On Sunday, April 15, 1888, Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926) delivered a sermon titled “Jew and Gentile,” exhorting his congregants at New York's Temple Beth-El to “render religion so broad and comprehensive, as to admit all that is sacred, ennobling, and inspiring in the field of literature, art, science, and law offered by any of the nations and the sects.”Footnote 1 A leader of Reform Judaism, Kohler theorized Judaism as a rational religion compatible with culture writ large, capable of superseding all local and national particularities to unite disparate peoples into a global, enlightened civilization. Sharing the cultural optimism (and chauvinism) that characterizes what William Hutchison called “the modernist impulse” of contemporary Christianity, Kohler nevertheless insisted that Reform Judaism was the “most lethal enemy” of Christianity in its bid for cultural dominion.Footnote 2 Drawing on longstanding German-Jewish criticisms of Christianity, Kohler understood Judaism, not Christianity, as the religion most able to transcend dogmatic and material particularity.Footnote 3 For Kohler, Judaism was a civilized religion and, indeed, the civilizing religion modernity needed to achieve its global aims.
Late-nineteenth-century American Jews, however, largely did not share Kohler's perception of and ambition for their religion. For the Eastern European immigrants who arrived to the United States beginning in the 1880s, Judaism was not a theory of civilizational unification but an improvisational practice subordinate to their basic material survival.Footnote 4 Even during the so-called “German period” of 1820–1870, during which Jewish immigrants worked their way toward bourgeois class respectability, ideological rigidity in religion was secondary to the material exigencies of American life.Footnote 5 Since the mid-nineteenth century, there had been attempts to produce a unified American Judaism in the religious and economic spheres. These attempts, however, like Kohler's own writings, encountered a community that resisted theological unification or administrative organization.Footnote 6 Despite the supreme confidence of his rhetoric, then, Kohler's ideological project is unrepresentative of the broader social history of his context.
Recent work by Hasia Diner and Shari Rabin has complicated our understanding of what an earlier generation of scholarship viewed as a monolithic “German period” as well as its attendant picture of German-derived Reform as the dominant mode of American Jewish religious life.Footnote 7 “German” here is less a sociological descriptor of authors such as Kohler than it is a loaded “synonym for successful assimilation: for distancing from Jewish tradition and the Yiddish language … that clearly distinguished itself from the ‘backwards’ Eastern European tradition.”Footnote 8 Insofar as historians of the Jewish nineteenth century have summarized that epoch as a “German period,” they have projected an elite polemic onto that period. Individuals like Kohler did argue for rational, institutionalized Judaism, and they did come from a tradition of nineteenth-century German-Jewish thought. But they did not predominate the social practice of Judaism as much as their rhetoric, or the subsequent historiographical diagnosis, might suggest, and this disjunction between elite rhetoric and social reality is important for understanding Kohler's elite project.
Influenced by the study of lived religions, recent scholarship in American religious history has turned away from pulpit theology and institutional archives to examine how religion operates materially in everyday lives.Footnote 9 In the study of American Judaism, this approach has yielded fruitful results, diminishing the hold of a “denominational” historiography that privileges the positions of elite ideologues such as Kohler. In this essay, I return to Kohler to understand his writings in light of this new, more complicated view of the Jewish nineteenth century. I argue that the very disjunction between his ideological commitments and the lived reality of American Jews make him a particularly fruitful figure for exploring the politics of constructing “religion” in elite religious thought.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many liberal Protestant American theologians sought to construct a universal religion that would transcend the particularities of Christianity. Despite their cosmopolitan ambitions, such efforts (mobilizing “a decidedly Protestant vernacular”) were far from neutral.Footnote 10 Tracy Fessenden and John Lardas Modern have shown how Protestant theological notions of an ethical monotheism extricated from all materiality, law, and ritual underwrote imperial visions of American civilization progressively conquering its atavistic Others.Footnote 11 Supersessionism, which theologically relegates Judaism to Christianity's unredeemed prehistory, thus implies and effects the erasure of Jews from the community of (secular) Western civilization.Footnote 12 The very category of religion therefore becomes, in the nineteenth century, a barometer of civilization as the ability to extricate “religion” from politics, nation, race, ritual, law, and other factors signals the status of a people as civilized or not.Footnote 13 Theological and scholarly arguments that Judaism is a “religion,” then, are inseparable from political claims for Jewish belonging in that amorphous yet hegemonic construct, Western civilization, rather than its equally amorphous other, the Orient.
Kohler is a thoroughly anti-Christian thinker, but his writings nonetheless recapitulate the supersessionist tropes of what Fessenden and Modern term the Protestant secular in his very attempt to contest its construction of Jewish difference. I seek to draw our attention to the overlap between the discourse of an imperial Judaism in Kohler and a universalizing Christianity among Protestant moderns. Reform Judaism has been interpreted by scholars and practitioners alike as a progressive movement focused on organizing Jews in an inclusive and optimistic practice of social identity under the sign of “religion.” Yet, this view requires revision. If we take seriously Kohler's writings about a universal Judaism, and the Orientalist framework that he deploys, it is difficult to distinguish his Orientalism from that of his Christian modernist contemporaries. The theological project of Reform Judaism, as articulated in Kohler's writings, is inseparable from the racial hierarchies implicit in modern Protestant thought. That project both subverts the implicit anti-Judaism of those racial hierarchies and reiterates them in a Jewish idiom. By articulating Judaism as “a higher and purer form of religion,” Kohler makes room for Jews in the imperial space of secular modernity, resisting its anti-Jewish supersessionism while incorporating its civilizational supersessionism into Jewish thought. This makes Kohler an instructive thinker in the history of the Protestant secular and its subaltern appropriations.
I seek here to connect the critiques of modernism and liberal Protestantism to the scholarly landscape of modern Judaism to ask what it means for a minoritized writer to articulate a rational religion that civilizes a population and makes possible the secular triumph of “religion.” To do this work, I consider Kohler's life and intellectual formation as source material. Kohler was embedded in both German-Jewish scholarly paradigms and American realities, and, as I show, he sought to connect those paradigms with religious life in America in an effort to bring about a new social order. After giving an overview of Kohler's biography in these contexts, I turn to his 1885 dispute with Alexander Kohut, a German-speaking rabbi with similar university training to Kohler, who had recently arrived to assume the pulpit at New York's Ahavat Chesed. The central point of dispute was whether the essence of Judaism was a legal tradition, rooted in the authority of sacred history, or an ethical principle that transcended any historical moment or source of authority. Kohler's sermons in response to Kohut's criticism of Reform show how the questions of religion and civilization are entangled in Kohler's thought. Moreover, Kohler's description of “Orthodoxy” shows how his rhetoric of Reform requires a figure of Oriental degradation to define itself as civilized and modern. These sermons, then, illustrate both Kohler's appropriation of the Protestant secular and the dependence of this discourse on the very “others” it repudiates.
“Afterglow of the Old Jewish Life”: The Making of a Jewish Reformer
In his own retelling, Kaufmann Kohler's early life was spent in “the afterglow of the old Jewish life in its glory and cheer.”Footnote 14 As Steven Lowenstein shows, Kohler's family is typical for the period: most Jews in German lands remained rural, Yiddish-speaking, and relatively untouched by Reform until well into the nineteenth century.Footnote 15 Born in 1843 in Fürth, Bavaria, Kohler grew up in an observant Jewish home, although his family spoke “pure German” along with Yiddish.Footnote 16 In Kohler's home state of Bavaria, an ultramontane government had come to power in 1837, preventing Bavarian rabbis from attending the three rabbinical conferences of the 1840s and impeding the progress of religious reform.Footnote 17 The synagogue in Kohler's town did not have an organ (a typical marker of reformist inclinations) until 1873.Footnote 18 As an adolescent and young adult, Kohler received an education in biblical and postbiblical Jewish texts, interacting with the whole spectrum of Jewish approaches to modernity. In Altona, for instance, he learned from students of the Hatam Sofer (1762–1839), whose principle of chadash asur min ha-torah (“innovation is forbidden by the Torah”) became the watchword of what is often called ultra-Orthodox Judaism.Footnote 19 In 1862, Kohler began formal university studies at the Gymnasium at Frankfurt am Main as he also continued study of Jewish texts under the neo-Orthodox leader Samson Raphael Hirsch.Footnote 20 With his “strange combination of Hebrew lore and German culture,” Hirsch seemed the perfect embodiment of the Jisroel-Mensch (“Israel-Human”) and an ideal mentor for a young, acculturated Jew from an observant background such as Kohler.Footnote 21 Later, Kohler still recalled Hirsch with great fondness because, as he put it to the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1909, “[Hirsch] made me, the Yeshibah Bachur from Mayence and Altona, into a modern man.”Footnote 22 Kohler credited Hirsch with “a bold attempt at a revival of orthodoxy” but considered such attempts futile in the face of “the new era of modernism.”Footnote 23 “We cannot live the dead past over again,” he said in the same talk.Footnote 24 Kohler saw himself as modernized by his encounter with Hirsch, but that very modernization left him unable to maintain his affiliation with Orthodoxy. His university education in the 1860s, and especially the study of the Arabic language, convinced him that Hirsch's Orthodoxy could not respond to the intellectual and cultural questions of modernity. By the time Kohler was ordained as a rabbi in 1867, he was fully committed to Reform.Footnote 25
Kohler received his PhD from the University of Erlangen in November 1867 for a dissertation titled “Jacob's Blessing” (Der Segen Jacobs).Footnote 26 A historical-critical study of Genesis 49:1–28, Kohler's dissertation reflects the influence of the tradition of Wissenschaft des Judentums, or the scientific study of Judaism.Footnote 27 Inaugurated in the second decade of the nineteenth century by texts like Leopold Zunz's 1818 “On Rabbinic Literature” and Immanuel Wolf's 1822 “On the Concept of a Science of Judaism,” the Wissenschaft des Judentums submitted Jewish texts to the protocols of secular philology to isolate an essence of Judaism from its historical variants.Footnote 28 Although these scholars claimed scientific detachment, the Wissenschaft des Judentums had a distinctly political aim, seeking to translate Jewish knowledge into the dominant categories of nineteenth-century European thought while refuting the anti-Jewish presuppositions of German scholarship.Footnote 29 For this reason, contemporary scholars such as Susannah Heschel have characterized the Wissenschaft des Judentums as a postcolonial project, challenging the discursive production of knowledge that policed the status of Jews in nineteenth-century Germany.Footnote 30 In her study of Abraham Geiger (who was a key influence on Kohler), Heschel shows how, in nineteenth-century Germany, Orientalist scholarship became a way for Jews to “reverse the gaze” back upon the Protestant majority, constructing a “counterhistory” of the West. The Reform Movement, which developed in nineteenth-century Germany and of which Kohler would become a principal American representative, was not identical to the Wissenschaft des Judentums, but its contention that ethical monotheism constituted the essence of Judaism was heavily indebted to the philological work of Jewish scholars.
Jewish scholars pursuing this counterhistorical project worked within the philological discipline of Orientalism. German Orientalism wedded historicist interest in Oriental antiquity with contemporary anxieties about Jews as an Oriental element within German society.Footnote 31 This nexus of historical interest and contemporary anxiety was especially pronounced in Kohler's academic subfield because, as Suzanne Marchand puts it in her synthetic study of German Orientalism, “for Orientalists, the Old Testament remained … a key literary, historical, and anthropological text.”Footnote 32 The nineteenth-century study of the Old Testament in Germany was structured by the Protestant presupposition that the pure ethical monotheism of Christianity had superseded the nationalistic legalism of Judaism.Footnote 33 As Julius Wellhausen put it in 1881, “The Gospel develops the hidden impulses of the Old Testament, but it is a protest against the ruling tendency of Judaism.”Footnote 34 As an antiquated, Oriental religion, Judaism appeared to be an obstacle to Jews’ belonging to the German nation and even a threat to the nation itself. The philosopher Jakob Fries bluntly expressed this idea in 1819, claiming, “We are not declaring war on Jews, our brothers, but on Judaism … an atavism of an unenlightened prehistoric era, which one should not limit but exterminate.”Footnote 35 The anti-Jewish climate of nineteenth-century Germany explains why study of the historical Jesus became important as a way of appropriating the Jewish elements in Christianity while rejecting the influence and relevance of Judaism itself.Footnote 36 To that end, Adolph Harnack argued that Jesus “distinguished between the traditional elements [of Judaism]—he left out none in which there was a spark of moral force, and he accepted none which encouraged the selfish expectations of his nation.” Writing in 1902, Kohler criticized Harnack and Wellhausen as “Christians only in so far as they hate whatever is Jewish,” identifying the task of his own scholarship as “to open the eyes of Jew and Gentile to the doings of Judaism throughout the ages … to map out for us a system of Jewish theology which challenges the Christian dogma.”Footnote 37 For Kohler, as for his German-Jewish predecessors, this dogma entails not only theological rejection of Judaism but also a cultural and political aversion to Jews as Oriental outsiders. At stake in his challenge, then, is the Jewish claim to rightful belonging in, and even ownership over, Western culture itself.
Jewish scholars used Orientalist scholarship to argue that the ethical elements of the Bible revealed the essence of Judaism, not an anticipation of Christianity. By arguing that Judaism was the foundation of both Christianity and Islam, Jewish scholars claimed that the rational, monotheistic core of modern Western civilization was Jewish, not Protestant.Footnote 38 At the same time, the portrait of Judaism as a rational, universal religion sought to reject the image of the Polish Jew (pejoratively termed Ostjuden) as backward and parochial.Footnote 39
To be sure, the Wissenschaft des Judentums was heavily influenced by Protestant scholarly paradigms, particularly the historical work of the Tübingen School of biblical criticism.Footnote 40 Kohler, despite his criticism of anti-Judaism in Christian scholarship, cited extensively from scholars such as Wilhelm Bousset, David Friedrich Strauss, and Max Müller in his own Jewish Theology: Systematically and Historically Considered (1918). Nonetheless, the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums reversed the image of Judaism as Oriental that predominated in German biblical scholarship of the day. For a community with tenuous legal status, largely seen as an alien element within the German nation, the master tools of Oriental philology provided a language, however fraught, with which to contest pervasive anti-Judaism and write a viable German-Jewish self.Footnote 41 Arguments about Jewish history, therefore, had “everything to do with trying to close the East–West gap at home,” asserting a certain image of Judaism as a vital force for the future of Occidental civilization, not an archaic remnant of its Oriental past.Footnote 42 Kohler inherits this tradition and plays a significant role in bringing it into an American context, asserting America, not Germany, as the place where the essence of Judaism can be most fully realized.
From the beginning of his career, Kohler's scholarly efforts evince the same drive to marshal Jewish history in the service of contemporary affairs. In the forward to his dissertation, Kohler declares that the true “alpha and omega of Judaism … [is] not the law, but rather the eternal moral idea!” Like many other modernist religious figures, Kohler identified the value of his specific tradition not in its particular texts or rites but in what he claimed was the universal ethical principle at its core. This allows him to draw certain ideas from biblical and, as we shall see, rabbinic texts while disregarding other elements of those texts, subjugating their textual authority to the principles of universal ethics. For Kohler, religion imbues human existence with a higher purpose and elevating capacity, but not all religions are equally useful in this effort. Kohler claims that “Judaism, or to speak more generally, Prophetism [Prophetismus]” will bring about an era “in which men unified in the love of freedom and truth know and love each other as children of One God.” Although the dissertation's manifest interest is in a historical reading of the Bible, Kohler's attention to contemporary social concerns and the relationship of religion to the progress of modernity on a global scale anticipates the concerns of his later work.Footnote 43
Kohler's argument that Genesis 49 had been composed during the time of the Judges proved too radical for a German pulpit, and he was unable to find employment as a rabbi. As he later put it, “I was so liberal in 1869 that Germany would have none of me.”Footnote 44 Upon the advice of Abraham Geiger, he pursued postdoctoral coursework in Oriental studies at Leipzig, preparing himself for a career of “mere literary enterprises.”Footnote 45 During these studies, he continued to bring his scholarly expertise to bear on contemporary sociopolitical questions. In 1868, he published a pamphlet titled “The Bible and the Death Penalty,” responding to the contention that Saxony's abolition of the death penalty was “a shameful injury to the Word of God.” Although the text of the Bible does not outlaw capital punishment, Kohler theorizes the “religious-progressive spirit of the Bible” as a force capable of “uplifting [aufheben] the death penalty, and leading the criminal to a better life, not to death.”Footnote 46 In other words, Kohler rejects what he sees as the archaic historical letter of tradition while claiming the continued relevance of a transhistorical moralizing spirit that spans from the Bible to the present day. As we will see, this ambivalent relation to tradition infuses his theorizing of Judaism, enabling him to cite from biblical and rabbinic texts while relativizing biblical and rabbinic authority. Like other modernist religious thinkers, Kohler's ambivalence depends on relegating the validity of ritual and legal aspects of Jewish tradition to particular historical periods while positing an ethical spirit that is not only transhistorically valid but also the very essence of Judaism.
“Against the Dead Gods”: Orientalism and the Kohler-Kohut Debate
With recommendations from Geiger and David Einhorn, Kohler was eventually able to secure a rabbinical post at Temple Beth-El in Detroit in 1869. During the 1870s, he established himself as a national leader in the American Reform movement, first in Detroit, then at Temple Sinai in Chicago, before coming to New York in 1879 as the rabbi of Temple Beth-El.Footnote 47 While in Chicago, he was involved in various congregational controversies, including his criticism of a lecture by Felix Adler, the founder of Ethical Culture (and apostate from Reform Judaism), and his plan to move Sabbath worship (traditionally held on Saturday morning) to Sunday.Footnote 48 These widely publicized controversies helped him gain prominence as a public authority on Judaism at a moment when, as Zev Eleff has shown, the synagogue was on the decline as a site of religiosity. With his “propensity for oratorical flare,” as well as his scholarly status, he became the intellectual leader of the Reform movement in America.Footnote 49 In 1885, he was the primary author of the Pittsburgh Platform and, in 1919, he published a massive systematic theology of Judaism.Footnote 50 Shortly after the turn of the century, he directed the production of the Jewish Encyclopedia, bringing the project of Wissenschaft des Judentums into an American context.Footnote 51 The universalizing impulses of Kohler's thought enabled him to transform his German cultural affinities into an affirmation of America's unique capacity to unleash Judaism's civilizing potential. In America, Kohler argued, “the old dividing lines of race and sect are obliterated and by natural selection [!] a new type and standard of manhood and womanhood is developing.” For Kohler, in the late nineteenth century, America was displacing Europe as the vanguard of Jewish life, making possible “the concordance of Judaism and Americanism” despite the retrograde forces that “threaten to Orientalize” the Jew. The same logic that enabled Reformers to assert the spiritual identity of Judaism and Germanism allowed Kohler to transpose German-Jewish thought into an American context.Footnote 52
Kohler also gained intellectual prominence beyond the Jewish world. His 1918 book Jewish Theology garnered a review in the liberal Protestant American Journal of Theology (to which he was also a contributor), and his active membership in the American Oriental Society, which held its Midwestern regional meeting on the campus of Hebrew Union College where Kohler was president, put him at the center of American Oriental scholarship.Footnote 53 In the words of George Foot Moore, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Kohler was “one of the foremost exponents of Jewish scholarship in this country.”Footnote 54
In summer 1885, Kohler got the opportunity to articulate his agenda on a public stage when Alexander Kohut gave a series of sermons attacking Reform. Kohut had arrived from Hungary earlier that year to assume the rabbinical post at New York's Ahavat Chesed.Footnote 55 Ahavat Chesed was not necessarily radical, but it was designed in recognizably modern style and aligned itself, according to the minutes of its first general meeting in 1870, with “Reformed Judaism.”Footnote 56 As for Kohut himself, in Kohler's words, “every one was anxious to hear what position he would take.”Footnote 57
Kohut was surely no traditionalist. When The American Hebrew reported on Kohut's selection, they called him a “veteran in the field of letters” who would be a partisan for “an enlightened Judaism.”Footnote 58 In many ways, Kohut's intellectual formation resembled Kohler's own. Born in 1842 in a small town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kohut received his doctorate in Oriental Studies from the University of Leipzig at the age of twenty-two while completing rabbinical studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau.Footnote 59 His dissertation on the indebtedness of Jewish angelology and demonology, particularly in the Babylonian Talmud, to its Persian context not only signals his mastery of the philological practices of German Wissenschaft but also anticipates questions still current in the academic study of rabbinic literature.Footnote 60 In addition to his PhD work, Kohut compiled the Arukh Completum, a reference work for Talmudic studies widely hailed in Kohut's lifetime and still referenced by scholars today.Footnote 61
To be sure, there are important differences between Kohut and Kohler. Kohler located the essence of Judaism in the Bible, whereas Kohut's attention to Talmudic literature reflects a belief in the continuity of rabbinic Judaism, alongside interest in its changes over time in different environments. In this respect, Kohut's thought extends the “positive-historical Judaism” of his teacher Zacharias Frankel, seen by scholars as a precursor of the Conservative movement in America.Footnote 62 It is important, however, not to overstate these differences. Like many American Jews in the decades following the Civil War, Kohler and Kohut were both deeply German in their cultural-linguistic orientation.Footnote 63 This influence is palpable in the sermons Kohut delivered criticizing Kohler: like many Jewish sermons in the nineteenth century, they were delivered in German.Footnote 64 As the wave of German-speaking immigrants that arrived between 1848 and 1860 became comfortable in English, German preaching became less common, although Robert Friedenberg holds that “definitive evidence is simply not available” for when exactly English surpassed German.Footnote 65 There is nothing unusual or suspect, however, about the recently arrived Kohut delivering his sermons in the summer of 1885 in German, and there is no necessary relationship between the language of preaching and one's stance toward religious reform: as early as the 1830s, the traditionalist Isaac Leeser insisted on English preaching, whereas the radical reformer David Einhorn viewed “German as the one and only language for the proper expression of both Jewish scholarship and progressive ideas in religion.”Footnote 66 Kohler's responses to Kohut were in English, but he had delivered his inaugural sermons in Baltimore, Chicago, and New York in German, and he continued to publish in the language, with his monumental Jewish Theology appearing initially in German in 1913. Once Kohut had criticized Reform, Kohler would portray Kohut's position as rigidly traditionalist, but this criticism obscures their basic intellectual similarity.
The very genre of the sermon may be considered within the postcolonial framework described previously because it is both appropriated from a hegemonic Protestant model and yet used to articulate a Jewish self.Footnote 67 Whereas a traditional derasha (exegetical homily) addresses questions arising out of traditional Jewish texts (contradictions between different sources, complicated syntax, etc.), the sermon extracts spiritual and ethical principles from texts to promote Erbauung, or ethical-spiritual edification. As such, within Jewish history, the sermon is a specifically modern development, even when it is used to defend a notion of “tradition.” In a series of sermons delivered in June and July 1885, Kohut charged Reformers with abandoning what he argued was the foundation of Judaism: rabbinic law. Kohut's sermons were an exposition of Pirkei Avot (often translated “ethics of the fathers”), a second-century rabbinic text. Pirkei Avot begins by recounting the rabbinic narrative of scriptural transmission: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai, then passed it on to Joshua, then Joshua to the elders.” For Kohut, this historiography establishes Judaism's essence, without which it would cease to be Judaism. “On this foundation,” Kohut says, “rests yet today Mosaico-rabbinical Judaism … whosoever denies this; denies this on principle, disclaims his connection with the bond of the community of the House of Israel.” Kohut underscores that he specifically means those who deny the “unbroken chain of tradition” on principle, not simply those who find themselves unable to fulfill the entire law in practice. A principled denier—radical reformers like Kohler—“writes his own epitaph: ‘I am no Jew; no adherent to the faith of my fathers.’” For Kohut, Judaism without rabbinics “is a skeleton of Judaism without flesh and sinew, without spirit and heart. Without tradition there is no life, but only vegetation … a suicide. And suicide is no Reform.”Footnote 68
At the time of the Kohler–Kohut dispute, American Judaism was in a state of both expansion and anxiety. In New York City, the number of synagogues was rapidly growing, from fourteen in 1845 to nearly one hundred and fifty in 1890.Footnote 69 The pews of synagogues such as Kohler's and Kohut's were filled with central European Jews, many of whom had immigrated in the 1850s and who had moved uptown from the “Kleindeutschland” or Five Points neighborhoods on the Lower East Side.Footnote 70 Historians of American Judaism have observed this geographic movement—uptown from lower Manhattan—as a physical manifestation of acculturation and assimilation in which certain signifiers of immigrant identity were shed to coordinate their emerging American identities with a broader social whiteness, with the word “uptown” becoming synonymous with this social status in the historiography of the period.Footnote 71 Along with the growth and embourgeoisement of New York Jewry, however, came anxieties about laxity in observance. An 1879 New York Times article claimed that as few as ten to fifteen thousand of the roughly ninety thousand Jews in New York City observed the prohibition on economic activity on Shabbat (Saturday).Footnote 72 Jewish practice was, thus, a matter of intense interest for communal elites anxious to create an institutional and theological form of Judaism that was sustainable on American soil and respectable in bourgeois society. The main consistency within this diverse history is a pervasive sense of anxiety and concern about how to embody Jewishness without losing access to American opportunity. One physical manifestation of this ambivalent toggle could be discerned in synagogue aesthetics. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a boom in “Moorish”-style synagogues, designed to flaunt Jewish difference in an exotic yet contained architectural idiom. Such synagogues were more expensive than the simpler synagogues of the Lower East Side (and so demonstrated Jewish wealth) and suggested a desire to render Jewish difference legible while maintaining bourgeois respectability.Footnote 73
This desire appears in the wake of a wave of migration beginning in 1881 that would drastically alter the demographics of American Jewry. Appealing to bourgeois Jews and keeping them in the pews went along with “civilizing” new arrivals to protect the social acceptance of acculturated Jews.Footnote 74 The first calls for “radical reform” referred not to religious matters but to a communal philanthropy infrastructure perceived as inadequate to the task of making Jewish immigrants into good bourgeois and, hence, embarrassing for the acculturated members of the community.Footnote 75 The theological issues of the Kohler–Kohut debate were far from the minds of most American Jews, but the broader task of constructing communal infrastructure that could both represent Judaism to respectable, bourgeois America and lead the charge in uplifting the increasing number of immigrant Jews was the definitive dilemma of late-nineteenth-century American Judaism.
The social context of the theological debate between Kohler and Kohut is instructive for understanding Kohler's sermons. As millions of Russian Jews migrated to Western Europe and the United States, their visible difference from the picture of bourgeois respectability presented a socioeconomic and cultural problem for religious leaders, social scientists, and other community stakeholders.Footnote 76 Like many nineteenth-century German-Jewish thinkers, Kohler viewed the spectacle of the Eastern European Jew as a figure of backwardness, a “ghetto Judaism” whose “alien form … [is] a piece of Orientalism in the midst of vigorous, forward-pressing Occidental civilization.”Footnote 77 The debate about law and ethics in Judaism's past was also a debate about the role of Judaism in America's present; when Kohler says “Oriental,” he references not only the Palestinian past but also the Polish present, which was increasingly visible on American shores.Footnote 78 Turning now to a close reading of Kohler's response to Kohut, we see how, for Kohler, the “Oriental” is less the name of a geographical area than the figure of temporality and authority against which he articulates Reform Judaism as a civilized, civilizing force.
Kohler responded to Kohut's critique of Reform in four sermons, given in the summer of 1885.Footnote 79 Kohut had claimed that Judaism without rabbinic law was no Judaism at all, but Kohler's response set out to show that the essence of Judaism was ethical monotheism, not law. Kohler argued, moreover, that Kohut's emphasis on law required an unhealthy attachment to the past, whereas an ethical view seamlessly separated historical relics from transhistorical necessities. Kohler presents the debate in binary terms, as a contest between “Reform Judaism” and “Talmudical orthodoxy” as to which is “strong enough to stand at the helm and steer American Judaism towards its lofty goal.” The distinction not only concerns beliefs and practice but also temporality: “Mosaico-Rabbinical Judaism is retrospective … it longs for the restoration of the temple and the state in Judea,” whereas Reform “looks forward with hopes for a far brighter future … its golden era lies not behind but before us.” Orthodoxy “turns the dials of the time backwards,” whereas Reform “proudly points to the forward move of history.”Footnote 80
Kohler's sermons take up three theological questions: First, must Jews believe in the divine origin of Scripture, especially its messianic eschatology? Second, must Jews observe rabbinic law? Third, must Jews desire a return of “the bloody sacrifices as the only mode of worship” and “the entire Jewish State, with its temple and priesthood, restored”? Kohler answers all three questions in the negative. His reasoning shows the relationship among theology, history, and civilization in his thought. For Kohler, rabbinic law is only valid for “an uncouth and uncivilized age” and is as unsuitable for the present as food for infants is for adults. Kohler views biblical Israel as “a still childish and semi-barbarous nation in an age of rude barbarism and unmitigated polytheism.” Yet, however backward it was, the Bible sought to “[train] the Jewish people for its high mission as a people of God in the midst of an idolatrous world, prone to most vices and abominable superstitions.”Footnote 81 Once again, we see how Kohler's historical consciousness functions as an index of civilization: extracting a supposedly transhistorical principle at the core of a historically situated (biblical or rabbinic) text, he draws freely on Jewish tradition while sublimating its authority to rationalist principles.Footnote 82 Kohler charges that orthodoxy errs in viewing the law itself as static and unchanging, failing to read texts historically and, thus, turning Judaism into “a sacred mummy.” Just as rabbinic Judaism superseded Mosaism (i.e., biblical religion), Kohler argues, “so will Rabbinism be replaced by a higher and purer shape of religion … the foundation [will] be laid to a temple of God spacious enough to embrace all sects and races, and rally them around the uplifted figure of the One God.”Footnote 83 By “pure,” Kohler means a religious idea that avoids turning contingent historical forms of sociality and ritual into absolutist doctrines. That Kohler should distinguish between a primitive past and a civilized future on this basis is, of course, all the more ironic given that, as we have seen, Kohler himself is profoundly indebted to the prevailing social and religious idioms of his contemporary contexts.
Kohler's first sermon closes by citing the second-century rabbinic text Kohut discussed, Pirkei Avot: “‘And the writing was God's writing, engraved upon the tablets’ [Exodus 32:16]: read not ‘engraved’ [harut, חרות], but rather ‘freedom’ [herut, חרות].”Footnote 84 The freedom that Kohler finds in this passage signifies “freedom from the bondage of the letter; freedom from the yoke of mere legality, freedom from blind authority-belief; freedom for all the neglected and excluded; freedom for women … freedom from all the rust and mould of the past, which disfigure and obscure our bright heritage before the world and check its wholesome growth.” In Kohler's reading, freedom requires not only the integration of modern science or biblical criticism into Jewish thought but also emancipation from “obsolete and meaningless practices of the past.” In that sense, freedom is a means of differentiating between the “fixed form” of “Ghetto Judaism” and the “loftier and more spiritual form” that will arise from its “ruins.”Footnote 85 Freedom is moving to upper Manhattan Moorish synagogues while disavowing signifiers of the immigrant past, participating in the very racial hierarchies with which those down the street at Episcopal and Presbyterian churches were also experimenting.Footnote 86
Kohler's second sermon makes a similar argument by advancing a lengthy series of antitheses, particularly between a “living faith … [not] dead letters” and a “vital spark … [not] dead forms.” As even this brief citation implies, the opposition between living and dead faith implies oppositions between freedom and ceremonialism, ethics and ritual, dynamism and passivity. Kohler seems supremely optimistic about the future of Reform: although he admits that “ritualism is not altogether dead,” he describes the present state of American Judaism as “the victory of prophetism over church dogmatism and synagogue ceremonialism.” Nonetheless, the ambivalence of his writing undermines the confidence of his claim. Kohler can hardly articulate a positive principle without inserting a negation almost immediately:
Judaism entered the world's arena with a protest against the dead gods of the heathen world, while asserting its God to be the God of life…. Judaism is a living faith, not a religion confined to dead letters, to a scarcely readable parchment scroll, but one which forms the vital spark of all moral action and conduct, which prompts us to worship and perceive God, not in dead forms, in rites of by-gone ages, in signs hardly intelligible, but in living truths and forms, expressive of life and truth. And as life manifests its power in attracting and absorbing all that nourishes strength, and in rejecting all that is obnoxious and burdensome, so religion shows its vitality in constant change and reform.Footnote 87
As I have argued, Kohler's dichotomous portrayal of Orthodoxy as backward elides the glaring similarity between Kohut and himself. Given this similarity, Kohler's picture of Kohut's stance was, as the American Hebrew put it in a June 12 editorial, “a bugaboo of his own imagining.”Footnote 88 Writing in the Jewish Messenger, the rabbi H. Pereira Mendes argued that, if Orthodoxy were, as Kohler had claimed, a mummy, “considering that orthodoxy has so many millions of followers, the mummy is a pretty lively one.”Footnote 89 Kohler's picture of Reform's progress was as problematic as his portrayal of Orthodoxy's morbidity. Although “by 1870 … there were congregations in America in which substantial reforms had not been introduced and in which an accelerating program of radical revision was not in process,” such reforms were “mobile assemblage[s]…collected in and out of secular and multireligious networks and markets, institutions and ideologies,” lacking the theological and institutional coherence Kohler desired.Footnote 90
Rather than see this as intellectual carelessness on Kohler's part, I read the misrepresentation of orthodoxy as a necessary component of his argument. In other words, what interests me about Kohler's description of “orthodoxy” is not its failure to accurately represent some real entity by that name but the centrality of “orthodoxy,” as a figure, in Kohler's attempt to define Judaism's essence as modern. As we saw previously, Kohler's concept of Reform Judaism is articulated via a dense web of binaries, making negation the very mode through which any positive content can be articulated. In this respect, as well, Kohler's Jewish theology mirrors the ambivalence found in contemporary American Protestantism. Kathryn Lofton has shown that Protestant modernists privilege a method of theological inquiry above any particular theological content.Footnote 91 For Protestant writers such as Shailer Matthews and Henry Nelson Wieman, how one thinks matters more than what one thinks, per se. Positing any particular content—doctrinal, historical, or institutional—as the foundation for a systematic theology risks absolutizing that content and, thereby, repeating the very materialistic fetishism that defines the uncivilized other. Therefore, the identity of Protestantism (qua modern) is secured not through defending particular theological propositions but, rather, in the persistent disavowal of any possible foundation.Footnote 92 Kohler's thought mirrors this privileging of an antifoundationalist spirit over foundational content. For example, in “Jew and Gentile,” Kohler declares that Judaism “is to be not a mere belief or creed, but a life-purpose … not a dogma, but a grand ideal … not built on the Bible, nor on supernatural revelation. It rests neither on Moses nor on any authority.”Footnote 93 Paradoxically, then, the very gesture of disavowing any possible foundation is the foundation upon which the edifice of Reform Judaism is constructed. “Stand-still is death,” writes Kohler; for the “living and working religion” that he desires to come into being, it needs a frozen figure of “stand-still” that it can reject as “the dead ritualism of the past.”Footnote 94 Far from being incidental, the “bugaboo” of Oriental, atavistic Orthodoxy is necessary as a discursive figure if Kohler is to articulate Occidental, progressive Reform because this Reform is founded on the gesture of disavowing—that is, superseding—the Orthodox.Footnote 95
Kohler's Reform is forged not only by defining Judaism as a “religion” but also through a supersessionist stance toward a figure of the atavistic primitive that constitutes its opposite. In his sermon “Piety or a Living Religion?”, the third response to Kohut, we see the entanglement of temporality with the delimitation of the religious in Kohler's thought:
I shall always remember with longing the deep impressions of my childhood, so sweetly interwoven with the beautiful life our fathers led under the sway of true orthodoxy … not the synagogue only, but the house; not the Sabbath only, but each day was filled with holy thought…. Can Orthodoxy, fanatical, inconsistent, and anachronistical orthodoxy conjure [this life] back? As little may the florist undertake to expose his Eastern hot-bed plants, artificially nurtured on our soil, to the fierce blasts of our Western winds. No. Orientalism on our free American soil will not stand the test of time. We want Judaism to be the exponent of a religious truth for all ages and climes. We want to see Judaism practiced in fullest accordance with our Occidental civilization.Footnote 96
Notice how Kohler's articulation of the relationship between civilization and religion draws on scientific rhetoric, both through its botanical metaphors and through the portrayal of progress in civilization as an inexorable historical force.Footnote 97 In that sense, Orthodoxy is quite literally “anachronistical,” outside of the proper time ascribed to it by science. The identity of the Occident is also marked by place, with “free American soil” constituting an “artificial” environment for Orthodoxy. The distinction between the anachronistic and artificial and the natural and present is revealed by the delimitation of the religious sphere itself: religion that takes place “not in the synagogue only” is a remnant of the past, both an object of nostalgia and a threat to the present of civilization.
Kohler refers frequently to “Reform” and “Orthodoxy”; viewing the Kohler–Kohut debate through the lens of “denominationalism,” however, obscures more than it illuminates about the relationship between religion and civilization in nineteenth-century American Jewish thought. For Kohler, orthodoxy and reform are equivalent to Orient and Occident. As he puts it, “every exchange of Occidental features for Oriental ones is an inroad on Rabbinical Judaism and a victory of Reform.”Footnote 98
Kohler's Orientalism comes out most clearly in the fifth sermon, delivered on the Fourth of July and titled “Palestinian or American Judaism?” In the Hebrew calendar, July 4, 1885, was also the seventeenth of Tammuz, a minor fast day marking the beginning of preparations for Tisha b'Av, when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The fast gave Kohler an opportunity to expound upon the question of Palestine, which, it quickly becomes clear, entails the question of the Orient.Footnote 99 “Every Jew to-day ought to take sides,” Kohler said, “whether this day … should be devoted to wailing over Jerusalem's sad fate, or, being the Fourth of July, given over to joy and thanksgiving in view of the Holy Land of Freedom and Human Rights.” Once again, this dichotomy distinguishes temporally between “our past political power” and “the new aims and prospects opened on this free soil for the realization of our Messianic expectations.” This binary is particularly potent for Kohler's figuration of Reform Judaism as Occidental. Because the legally mandated fast prioritizes mourning for a Palestinian past over celebration of a diasporic present, it allows Kohler to raise the question of loyalty to America. Moreover, because the fast is related to commemorating the destruction of the temple, Kohler can portray it as clinging to a superstitious, physical mode of worship that subverts the rational religion appropriate to the modern age. For Kohler, “the sad reminiscences of Israel's tragic fate” that the seventeenth of Tammuz calls to mind stand in the way of Judaism's bid to “drop its Orientalism and become truly American in spirit and form.”Footnote 100 In this way, the question “Palestinian or American Judaism” shows quite neatly how the questions of liturgical practice that scholars recognize as priorities of the Reform movement function within an Orientalist discourse and stage broader questions about the relationship of Jews and Judaism to Occidental civilization.Footnote 101
At first glance, the Kohler–Kohut debate may seem to concern theological questions, but, upon further examination, the stakes are quickly seen to exceed “religion” per se. Just as Protestant writers positioned “secular” American freedom in dialectical relation to the purported degenerate materialism of peoples shackled by “religion,” Kohler presents Reform Judaism as the liberator, first of Jews and, subsequently, of all humanity, from a servitude marked as Oriental. Paradoxically, however, Kohler's very desire for religion to be free of all materiality and legalism forces him to be intensely interested in the form of religion: to “hold aloft only that which enhances [Judaism's] human worth and brightness … we certainly ought to render our mode of worship, all of our religious observances, truly attractive and impressive for all.” “It will not do for us as teachers of humanity,” writes Kohler, “to remain Hebrews in garb and custom, in views and language.” The modern person “disdains to bend his neck to a yoke imposed upon him by uncultured ages of the past, whether it consists of creeds which shackle and cripple his reason; or of statutes and prohibitions which enchain and imprison his body.”Footnote 102 To be truly religious is to be Occidental, so religion becomes less a component of civilization than its enabling condition. But being Occidental is revealed here as an ambivalent condition, requiring at once the disavowal of materiality and the promotion of a particular morphology of religion, “a higher and purer shape,” as the sign of true religiosity.
Kohler proclaims the capacity of Judaism to redeem all civilization, yet he is sensitive to the disjunction between his claims and the relatively ad hoc, nonideological character of the American Jewish community. Two reasons account for this: first, Kohler was attempting to refute Christian contentions that true Judaism was precisely the primitive Oriental tribalism that Kohler projects on Orthodoxy. In the “Jew and Gentile” sermon with which we began, Kohler laments that Jews are never praised “as Jews. The more exemplary our conduct is, the more apt we are to be lauded by well-meaning outsiders as exhibiting Christian virtues.” These associations of Judaism with uncivilized, uncouth tribalism were only heightened by the influx of Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth century, referred to by one minister as “Jewish hordes, ignorant of all patriotism, filthy, vermin-infested, stealthy and furtive in manner.” Thus, Kohler is adamant that Jews who seem to deviate from Protestant respectability are not good examples of true Judaism and can be reformed. Kohler would later proclaim that his concern was “the soul and not the body, it is Judaism and not the Jew,” illustrating how the very signifier, Judaism, entails a disavowal of immigrant bodies figured as Oriental. In the midst of Kohler's proclamation of Judaism's “democratic, cosmopolitan character” lies a subtle acknowledgment that “we have first to use the pruning-knife and trim our own tree of life before improving those of others.” Reform functions as an intra-Jewish civilizing mission, aimed at “opening the eyes of our own people … familiarizing them with our priceless past and world-redeeming truths.” This intra-Jewish mission, however, is prologue to the globalizing of Judaism itself as a civilizing force, “to render Judaism honored, admired, and influential in our country … before we dare offer our religion as a model and a bright gem to others.”Footnote 103
Conclusion: Orientalism and Modern Jewish Religion
Recent work in the study of modern Jewish thought has brought the category of “religion” under critical scrutiny. Scholars have drawn on genealogical work in religious studies scholarship to show the political valence of the modern contention that Judaism is a religion.Footnote 104 This work has brought Jewish studies into conversation with critical scholarship in religious studies, illuminating how modern Jewish thought (at least in its Western and Central European iteration) develops in the crucible of Christian hegemony and necessarily draws on the conceptual apparatus it made available.Footnote 105 Placing modern Jewish thought into the broader context of Jewish difference in modern European society has complicated a tendency in religious studies uncritically to group Jewish theorists of “sui generis” religion with their Protestant contemporaries without considering Jews’ minoritarian status.Footnote 106 Moreover, this resituating of modern Jewish thought has raised fruitful questions about the relationship between forms of writing and minority critical traditions.Footnote 107
The example of Kaufmann Kohler shows how, far from restricting Judaism to individual matters of faith, the rhetoric of religion entailed an imperial vision of Judaism uniting the entire world by civilizing it. Trading on binaries of temporality (past/future, forward/backward), authority (legalistic slavery/ethical freedom), and form (dead ritual/living truth), Kohler's construction of religion works within an Orientalist idiom to assert Judaism as the engine of Occidental modernity's triumph. “Religion” names a globalizing aspiration, untethered from the stigmatized Jewish body or the authoritative sway of local historical moments, the imperial Protestant secular in minoritarian drag. Kohler helps us to understand how, for Protestants and their subjects alike, “religion” functions as one way of articulating what it should mean to be properly modern.
Kohler is aware that the reality is far more complicated than his rhetoric allows. He is sensitive to the criticisms of Protestant scholars and concerned to make Judaism (and Jews) respectable in their eyes. Nevertheless, in the face of historical countertestimony, Kohler theorizes Reform as “the vital spirit permeating the past … ever creating new and better forms in place of the old ones.” This “fire” must first enlighten American Jewry, but its ultimate designs are global in scope: “only when the fire has spread to fill the entire world with its bright blaze of holiness, only when Israel's God will be worshipped in truth as the King of the nations and the Father of men … the mission of the Jew is fulfilled. Amen.”Footnote 108
Kohler's Orientalism has been hiding in plain sight. In his classic study of the Reform Movement, Michael Meyer remarks off-hand that, in late-nineteenth-century debates about liturgical reform, “the prevalent view was that ceremonialism was Orientalism and that casting off ceremonies better revealed the purer Judaism of faith in God and love of man that lay beneath it.”Footnote 109 Meyer rightly recognizes that Reformers of this period rejected rituals prescribed by Jewish law and posited an ethical core of Judaism that transcended any particular practice. But Meyer seems to pass over “Orientalism” as an archaism that simply means “bad” and not a concept to be interpreted to understand the project of Reform Judaism. Reading Kohler on his own terms, however, Orientalism becomes the central idiom by which Judaism can be defined as a scholarly concept and religious practice. For religious leaders such as Kohler, Judaism has to transform to become itself. To become what it essentially is—religious, Occidental, American—Judaism must cast off what it historically has been—tribal, Oriental, Palestinian. Reform, therefore, is less a certain ideological trajectory within Judaism than the name for the repeated transcendence of the particular and local that is, for Kohler, Judaism itself.
Future studies of nineteenth-century American Judaism, then, cannot ignore the imbrication of Jewish thought with what Tisa Wenger has called “the civilizational assemblages of race and empire.”Footnote 110 The particular genre of theology that Kohler authored is ripe for reassessment as an elite activity, anxiously yet consciously carried out against the backdrop of a starkly divergent sociological picture. Kohler helps us to understand how non-Protestants both criticized and claimed Protestant theological forms. In that respect, Kohler exemplifies what Gary Wilder, citing Gayatri Spivak, describes as “‘the deconstructive predicament of the post-colonial,’ who must make political claims ‘from a space that one cannot not want to inhabit and yet must criticize.’”Footnote 111 Reading American Judaism in this manner departs from a historiographical tradition that presumes a basic similarity between Judaism and Christianity as building blocks of “Western” culture.Footnote 112 Instead, we see how the project of defining Judaism in America had a distinct relationship to Europe and to the imperial project of American Protestantism. Laura Levitt has shown how the articulation of Judaism as a religion is intimately bound up with a mid-twentieth-century attempt to ally Jews with the white American mainstream.Footnote 113 This essay argues for an earlier timeline for that effort. Kohler is a pivotal figure in that history, both because he anticipates these later apologetics and because reading him critically reveals how his apologetics are conditioned by the marginality of Jews within the Christian West. Such marginality perhaps seems, like Kohler's rationalist and Orientalist Judaism, a thing of the past. Yet, as Kohler's own writings evince, the designation of something—a figure, a religion, a people—as a thing of the past is never neutral or self-evident. The lessons to be learned from Kohler's naïve and ultimately failed project are far from archaic. It resounds in dialectics of difference that call for the supersession of a stubborn, spectral past identified with a people whose improvement is necessary for collective security and progress.
