is central to faith, but rather that the revelation of God as a person rouses and confirms the existential truth of faith. See Maurice, What is Revelation? (Cambridge: Macmillan & Co., 1859), 54- 55. 128 American Hebrew, June 26, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 7: pg. 9. 165 to "challenge the essentials of Judaism" Reform changed what had traditionally been considered the essentials of Judaism in order to better preserve it. The conservatives, on the other hand, sought to check criticism by allowing in moderate criticism. Naomi Cohen comments that the reason Reform confronted and assimilated biblical criticism into its worldview was not to thwart Orthodoxy, but to contest what it saw as threats from the left:

"Reformers challenged the agnostics, the followers of Ethical Culture (for substituting faith in man as the foundation for human morality), secular nationalists and proto-Zionists (who argued that nationalism was the only vital component left in Judaism), and even the so-called liberals who tried to find 'rational' explanations for Biblical miracles. They, the Reform rabbis, were reiterating once again their brand of religion, an evolutionary Judaism, harmonized well with the spirit of the age."130 Biblical criticism was part of the organic evolution of the human mind, and the Reform movement was an early adapter.

Kohut did not see any reason to align the purposes of biblical criticism and the emerging sciences with the Bible. All he would claim about the Bible was that it was "not in contradiction with the results of honest, thorough science." Scientific criticism or archaeological evidence did not influence his view of the Bible, which was never "textualist" in any case (there is no comparable biblical fundamentalism in normative, rabbinic Jewish history to the fundamentalism that developed among some Protestant groups in North America in the early part of the twentieth-century). He encouraged his students at the Jewish Theological Seminary to know the findings of higher criticism if only to know that the scholarship behind them was

Naomi W. Cohen, "The Challenges of Darwinism and Biblical Criticism to American Judaism" Modern Judaism 4(1984), 121. 130 Ibid. 131 Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism, 290. 166 "anti-biblical." The Bible's truth rested in the communication of God's word to the world

generally and the Jewish people specifically: it was neither a first-order historical work nor a

scientific treatise. The biblical critics focused on what the Bible was not rather than what it was.

Again, Kohut and his colleagues cut a middle path by studying the Nevi 'im (prophets), Kethuvim

(writings) and Talmud critically but refusing investigation into the composition of the

Pentateuch.

One of his most prominent colleagues was Sabato Morais, an Italian-born Jew who also

lived in and learned from his experience in England. Morais, the first president of the Jewish

Theological Seminary (1886), supported Kohut's conservative tendencies in biblical criticism.

Writing in the American Hebrew during the heat of the Kohut-Kohler controversy, he responded

to the Reform rabbi's embrace of higher criticism by stating, "I shall never acquiesce in the theory of your modern school of criticism, placing sacerdotalism and prophetism squarely

•I -2-5 against each other in open war...I read my Bible without the spectacles of Wellhausen."

Morais cut Kohler to the quick: to be accused of siding with Wellhausen, and not just assenting to his theories, was to be convicted of consorting with a form of scholarship that attempted to

give anti-Judaism a respectable, educated face.134

Kohut principally saw in biblical criticism not an external threat rather an internal one.

The internally compelling reasons behind the commandments—that they were given by a God who transcends history yet acts in it—had been diminished by the critics who judged that the commandments were invented by humans for limited human purposes. That is to say, the transcendent had become immanent, the permanent, provisional. "The views of non-Jewish

132 Ibid., 296. 133 American Hebrew, July 10, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 9: pg. 9. 134 Higher criticism was censured by most Conservatives. Schechter famously equated higher criticism with a "higher anti-Semitism." See "Higher Criticism—Higher Anti-Semitism" in Seminary Addresses and Other Papers (Westmead, Eng. Gregg International Publishers, 1969). 167 Biblical critics must be banished from the camp of Israel, when they endanger its holy treasures.

The results of Wellhausen's researches belong as little to the Jewish pulpit as the religious beliefs of Unitarianism,"135 he wrote. Jewish biblical criticism would be alive to the reality of the Torah as it has been transmitted. Such a criticism would seek out continuities rather than discontinuities. This overview of biblical criticism in the Reform-traditionalist divide leads directly in the next section. The debate about the value of higher criticism hinged on what that criticism meant for the authority of the law and normative practice.

Law

Kohut and Kohler agreed that Judaism had clear points of development in its history and that biblical criticism had its place in a modern Jewish seminary. They disagreed about the degree to which development occurred and the consequences of that development. They differed about the results of biblical criticism. But on each issue they started from a similar point, even if they ended with markedly dissimilar conclusions. They would part decisively on the nature of and commitment to traditional Jewish law.

Law, Jewish or otherwise, is a naming device: who's in, who's out, a boundary marker between the innocent and the guilty, Jew and gentile, a good Jew and a bad Jew. And law does not exist in a vacuum; it is decidedly historical. Law demands continuity even when it evolves

(it must evolve from something), and continuity insists on authority. It is by nature and necessity conservative (laws cannot be churned over constantly: who would follow such a system?), but by that same nature and necessity it is plastic, flexible, the better to be applied to particular situations, "negotiating] the tension between its static rules and the dynamic flow of events.. .The major method whereby the law accomplishes the negotiation between the static and

135 The American Hebrew, Sept. 17, 1886: pg. 3. 168 the dynamic, the general and the individual, the adherence to the formal law and the need for flexibility is equity." Law, or rather the principles of law, do not change, but laws, built out of the raw material of the principles of law, do change as dictated by circumstance, conscience and sometimes self-conscious choice. Authority in matters of Jewish law and its principles rests not in the charisma of the posek (religious judge) nor in the genealogy of the judge (Judaism has been quite meritocratic in letting talent rise, to not block it by nepotism or cronyism) but in the robustness of the interpretative ability and rational persuasiveness of the individual posek.

Typically, authority for deciding Jewish law is placed in the hands of the local rabbi {mara d'atra). That rabbi decides what customs his (or her, in non-Orthodox denominations today) community or congregation will follow. Generations of authorities had argued intensely over the correct application of a specific law, but that the law when decided was obligatory was not debated.

Aaron Kirschenbaum outlines three conventional approaches to Jewish law: the conservative, explicative and accumulative. The conservative view of Jewish law considers that the Written and Oral Law of the Sinaitic revelation is "exhaustive. All subsequent halakhic activity of substance.. .is nothing more than discovery." Under this view, there is nothing new in the legal life of Judaism. The resources of revealed law provide sufficient answers to any situation: the interpreter or judge just has to look closely enough. Authorities relying on the explicative method hold that "authorized human agencies.. .have the power to explicate the true intention of the divine Legislator." Kirschenbaum quotes the medieval rabbi and philosopher

Joseph Albo as representative: ".. .the law of God cannot be perfect so as to be adequate for all times, because the ever new details of human relations, their customs and their acts, are too numerous to be embraced in a book." The final approach described is the accumulative. In this

136 Kirschenbaum, "Subjectivity in Rabbinic Decision-Making" in Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy, 62. 169 process, there is a great deal of human involvement in "a kind of ongoing revelation."

Authorities clarify "the biblical, talmudical, and medieval heritage (to which they have subjected every fiber of their being) anew."137

The first approach charted by Kirschenbaum was dismissed by both Kohut and Kohler.

They could not return to a method that denied the large human share in the working out of the details of Jewish life. The conservative mode was too positivistic, denying as it did the use of individual conscience, history, psychology, sociology, among other sources and disciplines, in framing legal understanding and application. The explicative is descriptive largely of Kohut's approach to Jewish law. The revealed law is divine, but the Torah is "not in heaven,"138 and the mandate to interpret revealed law is charged to human beings. The accumulative approach is embraced by Kohut and Kohler. The latter turns this method to radical ends. What constitutes seeing the tradition "anew" for Kohler means loosing old attachments to the developed law.

Thus, Jewish law, its origin, development and continuing authority represented the great parting of the ways between the two rabbis. Reform Judaism in American never considered itself a halakhic movement; the Conservative movement did (and does). The separation of their philosophical and theological commitments to the degree of obligation imposed by halakha played out in the pages of the American Hebrew during the summer of 1885. Kohut wanted to extend the chain of tradition, even while making it more self-aware of its own historical evolution; Kohler wished to break that same chain, and anchor Judaism in what he considered its enduring legacy, the moral law that is not subject to local conditions. For the latter, it was better to live under the rule of American law, liberal in its promise and application, than to remain

Ibid., 63-66. For the rabbinic discussion of the phrase "not in heaven" and how it applies to Jewish law, see Bava Metzia 59b. 170 (voluntarily) under rabbinic law; that is to say, the moral law as taught by prophetic Judaism dovetails nicely with life in democratic America in contrast to ghetto medievalism of the

Shulhan Arukh.140

In one of his first sermons printed in the American Hebrew, Kohut points to Pirkei Avot as establishing the binding power of the Oral law. The Oral Torah was given to Moses at Sinai along with the Written Torah, passed to Joshua, then on to the judges, transmitted to the prophets, and so on to the rabbis of the Talmudic period who developed an explicit and sophisticated understanding of the oral traditions. This oral transmission, which passed down both a particular tradition and the authority to interpret and adapt that tradition, is called by

Kohut a "foundation" (yesod) of normative Judaism. "Whoever denies this; denies this on principle, disclaims his connection with the bond of the community of the house of Israel."141

This declaration cuts off those who deny in principle though not in practice the authority of the

Oral law. For him, this is the break of Reform with the Jewish past. Kohut stresses that many faithful Jews "do not observe this or that ordinance of the mosaic-rabbinical Judaism, who cannot or will not apply it to the exigencies of life, but they do yet grant that those laws belong to the condition of existence."142 Recognition of an obligation naturally for adults precedes implementation of an obligation, but does Kohut give priority, not just in time but existentially, to recognition rather than performance? Whatever the case may be, he links acknowledging the divine source of Jewish law with being within the fold of Judaism. Along with Kohler, Kohut knows that not all of the taryag mitzvot (the traditional listing of the 613 commandments) can

139 Those who did follow traditional Jewish observance saw no conflict in that observance with their loyalties as Americans. 140 "We want a Judaism congenial to the freesoi l of America," Kohler wrote. American Hebrew, June 19, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 6: pg. 4. 141 American Hebrew, June 5, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 4: pg. 3. 142 Ibid. The implication of Kohut's statement and similar assertions by later Conservative leaders would vex the movement: an observant clergy, a lax laity. In more cynical terms: a Conservative congregation is, the joke goes, led by an Orthodox rabbi preaching to Reform Jews. 171 today be kept for a variety of reasons (many commandments are dependent upon a functioning

Temple under Jewish political control.) So, he concedes that the political situation of Jews in

America differs significantly from Second Temple era and the millennia-long excursion in

Europe. American Jews experience religious freedom unchecked by government interference and internal coercion: this was a novum in Jewish history. Consequently, the one who does not observe the law in all its details is to be regarded with leniency, but not the one who denies the compulsory character of Jewish law. A person who publicly denies this character "has banished himself from the camp of Israel; writes his own epitaph: 'I am no Jew; no adherent to the faith of my fathers'...Whosoever breaks through the verity of tradition has ceased to be a Jew, and is a

Karaite."143

This opening salvo in the dispute over Jewish law between the two rabbis witnesses

Kohut designating Reform Judaism a Karaite movement. Kohler by implication was himself named a Karaite, and therefore responsible for spreading heresy. Kohut provides a thumbnail sketch of this medieval heresy, which accepted the authority of the Hebrew Bible but refused the mandate of the Talmud. The latter was a human invention, as far from the literal sense of the

Torah as possible. The Talmud was a political document, meant to support the authority of the rabbis. It was not a revealed text. One of the major tenets of early Karaism was the idea of reading the Bible without external interpretation, as God revealed the Torah to all of Israel not just a learned elite. In time, of course, the Karaites developed their own oral traditions (even covertly using the Talmud). No tradition can exist without a (generally) recognized and authoritative body of interpretative texts. Even if the Reform movement did not parallel exactly

143 Ibid. This is a damning charge. The Karaite movement, which began in the 8th century in the Islamic world, denied the normative authority of the Talmud. To define Kohler (or at least Kohler's theology) as a Karaite was to read him out of rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism of contemporary Jews. Kohler certainly thought himself a rabbinic Jew: the rabbis transformed Judaism in the diaspora as he was doing in America. 1920 variation: "He who breaks down the truth of tradition ceases to be a Jew—he is a Karaite" (pg. 6). 172 the Karaite movement (and Kohut warns against thuggish "heresy-hunting," which is inevitably disastrous for both parties), the latter served as a proxy well enough: "No, we cannot maintain

Judaism without the tradition as it has been orally bequeathed to us from the time of Moses." 44

The difficulties of torah she-bikhtav (the Written Torah) are resolved by the exegetical and rational modes of interpretation in torah she-ba'alpeh (Oral Torah). Kohut then famously pronounces this kind of departure from rabbinic Judaism as a "deformity": "Such a reform which seeks to progress without the mosaic-rabbinical tradition, such a Reform is a Deformity; is a skeleton of Judaism without flesh and sinew, without spirit and heart. Without tradition there is no life but only vegetation; without it we have a tieing of the wheels of life—a suicide.

And suicide is no Reform."145 Kohut notes that we learn from Pirkei Avot the value of moderation and mercy in judgement. He does not wish to "excommunicate"146 Reformers. Such a notion is implausible in America, in any case.

Kohut has turned the Reform critique, which drew on the haskalah critique, of rabbinic

Judaism. The maskilim (Jewish proponents of internal and external Enlightenment) and later the

Reformers would regularly describe rabbinic Judaism as dead or dying, with the subsequent need for a new Judaism to take its place. No, Kohut exclaims, it is Reform that leads to

Judaism's death: it seeks, according to him, to cut out its vital organs. Kohut's vision of traditional Judaism, one separate from immigrant Orthodoxy, then carves out its position as centrist: it will preserve the past, which includes a transmitted Oral Law, "but is receptive of the ideas of the present, and accepts the good and the beautiful from whatever source it may

Ibid. 1920 variation: "Without the oral teaching we cannot comprehend the written, out of which it is developed" 5-7). Ibid. Ibid. 173 come."147 In the same sermon, he defines his Judaism in the same manner Schechter would: "my religious standpoint [is] mosaic-rabbinical Judaism freshened with the spirit of progress; at all events, to maintain the healthy golden mean." This idea of the "golden mean," of moderation, would become perhaps the most transparent and self-conscious public feature of early

Conservative Judaism.

There was a response to Kohut's planting of the conservative standard. Kaufmann

Kohler replied a week later with a forceful defence of American Reform Judaism. In a sermon entitled "Are We Progressing or Retrograding?" Kohler wonders whether rabbinic Judaism will continue to pursue American Jews, who have a different destiny than their European ancestors.

The night of ghettos and narrow legalism is past, and the day is breaking wherein American

Jews, free of political restraints and free from institutionalized discrimination, would take up the banner of Reform. Jewish law abounds in "obsolete observances of by-gone days." The ritual laws had to go, their advantage dried up. Yearning for the Temple and the restoration of sacrifice was a spiritual dead end and a political impossibility. Why the nostalgia when the future promised so much more? The conditions for the ritual, judicial and civil features of

Jewish law were no longer in place: the latter two could not conflict with the secular law, and the force of ritual law was lost at the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of any semblance of Jewish political independence in Judea. In the place of Jewish law, Kohler sets the messianic age, whose "golden era lies not behind, but before us."150 This observation about human destiny, not the unique Jewish destiny, is held by him to be in line with the spirit of the age.

147 Ibid. Kohut here paraphrases Maimonides' belief that one must accept the truth no matter its source. See Introduction to Shemonah Perakim le-Rambam (Jerusalem: Y. Malkah, 1997). 148 Ibid. 149 American Hebrew, June 12, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 5: pg. 3. 150 Ibid. 174 Kohler adds it up in the following: "The one that wails over the ruins of the past, over the decay of ritualistic religion, over the downfalls of creeds and blind authority-worship, or the one that hails the rising faith in all that is divine in man, the building-up of a religion which already our prophets of yore proclaimed to be as broad as man and as wide as the globe?...Can we, or must we believe exactly what our fathers believed concerning revelation and the Law, resurrection and the Messianic future?"151 There can be no other way: the spiritual avenues of the past have been blocked. The new social and political arrangements that Jews in America find themselves cry out for a new (or renewed) Judaism, free from the stagnant beliefs of the past.

Revelation, science teaches us, is impossibility. The natural order cannot be disrupted. And if revelation did not happen as presented by rabbinic authorities (who claim a mandate to adjudicate from this revelation), then Jewish law is a fully human creation. In fact, the commandments of the Bible themselves are of human creation. Many of them violate our moral sense, a moral sense which is universal and prior to any specific claimed revelation; that is, one needs to know how to live under natural law to have the experience to live under a specific revelation.

Kohler tells his hearers decisively, "I do not believe that the Mosaic statutes about the sacrifices, the incense...are unchangeable ordinances of God dictated from heaven." Two weeks later he extends his rejection of rabbinic Judaism, holding that "Rabbinic-Mosaical

Judaism is dead." With his interest in comparative religion, Kohler provides a rationalist explanation for the non-moral commandments: Biblical man was a primitive, a child in developmental terms and biblical law, which was revolutionary for its time, tutored him.

American Hebrew, June 26, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 7: pg. 9 See American Hebrew, June 12, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 5: pg. 3. 175 When biblical man grows up his reasoning capacities and moral sophistication increase accordingly. Old software swapped out for new. He becomes "self-conscious" when he partakes of the "forbidden fruit of universal knowledge."155 Modern Jews, nursed on secular education and Western science, have outgrown the need for the political ordering provided by those kinds of commandments. Secular political liberalism secures individual liberties, protects minority religions and offers rational economic planning.

Under systemic suspicion if rarely outright persecution, rabbinic Judaism made a fence not just around the Torah but around Israel as well. "Seclusion and distinction became the prominent feature of every Jewish rite,"156 he noted. His example of a rite of this kind is shatnez, the forbidden mixture of wool and linen in clothing that is classified as one of the hukkim, laws that are not rationally evident and are binding on Jews alone. He saves especial opprobrium for the dietary laws. But with the inception of emancipation and especially in the free air of

America (die goldene medina), isolating laws are unnecessary. Jews have been invited to full citizenship, why then spurn this opportunity for an obsolete law?

The laws that satisfied medieval Jews do not meet the needs of modern Jews. This idea of the outmoded nature of traditional Jewish law does the heavy lifting for Kohler. They had their time, and that time is passed. What are needed today are forms of religion, ethical religion, that correspond with the "on the ground" situation of American Jews, which is different in every way from those who were forced by their circumstances to have a "Ghetto-Judaism."158

Consequently, in a remarkable passage that demonstrates the decisive break Kohler makes with

155 Ibid. 156 Ibid. 157 Isaac Mayer Wise called the traditionalist emphasis on the laws of kashrut, "kitchen Judaism." Kohler charges his Conservatives of misunderstanding the purpose of the dietary laws: "Our latter-day representatives of conservatism fail to see that they deviate from both the Rabbinical and Biblical Judaism in trying to find sanitary provisions in the prohibitions of the things declared as unclean for Jews as a holy people" (ibid). 158 Ibid. 176 rabbinic Judaism, he holds that his contemporaries should not "be cowed down by fear of the thunders on Sinai and obey the law as slaves yoked to the letter." Sinai, the place of revelation, is to be replaced by Zion, where the peoples of the earth will gather to worship not the God of Israel but the God of the world. Kohler suggests a system of natural development from the low barbarisms of much of biblical law to the gentler yet still rigid rabbinic law ("in a great many respects Rabbinism was an improvement upon Mosaism"160) to today when religious law is not necessary. The only law is the moral law known by conscience and exemplified in the prophets who "utter truths which will never perish."161 Kohler's move unknowingly replicated the move of Pauline Christianity: from carnal to spiritual Israel.162 While Orthodoxy clings to

"the letter. We discern the divine Revelation only in the spirit permeating the Mosaic legislation." The spirit is mobile, moving through historical epochs; the law is static, only a snapshot of a particular historical reality soon supplanted by another.

Despite the similarities to early Christianity in his critique of the "old law," Kohler feared that the ignorance of Jewish traditionalism will lead sensitive, thoughtful Jews into apostasy. (Schechter had the same fear about Reform due to what he saw as its Christianizing tendencies.) Curb the attraction to Christianity by becoming more like its liberal forms, though without its underlying theology: this seems to be the outcome of Kohler's worry about Jews abandoning Judaism. He knew that liberal Christianity taught the same public ethical message

159 Ibid. 160 American Hebrew, June 26, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 7: pg. 9. 161 American Hebrew, June 12, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 5: pg. 3. 162 This parallel is neither to equate them nor to invite invidious comparison for either. The groups developed at different times, had a different understanding of the law (Paul was inconsistent in what he thought the contemporary force of the law was) and worked towards different purposes. But the parallel is there, and Jews and Christians borrowed from each other willingly and unwillingly. For use of "carnal Israel" and "spiritual Israel" in Jewish and Christian sources see Leora Batnitzky, "The Philosophical Import of Carnal Israel: Hermeneutics and the Structure of Rosenzweig's Star" Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 9.1 (1999), 127-153; J5rg Frey, "Flesh and Spirit in the Palestinian Jewish Sapiential Tradition and in the Qumran Texts : An Inquiry into the Background of Pauline Usage" in The Wisdom Texts from Qumran and the Development of Sapiential Thought, ed. C. Hempel, A. Lange and H. Lichtenberger (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 367-404. 163 American Hebrew, June 26, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 7: pg. 9. 177 (theology is for internal consumption) with its emphasis on "reason [as] the light of God in the soul of man, that there is no contradiction between God's revelation and God's revelation in the laws of man's conduct, that Divine Revelation is not a matter of the past, no absolute and complete system but a constant unfolding of truth and knowledge..." Good and all, but he fails to inform his listeners of the reasons why they should chose Reform Judaism instead of a liberal

Protestant group.

The point-counterpoint continued the following week with the publication of another

Kohut sermon. Contrasting himself with Kohler, Kohut situates his understanding of Judaism in the Mosaic tradition. He claims that developed Judaism "stands or falls as long as it is or is not based upon a Mosaic-rabbinical foundation."164 He agrees with Kohler that changes in the law have taken place even in the most Orthodox circles, but always within accepted modes of legal transformation. Kohler in his sermon wished to see the emphasis on the letter, that is, the law, removed so that an emphasis on the intention behind the law, namely moral holiness, becomes the public face and internal understanding of modern Judaism. Kohut identifies this position not with Pauline Christianity but with the Jewish philosopher Philo,165 whose work had been preserved for centuries by the Church. The specifics of the law, their reasons, represent ideas.

All of the laws of the Torah are underpinned by some key moral feature or intellectual idea, but they are not important in themselves. They teach rather than act as a positive law for all times.

Such abstracts are shadows without substance, according to Kohut. He appreciates the intellectual conception of Judaism, but understands as well that Judaism cannot be reduced to ideas: a religion of law is a religion of deed.

164 American Hebrew, June 19, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 6: pg. 2. 165 Kohut's view of Philo certainly falls outside the consensus. Philo sought moral reasons for the law, but that did not lead him to a quasi-antinomian position. See Harry Wolfson's Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 1:143-54. 178 Kohut also attacked Kohler's notion that the elimination of the Mosaic and rabbinic law adds to freedom. Instead, it leads to "license." In the absence of law, anarchy flourishes and authority is nowhere to be found. Kohut in fact argues that the very binding power of religion, that very thing Kohler rejects, offers true freedom. The law of God is eternal, and promises inviolable rights. The laws, the rights and obligations, of a secular polity, while necessary, are always open to negotiation as they were instituted by human beings. Unless, of course, those human beings see that law as having a prior source in the greater law of God. Without divine law, nothing is certain. However, Kohut does warn against the conventional Orthodox insistence of the inflexibility of Jewish law. The ancient laws are the starting point of Jewish life, but not its conclusion. Some laws are more pertinent than others at different times. "But search up, too, in each generation of what is of use, and what is needed in each,"167 he counsels. Fancifully, he suggests that Moses himself knew that the law was both eternal and developmental, as "every generation would have its dominant ideas, its peculiar ideals...In the progress of each generation, its needs must be kept in view...This thought was conceived by the Talmud and transferred into a saving reality for the salvation of Judaism." Kohut declares Kohler wrong in assuming rabbinic Judaism does not recognize change and the particular requirements of an age.

Kohler continued the debate between the two rabbis in the same number of the American

Hebrew. His listeners are told of a comment Kohut made to Kohler, "you are only an ethical

Jew!" meaning that he only considers the moral law obligatory. Kohler took this statement as praise. Indeed, he says, the best Jews, the prophets, were ethical Jews only. The prophetic ideal of righteousness is Abraham, the man of faith who demands justice (even from God, in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah). The prophets never held "observance of the Mosaic ceremonial

166 Ibid. 167 Ibid., pg. 3 168 Ibid., pg. 4 179 laws"169 as the highest religious ideal or the right way to worship God. And the voice of the prophets has won the day. This change in outlook is due to Reform's "mighty influence" on the Jewish people. The moral suasion of the prophets trumps the unyielding and morally pointless ritualism of Jewish ceremonial law. He claims in a confident tone that would rarely be repeated by later Reform thinkers: "Every organ that is played in the Jewish synagogue, every woman that sings in the choir or joins in the prayers of the congregation from her pew, every confirmation solemnity introduced, every exchange of Occidental features for Oriental ones, is an inroad upon Rabbinical Judaism and a victory for Reform."171 It was this attitude that irritated

Kohut and later Schechter (both battled with Kohler). They saw this type of Reform as a translation of Jewish identity into Christian terms. The standard of Jewish ritual and moral action in the world and in the synagogue was measured by its similarity score with Christianity.

We can close this discussion about the nature of Jewish law in the Kohut-Kohler dispute with a comment from Kohut that gets at the heart of the issue. Kohut consistently maintains that fidelity to the law will preserve the Jewish people. Kohler would argue similarly, but disagreement arrives over what kind of law was given to the Jewish people to be observed eternally (the moral law alone or the whole of the Mosaic Law), the benefits of that law and the comprehensiveness of that law. Kohut acknowledges the difficulty of trying to secure a consensus in America about this feature of Judaism: "Surely everyone recognizes the necessity of imbuing modern Israel with new life. But on the question of how it is to be done, views diverge, and alas, so widely diverge, that we are nearly forced to despair of success in the needed task." At the center of the entire dispute between the two rabbis sits the law. Yet there

169 Ibid. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid. 172 American Hebrew, August 21, 1885. Vol. 24, no. 2: pg. 3. 180 are no mechanisms to give precedence of one view over another, and this was both blessing and curse for both rabbis. It was blessing because there was no method to coerce someone to observe, and they valued the freedom they found in America. Even social pressure, a limited type of coercion, had little effect. It was a curse in a sense because Jewish unity, which had always been more hope than reality, was unattainable when religious options were limited only by one's imagination.

Denominationalism

Scholars can use the dispute between Kohut and Kohler as a way into a broader discussion of the development of denominationalism in the United States generally and among

American Jews specifically. While the categories of Jewish denominationalism began in

Germany, only two of the modern branches of Judaism made any headway: Orthodoxy and

Reform. German Orthodoxy was deeply divided about how to deal with the Reform movement, which it saw as a heresy,173 and how to negotiate with German culture now that emancipation had opened new pathways previously denied to Jews.

Zacharias Frankel described the new rival "parties" that emerged in nineteenth-century

Germany. The Orthodox are noted for their piety and their desire to keep all of the traditional observances. The Reform party, on the other hand, "finds its aim in the opposite direction."

Reformers wanted to pare Judaism down to its "simple original ideas." Like Kohut later, Frankel wondered whether the beliefs and actions of the Reform group meant that it could be part of

Judaism. The Reformers consider themselves Jews and have not opted for another religion.

"They do not, however, belong wholly to Judaism," he wrote. In contrast to these parties, a third

173 See David Ellenson, "Traditional Reactions to Modern Reform" in After Emancipation: Jewish Religions Responses to Modernity (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004), 154-83. 181 group appeared on the Jewish religious scene, which Frankel claims grew out of the Orthodox.

This group is willing to allow certain forms of Jewish religious expression to fall into disuse, as they did not originate in antiquity or are "not inherently connected either with the high ideas or with the religious forms delineated by the revealed laws." In contrast to Reform, Frankel maintains that this centrist party, what will be called positive-historical Judaism, upholds tradition, which means rabbinic authority.

On two accounts, I believe, Frankel is engaging in wishful historiography. First, calling this third group a "party" implies some formal and established institutional life. Positive- historical Judaism had a minimal existence in that regard. Second, he claims that this group "has arisen from" Orthodoxy. Frankel, however, was a reformer, though of a very conservative cast

(this was more plausible in the German context than the American). Positive-historical Judaism was instead a conservative response out of Reform Judaism: conservative Reform rather than liberal Orthodoxy. m

These parties were replicated in the American Jewish scene, although the third movement was ill-defined at this time. (Abraham Karp, however, notes that even in 1866 a newspaper editor and rabbi, Jonas Bondi, discerned three distinct movements in American

Judaism. Bondi called the third group "the golden middleway.")175 Reform, as in Germany, became dominant, although more rapidly in the United States. Denominationalism was a knife in the heart of the ideal of Jewish unity, of an am ehad (a single people). The prior reality of this ideal had been gossamer-thin before the advent of modernity, but the disruptions of modernity ended it decisively while encouraging the development of religious markets, with competitors vying for members. Those competitors (denominations) offered worldly and other worldly

Frankel, "On Changes in Judaism," 47. Karp, Jewish Continuity in America, 208. 182 incentives. This new reality did not restrain regular calls for Jewish unity. But unity on my terms and not yours. In the middle of the Kohut-Kohler dispute, the lead blurb in a July issue of the

American Hebrew noted that Jerusalem fell on the Ninth of Av (the fast that occurs in the middle of the summer) "by reason of the dissension among its leaders; would the broader

American Judaism of this day repel a siege any more successfully?"176 The conservatives identified themselves as the party of reconciliation, but was helpless to curtail the growing divisions. In fact, the call for unity was itself recognition of division, and the movement added to those divisions: they did not want to be Orthodox or Reform any more than members of the other groups wished to join the conservatives. As Kohler put it, "we want union. We want co­ operation in all matters pertaining to the common interests of Judaism in America and the world over. But we cannot allow any interference with our religious progress by Rabbinical anathemas."177 The cost of unity is dear, and "non-denominational" religious institutions did not flourish with such an identity. Jonathan Sarna, the dean of American Jewish historians, argues persuasively that denominationalism is at the heart of American Judaism: "historically, every group that has announced that it is non-denominational, post-denominational or trans- denominational ends up being just one more denomination."178 Since the cost of unity is high and its benefits are marginal in the United States where there was no external threat to Judaism necessitating a unified community, it is little wonder that denominationalism flourished in reality and unity receded as an ideal.179

American Hebrew, July 17, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 10: pg. 1. See rabbinic source in Gittin 55a-57b. 177 Philipson, "The Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference," 195. 178 Quoted in Uriel Heilman, "Beyond Dogma: Is American Judaism headed toward a post-denominational future?" The Jerusalem Report (Feb. 11,2005). 179 The new Reform prayer book (2007) is called Mishkan T'filah: a Reform Siddur. This is, I believe, the first Reform prayer book to explicitly state that it is for Reform Jews. 183 Kohler said that the mystery of Jewish survival is the persistence of re-creation and reform. "The secret of our immortal youth," he calls it. Reform Judaism is an instance of re­ creation in response to a new cultural context and political reality. Whatever the faults of rabbinic Judaism, it did well enough to shepherd Jews to the edge of modernity. It could not lead them further. That task was charged to Reform. Reform's historical role, then, is not "an invention or innovation of ours."181 The study of the Jewish past demonstrates that one form of

Judaism replaces another when the resources of the prior Judaism are exhausted, when it can no longer adequately meet the needs of the contemporary community. The prophets replaced the priests of the Temple cult, and the rabbis replaced the prophets when national independence was lost after the destruction of the Second Temple. From reform to reform. The Reformers, who trace their story back to Moses Mendelssohn (everyone claimed his legacy), now supplant the rabbis of medieval Judaism. Instead of "blind authority-worship" they offer autonomy, which takes its counsel from conscience rather than the Shulhan Arukh. Reason displaces supernaturalism, and scholarship ousts uncritical acceptance of any traditional Jewish idea outside of ethical monotheism and social justice. The freedom of America calls for a free

Judaism. Kohler is very aware of the distinction between himself and the traditionalists.

In his sermons of 1885, Kohler believed that the conservative group was part of a largely undifferentiated mass of traditionalists. An editorial in a mid-August number of the American

Hebrew showed that other Jews considered the movement slowly developing around Kohut not a distinct group but as an expression of normative Judaism. The author of the editorial noted that

Judaism preceded the "fierce wrangle" of sectarianism. "What Dr. Kohut, did, and is doing with

American Hebrew, June 26, 1885. Vol. 23, no. 7: pg. 9. 1 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 184 wonderful force, is to bring us back to the realization of this old truth." Despite the optimism of the editorial, what Kohut was in fact doing was defining the broad outlines of a third movement in American Judaism instead of extracting himself from sectarianism.184

Kohut summarizes his understanding of what an authentic Judaism looks like: "only a

Judaism which does not disown the character of its worthy antiquity, but is receptive of the ideas of the present, and accepts the good and the beautiful from whatever source it may come; only such a Judaism can command respect and recognition." All of the centrist themes are gathered here, from an appeal to the sanctity of the people's history to the need to absorb ideas no matter their source. This is the distinctive centrist strategy: both the past and the present are of equal authority. Those who trump the past with the present or vice versa are promoting something far from the original intent of the religion. Anglican centrists would claim this as well as Jewish centrists.

And to be a centrist meant to aspire to "wise moderation." Reform was the party of

"nerveless indifference" and Orthodoxy was the party of "glowing fanaticism," according to

Kohut. These two groups were willing to put their sectarian interests ahead of the common good of the community. Judaism, for Kohut, is a public good held in trust by all of its members.

But there are competing understandings of what the trust entails: that is to say, what is the proper way to define Judaism? Kohut defined it as "conservative progress" against "nerveless indifference" and "glowing fanaticism."186 By defining the boundaries of his conception of

Judaism versus those to his right and left, Kohut was not marking out a Judaism above

183 American Hebrew, August 14, 1885. Vol. 24, vol. 1: pg. 2. 184 Kohut did not think so. He believed that the Judaism he was recommending was established on historical lines that reached back thousands of years. He wrote that if Moses b. Amram or Moses b. Maimon were alive today, they would not identify with either the Reformers or the Orthodoxy, but rather the traditional Judaism that existed prior to denominational fracture. 185 American Hebrew, June 5, 1885. Vol. 23., no. 4: pg. 3. 186 American Hebrew, August 21, 1885. Vol. 24, no. 2: pg. 4. 1920 variations: "intense fanaticism" and "cold indifference" (pg. 92). 185 denominationalism but very much within it. This is one of the central aspects of his dispute with

Kohler.

The Pittsburgh Platform

The Conservative movement has had the greatest trouble defining itself, but Reform

Judaism has defined and redefined its self-understanding on many occasions since the late nineteenth-century. The first attempt to outline what distinguished Reform occurred in

Pittsburgh in 1885. Like all subsequent Reform platforms, the Pittsburgh platform was "a theological response...[to] a socioreligious crisis." The vigorous Kohler, who was the force behind this public declaration of Reform principles, recognized that Reform was threatened from its left by Felix Adler's Ethical Culture movement and had to guard its right flank from the inroads of Conservatism, which was often identified with Orthodoxy both by opponents and supporters.189 The summer dispute between Kohler and Kohut proved to those committed to

Reform that the traditional faction would likely never consent to the conscious innovations in practice and theology of the radical Reformers. David Philipson, who attended the Pittsburgh conference as a young rabbi, held that the proximate cause of the conference was the Kohut-

Kohler dispute.190

Dana Evan Kaplan, "Reform Jewish Theology and the Sociology of Liberal Religion in America: the Platforms as Response to the Perception of Socioreligious Crisis" Modem Judaism 20 (2000), 60. 188 Kohler badly misread the tea leaves: the appeal of Adler, a son of a Reform rabbi, and his movement was limited to disaffected intelligentsia, and never gained much traction. But one must respond when one sees a threat, and historical retrospection was not one of Kohler's duties. See Benny Kraut, From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: the Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1979). 189 One could argue that in the context of defending Reform against the inroads of traditionalism and Ethical Culture, Kohler was setting up the movement as a via media. He did not think so, and neither did anyone else. He was proudly radical, especially in the period under examination here. But this is an important reminder that religious life can be sliced many different ways. Nevertheless, Reform was perceived by advocates and adversaries alike as being on the religious left. 190 Philipson, "The Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference," 195. Sefton Temkin argues, on the other hand, that it was Adler's Ethical Culture movement that was the reason for the conference. The principles enunciated by the rabbis in 186 Although his more moderate voice was neutralized at Pittsburgh, Isaac Mayer Wise confidently said that the consequences of the Platform could not be reversed because history was on the side of the Reformers. Progressive religion was a on a gradient projected always upward: such was the confidence of historical determinists in 1885. Wise could afford to be confident, as Reform

Jews felt at home in America. In the United States, Jews did not have to grasp for equal political rights or make special claims to practice their religion.

The Pittsburgh Platform was not the work of many hands. Only fifteen to twenty rabbis attended the conference. The Pittsburgh document was the controlling force for "classical" or

"radical" Reform for about fifty years. In 1937 a new platform for Reform Judaism was published out of a rabbinical conference in Columbus, Ohio. The Platform of 1885 established guidelines for Reform belief and practice. Platforms or sets of principles are by their nature non- pluralistic documents, no matter how liberal their intention. Platforms define, mark out, the permissible. The Pittsburgh Platform was a concession to the reality of Jewish life in America: because there are no internal or external constraints on religious expression, denominationalism was and is the norm rather than the exception.

The proceedings of the conference present the reader with an understanding of the principles themselves (to be discussed below). Kohler admitted to his audience that he was worried about the alienation of Jewish youth from Judaism, an anxiety surely not limited to this era or this denomination. He acknowledged that many non-Reformers saw the movement as merely a temporary home before a final exit from Judaism altogether, that a religious justification of release from halakha would also justify "laxity and indifference." But Kohler

Pittsburgh, however, belies that explanation. "The Pittsburgh Platform at 100," Journal of Reform Judaism (Fall 1985), 7. 191 See The Changing world of Reform Judaism: the Pittsburgh Platform in retrospect, ed. Walter Jacob (Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom Congregation, 1985), 93. 187 desired to rebuild Judaism on new foundations, even if "we can no longer be blind to the fact that Mosaic-Rabbinical Judaism, as based upon Law and Tradition, has actually and irrevocably lost its hold upon the modern Jew." The construction of a Judaism amenable to American

Jews includes a moral renewal founded on the teachings of the Prophets, concern for social justice, economic reorganization and the full integration of Jewish immigrants into their new host society.

Kohler also suggested that the time was ripe to reconsider Jewish-Christian relations.

Jews had been treated well in overwhelmingly Christian America. Judaism's views on

Christianity "are long antiquated."193 It was imperative that Jews gain a better understanding of their Christian neighbours just as these neighbours grow in appreciation of them. Theologically,

Christians are "worshippers of the same God as we worship."194 Those Christians who wish to join the Jewish people through conversion should be exempt from circumcision, "a barbarous cruelty which disfigures our ancestral heirloom and our holy mission as priests among mankind."195 Kohler also wished to dispense with matrilineal descent.

The actual Platform itself was kept to eight brief but significant paragraphs. The principles of the Pittsburgh document are: the idea of God reaches its apex in Judaism, although all religions share in the endeavour of understanding God; the Bible's enduring teaching is moral and that biblical criticism does not distress that moral core of Judaism; the ritual law of

Moses tutored Israel but does not promote religiously grounded virtues today; distinctive non- moral laws such as kashrut are "apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual

xi/iu. Ibid, 98. Ibid, 98-99.

188 elevation" ; Jews are a religion and not a ethnos, and the messianic goal of a reconstituted land of Israel guided by Jewish law is not an ambition of modern Jews; Jewish doctrine is in accord with reason, and other monotheistic traditions further the repair of the world; the soul is immortal but the body is not resurrected; and socioeconomic injustice is the great social blight of the day. The 1885 Platform followed the outlines of the template proposed by the

Reformfreunde of the 1840s. And although the Pittsburgh Platform would become the locus classicus of Reform for the next half century it was "disavowed"198 by the synagogue arm of the

Reform movements and its seminary, Hebrew Union College.

The American Hebrew responded swiftly to the passage of the Pittsburgh Platform. The initial reaction was surprising. The first mention of the Platform occurred on November 20,

1885. The author commended the Reform rabbis for going "conservative" in six of the eight principles. "They form a wise and temperate platform." The elimination of Zionism and ritual law constitute the only points of disagreement, according to the author. The document "is a far more conservative one than we had looked for." But the mood shifts in the next paragraph, where the author reproaches the rabbinic attendees for forcing another wedge into an already divided Judaism. Platforms are naturally divisive: they decide what beliefs and practices are in and which are out. The Pittsburgh meeting was not convened for the purposes of "unity," instead to "glorify reform at the expense of conservatism."199 The principles spelled out at Pittsburgh were acceptable, but the spirit of the meeting was excessively sectarian. A later number

"The Pittsburgh Platform" at http://ccarnet.org/Aiticles/index.cfm?id=;39&pge id= 1606. Accessed January 22, 2008. 197 The Reformfreunde had five planks: progressive development of law; ritual law was not obligatory; the normative teaching authority of the Talmud was rejected; and Zionism was declined in favor of seeking social, legal and political equality in the diaspora. See Meyer, "Alienated Intellectuals in the Camp of Religious Reform: the Frankfurt Reformfreunde," 62. 198 Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776-1985, v. Ill: The Germanic Period, Part 2, 100. 199 The American Hebrew, Nov. 20, 1885. Vol. 25., no. 2: pg. 1. 189 encourages Reform congregations with conservative tendencies to break off from the Union of

American Hebrew Congregations, the synagogue arm of the Reform movement.

If the Kohut-Kohler dispute was an immediate cause of the Pittsburgh Platform, then the founding of the Jewish Theological Seminary was in response to the Platform. Like the authors of the Platform, the founders of the Seminary sought to define American Judaism and to be embraced by American Jews.

The Jewish Theological Seminary

The conservatives in the Reform camp rejected the spirit of the Pittsburgh Platform, even though some of the elements of the Platform were not far from conservative principles. The primary concern was that the Reformers were causing schism in American Judaism. Although the main institutions of Reform Judaism initially rejected the Pittsburgh Platform, the conservatives believed that Reform had fully broken away from normative Judaism. Solomon

Solis-Cohen, an important advocate for the new traditionalist Seminary and critic of Reform, later declared that all the Pittsburgh document did was to accelerate the inevitable split between the two groups. "With or without the Pittsburgh conference, the Seminary was bound to come,"

Solis-Cohen wrote.201

The Preamble to the Seminary's 1886 Constitution understands the mission of the

Seminary to organize traditional Jews in America "for the purpose of keeping alive the true

Judaic spirit."202 This authentic Jewish spirit includes a commitment to teaching the Bible

200 The American Hebrew, Nov. 27, 1885. Vol. 25, no. 3: pg. 1. 201 Solomon Solis-Cohen, "The Jewish Theological Seminary: Past and Future" (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1919), 22. 202 "prearn|3je" i0 Constitution and By-Laws of the Jewish Theological Seminary Association (New York: Philip Cowen, 1886), no page. 190 "impartially" —that is, not as the Reformers teach it—and rabbinics "faithfully." Loyalty to

Jewish law is also stressed. According to the Seminary's Constitution, it will promote

"knowledge and practice of traditional Judaism."204

The Seminary was not originally conceived of as a center for the development of a separate denomination. "It introduces no factional quarrels," says a letter to the American

Hebrew. One editorialist, exhausted by the constant labelling of the new Seminary, writes that not every institution can be neatly categorized as Reform or Orthodox. "This is simply ridiculous," he writes. He notes that some members of each group reject the Pittsburgh Platform.

The whole point of the Jewish Theological Seminary is to extract American Jews from the pettiness of denominationalism. The editorialist continues: "What we want is a Jewish seminary." Kohut will later repeat this call, seeking "no other title than that it be purely and truly Jewish...like that of Breslau."207 A non-sectarian Jewish institution of education and training will inculcate the virtues of "observance]" and "practice" in contrast to Hebrew Union

College. The latter teaches its pupils "to learn and to teach."208

One can be centrist in two ways: either through comprehensiveness or the middle path.

Comprehensiveness means rising above division and incorporating the best elements of the opposing sides, the partial truths that each group contains. Comprehensiveness was the goal of the conservatives. But in practice the middle way won out, as denominationalism became the dominant feature in American Judaism. What later generations would call Conservative

Judaism, which began as an effort to situate a forward-looking traditionalism in America above

203 Ibid. 204 Article II to Constitution and By-Laws of the Jewish Theological Seminary Association. 205 American Hebrew, Dec. 18, 1885. Vol. 25, no. 6: pg. 3. 206 Ibid, Jan. 15, 1886. Vol. 25, no. 10: pg. 2. 207 Ibid., Feb. 5, 1886. Vol. 25, no. 13: pg. 3 208 Ibid., pg. 1. 191 partisanship, ended as the centrist partisan, flanked by two other groups, all competing for members.

Conclusion

The religious market of the United States smoothed the way for the creations of denominational pluralism. The religious market in the United States was decentralized and unregulated, limited only by financial resources and, more importantly, individual and collective imagination. Not that Jewish denominations welcomed such a market: each tried to become a monopoly, a practical impossibility in the absence of government intervention. Everyone wanted

Jewish unity, but at a price—my version of unity and not yours—and that price was one they were not in the end willing to pay. Better to preserve what one sees as true than to suppress even part of that perceived truth for the sake of unity.

Unlike the situation in much of Europe, there were not laws constraining religious competition. When the monarch of the English throne is also the head of the national Church, and public monies are diverted from the public treasury to that national Church, religious competition is not level. Institutional Anglo-Jewry in the era under examination in this thesis attempted to emulate that model. Such a model was not available to American Jews, although

Schechter was influenced by it. The Anglo-Jewish model, based on the example of the Anglican

Church, was conservative in a special sense: it sought to freeze the institutions of the community while allowing various factions within the larger umbrella to squabble over points of belief. But they were to squabble as brothers. In contrast, the market model—which does not fit the situation in Europe then or today209—stimulates competition which is a spur to innovation but

209 As British sociologist Grace Davie explains, "Europeans don't work in market mode. Many of my American colleagues, for example, do work on 'switching,' which is a market thing to do. You change your brand if you don't 192 does not advance unity. And religious innovators can fall anywhere on the religious spectrum, from liberal congregations such as the Sinai Temple in Chicago to separatist Orthodox groups such as the Satmar hasidim.

The choices that Kohut and Kohler, and those anonymous many that became

Conservative and Reform Jews, were rational. Rational, that is, in the sense intended by Rodney

Stark: "Within the limits of their information and understanding, restricted by available options, guided by their preferences and tastes, humans attempt to make rational choices."210 The economic model of religion has been used in this paper to explore the rise of denominationalism in American Judaism generally and the emergence of a centrist movement, Conservative

Judaism. Centrism is a by-product of denominationalism, and denominationalism is an outcome of relatively free religious marketplace. In a free religious market, consumers—believers, devotees, et al.—are able to activate a set of options largely unavailable in religious "command" economies. Stark notes that religious markets naturally create "niches," which means that "no single supplier can satisfy the full array of niches since no organization can be at once intense

911 and lax, worldly and otherworldly." Suppliers—in our case, Kohut and Kohler—fulfill the demands of consumers—traditional and Reform Jews. It is a recognition that not all wants are the same, that religious desires are manifold and to meet those desires means to fragment the larger religious group. The market bears out what people want; a monopoly does not. Stark writes: "Religious monopolies are artificial, existing only to the extent that coercive force is like it, including your brand of religion, but Europeans tend not to do this. Some of them, the active ones, do, but the default position in Europe is to be a passive member of the historic churches, to activate that membership only when you need it, most often at the time of a death, your own or someone else's. And there is deep offense, of course, if that service is either denied or thought to be inadequate." From her Dec. 5, 2005 lecture at the Pew Forum's Faith Angle Conference in Key West, Florida, "Believing without Belong: Just How Secular is Europe?" http^/pewforum.org/events/^EventlD^?. Accessed November 12, 2007. 210 Stark, Rodney. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 38. 211 Rodney Stark, "The Economics of Religion" in The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. Robert Segal (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 52. 193 utilized to prevent competition. Many governments in contemporary Europe employ less brutal techniques to place all religious groups other than the 'state church' at severe disadvantages. But however pluralism is impeded, the result is religious dissatisfaction, apathy and antagonism, since the religious preferences of most market niches thereby go unmet." And the American religious scene was the opposite of such a monopoly: earlier visitors such as Tocqueville were taken aback by the pluralism of American religion.

The growth of denominationalism and centrism in Judaism can in part be attributed to the cultural and socioeconomic dynamics of modernity. That is the demand side. But Roger

Finke and Larry Iannacconne argues that there is a supply side element to the pluralism of the

American religious market as well. He notes that Congregational Churches in colonial New

England received "the state's direct and indirect support." Tax subsidies from public coffers, paid by Congregationalists and non-Congregationalists, went to pay the salaries of

Congregationalist ministers and provide upkeep for their churches. Non-Congregationalists

"risked persecution, including imprisonment, for their support of a dissenting faith." But by the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Congregationalism was

"deprived of its privileged position and financial support" and suffered a subsequent decline of membership. From 1776, the beginning of the American Revolution, to the mid-nineteenth century, the percentage of Congregationalists in New England slipped from two-thirds to twenty-eight percent. Baptists and Methodists, according to Finke and Iannaccone, were the biggest gainers. Once restrictions on the supply side were lifted, new groups went (successfully) after new members. For, as Rodney Stark argues elsewhere, "religious demand remains relatively constant, whereas suppliers rise and fall."213 Finke and Iannacconne showed that when

2,2 Ibid. 213 Stark, "An Economics of Religion," 49. 194 the monopolistic practices were removed, religious participation went up as supply met demand.214

Another example: How did televangelism begin? In the early days of television, the

Federal Communications Commission ruled in the Communications Act of 1934 that stations had to devote a block of time to public service. The stations were not prohibited from selling this time, but the custom was established early on to give this time to religious organizations for free.

The time blocked out for public service was usually set for Sunday morning: the station owners were not fools; they knew that these were not prime hours. The station owners turned the time over to the Federal Council of Churches for either religious instruction or broadcasting services.

The members of the Federal Council of Churches included mainline Protestant churches. They wished to promote liberal Christianity and "worked to keep conservative—that is, fundamentalist and evangelical—Protestant denominations off the airwaves...[by] denying them access to freetime.. . [and] pressuring national networks and local stations not to provide any additional commercial air time." Beginning in the 1960s, evangelical lobbying groups began pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to repeal that part of the Communications

Act that compelled stations to dole out free time. By 1977, only 8 percent of religious broadcasts were non-commercial, and by the late 1980s non-commercial broadcasts ceased. Stations now sold air time to religious organizations, and for the most part liberal denominations declined to bid, whereas evangelical groups were only too happy to fill the space that had been monopolized by the mainstream churches. Evangelical Christianity was certainly a significant element of the rise of the religious right and the political right from the 1970s forward. This rise was made

Roger Finke and Laurence Iannaccone, "Supply-Side Explanations for Religious Change" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 527 (May 1993), 30. 2,5 Ibid., 35. 195 possible in part by unclogging the supply side, allowing the demand side to regulate freely which religious suppliers would succeed and which would not.216

Religious centrism, then, is an example of the religious market at work.217 If the market is working without intervention, then the shifting, switching and settling of religious choices create equilibrium, where religious members distribute themselves across religious traditions. A religious market does not bode well for any sort of religious consensus. In this case, the free market was good for Jews but bad for Jewish unity. Like all other choices, it was a trade off: so much unity for so much choice, so much obligation for so much autonomy, so much "degree of tension" with the "surrounding socio-cultural environment"218 for so much relaxation of tension.

This chapter has explored one event in the introduction of denominationalism into

American Judaism. Specifically, this chapter has considered how Alexander Kohut and the burgeoning conservative "tendency"—still not distinct from Orthodox Judaism—came to define itself against Reform Judaism. Kohut's dispute with Kohler showed the need for a redistribution of ideas and people within Judaism. Kohut and his supporters would not return to East

European-style Orthodoxy, but they found that both the slackness in observance and the conceptual opposition to traditional observance barred them from the path of Reform. So they supplied a new niche in American Judaism, an explicitly centrist niche.

216 Ibid. 217 The contemporary decline of centrist denominations—Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism—is also an example of the religious market at work. Centrist attitudes are currently re-shifting and re-setting, and in a way not seen since the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. It may well be that the Union for Traditional Judaism and those associated with Yeshivat Chovevei Torah will become the new "center" in American Judaism as Conservative Judaism moves closer to Reform (and Reform moves closer to Conservative Judaism). 218 William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark, A Theory of Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 122. One of the great contributions of the economics of religion to the overall study of religion is the typologies of tension, of examining the friction between a tradition, denomination or sect and its milieu. Because of time constraints, I will not be conducting a full exploration of the "medium" tension of Conservative Judaism versus the "low" tension of Reform Judaism (however, Stark argues that part of the contemporary success of Reform has been its shift to a movement that is more "medium" tension). Should this thesis be expanded into a book, such a discussion would be imperative. Impressive steps into the economics of religion in Judaism have been taken by Kaplan, "Reform Jewish Theology and the Sociology of Liberal Religion in America." 196 A centrist matures in two major models: first, he or she conducts an internal evaluation of his or her own tradition; or second, one studies the resources of another tradition in order to detect the centrism embedded in one's native faith. Following the second model, the first chapter showed a Jewish thinker creating a highly developed understanding of centrism through his lived experience in Christian England. The previous chapter and the present chapter follow the first model. The second chapter considered an Anglican thinker who enquired into the doctrinal and philosophical history of his tradition to illustrate the exceptional location of the Church of

England. This chapter presented a Jewish thinker who utilized the breadth and depth of his tradition to show that normative Judaism is fundamentally centrist. The next chapter will examine religious centrism in nineteenth-century literature.

197 Chapter Four

Centrist Fiction or Centrist Fictions? Religious Centrism in Grace Aguilar and J.H. Shorthouse

Introduction

In Victorian England, literature and religion were inextricably linked. As we saw in previous chapters, religious writers such as Newman, Maurice, Arnold and even Schechter wrote fiction or poetry. (Arnold, of course, was the only one of the four whose fame rests on his literary writings.) The two authors studied in this chapter, the Anglo-Jewish writer Grace

Aguilar and the Quaker turned Anglican John Henry Shorthouse, were literary talents first and theologians second. But religion was deeply integrated into their work. If one were to extract the religious elements from their writings, then those writings lose both their substance and raison d'etre. This chapter aims to use the fiction and non-fiction writings of Aguilar and Shorthouse to examine the concept of religious centrism from a different angle. Finding centrism in the works of theologians is relatively unproblematic relative to authors of fiction. Theologians reflect publicly on the meaning of their tradition, and where that tradition fit among other traditions.

Literature is more oblique: most authors do not write as themselves, and their purpose in writing is typically not pedagogic. This chapter uses fiction like an x-ray to examine religious centrism: like an x-ray, fiction lets us see something we would not have been able to see before; namely, the imaginative resources of the centrist imagination. I will also consider their non-fiction writings on religion.

198 Grace Aguilar's Socio-Religious Context

The course of Jewish emancipation in England did not parallel the emancipation

experienced on the Continent, especially Germany. In Germany, advocacy for and against equal

civil and economic rights for Jews was intensely public, and the issue was implicated in the

development of German self-understanding in the process of nation-building. There was an

expectation from German gentile supporters that Jews would, rapidly or gradually, abandon

distinctive markers of dress, habit and religious rite. They would not become Christians, but in the public square they would be Germans first, part of a universal culture with little patience for religious or ethnic particularism. Equal rights meant a compression of difference, and the realization of those rights was conditioned by Jewish compliance in diminishing the public

character of their religion.1

The English case was different. Jews in Britain, in fact, commonly neither entered the political fray nor were their opinions sought out. Jewish emancipation in Britain was a Christian

issue; that is, the emancipation debate shaped and was shaped by disagreements over the

Christian character of England. While there were many opinions issued on the debate, Jewish emancipation was a proxy for England's most conspicuous religious minority: Roman Catholics.

As Todd Endelman has shown, in Anglican and Protestant England, Jews and Catholics were at times pitted against each other. Both stood outside the mainstream of English life, but there was no fear that Jews constituted an imperio in imperium whereas Catholics were thought to give their primary loyalty to Rome. Many German opponents of Jewish emancipation believed that the Jewish yearning for a return to Israel marked them as potentially disloyal. Such a fear was absent in the English debate: the English loved Jerusalem and feared Rome. The Bible was central in the English imagination, as we saw in our chapter on Arnold, and the Jews were the

1 Moses Mendelssohn, for one, believed that gentile supporters had it backwards: it was not Judaism that needed to be reformed. It was the state that had to change. 199 people of the Bible, however errant they may presently be. The fear, then, was that Jewish

emancipation would force the government to grant equal civil and political status to Roman

Catholics. Groups opposed to Catholic emancipation often supported Jewish emancipation: on

humanitarian and conversionary grounds, evangelicals were significant advocates.

Unlike the German situation, where Jews were pressed to reform both their religion and

daily lives as a passport to equality, Endelman observes that in England "Christian champions of

emancipation did not set conditions for their emancipation. In most European states,

emancipation was conditional. In return for equal rights, Jews were expected to abandon their

social cohesion, national consciousness, ritual separatism (short of conversion, of course), and

skewed occupational profile." English Jews, at least those affiliated with the community,

maintained moderate social separation and religious traditionalism.

By the early 1840s, however, the Anglo-Jewish world began transforming itself. Because

of the growing voluntarism of the Jewish community, though not at the level of the American

Jewish community, some English Jews declared their independence from some elements of

traditional Judaism. The Reform movement among Anglo-Jewry in the nineteenth-century was

small and cautious. In 1840, the first Reform synagogue was founded in England (West

London). Most of the Jews associated with the larger Jewish community were Orthodox,

although their level of observance fell well below, for instance, German Orthodoxy. What

separated the Reformers from the Orthodox was not the alteration of some ritual practices

(dropping the second day of the festivals was their most radical move), but rather the former's rejection of the Chief Rabbi's authority. Surely many nominally Orthodox members were

relaxed in their approach to Jewish law, yet by remaining within the traditionalist fold they

assented, at least by tacit consent, that they continued to see themselves as living under

2 Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), chapter 3. 3 Ibid., 108. 200 traditional Jewish jurisprudence. In the last chapter, we saw that this approach was applauded by

Kohut; that is, concede that many Jews will not reach an elite standard of observance, but do not excise them socially from the community nor lower the standards of the community. Endelman argues that the lack of success of Reform in England compared in particular to its German version was that there was no external factor that necessitated the reformation of Judaism. There was an internal reason as well: English Orthodoxy was decidedly more liberal than German

Orthodoxy. Whereas even a moderate like Hirsch accepted Orthodox separation from the growing Reform community, Anglo-Jewish leaders, especially the Chief Rabbi, wished to prevent division at almost any cost. Additionally, Anglo-Jewish Orthodoxy was greatly influenced by the national Church: the Church of England had a spiritual leader who tried to embrace the greatest number of English Christians possible. As I argued in the first chapter, the

Adlers attempted to reproduce the Chief Rabbinate and the institutions of Anglo-Jewry on the

Anglican model. The Chief Rabbi's goal was unity parallel to the presumed unity sought by the

Archbishop of Canterbury, while "the schismatic character of Reform invoked comparison with low-status, sectarian Nonconformity."4

This background was the political and religious context in which we encounter Grace

Aguilar, a novelist, poet and theologian who argued for Jewish political equality and for a

Judaism that cut between rabbinic Orthodoxy and Reform. It is to this centrist that we now turn.

Grace Aguilar (1816-1847)

"Ibid., 115. 201 Grace Aguilar was born to an Anglo-Sephardic family. In her brief span of years,

Sephardic Jews constituted the majority of observant English Jews, although the Ashkenazim became the Jewish majority in England by the 1880s at the latest. Aguilar's background is important, as Michael Galchinksy stresses.5 Her family had been conversos (Jews in Iberian countries forced to convert to Catholicism, although many retained certain Jewish customs in private), and for many converso families the home was the principal religious sphere. In

Aguilar's fiction and non-fiction, she removes Judaism from public view and "veils"6 it by domesticating religion, as conversos in Spain and Portugal could not publicly acknowledge their

Jewish roots without censure at best or death at worst. Although such veiling was not necessary in England, the traditional reticence of the Jewish community encouraged this veiling to continue.

Aguilar was a prolific and popular author. Her poems, stories and theological tracts were admired both in England and the United States. Her work in the United States was, in fact, promoted and published by a noted centrist, Isaac Leeser, and his sponsorship helped make the

United States her "largest reading public."7 Dianne Ashton argues that "her books linked

Victorian Jewish culture on both sides of the Atlantic into the twentieth century. She articulated

o a Jewish theology that merged Victorian values with popular Jewish beliefs."

Like Schechter after her, Aguilar's readers consisted of Jews and Christians. Galchinsky notes that her work was "recognized by Christians and Jews alike as the writer who best defined the Anglo-Jewish response to the challenge to enter the modern world."9 The language she employed to describe religious experience and practice paralleled contemporary Christian usage.

5 Michael Galchinksky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 135ff. 6 Ibid., 137. 7 Dianne Ashton, "Grace Aguilar and the Matriarchal Theme in Jewish Women's Spirituality" In: Active Voices, ed. Maurie Sacks (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 80. 8 Ibid., 81. 9 Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, 135. 202 As I suggested in the first chapter, Schechter used Anglican terms to articulate his vision of

Judaism, both to Jews and gentiles. Both were aware that their audience was often more familiar with Christian idioms than classical Jewish expressions, and like all good teachers they taught at

a level their readers could immediately understand. That is to say, they introduced Judaism to

Jews through Christian concepts.

There is no scholarly consensus about the nature of Aguilar's Judaism. Opinions range

from Galchinsky, who claims her as a forerunner to Lily Montagu and Liberal Judaism, to

Ashton, who defines Aguilar as a "traditional observant Jew... [who] defended Jewish tradition."10 This divergence in opinion again parallels the ambiguity that surrounded Schechter: to some he was a reformer who undermined Jewish tradition because of his Wissenschafi tendencies, and to others he was a traditionalist who merely deployed the historical-critical method to show the continuity of historical Judaism rather than its fractures. As with Schechter,

I think it is helpful to see Aguilar as falling between those two camps. There was no organized centrist movement in England in the 1840s; she was, in spite of this, a centrist. To be more precise, we can install Aguilar on the center-left, just as we ought to place Schechter on the center-right, but they had more in common with each other than with advocates of Reform or

Orthodoxy.

The next two sections are an account of Aguilar's centrism. The first section looks at The

Perez Family, and how this novella portrays Jewish women as the true centrists. The second section considers Aguilar's Jewish Faith, an apologia pro sua religio in epistolary form. This non-fiction work displays most explicitly her centrism.

Women as Central, Women as Centrists: Aguilar's The Perez Family

10 Ashton, "Grace Aguilar and the Matriarchal Theme in Jewish Women's Spirituality," 80. 203 The Perez Family was the first fully dressed depiction of "domestic Jewish life in Anglo-

Jewish history." Written for the Cheap Jewish Library series (founded by Charlotte

Montefiore), the novella portrays an idealized middle-class Jewish family that aspires to thrive in the world while at the same time observing the precepts of Judaism, precepts that are more likely to be found in Psalms or the prophetic writings than in the Talmud. Galchinsky notes that the book's intended readers were "working-class Jews-only."

The Perez Family consists of several interlocking stories: the family's loss of social status and the attempt to recover that status, the marriage of one of the sons to a gentile and the religious awakening of a previously anti-religious relative. The middle story will be the most relevant to my purposes. The novella's intention is sentimental, at times perhaps treacly, and it is very successful at bringing out visceral emotional attachment to the characters. People die at the right moment, one parting with words of wisdom that will transform the family, another expiring at the moment he achieves physical and spiritual freedom.

The characters are narrowly drawn: the women are happily domestic and never err morally, whereas the men are publicly vigorous but lack sufficient moral judgement. The men need a woman's wisdom to harness their often reckless religious and personal choices. In this aspect, it paralleled comparable Christian religious fiction of the day. As Ashton notes, "Aguilar provided Jewish women with an image of family devotion linked to religious piety that resonated with Jewish memory, yet she used the same sentimental rhetoric and terms as did contemporary Christian mentor literature for women."13 She poured the substance of Jewish life into the form of Christian literature. This was a dual transaction: she admitted that the cultural resources of Christianity were of great assistance, and she borrowed from them freely. On the other side of the transaction ledger, she offered a picture of Judaism through these cultural

11 Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Woman Writer, 138-39. 12 Ibid., 180. 13 Ashton, "Grace Aguilar and the Matriarchal Theme in Jewish Women's Spirituality," 82. 204 resources amenable to those middle- and working-class Jews caught between the forces of modernity, which appeared to lead to assimilation or apostasy, and traditionalism, which appeared to cut off avenues to self-fulfillment. Endelman describes the respectability that upwardly mobile Jews, comfortable with gentile culture yet wishing to retain their ancient customs, wished for: "The embourgeoisement of most native British Jews in the nineteenth century transformed more than the material conditions of their lives. Entry into the middle class influenced how they educated their children, comported themselves in public, worshipped in their synagogues, and thought about themselves and their relationship to state and society.

Material success and acculturation to middle-class English habits and values engendered, in turn, further efforts to reduce, but not obliterate differences that set Jews apart."14 The title family of Aguilar's novella squares nicely with Endelman's picture of the typical aspirations of a middle-class Anglo-Jewish family.

The Perez family was solidly middle-class, carefully ambitious, traditionalist in moral values, liberal in generosity and open to wider cultural currents. Such a family represents the liberal edge of the Orthodox Anglo-Jewish community: unobtrusively devout, committed to ritual practice but more likely to stress the moral, universal core of the religion. When the matriarch of the family, Rachel, quotes Scripture, it is invariably from Psalms or the Prophets.

The wisdom of the former and the moral suasion of the latter represented a culturally neutral space, acceptable to both Jews and Christians by their apparent universalism. While the

Pentateuch is honored, it rarely gives shape to anything beyond ritual life.

This section will focus on one of the central stories in The Perez Family. The story under examination here consists of an argument between the stiffly Orthodox Simeon and the assimilationist Reuben, the two eldest sons of the family. They represent the extremes in Anglo-

14 Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 95. 205 Jewish life, and their reconciliation will be effected by the Perez women, who represent the happy center.

At the Sabbath table, Rachel, whose husband has recently died, assures her children that prayer, faith and trust are crucial ingredients of a religious life. Simeon asks his mother if this is true of women in particular. She answers: perhaps so, "but believe me it is equally, if not more necessary for man. Think of the many temptations to evil which men have in their intercourse with the world; the daily, almost hourly call for the conquest of inclination and passion, which, without some very strong incentive, can never be subdued. One unguarded moment, and the labour of years after righteousness may be annihilated. Man may not need the comfort of this close communion so much as woman, but he yet more requires its strength."15 Men are given over to passion more easily, more likely to take an extreme position; women, on the other hand, are centered. Although men live public lives, they are weak, and need the support of religion. As we shall see, it will take the centrist efforts of the Perez women to pull the men back from the extremes.

In Aguilar's story, the eldest sons, Simeon and Reuben, have a falling out over the latter's decision to marry a non-Jew.16 Prior to his engagement, Reuben's attitude towards religion was universalistic, but he did not wish to separate himself from his family. Separated somewhat from his religion, Reuben nonetheless did not publicly violate the commandments, especially observance of the Sabbath. But he chafed against the social and cultural restrictions of being a Jew. He asks: "What is it to be a Jew, but to be cut off from every honourable and manly

15 The Perez Family In: Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, ed. Michael Galchinsky (Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 2003), 117. Subsequent quotations from The Perez Family will be cited in text. 16 In the Talmud, "Simeon" and "Reuben" are the generic names often given to those involved in a legal dispute and its halakhic resolution. In the Torah, Simeon is an extremist, condemned by his father Jacob for his indiscriminate murder of some Canaanites because of the rape of his sister Dinah by the Canaanite Shechem. Jacob says of Simeon (and Levi): "Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath, for it was cruel; I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel" (Gen. 49:7). The biblical Reuben was considered to be guilty of incest because of his relations with Bilhah, with whom his father had previously had relations (Gen. 49:4). Like Aguilar's Reuben, the Reuben of Genesis was responsible for a sexual transgression. 206 employment? To be found, fettered to an obsolete belief, which does but cramp our energies, and bind us to detestable trade. No wonder we looked upon with contempt.. .only because we have no opportunity of showing them" (92). This passage describes the Enlightenment critique of both Judaism and anti-Jewish policy. The religion of their fathers held blocked avenues to commerce (such as working on the Sabbath and holidays), but the larger society has done nothing to unclog persistent anti-Jewish attitudes that restrict Jews to certain trades. Reuben resented his religion for obstructing his ambitions. He was worldly, and wished to drop the particularism of Judaism to move up. Reuben's ambivalence towards his inherited faith was part of emancipationist negotiation with the promise of civic and cultural equality: although not denying his identity, Reuben, and others like him, considered Judaism too tribal, focused not on humanity but on the closed circle of family and community. He wished, literally, to be emancipated; that is, freed from the burden of Jewishness. In his relationship to Judaism,

Reuben was what the Rabbis called an apostate of convenience (mumar le-te 'avori) rather than an apostate of conviction (mumar le-hakh 'is).11 While he did not see himself as living under

Jewish jurisprudence, he did not see himself as a member of another religion. Aguilar does not portray him as wicked: Reuben is generous, often giving to his mother his weekly earnings. But his mother fretted over his non-observance, and with good reason, yet she counselled her other children not to abandon Simeon: "Do not cast him from your hearts, my children, for your dead father's sake" (102).

Aguilar shows Simeon as industrious in business and devout in faith. In these characteristics, he resembled his kind father. Yet there was a divergence at the level of personality: "Perez [the father] could bear with, nay, love all mankind—could find excuse for

17 See B. Avodah Zarah 26b and B. Sanhedrin 27a, among others. Because Reuben never formally converted, he could not be designated as a mumar le-khol haTorah kulah, or total apostate. See the responsum of R. Joseph Mesas, She'elot uTeshuvot Mayyim Hayyim, vol. 1, #143, trans, by Zvi Zohar in his lecture, "The Role of Values and Outcome in the Halakhic Process: the Sephardic Approach." Accessed at http://merkaz.com/lectures.htm on April 25/08. 207 the erring, even for the apostate, much as he abhorred the deed; could believe in the sincerity and piety of others, though their faith differed from his own; but Simeon could not feel this.

Often, even in his childhood, his father had to reprove him for prejudice; and as he grew older, his hatred against all those who left the faith, or united themselves in any way with other than

Israelites, continued violent. Prejudice is almost the only feeling which reason cannot conquer— religion may, and Simeon was truly and sincerely religious; but he loved his faith better than he loved his God''' (106-07). Simeon's piety is commendable, but it blinds him. His father's piety was secure: he did not need others to share it. Simeon's religious devotion, however, was insecure: it turned him into a bigot. Reuben discards his Jewishness for universalism, whereas

Simeon's particularism allows him to honor fellow Jews alone. The Perez women will show the men how to properly negotiate the boundaries of particularism and universalism.

The tensions that develop between the brothers represent extreme paths: assimilation and isolation, both of which are spiritually deadly and outside of normative Judaism for Aguilar.

Reuben's decision to marry Jeanie Wilson, a friend's daughter, manifests most strongly these paths. After informing the family of his choice, Simeon sneers, "it is folly to be surprised—I knew it would be so" (121). Like one sunk in ghetto medievalism, he charges Reuben with chukot hagoyim,n following the ways of the non-Jewish nations, "loving what they love, doing as they do" (122). With mounting fury, Simeon compares him to Esau, the classical enemy of

Israel, who sold his birthright for a mess of porridge. Reuben, at least to his brother, has implicated himself in a design meant to bring the historical Jewish people to ruin, as intermarriage destroys the integrated Jewish family.

One brother wished to eliminate differences between Jews and Christians, while the other desired to reinforce closed religious boundaries. Like other assimilationists, Reuben

See B. Sanhedrin 52b, B. Hullin 41b and B. Avodah Zarah 1 la, re:Lev. 18:3. 208 thought intermarriage would speed up the process of Jewish civic equality. How could one have

brotherly feeling if two peoples, separated by human creeds alone, could never be family?

Simeon, on the other hand, was willing to forego the advance of equality if it encroached upon

the foundations of religion, such as recognizing as halakhically valid a marriage between two

Jews. The brothers represent radical responses to emancipation. To her readers, Aguilar presents

Simeon and Reuben as unpalatable options. Through the Perez women, she tries to show that

Jews and Christians are morally alike, separating only at the level of ritual criteria. Rachel, for

instance, uses Psalms and the Prophets as the sources of Jewish morality, a sign to her readers

that Jews possess a universal morality.

Reuben assures his mother and siblings that he has no intention of converting to

Christianity. He will remain a Jew, and Jeanie will stay an admittedly tepid Christian. (His brother, nevertheless, says that he is on an "apostate path" [122]). Mr. Wilson, Jeanie's father,

did not set conversion as a requirement for marriage to his daughter. His religious convictions

mirror Reuben's: they believe in God, but their belief is not conditioned by creedal formulations.

Simeon responds that this narrowing of religious difference means death for Judaism, for at least

in the past you could depend on anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians. Simeon observes of

Reuben's and Mr. Wilson's shared conviction: "He is, like yourself, of religion at all. Better he had been prejudiced, rigid, even despising us as others do; then this misfortune would not have befallen us" (122). One gets the honey and the sting either way: if a society expands equality and, subsequently, voluntarism, then intermarriage and conversion (in both directions) is inevitable; if a society limits equality, then religious boundaries are firmer, but the horizons of the afflicted minority religious group are lowered.

Reuben's mother and sisters are upset, too, but they express their unhappiness in more gentle tones. They do not seek to remove him from the family or from his ancestral faith.

209 Reuben protests that he has done nothing to shame his family, yet even his sympathetic sister

Leah expresses her wish that she had married a Jew: "how much happier it would have made us!" (123). Reuben declares that Jews are "in no way commanded" to wed other Jews only.

Rachel, his understanding mother, reminds him that Jews are indeed obligated to forego marriage with non-Jews, and she cites biblical examples that articulate this prohibition. Reuben objects: "But they were idolaters, mother. Jeanie and I worship the same God." Rachel responds that this similarity masks a fundamental divergence, namely, that Jews and Christians have unbridgeable theological difference. That is, the way to salvation is either through the Torah or through belief in the saving death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. These paths are irreconcilable. Aguilar's representation of Jewish-Christian relations in The Perez Family differs significantly from her public non-fiction works, where she consistently dismisses theological conflict in favor of points of moral contact. The Perez Family, of course, was written for a

Jewish audience. Aguilar's non-fiction, on the other hand, transacts on a different level: her non- fiction offers representations of Jews to Christians that minimize religious variance and maximize moral correspondence.

Rachel's promptings are an example of the religious center. She understands the forces of modernity are causing a reordering of traditional priorities. It is practically useless and morally defeating to believe that the resources of tradition can stem all intermarriage. But the established commandments and prohibitions remain despite the historical circumstances, an idea to which Reuben did not assent. Simeon, too, was wrong: the world had also changed for the better. Rachel and her daughters encourage Simeon to break from his narrow bias and recognize that the possibilities for Jews had increased because of, and not despite, Christian tolerance in

England. As Rachel understood, the Bible counselled both love of humankind and the obligation of in-marriage. These two practicalities were not in conflict with each other for the Perez

210 women, as they were for Reuben and Simeon. By portraying the Perez women as centrists,

Aguilar is trying to enhance the general profile of Jewish women in Jewish and Christian eyes.

Rachel and her daughters are devoted to their faith, but not obtrusively so, and they encourage

(non-romantic) interaction between Jews and gentiles. Aguilar clearly is trying to buttress the

case for Jewish emancipation: Jews will remain positively Jewish, but they do not discriminate

against gentiles.

Reuben marries Jeanie. He does not scorn his family, and in fact seeks to have his mother reside with him and his wife, yet Reuben does discard any semblance of Jewish identity.

Aguilar describes him as "a son of Israel, but all real feeling of nationality was dead within him"

(129). He is compared to his cousin, Sarah, who "often gloried in being a daughter of Israel," even when that meant her social prospects were subsequently reduced (132).

Later, a despondent Reuben returns home: he now has a daughter, but his beloved Jeanie has died. He admits to his family that he wanted a non-Jewish wife to "put a barrier between me and the race I had taught myself to hate," yet he felt ancestral longings close to his nerves, and, in any case, no one would allow him to forget his pedigree (151). He admits that he should have delighted in his life with Jeanie, as she treated him with all the kindness and tenderness that a wife can show to her husband. For the sake of family unity, he even pondered conversion, for

Jeanie had become religious. Reuben attended services, and promised her that if he could accept as true the doctrines of Christianity then he and their daughter would be baptized. He found that he could not accept the divinity of Jesus: such a doctrine proved an unbridgeable gulf between himself and Jeanie. Conveniently enough for the progress of the novella, Jeanie died before his decision became divisive.

Reuben was drawn back to Judaism not through immediate intellectual identification, but rather through the influence of the Perez women, who had never disowned him even when he

211 disowned his legacy. His move from assimilation back to faith manifests itself in Reuben's love for his cousin Sarah, whose steadfast devotion to her God and her family stirred dormant feelings in his soul and heart. Sarah's faith was at a far remove from the isolationism of Simeon; it was moderate in all its aspects. Due to her influence, Reuben again feels the pride of being a

Jew, "the once hated name.. .no longer hurt my ears" (151). He asks Sarah to marry him, because he loves her and judges that her temperate religious attitude will aid in the rearing of his child (also named Jeanie). Reuben begs of her: "I looked to you to train up my motherless

Jeanie, as indeed a child of God, according to your own pure belief; and to bind me to Him by links I could never, even in the strongest temptation, turn aside" (164).

Only through the moderating influence of the Perez women, who are not given over to the flames of extremism, could the Perez men be brought back from rigid Orthodoxy and assimilation. Simeon's extremism is disarmed by the words of his mother and sisters, while

Reuben's assimilationist desires are extinguished by his specific love for Sarah and more general wish to return to Judaism. Aguilar's centrism in The Perez Family reveals itself through the religious influence women have on men. Men may represent the public face of Judaism, but religious life is nurtured in the home, and Aguilar restricts women's power to the domestic domain. For this, this restriction does not represent a constriction of women's power: the home is literally and metaphorically the religious and moral center, whereas the public sphere is the source of temptation and extremism. Centrism, for Aguilar, is an amplification of women's religious authority.

What, then, is at stake for religious centrism in The Perez Family? Aguilar establishes her centrist bona fides by presenting three religious options: isolation, assimilation and moderation. Aguilar centers the Perez women between Simeon's suffocating particularism and

Reuben's dislocating universalism, supporting instead a middle-of-the-road approach in the

212 Jewish negotiation with Christian culture. Centrism for Aguilar, then, was appealing at a political level and as a religious option. Politically, if Aguilar could show Judaism as centrist, and consequently parallel to the centrism of the Church of England, then a potential obstacle in the path of emancipation is removed, or at least one argument against emancipation is eliminated.19 As a religious choice, centrism might permit a flourishing of Jewish intellectual life because of its emphasis on freedom of belief hitched to ritual conformity.

The Public Center: Aguilar's The Jewish Faith

In his preface to the American edition of The Jewish Faith, Isaac Leeser calls the book

Aguilar's "dying confession of faith."20 It is a summation of her religious convictions and a defense of Judaism as a living tradition. The Jewish Faith is series of letters from Inez Villena to

Annie Montague, a young woman tempted by the spirituality she sees in Christianity and finds

The other two options presented run counter to the possibility of emancipation: if Jews isolate themselves, they will be considered little more than "strangers," non-citizens, to English Christians. Thomas Arnold, Matthew's father, presented this view most fully in a letter to W.W. Hull in 1836. Arnold wrote: "I want to petition against the Jew Bill, but I believe I must petition alone; for you would not sign my preamble, nor would many others who will petition doubtless against the measure. I want to take my stand on my favourite principle, that the world is made up of Christians and non-Christians ; with all the former we should be one, with none of the latter. I would thank the Parliament for having done away with distinctions between Christian and Christian; I would pray that distinctions be kept up between Christians and non-Christians. Then I think that the Jews have no claim whatever of political right. If I thought of Roman Catholicism as you do, I would petition for the Repeal of the Union to-morrow, because I think Ireland ought to have its own Church established in it; and, if I thought that Church antichristian, I should object to living in political union with a people belonging to it. But the Jews are strangers in England, and have no more claim to legislate for it, than a lodger has to share with the landlord in the management of his house. If we had brought them here by violence, and then kept them in an inferior condition, they would have just cause to complain; though even then, I think, we might lawfully deal with them on the Liberia system, and remove them to a land where they might live by themselves independent; for England is the land of Englishmen, not of Jews. And in this my German friends agree with me as fully as they do in my dislike to the Protestant Establishment in Ireland, which is the land of Irishmen; and from which we ought to go." Accessed at http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/arnold/14.html. May 15, 2008. See also Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16ff. On the other hand, if Jews such as Reuben are willing to assimilate so readily, emancipation is unnecessary, as they or their children will likely become Christians. Emancipation was meant to protect Jewish identity. 20 "Preface" to The Jewish Faith: Its Spiritual Consolation, Moral Guidance, and Immortal Hope, with a Brief Notice of the Reasons for many of its Ordinances and Prohibitions (Cincinnati: The Bloch Publishing and Printing Co., 1864). Leeser also noted that in some of her prior work—namely, The Spirit of Judaism—he disagreed with her interpretation of Judaism. Leeser, in fact, added editorial comments to The Spirit of Judaism to indicate where he and Aguilar diverged. On this editorial arrogance, see Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Woman Writer. 213 lacking in Judaism. Villena's letters are a temperate reproach to the idea that Christianity alone

contains a spiritual ideal. She attempts to persuade young Anna that Judaism includes all that

which Christianity includes, and much else besides. Villena/Aguilar appeals to reason, emotion

and tradition to encourage her young friend not to apostatize. She acts as a mentor to Anna, and,

by extension, to all sensitive Jews who are exploring religious options outside their inherited

faith. Aguilar was a liberal-minded traditionalist who saw herself as having a public

responsibility to present a Judaism denuded of anti-Judaic (not anti-Jewish, as her concern here

is with religion exclusively) stereotypes that had been accepted by many Christians and not a

few Jews.

Aguilar remarks that the contemporary religious scene gives reason for optimism and pessimism. Today, there is "far, far more hope for the Future, than in the apathy and indifference

of former years."21 When Aguilar was writing the book, Reform and Orthodox camps were beginning to coalesce. While the "fearful evils.. .of party spirit.. .darken the Present" the very

fact that there is religious division confirms developing interest in religious matters. Division compels action; indifference is fatal. Religious competition, like competition in other areas, triggers hard work, a desire to present a coherent, positive public philosophy. Although anxious about an already fragile Jewish unity, Aguilar feels "more hope for the regeneration of spiritual

Israel, than there has been for many generations."23 And the hope for her generation, according to Aguilar, lay in recovering the sources of Judaism that would contribute to a religious rejuvenation. These sources are the Bible, the "spirit" of religion and the Law. The Jewish Faith finds that the first two, especially, are missing among Jewish youth, and Aguilar aims to correct that omission. This primer was designed as a guide for the perplexed of her time, challenged not by regnant Greco-Arabic philosophy, but rather the twin temptations of apostasy and

21 Aguilar, The Jewish Faith, 13. 22 Ibid., 13. 23 Ibid. 214 assimilation. Aguilar believed that repossessing the Bible, highlighting the spirit of religion and re-imagining the Law would make straight the crooked.

Bible

One of the aims of The Jewish Faith was a retrieval of the most ancient prooftext of

God's abiding concern for his people. The Bible recorded God's steadfast love for an errant, stiff-necked people, a people persistently recalled to God's covenant by those authorized to speak the word of God, the prophets. The challenges, threats and promises of the prophets were close to the skin of English Christians, yet often at a remove from English Jews. Biblical commentary, at least in England, was regarded as the bailiwick of Christians. But

Aguilar/Villena reminds Anna: "The Bible is the source, the foundation, the example of all prayer, and that is OURS."24 As the Jewish people remain God's treasured possession {am segulah), the revealed Bible persists as God's greatest gift (mattari) to human beings.

Like other centrists, Aguilar defends the divine origin of the Bible against those who understand it as a human creation, among whom we may include most, though not all, of the prominent Reform thinkers of the nineteenth-century. She neither disparages biblical criticism nor advocates it; it is simply passed over in silence. (In any case, biblical criticism in England was still in its infancy in the 1840s, but at least some of its features would have been known to someone as theologically sensitive and literate as Aguilar). Aguilar, in the guise of Villena, muses to her young friend: let us imagine that the Bible was crafted through human design, why then would not such a transient object be "overthrown by man? That no other book has ever risen alike it?"25 Durability marks divinity, and all other rival claimants to the allegiance of men and women lack this mark. Moreover, what the Bible instructs "tends to make us happier and

24 Ibid. "Ibid., 131. 215 better, and so bears, on every ordinance, the stamp of the loving and beneficent Deity, whom

Creation reveals." Arnold will later make the same argument: the Bible makes us moral, or teaches the moral life best through its prophetic reasoning and persuasion.27 According to

Aguilar, these attributes of God, a God who loves and assists his creatures, if we assent that they are true, then the supernaturally given Mosaic law has "proof of its "divinity."28 The Law, then, remains intact, because God's word is eternal and only meant for the advantage of men and women. Aguilar's belief in the divine origin of the Bible and the Mosaic Law was shared by her fellow centrists in the United States, although her bibliocentrism was not central to their

29 project.

Spirit

26 Ibid., 100-01. 27 Aguilar argues that reason also confirms the supernatural provenance of the Bible: "We may certainly appeal to the evidence of reason, as well as to the thrilling response of faith and love, to prove the divinity of the Bible" (ibid., 131). 28 Ibid., 103. 29 Her bibliocentrism led her to state unpopular positions. For example, Aguilar praised Christian missionaries: "I do indeed rejoice, when I hear of the efforts of those noble pure-spirited men, whom the worldly so often deride and contemn, the missionaries, who seek to preach even their gospel to benighted lands, and so win them to some knowledge of the divine commands. I know many would loudly condemn this as an entirely anti-Jewish idea; but believing as I do, and as my Bible authorises me to believe, that all the present systems of revealed religion are working God's will, and gradually bringing nearer that glorious day... when, our chastisement being ended, we shall be restored to our own land, and all nations flow unto us, and acknowledge with us that God is One; and believing, too, that unless the earth is brought in some degree to know God, this will not be accomplished: I must rejoice at every effort (be it of individuals or nations) to remove ignorance and reveal the Bible, or (as in the case of the Koran) some part at least of Revelation"( Ibid., 162). This passage is remarkable, for several reasons: first,an d most obvious, here is a traditional Jew advocating Christian missionizing. She means missions to those who do not know the God of Israel, yet she does not explicitly state that "witnessing" the Bible to Jews was theologically absurd (they already know the Bible, as Aguilar stresses). Little wonder, then, that such an excerpt would cause Aguilar to be cast as a Christian, though without any formal conversion, in some Jewish eyes. Yet the passage is deeply traditionalist as well: it acknowledges that when the world comes to know God, then the Jewish suffering in exile will end, and they will be freet o return to Eretz Israel. Her religious Zionism clearly chafes against arguments for her Reform tendencies (though she has some Reform tendencies, as we shall see below). Finally, this selection is indebted to Maimonides. Maimonides argued that Christianity and Islam were part of the messianic process, that they brought the pagan world to accept the one and universal God. The work of these two great religions was necessary, but it was only prepatory. Maimonides writes: "and all of these things that Yeshua ha-Notsri (Jesus of Nazareth) and of that Ishmaelite who came after him only function to set the path for King Messiah, to rectify the whole world and to worship God together" (Hilkhot Melakhim 11:4). For the American Jewish reaction to Christian missionizing, which was not wholly dissimilar to Aguilar's, see Jonathan Sarna, "American Jewish Responses to Christian Missions" Journal of American History 68 (June 1981).

216 One of the keywords in Aguilar's religious lexicon is "spirit," a term that, as Galchinsky correctly observes, she borrowed from the surrounding Christian culture. Galchinsky calls "the emphasis on spirit...the major legacy from her Christian contacts."30 Although Aguilar admitted that Judaism was a religion of law, she wished to present to her audience a vision of Judaism that welcomed the spiritual side. She rarely made invidious comparisons between spirit and law that had characterized so much Christian anti-Jewish polemic, but her use of "spirit" surely summoned such comparisons. If Aguilar's view of the Bible tilted traditionalist, her insistence on the spiritualization of Judaism leaned Reform: like many other centrists, she consciously balanced alternative conceptions of Jewish life with maintenance of established attitudes towards the objects of sanctity.

Thus the Bible remained for her the actual word of God, yet the Bible was not simply a register of positive commandments {mitzvot aseh) and negative commandments (mitzvot lo ta'aseh); it dictated to the heart as much as to the body. The Sinaitic laws communicate the path to a properly ordered society, while the words of the prophets counsel the penitent and bring succour to the suffering. As Aguilar states: "Now, though the Pentateuch is the most important, as the foundation not only of the Jewish, but of all Religions.. .it will not bring so much spiritual comfort and spiritual guidance to individuals, as the Psalms and Prophets, Proverbs and

Ecclesiastes."31 Aguilar declares that the Mosaic Torah underpins all religion, yet at the same time she circumscribes that judgement by affirming wisdom and prophetic literature as more immediately germane to human concern. In an era of growing religious choice, the Psalmist and the prophet speak louder. Wisdom and prophetic literature are seen by Aguilar as addressing individual concerns while the Pentateuch focuses on communal concerns. Moreover, the

Pentateuch stresses ritual obligations, whereas the non-Pentateuchal portions emphasize moral

30 Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, 135. 31 Aguilar, The Jewish Faith, 142. 217 obligations. Aguilar even appears to hold that the ritual laws are not themselves divine. Instead, she contends that only "the spiritual and the moral" are divine. She states later in The Jewish

Faith her belief that the ritual commandments are of divine origin, but of a lesser sanctity because they are restricted to the people Israel.

Finally, Aguilar charges "formalists"33 with removing the spiritual core from Judaism.

That core had always existed, but in exile it had wilted under external oppression. The formalists conform to the law yet have no larger sense of the spiritual weight of the law. They "have thrown such odium on the Jewish faith."34 These formalists, or, as she writes, "orthodox

Hebrews,"35 choose not to access the spiritual resources, for "the Psalms and Prophets must be to them utterly unknown, and the spirit of the law, a meaningless word." Aguilar does not diminish the obligatory nature of the law, ritual or moral; she wishes only to amplify the modern understanding of law by recovering its ancient "spirit" whose very antiquity speaks to those moderns for whom the formalism of much of traditional Judaism gives cold comfort.

Law

What is remarkable about The Jewish Faith is not that Aguilar highlights the spiritual side of Judaism, it is that the commendation of the spirit does not come at the expense of the

Law. Reformers cheered the Prophets to the disadvantage of the Mosaic Law. The only enduring law was moral; the ritual law was restricted to Israelite sovereignty in its own land and in its own time. For the Orthodox of Aguilar's time (the "formalists"), the Law was used as a hedge against extra-halakhic considerations in the development of Jewish life. They were positivists,

32 Ibid., 105. 33 Ibid., 35. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 36. 36 Ibid., 86. 218 and nothing could leach into the airtight halakha. Aguilar cut a centrist path between these two positions.

Unlike the formalists, Aguilar does not believe that the ritual law has a teleological purpose. The Law is divine in that it is the literal word of God, but its end is utilitarian, to

'in prepare Jews for their spiritual purpose in this world and the world-to-come. The ritual commandments remain obligatory, but they are empty of value per se. Nevertheless, these commandments have a positive role in the religious life. The religious life, according to Aguilar,

"could not be only a system of spiritual worship. In this life humanity, however far advanced, cannot realise a religion of the inward heart alone. It must have outward aids." Ritual law disciplines the body, just as moral law disciplines the soul, and body and soul are integrated: the soul is immortal and the body will be resurrected at the end of days.

Despite her distaste for religious formalism/positivism, Aguilar trusts that even those commandments that are at present inoperative will again be in effect. For example, she notes that the sacrificial system of the ancient Israelite cult was only possible with a functioning

Temple under Jewish political authority. Many Reformers decried liturgical passages that sought the restoration of animal sacrifice, noting that prayer had taken its place. But Aguilar/Villena tells her friend that, while sacrifice is not an end in itself, "do not imagine from this, that I believe the forms of our religion are of no importance, and that the sacrifices are for ever done away. I believe that every form which we can observe in our captivity is imperatively incumbent upon us, that our religion is imperfect without it, and that every truly spiritual Hebrew, instead of disregarding the outward ceremonies, will delight in obeying them for the love he bears his

God, welcoming them as immediate instructions from Him..." She continues: "when we are

37 The last half of The Jewish Faith adduces proofs for the immortality of the soul and its place in the world-to- come (olam ha-ba). 38 Aguilar, The Jewish Faith, 219. 39 Ibid., 221. 219 sufficiently purified to be restored to our own land, the outward rites will be the same as they

were in the days of old, and with them, but merely as part of them (having no merit in itself),

sacrifice of course."40 Aguilar here clearly distinguishes herself from Reform in her

comprehensive religious Zionism, just as she had separated herself from the Orthodox by calling

for the spiritualization of Judaism.

Conclusion

Where does Aguilar fit along the spectrum of Jewish possibilities among Victorian

Anglo-Jewry? Some placed her in the Reform camp and others in the Orthodox camp. One early

commentator called her "sui generis,"41 neither completely reform- or traditionalist-oriented. In

his study of Aguilar and other Anglo-Jewish women authors, Galchinsky denies she is unique.

Rather, she is part of the haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, which pressed for the civil and

economic equality of Jews and gentiles, and advocated reform, usually conservative but

sometimes radical, of the Jewish religion to align it more closely, at least in decorum and other

external matters, with Christianity.42 But the history of Anglo-Jewry shows little interaction with

German haskalah or German-style Reform Judaism. As Steven Singer notes, "The beliefs and

doctrines of German Reform found little popular acceptance across the Channel and had almost

no effect on Jewish thought in early Victorian London."43

I believe Aguilar can best be identified with what Singer calls the progressive Orthodox,

or what I would call the centrists. Singer makes a distinction between the traditionalists and the

progressives in Anglo-Jewish Orthodoxy. 4 The former admit no change in form or doctrine,

while the latter reject the radicalism of Reform (just beginning in England) but are willing to

40 Ibid., 223. 41 See Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, 151. 42 Galchinksy, Grace Aguilar, 14. 43 Steven Singer, "Jewish Religious Thought in Early Victorian England" AJS Review 10.2 (Autumn 1985), 187. 44 Ibid., 186. 220 adjust rabbinic norms to fit the circumstances of their age. Aguilar acknowledged at least implicitly the authority of the Chief Rabbi when she sent a copy of The Jewish Faith to Nathan

Marcus Adler, who thanked her in reply.45 Anglo-Jewry did not wish to cut ties with a public authority such as a Chief Rabbi. If change was to occur, the progressives felt, then it could happen through the office of the Chief Rabbi, who "possess [ed] the right to grant dispensations from the observances required by Halakhah...[Anglo-Jews saw him] not as a traditional rabbinic scholar with the power to interpret the law, but rather as an Anglican bishop."46 Reform could take place, but only within the established modes of halakhic change: a recognized authority could sanction change; it was not a decision left to individual conscience, as some German (and

American) Reformers stated. Anglo-Jews, even when they diverged on theological or ritual grounds, sought justification for change through traditional Jewish jurisprudence. Anglo-Jewish reformers and perhaps some progressive Orthodox/centrists might applaud the actual transformations brought about by continental or American Reform, yet, as Singer notes, "it was not the results of such a revolution which the progressives opposed, but the revolution itself."47

Like left-wing centrists elsewhere (for example, Benjamin Szold in the United States),48

Aguilar distinguished between the divinely revealed Written Torah and the humanly constructed

Oral Torah. The Jewish legal system was created by rabbinic interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and the tradition holds that the Oral Torah was given to Moses along with the Written Torah.

Aguilar thought that rabbinic authority was divinely ordained, but that it was to be followed in dual consultation with one's own rational capacities and Jewish learning. As Singer states, she

45 Ibid., 189fhl4. 46 Ibid., 207. 47 Ibid. 48 See Moshe Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism: the Historical School in 19th Century America (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963). 221 "did not openly reject the Oral Law but rather downplayed its importance." This difference

separated Aguilar from the radical Reformers: she did not deny rabbinic authority; rather, she

saw it supplementing the greater, more immediate authority of the Bible.

In the end, we may count Aguilar a centrist. She embraced the individualism of a

spiritualized Judaism yet refused at the same time to undercut commitment to traditional Jewish

law. Aguilar elevated the Bible as the supreme authority in Jewish life and diminished the role

of the Talmud, but did not renounce Jewish jurisprudence. She was a traditionalist who promoted cautious reform. As she tells Anna: "We may watch too, with dread, the too violent reforms, the too indiscriminate clipping away of old-established, and so somewhat treasured

forms; but better, far better, this agitation, than the stagnant waters of apathy and indifference"50

Aguilar may not have sided with the Reformers, but she recognized their value: they provided competition for traditional Jews who had grown slack in belief and formalist in practice. If

Reform did nothing else, it forced Anglo-Jewry to reflect publicly and privately on the nature of

Judaism, both at a communal and individual level.

Shorthouse's John Inglesant

Born in 1834, John Henry Shorthouse was reared in a devout Quaker household in

Birmingham. Like many Quakers, his father was a merchant, and a prosperous one. Shorthouse, however, chaffed against what he considered the spiritual narrowness of Quakerism, and in 1861 he and his wife were welcomed into the Church of England. Shorthouse's novel, John Inglesant, is an apologia to his former co-religionists and a defense of the middle path of Anglicanism against the incursions of Roman Catholic and dissenting claims. Paul Elmer More calls it "the

49 Ibid., 190. Galchinsky notes that that several early critics disapproved of Aguilar's theological writings because of her lack of rabbinic knowledge. She was, of course, excluded fromsuc h knowledge, as he observes. I wonder, though, about the general level of Talmudic knowledge in early Victorian Anglo-Jewish history. How many complete editions of shas were available to anyone? 50 Aguilar, The Jewish Faith, 441-42. 222 one great religious novel of the English language." Coming from a non-conformist background and pulled strongly towards the ritualism but not the theology of Roman Catholicism,

Shorthouse finds his place in the religious world as an Anglican, which was for him the mediating Church between two perceived polarities.

Though virtually forgotten today, the Victorian reading public loved John Inglesant, especially Anglicans: converts tend to present their voluntarily chosen tradition in the best possible light. And although John Inglesant is indeed a love letter to the Anglican Church, like any kind of love it is not without its complications and heartache. The eponymous main character plumps in the end for the Church of England, but not before supping at other religious tables. When other religious options exhaust themselves, only the Anglican Church remains.

The publication history of John Inglesant is of more than passing interest. Shorthouse privately published the quasi-autobiographical novel (as autobiographical as a novel set two hundred years prior can be) in 1880 with a Quaker printer. The novel eventually found its way to

Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Matthew Arnold's niece and an important novelist herself, and she shepherded to the famous publisher Alexander MacMillan who brought out a popular edition of the book. (MacMillan had personal sympathies with Shorthouse: both were Platonists and disciples of Frederick Denison Maurice). John Inglesant was given further publicity when Prime

Minister Gladstone, a natural ally of Shorthouse's religious tendencies, was photographed reading the book. When the novel was re-issued in 1961, it was published under the auspices of the SCM Press, the semi-official publisher of the Anglican world. This edition was introduced by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey. Ramsey himself saw the Church of England as occupying the religious middle.

51 Paul Elmer More, Shelburne Essays 3rd series (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907), 227. 52 See especially The Anglican Spirit, ed. Dale Coleman (Cambridge, Mass: Cowley Publications, 1991). 223 The afterlife of the novel was not without its controversy. In 1925, W.K. Fleming noted that long passages in John Inglesant were lifted directly and without attribution from the writings of several of the seventeenth-century figures prominent in the book. Shorthouse, for instance, borrowed freely from Hobbes' Leviathan. Scholars such as Fleming and Polak accused the author of brazen plagiarism.53 Such use, however, was widespread in the nineteenth-century.

In his study of the religious novel, Raymond Chapman writes that "no one objects to

[plagiarism] in the novels of Newman, Kingsley, Wiseman and Neale."54 These writers and theologians were Shorthouse's contemporaries.

Shorthouse was a centrist's centrist. He described his Anglicanism as "Broad Church

Sacramentalism."55 Accordingly, he felt that diversity of belief was permissible (the Broad

Church component) as long as that diversity did not encroach on the ritual conformity, or orthopraxis, needed to give direction to religious life (the sacramental component). Like

Maurice, Shorthouse's Anglicanism did not fit neatly into the scholarly triad of Broad, High and

Low Church. He located himself securely in the center of what he perceived as the definitive centrist form of Christianity. Some scholars attempt to shoehorn both Shorthouse and his novel into a firm Anglican category. Joseph Baker Ellis describes him as "an advocate of very High

Church Anglicanism."56 Others painted him as a religious liberal. Andrew Drummond credited him for "prepar[ing] Church and people for the more liberal version of Anglo-Catholicism that found expression in the epoch-making symposium, Lux Mundi."51 He was, I believe, a religious

See W.K. Fleming, "Some Truths about John Inglesant" Quarterly Review CCXLV (July 1925), 130-148 and Meijer Polak, The Historical, Philosophical and Religious Aspects o/John Inglesant (Purmerend, Netherlands: J. Muusses, 1933). 54 Raymond Chapman, Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement (London: Weidenfeld andNicolson, 1970), 259. 55 The Guardian, March 18, 1903. 56 Joseph Ellis Baker, The Novel and the Oxford Movement (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 189. 57 Andrew L. Drummond, The Churches in English Fiction (Leicester: Edgar Books, 1950), 93. Shorthouse did tell a correspondent, "I am reading Lux Mundi with great interest." Life and Letters ofJ.H. Shorthouse, ed. Sarah Shorthouse (London: Macmillan and Co., 1905), 279. 224 centrist, and this can be shown through his private writings and his public work, most notably in his only critically and commercially successful novel, John Inglesant.

The minimal scholarship devoted to Shorthouse notes his affinity for Hawthorne, especially Hawthorne's nuanced use of religious symbols and focus on the individual believer in

CO struggle with the great themes of sin, forgiveness, doubt and conviction. An anonymous reviewer of John Inglesant in the New York Times contends that the author "is indeed in many ways a worker in the field of Hawthorne"59 The reviewer concluded that Hawthorne was "better equipped for the future; his novels are not concerned with phases of religion, but with the moral consciousness and the feeling of guilt, which are eternally the same."60 He is surely correct: no one reads Shorthouse today for anything other than purely historical interest.

While Hawthorne was his literary guide, Shorthouse's theology was shaped by his encounter with the work of F.D. Maurice, whom I have already called the archetypal Anglican centrist.61 Born into a Unitarian family, Maurice later joined the Anglican Church, and

Shorthouse saw obvious parallels with himself. The former's Kingdom of Christ was both a gentle polemic against and a qualified apologetic for the Quakers, the people amongst whom

Shorthouse was reared. He considered Maurice the best model of an Anglican theologian.

Wagner argues that Maurice's "love of form and beauty and...fear of materialism and scepticism inherent in the new science"62 corresponded to Shorthouse's embrace of the formalism of

Anglican liturgy and worship, and his worry that science, especially the social and religious implications of Darwinism, would debase the spiritual side of human life. The son of Maurice

58 See Klaus Hansen Sin and Sympathy: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Sentimental Religion (New York: P. Lang, 1991); and John Updike's lecture, "Hawthorne's Creed" (New York: Targ Editions, 1981). 59 New York Times, July 4, 1882. 60 More, Shelburne Essays, 236. 61 Shorthouse greatly admired another Anglican centrist: Matthew Arnold. We know that he corresponded with Arnold and quoted him regularly in his letters. See Shorthouse's letter of Oct. 23, 1871 to Arnold in Life and Letters ofJ.H. Shorthouse, 83. In a later letter, he approvingly quotes Arnold's famous definition of God as "a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness" (April 1882), 151. 62 Frederick J. Wagner, J.H. Shorthouse (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 41. 225 asked Shorthouse to write a review of his biography of his father. Shorthouse gladly complied, and his article on Maurice is key to understanding Shorthouse's centrism.

Shorthouse tells his readers firmly: "I conceive that Mr. Maurice himself was absolutely unique."63 For him, Maurice found that level of moderation that was exceptional to the Church of England; namely, balancing broad-mindedness and the right of private inquiry with conformity to a national church. Shorthouse writes, "he united an almost perfect freedom and toleration of thought with the most entire certitude of conviction and teaching."64Like

Shorthouse, Maurice "believed, with his whole heart, in the English Church, in its formularies, in its Articles, in its Liturgy, in its Creeds"65 The Church of England best expressed the core

Christian truths that had been transmitted from the early Church. Anglicanism was flexible on matters indifferent (adiaphora); it could tolerate pluralism. But the design of the Church of

England, according to Shorthouse's Maurice, was meant to suit the religious sensibilities of the

English people, and to be embraced by them. It denied the low factionalism bred by anarchic

Protestantism but cheered free historical scholarship and development of doctrine both of which were repudiated by the Roman Catholic Church. Ultimately, the error of Protestants and Roman

Catholics was to collapse the notion of Christian unity.66 On this most exigent matter,

Shorthouse writes of Maurice: "So far as the sectaries set themselves up against the visible unity of the one Kingdom and Church of God—so far he would have no fellowship with them; but he would have been the first to recognise the side of truth each of them grasped, as a witness

Literary Remains ofJ.H. Shorthouse, ed. Sarah Shorthouse (London: Macmillan and Co., 1905), 287. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 294. 66 Many Anglican traditionalists in the Victorian era believed that the early Church provided the model for Christian unity. But unity cannot be squeezed out of the many dissensions of the first few centuries of the Christian era. One need only point to the early second-century letters of Ignatius of Antioch (written in haste on a martyr's journey to Rome) which instruct the churches of Asia Minor and Rome to submit to episcopal authority to avoid the divisions that the arrival of the heretical Docetists (a Christian group that denied the human reality of Jesus of Nazareth) promised. 226 against the error and backsliding of the Church." Shorthouse's novel was a creative repudiation of sectarianism and a plea for unity.

Plot Outline

The novel makes for a jarring read. Shorthouse employs the device of a discovered manuscript to justify abrupt changes in narrative pacing and physical location of the eponymous main character. But the plot itself is simple enough:

Born in 1622, John Inglesant is reared in an Anglican home with distinct Catholic predilections. He is tutored in medieval mysticism, Catholic thought and Platonism. From age fourteen onward, Inglesant's education is conducted by Jesuits. They are charged to train him to work towards the reconciliation of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Communions. His father supported this unusual pedagogy. He does not become a Catholic, and in fact is actively discouraged from conversion by his Jesuit teacher. Inglesant's value to the Jesuits lies in his outward Anglicanism. He becomes involved in Civil War intrigues as a soldier on the royalist side. He is then sent on a diplomatic mission to Scotland; involves himself in the trial of the royalist, High Church Archbishop Laud; and is finally tasked to gain Irish assistance in the battles at Chester. Inglesant fails in the latter commission, is betrayed by Charles I and is sentenced to hang. But by the judicious machinations of his former Jesuit teacher he is spared;

Charles I (whom Shorthouse personally admired) will not be as fortunate.

England under Cromwell was inhospitable to High Church Anglicans like Inglesant, but he leaves his home because of the murder of his (hurriedly reintroduced) twin brother, Eustace,

Ibid., 295. 227 by the Italian Malvolti. He departs for Italy with vengeance on his mind. Shorthouse does not transition the story smoothly to the Continent, but Inglesant will spend almost half of the novel there. He finds his brother's murderer, but, in a spiritual epiphany, cannot bring himself to kill

Malvoti. Inglesant will later stumble upon and personally forgive the dying Malvoti, who has turned religious and tends to the sick. The rest of Inglesant's time in Italy is spend involving himself in papal elections, marriage (his wife and child, whom we meet but briefly, perish in an outbreak of plague) and long intellectual conversations with various Roman Catholic figures from worldly bishops to mystics such as Miguel de Molinos. Molinos' combination of

Catholicism and Platonism proves irresistible to Inglesant, and he defends the mystic against charges of heresy. Molinos, however, is hounded into prison by the Jesuits (Inglesant's former tutors). Turned off by the physical terror and intellectual constriction of the Inquisition,

Inglesant in the last few pages returns home where we are told that he finds religious succour and personal peace in the via media of the Church of England, which avoids the hot fanaticism of separatist Protestantism and the absence of intellectual freedom in Roman Catholicism.

Critics were dubious about the historical accuracy of the novel. He may have breathed in the ideas of the seventeenth-century, but Shorthouse's ear failed him, according to one reviewer:

"If Mr. Shorthouse intended a tone of antiquity and an adherence to such turns of thought and phraseology as belong to the age he has not been successful."68 But Shorthouse's purpose was not historical accuracy or capturing dialect; it was rather to express by a selective reading of history an understanding of the religious controversies of his day. Using the events of the seventeenth-century allowed Shorthouse, and presumably his readers, to see their battles through a different and detached prism. In the seventeenth-century, the national Church was sorely tested, its boundaries crying out for definition as it was challenged by a resurgent if clandestine

New York Times, July 4, 1882. 228 Roman Catholicism and a zealous Puritanism. While the historical precision and literary merit of the novel may be lacking, John Inglesant does provide a window on the religious culture of late

nineteenth-century Anglicanism as it struggles to remain a national Church above Roman

Catholic and Protestant sectarianism. Wolffs assessment is right: "one thing is clear: anyone

interested in the Victorian novel of religion will want to read John Inglesant."69 The rest of the

chapter will focus on the novel's concern with religious dissent, Roman Catholicism and the

Church of England.

The Nether Millstone: Dissent in John Inglesant

7ft

Shorthouse's novel, a "philosophical romance," seems at a far remove from our time.

As literature, John Inglesant does not commend itself. The novel's verbosity and lack of natural transition show the hand of a (talented) amateur. It is also a product very much of its own era, whereas literary greatness transcends the temporary cares and immediate passions of its age. But

for that very reason, the religious concerns of John Inglesant lend themselves to a discussion of

Victorian Anglicanism as it attempts to articulate its position along the Christian spectrum while at the same time attempting to hold on to ever narrowing political, social and cultural privilege and authority. Because the novel is of typical quality rather than atypical it stands as a solid data point for considering religious centrism. Shorthouse's centrism emerges through his hero's rejection of Roman Catholicism and Puritan Protestantism, finding a home in the Church of

England which preserves the ancient forms of Catholic ritual and liturgical life while freedom of thought and conscience.

Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: Garland Publishing), 175. 70 "Preface to the New Edition" in Shorthouse, John Inglesant: A Romance (London: Macmillan and Co., 1903). Subsequent quotations from John Inglesant will be cited in text. 229 Shorthouse was reared in a conservative, sober Quaker home. His break with the

Quakers was personally painful, as his letters reflect. And, as Chapman observes, "to see

Shorthouse as a former Quaker is as important to understand the Evangelicalism of Newman and the Wilberforces. The revival in the Church of England was able to give him what was lacking in his first faith: a deep sacramental sense, without rigid conformity or insistence on details of developed dogma."72 For all of their concentration on the inner life of the believer (and

Shorthouse never relinquished his love for this sort of individualism), the Quakers lacked the marks of catholicity, marks that he deemed historically and existentially evident in the Church of England.

The central division in John Inglesant is between Anglicans and Catholics.

But Inglesant, Shorthouse's fictional representative, also rejects the regnant Puritanism of mid- seventeenth century England. In the Preface, the reader is told this novel reflects on the "the conflict between Culture and Fanaticism" (x). The relevant representatives of culture and fanaticism are, for the former, the Church of England and, for the latter, the dissenting or Non-

Conformist churches. By using the terms "culture and fanaticism" the author is sending a socio- religious cue to his readers that he understands the competing labels as Arnold did: culture was national, pedagogical, unifying and morally edifying, whereas fanaticism was narrowly self- interested, divisive, and morally unsound due to its separatist tendencies. Although the preface appears to promise a detailed fictional look at the controversies between the Church of England and the dissenting or Non-Conformist bodies, this promise does not materialize into sustained reflection on their relationship. But there are two incidents of note.

Shorthouse assures a former co-religionist that he wishes his decision to convert to Anglicanism did not trouble his family and friends. "/ cannot alter the whole course and constitution of nature and religion, nor can I help myself from... appreciating and attaching myself as far as I can to that plan and system of religion which I can doubt God has appointed for the world." Life and Letters ofJ.H. Shorthouse, 65. 72 Chapman, Faith and Revolt, 253. 230 The first incident involves a conversation between Inglesant and a Puritan, a man

"possessed of considerable property in Peterborough" (80). They were romantic rivals for the saintly Mary Collet, who lived at the Anglo-Catholic religious community at Little Gidding. In the end, neither would be worthy of her hand, and she would die young in Paris (the historical

Mary Collet lived to old age). Inglesant saw in Mr. Thorne, who darkened Little Gidding with his constant presence, "a man in whom a perpetual struggle was going on between his real nature and the system of religion which he had adopted" (80). Thome's Puritanism created a stern, narrow outlook in him: he harangued Inglesant at every opportunity "in the way the

Puritans took upon them to do" (81). This outlook was meanly sectarian: Thorne denied that the resources of Christianity, which favored the poor in spirit and scorned the world, could embrace the "saints" and the "followers of the pleasures of this world" (81). "How can two walk together unless they are agreed?," Thorne asks Inglesant. When his zeal subsides, he requests of his rival to watch over Ms. Collet, as he recognizes that she will rebuff his marriage proposal. Inglesant admires Thome's candor, noting that "there was something extremely pathetic in the sight of the human nature in this man struggling within him beneath the force of his Puritanism, and the next moment the old habit breaking in insult and denunciation; the one opening to him glimpses of human happiness which the other immediately closed" (83-84).

The second important Protestant episode involves the conversion of a Lady Cardiff to

Quakerism. (Lady Cardiff later marries Eustace, Inglesant's twin). The Quakers are rather uncharitably described by Shorthouse as "an unpleasing sort of people, silent, sullen, and of reserved conversation" (168). The author is sympathetic to Lady Cardiff, who is of a kind disposition and altruistic to a fault. At the same time, she is portrayed as foolish and naive. She distributes alms to the poor and "masterless people," but her search for physical and religious

231 well-being sees her diverting a majority of her charity to "mountebanks and quacks of all kinds"

(184).

Lady Cardiff introduces Inglesant to Henry More, her teacher. The great representative of Christian Platonism, More reflects on the differences and similarities between his mystical

Christianity and the Christianity of the Quakers.73 The structure of More's theology would seem at first glance to be simpatico with Quakerism: both focus on the inner Light of the believer who searches for God. There is much truth in their teaching, he contends, as they are "very nobly

Christian" (188). They respect contemplative life, but they separate themselves from their fellows, which makes "them seem so uncouth and ridiculous" (189). Their emphasis on the dwelling of the light of God within individuals is true, but for them the truth ends there. They do not consider the catholicity of the church of Christ, toiling instead in their private gardens, cushioned against the pressing reality of Christian life in the world. Inglesant resists such world- denying theologies.

These Protestants of John Inglesant function as theological extremists, willing to cut themselves off from the historical Church in order to follow their conscience. For a centrist like

Shorthouse, the historical Church, nurtured by the Church Fathers and maintained to the present day, insists on ritual conformity and general assent to a common body of doctrine. Shorthouse's

Protestants fail to meet this charge of the early Church. Puritans are willing to divide the

Christian community into a Manichean one: on the one side are the sainted elect, and on the other reside those irredeemably sunk in sin. Quakers go astray through their theological solipsism: that is, piety developed in the individual heart and mind is the singular source of religious truth and knowledge. The developed Christian tradition, thus, is given neither voice nor

On More, see Aharon Lichtenstein, Henry More: The Rational Theology of a Cambridge Platonist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). 232 veto. For Shorthouse, Anglicanism alone balances individualism and tradition, creating a natural

Christian center.

The Upper Millstone: Roman Catholicism in John Inglesant

The few academic writings that touch on John Inglesant recognize that the real encounter, both in the title character's soul and the soul of the nation, is not between

Anglicanism and dissent but between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. As Margaret

Maison observes, the novel "deal[s] with the soul's escape from Catholicism to Anglicanism"74

While Catholic practice and many individual Catholics are portrayed sympathetically, an early reviewer judged both the tone and substance of the novel as unambiguously anti-Catholic: "That the novel is extremely offensive to Catholics is plain. It is all the more disliked because Mr.

Shorthouse does not denounce Pope, prelate, or Jesuit. He draws attractive pictures of

Catholicism...while careful to be always slyly turning the stuff and showing the reverse. Perhaps

Catholics will find such methods all the worse for being insidious."75 Later reviewers were more generous: Chapman observes that even the Jesuits "are not all condemned."76 No group cut a more fearsome figure in the English religious imagination: the Jesuits were narrow bigots, seeking to import to freedom-loving Britain an authoritarian Catholicism with its attendant gloomy doctrine that extinguishes mind and soul. Even Shorthouse, more sympathetic than most to the Jesuits, comically describes Inglesant as a man "who in spite of his Jesuitical and Court training was naturally modest" (57). In Shorthouse's century, the Jesuits had been reconstituted in England (1814), and represented in the popular and literary imagination an "Other" menacing

Margaret M. Maison, The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 64. 75 New York Times, July 4, 1882. 76 Raymond Chapman, The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 121. 233 Englishness. For example, in 1832, Gregory XVI issued an encyclical (Mirari Vos) forbidding liberty of conscience and condemning freedom of the press. And England jealously guarded its

self-perception as an island of liberty.

If not emphatically negative, Shorthouse's John Inglesant displays at best an ambivalent attitude towards Roman Catholicism. Whereas Protestantism emphasizes private judgment,

Catholicism is portrayed as suffocating the beliefs of individuals. Catholicism attracts by its forms and its antiquity, but it repels by its political corruption and crushing of conscience.

Shorthouse is concerned with. Catholicism, and the tension of attraction and repulsion is felt close to the nerve. The hero's father, Richard, was an Anglican in name only, and had his sons tutored by Roman Catholics. Although to be a Roman Catholic in the 1630s and 40s was dangerous, this era also represented the height of Roman Catholic influence in the country.

Archbishop Laud, the great High Churchman accused of being a closet Catholic, is described accurately by Shorthouse as "refusing to allow it to be abused or described as Antichrist in the

English pulpits" (72-73). Catholic interests in England try to persuade Laud to take a cardinal's hat, but he rebuffs their offer. While legally barred from accepting converts in England, Catholic priests did so openly. The narrator of John Inglesant states that, despite Catholic disabilities, all

Englishmen except the most ardent dissenter felt "veneration and awe" (260) towards the historical Roman Catholic Church. What dissuaded many from conversion or reversion to

Catholicism was the political corruption and shrinking of individual freedoms that seemed to follow the Church wherever it had power.

For the poet Richard Crashaw (1613-1649), the attraction of Roman Catholicism is political rather than explicitly theological. In the novel, Inglesant is told by Crashaw that

Catholic piety and respect for institutional religion is root and bark of the Church of England.

77 See Maurice Whitehead, " 'Education and Correct Conduct': Randal Lythgoe and the Work of the Society of Jesus in Early Victorian England and Wales" In: Victorian Churches and Churchmen: Essays Presented to Vincent Alan McClelland, ed. Sheridan Gilley (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2005). 234 However, unlike the situation in Italy and France, the national Church is threatened by the anarchic impulses of Protestantism. Crashaw "feared that the English Church had not the sufficient authority to resist the spread of Presbyterianism, in which case he saw no safety except in returning to the communion of Rome" (58). Of course, the historical Crashaw did convert to Catholicism while in France.

Inglesant himself flirted with conversion, both in England (where it was politically unfeasible) and on the Continent. After pursing, finding and forgiving his brother's murderer, he finds himself wooed by the aesthetic charms of Italy and the devotions of Rome. He considers entering a monastery, but ceases at the novice stage. Inglesant judges that the Church would have retained its position in the world except for the sacrament of confession. He thought confession should be voluntary, otherwise it is a constraint on conscience, an intolerable act of religious tyranny. A Christian, he observes, should have access to the sacraments even in the absence of confession. If only the Church had dropped this prerequisite and subsequently tolerated a range of theological opinion it could have flourished. In other words, if the Roman

Catholic Church had become Anglican: "That free speculation and individual growth could be combined with loyalty to acts and ceremonies, hallowed by centuries of recollection and past devotion, was a prospect sufficiently attractive to many select natures" (410).

John Inglesanfs ambivalence about Roman Catholicism becomes most clear in the section on the mystic Molinos. Miguel de Molinos (16407-1697) was a Spanish mystic whose individualistic pietism (Quietism) was condemned as heretical. Pursued by the icy hand of the

Inquisition (whose judges were encouraged by the Jesuits), his teachings were censured. He died in prison while serving a life sentence.

The principles of Molinos, what might be called a modified Christian Platonic mysticism, held great personal appeal to Shorthouse. He even published a brief note on Molinos'

235 Spiritual Guide. And the mystic plays a central role in the novel. Molinos attempted to convince his pursuers, the Jesuit and Benedictine order, both of whom previously supported him, that spiritual freedom was not anarchy; the orders recoiled at this suggestion. Inglesant seeks Molinos' release from prison, but to no avail. He attaches himself to the mystic, seeing in his thought a way to individual perfection in a terribly imperfect world, and aspiring to "union with God." This philosophy was perceived as a threat to religious authority: the individual could bypass priests and "deal directly with God." Molinos, however, did believe that

Catholics must submit themselves to temporal and spiritual authority. Some of his followers did not.

Inglesant was distressed by the Jesuit persecution of Molinos. He called it an "intolerable tyranny" (431). His religious sympathies move away from Catholicism, and he wishes to begin a

"crusade on behalf of religious freedom and of the rights of private devotion and judgment."

One of the judges tells Inglesant that the issue with Molinos cuts to the heart of the problem of who can legitimately exercise religious authority, observing that the "question is between individual license and obedience to authority." "The very existence of Christianity in the world" is contingent on the correct answer to this question. The Jesuit remarks that everyone submits to religious authority, whether that authority originates in Rome, in the conscience or in tradition.

It is a matter of which authority is more persuasive. For Inglesant, Roman Catholic authority is not morally persuasive, rationally justifiable or emotionally compelling because it is politically coercive. He will seek (and find) authority elsewhere.

The conduit of Roman Catholic influence in Victorian England was not through numerical increase, but the intellectual and aesthetic appeal of Catholicism to many sensitive persons who felt that Anglicanism had forgotten its Catholic roots. Shorthouse's life is a prime

78 See "Golden Thoughts From the Spiritual Guide" in Literary Remains ofJ.H. Shorthouse, 281. 79 Henry Charles Lea, "Molinos and the Italian Mystics" The American Historical Review 11.2 (January 1906), 243. 80 Ibid. 236 example. There was nothing in his biographical profile would suggest an attraction to Roman

Catholicism. In fact, outside of converting to another religion altogether, there was no lengthier move along the Christian spectrum than that of Quakerism to Roman Catholicism. But the nature of religion in Victorian England made such a move plausible, as religious switching was no longer uncommon, and the social and political censure that often accompanied such a change was muted. By the 1880s, Shorthouse's audience would have comfortable with the idea that the

Church of England maintained elements of Roman Catholic ritual and liturgy. Carrying over this religious language and worship did not mean, however, that Roman Catholicism itself was acceptable as its moral and political theology were instinctively off-putting to Anglican centrists such as Shorthouse.

Recovering the Center: the Church of England in John Inglesant

While Inglesant takes measure of both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, only the latter is viable as a religious option (Protestant countries, however, are more attractively politically). Catholicism is a challenge because it promises continuity in ritual and unity in liturgy and practice. Such a design is close to Anglican self-understanding. But Inglesant rebuffs the charms of Catholicism for his native Anglicanism. Wolff describes the religious situation in which he is embedded: "Calvinism, Quietism, Astrology, Magic, all are given a sympathetic hearing. The more Protestant the outlook, the less can survive of the blessings of culture, all the beauty in the world that alone makes life worth living. The more Catholic the outlook, the more one has to abandon one's individual freedom. Only the Church of England has the Via Media, the happy medium."81 Wolff recognizes that the centrist path of Anglicanism was for Inglesant, and, by extension, Shorthouse, the only path possible.

Wolff, Gains and Losses, 174-75. 237 The first intimation concerning the battle between the two traditions comes in the opening pages. The discoverer of the life of Inglesant, Geoffrey Monk, is staying with a Catholic family at Oxford, and attends High Mass with them. He warms to the surging singing, the devotional mood set by the church's architecture, and he experiences awe at the service. Awe, but not truth. He is overwhelmed emotionally, yet he cannot be a Catholic in mind or body.

Although staggered by the Mass, he admits a preference for "the simpler Anglican ritual of the

Blessed Sacrament" (4).

Inglesant's early education was at the hands of the Jesuits. He knew nothing of classical

Protestant doctrines such as justification by faith, predestination and assurance in personal salvation. Although attracted to Catholicism, he was, despite his religious yearnings, worldly, fond of the ephemeral joys of this life. As a twenty-two year old, we encounter Inglesant as a young man "sincerely and vitally religious, though his religion might appear to be kept in subordination to his taste" (102); he was, in short, a dandy. He wished to follow a religious path, but felt compelled to refrain from such a path because "he was not capable of a sacrifice of his tastes or of his training" (103). Shorthouse describes his religion in those years as that

"possessed in common with most in that day" (186). What kind of religion was that? It was a form of Christianity "similar in many respects to that which prevails in the present day in most

Roman Catholic countries, and may be described as Christianity without the Bible" (186).

Inglesant rarely read the Bible, and indeed did not own one. He confesses that he is ignorant of its historical and ethical content, and what he did know he learned piecemeal through the Jesuits.

His Anglican awakening occurs at Little Gidding, an Anglican "monastery" founded by

Nicholas Ferrar.82 Little Gidding was a "religious" house, one of the first houses of devotion in

England since the Reformation. Loathed by Puritans and not Catholic enough for the Catholics,

82 "For a vivid picture of the Rule in practise it would probably be difficult to better that presented in the unforgettable pages of John Inglesant,"H.P.K. Skipton, The Life and Times of Nicholas Ferrar (London: A.R. Mowbray & Co., 1907), 93. 238 Ferrar restored a Catholic, though not Roman, ideal of piety: separation from worldly concerns,

and commitment to religious routine. Inglesant finds irresistible the dedication of the Ferrars.

Even more than the daily life at Little Gidding, he is moved by Nicholas Ferrar's "idea of Christ,

that is, a lively conception of and attraction to the person of the Saviour." Inglesant sees Ferrar's

life and thought as a personal model, as someone who fits somewhere between Roman Catholics

on the right and the Puritans on the left. Ferrar advocated a quiet piety, but that piety could only

flourish in a national church. Inglesant understands that personal religious devotion must be

anchored in a tradition, that it must be, or strive to be, continuous with the early Church. Ferrar

in fact counsels him that he, Ferrar, can be a spiritual guide: "I ought to be a fit person to advise you...for I am myself, as it were, crushed between the upper and nether millstone of contrary

reports, for I suffer equal obloquy...both for being a Papist and a Puritan" (60). For his dismissal

of papal claims and the Catholic magisterium (the official teaching of the Church), Ferrar is

dubbed a Puritan by the Catholics. For the seemingly Catholic forms of worship at Little

Gidding, the Puritans deem him a man gone over to Rome. Neither side imagines a third way, but for Ferrar the Anglican Church negotiates a centrist path between them. He understands the temptations of the Catholic Church, and encourages Inglesant to go to Italy to get a first-hand

impression of the situation before joining their communion. He knows that intellectually

Inglesant tilts to Rome, but that the entanglements of the Church and the public square will

dissuade him, because the Church seeks to dominate political life and set the criteria for

intellectual exercise.

John Inglesant grapples with but quickly dismisses Protestantism as a viable religious option; it simply lacks the thickness of antiquity. The novel, then, is a debate between Roman

Catholicism and Anglicanism. Shorthouse writes: "This is the supreme quarrel of all. This is not

a dispute between sects and kingdoms; it is a conflict within a man's own nature—nay, between

239 the noblest parts of man's nature arrayed against each other. On the one side obedience and faith, on the other, freedom and reason" (441). Obedience and faith are components of the religious life. Obedience means submission, and according to Inglesant Roman Catholics submit themselves, mind, soul and body to a human authority very much of human making. Rather than submitting to the developed tradition of the Church, Catholics handed over their natural religious freedom and reason to a political authority, the Pope. Submitting oneself to tradition, which human hands have shaped but was not originally of human making, is appropriate.

Roman Catholicism presents to the world the deepest truths, yet at a political level it is an

"enemy of the human race" (442) as it flattens liberty of conscience and freedom of thought.

Only the Church of England, for Inglesant at least, could secure and preserve, in equal measure, continuity with the developed tradition and permit a broad range of theological opinion. Unity must prevail in ritual practice and worship; you may, however, think what you like, as the Church has no authority over thought (that is not to say that one may preach publicly anything contrary to the flexible Thirty-Nine Articles). Inglesant maintains that "the English

Church, as established by the law of England, offers the supernatural to all who choose to come.

It is like the Divine Being Himself, whose sun shines alike on the evil and on the good" (442).

Anglicanism, as a national church, accepts every Christian no matter his or her belief, provided that they submit by free choice to the structure of the liturgical and ritual tradition. The Church of England, because it is a legal-constituted national Church, can insist on uniformity in its laws and conformity to its practices {orthopraxy), but like other legal systems it cannot insist on right belief {orthodoxy). Against the Catholic Church, Inglesant asserts that "absolute truth is not revealed" (443). And this was the result: Catholic authorities projected their understanding of truth as something wholly outside immediate human experience, leading to a "wild unreasoning superstition" (443).

240 The true, historical Church counsels but does not, indeed, coerce right belief; only God knows the heart: doctrinal tests should not be applied. Inglesant cleaves to the centrist path, yet confesses the problems in such an arrangement. Can centrism generate enough religious heat to result in theological light? A fretting Inglesant says, "I am not blind to the dangers that beset the

English Church. I fear that its position, standing, as it does, a mean between two extremes, will engender indifference and sloth; and that its freedom will prevent its preserving a discipline and organizing power...nevertheless, as a Church it is unique: if suffered to drop out of existence, nothing like it can ever take its place" (443). Noting the problems with a centrist confession,

David Neelands suggests that the lack of ecclesiastical and lay discipline in the Church of

England was both blessing and curse for the maintenance of centrism:83 because it does not insist on right belief, because it does not attempt to coerce conscience, Anglicans are left with a

Catholic structure and hierarchy (the three-fold ministry) that acts like a Protestant denomination.

The type of centrism Shorthouse finds in the Church of England resembles Schechter's conception of Judaism. Both stressed historical continuity rather than any explicit theological claims, although Shorthouse and Schechter were liberal traditionalists. They were concerned with the unity of their respective traditions above all, even if unity meant tolerating great variance in religious belief. They embraced the "national" aspect of religion, that is, that the tradition should embrace as many Jews or Christians without lowering ritual standards. Finally,

Shorthouse and Schechter came a long way to become centrists: Shorthouse from the Quakers and Schechter from the Hasidim. Only the quickened pace of religious change in the nineteenth- century allowed for individuals to move so radically within their traditions, and that pace also permitted centrism to emerge and prosper.

83 Communication to the author, July 23, 2008. 241 Conclusion

Shorthouse's own Anglicanism parallels Inglesant's. Wagner describes the last chapter, where the hero is restored to the Church of England, as a great apologia for the Church, and that

Inglesant was a "Broad Church sacramentalist."84 Shorthouse and his literary creation took a

"high" view of the sacraments, in a manner echoing the Oxford Movement and the High

Church. Chapman concurs: there is no reason a modest manufacturer of vitriol who was a literary amateur and a former Quaker should come to pen a conspicuously Anglican novel of ideas and become "an apologist for a highly sacramental type of Anglicanism." His immediate intellectual sympathies were Broad Church, if by that term we intend the catholic tastes of a

Maurice, who was suspicious of many Broad Church ideas.

More argues, however, that Shorthouse, like Maurice, did not fit tidily into the "three- cornered embroglio within the Church... Almost it would seem as if he dwelt in some charmed corner of the fold into which the reverberations of those terrific words Broad and High and Low penetrated only as a subdued muttering."86 To nominate him a Broad, High or Low Churchman would be procrustean. One label does stick: he was a centrist, finding the center in the controversies between Catholic and Protestant and the internal quarrels of Anglicanism, for "he had been able to take the best from all sides of the controversy and to weld these elements into harmony."

84 Wagner, J.H. Shorthouse, 84-85. 85 Chapman, Faith and Revolt, 253. 86 More, Shelburne Essays, 222. 87 Ibid., 230. More contends that, again like Maurice, he reaped the wheat and discarded the chaff of the three groups. From the Low Church he learned "hostility to the Romanising tendencies and distrust of priestcraft." But he maintained, against the evangelicals, that "the imagination [was] as equally potent [to] the moral sense in the upbuilding of character." He joined with the Broad Churchmen in their "abhorrence of dogmatic tests." They erred in discarding a focus on "individual holiness" and instead translated religion into a "brotherhood of charity or the association of men of good works." He thought that the High Church got "worship" right, but that worship often deteriorated into "sacerdotalism," that is, worship without an object. 242 Shorthouse's centrism caused him to fret about the future of the Church. He knew that its privileges were eroding, and that its place in English cultural and religious life was slowly being marginalized. National churches simply do not flourish when the legal means and social ballast intended to protect its privileged position fall away. England was gradually becoming meritocratic in matters of religion: competition would reward those groups who worked hardest, because the obstacle of government interference was removed. Shorthouse was resigned to this situation, though he did not welcome it. In an 1892 letter, he proclaimed passionately that "a cataclysm such as the world never saw is probably at hand, and before the storm the Church of

England by law established will go down, but nothing can deprive her of this glory, that never in the history of the world has anything like her even been conceived, the Church of Hooker, of

Jewell, No well, Andrews, of Laud, of Sancroft, of Sutton, of Joseph Hall, of Hammond, of

Jeremy Taylor, of Leighton, of Patrick, of Comber, and a host more. She may be destroyed, but

QO what will take her place!!!" The list enumerated by Shorthouse is a centrist's syllabus. These sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century theologians shaped the distinctive Anglican self-identity as the centrist path in Christianity. Shorthouse was an amateur theologian, but he was in the end a professional centrist.

Literary critics must be mortified. I have hunted through literature for ideas, disregarding form, language, style and structure. I have used the writings of Grace Aguilar and J.H.

Shorthouse as repositories for religious ideas, ideas that reflect how traditions, and those that follow those traditions, negotiate religious change and choice. In particular, I wanted to find out if the literature of the nineteenth-century reflected the religious thought of that century. Did the concept of religious centrism find a literary niche as well as a theological one? Hopefully, this

Life and Letters of J.H. Shorthouse, 304-05. 243 chapter has demonstrated that religious centrism can found in imaginative writing as well as reflective writing.

In her novella, Grace Aguilar showed how women represented the religious center. In

The Perez Family, the Perez women avoided the religious and secular extremism of the Perez brothers. The Perez women reconciled traditional faith with the movements of modernity, willing to sacrifice neither ancient custom nor new found equality. They eventually convince the brothers to pull back from isolationism and assimilationism, as each attitude is extreme and falls outside Jewish norms. In another paper, my study of The Perez Family would demand a conceptual examination of how gender shapes religious convictions in the story, but the limits of time do not permit to consider gender at the level of detail it deserves. But it is worth noting that

Aguilar confirms a traditional attitude about gender: women are naturally religious, and it is men who need the assistance of religion in restraining extreme passions. The Perez women simply do not suffer the same religious insecurities of Reuben and Simeon, and thus their religious attitudes do not polarize to the left or the right.

In Shorthouse's John Inglesant, the title character goes through several spiritual iterations. Early on, Inglesant rejects Protestantism on religious grounds, as its theological individualism leads to anarchy and its narrowly defined doctrine leads to fanaticism. It is simply unable to provide robust intellectual support. While tempted by Roman Catholicism, he denies its normative status because of its political tyranny, shackling mind and body. Catholics get the religious element of Christianity correct, while the Protestants secure the political liberty necessary for Christianity to flourish. But only the Church of England comprehends both elements. For Shorthouse, the national Church effectively supplies to all English Christians what the body and soul require.

244 The authors considered in this chapter have nothing in common, except that Aguilar and

Shorthouse incorporated religious sensibilities into their fiction and non-fiction works. They wrote at different times, for different purposes and to distinctly different audiences. But I believe, in a very real way, they ended up at the same place: voluntarism, if not at the American level, was slowly becoming the model of English religious life. This fact had two consequences: expanded choice upset the equilibrium of religious unity and it compelled public reflection on growing division. For Aguilar, the Reform movement was in its infancy, but the burgeoning pluralism of the Anglo-Jewish community and the grudging acceptance of Jews in gentile society allowed for multiple ways of being Jewish in the modern world. For Shorthouse, the loss of Anglican privileges released the blocked energies of Protestantism and Catholicism to challenge the national Church's hegemony. This chapter has argued that each of these authors was sympathetic to religious centrism, but just as importantly their works illustrate that religious centrism was a reality.

I believe that the writings of Aguilar and Shorthouse fit comfortably alongside the work of the clergymen and scholars studied in previous chapters. Aguilar and Shorthouse reflected publicly on the place of religion in national life just as Schechter, Maurice, Newman, Kohut and

Arnold did. They employed different means to realize the centrist vision, but the result was the same: it was better to be a (self-designated) religious moderate than an extremist, not simply because moderation was superior to extremism but that a centrist attitude accurately reflected the developed Jewish and Christian historical traditions. Aguilar showed how the approach of

Jewish women to their religion was continuous with the Bible, whereas Jewish men broke from the centrist counsel of Scripture. In her nonfiction offerings, she presented a spiritualized

Judaism that does not lose touch with its legal foundations. Kohut would have approved, as he used PirkeiAvot, a tractate of moral teaching and not normative law, to prove that the ethical

245 foundation of Judaism was not upset by the continuing application of halakha to modern Jewish life. Shorthouse drew on the theological efforts of Arnold and Maurice to endorse the Church of

England as a satisfactory religious solution to Christian disunity. For these thinkers, the Church of England was marked by its catholicity and connection to the early Church; it was, in fact, the only national Church that maintained moral and theological integrity with the early Church.

Protestantism erred when it granted too much autonomy to the individual believer, leading to anarchy and schism, whereas the Catholic Church went astray by cutting off the individual believer from the sources of tradition, restricting them to trained elite. While the lines of influence between novelists and theologians may not be immediately evident, I think that this chapter confirms that such relationships are real, and add to a more global appreciation of the development of religious centrism.

246 Conclusion

R. Esriel Hildesheimer: "On the two sides of the street, the right and the left, people go. Only horses go in the middle."1

John Boys, Dean of Canterbury (1571-1625): "Against the Romanist I use a sword, against the novelist I use a buckler."2

The four chapters of this dissertation have examined the emergence of a new religious attitude in the nineteenth-century, religious centrism. I traced the appearance of this outlook in a diverse set of Jewish and Christian thinkers. These thinkers differed greatly in their specific religious convictions, and there was little uniting them politically, culturally or socially: the dissimilarity between the life and intellectual commitments of, say, Grace Aguilar and John

Henry Newman could not be greater. But they did share one important religious approach, and this was a dedication to creating a centrist stance to those perceived to be on their theological left and right.

We can locate other familial resemblance among the centrist Jews and Christians in this study: although religious division was recognized as a reality, each of these centrists believed in unity, even at the potential cost of sullying doctrinal integrity; they regarded their formulation for religious life as the optimal "national" model (the Church of England for English Christians and the Conservative branch for American Jews) that would embrace divided communities; these thinkers gave equal authority to past and present, a difficult balancing act that has generated more than its share of intellectual confusion; and, finally, each group attempted to

1 See Chaim I. Waxman, "Dilemmas of Modern Orthodoxy" Judaism 42.1 (Winter 1993), 64. 2 See Peter White, "The Via Media in the Early Stuart Church" in The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993), 215. 247 maintain openness to contemporary streams of religious thought while insisting on ritual conformity, a typical centrist equalization of liberal and conservative ideals.

Could religious centrism have been found prior to the nineteenth-century? I would argue that among solitary theologians such as Erasmus and Hooker the centrist perspective can be discerned, but their religious thought represents historical outliers. One of the primary intentions of this dissertation was to chart a process of religious change, and the only the religious, cultural and political conditions of the nineteenth-century made centrism possible as a mature movement of minds and traditions. To be a centrist prior to the period considered here was possible, but centrism was not. Religious centrism was a key element in shaping the institutions and philosophy of Conservative Judaism in the United States (and, to a lesser extent, it was important among some Anglo-Jews, notably Grace Aguilar and Morris Joseph) and readjusting the self-understanding of the Anglican Church, a Church that reclaimed its Henrician and

Elizabethan heritage as a via media between Roman Catholicism and continental Protestantism.

What, then, made religious centrism both a possibility and a reality in the nineteenth- century? I have argued in the course of the thesis that the essential instruments of the centrist toolbox are pluralism, voluntarism and denominationalism.4 The three are tied together, and, like a feedback mechanism, each of these ideas creates and is created by the others. Voluntarism means a lack of governmental coercion (in hard or soft form), which allows pluralism to flourish, and denominationalism is a predictable response by freely formed groups with

3 At least in his early years in the United States, the centrist attitude could also characterize the outlook of Isaac Meyer Wise, the founder of much of institutional Reform in America. He wished to found an "American Judaism" based on conservative Reform principles. See Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism. But he rarely couched his Judaism in self-consciously centrist language. 4 Jonathan Sarna correctly notes that the principles of denominationalism and "voluntaryism" were part of the Protestant fabric of the United States, and were guaranteed in the Constitution. He lists five principles that "were collectively known as 'the great tradition of the American churches'": religious freedom; church-state separation; denominationalism; voluntaryism; and patriotism. Judaism "especially benefited" from these principles. Sarna, American Judaism, 41.

248 conflicting values (even if these "micro-groups" are drawing on a "macro-tradition" such as

Judaism or Christianity). Denominationalism sustains pluralism by providing the socio-religious world with multiple actors, and so on. Therefore, assuming a sufficient amount of rational actors

(groups, not individuals) freed from the hard pressure of governmental interference or the soft pressure of social oppression, centrist groups will consistently arise because of the multiplicity of religious attitudes freely expressed. Lastly, what made religious centrism a nineteenth-century innovation was the self-conscious use of centrist language. Individual theologians prior to the eighteenth-century had employed the vocabulary of the religious "middle" but had not used this vocabulary as a consistent normative description of a particular tradition. This vocabulary was explicitly applied in the nineteenth-century.5

Although Anglican theologians, Hooker most notably, prior to the nineteenth-century developed a "centrist" position, this position could not flourish fully when religious freedom in

England was constrained by the monopolistic privileges of the Church of England. Only in a situation when freedom of religion exists can religious choices stabilize, when individuals decide, within the information available to them and in the absence of coercion, which movement, church or sect to join. The nineteenth-century witnessed the slow, fitful decline of

Anglican privilege, both politically and culturally. But this material decline generated a Church that worked harder, that sought to define and redefine itself in the midst of a teeming pluralism,

5 This study of the religious "center" differs from Paul Conkin's magisterial primer on mainstream antebellum Protestantism, The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). In this work, Conkin argues that the Reformed but non-Lutheran denominations represented the center of American Christianity, numbering fully 90% of the Christian population at the time of the revolution, declining to 60% on the eve of the civil war (ix). For Conkin, and this is where we differ, the center is the numerical center, the mainstream, the majority. He does not claim that the non-Lutheran Reformed Protestant groups made any self-conscious argument for their own religious centrism between, say, Quakerism and Roman Catholicism. I do believe that there were centrists prior to the nineteenth-century—David Sorkin's articles on the religious enlightenment of the eighteenth-century proves this—but that centrism as movement of mind or a broad-based attitude was not present, because of the political, social and religious conditions unique to the nineteenth-century.

249 including the gathered strength of Protestant non-conformity and the formidable religio-

intellectual, if not demographic, challenge of Catholicism.

Conservative Judaism, which has its institutional though not denominational origins in

the 1880s, entered a very different religious marketplace in the United States. There were no

monopolistic religious structures as in England. Moreover, there was no organized kehillah to

enforce Jewish civil and criminal law. Thus, the external pressure of government influence and

the internal pressure of an organized Jewish community with exclusionary power were absent.

The religious market in the United States in the late nineteenth-century was a free one, and

groups rose or fell by reason of their own effort and imagination. Unlike in England, there were

no public suppliers of religion, only private—though religion was by no means restricted to the private sphere—suppliers to meet demand. Public suppliers of religion, that is, government, provide it through public services such as birth, marriage, burial and subsidizing clergy, clerical

housing and places of worship. When government supplies religion, no matter how broadly, it

distorts the equilibrium of supply and demand by privileging one religion over another. Free trade in religious ideas is constrained, and the centrism that would emerge in a competitive market is denied. Conservative Judaism in the early twentieth-century emerged in an era of

expanding choice: the alternatives went beyond remaining a Jew or apostatizing, as now

Judaism itself presented multiple and competing options for the hearts and minds of Jews.

Jewish life was voluntary, and it was the responsibility of Reform, Orthodox and Conservative

leaders to articulate rationally convincing and emotionally powerful reasons for remaining

Jewish and for choosing one movement over another. The pluralistic, voluntaristic and

denominational nature of American Judaism produced a Judaism more fractured than in any

other era since the Second Temple. (There had been previous fractures: Sabbatianism broke

apart some Jewish communities in the seventeenth-century, yet those who remained followers of 250 Sabbatai Zevi were not for centuries afterwards a concern of the normative, rabbinic community. Its antinomian tendencies did not spread to the majority of the community.) But it was fractured by choice, and centrism needs a certain amount of disunity to find its place .

Religious centrism, then, is a result of competition, at least for Conservative Judaism.

Anglicans still had financial, political and social advantages over other English Christians, although the gap had narrowed. Because competition shatters any hope for unity, the religious market is open to numerous participants. The American Jewish scene in the 1880s was dominated by Reform, but there was an increasing presence of traditionalist Orthodox. Kohut, and Schechter later, felt that the two competing groups were radicalizing and departing from normative Judaism. According to Kohut and Schechter's reading of Jewish religious history,

Judaism had happily married together the best of current intellectual life with commitment to

Jewish law. Judaism could assimilate useful non-Jewish ideas and eliminate those thought to detrimental to a flourishing religious life. The centrism of Anglicanism developed along different lines: the transparent religious divisions of Christendom had been around much longer than the divisions among Jews.

The narrative presented in the preceding chapters focused on the past of Conservative

Judaism (or liberal/inclusivist Orthodoxy in the late nineteenth-century) in the United States and

Anglicanism in England, with excursions into Anglo-Jewish history. I have tried to note parallels in the self-understanding of the two groups. Specifically, this dissertation considered the concept of religious centrism as pivotal to the self-definitions of Conservative Judaism and

Anglicanism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each group has tried to define itself

6 See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah: 1626-1676 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). Of course, Scholem famously argued that the antinomianism of Sabbatianism might have coursed its way into modern Judaism. 7 For a religious centrist, this fact is ironic: he or she needs disunity in order to proclaim the need for communal unity, a staple of centrist rhetoric. 251 within a larger tradition, sometimes claiming to stake out the middle ground in their tradition and at other times professing to be the most comprehensive, continuous and authentic part of their tradition. Then as today, Conservative Jews and Anglicans have had great difficulty

Q defining themselves. Most of their members have been historically aware that Conservative

Judaism and Anglicanism have been seen, by supporters and detractors alike, as the centrist strand in Judaism and Christianity, respectively. This intermediate position works against firm definitions, because as the left and right shift, the middle ground moves correspondingly. From this emerges a significant question: can a centrist movement define its parameters without reference to the perceived extremes?

But outsiders have not had the same trouble: both the media and the academic literature refer to Conservative Judaism as centrist. The needle, as it were, has not moved much from the middle regarding the public and internal perception of the Conservative movement. In his long article on the history of the Conservative movement, Abraham Karp terms the denomination as "centrist" and considers this attitude to be crucial to its self- understanding among the various streams in modern Judaism ("A Century of Conservative Judaism in the United States" American Jewish Yearbook, 1986, 4). Charles Liebman, in his Deceptive Images, endorses the same terminology (Deceptive Images: Towards a Redefinition of American Judaism [New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988], 79). Sociologists Sidney and Alice Goldstein also use the language of centrism in their overview of the demography of Conservative Judaism ("Conservative Jewry: a Socio-Demographic Overview" In: Jews in the Center: Conservative Congregations and Their Members, ed. Jack Wertheimer [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000], 69-71). Popular media also accords a centrist designation to Conservative Judaism. Laurie Goodstein, writing in the New York Times, calls it the "centrist position in Judaism" ("Conservative Jews to Consider Ending a Ban on Same-Sex Unions and Gay Rabbis," New York Times, March 6,2006). The same reporter notes its middle position of the movement a few months later: Conservative Judaism "is considered the centrist movement in Judaism" ("Conservative Jews Allow Gay Rabbis and Unions," New York Times, December 7,2006). Michael Luo, in the same paper, tells Times readers that the Conservative movement, which at that moment was seeking Ismar Schorsch's replacement as chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, "is distinguished by its commitment to Jewish law, while also embracing modernity and contemporary changes in religious practice, making it something of a middle ground between Orthodox and Reform Judaism" ("Jewish Group Expected to Fill Chancellor Post," New York Times, April 8,2006). In an article in a major West Coast Jewish newspaper, a reporter laments the numerical decline of the Conservative movement because it stood as a bulwark against left and right. The reporter describes the movement as centrist: it "served as the middle ground between the stringency of the Orthodox movement and the modernity of the Reform movement" ("In Search of a Leader: Can Anyone Save Conservative Judaism from Itself?" Jewish Journal, October 10, 2005). Denominational leaders still claim Conservative Judaism as centrist. Rabbi Jerome Epstein, Executive Vice-President of the United Synagogue, argues that "the Conservative Movement is a centrist movement" ("Conservative Judaism: Loud and Proud" at www.uscj.org/seabd/SynagogueResourceCtr/ConservativeJudaism.pdf Accessed March 24,2008).This perception remains strong. Rabbi Alan Silverstein confirms Epstein's judgement, stating that the denomination is "a pluralistic ('big tent') movement in which creativity is welcome both on the left and on the right of the centrist component of the Jewish religious spectrum" ("Conservative Judaism at a Crossroads," The Forward, August 29,2007). 252 Centrism is appealing, but it is not irresistible. There is something naturally satisfying about avoiding, or claiming to avoid, extremism or radicalism. But the center adjusts after left and right adjust. Seen as a via media, centrism is reactive. When the left and the right reorder themselves based on new political or religious circumstances, those in the center rearrange themselves accordingly. That is, today's centrist may well have been yesterday's liberal or conservative. And this has troubled the history of both Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism.

Each group has persistently faced an identity crisis.10

9 Significantly, one is in the center, where the perceived extremes are on the right and the left. Those in the center can seem placed there, while its opposites choose to be where they are. 101 think the language of crisis is essential for understanding contemporary Conservative Judaism and Anglicanism. In his essay, "Israel: the Ever-Dying People," the historian Simon Rawidowicz observed that Jewish writers and thinkers often portrayed their generation as the last Jewish generation, that the people Israel were doomed to extinction because of, inter alia, assimilation, loss of religious belief, absence of Jewish unity, etc. These public figures saw Judaism in perpetual crisis {Israel: the Ever-Dying People, and Other Essays [Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1986]). I think Rawidowicz's insight can be applied to the Conservative Movement: I call it "the Ever-Dying movement." (After writing this section, I discovered that Kimmy Caplan applied this designation to Orthodoxy, "The Ever Dying Denomination: American Jewish Orthodoxy, 1824-1965" in The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, ed. Marc Lee Raphael [New York: Columbia University Press, 2008]). From Kohut forward, Conservative Jews have tried to define themselves within Judaism. The Orthodox and the Reformers seem to know who they are, whereas Conservative Jews have had great trouble in marking out a stable description. This is not to suggest that Reform or Orthodox Jews do not disagree among themselves, but there has been little desire to shed the label Reform or Orthodox. These two groups are more comfortable in their denominational skin. In a significant way, Reform has moved to the big-tent model today. From those adhering to Classical Reform to those embracing (while at the same time repurposing) traditional forms of Jewish practice, the institutions of Reform Judaism have helped to create a movement that welcomes almost every possible expression of non-Orthodox Judaism. This pluralism leads to real disagreement, but the tensions generated have not produced schism. The Orthodox case is more complicated. One could argue that Jewish pluralism is most lively among the Orthodox, despite sharing common practices. As an "Ever-Dying Movement," Conservative Judaism is persistently perceived to be in crisis. The language of crisis has been applied to almost any structural change in the Conservative movement: women's ordination, decrease in membership, same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay and lesbian rabbis. A quick tour through both the popular press and the scholarly literature indicates that those inside and outside of the movement believe it is in distress. The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles informs its readers that, because Conservative Judaism appears to be leaking members like a sieve, there is a "Conservative crisis." As the movement has largely refused to establish boundaries in order to further a pluralism that remains tied to tradition, Amy Klein argues that "this pluralism, this lack of a constitution, has today wrought a movement of Judaism that is often seen as anarchic, disorganized and lacking a clear vision. In other words, it has fuelled the movement's identity crisis" ("In Search of a Leader: Can Anyone Save Conservative Judaism from Itself?" Jewish Journal Oct. 10,2005.). In a communal self-help book designed to invigorate American Jews, Scott Shay tells us that Conservative Judaism is in "crisis" (Getting Our Groove Back: How to Energize American Jewry [Manchester, Eng.: Devora Publishing, 2007], 186). In a recent forum on the Conservative movement in the Forward, still the United States' largest circulation Jewish newspaper, Rabbi Alan Silverstein, while not using the term "crisis," comments that his movement "is suffering from a 'malaise'" ("Conservative Judaism at a Crossroads," The Forward, Aug. 29,2007.). Even non-Conservative leaders add their voice to the language of crisis. At a board meeting for the Union of Reform Judaism, Eric Yoffie, 253 The larger question of this dissertation is a perennial one: how does one define Judaism

(or Christianity), and what makes one a good or bad Jew (or Christian)? Each denomination or movement marks out the boundaries of acceptable belief and practice, and transgressions against the boundaries are "punished" by social censure or moral dissuasion. The centrists of the nineteenth-century consistently perceived their respective interpretation of their tradition as normative; that is, as the authentic expression of Judaism or Christianity. Other groups, movements or sects partially expressed that authenticity, but failed to comprehend the fullness of religious truth. This era witnessed a proliferation of alternative definitions of Judaism and the President of the Union, observed that "Conservative Judaism is in crisis; its numbers are in decline, its goals are uncertain, its halakhic ideology is under attack" (http://urj.org/Articles/index.cfm?id-6950. Accessed March 30, 2008.). The language of crisis is also common to Anglicanism. Similar to the situation of Conservative Judaism, academic literature and the secular press is replete with breathless titles and headlines about the threatening crisis in the Anglican Church. A few titles will suffice: Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and their African Allies are Reshaping Anglicanism (Miranda Hassett, [Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2007]); Wild Vine, Fruitful Vine: Crisis in the Anglican Communion (Bill Atwood, [Carrollton, Tex: Ekklesia Society, 2004]); The Anglican Quilt: Resolving the Anglican Crisis over Homosexuality (Robert van de Weyer, [Washington, D.C.: O Books, 2004]); Women Priests in Australia?: the Anglican Crisis (David Wetherell, [Melbourne: Spectrum, 1987]); The Anglican Church Today: Catholics in Crisis (Francis Penhale, [London : Mowbray, 1986]); and The Church of England in Crisis (Trevor Beeson, [London: Davis-Poynter, 1973]). Newspapers and magazines, too, have informed their readers of possible crises in the Church: "Anglican Crisis as Woman Leads US Church" (London Telegraph June 20, 2006); "Anglican Church in Crisis Debate" (http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/americas/5085472.stm: accessed March 16, 2008); "Anglican Church in Crisis" (Toronto Star, March 31, 2007); and "What is Anglicanism?" (Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, First Things [August/September 2007]). The tensions generated by the Southward shift of Anglicanism (the center of the Anglican communion today, at least as measured numerically, is Nigeria) has led many pundits and clergy to predict the imminent breakup of the Church of England. The tensions cannot be neatly divided into North versus South. Instead, the division into religious liberal and religious conservative gives a more accurate picture of the rift today. Like Conservative Jews, Anglicans have had to confront the issues of women's ordination, same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy, and both groups have felt the tensions between tradition on the one hand and the wish for social change on the other. As centrist movements that claim to balance and promote tradition and change, they have not found a mediating third term that would cogently negotiate between the two. On this conceptual difficulty, see David Novak, "Toward a Conservative Theology" in The Seminary at 100: Reflections on the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Conservative Movement (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1987).

111 use the term "denomination" throughout as an easy and recognizable referent, while being at the same time aware that the term does not precisely capture the reality of American Judaism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Sarna, American Judaism, xix). The boundaries, especially in Conservative Judaism, were far more fluid. For instance, many early Conservatives, notably Sabato Morais, wanted to call the Seminary "Orthodox." In fact, the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary was placing rabbis in Orthodox pulpits until the early 1960s. My teacher, Dr. David Novak, was the last Seminary graduate to take a pulpit in an Orthodox synagogue, Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore. On this issue, see Jeffrey Gurock, "From Fluidity to Rigidity: The Religious Worlds of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in Twentieth Century America" (Ann Arbor: Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, The University of Michigan, 1998). 254 Christianity, and this proliferation is due primarily to the retreat of the state from internal religious matters (though only partially, and never happily, in England). Without state interference in religion, Jews and Christians of all types had to place themselves in this new order. Centrism was one outcome.

How, then, did each chapter attempt to the reality of religious centrism? In the first chapter, we saw Solomon Schechter, the founder of institutional Conservative Judaism in the

United States, creatively employ Anglican terminology to shape his vision of Judaism. He judged Anglicanism as the moderate strand of Christianity, and found the national model of the

Church of England appealing. He sought to transfer, albeit without state support, the example of

Anglicanism to the libertarian American Jewish scene. The Anglican emphasis on ritual conformity, decorum in service and respect for antiquity was balanced by its appeal to broad sections of the divided Christian community and its theological pluralism. Schechter saw in the balance of these conservative and liberal aspects something very close to his understanding of

Judaism, a Judaism that would (he hoped) reunite the community from its growing division.

Like his Anglican contemporaries who wished for a broadly constituted Christian ideal that would embrace all English Christians, Schechter believed that Conservative Judaism gathered together the separated threads of historical Judaism, and that these rejoined threads would unite a community that had been brought asunder by the disruptions of what he deemed to be an antediluvian Orthodoxy and rebellious Reform.

Matthew Arnold also used Anglican liturgy, history and theology to inform his religious understanding. Like Schechter, Arnold was a centrist but his theological leanings were quite radical and would find a more ready home in twentieth-century liberal theology.12 However,

12 See James Livingston, Matthew Arnold and Christianity: His Religious Prose Writings (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986). 255 Arnold's theological liberalism was balanced by a fierce conservatism, as he aspired to put the established resources of the Church of England in the service of shaping a society that encouraged classical virtues. Unlike some of his liberal contemporaries, Arnold did not believe that secularism could provide either the moral compass or the intellectual heavy lifting to create the good society. He viewed the Church of England, established by law and shaped by custom, as a hedge against both political anarchy and religious fanaticism. He held the Roman Catholic

Church in great reverence for its continuity with early Christianity, but faulted it for its moral failings. Arnold thought Protestantism naturally divisive, as it encouraged individuals to seek their own salvation after their own fashion. The Church of England was centrist: it provided moral guidance, intellectual latitude and liturgical consistency. Although Arnold did not believe in the classical doctrines of Christianity, he did believe in the power of the Church of England to create a cultured society free of the fanaticism Arnold associated with Protestantism and the political forms of Roman Catholicism.

The key chapter of the dissertation spelled out the first formulation of a traditional

Jewish philosophy native to the United States that would begin to distinguish the contours of a centrist Judaism. In his 1885 debate with the radical Reformer Kaufmann Kohler, the

Hungarian-born Alexander Kohut charted some of the fundamental tenets of early Conservative

Judaism. These tenets continue to resonate with many Conservative Jews today, although

Kohut's (and, later, Schechter's) designs are under increasing suspicion.13 Kohut set out the controlling Conservative insight: tradition and history can be balanced because history confirms tradition, and tradition is not resistant to organic change. Judaism and the Jewish people have a history, and the study of history is often the study of change. However, change does not by

13 See Harold Kushner, "Conservative Judaism in an Age of Democracy" Conservative Judaism 59.4 (2007) and Neil Gillman, "A New Aggadah for the Conservative Movement" Conservative Judaism 58.2-3 (2006). 256 extension mean discontinuity. Fundamental beliefs—in providence, chosenness, the divine origin of the Torah and the continuing authority of the Covenant—are untouched by historical change; only our perceptions of those beliefs are changed. But in matters of ritual life, change has been consistent, but when a community agrees to follow a certain minhag it cannot be changed except by the slow, perhaps imperceptible, force of organic transformation. The brilliant, though philosophically incoherent, Conservative motto of "tradition and change" found an able defender in Kohut. He was equally repelled by the explicitly anti-halakhic stance of

Kohler and the insularity of the immigrant Orthodox. He was at home in neither community, and was conscious that a second movement within traditional Judaism was gathering momentum, a movement that in fact reconfirmed a pre-existent traditionalism prior to denominationalism.14

The final chapter placed religious centrism in a literary context. Grace Aguilar and John

Henry Shorthouse used their literary skill to present a centrist case for Judaism and Christianity, respectively. In Aguilar's case, there were no well-defined parties to the right and left, but an emergent Reform movement began in the early 1840s, posing the first public challenge to the entrenched traditionalist community. Aguilar valued Reform for its daring, but declined its radicalism. She was a traditionalist at heart, but for Aguilar the Bible, not the Talmud, had normative authority for directing religious life. She thus appreciated the bibliocentrism of

Reform, yet did not wish to upset the fragile communal unity. On the other hand, the division of

Christendom along Roman Catholic, Protestantism and Anglican lines had long been established by the time Shorthouse wrote John Inglesant. The book turns into fiction the conventional self- understanding of the Church of England as centrist, falling between the authoritarian Catholic

Church and the anarchic Protestants. For Shorthouse, the moderation of the Church of England

14 See Lupovitch, "Navigating Rough Waters: Alexander Kohut and the Hungarian Roots of Conservative Judaism" AJS Review 32.1 (April 2008), 49-78, passim, for a discussion of where Kohut fit on the Hungarian and American Jewish spectrum. 257 is best seen in that it hitches intellectual pluralism to ritual conformity: the mind may think and express what it likes, but the body must act in unison with Anglican bodies—that is, act in conformity with the norms of the developed historical Christian Church.

Religious centrism shaped and was shaped by its era. It allowed those Jews and

Christians who wished to fuse tradition and modern thought together a conceptual lens by which to attempt such fusing. Schechter, Arnold, Kohut, Shorthouse and Aguilar looked to their respective right and left and found them wanting in intellectual inquiry and commitment to traditional forms and customs. Religious centrism also confronted religious liberals and conservatives with a moderate alternative, giving some disaffected liberals and conservatives a new platform. In the case of Conservative Judaism, the emergence of religious centrism at times caused those to its right and left to diminish their perceived radicalism.15 Conservative Judaism provided a home for ex-Reformers who appreciated Reform's rational stance on religious belief but withdrew from its public deviations from rabbinic Judaism. It also provided refuge for those estranged from exclusivist Orthodoxy, but who wished to maintain a close connection with the developed Jewish tradition. And this approach was the upshot of religious centrism: a refusal to part either with intellectual openness to modern thought (and a willingness to alter one's own pattern of belief in most instances if historical or scientific evidence was rationally sound) or devotion to traditional religious life.

15 Kaufmann Kohler, the archetype of a Radical Reformer, moderated his views later in life, seeing value in the customs of the Jewish tradition, and fearing the anarchic impulses unleashed by antinomianism.

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