Season 2: Episode 16 - The Emperor and the Jews

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Be a Jew in your home, said Demaskel Yehuda Leib Gordon, and be a man in the world. Well, I'd like to believe I'm a Jew no matter where I am, and man enough to be one both at home and in the world. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 16, The Emperor and the Jews. So we saw the first sparks of civil emancipation last episode in Austria, under Joseph II with his Edict of Toleration, but the true wave of the future begins in France. And French jury, I hope you recall, has two faces. There are some 3,500 Svardim, concentrated mostly in the southwest, and between 30,000 and 40,000 Ashkenazim in the Rhineland provinces of eastern France. And I say two faces deliberately, because the two groups just don't look alike.

Aspartam had been there since the exile from Spain, they'd crept in as new Christians, and looked much like the French, while the Ashkenazim had been acquired, so to speak, by the French crown in their conquests of the 17th century, and they look, well, perhaps much like traditional Ashkenazim look today. And the question facing the French is more than just a cosmetic one. It goes to the heart of a problem that still plagues the world today. Is integration into society dependent on homogenization? Do you have to look like the majority culture in order to be truly accepted? And whether it's the struggle over traditional Muslim garb in France, the dangers of driving while black in America, or the life of a religious Jew in certain parts of our beautiful country, the melting pot model society no longer seems so appealing.

It's true that today we like to give lip service to diversity, and to say that the tossed salad has replaced the melting pot, and that there's no need for carrots to be cucumbers for Asians to look like Caucasians. But beyond superficial acceptance lies a deeper question. Are there really shared values and vision which bind together civil nation states beyond the self-interest of their citizens? Because remember, self-interest cuts both ways. it can be just as much a source of strife as it is cooperation. Read the news. And as for European society of the day that we're speaking about, the emancipation of the Jews will be a test run for tolerance. Don't forget, at this stage of our story, these are societies which endorse the enslavement of other human beings, if indeed they even see them as such, and the true colonial era still lies ahead of us.

What's experienced as emancipation for Jews is also what we call naturalization. The Jews see themselves as a foreign people in exile, and the question they pose to European society is whether someone not naturally French can be a citizen of the French nation. And just to make it worse, the question's bound up with the process of figuring out what exactly a modern nation is. Not so long ago, Louis XIV had said, I am the state, which may sound horribly medieval to modern ears, but it did make our question much simpler. If the king is the state, then a citizen perforces anyone whom he grants the privilege of residence. And this is why Jewish existence in Europe from post-Roman times until modernity has been dependent on compacts, explicit or implicit, with the ruling powers.

but the enlightenment has set in motion a chain of events which will result in the evolution of the modern nation state, a political entity that will seek philosophical legitimacy by rooting the authority of the rulers in the rights of the governed. What we know as citizenship cannot be separated from government in the modern era, and so emancipation as Mendelssohn indicated in his work Jerusalem, is a test case, for the beliefs of the Enlightenment, which takes us back to France, right on the eve of the Revolution. Now you recall, I hope, the ideological Jew hatred of Voltaire, who viewed the Jews as immutably corrupt in both culture and character. And he represents the attitude within European culture, which sees the Jews as alien and therefore opposes emancipation altogether.

The only solution, in the eyes of Voltaire and his philosophical inheritors, for the Jews in a civil state which rests on the equality of its citizens, is expulsion. The Jews must go elsewhere. Then, there was the view of the Baron de Montesquieu, who held that classic Enlightenment belief that the Jew, like all men, was a product of his environment. and since the Jews' environment of formation for at least the last thousand years has been oppression which produced the immoral, dishonest and frankly ugly Jew he's currently unfit for citizenship this philosophy and how it explains the current state of the Jew is what will underlie the regenerative approach to emancipation the Jew can become a member of European society but first he has to become a European he must be regenerated, shedding all the negative traits that make him a Jew before we can grant him civil rights as a European.

Now we saw this in the last episode in Damm's proposal about the Jews of Germany and as the underlying assumption in Joseph II's Edict of Tolerance and its focus on re-education. So finally, we have a third stance, which was expressed by Mendelssohn in Jerusalem, which is the essence of a purist Enlightenment philosophy. Citizenship is an unconditional right due to all people, not a privilege to be gained in exchange for altering or abandoning our culture. And remember, he insisted on this fact, despite his belief that the Jews indeed needed to be enlightened in his eyes. And so to our story. In 1785, the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Metz, a city in northeastern France, announced a prize essay on the subject, are their means of making the Jews happy and more useful in France.

Now the question was particularly pressing in Metz and the surrounding provinces because they were the home to those 30,000 to 40,000 Ashkenazi Jews whom the Frenchmen found both strange in appearance and problematic in their economic role. And the prize was rewarded three years later to three different men. And what their particular formulas may have been for Jewish happiness are irrelevant to us right now. What matters for our story is that all agreed on a single principle, that the Jews were indeed capable of regeneration, because as one stated so nicely, they were men like ourselves before they were Jews. Oh, thank you. Whatever the royal regime in France planned to do with such thoughts, we'll never know, because within a year of the contest, the Bastille prison was stormed and the Paris Commune declared.

As the story goes, when upon hearing about the storm of the Bastille, Louis XVI asked one of his advisors, is it a revolt? The reply he received was, no, your majesty, it's a revolution. And the next three years were a whirlwind of reordering the sociopolitical structure of France, not to mention the terror that followed in its wake. At the center of this early phase of the revolution was the National Assembly, perhaps best known for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, voted into law on August 27, 1789. Article 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good. Article 2. The goal of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.

Number 3. The principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. Nobody, no individual can assert authority which does not emanate expressly from it. There's much more. But hopefully you can hear just from these first three articles how the birth of the modern nation-state is bound up with the rights of the citizen. And for the Jewish story, our focus is actually on the first article. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good. it would seem that in revolutionary France the era of full Jewish emancipation had already arrived after all, men are free and equal in rights and aren't Jews men before they're Jews? well, in theory perhaps but as we'll see, the common humanity of Jew and non-Jew was not obvious to the assembly in all honesty, it wasn't obvious to the adherence of traditional Judaism either the first attempt to extend the declaration of the rights of man to the Jews occurred only a few months after its publication, but it was quickly tabled due to lack of support.

A month later, advocates succeeded in gaining citizenship for the so-called Portuguese or Spanish Jews. The decisive argument in their favor was that these Jews were culturally and socially already French. They looked French, they spoke French, they were engaged in what was deemed to be productive economic activity. In other words, they had been regenerated, and so could be safely admitted into the new nation. And for two more years, the assembly worked through all of the issues of French society, and there were a lot of them, and among them they returned repeatedly to the status of the Jews. But there were few delegates that advocated to extend the rights of man to the Ashkenazim, and many who voiced the traditional opposition to their strange appearance in parasitic economic ways.

But the issue went beyond the reaction of the French against the appearance and behavior of this or that Jew. It was also a question of what it means to be a Jew. As one delegate declared in the initial debate, I observed, first of all, that the word Jew is not the name of a sect, but of a nation that has laws which it has always followed and still wishes to follow. Calling Jews citizens would be like saying that without letters of naturalization, and without ceasing to be English and Danish, the English and Danish could become French. Now this poses a problem beyond that which Voltaire posed, who saw the individual Jew as irredeemable. It a concern which will plague the existence of the Jew throughout the rise of the civil state that the Jews aren a religion like Christianity we a nation And a fear which will be repeated by many opponents to unconditional emancipation will be that the Jews will become a state within a state, that perhaps by definition one cannot be both a Frenchman and a Jew.

And again, it's a perspective that many traditional Jews will share, not to mention the nationalists who are still a little bit out of sight on the horizon. In the very same debate, the infamous Robespierre argued, the evil qualities of the Jews emanate from the degree of humiliation to which you have subjected them. Any citizen who fulfills the conditions you have laid down has the right to public office. His was the voice of regeneration, that the Jew act like any other Frenchman, and he will be a full citizen. But still no resolution was reached. Until finally, in the closing days of the National Assembly, on September 27, 1791, Adrien Jean-François Dupont made the following declaration. I believe that freedom of worship no longer permits any distinction to be made between the political rights of citizens on the basis of their beliefs, and I believe equally that the Jews cannot be the only exception to the enjoyment of these rights, when pagans, Turks, Muslims, even Chinese, men of all the sects in short, are admitted to these rights.

In other words, in his eyes, in order to complete the revolution, the Jews must be set free. And in the wake of deport-stirring words, the opposition was finally shouted down, and a decree of complete emancipation was declared. Now, despite the widespread misgivings of the delegates. The unconditional model of emancipation had won the day. The members of the National Assembly accepted the notion that it was impossible to have a society in which all men are given equal rights and status, except the Jews. The news from France spread like wildfire, and was of course reported with exaltation in Hama'asef, I hope you recall that's the Hebrew language journal of the Berlin Enlightenment, and it was celebrated by the Maskelim throughout Europe.

However, their excitement was soon suppressed in the name of patriotism, as revolutionary France went to war basically with the rest of Europe. Because though it was the National Assembly that granted French Jews citizenship, it would be the armies of Napoleon which carried the notion of emancipation throughout Europe. The French Revolution may have liberated the Jews, but it did not assimilate them. In fact, what made the Declaration of the National Assembly so radical was that it chose that pure philosophy over the regeneration model which was widely held to be the only way to a successful integration of the Jews into European society. And in truth, in the chaos which followed the initial phase of the revolution, it became clear that the model of unconditional acceptance of the Jews was to most French, well, unacceptable.

Now, I'm not going to detail the progress of the revolution. It's not the place to do that. Suffice it to say that the phase guided by the National Assembly culminated with the execution of King Louis XVI. Then years of external war and internal terror followed until ultimately Napoleon Bonaparte emerged as first citizen, protector of the revolution, and finally, emperor of France. But was Napoleon good news for the Jews? And as usual, it depends on who you ask. At first, it's clear he was hailed as a liberator. During his campaigns in Italy, he tore open the ghetto gates, and in many of the conquered territories, the legislators he created followed in the footsteps of the National Assembly in granting citizenship to the Jews.

There's even a legend that during his Egyptian campaign, he issued a proclamation inviting all the Jews of Asia and Africa to gather under his flag in order to reestablish the ancient Jerusalem. But back home in France, things were a little less straightforward. Napoleon had already pulled back from much of the radical momentum of the revolution. He'd signed a concordat with the Catholic Church in 1801, and he'd begun to retreat from the unconditional model of Jewish emancipation. He felt that a certain measure of reform in the Jewish religion was needed before the Jews could become Frenchmen in anything but name. The barriers which separated Jew from non-Jew, which are frankly so fundamental to Jewish culture and religion, must fall in order to assimilate this foreign people into the national body.

And unlike the Muskeum of Berlin, Napoleon was not interested in a slow educational process. In April 1806, the emperor summoned an assembly of Jewish leaders, the lay and rabbinic notables of France, and he presented them with a set of 12 questions. And soon, realizing that if the deliberations of such a body were going to be authoritative to the Jews, it had to consist primarily of rabbis. Napoleon directed that assembly to invite all the rabbis of Europe to convene for a new Sanhedrin. That's the name of the Jewish high court that had ceased to exist back in late antiquity. And in fact, this was its first reconvention since late antiquity, if you could call it such. And his goals were clear. I quote, The principal aim in view was to protect the Jewish people, to come to the help of the countryside and to free some departments from the disgrace of having become vassals to the Jews.

The second aim is to weaken, if not to destroy, the Jewish people's inclination to such a great number of practices which are contrary to civilization and to the good order of society in all the country of the world. The evil must be stopped through obstruction. It must be obstructed by the transformation of the Jews. And so, 71 delegates were dutifully assembled. Two-thirds of them were rabbis, one-third laymen, largely from France in the end, and also the Western German territories. And at their heads sat the noted Talmudic scholar, Rabbi David Zinsheim of Strasbourg. And here's a sample of the questions which they faced. Is it lawful for Jews to have more than one wife? Is divorce allowed by the Jewish religion?

May a Jew marry a Christian? In the eyes of the Jews are non-Jewish Frenchmen considered as brothers or as strangers? Do the Jews born in France and treated by the law as French citizens acknowledge France as their country? Are they bound to defend it? Are they bound by its laws? There's more, including a number of questions about usury, which was an issue of significant concern to the French. But the general thrust of the questions is clear. Are you Jews who happen to live in France? Or are you Frenchmen of the Jewish persuasion? Napoleon's aim was rapid assimilation, and he wanted an official sanction for his plan. He expected the rabbis to give him a clear Jewish answer to which he could point when he made the citizenship, which had already been granted, conditional on the reform of the Jewish religion.

Now, I've got to tell you, I don't envy this Sanhedrin. The emperor was not known for tolerance of disagreement, and these men were surely savvy enough to sense that both their personal and national survival might just be on the line. However, later historians would not be overly kind to the men of Napoleon Sanhedrin, especially the nationalist historians. As it says on the website of the World Zionist Organization, the French Jews told the emperor just what he wanted to hear. All the Jews were cowed, defining themselves as Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion, hair-splitting and somersaulting their way out of the situations in which Jewish custom or law contradicted French law, these Jews ripped Judaism from its moorings.

Ouch. That's a judgment. Now, other historians would be less judgmental, claiming that the rabbis of the Sanjahandran didn't yield any real ground, and frankly that they used all the Talmudic logic at their disposal to give an honest answer which would still pacify the emperor. Because even on the critical question of intermarriage, which Napoleon was particularly anxious that they endorse, they stated simply that marriages between Jews and Christians were valid civilly and promised that no excommunication would be imposed against those who entered into them. But no matter how we judge the Sanhedrin, one thing is clear. In order to be Jews in the modern state of France, the national, and even really the binding communal elements of tradition, must be left behind.

And it's for this very reason that in early history of the Reform Jewish movement identified Napoleon Sanhedrin as a crucial precursor to their own philosophy in its suggestion that France was French Jews' native country and that rabbis should have no jurisdiction in civil or judicial matters. And though there were bumps on the road ahead, Be it under Napoleon or under the restored monarchy which replaced him, the Jews of France were on the fast track for becoming the most assimilated in Europe. It was a resounding victory for the cause of regeneration. And as Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre had declared back in the initial debate of the National Assembly, the existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.

the Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals. But when that happens, will they still be Jews? Meanwhile, back in Berlin, right? So we left the story of the Berlin Enlightenment on a somewhat triumphant note. If you recall, Yitzchak Eichel, Naftali Wellesley, and the other members of the Dor HaMaaswim, that generation that followed Moses Mendelsohn had determined that the path to emancipation lay through cultural transformation, and as we're labeling it now, through regeneration. They were looking to shape a new Jew for the modern era, rooted in biblical Hebrew, guided by universal morality, and engaged with the world as a whole. And they understood that the primary tool for this project was education.

And in the second half of the 18th century in fact new schools began to spring up throughout Prussia and the Austrian Empire The Maasef continued to be a central voice of the ideologically motivated Maskelim But for many German Jews a Hebrew-language journal which claimed to serve as a vehicle of enlightenment was an oxymoron. Consciously or not, large parts of German Jewry had internalized the model of emancipation through regeneration, and they were looking to join general culture, not move deeper into their own. And so, one sign of this shift was that in 1806, Hamasef was joined and in many ways replaced by the German language, Journal Shulamit, a journal for the advancement of culture and humanity in the Jewish nation.

And in fact, it might just be that the cautious and still largely traditional nature of these early enlightened educators caused them to move too slowly to prevent disaster. Beginning with the products of the intellectual salons of the 1770s, a wave of conversion swept German Jewry in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was so severe that the 19th century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz would call it the Tauf Epidemie, the epidemic of conversion. At its height, one in seven Jews were leaving Judaism to join Christian society. and it's true, conversion is not a new phenomenon at this point but the Tauf epidemic was different this was no longer a trickle of Jews who lived a marginal existence converting in hopes of better life this was now the economic and intellectual elite because in the generation following Mendelssohn the Masculin had progressively come to see Jewish practices as superfluous in the face of the religion of reason and even harmful insofar as they were practically speaking the chief barrier which stood between the Jew and full participation in non-Jewish society.

And so in the schools they built, the focus was on subjects which would prepare young Jews for citizenship in non-Jewish society. Their approach to Jewish learning was selective at best, emphasizing the universal moral doctrines of Judaism, and often leaving out entirely the classic Talmudic and Halachic foundations which actually allowed one to live as a Jew in the world. And thus, a generation was born for whom non-observance of the law was a defining characteristic of enlightenment. But there was still a tension, because though many found the practices of traditional Judaism increasingly irrelevant, they still saw the tradition as a legitimate model for being Jewish. I mean, hadn't their hero Mendelssohn himself insisted that the law was binding on all Jews?

There's not yet a coherent philosophy of reform which could offer a systematic alternative. And so educators picked and chose as they saw fit. And the hallmark of non-observance was laxity rather than ideology. And in fact, many of the converts of this era were not seeking Christianity as a religious alternative. They were just rejecting a Judaism that they saw as outmoded. What they really wanted was access to the non-Jewish society, which they had already partially joined, and for which they had been prepared by the schools of the Maskelim, and an enlightened version of Christianity didn't seem too high a price to pay. As the poet Heinrich Heinz said before his own conversion in 1825, becoming Christian was simply the entry ticket to European culture.

In 1799, David Friedlander, a disciple of Mendelssohn while he lived, actually published an anonymous proposal suggesting that the Jews of Germany would join en masse the Protestant Church if they could be allowed to keep their reservations about Christian dogma, meaning not accepting the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, and be allowed to confess only to the religion of nature. Needless to say, even the most enlightened of Christian pastors was unwilling to accept conversion on the basis of abandoning a core principle, Christian belief. But they weren't afraid of suggesting such a path to the Jews. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the founding father of modern liberal Christian theology, actually gave the most telling response to Friedlander.

He was a regular in the Jewish salons of his day, and well familiar with the cultural struggles of Berlin Jewry. And Schleiermacher was more than happy to have the Jews convert, but not on the basis of undermining Christianity. Therefore, he suggested that the best path to widespread civil emancipation was for the Jews to establish a reformed sect, founded on the moral doctrines of Judaism, and stripped of the traditional beliefs and practices which prevented the Jews from actually joining Christian society. Ironically, it may have been this idea, if not his actual suggestion, which stemmed the tide of conversion. At the very least, there were Jewish leaders who began to sense the need for a reformation of what it meant to be Jewish.

And perhaps at first unconsciously, they began to formulate a model of Judaism which would allow them to be Jews at home and men in the world. They were looking to regenerate the Jews, just like everybody else. An example is very telling. In 1806, the journal Shul Amit published an anonymous article which offered a revolutionary new perspective on the classic Jewish concept of Messianic redemption. It said that the Talmudic sage Shmuel of Nardia taught There's no difference between this world and the world of the Messianic era other than the servitude of Israel to the nations. Now traditionally, the Jews had pictured the end of exile as a return to sovereignty into our land and the rebuilding of the temple.

Freedom from the subjugation of the nations means a rebirth of our independent national existence. But, as we saw explicitly with Napoleon Sanhedrin, and we can sense underground in the actions of the German masculine, national existence is increasingly seen as a medieval throwback. To these reformers, the Jew in the modern era is an individual, one who joins the non-Jew as a citizen of a state. they may differ in their confessional faith but they're members of the same nation and so the author of the article suggested that the proper understanding of Shmuel's statement that the only difference between this world and the messianic era is our servitude to the nations is actually emancipation by becoming equal citizens of the nations of Europe the Jews are freed from subjugation and then there's no longer any need for a vision of redemption bound up with an actual redeemer who will lead the exiled nation back to Zion, reign as king, and restore the glory of the temple, all of which struck the modern ear as simply fantastic.

If we're willing to give up on such myths, says the author of the article in Shulamit, and find our home where we are, then the messianic era is already upon us. Emancipation is redemption. and if emancipation depends on regeneration, on abandoning those aspects of Judaism which are a barrier to joining modern society, is that such a high price to pay for redemption? So as I said, it was the armies of the emperor which spread the ideals of the French Revolution across Europe. In 1807, following the defeat of Prussia, Napoleon created the Kingdom of Westphalia on a large chunk of German land, and he placed his brother Jerome on the throne as king. And there Napoleon enforced the first modern written constitution on Germany, liberating the serfs, granting equal rights to all.

And only a year later, the kingdom passed Germany's first laws granting Jews equal rights. Together with these rights, the Jews were organized into a formal community, the royal Westphalian consistory of the Israelites, and Israel Jacobson was chosen as its president. The choice may have seemed odd to many Jews at first. After all, Jacobson was not a rabbi. He was a businessman and a wealthy philanthropist. And though he was a community leader, he was far from universally loved. In his youth, Jacobson absorbed a traditional Jewish education. But his later readings of Mendelssohn and other non-Jewish Enlightenment philosophers led him to the belief that change was required if the Jewish people were going to join fully in the modern era.

This should sound familiar. In 1801, in fact, he had established a school in Cisen based on the principles of egalitarianism and religious pluralism in education. It actually served both the Christian and Jewish children of the town for a couple hundred years. It was here that he first introduced into Jewish services the pipe organ, German hymns preaching in the vernacular and other innovations that would eventually lead to what's known in Jewish history as the Temple Controversy. It's a story that we'll look at, actually, when we discuss the rise of the Reform movement as a whole. But it is enough for now to tell us why Jacobson was chosen as the head of the Westphalian consistory. Because this consistory was not unique.

Throughout his conquered domains, Napoleon was pushing the model of regeneration, of transforming the Jews into modern Europeans in order that they could be happy, productive citizens of the modern state. And the Jewish communal organizations he created were his tool. They were expected to reform the Jews to change their behavior, their appearance, and to redistribute their economic structures. And he found many Jews happy to lend a hand. The later founders of the reform movement will claim Jacobson as a precursor, if not actually one of their own. But in truth, he represents this difficult era in which he lived. His general worldview was still traditional. He may have offered a piecemeal reform, but he didn't offer a philosophical alternative to traditional Judaism.

But nevertheless, Jacobson felt the full wrath of the identity he dared to challenge. People refused to pay their taxes to the consistency, and the heads of Jewish communities near and far condemned even the mild changes he tried to advance. And you have to remember that the principle every action has an equal and opposite reaction is not just a foundation of physics, it applies to society as well. And as the notion of regeneration gained traction eventually flowering into a coherent philosophy of reform so a traditionalist stance began to develop which will eventually emerge as orthodoxy In order to understand the coming wave of orthodoxy, and indeed the struggles which characterize the Jewish people to this very day, we have to make a distinction between traditional and traditionalist society.

The great sociologist Max Weber defines a traditional society as one whose acceptance of tradition as a source of authority is unquestioned. We do what we do because this is what we do, and who would do otherwise anyway? But maintaining a loyalty to tradition in the face of the massive changes of modernity, and especially now when the option of emancipation based on regeneration is being dangled before our very eyes demands a different stance altogether. A traditionalist society, one which will ultimately become orthodoxy, adheres to tradition as a source of authority in a self-conscious act of commitment. Now, you should know, a significant amount of evolution and cultural amalgamation can actually be assimilated by traditional society.

Traditional society amongst the Jews looked very different 1,500 years ago than it did five. That slow pace of change in pre-modern times, the limited interest in critical perspective on traditional practice, which characterizes such societies, and their unquestioned authority, actually gives them surprising flexibility. But in contrast, the deliberate nature of the choice of a traditionalist society, deliberate and self-aware nature of such a choice, To reject the alternatives requires a far more conservative stance. And this is why the mantra of the traditional society, which begins to emerge together with the Haskalah, is, anything new is forbidden by the Torah. It's a play on words, actually, coined by the great rabbinic leader of the early 19th century, Rav Moshe Sofer, best known as the Chatham Sofer.

the original meaning is a rabbinic phrase which deals with the prohibition against eating the new season's grain until the proper time but under the guidance of the chatam sofer it became a rallying cry against change itself as the great sage said in one of his shuvot, his responsa it is necessary to be one who preserves the Torah our sages warn against those who provide an opening and seek leniencies for the radicals of our people who desire them If these radicals find a minute crack, they will greatly expand it into a breach. Therefore, it is best to elevate and exaggerate the nature of the prohibition. In other words, even if something might have been permissible to change, now, because of our opposition to change itself, it becomes forbidden.

Hadash Asur Min HaTorah And we can hear in his word already the echoes of the culture of stricture, which is a defining characteristic of orthodoxy down to this day. In 1806, the Chatham Sofer founded Yeshiva in Pressburg. Notice the date. Just as the Maskilim were marshalling the tools of education to regenerate the Jews of Europe, the rabbis began to marshal them in order to preserve the world from which they came. Now, the emergence of a competitor to traditional Judaism is hardly a new phenomenon in our story. from Christianity to the Karaites and others we don't even need to get into, there have always been those who claim to represent rival traditions and claim for their traditions greater authority.

What's new now is that modernity, and ultimately the reform movement that embodies it, will assert the idea that tradition itself should be abandoned and change embrace. When the alternative to traditionalists is progressive, then change itself becomes the primary threat. And thus, the Chatham Sofer pushed the idea that change itself had to be opposed. Now, ironically, this claim to unchanging traditionalism is one of the greatest innovations ever in Judaism. And as a response to modernity, it will threaten to stick the emerging Orthodox movement into reactionary posture. And we're going to speak more in a coming episode of the actual reform in Orthodox movements which will take form out of these competing instincts to regenerate or to preserve.

But for now, there's one last element in the mix of European Jewry, which we haven't mentioned for some time, and they'll take us back to Napoleon. In 1812, Napoleon's Grand Army invaded Russia. It was the final stage in the Emperor's ultimate goal of liberating Europe by bringing it under his control. And as the liberator approached, Rabbi Schnur Zalman of Liadi, that founder of Chabad Chassidut, the disciple of the great Magid, who we last saw in his defense of Chassidut against the Vilna Gaon, wrote to one of his disciples, If Bonaparte will be victorious, Jewish wealth will increase, and the prestige of the Jewish people will be raised, but their hearts will disintegrate and be distanced from their Father in Heaven.

But if Alexander, meaning the Tsar of Russia, will be victorious, although Israel's poverty will increase, and their prestige will be lowered, their hearts will be joined, bound and unified, with their Father in Heaven. And the Alt-Rebbe didn't stop short at spiritual predictions. He sent the very same Hasid to whom this letter was addressed, Reb Moshe Meiselish of Vilna, to serve as a translator and spy in the French general command. And there's no question that Reb Shnur Zalman shared the Chatham Sofer's evaluation of the threats of modernity which would follow in Napoleon's wake. And he also recognized the material benefits that attracted the masculine, the wealth and the grandeur of the Jewish people would indeed increase.

But the Rebbe felt that redemption belonged in the hands of the Messiah and not in the hands of the Liberator, and that it was better to suffer than to fall prey to a false Messiah. It seems, however, not all of the Tzaddikim agreed. Some of the rabbis believed that the freedom which followed in the waking Napoleon was an expression of God's will. And in fact, there's a legend, which the Hasidim like to tell, of a contest that took place on the morning of Rosh Hashanah between Rabbi Schnur Zalman and the Magid of Kosnitz. And they were battling to decide the outcome of Napoleon's war against Russia. Now you should know, according to tradition, the sounding of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish New Year, affects God's coronation as king of the universe and specifically as master of human affairs for the entire coming year.

And each of these two Rebis, with their very different perspective on what ought to come in the battle between Napoleon and the Tsar, endeavored to be the first to sound the shofar in that fateful year of 5573, that's 1812, and through this to influence the outcome of the war and perhaps of Jewish history. The Magi of Koshnitz arose well before dawn, dunked himself in the mikveh, and began his prayers at the earliest possible hour, speeding through them in order to reach the moment of sounding the shofar. But he'd already been defeated, because Rav Schnur Zalman actually deviated from the common practice altogether and sounded the shofar at the crack of dawn before he even prayed. The Litvak, as the other Hasidim called Rav Schnur Zalman, has bested us, said Rabbi Yisrael Kuznitz to his Hasidim.

And indeed, Napoleon's army would dissolve on the steppes of Russia, and much of the liberty he brought to Europe would be rolled back at the Council of Vienna, which reordered the continent after his total defeat in 1815. And that would bring to close the first phase in the struggle for Jewish emancipation. The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, wouldn't reach the Jews of Russia in their pale of settlement until mid-century, and will tell its story when the time is right. But I wanted to end this episode here, not just because it's a good story and why not, because you have to know that aside from this struggle between the progressive and the traditional, between regeneration and preservation, there's always another force at play in Am Yisrael, and that's the mythic creative.

Don't forget, the story that I'm telling, the Jewish story, is a story of the development of consciousness in its historical context. And the tale of these two dueling rabbis shouldn't be discounted as a fantasy of the unenlightened. In terms of consciousness, the Baal Shem Tov taught us a very important lesson. And in terms of its role in modernity, he took the great philosopher of the Enlightenment, Kant, to a whole new level. The philosopher may have turned the tables on objective knowledge. Kant was famous for rooting knowledge and experience in the subjective as opposed to the external objective. But when the holy Baal Shem Tov taught his Hasidim that where our thoughts are, there we find ourselves, he taught them that we're not just knowing the world through our subjectivity, that we're creating it, that our consciousness is a partner in creation.

In a real sense, existence itself, says the Baal Shem Tov, is a product of our subjective experience in relationship with the will of the Creator. And it's this stance which offers a power that lies beyond a reaction against the forces of tradition or against the forces of change. Because the Holy Baal Shem Tov offered us an invitation to create a new world together with God. I just want to thank a few people I want to thank all the people who give their hard-earned money to help make this show happen and keep it free and widely available and I want to invite you to join them go right now to robmike.com and you'll see in the upper right hand corner the opportunity to become a patron click that button and follow it through for a little bit of per podcast support you can do it right now I want to thank the folks of the Land of Israel Network for providing a platform which allows me to reach so many people across the world.

I want to thank the Pardes Institute for building an institution that lets me teach so many wonderful Jews. That's p-a-r-d-e-s dot org dot i-l. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.