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The Legacy of Yehiel Jacob Weinberg

Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Woolf

Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Yehiel Jacob Weinberg, 1884–1966
by Marc B. Shapiro
Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 283 pages.



In his classic work, The Italian Renaissance, the eminent British historian Peter Burke introduces his readers to a sociological phenomenon known as “clustering.” The term refers to instances in which a high concentration of intellectual or cultural creativity is found in a place or time where one would not have expected to find it based solely upon considerations of population, economics, social structure, and the like.
Burke was intrigued by the fact that sixteenth-century northern Italy produced a higher concentration of artists and men of letters than any other period or place before or since. The concept of clustering, however, is clearly not limited to Western Eu­rope; Jewish intellectual histo­ry has also had its periods of clustering. In twelfth-century Euro­pe, for example, titans such as R. Jacob Tam, R. Judah Hasid, R. Abraham of Posquieres, Maimonides, R. Abraham ibn Ezra, R. Judah Halevi, and others almost simultaneously lived, created, and changed the face of Judaism for all time. Similarly, the sixteenth century witnessed an unparalleled flourishing of Jewish intellectual creativity in both Eastern Europe and the Ot­toman Empire. It was then that R. Joseph Karo and R. Moses Isserles combined to produce the Shulhan Aruch, a watershed in the development of Jewish law. At the same time, R. Isaac Luria promulgated the mys­tical doctrines which revolution­ized Jewish spirituality and led directly to Sabbateanism and modern Hasidism, and which, according to Gershom Scholem, contributed to the development of other Jewish move­ments and intellectual trends that prospered in the modern era, among them Zionism.
Less well known, though of critical importance for a sober understanding of contemporary Jewish history and culture, is the instance of “clustering” that occurred in Jewish Lithuania from the middle of the nineteenth century until the Holocaust. During this period, a group of brilliant scholars revolutionized talmudic methodology and created the system of yeshivot, which ultimately established its hegemony in the Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe and continues to define the institutions of Orthodoxy to this day. These men and the institutions they established provided a notable portion of the leadership of the Jewish people in the period up to and including the founding of the State of Israel.
It was these scholars who, together with the leaders of Polish and Hungarian Hasidic dynasties, to a large degree determined the responses that Orthodoxy adopted toward Enlightenment, emancipation, Zionism, socialism, anti-Semitism, and all the rest of the ideas, aspirations, and social forces that constituted the challenge of modernity. They set the tone both for the growth and development of twentieth-century Orthodoxy, and for the criticism leveled against it. Understanding their lives and teachings and the circumstances that influenced them is thus not only of academic interest; rather, it is critical for an intelligent appraisal of the state of contemporary Jewry. These rabbis are still a real presence in Orthodox life, and their ideas still influence how today’s Orthodox Jews relate to the wider world—and in many cases, how the wider world relates to them. 
Unfortunately, almost no critical biographies of the Lithuanian rabbis have appeared which would present not only their lives but also the intellectual and historical context in which they lived. True, Immanuel Etkes and Hillel Goldberg have presented authoritative studies of the founder of the Musar movement, R. Israel Sa­lanter; and Shaul Stampfer has provided us with an illuminating examination of the institutional history of the major Lithuanian yeshivot. But aside from some scattered monographs in scholarly publications, no full-fledged, non-hagiographic study exists for such major figures as R. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netziv), R. Israel Meir Kagan (the Hafetz Haim), R. Meir Simha of Dvinsk, R. Yehiel Michel Epstein of Nov­hardok, R. Nota Finkel of Slo­bodka, R. Isaac Elhanan Spector of Kovno, R. Joseph Rosen (the Rogatchover), R. Haim Solo­veitchik, R. Haim Ozer Grod­zensky, and many others. The same is true even for those twentieth-century figures whose influence on Orthodoxy today is most keenly felt. Despite numerous narrowly focused monographs on their lives and writings, there are still no full-scale, balanced, scholarly bio­graphies of R. Abraham Isaac Kook, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, R. Moses Feinstein, R. Aaron Kotler, or R. Abraham Isaiah Karelitz (the HazonIsh).
Scholars and laymen alike, therefore, owe a debt of gratitude to Marc B. Shapiro for providing us with a highly engaging study of the life and writings of R. Yehiel Jacob Weinberg, commonly known as “the SerideiEsh,” from the title of his collected writings. Weinberg, who served as the last director of the famed Hilde­s­heimer rabbinical seminary in Berlin, epitomized what Hillel Goldberg has termed the “transitional figure,” an Eastern European talmudist who went to Berlin in order to absorb, encounter, and grapple with Western culture. Shapiro’s presentation is learned and informative, and despite several methodological lapses which raise questions about some of his conclusions, Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy is nonetheless one of the finest scholarly efforts in the field.
 
As a child, Yehiel Jacob Weinberg was educated in the intellec­tually rich but culturally limited Or­thodox institutions of late nineteenth-century Lithuania. A talmudic prod­­igy in his youth, he studied at the famed Slobodka yeshiva, where he stood out for his brilliance and promise. After a short, unhappy stint in the rabbinate of the town of Pilwishki (and a miserable marriage to the daughter of the town’s previous rabbi), Weinberg went to Berlin, where he pursued the course of secular studies that had begun to interest him already in his days in Slobodka. He was to stay on in Berlin, serving as head of the Hilde­sheimer seminary until its closure in 1938. During that time, he was recognized as the preeminent authority on Jewish law in Germany, and developed an academic career as a scholar of biblical and targumic literatures.
At the same time, Weinberg emerged as a leading advocate of the German approach to traditional Judaism known as neo-Orthodoxy, an ideology that he had openly opposed in his youth. Neo-Orthodoxy (like its American counterpart, “modern Orthodoxy”) affirmed the inherent value of modern culture and advocated the integration of secular learning into the traditional Jewish curriculum. The guiding spirit of neo-Orthodoxy had been the nineteenth-century luminary R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, and it was his heritage that Weinberg championed during his tenure at the Hildes­heimer seminary. After the war (which he passed in unusually benign circumstances), broken in health and spirit by the destruction of all the worlds that had bred him, Weinberg retreated to the small Swiss town of Montreux, where he spent the remainder of his life in self-imposed exile.
Shapiro’s presentation of Wein­berg’s life and times is riveting. To begin with, he is a superb historical researcher. In addition to Weinberg’s writings and the relevant primary and secondary literature, Shapiro gained access to innumerable governmental, newspaper, and private archives, unearthing dozens of fascinating unpublished sources, such as a communal letter sent to Adolf Hitler by the leading lights of German Orthodoxy in October 1933 in the hopes of achieving “a gradual relaxation of the tensions arising from the present situation.” Similarly, he treats his readers to any number of piquant discoveries, such as the fact that Weinberg officiated at the marriage of the renowned Hebrew novelist S.Y. Agnon. Shapiro uses his vast store of data judiciously, giving an account of Weinberg’s life that is both comprehensive and readable. He portrays him as a man torn between competing intellectual and spiritual loyalties. Chief among these, though by no means alone, is the struggle that rent his spirit between his abiding devotion to the Talmud-centered piety of Slobodka and his embrace of Western culture and scholarship. The author, in large part through Weinberg’s own words, depicts an intellectual journey from a passionate advocate of self-sufficient, isolationist Orthodoxy to an equally impassioned champion of engagement with modern culture, and along the way carefully describes the cultural background of Weinberg’s odyssey. Shapiro’s account is moving, vividly detailed, and somewhat suspect.
 
It is, of course, no crime for a biographer to identify strongly with his subject. Yet it seems that Shapiro’s sympathy for modernity leads him to unduly simplify Weinberg’s story, presenting him as a heroic scholar emerging from the darkness of Eastern European Orthodoxy into the light of German neo-Orthodoxy, whose inner struggle with modernity eventually was resolved in favor of Enlightenment. After describing one of Weinberg’s last writings, for example, Shapiro renders the opinion that “Weinberg’s public identification with… German Orthodoxy, at the expense of East European Orthodoxy, was never made clearer.” And when he remarks in the afterword that “Weinberg’s form of Orthodoxy has been forced on the defensive in recent years,” he is surely referring to the modern variety.


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