The Secular and the “Torah-true”
The Nineteen Letters on Judaism.
by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Prepared by Jacob Breuer in a new edition based on the translation by Rabbi Dr. Bernard Drachman.
Philipp Feldheim. 144 pp. $2.50.

Ever since its promulgation in Mishnaic times, the doctrine Torah im derech eretz has meant what it said: a linking of Torah with the contemporary surrounding civilization. It mattered little whether thick ghetto walls limited such contact to mere passive cultural coexistence or whether—more often than generally imagined—a conscious, active cross-fertilization occurred. Regardless of circumstance, the Diaspora formula for Jewish existence remained the same: Torah with derech eretz, tradition plus secular culture. But the new age of the beginning 19th century, which wrought havoc with almost every aspect of Western life, changed the meaning of the classic formula as well. As the erstwhile Judengasse-dweller strode furiously into the wide open spaces of a whole world’s opportunity, he demanded, if he remained in the Jewish fold at all, that the ancient Law now fit his life, that Torah, out of step and out of fashion, conform to his tastes, thoughts, and ways. Judaism needed adjustment, needed reform—and not long thereafter, Leopold Zunz, Abraham Geiger, Samuel Holdheim, their disciples and followers, responded to the demand.

Had these men and their movement unbalanced the formula, had they made Torah subservient to the Zeitgeist? Those who called themselves “Torah-true” thought so. The sacred had been tampered with, the law of God relegated to a secondary place. This, said the defenders of the faith, must not be—and neo-Orthodoxy was born. Their leader, Samson Raphael Hirsch, delivered the counter-blow: Torah im derech eretz, indeed; but, contrariwise, it was not the Law that needed to fit life, but life the Law; regardless of time, place, circumstance, the Torah was sovereign to any civilization of man. The reformers had impudently put derech eretz above Torah; Hirsch declared: Torah above derech eretz.

Hirsch carried out his theory in practice—if not in theory. In his own daily life, he unflinchingly adhered to all the traditional commandments, observed the Law piously, and growing older, militantly. He left his prestige position as the Chief Rabbi of Moravia to go to Frankfort to head an independent congregation that was then no larger than a minyan, and not a part of the formally organized community; it was Hirsch’s belief that Orthodoxy needed to be practiced independently, unsullied by communal heresies. Rightfully, he is considered the father of modern Orthodoxy. Yet his ideological underpinnings do not square with his avowal of Torah above secular culture; they are for the most part 19th-century European, and not unlike the very premises of Reform which he so vehemently attacked.

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Bearing witness to this strange phenomenon are the Nineteen Letters on Judaism, which Hirsch wrote in 1838 at the age of twenty-eight and which remains his most renowned book. They are addressed to Benjamin, an imaginary typical young intellectual of the day, to whom Judaism had lost relevancy. Toward Benjamin’s return (and that of the legion of Benjamins), Hirsch composed a fiery apologia for Orthodoxy, calling for use of “the general sciences as auxiliary studies for the understanding of Torah.” Re-reading the Letters (in this new edition and more polished translation), one is struck by the way in which this valiant defender of the faith, without being quite aware of it, speaks the words of his opponents—even, at times, going farther in their own direction. Judaism, in Hirsch’s definition, emerges as largely a dogmatic religion with major emphasis on tenets of belief and sets of observances. The national factor is only vaguely dealt with, limited in effect to a designation of Israel as a Religions-nation. Israel occupied a territory and constituted a state, but these, in Hirsch’s view, were means only for the people’s “spiritual calling.” Hirsch advocated the Jewish religious mission as strongly as any of his universalistic Reform confrères; he conceived that mission to be largely an individual task, and hailed the Emancipation as a new ground for it. (Sensing his affinity to Reform, Abraham Geiger, the intellectual leader of the movement, in two comprehensive reviews in the Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für judische Theologie, called Hirsch “sublime and noble,” his interpretation of Judaism “lofty.” And the late Kaufmann Kohler, when he was president of the Hebrew Union College, described Hirsch as the man responsible for his own liberation from “the thralldom of the blind” and his transformation into “a modern man.”)

But Hirsch’s use of contemporary German philosophical methodology may be regarded as more significant even than his unconscious espousal of reform emphases. He puts great stress on understanding Judaism from within (“aus sich selbst heraus”) and finds fault with Maimonides and Mendelssohn for incorporating foreign elements into the ancient faith. No outside criteria, no devoutly constructed hypotheses may be applied to Judaism. Judaism must be organically comprehended. Yet this, precisely, is what Hirsch did not do. The distinction between investigating Judaism from without and from within points to Hegel’s plea to consider phenomena not alone as they appear to us (“für uns”), but as we feel them in their inner meaning (“für sich”). When Hirsch proposes to extract this inner, basic Jewish spirit from Bible and Talmud, he follows Herder, to whom the literature of a people reveals its most fundamental characteristics. The Hirsch approach resembles most, perhaps, that of the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, a group of young intellectuals in the Berlin of 1819 who were banded together to rehabilitate Judaism, to trace systematically the individual parts to “the basic principle of the whole,” and to treat the subject in accordance “with its reasonableness.” Hirsch argued similarly in his Letters : that Judaism’s ways are many-faceted, but if correctly understood are but parts of one harmonious system, of the All-One. Moreover, “there must be sense in all the commandments”—they must be reasonable to be worthy of observance. Hardly the old-time religion, which considered the observance of the Law a natural phenomenon, a matter of course, without seeking to rationalize it. Hardly a Judaism pure of foreign influences: among members of the Verein were Zunz—founder of the “Science of Judaism”—and Edward Gans and Heinrich Heine—both later converted to Christianity.¹

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I suggest it is precisely the Westernization, the universalized aspirations, the genteel norms and urbane manners of the Nineteen Letters on Judaism, which explains the extent of the little book’s significance, and especially its profound initial impact. With the coming of Emancipation, to many a young man of intellect and scholarly bent Judaism and modern thought appeared incompatible. Judaism was understood to mean a good dose of Talmudic ideas mixed with the social ingredients of the ghetto. Graetz was among those repelled, disenchanted—until Hirsch’s treatise came his way. Suddenly, what had been painfully lacking became to Graetz abundantly clear; he discovered “an idea of Judaism never heard nor anticipated before”; Hirsch became his idol, the Ezra of his “spiritual Galut”; he went so far as to live with his master for two years. What startled Graetz and so many of his contemporaries was that a full-scale defense of traditional Judaism had been undertaken in meticulous, solemn German by one whose education, professional life, and political outlook were likewise German. Here obviously was a man of classical and modern education, versed in contemporary science, acquainted with the thought of the leading minds of his day; this man and his book gave the lie to those who equated Orthodox Judaism with superstition and the older generation. In that generation, or in any previous one, Hirsch’s enthusiastic affirmation of European culture would have caused his excommunication, but to the German Jew of the 19th century it represented the beginning of an epoch. Orthodoxy now had arrived, it had become respectable.

For this same reason, the Letters remain popular, as do all of Hirsch’s works. Here in America, in England, and in Israel, translations and new editions of his vast literary output have appeared with increasing frequency. Orthodoxy still feels the need to be modern, still wants to be part. If Hirsch once before, as Jacob Breuer points out in the Introduction, solved “the unbearable tension between the Torah and the new era,” in the space age now, his writings may again achieve the same.

Will they? The warm glow of enthusiasm, the honest convictions, the dogged courage of one man seeking almost single-handed to stem the flight from traditional Judaism still ring true. But is that enough? When pressed for exposition, Hirsch responds with exhortation. How is revelation to be regarded, one would want to know: historic fact of the one time and the one place or a theological concept that constitutes a continuous, on-going process, or both? Hirsch does not say; he affirms, but does not discuss; nor does he engage in serious exposition of other major problems of Jewish theology: God, covenant, prayer, destiny. Without such exposition, it is doubtful that many modern Benjamins can be won over.

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It need not be assumed that Orthodoxy, because it is Orthodoxy, must be unable to arrive at precise theological formulations. The doctrine Torah above derech eretz can be clearly etched and developed to its logical limit. Isaac Breuer, Hirsch’s grandson and most illustrious disciple, did this when he assigned a “meta-historical” role to the Jewish people, who alone are able to cope with the dark groping and infinite tragedy of mankind. The Jews, according to Breuer’s thinking, through the covenant at Sinai, were raised above the ebb and flow of human history and entrusted with the Torah, the one and genuine scheme of the Kingdom of God. But only those Jews who obey absolutely the rules of the divinely fashioned community are truly Jews. All others (even the Orthodox who associate with a Gemeinde that includes non-Orthodox) are “traitors [to the] nation of God.” Inevitably, perhaps, such doctrine would freeze and crystallize Judaism—as the Agudat Yisrael, its organizational offspring, undoubtedly attempted to do. But the virtue here was the virtue of perspicuity—a quality with which theologians have always had their particular difficulty.

While the Letters will not provide a philosophic base for an Orthodox Weltanschauung, they will by their fervor continue to appeal to those already possessing religiosity. They will scarcely add souls to the roster of traditional Judaism, but they will, for the Orthodox Jew who subconsciously feels himself alienated from his environment, provide a 122-year-old reason for maintaining that secular thought is not out of bounds. Perhaps, finally, a modern re-reading of the Hirsch classic may lead to the very opposite of what the author intended: the notion that Torah and derech eretz remain suspended in a constant tension; that in this interplay, subtle yet dynamic, varying in time and space yet consistent in essence, lies incarnate the secret of Jewish existence.

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¹ For a full documentation of the influence of Western critical thought upon Hirsch, see the recent revealing article by Noah H. Rosenbloom, in which the Letters are labeled flatly a “Hegelian exposition” (Historia Judaica, April 1960).