“A NEW SHOOT FROM THE HOUSE OF DAVID:” ADOLF JELLINEK AND THE CREATION OF THE MODERN RABBINATE Samuel Joseph Kessler A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved By: Randall Styers Yaakov Ariel Susannah Heschel Jonathan Hess Malachi Hacohen Lloyd Kramer @2016 Samuel Joseph Kessler ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Samuel Joseph Kessler: “A New Shoot From the House of David:” Adolf Jellinek and the Creation of the Modern Rabbinate (Under the direction of Randall Styers) This dissertation is a social history of Jewish religious experience in Central Europe during the nineteenth century, primarily told through the life and work of one of its founding rabbis, Adolf Jellinek (1821-1893). In response to Enlightenment ideology, emancipation, and urbanization, from about 1830 to 1860 three major changes occurred in institutional Jewish religious life, changes that transformed the very essence of what the practice of Jewish religion meant between the pre-modern and modern periods. First, the role of the rabbi in the life of the Jewish community shifted fundamentally. Second, because of demographic shifts brought about by emancipation and economic conditions, the monumental urban synagogue became the dominant space for the expression of Jewish religious activity and expression in European cities. Third, the sermon became an integral part of Jewish religious practice and rabbinical responsibility, one that introduced a new form of public Jewish theology focused on individual belief and history (the constituent components of “religion” as it came to be defined in modern Europe). The Moravian-born Austrian rabbi Adolf Jellinek was both creator and observer of these myriad changes. He was the recipient of a world that (within a relatively short time) lacked many of the legal and cultural discriminations that had kept his parents and grandparents from a more robust participation in European cultural and civic life. His innovative uses of Jewish texts within the new practice of the public weekly sermon, coupled with his prominence as the head of the Viennese community, make him one of the founders of modern Jewish religious practice as we understand it today. This dissertation places Jellinek’s life and writings within a broad framework of religious iii institutional and practical reinvention in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It draws our attention toward an overlooked figure, and points toward many avenues of further research concerning the impacts of urbanization and Enlightenment ideology on Jewish rabbinical and synagogue reformation in the nineteenth century. iv To my mother and father שמע בני מוסר אביך ואל תטש תורת אמך: Listen, my son, to the musar of your father, and do not forsake the torah of your mother. משלי 1:8 יצתה בת קול ואמרה אם הבנים שמחה: A divine voice emerged and said: A joyful mother of children. בבלי גיטין , דף נז v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation began as an intellectual biography of Adolf Jellinek, and over the course of two years became a social history of the religious life of mid-nineteenth century Central European Jewry. As I ran after Jellinek’s story I discovered that something bigger and, to me, more interesting was at play, and that Jellinek was but one key figure in the vast religious transformation that gave us the form of modern rabbinic Judaism we know today. It is written in the Talmud: “As Rabbi Elazar said that Rabbi Hanina said: Whoever reports a saying in the name of he who said it brings redemption to the world. As it is stated: ‘And Esther reported to the king in the name of Mordecai.’” (BT Tractate Megillah 15b) The people whose names appear in the pages of this acknowledgement have been essential both in my attempt to tell the story of Jellinek and his age and in the more fundamental shaping and encouraging of my education and intellectual growth. Whether recommending books, retrieving documents, reading drafts, or spending hours over dinner discussing the intricacies of nineteenth-century European life, these men and women are dear and beloved to me. Their help and critique have made this dissertation fundamentally better than it would have been, though its faults remain, of course, my own. There are so many people in whose name I have brought sayings, not only the brilliant and insightful scholars quoted in these pages, but many more from interlocutors too numerous to cite in full, sieved through thousands of hours of conversations, lectures, and classes, all of which informed the words and ideas that brought this project to fruition. I owe more gratitude than can be rightfully expressed to my doctoral committee: Randall Styers, Yaakov Ariel, Malachi Hacohen, Susannah Heschel, Jonathan Hess, and Lloyd Kramer. They have devoted many hours of their precious time vi to me; have supported me with recommendations to places near and far; and have believed in this project and in me, all the way from the early days when it was a muddled mess of half-formed thoughts and historiographical assumptions to the present. To these six scholars I owe my utmost professional and personal gratitude. To Randall Styers, my chair, I especially owe a marked note of thanks. From my first weeks at UNC he has watched my progress and guided me through the trials of graduate school. He kept me on the straight and narrow. For admirably fulfilling this difficult task--especially given my proclivity for side projects and attendance at far-flung conferences--I owe him much appreciation. Many professors at New York University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University have taught and encouraged me along the way. I am immensely grateful for their knowledge, their guidance, and their love of learning. “Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua said: Let your student’s honor be as precious to you as your own; let your colleague’s honor be like the reverence due to your teacher; and let the reverence you have for your teacher be like the reverence due to Heaven.” (Pirkei Avot 4:15) Many institutions have supported my research with generous grants and fellowships. The Carolina Center for Jewish Studies supported my work for three summers and on three continents. Karen Gajewski, especially, works tirelessly at the Center to make everything run smoothly and efficiently. I owe a special thanks to the Jack O. Spies and Family Jewish Studies Fund, which allowed me to spend a summer in the archives at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. As directors of the Center, Jonathan Hess and Ruth von Bernuth have succeeded in creating a vibrant intellectual and social life for scholars of Judaism in North Carolina, and wonderfully included me within it. Similarly, the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar and Triangle Jewish Studies Seminar have given me a window into the depth and breadth of contemporary scholarship. vii Numerous scholarly centers provided me with the funding, office space, and intellectual stimulus to complete this project. I owe many thanks to the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig for a grant in the summer of 2013 that made preliminary research for this dissertation possible, and which provided me with so many wonderful and supportive friends and colleagues. I wish especially to thank Jörg Deventer of the Dubnow Institute for giving me an intellectual home that summer, and to Arndt Engelhardt, also of the Dubnow Institute, for his selfless help, encouragement, support, and friendship these last few years. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars hosted me in June 2015 on a Title VIII Short-term Research Grant. I gained a handful of new friends and colleagues during that month, whose thoughtfulness, dignity, and humor made the long hours of work nothing but joy. Grants from the Council for European Studies Society of Fellows at Duke University and the DAAD-Leo Baeck Institute provided me with the monetary assistant to work in libraries in New York City during fall 2015 and spring 2016. Finally, an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Graduate School at UNC Chapel Hill for spring 2016 allowed me the time away from the classroom for the final months of writing. To the scholars and staff who have made research possible all along the way, here is a list that will undoubtedly be missing important names: Mandy Fitzpatrick, Carina Röll, Grit N. Scheffer, and Marion Hammer of the Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur an der Universität Leipzig. Klaus Fitschen and Stefen Hoffmann of the Universität Leipzig. Peter Honigmann and Eva Blatter at the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Heidelberg. Emily Buss, Christian F. Ostermann, and Zdenek David of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Global Europe Program. To the staff and archivists at whose institutions I have researched and written: the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem; the Center for Jewish History in New York City; the Universitätsarchiv in Leipzig; the Stadtarchiv in Leipzig; the Albertina Bibliothek in Leipzig; the viii Bundesarchiv in Koblenz; the Davis Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Duke University Libraries; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; and the Dorot Jewish Division at The New York Public Library in New York City. (I especially wish to thank Eleanor Yadin of NYPL, whom I have had the fortune to know now for almost a decade, and whose wit and irreverent joy lighten every interaction, given always in that delightful Hebrew-English patois so particular to a certain generation of Israeli ex-pat.).