The Hamburg Temple Controversy. Continuity and a New Beginning in Dibere Haberith

Philipp Lenhard

Source Description

The present source deals with the Foreword to a collection of expert report entitled Dibere Haberith (Words of the Covenant, DH), that the three executive board members (Dajanim) of the rabbinic judicial court of the Hamburg CongregationBaruch Meyer, Jacob Meyer Jaffe, und Michel Israel Speyer– published in the German language in September 1819, in order to respond to the erection of a new Reform synagogue, the "New Israelite Temple Association." In May / June 1819, the collection appeared first in a Hebrew edition, which soon thereafter was supplemented with a German-language edition printed in Hebrew letters. At the “wish of several readers” (Preface to Dibere Haberith), finally there appeared a German-language edition in Latin letters, from which the following textual excerpt is taken – apparently, a part of the readership could no longer read Hebrew. Unlike the Hebrew version, which first and foremost represented a halakhic compendium, the German version was meant for “general use” (Preface to Dibere Haberith) and therefore dispensed with the cross-references to rabbinic sources. A few opinions – for example, that of the Alsatian Rabbi Katzenellenbogen – are completely missing.
  • Philipp Lenhard

The New Israelite Temple Association – the Establishment of Reform Judaism in Hamburg


As early as 1815, the first plans were pre­sented to build a new kind of syn­a­gogue, one that could sat­isfy the re­li­gious needs of ac­cul­tur­ated cir­cles. The syn­a­gogue was to be called a “Tem­ple,” thereby em­pha­siz­ing that the moth­er­land of Ham­burg Jews was no longer Jerusalem but the Hansa city Ham­burg. If the “Tem­ple” now stood in Ham­burg, Jews in mes­sianic times would no longer have to re­turn to the Holy Land to re­build Solomon’s tem­ple, as pre­scribed by the tra­di­tional vi­sion. Si­mul­ta­ne­ously, the nam­ing of the new syn­a­gogue cut the ties to “Zion” and pro­claimed pa­tri­otic loy­alty to the home­land. Ed­uard Kley, a rad­i­cal sup­porter of Re­form, who had gained ex­pe­ri­ence giv­ing ser­mons in Berlin, ar­rived in Ham­burg in 1817 in order to teach in a pri­vately fi­nanced Jew­ish Free School there and to lead the es­tab­lish­ment of the New Is­raelite Tem­ple As­so­ci­a­tion. There­after, plans be­came more con­crete: less than a year later, the New Is­raelite Tem­ple was ded­i­cated on 18 Oc­to­ber, the fifth an­niver­sary of the Bat­tle of the Na­tions at Leipzig, or, as the na­tion­al­ist mind­set would have it, Ger­mans were freed from Napoleon’s yoke. Got­thold Sa­lomon, the rabbi of the tem­ple, spoke ret­ro­spec­tively of “a highly im­por­tant hol­i­day for all Ger­mans.” Got­thold Sa­lomon, Kurzgefaßte Geschichte des Neuen Is­raelitis­chen Tem­pels in Ham­burg während der er­sten 25 Jahre seines Beste­hens, nebst An­merkun­gen und Beila­gen, Ham­burg 1844, p. 6. Con­cise His­tory of the New Is­raelite Tem­ple dur­ing the First 25 Years of Its Ex­is­tence, with Notes and Sup­ple­ments. In the new tem­ple, ser­mons were to be de­liv­ered in Ger­man, an organ was to be in­tro­duced, and nu­mer­ous pas­sages that had mes­sianic echoes of a re­turn to Pales­tine should be elim­i­nated from the prayer books. Re­gard­ing this, see the pro­gram­matic book by Ed­uard Kley and Carl Sigfried Günsburg, Die deutsche Syn­a­goge, Berlin 1817. In 1819 the prayer book in Ham­burg was en­ti­tled “The Or­der­ing of Pub­lic Wor­ship for the Sab­bath and Hol­i­days dur­ing the En­tire Year. Ac­cord­ing to the Prac­tice of the New Tem­ple As­so­ci­a­tion of Ham­burg. Pub­lished by S. J. Fränkel and M. J. Bress­lau.” In con­trast to later Re­form prayer books, it was still bilin­gual, in Ger­man and He­brew.

In ad­di­tion, Protes­tant prac­tices were in­tro­duced into the liturgy; the Bar Mitz­vah now sud­denly be­came the “Con­fir­ma­tion” and Ju­daism be­came a “Church” of “the Fol­low­ers of the Mo­saic Re­li­gion.” See Gründungs-​ und Vere­ini­gung­surkunde des Neuen Is­raelitis­chen Tem­pelvere­ins in Ham­burg. 2. Tebeth 5578, 11. Dezem­ber 1817, in: David Leimdörfer, Festschrift zum hundertjährigen Beste­hen des Is­raelitis­chen Tem­pels in Ham­burg 1818–1918, Ham­burg 1918, pp. 11-15, here p. 11.

Schism in the Jewish congregation


All this was a mon­strous provo­ca­tion in the eyes of the Or­tho­dox rab­binate. The Ex­ec­u­tive Board of the con­gre­ga­tion was deeply split: four of the eight board mem­bers had en­dorsed the statutes of the Tem­ple As­so­ci­a­tion Tempel-​Verband. The re­main­ing four, how­ever, bit­terly op­posed to the Re­form ef­forts. Prob­lem­at­i­cally for them was the fact that the Re­form­ers could rely on good will within the con­gre­ga­tion for their con­cerns. Thus, ac­cord­ing to the Tra­di­tion­al­ists’ view, it was vital to make clear to the con­gre­ga­tion mem­bers that the striv­ings of the Re­form­ers amounted to heresy that ought not be tol­er­ated, let alone sup­ported. Ini­tially, they posted a warn­ing on the ex­te­rior of the syn­a­gogue, but be­cause this seemed to help only a lit­tle, and be­cause sub­mis­sions to the Ham­burg Sen­ate also re­mained with­out ef­fect, Baruch Meyer, Jacob Meyer Jaffe, Michael Wolff Speyer to the Ham­burg Sen­ate, 7. 5. 1819 and to Sen­a­tors Jacob Hin­rich Jenc­quel and Jo­hann Matthias Hasse, 16. 11. 1818, in: StAHH, Sen­at­sak­ten, CL. VII Lit. Lb No. 18 Vol. 7b Fasc. 4 Inv. 1, quoted in: An­dreas Brämer, Ju­den­tum und religiöse Re­form. Der Ham­burger Is­raelitis­che Tem­pel 1817–1938, Ham­burg 2000, foot­note 49. the ex­pert opin­ions of 22 em­i­nent Eu­ro­pean rab­bis were writ­ten down, col­lected, and pub­lished as Dibere Haberith.

Supra-Regional Significance of the Book


The sig­nif­i­cance of the Ham­burg con­tro­versy is demon­strated, not only in that it elicited four writ­ten replies and two brochures pub­lished by the Re­form side, but also by the fact that Or­tho­dox rab­bis from the Ger­man lands (in­clud­ing Bo­hemia and Moravia), Hun­gary, Italy, Poland, the Nether­lands, and France could be won over to in­ter­vene in an ap­par­ently local mat­ter. Be­yond this, what was re­mark­able is the form of the ar­gu­men­ta­tion: al­though the Ham­burg rab­bis had no for­mal au­thor­ity to pro­nounce a herem (ban), they ini­tially ori­ented them­selves to the early mod­ern pe­riod’s dic­tion of ex­com­mu­ni­ca­tion. See the Ham­burg Con­gre­ga­tion Statutes (Ver­sion of 1780), takanah 8, in: Heinz Mosche Graupe, Die Statuten der Gemein­den Al­tona, Ham­burg und Wands­bek, Ham­burg 1873. Thus, the de­c­la­ra­tion of Oc­to­ber 27, 1818, signed by Eck­iva A. Bress­lau, pres­i­dent of the Board of Rab­bis of Al­tona, reads: “Chil­dren of God! Un­law­ful is the path these peo­ple have trod. Guard your­self against any sort of col­lab­o­ra­tion with them.” (DH, p. 16) This man­i­festo, posted pub­licly in the syn­a­gogue, thus en­joined the con­gre­ga­tion, not only to avoid the new syn­a­gogue but also to break off any con­tact with the mem­bers of the Tem­ple As­so­ci­a­tion Tempel-​Verband. As a model for this for­mula, cf., takanah 18 of the Statutes of the Con­gre­ga­tions Wands­bek and Ham­burg of 1708 / 1709, in: Graupe, Die Statuten. It was de­clared no le­git­i­mate part of Ju­daism, but rather a cult.

The effect in Hamburg


Ev­i­dently, this ur­gent ap­peal went un­heeded; the old co­er­cive mea­sures were no longer avail­able to in­vig­o­rate it and it was gen­er­ally dis­obeyed. Nonethe­less, the pub­lish­ers of the book main­tained that the He­brew orig­i­nal had been “met with un­di­vided ap­proval” (DH, Pref­ace), a claim con­tra­dicted by the state­ment that “for sev­eral years now, ir­re­li­gios­ity and free­think­ing have in­creased among us” (DH, p. 1). The rab­bis as­serted that for a long time it had been a mat­ter of “error on the part of in­di­vid­ual broth­ers” (DH, p. 2), but they at the same time con­ceded that now, all at once, “so­ci­etal as­so­ci­a­tions” had been es­tab­lished (DH, p. 2), which com­manded their in­ter­ven­tion all the more ur­gently. The Or­tho­dox lead­er­ship of the con­gre­ga­tion was no longer deal­ing with in­di­vid­ual Re­form­ers but rather with groups that were seek­ing to in­sti­tu­tion­al­ize their ideas, thereby call­ing into ques­tion the ex­ist­ing power struc­ture.

A question of the authority to define


Not least at stake for the rab­bis was the mo­nop­oly over de­cid­ing be­tween “cor­rect” and “false,” “Jew­ish” and “un-​Jewish.” In prac­ti­cal terms this cri­sis over the au­thor­ity to de­fine ex­pressed it­self in the litur­gi­cal re­form in­tro­duced by the Tem­ple As­so­ci­a­tion Tempel-​Verband: ac­cord­ing to the view of the Tra­di­tion­al­ists, it was not just a mat­ter of al­ter­ing “unessen­tial cer­e­monies” (DH, p. 3) but rather “an es­sen­tial part of our Order of Prayer” (DH, p. 3). Re­mark­ably, the rab­bis and the Re­form­ers shared the as­sump­tion that there were dif­fer­ences be­tween es­sen­tial and unessen­tial – a premise, in prin­ci­ple, that con­firmed the liturgy could be changed. What di­vided the two par­ties was the ques­tion of what was to be re­garded as “es­sen­tial.” Es­pe­cially of­fen­sive to the pub­lish­ers of Dibere Haberith was that Re­form did not issue from the spirit of Ju­daism, but rather sought to adapt to the “spirit of the times,” above all “the forms prac­ticed by those of other faiths” (DH, p. 3) – that is, tai­lor­ing them to the Chris­t­ian liturgy.

Al­though the rab­bis an­nounced their readi­ness to give up “the unessen­tial,” they em­phat­i­cally de­nied that the mem­bers of the Tem­ple As­so­ci­a­tion had any right to im­ple­ment such changes. They had “nei­ther the proper au­thor­ity, nor the re­quired knowl­edge to carry out such un­der­tak­ings” (DH, p. 3). “Solely au­tho­rized” (DH, p. 4) to im­ple­ment re­forms are trained rab­bis, the suc­ces­sors to the “men of the Great Synod” (DH, p. 4) – that is, the an­cient San­hedrin, the supreme Jew­ish court that stood in Jerusalem.

The Two-Pronged Strategy of the Orthodox rabbis


To be sure, the au­thors im­plored mem­bers of the con­gre­ga­tion to stay away from the Tem­ple, but they had to ac­knowl­edge that in the pre­vi­ous months the Re­form liturgy ac­tu­ally had aroused great in­ter­est. There­fore, they fol­lowed a two-​pronged strat­egy – no mat­ter how dim the prospects may have been: they did not only turn to the mem­bers of the con­gre­ga­tion, but rather also to the Re­form­ers them­selves, of­fer­ing a re­turn to the bosom of the con­gre­ga­tion, if they would set aside their plans. At the close of the text, the tone changed from harsh to con­cil­ia­tory: “Far be it from us to preach hate and per­se­cu­tion of our stray­ing broth­ers” (DH, p. 13). The con­trast in strate­gies is par­tic­u­larly ap­par­ent in the older edi­tion, writ­ten largely in He­brew, that ends with a printed de­c­la­ra­tion in which the pub­lish­ers once again de­ci­sively em­pha­size that they will en­gage in no dis­cus­sion with the Re­form­ers and “none [of their] refu­ta­tions will be re­sponded to.” Bejt din tzedek be-​hamburg, eleh di­vrej ha-​brit, Al­tona 1819, p. 132. They were pre­pared to re­ceive the os­ten­si­ble heretics “with open arms in broth­erly fash­ion back into the sa­cred Covenant” (DH, p. 13).

Dibere Haberith – Pivot point between tradition and modernization


The text re­flects in con­cen­trated form how an Or­tho­doxy, whose for­mer power base was al­ready erod­ing and there­fore had to re­order it­self, re­acted to the chal­lenge of the Re­form­ers. In 1799, Raphael Cohen, chief rabbi of the old Triple Con­gre­ga­tion Dreige­meinde of Ham­burg, Al­tona, and Wands­bek, had his power to issue the ban with­drawn by the gov­ern­ment, where­upon he re­signed. The pub­lish­ers of Dibere Haberith had taken upon them­selves the task of car­ry­ing tra­di­tional Ju­daism for­ward, but they lacked the so­cial and po­lit­i­cal basis for doing so — a con­gre­ga­tion’s au­ton­omy. In view of the con­tin­u­ing process of so­cial trans­for­ma­tion, and with­out the tra­di­tional dis­ci­pli­nary and co­er­cive mea­sures at their dis­posal, they were no longer in a po­si­tion to main­tain their ab­solute au­thor­ity against the re­formist and lay el­e­ments of the con­gre­ga­tion. The Ham­burg Tem­ple con­tro­versy there­fore con­sti­tuted a piv­otal point in the con­fronta­tion be­tween the so-​called Tra­di­tion­al­ists and Re­form­ers. Viewed su­per­fi­cially, the Dibere Haberith col­lec­tion rep­re­sents a form of Ju­daism that de facto could no longer exist, given the dis­so­lu­tion of the con­gre­ga­tion’s au­ton­omy. Con­sid­ered more care­fully, the present doc­u­ment al­ready clearly in­di­cates the mod­ern­iza­tion process that led in the fol­low­ing years to a self-​described “Mod­ern Or­tho­doxy” or “Neo-​Orthodoxy.” Thus, it seems ap­pro­pri­ate to read Dibere Haberith, not only as a doc­u­ment of a wan­ing era, but also as the pre­lude to the form­ing of a mod­ern Or­tho­doxy.

New developments within Orthodoxy


For a long time, re­search on Or­tho­dox rab­bis at the turn of the 19th cen­tury has por­trayed them as mired in the past; that view de­rives from the way Re­form­ers saw them. Thus, Got­thold Sa­lomon char­ac­ter­ized – the pub­lisher of Dibere Haberith as one of the “hyper-​Orthodox,” men who “with their opin­ions and man­ner of think­ing be­longed in an ear­lier cen­tury.” Sa­lomon, Kurzgefaßte Geschichte, p. 9. They were men whom the times had “passed over with­out a trace.” ibid. Even Abra­ham Geiger held firmly to the idea that the rab­bis were still “wan­der­ing up blind al­leys with an in­her­ited, con­fused ca­su­istry.” Abra­ham Geiger: Der Ham­burger Tem­pel­streit, eine Zeit­frage. Bres­lau 1842, p. 2.

The sharp con­trast be­tween an en­light­ened moder­nity and an al­legedly me­dieval Or­tho­doxy played to re­li­gious po­lit­i­cal in­ter­ests; but it ob­scured the trans­for­ma­tional processes within Or­tho­doxy it­self. In this re­gard, the Fore­word to Dibere Haberith does not sim­ply re­flect a cling­ing to con­ser­v­a­tive po­si­tions that would like every­thing to stay the same as it was; it is also marked by de­ci­sive in­no­va­tions. These begin with the use of the Ger­man lan­guage; up to this time, no rab­binic rul­ings ap­peared in Ger­man. The ren­der­ing into Ger­man im­plied an adap­ta­tion to cen­tral con­cepts of the Re­former camp, above all in the use of the word “Is­raelite” in­stead of “Jew.” The word choice cer­tainly re­ferred to the He­brew bib­li­cal des­ig­na­tion “b’nej jis­rael" (Sons of Is­rael), but it was taken by the pub­lic as a re­treat from the idea of the ex­is­tence of a spe­cific “Jew­ish na­tion.” The sep­a­ra­tion of the re­li­gious di­men­sion of Ju­daism from the eth­nic is not what the rab­bis, in con­trast to the Re­form­ers, had in mind, as is borne out by the con­tin­ued usage of con­cep­tions, such as “Peo­ple,” “Na­tion,” “Prog­en­i­tors,” and “Fore­fa­thers.”

Developments after Dibere Haberith


In this re­spect, the text ought to be un­der­stood as a con­nect­ing link be­tween the old and the new Or­tho­doxy. This can also be traced chrono­log­i­cally: in 1821, just two years after the pub­li­ca­tion of Dibere Haberith, Isaac Bernays be­came the rabbi of the Ham­burg con­gre­ga­tion. The sec­u­larly ed­u­cated Bernays adopted sev­eral sym­bols from Re­form Ju­daism, such as the winged neck­tie and the cas­sock. He gave ser­mons in Ger­man, cham­pi­oned the Re­form ped­a­gogy in Jew­ish schools, and called him­self “Chacham” (the Wise One), a des­ig­na­tion for a rabbi in the tra­di­tion of Sephardic Ju­daism and that was thought of as par­tic­u­larly en­light­ened in his day. How­ever, at the same time he de­manded a rigidly ha­lakhic ob­ser­vance and held a clear po­si­tion against the Re­form­ers. Bernay’s friend of many years, Jakob Etlinger, who suc­ceeded Eck­iva A. Bress­lau as the chief rabbi of Al­tona, founded to­gether with Samuel Enoch, the di­rec­tor of the Jew­ish sec­ondary school in Al­tona, the pe­ri­od­i­cal, “Der treue Zionswächter” [“The Loyal Guardian of Zion”]. It ap­peared weekly (later, bi-​weekly) in Ger­man and dis­sem­i­nated the po­si­tions of Or­tho­doxy, rep­re­sent­ing both out­wardly and styl­is­ti­cally a mod­ern media in­stru­ment within the plu­ral­ist bour­geois pub­lic sphere. Cer­tainly, the ori­gins of mod­ern Or­tho­doxy can­not be traced back in lin­ear fash­ion to the Ham­burg Tem­ple con­tro­versy. How­ever, lines of that de­vel­op­ment can be dis­cerned, sug­gest­ing that the Fore­word to Dibere Haberith ought not be read sim­ply as a doc­u­ment of con­ti­nu­ity, but also, and in the same mea­sure, as a new be­gin­ning.

Select Bibliography


Andreas Brämer, Judentum und religiöse Reform. Der Hamburger Israelitische Tempel 1817–1938, Hamburg 2000.
Philipp Lenhard, Volk oder Religion? Die Entstehung moderner jüdischer Ethnizität in Frankreich und Deutschland 1782–1848, Göttingen 2014.

Selected English Titles


David Ellenson, Tradition in Transition. Orthodoxy, Halakha, and the Boundaries of Modern Jewish Identity, Lanham 1989.
Jacob Katz, The Controversy over the Temple in Hamburg and the Rabbinic Assembly in Braunschweig. Milestones in the Development of Orthodoxy, in: ibid. (ed.), Divine Law in Human Hands. Case Studies in Halachic Flexibility, Jerusalem 1998, pp. 216–254.
Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, New York, 1988.
Alan Mittleman, Between Kant and Kabbalah: An Introduction to Isaac Breuer's Philosophy of Judaism: Hermeneutice, Mysticism and Religion, New York 1990.
Gunther Plaut, The Growth of Reform Judaism: American and European Sources, Philadelphia 2015 [50th Aniversary edition].

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About the Author

Philipp Lenhard, Dr. phil., is research assistant / academic councilor at the Department for Jewish History and Culture at the Historical Seminary of Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich. His dissertation was published by Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht under the title "A people or a religion? The emergence of modern Jewish ethnicity in France and Germany 1782-1848" in 2014.

Recommended Citation and License Statement

Philipp Lenhard, The Hamburg Temple Controversy. Continuity and a New Beginning in Dibere Haberith (translated by Richard S. Levy), in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, September 21, 2017. <https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:article-24.en.v1> [February 18, 2025].

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.