After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (review)

Abstract

After Emancipation: Jewish Religious to Modernity, by David Ellenson. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004. 547 pp. $35.00. After Emancipation: Jewish Religious to Modernity compiles twenty-three essays that explore what Ellenson calls commonality and adaptability that mark the Jewish condition and Jewish life in the modern situation (p. 19). chapters, which represent a decade's worth of research and writing, focus on five themes: reflections on modernity, the challenge of emancipation, denominational responses, modern responsa, and a concluding section on new initiatives and new directions. While the essays move quickly across historical and disciplinary lines, they tied together by Ellenson's interest in how Jews adapted their Judaism in the face of modernity. After Emancipation opens with an exploration of American Judaism. Here, Ellenson is at his best synthesizing the historiographic contributions of Oscar Handlin, Irving Howe, Arthur Hertzberg, and Charles Liebman to the evolving condition of American Jewry. Contemporary American expressions of Jewish tradition, Ellenson concludes, are viewed by many as bearing an affinity to the positive moral values bequeathed by Enlightenment rationalism to the modern world while at the same time offering a corrective for the fragmentizing effects of that secular tradition (p. 48). In subsequent chapters, Ellenson analyzes the contributions of Jacob Katz and Max Weber to our understanding of the modern period. In the second section of his book, The Challenge of Emancipation, Ellenson introduces a wide and versatile set of source materials for study. He explores the Sefer Meltiz Yosher, Dutch liturgy from the early nineteenth century, the debate over the use of an organ during services in nineteenth-century Prague, and the definition of marriage in mid-nineteenth century Germany. Ellenson's essay documenting the tensions between the Reform movement and German Orthodoxy is especially good, locating the origins of the contemporary debate between the two denominations much earlier than most observers. Denominational Responses comprises five chapters detailing the philosophical approaches of Abraham Geiger, Isaac Meyer Wise, Nehemiah Anton Nobel, and Isak Unna. Ellenson closes this section with an excellent chapter analyzing the curriculum of the Jewish Theological Seminary, offering an institutional history as well as intra-denominational comparison with the Reform Movement's Hebrew Union Colleger-Jewish Institute of Religion (where Ellenson serves as president). …