17 - Joseph H. Hertz, ‘Through Darkness and Death unto Light’, 1 January 1916, London

Summary

BORN in Slovakia in 1872, Hertz emigrated with his family to the United States when he was 12 years old. He received a BA from the College of the City of New York and in 1894 became the first graduate from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he studied with Sabato Morais, Alexander Kohut, Marcus Jastrow, and Benjamin Szold. In his graduation address of 14 June 1894 he cited Goethe, Coleridge, and Garibaldi. His first congregation was in Syracuse, New York. After two years here he accepted the offer of a rabbinical position in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he remained—except for a twoyear period of deportation during the Boer War (about which he expressed strong reservations)—until 1911. During this time he was vice-president of the South African Zionist Federation, and in 1904 he attended the Fourth Zionist Congress in London. In January 1912 he was installed as rabbi of Orach Chayyim Congregation in New York, and less than fourteen months later he cabled his acceptance of the position of British chief rabbi, succeeding Hermann Adler.

Today Hertz is best known for his editions, with learned commentaries, of foundational works of Jewish religious practice: The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (Oxford University Press, 1929) and the Authorised Daily Prayer Book (published posthumously in 1948). In addition, his Book of Jewish Thoughts was extremely popular. During his lifetime, however, he was known as a forceful and eloquent speaker from both pulpit and public platform, with a fine homiletical sense. He published three volumes of his Sermons, Essays and Studies in 1938, and another volume, Early and Late, in 1943. These volumes contain abundant evidence of his speaking in response to many events of cere - monial and historical—and, in most cases, tragic—significance, spanning two world wars and the persecution of Jews in eastern Europe both in the wake of the first war and under Nazism.

In his installation sermon as chief rabbi, delivered on 14 April 1913, Hertz said:

Ours is an age of doubt and disillusionment. Times are out of joint. Theological foundations are rocking. Dreams of humanity, that but yesterday seemed within grasp of realization, are dissolving into thin air in face of the malicious race-hatred that is being fanatically preached, and the purposeless human slaughter cynically practised, in the opening decades of the twentieth century.