8 - David Einhorn, Two Civil War Sermons

Summary

DAVID EINHORN, one of the most influential spokesmen in American Reform Judaism during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, emigrated to the United States in 1855 in the wake of a controversial career in central Europe. Born in Dispeck, Bavaria, in 1808 or 1809, he studied philosophy at the universities of Würzburg and Munich following his rabbinical ordination in Fürth. He played an important role in the German rabbinical conferences of the 1840s on questions relating to reform in Judaism. While opposing some of the more radical reforming tendencies, he championed such innovations as a vernacular liturgy and eliminating prayers for the restoration of the Jewish state and the Temple. The liberal positions he adopted led to friction with state authorities, and following the Austrian government's closure of the Pest synagogue where he served, Einhorn left Europe to accept a position at the Har Sinai Congregation of Baltimore. Soon after his arrival he launched a Germanlanguage monthly magazine called Sinai, and in 1858 he published a new prayer book, Olat tamid, which contained the most radical innovations of any published in America.

In a sermon delivered on 4 January 1861, a day of national fast and humiliation proclaimed by President Buchanan, Morris J. Raphall of New York addressed ‘The Bible View of Slavery’, challenging Christian preachers who condemned slaveholding as a sin, asserting that the biblical ‘doom of Ham's descendants, the African race’, remained ‘in full force to this day’, and insisting that slavery is never condemned as sinful in sacred Scripture. The text of the sermon was published in the New York Herald, and subsequently circulated widely in pro-slavery circles. Einhorn wrote a fierce rebuttal in a series of articles published in German in Sinai. He excoriated Raphall's position with savage sarcasm: ‘is Slavery a moral evil or not? It took Dr. Raphall, a Jewish preacher, to concoct the deplorable farce in the name of divine authority, to proclaim the justification, the moral blamelessness of servitude, and to lay down the law to the Christian preachers of opposite convictions.’