Rabbi Leo Baeck

Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times

Michael A. Meyer

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812299519
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Jüdische Theologie

Rabbi, educator, intellectual, and community leader, Leo Baeck (1873-1956) was one of the most important Jewish figures of prewar Germany. The publication of his 1905 Das Wesen des Judentums ( The Essence of Judaism ) established him as a major voice for liberal Judaism. He served as a chaplain to the German army during the First World War and in the years following, resisting the call of political Zionism, he expressed his commitment to the belief in a vibrant place for Jews in a new Germany. This hope was dashed with the rise of Nazism, and from 1933 on, and continuing even after his deportation to Theresienstadt, he worked tirelessly in his capacity as a leader of the German Jewish community to offer his coreligionists whatever practical, intellectual, and spiritual support remained possible. While others after the war worked to rebuild German Jewish life from the ashes, a disillusioned Baeck pronounced the effort misguided and spent the rest of his life in England. Yet his name is perhaps best-known today from the Leo Baeck Institutes in New York, London, Berlin, and Jerusalem dedicated to the preservation of the cultural heritage of German-speaking Jewry.Michael A. Meyer has written a biography that gives equal consideration to Leo Baeck's place as a courageous community leader and as one of the most significant Jewish religious thinkers of the twentieth century, comparable to such better-known figures as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. According to Meyer, to understand Baeck fully, one must probe not only his thought and public activity but also his personality. Generally described as gentle and kind, he could also be combative when necessary, and a streak of puritanism and an outsized veneration for martyrdom ran through his psychological makeup. Drawing on a broad variety of sources, some coming to light only in recent years, but especially turning to Baeck's own writings, Meyer presents a complex and nuanced image of one of the most noteworthy personalities in the Jewish history of our age.

Chapter 1

An Unconventional Student and Rabbi

The Background

During medieval times, Jews in Western and Eastern Europe, though their religious customs differed, were almost uniformly observant in their religious practice. They lived in tightly knit communities, their social and spiritual lives focused inward toward their coreligionists. Regardless of the kingdom or duchy in which they dwelled, they were first and foremost Jews—not German, French, English, or Polish. That situation began to change in the late eighteenth century, as Jews in the West increasingly identified with the surrounding non-Jewish culture, which—in some places and among some individuals—was, to some extent, willing to include them. New vistas opened outside Judaism; identities, now comprising Jewish and non-Jewish components, began to split in two as a process of acculturation gained momentum to the west of the Elbe River, separating Western from Eastern Ashkenazi Jews. But within the immense Jewry of Poland, to a much greater extent than in Germany, traditional Jewish life hung on.

Between these two realms, on the border, lay the province of Posen (today, Poznan) with its capital of the same name. In 1793, at the Second Partition of Poland, Posen fell to Prussia, only to return to Poland after World War I. Initally, the political transfer had little effect on Posen’s traditional Jewish life, which remained vibrant in the nineteenth century. The Jewish community had a traditional rabbinical academy (yeshiva), founded by the outstanding Talmud scholar Rabbi Akiba Eger, who had arrived there in 1815. Gradually, however, in the course of the nineteenth century, Western influences began to be felt. The Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), born in Königsberg and Berlin, gained a foothold in Posen: an increasing number of Jews, who had exclusively focused inward under Polish rule, became Germanized and Europeanized, creating an interaction between the old and the new that spawned religious and intellectual ferment. Major figures in Jewish thought who mingled tradition with modernity emerged from this borderland. They included the proto-Zionist rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, as well as the popular historian of the Jews Heinrich Graetz. From the province of Posen came a son whose fame would spread far beyond the Jewish community and beyond the ocean: Haym Salomon, a close associate of George Washington and a major financier of the American Revolution.

It was in the small Posen town of Lissa (today, Leszno), with little more than a thousand Jews, that Leo Baeck was born on May 23, 1873, and given the Hebrew name Uri, followed by the Yiddish Lipmann. His surname, Baeck, was said to be an abbreviation for ben kedoshim, literally “an offspring of holy ones,” but specifically referring to Jews who had undertaken the ultimate sanctification of God’s name by preferring to die rather than give up their Jewish faith. There was a tradition in the Baeck family that an ancestor in medieval times was such a martyr, and this knowledge may well have played a role in the emphasis on martyrdom in Baeck’s writings.

Leo Baeck was one of eleven children, the only one among them to become a rabbi. Growing up in Lissa, he was touched by both the traditional and modern spheres—the inner Jewish world but also the non-Jewish world beyond. Throughout his life, he would strive to integrate a profound sense of Jewish heritage with a striving to harmonize Jewish teaching with universal values. Though not an advocate of Jewish Orthodoxy, he refrained from criticizing expressions of Judaism that were more traditional than his own, just as he respected competing views of Jewish life in modernity. He valued and personally practiced Jewish ritual but did not seek to impose it on others. Baeck’s lifelong desire and ability to mediate among Jewish factions was surely related to the milieu of the place on the border where he was born and grew up. The value he learned to place on the sense of community that reigned in a small town like Lissa would find repeated expression as he moved on to ever larger centers of activity.

The Student

Leo Baeck was the descendant of prominent rabbis on both sides of his family. His father, Rabbi Samuel Bäck (as the name was originally spelled), was a learned Talmudist who held a doctoral degree from the University of Leipzig. Samuel’s interest in Jewish history, uncommon among traditional Jewish scholars, was employed for his contributions to the Jewish Encyclopedia—remarkably, produced in the United States—the publication that long held the field as the most important work of Jewish reference. In 1878, the elder Baeck published a history of the Jewish people and its literature, which was sufficiently popular to achieve three printings. As would be true of his son, who made additions and corrections to the third edition of 1906, the father sought to avoid sectarianism. Bäck presented all religious streams in Judaism as legitimate and bound in a common antagonism to indifferentism and materialism. He recognized the Zionist movement as a positive development in that it reawakened a diminishing sense of Jewish unity.¹ Yet, unlike his son, he eschewed biblical criticism, avoiding the subject by beginning his history with the Babylonian Exile.

Samuel Bäck provided Leo with a thorough education in Jewish sources, in part as his private tutor. Thus for the son, love of his father became entwined with a love for Jewish tradition. Like his father, the young Leo Baeck combined regular Talmud study with a thorough grounding in non-Jewish fields of knowledge. Despite its small-town milieu, Lissa boasted a first-rate academic high school, named after the Czech educational innovator John Amos Comenius. It welcomed Jewish students, who numbered more than sixty by the last decades of the nineteenth century.² Here Leo could lay the foundation for the extensive knowledge of classical languages that he would later display in his scholarly work. He did well there, finishing first in his class and thereby receiving the privilege, no doubt extraordinary for a Jewish student, of delivering the graduation address. The high school also gave young Baeck an early and pleasant contact with non-Jews, which may well have influenced his lifelong disdain for any form of Jewish—or non-Jewish—chauvinism. The living arrangements of the Bäck family may also have been an influence in this regard. Lissa had a small Calvinist community whose pastor owned the Bäck home; out of consideration for the relative poverty of his Jewish tenants, he charged only a minimal rent. It may well have been this early experience with a tolerant and merciful Calvinist pastor that set Baeck on a path of lifelong intellectual respect for the good works–oriented Calvinist form of Protestantism, as opposed to the personal faith–centered Lutheranism that he would encounter in his scholarship.

Many years later, after the destruction of German Jewry, Baeck nostalgically recalled his youth in Lissa. To a fellow survivor from his place of birth, he wrote in 1948: “I think back with deep appreciation of the town of my childhood and youth and of some of the people there, young and old; not least [I think] of the high school and its teachers and students. It is a lost world, but it was indeed a world. Alas, that it will never return.”³ Baeck was seventeen when he left Lissa, determined to become a rabbi, like his father.

Initially, Leo Baeck chose to obtain his rabbinical training at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau (today, Polish Wrocław), in Silesia. Of the three modern rabbinical seminaries in Germany at the time, Breslau’s was middle of the road. As in a typical yeshiva, its students devoted the largest portion of their time to Jewish law as it was anchored in the traditional texts of Judaism. Its founding director, Rabbi Zacharias Frankel, favored the more cloistered environment of a Jewish institution, as opposed to the establishment of Jewish studies within a university, for which more radical rabbinical colleagues had argued. Students prayed together regularly and, like their teachers, were expected to observe the ritual commandments. Although the school published an important scholarly journal, modern biblical criticism was decidedly excluded from its pages. Yet the curriculum included Jewish history and the practical skills that a rabbi would require in a modern congregation, especially the ability to present edifying sermons. The school’s intellectual approach was that Judaism evolved within history and that modern scholarship could reveal that development, especially for the first centuries of the common era, the period of the early Rabbis. Religious reform was therefore precedented and indigenous to Jewish history. But the only form of change held legitimate was the one that occurred within the framework of Jewish tradition, not through an arbitrary advance beyond what Frankel had deemed the “collective will” of the contemporary community.

Leo Baeck entered the Breslau seminary in May 1891, when he was almost eighteen. There, he was among the last students taught Jewish history by the widely read Heinrich Graetz. Like his fellow rabbinical students, he began taking courses simultaneously at the University of Breslau, where he chose philosophy as his major academic field. Surprisingly, he remained in Breslau for less than two years, completing neither his rabbinical education nor his secular studies there. Why he undertook this unconventional move, of which his father seems to have disapproved, has remained unclear.

There are at least three possible explanations, each of which may bear some truth. The first relates to the Breslau seminary itself, where Baeck may have felt constrained by the restrictive atmosphere. This unhappiness may have been conjoined with the wish for a broader exposure to Jewish scholars and a freer academic atmosphere, such as reigned at the Liberal seminary in Berlin, where he now decided to continue his studies for the rabbinate. The Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Educational Institution for the Scientific Study of Judaism), as it was then called,⁴ was devoted to the unfettered and uncompromising study of Jewish texts, including the Bible, while boasting a faculty committed to diverse theologies and varying ritual practice. It saw itself as serving both as a rabbinical seminary for students on the liberal side of the religious spectrum and as an academic institution for incipient Jewish scholars, who would not necessarily become rabbis. Although the Lehranstalt was doubtless attractive to Baeck, another very likely reason for his transfer is that he also wanted to study at the leading university in Germany, which was not that of Breslau but rather the prestigious University of Berlin. Finally, as would become characteristic of Baeck, he may have chosen to attend more than a single seminary, since he did not want his approach to Judaism to rest within but one of the channels in which Judaism then flowed in Germany. We know that while a student in Berlin, he supplemented his studies at the Lehranstalt with courses at a yeshiva run by a local Orthodox rabbi. He was clearly intent on not excluding any of the three branches of modern Judaism from his consciousness as a Jew.

When Leo Baeck came to Berlin in 1893, the wave of antisemitism that had shaken German Jews in the preceding decade and a half was about to evoke the establishment of a major Jewish defense organization, but Jews in the capital widely believed that the hatred had passed its apogee and that a comfortable future for them in Germany was not in doubt. The major challenge in the eyes of the religious leadership was not so much the enmity of non-Jews but the materialism that went along with the rising economic status of a Jewry that was now dominantly urban. In this atmosphere and with no German university open to Jewish studies, the Lehranstalt—among whose first teachers following its founding in 1872 had been Abraham Geiger, the radical Liberal scholar and rabbi, but whose faculty also included teachers of a more traditional persuasion—sought to serve as a center of both serious Jewish research and spiritual guidance. Yet Jewish support for the institution, which received no assistance from the government, was stingy, and its students, mostly from poor backgrounds, were forced to live in poverty. Baeck could earn very modest sums by teaching Judaism to young people but was sometimes forced to feed himself from leftover scraps of bread or rolls from Berlin restaurants, where he also gathered candle stubs for illumination. It was surely an unpleasant regimen but one that prepared him for the severities that would come later in life. Yet despite his privations, Baeck displayed a sense of humor, to which later acquaintances would frequently attest. There is evidence that at this time, he contributed his first published article to a popular satirical weekly, Simplicissimus, whose writers included such leading German literary figures as Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hermann Hesse.⁵

The increasing but incomplete secularization among Berlin Jews meant that whereas few attended religious services regularly, large numbers came to worship at the Jewish High Holidays, more than the synagogues could contain and more than the regularly employed rabbis of the community were able to serve. Consequently, additional religious services were arranged in public facilities, and rabbinical students were assigned to lead them. For three years, from 1894 through 1896, Leo Baeck was called upon to participate in this program. When, in May 1897, around his twenty-fourth birthday and after six years as a rabbinical student, he successfully passed a comprehensive examination at the Lehranstalt, he was certified as a full-fledged rabbi.

Baeck’s progress at the University of Berlin was more rapid. In 1894, he passed a comprehensive doctoral examination in philosophy; a year later, he successfully defended a heavily footnoted dissertation on Benedict Spinoza’s early influence in Germany. Published that same year, this exceedingly erudite work, which draws upon the original Latin versions of Spinoza’s writings, is more historical than philosophical in nature. Although Baeck was a student of philosophy, his later writing would avoid philosophical systems in favor of historical research. He was attracted to Spinoza not so much for his philosophy as for his historical role and influence, perhaps also because, among philosophers of Jewish origin, Spinoza was the best known outside the Jewish sphere. Baeck implicitly sympathized with those who defended this Jew expelled from Amsterdam Jewry in an early modern Germany that was intolerant of his ideas. Proponents of Spinozism in Holland, he noted, could propagate his ideas freely, while crypto-Spinozists in Germany were forced to do so surreptitiously. Baeck was able to show how, without explicit reference to Spinoza, they drew freely upon his ideas. Whereas many, if not most, rabbinical students, who were required by the state to complete an advanced university education, chose to write on strictly Jewish subjects, Baeck, in selecting to write on Spinoza, thereby indicated an unconventional desire to expand his knowledge beyond the Jewish sphere and thus more fully complement his rabbinical studies.

Yet Baeck was never a Spinozist. In a later analysis of Spinoza, he severely criticized him for what his theology left out: he had allowed “history and community to disappear in the face of the absolute.”⁶ Baeck’s own theology, as it developed over time, leaned away from Spinoza and rather in the direction of Immanuel Kant, whom he continued to admire throughout his life. For Baeck, Kant represented German thought at its most elevated. What he admired was not Kantian philosophy per se; rather, he strove to embody what he would later call “the Kantian personality, which stands as the bearer of the moral law, and in loyalty to the commandment finds itself and thereby its freedom.”⁷ What distinguishes his Jewish admirer from Kant is that for Baeck the Kantian sense of duty has its origins in the moral commandment emanating from God, and not in human reason alone. Kant’s ethics fiercely rejected the notion of divine command, arguing instead for the autonomous will of the individual. In sharp contrast, as a believing Jew, Baeck insisted upon the sense of obligation issuing from a transcendent God. “God does not reveal Himself,” Baeck later wrote of God, “but He reveals commandment and grace.”⁸ Like Kant, Baeck found the source of his faith both in nature and in morality—but for him, it was morality that mattered most in religion. With obvious reference to Kant’s famous statement regarding the two sources of inspiration, the starry heavens above and the moral law within, Baeck later wrote: “There is a grandeur in fulfillment of the commandment that is higher than the inspiring world of stars. Or, in other words: the moral law within us means yet more than the starry heavens above us.”⁹

Kantianism was transmitted to Baeck in its later form, neo-Kantianism, as that form was propagated by Hermann Cohen, the Jewish thinker who was more influential for Baeck’s own thought than any other. Baeck did not study personally with Cohen, who, at that time, was not yet teaching at the Lehranstalt in Berlin. He met Cohen only later, in 1912, when Baeck assumed a rabbinate in Berlin.¹⁰ But clearly, he read Cohen’s work, if not during his student days, then certainly thereafter. Cohen was a severe critic of Spinoza on account of the earlier philosopher’s conception of an immanent God who was virtually equivalent to nature. A Spinozistic theology did not allow for the ethical imperative of a transcendent God directed to the free will of human beings. Only such a God, according to Cohen, could create a moral tension within the human spirit and point toward a messianic future in whose establishment human beings played a role. Baeck found Cohen’s message exceedingly appealing and...