No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
“A Higher and Purer Shape”: Kaufmann Kohler's Jewish Orientalism and the Construction of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2019
Abstract
This article uses the case of Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926), an intellectual and institutional leader of American Reform Judaism, to explore the relationship between Orientalism and the category of religion in nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has shown that the lived religion of nineteenth-century American Jews departs significantly from the ideological hopes of Jewish elites. Connecting the emerging portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish laity with elite arguments for American Judaism, I reconsider Kohler's thought as a theological project out of step with his socioreligious milieu. Kohler is renowned for his theorizing of Judaism as a universal, ethical religion. As scholars have demonstrated repeatedly, defining Judaism as a “religion” was an important feature of Reform thought. What these accounts have insufficiently theorized, however, is the political context that ties the categorization of religion to the history of Orientalism that organized so many late nineteenth-century discussions of religion, Jewish and not. Drawing on work by Tracy Fessenden, John Modern, and Tisa Wenger, I show that Kohler's universal, cosmopolitan religion is a Jewish version of the Protestant secular. Like these Protestant modernists, Kohler defines Reform Judaism as a religion that supersedes an atavistic tribalism bound to materiality and ritual law. Being Jewish, for Kohler, means being civilized; reforming the soul of Judaism goes together with civilizing Jewish bodies and creating a Judaism that could civilize the world in an era in which religion and imperialism were overlapping interpretive projects with racial and gendered entanglements.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2019 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
1 Kohler, Kaufmann, Jew and Gentile (New York: Press of Stettiner, Lambert, 1888), 7Google Scholar.
2 Hutchison, William, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, 2d ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kohler, Kaufmann, “Das Prinzipien und Ziele der Reform-Judenthums,” in Studies, Addresses, and Personal Papers (New York: Bloch, 1931), 520Google Scholar. Translations are all my own unless otherwise noted. For a contemporaneous summary of the sermon, see “Israel's New Departure,” New York Times, September 7, 1879, 8.
3 On views of Christianity in modern Judaism, see Berlin, George, Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writing on Jesus and Christianity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Heschel, Susannah, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Hoffman, Matthew, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Robert Erlewine has recently highlighted the antagonistic view of Christianity in much of modern German-Jewish thought, connecting this theological polemic to the political situation of Jews in Germany; see Erlewine, Robert, Judaism and the West: From Hermann Cohen to Joseph Soloveitchik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
4 Diner, Hasia, The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 71–111Google Scholar. On the relationship between immigration and anxieties about American Jews’ status as civilized, see Imhoff, Sarah, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the prehistory of the idea that religious ideology should be responsive, even subordinate, to material concerns, see Stern, Eliyahu, Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
5 Rabin, Shari, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Polland, Annie and Soyer, Daniel, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 45–102Google Scholar.
7 Already, when Peter Wiernik published his History of the Jews in America in 1912, the notion of a German period running roughly from 1820–1870 was conventional (History of the Jews in America: From the Period of the Discovery of the New World to the Present Time [New York: Jewish Press Publishing Company, 1912], 136). Indeed, Kohler himself seems to treat the notion of a “German period” as conventional in his 1888 discussion of “The Three Elements of American Judaism,” Menorah Monthly 5 (1888): 314–22. In his Adventure in Freedom (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1954), Oscar Handlin went so far as to say that American Jews were “uniformly considered Germans,” though he acknowledged that this construction elided considerable internal diversity among Jewish immigrants (75) and routinely added scare quotes around the word “German” (e.g., 75, 105, 122, 136, 142). He nonetheless described the period from the 1820s to the 1870s as one of German hegemony, which was subsequently challenged by Eastern European immigration in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He persisted in characterizing the religiosity of the period century as defined by German-imported clergy “because German culture and learning then commanded the respect of all Americans, whether Jews or not” (78). In his programmatic 1958 text, “The Periodization of American Jewish History,” Proceedings of the American Jewish Historical Society, 47, no. 3 (March 1958), Jacob Radar Marcus connected immigration patterns with the purported adoption of Germanized reform religious practice in defining the German period running, in his view, from Isaac Leeser's call for a unified, national American Jewish organization in 1841 to the founding of the American Jewish Congress in 1920. Jick, Leon, Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870 (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press by the University Press of New England, 1976)Google Scholar, argues that Reform stems from adaptation to American conditions rather than “a transplantation” (x) of German thought. More recently, Hasia Diner has shown that divisions of American Jewish history into a “German” period, where relatively prosperous immigrants acculturated easily and practiced religion rationally, and an “Eastern European” period, where impoverished masses perpetuated an old-world culture defined by ethnonational attachment, owes more to nativist panic of the fin de siècle than the historical record per se. Only in response to racialized anxieties about mass migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did the myth of an earlier, more readily assimilable wave of migrants come into being (The Jews of the United States, 79–83). Shari Rabin's revisionist account of American Jewish lived religion in the nineteenth century shows that elites such as Kohler, who were active in circulating the discourse of respectable Americanized religion juxtaposed with a deviant, tribal Eastern European immigrant community, were the exception to the rule of religious fluidity and improvisation, especially outside of New York City. Her focus on mobility within the United States as the decisive condition of nineteenth-century American Judaism complements and complicates studies of the transnational character of American Judaism. For recent studies of German-Jewish immigration to America that accounts for its complexities, see Diner, Hasia, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Feingold, Henry L., “German Jews and the American-Jewish Synthesis,” in German-Jewish Identities in America, ed. Mauch, Christof and Salmons, Joseph (Madison, WI: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 2003), 8–20Google Scholar; and Brinkmann, Tobias, Migration und Transnationalität: Perspektiven deutsch-jüdischer Geschichte (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), 13–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although I focus here on the German, acculturationist forces within nineteenth-century American Judaism, I do so not to resuscitate that dubious periodization but, rather, to examine it anew as an idiosyncratic, elite preoccupation that helps us understand the tenuous religious and racial positioning of Jews in American life. In that sense, I am not in tension with Rabin's justified caution against reading American Judaism as Protestant mimicry because my argument presumes that figures such as Kohler are theologically and sociologically idiosyncratic relative to the communities they claim to represent.
8 Brinkmann, Migration und Transnationalität, 50.
9 On lived religions, see, e.g., Orsi, Robert, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Orsi, Robert, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Towards a History of Practice, ed. Hall, David G. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
10 See Emily Ruth Mace, “Cosmopolitan Communions: Practices of Religious Liberalism in America, 1875–1930” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010), quote on 23.
11 Fessenden, Tracy, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Modern, John Lardas, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a summary of the historiography of the Protestant secular concept in American religious history, see McCrary, Charles and Wheatley, Jeffrey, “The Protestant Secular in the Study of American Religion: Reappraisal and Suggestions,” Religion 47, no. 2 (2017): 256–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 For an overview of theological supersessionism, see Soulen, R. Kendall, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1996)Google Scholar. On the relationship between supersessionism and race, see Carter, J. Kameron, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Librett, Jeffrey, Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the German context from which Kohler emerges, Susannah Heschel refers to supersessionism as “theological colonialism” and traces its relationship to the late-nineteenth-century German imperial project in “Theology as a Vision for Colonialism: From Supersessionism to Dejudaization in German Protestantism,” in Germany's Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 148–63.
13 See, for example, Wenger, Tisa, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Ghost Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On secularism in relation to Orientalism, religion, and race, see Anidjar, Gil, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (August 2006): 52–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Kohler, Kaufmann, “Personal Reminiscences of My Early Life,” in Studies, Addresses, and Personal Papers (New York: Bloch, 1931), 469Google Scholar (first published in the fall of 1918 in The American Hebrew). The most comprehensive scholarly treatment of Kohler's life as a whole can be found in Meyer, Michael, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 264–95Google Scholar.
15 Lowenstein, Steven, “The Pace of Modernization of German Jewry in the Nineteenth Century,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 21 (1976): 41–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Kohler, “Personal Reminiscences,” 469.
17 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 105.
18 Bielefeldt, Katrin, Geschichte der Juden in Fürth: Jahrhundertelang eine Heimat (Nürnberg: Sandberg Verlag, 2005)Google Scholar.
19 See Silber, Michael, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Wertheimer, Jack (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 23–84Google Scholar.
20 Max J. Kohler, “Biographical Sketch of Dr. K. Kohler,” in Studies in Jewish Literature Issued in Honor of Professor Kaufmann Kohler, PhD, President Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio, on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. David Philipson, David Neumark, and Julian Morgenstern (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1913), 2.
21 Kohler, “Personal Reminiscences,” 475.
22 Cited in Jacob Haberman, “Kaufmann Kohler and his Teacher Samson Raphael Hirsch,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 43 (1998): 75. The Yiddishized term “yeshiva bochur” literally refers to a young, male student (bachar) at a traditional Jewish institution of learning (yeshiva), but, during the nineteenth century, it became a pejorative term in the German-Jewish vernacular, implying orthodoxy and backwardness, medievalness, and Polishness. See Jeffrey Blutinger, “Writing for the Masses: Heinrich Graetz, the Popularization of Jewish History, and the Reception of National Judaism” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2003), 166 and 201.
23 Cited in Haberman, “Kaufmann Kohler and his Teacher,” 75; Kohler, “Personal Reminiscences,” 475.
24 Cited in Max Kohler, “Biographical Sketch,” 3.
25 Kohler, “Personal Reminiscences,” 478.
26 Kohler, “Personal Reminiscences,” 4; Kohler, Kaufmann, Der Segen Jacobs, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der alten Versionen und das Midrasch kritisch-historisch untersucht und erklärt: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der hebräischen Altertums wie zur Geschichte der Exegese (Berlin: Verlag von Julius Benzian, 1867)Google Scholar.
27 The literature on the Wissenschaft des Judentums is vast; in addition to the studies cited below, see von der Krone, Kerstin and Thulin, Mirjam, “Wissenschaft in Context: A Research Essay on the Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 58 (2013): 249–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 On Zunz, see Bitzan, Amos, “Leopold Zunz and the Meanings of Wissenschaft,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78, no. 2 (April 2017): 233–54CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. A full translation of “On Rabbinic Literature” may be found in the appendix to Elizabeth Eva Johnston, “Reading Science in Early Writings of Leopold Zunz and Rifā`a Rāfi` al-Tahtāwī: On Beginnings of the ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums’ and the ‘Nahda’” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013). For a translation of Wolf's essay, see Wolf, Immanuel, “On the Concept of a Science of Judaism (1822),” trans. Kochan, Lionel, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 2 (1957): 194–204Google Scholar.
29 Schorsch, Ismar, “The Ethos of Modern Jewish Scholarship,” in From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1994), 158–76Google Scholar; and Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 1–22. To be sure, the Wissenschaft des Judentums was an elite project and is not necessarily representative of “German Jewry” writ large. For a nuanced reception history, see Roemer, Nils, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
30 Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; and Heschel, Susannah, “Jewish Studies as Counter-History,” in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. Biale, David, Galchinsky, Michael, and Heschel, Susannah (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998), 101–5Google Scholar.
31 On the image of Jews as Oriental, see Rohde, Achim, “Der Innere Orient. Orientalismus, Antisemitismus, und Geschlecht im Deutschland des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” Der Welt Islam 45, no. 3 (2005): 370–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Librett, Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew.
32 Marchand, Suzanne, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 105Google Scholar. On the relationship of late-eighteenth-century Old Testament scholarship to Orientalism, see Legaspi, Michael, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hess, Jonathan, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 56–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 On the relationship of biblical scholarship to Orientalism and anti-Judaism, see Kelley, Shawn, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (New York: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar; JPasto, ames, “Islam's ‘Strange Secret Sharer’: Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 40, no. 3 (July 1998): 437–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gerdmar, Anders, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semmler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Cited in Pasto, “Islam's ‘Strange Secret Sharer,’” 446.
35 Cited in Smith, Helmut Walser, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Consider also the proposition of Johann Gottlieb Fichte: “I would see no other way to give the Jews civil rights than to cut off their heads in one night and put others on them in which there would not be a single Jewish idea.” Cited in Hess, Jonathan, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 141Google Scholar. Of course, figures of Judaism as dead have a long history in Christian, and especially Protestant, theology. See Newman, Amy, “The Death of Judaism in German Thought from Luther to Hegel,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 455–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 In addition to the resources cited in note 31, see Moxnes, Halvor, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth Century Historical Jesus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012)Google Scholar; and Diana M. Segroves, “Racializing Jewish Difference: Wilhelm Bousset, the History of Religion(s), and the Discourse of Christian Origins” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2012).
37 Harnack, Adolf von, What is Christianity? trans. Saunders, Thomas Bailey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1986 [1900]), 56Google Scholar; Kohler, “Christian Scholars of Jewish Literature,” in Studies, Addresses, and Personal Papers, 417.
38 On Jews and Islamic Studies, see Heschel, Susannah, “German-Jewish Scholarship on Islam as a Tool for De-Orientalizing Judaism,” New German Critique 39, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 91–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 See Aschheim, Steven, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in the German and German-Jewish Consciousness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999 [1982])Google Scholar.
40 Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 106–8.
41 On German social anti-Semitism, see Volkov, Shulamit, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (January 1978): 25–46Google Scholar. For an exemplary account of the complexities of writing oneself in a language not of one's choosing, see Derrida, Jacques, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origins, trans. Mensah, Patrick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
42 Marchand, German Orientalism, 117.
43 Kohler, Der Segen Jacobs, viii.
44 “At 82 Still a Liberal,” New York Times, May 11, 1925, 17. The continuity in Kohler's thought is marked by his declaration (cited in the same article) that “the chief problem in the world as I see it is unity. We must become reunited. Humanity must get together.” Kohler's radical biblical criticism was not without critics in America. See Kohler, “A Word to my Critics,” Jewish Messenger, February 18, 1881, 6.
45 Kohler, “Personal Reminiscences,” 479.
46 Kaufmann Kohler, “Die Bible und Die Todesstrafe,” in Studies, Addresses, and Personal Papers [1868], 149.
47 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 270–76.
48 See Brinkmann, Tobias, Sundays at Sinai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the relationship of Ethical Culture to Reform Judaism, see Magid, Shaul, American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Post-Ethnic Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 35–56Google Scholar; and Imhoff, Sarah, “‘My Sons Have Defeated Me’: Walter Lippmann, Felix Adler, and Secular Moral Authority,” Journal of Religion 92, no. 4 (October 2012): 536–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Eleff, Zev, Who Rules the Synagogue? Religious Authority and the Formation of American Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 174, 196CrossRefGoogle Scholar (quotation).
50 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 270. On Kohler's Jewish Theology, see Imhoff, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism, 35–61.
51 Schwartz, Shuly Rubin, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The Publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 Kohler, “Palestinian or American Judaism?” in Studies, Addresses, and Personal Papers, 232; Kohler, Kaufmann, “American Judaism,” Hebrew Union College and Other Addresses (Cincinnati: Ark Publishing, 1916), 210Google Scholar.
53 In terms of his scholarship, see, e.g., Kohler, Kaufmann, “Dositheus, the Samaritan Heresiarch, and His Relations to Jewish and Christian Doctrines and Sects (A Study of Professor Schechter's Recent Publication),” American Journal of Theology 15, no. 3 (July 1911): 404–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kohler, Kaufmann, “Review: The Religion and Worship of the Synagogue from a Christian Point of View,” American Journal of Theology 13, no. 3 (July 1909): 439–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kohler's Jewish Theology was, in fact, reviewed twice in the journal, once, in 1911, when it was published in German, and again, in 1919, when the English edition was published See Brown, William Adams, “Review: The Theology of Reformed Judaism,” American Journal of Theology 15, no. 1 (January 1911): 128–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bloch, Joshua, “Review: Jewish Theology,” American Journal of Theology 23, no. 2 (April 1919): 235–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the American Oriental Society, see “Proceedings of the Midwestern Branch of the American Oriental Society, 1918,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 38 (1918): 70–75.
54 Moore, George F., “Review: Studies in Jewish Literature Issued in Honor of Professor Kaufmann Kohler,” Harvard Theological Review 8, no. 2 (April 1915): 257CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 An outline of the dispute can be found in LaGrone, Matthew, “Disagreement and Denominationalism: The Kohut-Kohler Dispute of 1885,” Conservative Judaism 64, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 71–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an overview of the press coverage, see Eleff, Who Rules the Synagogue, 190–98.
56 See the citation from those minutes in Bush, Olga, “The Architecture of Jewish Identity: The Neo-Islamic Central Synagogue of New York,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, no. 2 (June 2004), 183Google Scholar.
57 “Orthodoxy and Reform: The Controversies Between Rabbis Kohut and Kohler,” New York Times, June 28, 1885, 2.
58 “The Choice of ‘Ahavath Chesed,’” American Hebrew, February 20, 1885, 18.
59 Kohut, Adolph, “Alexander Kohut. Ein Characterbild,” in Semitic Studies in Memory of Rev. Dr. Alexander Kohut, ed. Kohut, George Alexander (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1897), xxGoogle Scholar. On Kohut's life, see Lupovitch, Howard, “Navigating Rough Waters: Alexander Kohut and the Hungarian Roots of Conservative Judaism,” AJS Review 32, no. 1 (2008): 49–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Kohut, Alexander, Ueber die jüdische Angelologie und Dämonologie in ihrer Abhängigkeit vom Parsismus (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1866)Google Scholar. See also Kohut, Alexander, “Les fêtes persanes et babylonienne mentionnées dans les Talmuds de Babylone et de Jérusalem,” Revue des études juives 24 (1892): 256–71Google Scholar; , Kohut, “Was hat die talmudische Eschatologie aus dem Parsismus aufgenommen,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 21 (1867): 522–91Google Scholar. For a historical overview of the study of the Iranian setting of the Babylonian Talmud, see Secunda, Shai, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Sassanian Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 10–14Google Scholar.
61 “The Completion of a Lifework: Dr. Kohut's Aruch Completum,” The American Hebrew, December 4, 1891, 100; “Dr. Kohut's Work,” The Sun, January 31, 1889, 4; Felsenthal, Bernard, “Review: Kohut's Arukh Completum,” Hebraica 9, no. 1/2 (October 1892–January 1893), 125–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sokoloff, Michael, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 15Google Scholar (this latter dictionary being even a scholarly step above the dictionary of Marcus Jastrow—also produced in the late nineteenth-century—used by beginning students of Talmud).
62 See Ismar Schorsch, “Zacharias Frankel and the European Roots of Conservative Judaism,” in From Text to Context, 255–65.
63 See Stanley Nadell, “Jewish Race and German Soul in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Jewish History 77, no. 1 (September 1987): 6–26.
64 Nathan Kaganoff, “The Traditional Jewish Sermon in the United States from its Beginnings to the First World War” (PhD diss., American University, 1961), 91–92. According to Robert Friedenberg, as late as 1872, only three rabbis in New York City preached in English. See Friedenberg, Robert V., “Hear, O Israel”: The History of American Jewish Preaching, 1654–1970 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 42Google Scholar.
65 Friedenberg, “Hear, O Israel”, 149n9.
66 Saim, Mirela, “The Modern Renewal of Jewish Homiletics and the Occurrence of Interfaith Preaching,” in A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Ellison, Robert (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 472Google Scholar (quote). On Leeser, see Friedenberg, “Hear, O Israel,” 24–38.
67 On the “edification sermon (Erbauungspredigt)” as a secularized Protestant institution in German-Jewish context, see Sorkin, David, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 82–83Google Scholar. Sorkin points out that even the term Erbauung is derived from Luther's translation of the New Testament, from 1 Thessalonians 5:11: “Therefore exhort each other [ermahnt euch untereinander] and build each other up [einer erbaue den anderen].” For a fascinating discussion of how Protestant discourses of edification are secularized in the aesthetics of the German Enlightenment, see Mücke, Dorothea von, The Practices of Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 63–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the broader history of Jewish preaching, see the sources in Langer, Ruth, Jewish Liturgy: A Guide for Research (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 130–33Google Scholar.
68 Kohut, Alexander, Ethics of the Fathers, trans. Cohen, Max (New York: Philip Cowen, 1885)Google Scholar; quote from Pirkei Avot found on 7; quotations from Kohut at 8, 11; the final quotation (12) comes directly from Leopold Zunz himself, further showing Kohut's modernist intellectual sensibilities. See Zunz, Leopold, Gutachten über die Beschneidung (Frankfurt am Main: J. F. Bach, 1844), 12Google Scholar.
69 Handlin, Adventure in Freedom, 114.
70 Jick points out (Americanization of the Synagogue, 175) that 1854 marked the high point of immigration from Central Europe so that, by the 1870s, most American Jews had been in the country for nearly two decades. On Jewish neighborhoods, see Soyer and Polland, An Emerging Metropolis, 73-102. They also note (30) that Beth-El was, in fact, the first “uptown” congregation, founded in 1852 on Thirty-Third Street to cater to German-Jewish immigrants who had moved north of Kleindeutschland.
71 Soyer and Polland, An Emerging Metropolis, 89. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 150; Sarna, Jonathan, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 196Google Scholar; Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 94; Brodkin, Karen, How the Jews Became White Folks (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 108Google Scholar.
72 See Moskoff, William Velvel and Gayle, Carol, “‘Our Temples Are Deserted’: The Jewish Sabbath Observance Movement in New York, 1879–1930,” Shofar 36, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 29–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
73 Soyer and Polland, An Emerging Metropolis, 73–102. Kohut's synagogue, Ahavat Chesed (constructed 1870 on 55th Street and Lexington Avenue), was built in this style, and Kohler's Temple Beth-El (on 56th Street and 5th Avenue) would be remodeled in 1891 in a Moorish-influenced style. On the search for a style that would differentiate Reform from immigrant synagogues, see Gruber, Samuel, “Arnold W. Brunner and the New Classical Synagogue in America,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 69–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar (note the picture of Temple Beth-El on 77). On the construction and style of Ahavat Chesed, see Olga Bush, “The Architecture of Jewish Identity,” 180–201. On Moorish style in a Jewish context more generally, see Kalmar, Ivan Davidson, “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architecture,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2001): 68–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
74 On the spectacle of “Oriental” Jewish immigrants for both Jewish and non-Jewish commentators, see Imhoff, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism, 97–127.
75 Soyer and Polland, An Emerging Metropolis, 59.
76 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 171–99Google Scholar; Hart, Mitchell, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
77 Kohler, “American Judaism,” 199–200.
78 It is worth bearing in mind here that the entire division between “Eastern” and “Western” Europe is a legacy of (inner-)European Orientalism, which was especially fraught in the case of Germany, given its Eastern border with Poland. See Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
79 The titles of the sermons (all of which are reprinted in Kohler, Studies, Addresses, and Personal Papers) show the starkly binary character of Kohler's thought, which will be explicated in more detail later in this essay: “Backward or Forward?”, “Form or Spirit?”, “Piety or a Living Religion?”, “Is Reform Constructive or Destructive?”, “Palestinian or American Judaism?”
80 Kohler, “Backward or Forward?” 201–203.
81 Kohler, “Backward or Forward?” 206, 205. For Kohler's views on ancient Israel's relation to the ancient Near East, see his “Assyriology and the Bible,” in Studies, Addresses, and Personal Papers [1903], 426–29.
82 For an analogous example of the relationship between hermeneutics and civilization, see Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (May 2006): 323–47.
83 Kohler, “Backward or Forward?” 206.
84 Kohler, “Backward or Forward?” 205. Because Hebrew is written without diacritical marks, a given consonantal text can often be read in several ways, serving as a potent site for rabbinic punning. Incidentally, this passage has a long afterlife in modern Jewish thought, serving as the epigraph for Emmanuel Levinas's Difficult Freedom and the title of a famous 1919 speech by Martin Buber.
85 Kohler, “Backward or Forward?” 205–207.
86 For an analogous case of a bourgeois Christian congregation's negotiation of racial hierarchy and immigration anxiety, see Wenger, Tisa, “The Practice of Dance for the Future of Christianity: ‘Eurythmic Worship’ in New York's Roaring Twenties,” in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965, ed. Maffly, Laurie Kipp, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 223–49Google Scholar.
87 Kohler, “Form or Spirit?” 210–12.
88 Kohler, “Backward or Forward?”
89 Henry Pereira Mendes, “A Reply to Dr. Kohler's Sermon,” The Jewish Messenger, June 19, 1885, 6.
90 Jick, Americanization of the Synagogue, 174; Rabin, Jews on the Frontier, 145. In a presentation at the 2018 conference of the American Jewish Historical Society, Rabin began to articulate a revised view of Reform that would locate its source in folk practice rather than elite intellectual history. Once again, I differentiate Rabin's persuasive revision that distinguished American Jewish lived religion in the nineteenth century from the ideological designs of elites such as Kohler from my interest in “Reform” as an idiosyncratic construct of those elites, interesting precisely for its tension with lived experience.
91 Kathryn Lofton, “The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism,” Church History 75, no. 2 (June 2006): 374–402.
92 On the relationship between Protestant disavowals of foundation and German Orientalism in the historical long durée, see Librett, Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew.
93 Kohler, Jew and Gentile, 6–7.
94 All citations from Kohler, “Piety or a Living Religion?” 219.
95 On the necessity of figures of difference for the secular, see Fernando, Mayanthi L., The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
96 Kohler, “Piety or a Living Religion?” 217–18.
97 The use of organic metaphors in descriptions of historical and civilizational development in German thought goes back at least to Herder. See von Herder, Johann Gottfried, “This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity,” in Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. trans., and Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 272–358CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
98 Kohler, “Form or Spirit?” 212.
99 The use of “Palestinian” as a metonym for the Oriental was not uncommon and was usually applied to Jews. In 1798, for example, Kant, Immanuel referred to Jews as “the Palestinians living among us.” Kant, Immanuel, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Gregor, Mary J. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974 [1798]), 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 1880, Hermann Cohen referred to Heinrich Graetz as part of “the party of Palestinians” who “have no basis within German culture” (Blutinger, “Writing for the Masses,” 112). In 1915, Jewish Theological Seminary professor Israel Friedlander referred to American Zionism as “the Palestinian sentiment of Russian Jews.” Friedlander, Israel, “The Present Crisis of Diaspora Jewry,” Menorah Journal 1, no. 5 (December 1915): 271Google Scholar.
100 Kohler, “Palestinian or American Judaism?” 229–30, 235.
101 See, for example, the issues of liturgical reform and synagogue aesthetics discussed in Langer, Ruth, “Prayer and Worship,” in Modern Judaism: An Oxford Guide, ed. de, Nicholas Lange and Miri Freud-Kandel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 231–42Google Scholar.
102 Kohler, “Palestinian or American Judaism,” 232–33; Kohler, “Form and Spirit,” 211.
103 Kohler, Jew and Gentile, 4 (emphasis original); Reverend A. E. Patton, cited in Imhoff, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism, 97; Kohler, “American Judaism,” 212; Kohler, “Palestinian or American Judaism,” 223–34.
104 Batnitzky, Leora, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
105 As we have seen, the privileging of Germany as the site par excellence of Jewish modernity is part of the inheritance of German-Jewish thought itself. For accounts of Jewish modernity outside of Western Europe, see Stern, Eliyahu, “Catholic Judaism: The Political Theology of the Russian Jewish Enlightenment,” Harvard Theological Review 109, no. 4 (2016): 483–511CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nahme, Paul E., “Wissen und Lomdus: Idealism, Modernity, and History in some Nineteenth-century Rabbinic and Philosophical Responses to the Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 3 (July 2017): 393–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
106 This is one of the chief contentions of Erlewine, Judaism and the West. He is responding primarily to the critique of “sui generis” religion in McCutcheon, Russell T., Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, which targets Schleiermacher, Buber, and Otto without accounting for Buber's marginal status as a Jew within the German tradition.
107 Mufti, Aamir, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
108 Kohler, “Palestinian or American Judaism,” 235.
109 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 280.
110 Wenger, Tisa, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
111 Wilder, Gary, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 195Google Scholar.
112 For an example of the facile manner in which Judaism is identified as primarily a religion, and the relationship of this claim to assertions of Judaism's contribution to “the West,” see the opening to Goodman, Lenn E., Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (New York: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar: “Judaism, as a religion and a way of life, has guided millions of lives and profoundly influenced its younger sisters, Christianity and Islam, as well as contributing major themes and norms to the liberal and humanistic traditions of the West” (1). On the disciplinary identification of Jewish Studies with the mainstream Western tradition more broadly, see Cheyette, Bryan, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, Ghetto and Diaspora,” Cambridge Journal for Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4, no. 3 (September 2017): 424–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
113 Levitt, Laura, “Interrogating the Judeo-Christian Tradition: Will Herberg's Construction of Religion in America, Religious Pluralism, and the Problem of Inclusion,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in America, 3 vols., ed. Stein, Stephen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3:283–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Levitt, Laura, “Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference: Revisiting Jewish Secularism,” American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (September 2007): 807–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.