Portrait of a Scholar

Keeper of the Law: Louis Ginzberg.
by Eli Ginzberg.
The Jewish Publication Society of America. 348 pp. $6.00.

Professor Ginzberg's affectionate account of his distinguished father is not formal biography but, as he himself properly calls it, a personal memoir. As such it is a private thing, addressed in the first instance to those who share some portion of the author's filial piety for his subject—his kinsmen, his disciples, his professional associates. But an account of Louis Ginzberg may also legitimately engage the remoter and larger public who are interested in the inner history of Judaism, for he did in fact play a considerable role in shaping the character of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and hence in influencing the configuration of American Judaism in the period of its widest expansion. “The public is always curious,” wrote Gibbon in connection with his own memoirs, “to know the men who have left behind them any image of their minds: the most scanty accounts of such men are compiled with diligence and perused with eagerness.”

The armature of Louis Ginzberg's public image was his quality as an outstanding talmudic scholar, and the key to his effectiveness was his consistent loyalty to a particular conception of scholarship. To appreciate the direction and scope of his influence we must look first at the formation of the man and then at his lengthened shadow in the institution he served. Ginzberg was born in Kovno, Lithuania (1873) into as proud an aristocracy as any democratic society can shelter. The patent of nobility was not wealth or official preferment but a particular kind of learning, and the members of the aristocracy were united by bonds of marriage and kinship. Its Grand Monarque was the Gaon Elijah of Vilna (1720-1797); Hebrew publications of Ginzberg's maturity bear on the title-page the proud identification “of the kin of the Gaon Elijah of Vilna.” Ginzberg's early education was at the yeshivot of Telsh and Slobodka, where he was recognized as a prodigy of erudition and acumen. The sole preoccupation of the yeshivot was the study of the classic texts; people like Ginzberg's father avoided sending their sons to schools touched by the influence of the musarnikes (or moralizers) for fear that traditional study might be diluted by spiritual exercises. Belles-lettres were naturally even more suspect; when the boy acquired a modern Hebrew poem which he concealed in the talmudic folio he was studying, the scandal was sorrowfully reported to his father. In his early teens Ginzberg joined his parents, who had removed to Amsterdam, and then proceeded to Frankfurt for his secular education, of which he had so far had none. The major part of his university study was accomplished at Strasbourg, where he devoted himself to Orientalia. He had evinced an inclination for mathematics but was discouraged from pursuing it because it afforded little prospect for a university career; one wonders how many embryo mathematical geniuses from Lithuania may have been similarly smothered.

Upon some who persisted—one thinks of the redoubtable Solomon Maimon (1754-1800)—Western outlooks did indeed work a transformation. In philological studies, on the other hand, though the university approach was more scientific, the goal was essentially similar to that of the yeshivah—control of a special library of texts. And in the university, too, philological virtuosity clothed a man with a peculiar aura as the guardian of traditional esoteric lore. There have been several conjunctures of history where mastery of a canon of classics has brought its possessor esteem amounting to reverence. In the first century, the scholar in ancient Greek classics, not the creative artist or thinker, was so esteemed, and even expected preferential treatment in another existence. Among the early humanists, a Petrarch or a Boccaccio rested his high claims not on his fresh creative work but on his now forgotten accomplishments in the Latin classics. No modern athlete or Nobel laureate receives such adulation as his contemporaries bestowed upon Erasmus for philological scholarship. And in German universities at the turn of our century, philological scholarship was again endowed with extraordinary prestige. Often the virtuosi of Altertumswissenschaft were indifferent to the poetic and philosophic qualities which gave texts their distinction, but they had no doubt that the texts enshrined the full precipitate of human wisdom and they regarded scholarly proficiency as the prime preservative of the values of civilization. For men who had undergone educational experiences like Ginzberg's, it was only the style of the old school tie, not its weave, that was changed.

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In 1899 Ginzberg came to America upon the invitation of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. The invitation proved abortive, but Ginzberg's willingness to accept it is significant, not of opportunism or an inclination to Reform (his own pattern of life was traditional) but because he regarded the maintenance of scholarship as central and how a man chose to apply it as secondary. Theological outlooks and modes of observance might diverge, Left as well as Right; provided the tradition of scholarship was left secure, the historical continuum would not be interrupted. Ginzberg earned his living in New York by a superb series of scholarly contributions to the opening volume of the Jewish Encyclopedia. Soon he was persuaded (by Henrietta Szold) to enter upon a work on the legends of the Jews for the Jewish Publication Society. It is worth noting that this work, completed in a much expanded form many years later, was initially undertaken as a potboiler and has proved the most widely useful of Ginzberg's writings. His opus magnum, which is his commentary on the Jerusalem Talmud, is known only to specialists.

In 1902 the Jewish Theological Seminary of America was reorganized under the presidency of Solomon Schechter, who recruited Ginzberg for his new faculty. The reorganization was promoted and financed by public-spirited philanthropists like Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall who were themselves members of Temple Emanu-El and less concerned with propagating conservative theological doctrine than with introducing decorum into the public life of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Its divergent and sometimes contradictory objectives were difficult for the infant institution to reconcile. Typical of the anomalies was the minor question of the choice of language for instruction. All of the new faculty had grown to adulthood in Europe and spoke badly broken English, but they elected to lecture in English rather than German or Hebrew (as Professor Alexander Marx once soberly confided to the present writer) on the grounds that students must be shown proper models of English speech. All had been bred to Orthodoxy; Mrs. Marx (but she alone of the Seminary matrons) wore the sheitel. But it was inevitable that the public it was intended to serve should regard “Schechter's Seminary” (the expression still carries opprobrium in certain quarters) as a high road to assimilation. Needless to say, these difficulties were soon transcended. Mere passage of time ensured that both students and faculty should be fluent in English, and accents of foreign scholars who joined the faculty proved no more troublesome than they are in secular institutions. More important, rapidly increasing segments of the public came to recognize the Seminary as a valid organ of Judaism. Massive immigration favored a position that could be called Conservative—not so sharp a break with ritual and observance as in Reform, and yet not an untouched replica of what had been left behind. But mechanical compromise and the sheer increment of numbers and wealth are not sufficient to explain the positive viewpoints inculcated by the Seminary—the viewpoint of which Ginzberg was a prime protagonist.

Among the divergences of objectives mentioned above, one of the most difficult was the need to combine functions actually disparate: that of a humanistic graduate faculty training specialists in Semitics, and that of a professional school training practitioners of the pastoral calling. The problem is one which modern seminaries have had to face; usually the training of scholars has yielded primacy to the training of spiritual guides. For a generation, reputable Protestant seminaries have been willing to confer degrees in divinity upon men who could read neither of the languages in which their basic texts were written. At the Jewish Theological Seminary the need for expanding the curriculum was the more urgent, for the entering students, as a rule, had already acquired basic competence in rabbinics but knew little of communicating to their intelligent congregants anything beyond so much textual scholarship as they were ready to receive. The curriculum was indeed amply and powerfully enlarged, with the result that Seminary graduates are easily the peers of ministers wherever trained. But at the Seminary there has never been any question that other subjects are ancillary to the central objective, which has always been high competence in the classical texts.

Because the issue may still have been unresolved in the early days of the Seminary, exaltation of bookish learning may seem to have been carried to extremes. Not only was the student's standing, official and unofficial, determined solely by scholarly competence, but the world at large was judged by a similar criterion. Ginzberg was quite explicit. Princely benefactors like Jacob Schiff and wise counselors like Louis Marshall, even Schechter's successor Cyrus Adler and Judah Magnes who pioneered the Hebrew University, were dismissed as inadequate by the scholarly gauge. Israel Friedlander, who lost his life on a mission of mercy to the Ukraine, was criticized as too activist. When the authorities of Temple Emanu-El were on the point of relegating Rabbi H. G. Enelow to early retirement on the grounds of shortcomings in personality, the Seminary faculty persuaded them to reconsider on the grounds that Enelow was a good scholar. “What point is there,” Professor Eli Ginzberg quotes his father as saying, “to revise Jewish theology for pants-makers?” To which the response might be made that textual scholars are not necessarily intelligent theologians and that a pants-maker, even a lensgrinder, may have thoughts on the subject worth considering.

But insistence on the dominance of scholarship is after all the right, perhaps the only, way to insure the continuity of historical Judaism. Over the millennia theologies and liturgies, like other modes of spiritual affirmation, have been edifying expressions of Judaism but not interchangeable with it. The canon of classics has constituted the essential, in the language of the philosophers, and applications and extrapolations the ephemeral accidents. To preserve and emphasize the permanent is conservatism in a true sense, not a passive compromise between extremes but an active determination to foster the essential, which itself delimits the degree of latitudinarianism of which it is capable. The bulwark of conservatism in this sense is the Jewish Theological Seminary, now grown great and assured. Faculty, student body, range of activity have expanded, teachers and cantors are trained in separate institutes, and modern Hebrew literature and institutions are dealt with. But the focus remains upon the ancient texts. By example and precept Louis Ginzberg contributed significantly to crystallizing the conception of historical Judaism, giving it currency, making it the informing principle of the Seminary and through the Seminary the prevailing attitude in what is probably the most active segment of American Jewry. “Keeper of the Law” is an apt designation.