Below is a summary of a much longer paper I gave in Oxford in January. There are many more names, people, and issues in the full version of the paper. This gives you a gist.
Louis Jacobs expected to publicly teach Biblical criticism while remaining an Orthodox pulpit rabbi. Was it axiomatic that in order to accept the higher biblical criticism you need to leave Orthodoxy or was Jacobs needlessly attacked by his critics for acceptable positions? This paper will explore the question from a descriptive historical perspective based on rabbis from 1920-1960 and then situate Jacobs in that historical framework. Specifically, it will seek out answers as to why he thought he could be both Orthodox and simultaneously accepting of biblical criticism. This paper will also look at and agree with those who disagreed with his position and believed he crossed a religious line.
This paper does not assume that the definition of Orthodoxy is the same for all countries and decades. According to Mark Noll, a scholar of Protestantism, during the first half of the twentieth century this question separated American and British Evangelical Protestants. In the United States, there was a less academic critique of religion rather congregants turned to pastors; academics were not conventionally accepted clergy. Hence, even mild academic critique was not tolerated from the pulpit in the United States.
In contrast, English academic dons were in fact viewed as members of the clergy and of the House of Lords. The Evangelical and Anglican Church turned to academics for answers, but fully aware of their simultaneous role as pastors, the academic critique was not sharp. The professors were not accidentally religious, but conservative Protestants who need to confront scholarship. They accepted a realistic and historical approach to the text, while preserving its divinity. We find a similar distinction between the countries when we look at Jewish authors.
A. Precursor Hayyim Hirschenson
Hayyim Hirschenson, creative thinker and rabbi of Hoboken, declared Biblical criticism the main issue of our time to solve. Hirschenson thought higher criticsm was completely false and heretical. But he concludes it would not be necessary for the Orthodox Jew to boycott the Hebrew University if some of its professors espouse the cause of Higher Criticism because of religious tolerance. Hirschenson suggests (Maiki Ba-Kodesh, Vol. I and II, St. Louis, 1919-1921) that the main objection in the Talmudic sources to the rejection of the doctrine of “Torah from Heaven” is that, such a rejection, impugns the honesty of Moses by suggesting that he claimed to write something he had not received from God. In a long essay, he shows that we can accept ascription of much of the Pentateuch to other hands as longs as we maintain- that Torah is from heaven, a position very similar structurally to Heschel’s 1960 position.
B. Hebrew University
When Hebrew University was established in the 1920s, its founders sought a Professor of Bible who was competent in both rabbinic worlds and with Biblical criticism. They first selected the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, Hirsch Peretz Chajes (d. 1927). He was a Gemenide rabbi with Orthodox training who accepted biblical criticism. Already there was protest that Hebrew University could not accept a biblical critic, so he withdrew his candidacy. Israel Levi said in the name of the British Lord Rothchild that there will be no bible chair for someone who accepts Biblical criticism. Greater tolerance was allowed for observant Orthodox professors to have liberal views in their seminaries than was given at Hebrew University.
Hebrew University found a compromise by finding lecturers who rejected the Documentary Hypothesis but accepted a predominately human formation of the bible such as Segal, Tur-Sinai, Seligmann and Kaufman.
C. From Moshe Seidel to Mordechai Kaplan: The creation of the Conservative Movement
The proximal background to the Jacobs Affair was the divide between Orthodox and Conservative movements in the United States.
Moshe Seidel taught bible at the Orthodox Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Rabbinical seminary in the 1920s and 1930s.Seidel sought to push the limits of Orthodoxy by wanting to teach Biblical criticism. He also corresponded with Rabbi Kook about Biblical criticism and brought Rav Kook to visit the United States. Rav Kook held that there is no cause for dealing with this heresy, which constitutes total falsehood, and he wrote to his disciple, Rab Moshe Seidel, asking him not to engage in resolving the contradictions posited by Biblical Criticism, but rather continue to observe the holiness of the Divine Torah as an integral unit.
Seidel had several major students who transferred from RIETS to JTSA and became the founders of the Conservative movement, especially Jacob Agus and Ben Zion Bokser (who, not coincidentally, wrote the first two books in English about Rabbi Kook). Agus and Bokser were also the two sides on the permissibility to drive on the Sabbath, each on opposite sides. Bokser, remaining true to Seidel, mildly accepted Biblical criticism and believed that God spoke words to humans but there was a human element.
Agus, in contrast, influenced by Mordechai Kaplan, maintained men were inspired by God and wrote based on their own perception: “We recognize that the divine light in scripture is necessarily clouded by the contingent passions and limits of the human agents of revelation.”
Agus also polished the isolated bon-mot from Franz Rosenzweig’s passage about R as Rabbanu, to falsely imply that Rosenweig was concerned with biblical criticism. Rather, Rosenzweig was concerned with revelation and holiness, not the historical text.
Just as a student of William James knows how to put every “religious experience” into the correct cubbyhole of the psychology of religion, and a Freudian student can analyze the experience into its elements of the old yet ever new story, so a student of Wellhausen will trace every commandment back to its human, folkloristic origin…
“Where we differ from orthodoxy is in our reluctance to draw from our belief in the holiness or uniqueness of the Torah, and in its character of revelation, any conclusions as to its literary genesis and the philological value of the text as it has come down to us.
My full discussion will include Solomon Goldman, another product of RIETS who became a leading student of Kaplan’s, was the protagonist in the major court case that started the separation of the two movements. Goldman rejected the Documentary Hypothesis but assumed the Bible was a human document.
D. American Orthodox reaction
The modern Orthodox reaction that became dominant in the early 1950s made the acceptance of the revelation of Torah directly from God into the dividing line between the Conservative Movement and Orthodoxy. A great variety of statements were issued by Mizrachi and other thinkers condemning the Conservative movement’s stance on revelation and Biblical criticism. Fox, Berkovits, Wurzburger all focused on the existential commitment. This culminates in the conclusion that held true in the United States that the concept an “Orthodox biblical scholar is an oxymoron.”
Wurzburger wrote: “This is an existential choice we cannot abdicate to anyone else. . . . In the final analysis, cognitive factors cannot resolve the question whether to accept or reject religious faith; it is a purely subjective decision . . . we cannot escape responsibility for choosing the categories with which we seek to understand our world.”
This reaction did not differentiate between liberal and conservative approaches, between the approach of Agus and Bokser, or between naturalism and supernaturalism. The position of American modern Orthodoxy was not sufficiently nuanced to analyze British Jewry.
E. England – Rabbi Hertz and Herbert Loewe
David Ruderman, the historian of Early Modern Jewry, states that most British Jews knew their own formulation of Judaism only through a massive English translation project, couched in English non-Hebraic terms. This produced their religious attitudes and behaviors, reflective of upper class English Protestants. British Orthodoxy was more academic and open-minded than in the United States and tolerated progressive thought as long as they deferred to the Anglican church- or in this case, the United Synagogue. Therefore, a Reform leaning preacher like Rev Morris Joseph who accepted Biblical criticism and had Reformist views of ritual was tolerated by the United Synagogue as long as he did not make waves.
But what about those that considered themselves Orthodox? Rabbi J.H. Hertz, in his well-known commentary on the Pentateuch, wrote that “Judaism stands or falls with its belief in the historical actuality of the Revelation at Sinai”
However, Herbert Loewe, reader in Semitics at Oxford was in tension with Chief Rabbi Hertz for his acceptance of Biblical criticism, but it did not write him out of Orthodoxy accepted that there was real person Moses who received revelation and was a significant author, but not all of the text is from him. Loewe thinks that the Biblical text was recreated by Josiah after losses of material. Loewe accepted an “inherent revelation” in which great eternal moral values are adapted for their age. In the introduction to a Rabbinic Anthology by his son Raphael, he credits his father with a commitment to the Bible and Orthodoxy not for sentimentality but as the germ of ethical values and theological notions of Rabbinic Judaism.
J. Abelson, leader of a congregation had a similar position and is cited by Jacobs.
F. Cohen and Epstein
Let us turn to the direct antecedent of Jacobs and works that were available in every United Synagogue member congregation.
Abraham Cohen (1887-1957) was the editor of the Soncino Books of the Bible and participated in the Soncino translation of the Talmud and Midrash. He most notably, explained his views in the essay, “The Message of the Bible.” The work demonstrates Cohen’s comprehension of the Bible.
The essay opens with a broad introduction that the Bible is a library of books, heterogeneous, and not speaking one word. The Biblical authors wrote based on their expectations for the times and current events, as well as based on their personal circumstances. What holds all these books together is their “unity of principle” in teaching “the revelation of God’s will as the controlling force in the life of man and laws for the government of the Israelite community.” The Bible provides individual and collective testimonies to the saving power of God. The book blends religion and morality with history
The Bible shows the need for revelation and teaches not only the limitation of human intellect but also the inadequacy of reason for understanding the mysteries of the universe and human living. Cohen follows the natural theology of the early 20th century. The message of scripture does not depend for its vitality on belief in doctrines but “upon its claim to be the communication of God to man.” This revelation was made through four media, nature, direct utterance, indirect intimation, and human experience.”
The first category of revelation includes the natural phenomena of those who know of God’s eternity, wisdom, infinite power, and mercy and leads to the second category of prophets: “To Moses, as well as to Israel, revelation assumed this direct form and in this respect he was an exception…the corpus of religious and ethical teaching and social legislation which he was instrumental in delivering to Israel from God is known as Torah.” Prophets were not just preachers but rather “they had consciousness that they were the spokesmen of God.” Following this, the third category, God is deduced from contemporary events.. The forth category is direct human experience where we sense God.
Cohen rejects the 19th century Protestant Biblical criticism which denigrated Judaism as a tribal legalistic and priestly religion that was rejected by the prophets. He rejects the critics who claim that there was evolution from the primitive Judaism to the developed prophets. Furthermore, he shows that one cannot use the divine name to separate the Pentateuch into authors. Cohen also shows that there are not two voices in the Bible one in favor of priest cult and one against. Yet, Cohen writes of the Garden of Eden that “this allegory framed in language understandable by the primitive mind”
Cohen’s Jewish statement that, “The revelation of God’s will as the controlling force in the life of man […] tThe Bible provides individual and collective testimonies to the saving power of God” is not far from the Anglican-Catholic definition that, “The authentic record of God’s revelation to man and is a revelation valid for all men and all time. In the Bible we have God’s revelation of Himself, His saving activity, and moral demands.”
G. Epstein
Isidore Epstein (1894–1962) was Orthodox rabbi and rabbinical scholar in England the editor of the Soncino English translation of the Babylonian Talmud. Epstein’s major work, The Faith of Judaism, offers a rational exposition of the doctrinal foundations of the Jewish region. Judaism must be founded to “make sense and answer to the rationality which is fundamental to human nature.” And his second allegiance is to the Jewish people in which the author as a “son of a people” must report on the “objective revelation of God in history involving the whole community of Israel. Epstein is dismissive of the recent turn to a religion of humanism, he is dismayed by those Jews who turn to Dewey, Mordechai Kaplan, or Julian Huxley.
The importance of Sinai was to confirm with human eyes the mission of Moses. Sinai gave him authority and thereby it gave authority to the Oral Law throughout the ages. Other prophets are now limited in what they can say and are limited to interpreting God’s word to Moses. Revelation is the foundation of all vital religion because it is needed to assert the existence of personal relationship to God. “If this is true of religion in general, it is at least equally true of the religion of Israel, out of which all higher religions have proceeded.”
Revelation is a psychological experience which implies the inter-penetration of the infinite mind of God and the mind of man.” If there is a personal god then it must be able to find entrance into finite minds. But it remains a mystery as to how and this communication of God does not denote interference into the natural course of things.
Both Cohen and Epstein leave opening in the Sinai Revelation for a human element. The instructors at Jew’s College were similar to the right wing of the American Conservative movement.
H. Louis Jacobs
The question becomes quite simply: why exactly did Jacobs think his views would be accepted?
In 1957, Jacobs was just a little more critical than the later discussed Epstein and Cohen because he rejected natural theology, and acknowledged that parts of the Bible are primitive.“The real significance of the Jewish religion lies in its ascent, in the height which it has reached and maintained, and not in the rudimentary forms out of which it has risen.”
How do we evaluate what is truly Biblical, he maintained that, “[I]it will be asked, if there are higher and lower teachings in the Bible how are we to recognize which are higher and which lower, how are we to distinguish between the eternal and the ephemeral? The answer is, surely, that the distinction is perceived by the human heart and worked out in Jewish tradition.” His views are dependent on sensing God in history; we sense through historical change what is no longer acceptable.
Dayyan Grunfeld’s complaints were not the issue because for example, he underlining Jaocb’s passage about the late date of the book of Daniel, was a position accepted by Epstein and Cohen. Jew’s College was positive historical not Hirschian.
However, between the years 1964 and 1965, Jacob’s writings had taken a turn out of Orthodoxy and began writing passages closer to Jacob Agus, a liberal position even within the American Conservative movement. Now, six years later it the bible a human work and you cannot study Semitics without acknowledging that. In the pages of the Jewish Chronicle, he threw down a gauntlet that if you don’t agree with him you are a fundamentalist, either/or.
Some of these views were already expressed orally since 1958, and he was in conversation with the NY JTSA to become part of their rabbinical faculty. But the influential editor of the Jewish Chronicle, William Frankel who wanted the United Synagogue to be more like the American Conservative movement goaded Jacobs ever to the left.
When Biblical criticism and historical scholarship generally have done their work the picture which emerges with the greatest clarity is of a human work, produced as all other human works are produced and thus amenable to literary analysis and philological investigation, which does not impart anything like infallible information.
Some Reform congregations today tend to hold similar views and in so far as they do are very close to our position. In the United States we would belong to the ranks of the Conservatives.
In discussing difficult biblical passages the rabbi can introduce his congregation to the idea of demythologizing.
By 1965, he already spoke about the difficulty of seeing a divine element in entire parshiot and that we have to grasp the demythologized message of the Bible. He also wanted criticism to be discussed from the pulpit, a position that was rejected by the Conservative movement and still frowned upon even among Reform preachers.
And by 1973, Louis Jacobs agrees with the Reform theologian Jacob Joseph Petuchowski that there was an existential meeting of the Jews and God, a human experience that produced no content. “God did “command” them but not by direct communication – as in the traditional view – but through the historical experiences of the people of Israel… The various propositions are, then, not themselves revelation but are the by-product of revelation.” Bible is primitive work does not offer direct moral guidance. He remained Masorati and was not Reform)
To reconstruct the development of the Genesis narratives is probably impossible now and a strong element of guesswork is involved in any attempted reconstruction. But something of the following would appear to be not too far from the truth. Out of the early myths, tribal movements and ancient traditions, the Genesis narratives were woven and told originally in the form of saga. These traditional stories were eventually put together to form the more or less continuous narrative we have in Genesis as part of the Heilsgeschicht, the sacred history in which God makes His covenant with the Patriarchs and their descendants… The various propositions are, then, not themselves revelation but are the by-product of revelation.
Even when discussing the ethical system of Saadia who considered that in the “revealed Scripture we have the precise details of how ethical norms are to be applied in concrete situations.” Jacobs commented: “But such a solution is not open to anyone who, under the influence of biblical criticism, cannot see the biblical laws as direct divine guidance of this kind.”
Jacob’s ideas were not unfairly rejected as un-Orthodox. And if his ideas were accepted it would not have created a more modern Orthodoxy, rather a British United Synagogue closer to the liberal side of the American Conservative movement. Jacobs was a liberal theologian operating against an Orthodox background.
The reaction to the Jacob’s affair, however, made the more historical approaches of Epstein, Cohen, Hirschenson, and even Loewe fade from the scene. This paper only covers until 1973. It does not discuss anything about today or evaluate contemporary thinkers.
The Book of Doctrines and Opinions: 
Very interesting. A new volume from Mossad Bialik explores Orthodox reactions to Jewish studies including Biblical criticism with some overlap of the period you describe including the relationship of scholars associated with Rav Kook such as Dr. Seidel.
http://www.bialik-publishing.co.il/product_info.php?products_id=1629&osCsid=sg62c6il546viqm1foue4vbbq5
The volume is by Yedidya Assaf. I am currently working my way through the book and his articles. He has done nice work.
In the full version, do you discuss at all the work of Hayyim Heller (1878-1960) and his reception by the scholarly world?
I am sorry, but no. I wanted to outline the theological dividing lines not those who tried to respond with schoalrship. He was not received in scholarly circles but was highly praised in Mizrachi circles.
ר’ חיים הירשענזאהן, מלכי בקדש ב’ עמ’ 216: אמנם נורא הוא המצב של העוסקים בבקורת התנ״ך וביחוד בהחלק הנקרא אצלם בשם ״בקורת הגבוה״, בונים להם מגדל ושמים בשמים פיהם, כופרים בתורה שלא מדעת תורה, ואין חכמה ואין עצה ואין תבונה לטעון להכופר בתורת עמו, כי הכופר בה לא עליה יחשב, ומה לו ולעמו
Thank you for an interesting post. May I suggest that missing here (although perhaps not in the longer paper) is the British context – and Louis Jacobs was VERY British! The United Synagogue itself was founded as a Jewish version of the Anglican Church, and had many Anglican characterisitics until 1967 (part the Six Day War, part the accession of Lord Jakobovits). Factors which play into this discussion may include (but are not limited to):
1. LJ himself, in one of his memoirs, recognises that his position would eventually have become untenable given the changes (the Artscroll revolution) which were on the horizon in UK Orthodoxy as elsewhere. (Compare the United Synagogue rabbinate today with that of, say, 1965).
2. There is no doubt that there were other Rabbis and ‘Ministers’ occupying pulpits in the US who were just as radical in their theology as LJ – especially in the New West End Synagogue, which was a ‘society’ shul long regarded as out of the mainstream.
3. The great fear of the Beth Din was that LJ was regarded as a contender for the ‘glittering prizes’ of Anglo-Jewry — the Principalship of Jews College and perhaps the Chief Rabbinate. They might have been prepared to leave him at the NWE, out of harm’s way — but they could not risk him in either of those two key positions. They also feared his possible influence on the yeshivah world, as LJ was wholly a product of Manchester Yeshivah and Gateshead Kollel — he did not go to university until he came to London (where his first post was at ‘Munk’s’ – the Breuer’s of London). At the famous meeting of rabbis around the time of the “affair”, called by Israel Brodie, Brodie made a point of saying to the Gateshead rabbanim (who turned out, exceptionally, to support Brodie) “This man comes from among you, not from us”.
4. The lay leadership of the US have a long, British tradition of abdicating all leadership and decision-making to the Beth Din; so Sir Isaac Wolfson went along with the ‘excommunication’.
5. The question of whether his theology (a defence of non-fundamentalist halachic observance) would have been defensible or viable in the Anglo-Jewish community is moot, because Anglo-Jewry has never had any interest in theology! Other than LJ, (and in a different way, and more recently, Lord Sacks) the UK is something of a desert for Judaism. Jews College was never the incubator of thinkers and scholars that YU or JTS became, and Jewish Studies at Universities in the UK exist in total isolation from the community, most of whom are unaware that such faculties exist!
Anyway — shabbat is coming……
In addition — expanding on point #4 — the lay leadership of the United Synagogue had changed. When LJ was barred by Israel Brodie from the Principalship of Jews College, most of the J/Coll Board resigned — representing the old Anglo-Jewish gentry. (The college never recovered). At roughly the samr time, leadership of the US passed from the ‘gentry’ — in this case, Ewen Montagu, who succeeded the legendary Sir Robert Waley Cohen – to the ‘new’ community, represented by millionaire Sir Isaac Wolfson (himself observant). Despite, perhaps, what I wrote above, the old-style leaders – out of touch with the community – while always careful to respect the Orthodoxy of the clergy (Robert Waley Cohen vs C R Hertz, and Dayan Abramsky), were essentially gentlemen, and held that the treatment of Louis Jacobs had ‘not been cricket’.
None of this bears on the issue of whether LJ would have been able to be theologically ‘accepted’; it really addresses the question of whether he could have remained in the pulpit of the United Synagogue. For what it’s worth, Immanuel Jakobovits said to me that if he had been C R at the time, “the Jacobs affair would never have been allowed to come to [this]”. However, a recent work by Meir Persoff records extracts from LJ’s diary which indicate unsuccessful ‘reaching out’ by IJ before taking up office.
Finally – LJ’s personality — shy, humble, academic – was also a factor. He was not a fiery orator, and he did not seek to be a leader of a new movement – he saw himself as genuinely Orthodox (“Minhag Anglia”). Had he have had a more outgoing personality, the outcome(s) may also have been different.
The whole Jacobs affair was a turning point in Anglo-Jewry. Personally – I think it was catastrophic. Many people think the opposite.
I disagree that that the moment of LJ’s separation from Orthodoxy was 1964-5. We Have Reason to Believe (1957) made statements about Sefer Daniel that offended Grunfeld but Epstein, Cohen and Brodie would have agreed with. However, the latter disagreed sharply about what LJ said about the Pentateuch in WHRTB. It was those comments which led to LJ’s exclusion from Anglo-Orthodoxy in 1959, when he was denied the Principalship of Jews’ College. That process was completed in 1964 with the foundation of the New London Synagogue, but it began well before.
Some revision needs to be done about the view of LJ as shy and humble. In his reviews, for example of Lamm’s ‘Faith and Doubt’, he is very strident, even arrogant. He was fond of the phrase ‘no thinking person’ would disagree with him. Lamm is a thinking person!
I removed from the blog version the following below that was in the original paper. My question was about his theology not about Rabbi Brodie or the United Synagogue.
And as I wrote in the post “Some of these [latter] views were already expressed orally since 1958, and he was in conversation with the NY JTSA to become part of their rabbinical faculty.” I was not doing a history between looking at the theological contours.
1. Orthodox and Liberalism
Liberal Christianity, broadly speaking , is an undogmatic method of understanding God through the use of scripture by applying the same modern hermeneutics used to understand any ancient writings. Liberal Christianity does not claim to be a belief structure, and as such is not dependent upon any Church dogma or creedal statements. The word liberal in liberal Christianity denotes a characteristic willingness to interpret scripture without any preconceived notion of inerrancy of scripture or the correctness of Church dogma
The theology of liberal Christianity was prominent in the Biblical criticism of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Bible is non-propositional. This means that the Bible is not considered a collection of factual statements, but instead an anthology that documents the human authors’ beliefs and feelings about God at the time of its writing—within a historical or cultural context. Bible are metaphorical or ‘myth based’.
Higher critics, such as Johann Eichhorn and David Strauss, denied the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch Most famous theologians of the 20th century are Bultman and Tillich “Liberalism at its best is more likely to say, ‘We certainly ought to honor the richness of the Christian past and appreciate the vast contribution it makes to our lives, but finally we must live by our best modern conclusions.
Orthodox theology, broadly speaking , is a dogmatic method of understanding God through the reading of scripture with a special hermeneutic, different than the way one reads any ancient writings. Texts are read through tradition, authorial bodies, and via prior understandings. Orthodoxy has a clear belief structure dependent upon any dogma and creedal statements. The word Orthodox means a characteristic unwillingness to interpret scripture without any consideration of the correctness of dogma. Perceived changes to the tradition are due to God’s revelation not contingent history
Orthodox theology when asked “When the consensus of the best contemporary minds differs markedly from the most precious teachings of the past, which do we follow? To which do we give primary allegiance, the past or the present?” The orthodox answer is always that “We ought to listen to the hypotheses of the present and take from them what we can, but ultimately the truth has been given to us in the past, and the acceptance of that is our ultimate obligation. Everything the contemporary world might say must be judged by its conformity to biblical revelation.” Important orthodox theologians include Karl Barth, The Niebuhrs, Cardinal Ratzinger, and John Henry Newman.
I take your point about LJ’s personality – but he was far more blunt in print than (generally) in public speech, and it is (I believe) certainly the case that he was shy. “Humble”? — maybe not. But he was not a rabble-rousing orator by any means, and I still think that the story would have been different had he had a more extrovert personality. Another factor worth considering is his northern, Manchester background; I think that he had a characteristically North-of-England bluntness, and I think that the Manchester tradition of non-conformism also figured in the whole picture of his personality and style.
Regarding Steve Bayme’s comment (below) about LJ’s religious belief / status in 1973 — by that time the controversy was over bar the shouting, and he had — in the views of some — been backed into a corner which required him to defend a series of views that he might not otherwise have made the focus of his life. He was certainly not Reform; not only was he a convinced defender of the halakhic system, but he turned down opportunities to become the head of the Leo Baeck College in London because he did not want to identify with their theology. ‘Conservative’? What did the term mean in London at that time? As he maintained, and has has been discussed, the old United Synagogue (UK) spanned the USA dividing line between Left-wing Orthodox and right-wing Conservative. (For old Anglo-Jews like myself, who remembers the Rev. Isaac Livingstone, minister of the Golders Green Synagogue for decades, who would proudly carry his umbrella to and from shul on shabbat morning along an eruv-less GG Road? Or Rev. Leslie Hardman of Hendon Synagogue; or Saul Amias of Edgware? All legendary pastoral leaders — but hardly Orthodox by any present-day definition.
Enough of memory lane — sorry, Alan, for taking the comments away from your focus!
Alan-First-rate piece and analysis. Surprising degree of evolution in Jacobs’s thinking.
In the meantime, for what they are worth are some comments and reactions:
1) Whether you are correct in characterizing Agus’s invoking of Rosenzweig as “falsely” is somewhat questionable. Rosenzweig’s citation here of Wellhausen and the Samaritan text suggest he may well have been referencing historical criticism. Certainly an entire generation, if not two, of Conservative rabbis understood Rosenzweig as legitimating historical criticism while revering the authority of the text as the one we have. Is there a Rosenzweig scholar since Agus who took issue with this interpretation of Rosenzweig?
2) The core of Jacobs’s quest is for an Orthodoxy that is intellectually compelling. Biblical criticism remains central to that quest. If one claims that acceptance of Biblical criticism crosses a line that places you outside the pale of Orthodoxy, you then have to ask how should the Orthodox Jew relate to questions of multiple sources, anachronisms, and historical error, to say nothing of morally troubling episodes. No shortage of these in either last week’s parshiot or this week’s. What troubles me is that in the Orthodoxy of today people are faithfully attending shul and never raising questions of this sort, even when they are obvious-e.g. on a moral level the war against the Midianites and on an historical level the Yair ben Menashe affair.
3) The Jacobs affair one would think would have stirred greater controversy here in the States. It appears to have caused barely a ripple. In 1965 the late Charles Liebman predicted that Modern Orthodoxy would soon be torn apart over Biblical criticism. Instead we have seen the triumph of the ArtScroll and its pathetic inability to distinguish peshat and derash. The closest we came to an American parallel is probably the 1966 Greenberg/Lichtenstein debate, but even there the entire focus-both contemporaneously and in historical memory- was over negiah and premarital intimacy. Greenberg’s comments on Biblical criticism in the initial interview elicited virtually no reaction or comment.
4) If one accepts your conclusion, that Jacobs indeed was Conservative if not Reform by 1973, the question becomes one of the limits of Orthodox dissent and of rabbinic authority. Does intellectual honesty compel one to shed one’s Orthodoxy or can Orthodoxy tolerate some level of deviant belief in the light of intellectually compelling evidence and argument? Given the absence generally of Conservative communities where these questions are taken seriously (Hadar is a noteworthy exception), is it unacceptable to declare oneself an Orthodox Jew by practice who chooses, quite logically, to identify with an Orthodox community? Last, Orthodoxy has never drawn strict lines to its theological right (pace David Berger). Can it not handle questions on its Left by saying, “legitimate questions, Orthodox Jews have always believed otherwise, but if we take modern culture seriously, we cannot afford to ignore findings of modern scholarship; that is what distinguishes us from the Haredi world”?
5) I was fascinated by your description of Rabbi Seidel. Interesting that his name has disappeared from the official histories of YU.
Again, really interesting paper. Would love to see and read more.
Best,
Stevce
Steven Bayme, Ph.D
National Director
William Petschek Contemporary Jewish Life Department
Rabbi brill, you might want to note Rav Amnon bazak’s new book on bible critism from the Har Etzion school. He just advertised it on his facebook today (“Ad Hayom Hazeh” , Yediot Sfarim press).
Shaya- yes, I know. But you may be interested in reading the book in English. It is on the VBM list serve – I have subscribed for the entire course. It is a good read but does not really get too near the fundamental problems. Rather, it introduced the issues in a safe religious context.
Absolutely fascinating post, Professor Brill. I never came across any connection between Agus and Seidel in my research, but it sounds like a particularly fruitful one to pursue, so thank you. I hesitate to nitpick, but you write above that both Agus and Bokser transferred to JTS, but this is only true of Bokser. Agus received his semikha from Moshe Soloveitchik and remained an Orthodox rabbi (at least on paper) until 1945-1946. Incidentally, Agus took a pulpit in Chicago at the behest of Bernard Revel in 1940-1941 and it was there that he most likely came under the influence of Solomon Goldman. Goldman’s influence probably played a large part in inspiring Agus to join the Rabbinical Assembly in 1945 and his decision to reorganize his congregation in Dayton, Ohio, under Conservative auspices. Agus also felt very close to Bernard Revel but did not see eye-to-eye with Samuel Belkin, so Revel’s passing may have eased Agus’ conscience and allowed him to make the leap officially. Agus’ closeness to Goldman and the fact that, as Leo Jung’s research assistant, he studied the question of the halakhic necessity of mekhitza, help explain Agus’ deep involvement with the various mekhitza cases and the Responsum on the Sabbath, and make them that much more fraught with meaning. If Agus played such an important role in defining Conservative Judaism at midcentury in contradistinction to Orthodoxy, it was in part because of this background, and because he was trained in philosophy and theology which was fairly uncommon at the time, so he was particularly interested in articulating the difference between Orthodoxy and Conservatism on the level of ideas. (He also played an important role in making a Conservative audience aware of Orthodox theologians they might not have otherwise – R’ Kook, as you mention, and (J.D.) Soloveitchik, in addition to helping to introduce English audiences to Rosenzweig and Buber.) To the subject of your post, defining the one necessarily involved defining the other, so Agus needed to define “Orthodoxy” for the purposes of rejecting it – he usually equated it with acceptance of Biblical “literalism,” but his break with Orthodoxy had just as much if not more to do with halakhic reasoning and a perceived lack of intellectual honesty within Orthodoxy than attitudes towards Biblical criticism in particular. Not that I am in any way implying you argue otherwise. Oh – and many years later, Louis Jacobs saw Agus as a like-minded thinker who shared his own “Liberal Supernaturalism.”
Thank you for the corrections. Can you find the Jacob’s citation and praise of Agus?