The Chosen Wars Read online

  Gilman (1791–1858) was a major figure in establishing Unitarianism in the antebellum South, and became a beloved figure in Charleston’s social and intellectual scene—though he is perhaps best known today as the author of his alma mater’s hymn, “Fair Harvard.” The Sabbath service he attended, Gilman wrote, was difficult for an outsider to follow, marked by incessant murmuring of Hebrew and occasional Spanish, people standing up and down and walking in and out, while chanting “with great indistinctness and volubility, now sinking into a low murmur, now in violent vociferation.”6 Gilman’s record is one of the few that describes what it was like to be in a service at Beth Elohim at the time that reformers wanted to break away.

  These were the qualities that “reformers” in Charleston were trying to tame. Gilman praised Harby, declaring in a backhanded compliment that he previously had no idea that so many Jews had “surmounted the proverbial prejudices of their race” to embrace the liberal spirit of the age. In a possible indication that Gilman and Harby had communicated—although there is not necessarily evidence that they even knew each other—Gilman cited Harby’s declaration that he had no intention of establishing a new sect of Jews, and that his purpose was only to align Judaism with the “enlightened” practices of Jews in France and Germany. Gilman erroneously suggested that the Jews might even shift Sabbath worship from Saturday to Sunday but later was corrected by Harby.

  Not all the reaction was positive, of course. Harby’s nemeses in this period included Mordecai Manuel Noah, who ridiculed the reform initiative as ignorant and antithetical to his own cause of trying to establish a colony for Jews in North America. A more serious and sustained criticism came from a prominent Jew in Richmond, Virginia, Jacob Mordecai, an observant Jewish educator and leader of Congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Shalome, who charged that the Reformed Society would “destroy the ancient fabric of Israelite worship” and “gradually undermine all confidence in their religion under the pretext of divesting it of Rabbinical impurities and interpretations.”

  Mordecai, descended from a family that had emigrated from Germany, had served in the Continental Army under General George Washington. Like Harby, he had struggled to make a living (as a tobacco merchant) but gave up business to establish an “academy” where he could impart the knowledge he had gained from studying the Bible and Jewish law. The Warrenton Female Academy became one of the leading institutions for women in the country. Harby, he said from Richmond, obviously knew too little of Jewish law to suggest changing it. He then backed up that assertion with his own knowledge of history, arguing that Harby misunderstood the Protestant Reformation (which Harby cited as a model), in that Martin Luther’s teachings resulted in “atrocious persecution and spiritual intolerance” of Jews.

  Introducing lectures in English, abolishing offerings, translating prayer books, and setting forth more uniform and orderly chanting of prayers could be considered acceptable, Mordecai conceded. But he charged that these changes seemed a subterfuge aimed at getting Jews to “cease to exist” as a separate people. Nor was it a blessing that the Jews were integrating themselves into the American fabric, Mordecai argued, because in places like Turkey and Arabia they enjoyed a “sovereign authority” over their own affairs that was preferable to falling under civil laws in the United States. American Jews, Mordecai reminded Harby, still suffered exclusion from certain political rights in America, including the military.

  As for Harby’s study of history, Mordecai ridiculed his reliance on modern Christian scholars of Hebrew and on such ancients as Josephus (the first-century Roman Jewish scholar he labeled a “half traitor”), Saint Jerome, Gibbon, the writings of Deists, Spinoza (“an atheist of the first order”), and other “calumniators of Jews.” He pointed out that Moses Mendelssohn, the great founder of enlightened Judaism and acquaintance of Immanuel Kant, was, for all his revolutionary thinking, an adherent to the Talmud that Harby was rejecting. Harby was clearly incapable, Mordecai declared, of understanding the writings of the rabbinic sages whom he dismissed as ignorant and bigoted. But what infuriated Mordecai the most was Harby’s embrace of the anathema that the United States was somehow the “new Jerusalem” that could replace the Jewish people’s object of yearning to return to the Holy Land. “The Scriptures speak of no other ‘spot as the future country of the Israelites’ ” than the land of Israel. “There is no enigma to solve, no room for ‘fanciful conjecture’ to justify a ‘belief that America truly is the land of promise spoken in our ancient Scripture.’ ”

  Mordecai appealed to Jewish youth not to be misled by Harby’s delusion that they could abandon tradition and still be Jews. He beseeched young Jews not to “take the fatal leap that is to separate you for ever from the religion of your fathers. . . . We wish to caution [you] in the language of our law giver: ‘take heed to thyself that you be not snared.’ ”7

  REFORMED SOCIETY: ATROPHY AND REVIVAL

  The arguments that tore the Jewish community apart in South Carolina have been likened by some traditionalists to the internal conflicts among Jews that contributed to the destruction of the Second Temple, as Jews descended into “a disjointed tribe, rent asunder by fierce party strife, and arrayed in hostile position against each other.”8

  But for all the sound and fury of the 1820s, the Reformed Society atrophied rapidly after its initial few successful years. One reason was that Harby dropped out of the battle. Devastated by the death of his wife in 1827, Harby was left to care for their six young children. He continued to teach and write, but Charleston’s own economy suffered, losing business to northern ports. Despite his efforts, Charleston became caught up in evangelical fervor among Christians, and Harby’s appeals for tolerance and universalism seemed increasingly out of favor in the Gentile community, as Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians held revival meetings filled with sermons and themes of repentance, damnation, and salvation.

  Disillusioned by Charleston and attracted by the cultural life of New York, Harby moved there in 1828. He became editor of the New York Mirror, And Ladies’ Literary Gazette, which featured writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and John Greenleaf Whittier. He was also drama critic for the New York Evening Post, established as a Federalist newspaper years earlier by Alexander Hamilton and John Jay but later evolving toward the antiestablishment Jacksonian view under the influence of a new associate editor, William Cullen Bryant. Struggling to make a living, Harby started a “classical & English Academy” for instruction of youth in New York, and advertised that it would accept women in June 1828. But it was not to be. Within months he succumbed to typhoid fever and died by the end of the year, leaving his children to be raised by his sister.

  Back in Charleston, the Reformed Society faced relentless hostility of the old guard at Beth Elohim, and angry divisions even among families, with dissenters turning against their own siblings and parents. Other issues divided them as well. A prominent member who was expelled, for reasons that are not clear, although it could have been because he kept a shop open on the Sabbath, was Philip Benjamin. He was the father of Judah P. Benjamin, later senator from Louisiana and the Confederate secretary of state.

  In 1833 the society formally abandoned the idea of starting its own synagogue and resolved to return the money raised for it. The society continued to exist on paper, but not as a congregation. It effectively ceased to exist by the late 1830s.

  Yet the failure of the dissidents sowed the seeds of success when Beth Elohim reached out for a new hazan. By this time, the American Jewish population was increasingly dominated by Ashkenazim. Still bruised by their fights with Reformed Society dissidents, the traditionalists at Beth Elohim were determined to find a compatible replacement. They turned to the Reverend Gustavus Poznanski (his Hebrew name was Gedalia; it was common in this period to refer to rabbis as “the Reverend”), who was with Shearith Israel in New York City, serving as shohet (kosher butcher), shofar blower, and assistant hazan on the High Holidays.

  Arriving in 1837
in Charleston, Poznanski made an immediate, favorable impression among those hoping he would restore order to a divided and unruly community. But he turned out to be something less than what the hidebound conservatives expected. Born in what was then called Storchnest, in western Poland but then part of Prussia, Poznanski (1805–1879) quickly learned that he had to navigate the lingering ill feelings at the synagogue, where traditionalists remained concerned about lapses in Jewish practices. His biographers say, however, that he was a master at bridging differences and imposing what he called “a more earnest respect for our religion.” Only one year after his arrival at the age of thirty-four, he was elected for life. In the same year, he also married Esther (Hetty) Barrett, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a prominent family in town, which “certainly made Poznanski’s position in Charleston more secure and relieved him of financial worries,” writes one of his biographers, Solomon Breitbart.9

  It should have been obvious that Poznanski had liberal and even anti-establishment leanings, however. He had received some education in Hamburg, a center of the Reform movement in Europe, making it likely he benefited from a secular German education and would be receptive to demands for change in rituals and practices. The way was paved for a confrontation because Poznanski’s arrival coincided with a new constitution at Beth Elohim, consolidating the two boards (adjuntas) into a single board of trustees and a single president (parnas). In a gesture to the reformers, the hazan was to be qualified in English and required to give a “suitable address” on the Sabbath in English—and the congregation was given more authority over synagogue affairs.

  The charter fired a warning shot by declaring that no “innovations” in the service be approved by the parnas or the administration unless approved by three-quarters of the members. Evidently, with the ill-fated Reform Society in mind, the constitution also barred members from joining any independent body that adopted innovations or alterations “in the Mosaical or Rabbinical Laws.”

  But the constitution also implied that the reforms already adopted at Beth Elohim, such as barring the practice of letting members bid for privileges with public offerings, could not easily be rescinded either. These limited reforms had given Beth Elohim the distinction of being one of the first American synagogues to ban such sales of privileges. Among these congregations were Har Sinai in Baltimore, which adopted a reform-oriented prayer book in use at the Hamburg Temple in Germany; Temple Emanu-El in New York; and Congregation Ansche Emeth in Albany, New York.

  In addition, the Charleston fire one year after Poznanski’s arrival changed the equilibrium of forces keeping the Beth Elohim congregation together. To pay for the rebuilding of the synagogue, the congregation needed new members, including disaffiliated reformers. The expanded body of members now contained more of those who favored changes. As plans for a new synagogue proceeded, thirty-eight members of the congregation petitioned the board to consider installing an organ in the new synagogue, noting that playing or listening to organ music constituted “nothing incompatible” with Jewish doctrine. They noted that organs had been installed in Prague a century earlier and that organs had been introduced elsewhere in Germany and in France.

  The request ushered in a historic turning point at the synagogue—and in the relationship between Judaism and the American judicial system.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ORGAN

  The use of an organ in a synagogue had gone through a stormy history in Europe well before its installation provoked a furor in Charleston. The complex arguments surrounding such an innovation illustrates the extent to which modern Jews were growing uncomfortable with Talmudic hair-splitting applied to contemporary life. A principal argument against the organ in Europe started with the importance of the Sabbath ban on work. Traditional rabbis said playing an organ or perhaps any musical instrument violated that injunction. An organ, after all, functions as a kind of giant whistle through which compressed air is forced, constituting a mechanism that strict adherents of Jewish law maintained should not be permitted during the day of rest, just as operating almost any piece of equipment or turning on a light switch is considered a violation of Sabbath rules in traditional Judaism.

  “Debate over the employment of an organ in Jewish worship remained the single most significant marker of the boundary between Liberal and Orthodox Judaism in Germany throughout the nineteenth century,” writes the religious scholar David Ellenson.10 The German Orthodox establishment, for example, directed that any student serving in a community employing an organ during the Sabbath or any other time should have his ordination certificate canceled.

  The organ controversies also illustrate the care that advocates of change took to argue that they were not trying to discard Jewish law but rather to reinterpret it in light of modern developments and practices for Jews wishing to retain their traditional identity. The German “reformers” insisted that they were applying interpretations in the tradition of the sages of old. Their contention that they were merely interpreting the law, and not abrogating it, incensed traditionalists with its additional brazenness, however. Orthodox scholars regarded the heretical views of reformers in Germany as “evil” on two counts: inherently wicked and even more so because reformers were allegedly arrogating unto themselves the right to reinterpret Jewish law to conform to their desired practices.

  How directly the European furor over organs in synagogues influenced South Carolina is not clear from the record, although contemporaneous accounts show that the Jews of South Carolina were more than aware of these controversies. The most historically important early furor over an organ in Europe flared at the Hamburg Reform temple in Germany, one of the first major “Reform temples” recorded in Jewish history. (The very first Reform synagogue is generally considered to be the one in Seesen, built in 1810.) The Hamburg temple’s installation of an organ in 1818 ignited furious protests among the Orthodox rabbinate throughout the city. The rabbinic court of the city then issued a pamphlet in 1819 (Eileh Divre ha-Brit, “These Are the Words of the Covenant”) containing twenty-two opinions signed by forty rabbis declaring that the organ and other practices were “outside the pale of Judaism.”

  An important corollary of the basic argument against playing an organ on the Sabbath was that, even if doing so were acceptable, there might be a temptation to repair a broken organ during the day of rest, which would be an even more egregious violation of the ban on work. To engage in a practice that might invite a transgression of Jewish law could thus be seen as forbidden on its face. This variant was offered by Rabbi Leopold Stein of the Rabbinical Commission to the Frankfurt Assembly, who said it was acceptable to play an organ on the Sabbath, but not to repair one. Stein gave his approval to playing an organ in theory, noting that the Talmud had alluded to an instrument in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem as having many pipes, bringing forth many sounds. But still he warned against installing one as a temptation to the violation of having to repair it.

  Some opponents of the organ conceded that there were references to musical instruments being played in the Temple of Jerusalem before its destruction, but they deemed this fact to be irrelevant. They argued that rabbinic law held that after the Temple’s destruction, Jews must mourn its loss and that an organ was thus inappropriate as an expression of joy counter to that spirit of lamentation. But other rabbis replied that although Jews were not allowed to be joyous in their secular lives, they could praise God with joy, even on the Sabbath.

  A number of other rationales were cited by the opponents of the organ in Hamburg. Perhaps the best key to understanding the spirit of that disapproval could be found in the generalized biblical command “Thou shalt not walk in their ways.” This phrase comes from Leviticus 18:3, and it refers to the injunction against “pagan” practices of others in Canaan or Egypt. The passage had been interpreted by traditionalists throughout the ages to say that whatever the goyim did in their practices, Jews must not follow suit, even if there was no other reason not to do it. Rabbi Isaak Noah Mannheimer of Vienna
, declared, for example: “I admit that the sound of the organ, like the sound of bells, has become too much a characteristic of the Christian Church, and it is therefore offensive to the Jew.”11

  But just because something is accepted by Christians, does that mean it can’t be accepted by Jews? Were Jews not even allowed to wear clothes worn by “pagans”? Reformers and organ proponents argued that such logic was absurd on its face, except in cases of outright idolatry. Thus, Rabbi Aaron Chorin of Arad, Hungary, observed that Christians were not idolaters and that the organ was a “sweet practice” that uplifted the soul. He and others cited texts noting that Jews could honor God with song and “every musical instrument.”

  Although the Hamburg organ stirred the most famous uproar over the issue in Europe until that time, the actual precedent setting the controversy had occurred in Prague. The Prague records show that an organ was in use going back to 1679 in the Maisel Synagogue of the Holy Community there. It was that precedent that Reformers cited as justification nearly 150 years later in Hamburg and that Orthodox rabbis disputed, saying that the authorities in Prague were simply mistaken. In any case, rabbis of the Orthodox Rabbinical Court in Prague said that records showing the use of the organ a century earlier were effectively a lie and that the practice now “sickens and pains the heart of the listener,” irrespective of any such precedent. Rabbi Moses Sofer Schreiber of Pressburg added that the organ was associated with idol worship. He asserted that evidence that it was played during Sabbath was contrived, and that in any case, because the Prague organ was not repaired after it broke down, the Jews of Prague must have recognized that it had been a violation of Jewish law.