Peggy Pearlstein: Good evening, everyone.
I'm Peggy Pearlstein, head of the Hebraic Section in the African
and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress.
Welcome to the 9th Annual Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lecture
on the Hebraic Book.
Our guest speaker tonight is Dr. Marsha Rozenblit,
Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History
at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.
The title of Dr. Rozenblit's talk is "Traditional Judaism or Reform:
The Case of the Mannheimer Prayer Book in 19th century Vienna."
The images that appeared on the screens in front
of you included an image of Rabbi Mannheimer, some of the prayer books
that he edited, as well as other Viennese prayer books.
All of the books are from the collections
of the Library of Congress.
I'm pleased to acknowledge the presence
of Myron Weinstein's family tonight.   His sister Muriel Stern
and her husband Philip [phonetically spelled] and Muriel's son
and daughter-in-law Jonathan Stern
and Kari Wenchler [phonetically spelled].
Myron's older sister, Helen, and her husband Mario were unable
to make the trip from Paris.
I look forward to seeing them next year.
I also welcome Dr. Michael Gruenberger, Director of Collections
at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
who was head of the Hebraic Section from 1985 to 2006,
Mrs. Claire Marwick, whose husband Dr. Lawrence Marwick headed the
Hebraic Section from 1949 to 1979, and Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb,
Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division.
Myron Weinstein served his entire 29-year career at the Library
of Congress in the Hebraic Section, which he headed from 1980
until his retirement in 1984.
I'm grateful to Myron for hiring me in 1982,
first as a 90-day temporary employee,
filling in behind the late Ellen Murphy, who was on maternity leave.
When Ellen decided not to return to work fulltime at the library,
Myron selected me to become Reference Librarian
from among several applicants, and I'm very grateful.
Myron Weinstein was a scholar, linguist, and bibliographer of note,
who published well-received and influential articles on Hebrew books
and manuscripts and scholarly journals
in the United States and Israel.
In 1991 following his retirement, he edited the commentary volume
of the facsimile edition of the Washington Haggada,
a 15th-century illuminated Hebrew manuscript housed
in the Hebraic section of the Library.
The Haggada has been digitized and is freely available
on the Library's Web site.
Previous Weinstein lectures have included Professor Jonathan Sarna
on the Hebrew Book in America, Dr. Bernard Cooperman also a professor
at the University of Maryland
on Isaac Delotta's [phonetically spelled] sermons and the impact
of printing on Italian-Jewish piety, and last year,
a lecture by Zachary Baker on Yiddish-American plays.
Zachary's the curator of Judaica and Hebraica
at Stanford University libraries.
Tonight's lecture is being webcast, and it will be available for viewing
on the Library's Web site in about six weeks.
I'm so very pleased to welcome Dr. Rozenblit tonight
as our guest speaker.
Dr. Rozenblit has been on the faculty
at the University of Maryland since 1978.
That alone will tell you how long she's also used the Library
[laughter] She has served as the Director of the Meyerhoff Center
for Jewish Studies at the University from 1998 to 2003,
and again in 2007 and 2008.
She's currently the Vice President for Programs
of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Dr. Rozenblit is the author of several books, including,
The Jews of Vienna: 1867 to 1914 -- Assimilation and Identity,
and also Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Hapsburg,
Austria During World War I.
Dr. Rozenblit has written over fifteen scholarly articles
on the Jews of the Hapsburg monarchy.
She's currently working on a study of Jews and other Germans
in Moravia, 1848 to 1938.
I would like to welcome Dr. Marsha Rozenblit.
[applause] Marsha Rozenblit: Thank you so much, Peggy,
for that very wonderful and warm introduction.
It gives me a lot of pleasure to be giving this lecture,
the Myron Weinstein lecture.
Peggy is right; I've been using the Library a lot time.
I was even mentioning on the way here with Miriam Isaacs,
who I came with that I used to come here every day I didn't teach
because I loved it so much.
Now I don't do that because there're computers and I stay home more,
it's terrible, you know, the computer has made...but I used
to come here all the time so of course I knew Dr. Marwick very well
and Myron Weinstein well and he helped me very much,
as did your husband, and Michael and Peggy and I really love this place,
so I'm really honored to be here in this beautiful room
with this beautiful garden out there, and more importantly
to be giving this lecture.
So my talk is entitled, "Traditional Judaism or Reform:
The Case of the Mannheimer Prayer Book in 19th century Vienna."
So let me start by telling you a little bit about Mannheimer
and who he was, not a household name.
Probably most people never heard of here.
Isaac Noah Mannheimer was one
of the great Jewish preachers of the 19th century.
He was born in 1793 in Copenhagen, of all, places to parents
of Hungarian origin -- what else?
He became an early-reform rabbi, first in his native city
and then briefly in Berlin, Hamburg, and the Leipzig fairs,
but he spent most of his life in Vienna,
the great capitol of the Hapsburg Empire.
It was in Vienna in the late 1820s
that Mannheimer created the famous Vienna Rite, R-I-T-E,
the ritual used in the synagogue.   He created the famous Vienna Rite,
a liturgy that combined complete devotion
to the traditional Jewish liturgy in Hebrew, absolute commitment
to a dignified and elegant, modern style of worship, including,
of course, edifying sermons by Mannheimer himself,
as well as beautiful and harmonious music.
The elegant services, the rousing sermons by Mannheimer,
and the beautiful music written by Vienna's great cantor,
Salomon Zulzer, all performed in the mangificant Staddttempel,
also called the Seitenstettengasse Temple,
because it's on the street called Seitenstettengasse,
may be one of the centers
of the early Jewish religious reform movement in Europe,
but while Mannheimer identified with the reform movement, with its ideas
and its concerns, he was always very devoted
to traditional Jewish prayer, its words, its forms, its concerns,
and its language, Hebrew.
Moreover, he opposed many of the main features of the reform movement
as it developed in the 1840s and '50s in the German states.
He never rejected prayers for Zion, which they did.
He had great affection for the idea that the Jews were a people, a folk,
and he utterly rejected the organ, the very symbol
of the reform movement itself.
He also refused to attend the reform rabbinical conferences of the 1840s.
Like Mannheimer himself, the Jewish community
of Vienna also embraced the early reform movement in the 1820s.
Vienna's Jews wanted order and decorum in a "dignified
and worthy"-- those are their words, so you can imagine quotation marks
around them -- in a dignified and worthy religious worship service.
They wanted edifying sermons by a master preacher.
They wanted Zulzer's beautiful music, but they did not want more.
They eschewed the more radical reforms
that many German reformers sought in the mid-century: the organ,
the removal of prayers for the return to Zion and the restoration
of the sacrificial system of worship.
They liked Mannheimer's Vienna Rite,
a traditional Hebrew liturgy sung beautifully in an elegant service
and they did not want to change it.
When more radical members of the community did petition
to remove prayers for the return to Zion in 1870,
five years after Mannheimer's death in 1865,
the community essentially rebuffed these requests, wedded as they were
to a style, to a liturgy, to a set of practices
that the great Rabbi Mannheimer had crafted in 1826.
Vienna's Jews may have been in the forefront of reform in the 1820s,
but by the 1870s Vienna was outside the reform camp devoted
to a modernized traditionalism
that suited Viennese Jews into the 20th century.
My goal this evening is to try and understand this apparent paradox.
How was Mannheimer and the Viennese Jewish community reform
in the early 19th century
and so traditional later without changing at all?
Why was Vienna at the forefront of Jewish religious reform
in the early 19th century, and why did it reject reform later
in that century remaining devoted to a modernized traditionalism?
Why indeed was Mannheimer so popular and so beloved
that Viennese Jews remained totally devoted to his compromise
between tradition and change for the next century and a half?
The key to understanding this paradox is,
of course, a Hebrew book.
Naturally, we're talking about a Hebrew book.
Naturally it's a lecture on a Hebrew book, or rather two Hebrew books.
I'm going to look at two.
The Hebrew books in question are the prayer book that Mannheimer --
I should say Mahnheimer not Mannheimer, that's terrible --
that Mannheimer produced for the Viennese Jewish community,
[Hebrew] -- Gebete der Israelitin in its German name,
"Prayers of the Jews" -- in 1841,
and in its endless new editions ever after.
The last edition that I have found was in 1969,
and so the book was continuously used
in the Viennese Jewish community, maybe not now but certainly
through the middle of the 20th century.
Also, his [Hebrew], his High Holiday prayer book, [Hebrew],
published in 1841 and in endless other editions.
These prayer books, the prayer book
and the [Hebrew] provide wonderful insight
into both Mannheimer's Jewish religious world view
and also his artful compromises between Jewish tradition
and modernity, which so pleased and so satisfied that Jews
of Vienna in the 19th century.
In order to understand these Hebrew books, first a few words are
in order about the Jews of Vienna and about Mannheimer's efforts
to create the Vienna Rite in Vienna in the 1820s.
In the early 19th century, the Jewish community
of Vienna was very small and very rich.
In fact, before the revolution of 1848 Jews were not allowed
to live in Vienna at all.
Only a very small number of very, very rich Jews, very,
very wealthy Jews were allowed to purchase for huge sums
of money were allowed to purchase the Right of Toleration.
In the 1820s only 135 Jews possessed the Right
of Toleration to live in the city.   By the way, later if you want
to see their signatures I happen to have a German book.
This book actually is the statutes of the Jewish community of Vienna,
which Mannheimer prepared in 1829 and which were signed
by the 135 tolerated Jews, actually only about 100 of them signed.
Some of them were away on business,
but you can look at their signatures.
This is a book that was, it's a facsimile edition published in 1926
by the Viennese Jewish community to commemorate the 100th anniversary
of the synagogue, of the Seitenstettengasse as a temple.
So it has the 1829 statutes in a facsimile edition
in beautiful Gothic handwriting, and then it has the signatures
and then thumbnail sketches of all of the tolerated Jews in the city.
It's a very beautiful edition which a grandson of a Viennese Jew
or son sent me 25 years ago I think.   But it's a really beautiful book,
and I will leave it here for people to look at.
So in the 1820s there were only a 135 Jews
with the Right of Toleration.
Since they could reside in Vienna with their families, their servants,
their employees, and their assorted hangers-on, in fact,
there were probably 2,000 Jews in the city, probably actually 4,000,
2,000 legal, 2,000 illegal.
Jacob Hadakawski [phonetically spelled] who taught
at Hebrew Union College used to say that "The first Jew
in a place is never the first Jew in a place,
there was always a Jew there before him."
[laughter] So when there were no Jews
in a city there are 4,000 Jews in a city.
[laughter] Anyway.
Nevertheless they did not have the right to form and organize community
or to build a synagogue, at least one that looked
like one from the street.
I'll talk more about that in a minute.
Yet as wealthy businessmen, mostly traders in money, precious stones,
textiles, sugar, and other commodities,
many of them like similar wealthy tolerated Jews in Berlin
or other German cities had begun the process of a acculturation:
learning German, absorbing some secular culture
and becoming less observant of the rules
and regulations of traditional Judaism.
Having internalized many of the aesthetic values or aesthetic tastes
of European society, they wanted to create a Jewish religious worship
that conformed to their new tastes.
In 1811 a small group of tolerated Jews bought a site
at Dem Fingerhoff [spelled phonetically],
soon to be renamed Seitenstettengasse.
If you've ever been in Vienna, by the way, I hope you have gone
or will go the next time you're there to the synagogue.
It still exists inside the shell of an apartment house.
Because it wasn't a freestanding building,
the Nazi's couldn't destroy it on Kristallnacht.
They trashed it, of course, but they didn't destroy it
and so it still exists and it was rebuilt after the war to look
like its 1826 splendor and it's really quite mangificant.
So they bought this site to serve as a school, a ritual bath,
and a better -- their words -- place of worship.
A few years later in 1819, some of the tolerated Jews lead
by Michael Lazar Beeterman [phonetically spelled] wanted
to introduce reforms along the lines adopted by the Berlin
and Hamburg Reform Congregations.
They petitioned the government, in those days one had to do that,
for permission to introduce an organ, a German sermon,
and some prayers in German, so as
to increase devotion and appeal to the youth.
In their explanation to their fellow Jews, they stressed the need
to attract the youth, bored and alienated
in the traditional synagogue.
You know that everything changes; everything remains the same, right?
[laughter] And women they said ignored
by Jewish tradition all together, not that they paid any attention
to women either, but that's okay.
[laughter] They wanted to purify -- their word --
they wanted to purify the service
and arouse noble sentiments in their fellow Jews.
They also wanted to "abolish the abuses -- their words --
that crept into the service in the course of time."
That was standard language of the early reform movement.
They wanted to get rid of customs that they deemed foreign, oriental,
non-European: like getting up, sitting down, going in, going out,
children screaming, running, carrying on, coming in late,
saying the service anyway, well never mind,
you know what I'm talking about.
[laughter] So they wanted to abolish the abuses, to introduce sermons --
in their words -- "to promote true religiosity,"
and to hire a preacher, a cantor, and a choir.
Not a traditional rabbi, but a person,
a religious leader who would give sermons.
Although these reformers would have preferred a separate new synagogue
for themselves, the Austrian government refused to allow them
to build a new synagogue.
Thus the reformers had to compromise with the other Jews
when in 1826 they renovated the synagogue
that they all attended, on Seitenstettengasse.
The reformers did succeed, however, in bringing Isaac Noah Mannheimer
to Vienna to be the preacher of this newly renovated synagogue.
Mannheimer, who had received a modern secular education
in Copenhagen, had been greatly influenced by Israel Jacobson,
an early Jewish religious reformer in Westphalia,
but also by Leopold Sunz [phonetically spelled]
and other scholars
of the Wissenschaftesjudentum [spelled phonetically] movement,
scholarly movement to study Jewish texts in an academic manner
and by other reformers in Hamburg, Berlin, and Leipzig.
Before he arrived in Vienna, Mannheimer wanted
to reform the religious service by shortening it;
these are standard reform early 19th century demands.
The service was too long.   They wanted to shorten it.
He wanted to remove peuteem [phonetically spelled],
the medieval liturgical hymns.
He wanted to read the Torah on a three-year cycle to shorten it,
to introduce some German prayers, to establish order and decorum,
and in a vague way, but nevertheless real way, to eliminate all prayers
that contradicted modern sensibilities
or the civic position of the Jews.
Mannheimer also espoused a reform position
on Jewish religious observance, that is on personal observance.
In his personal life Mannheimer did not observe punctiliously all
Jewish law.
I'm quoting from a letter he wrote to Sunz in 1835:
"My wife wears her own hair."
[laughter] That's a rejection of Jewish religious tradition, right?
"My wife wears her own shave, I shave and wear a cap in the street
when I am cold, otherwise not" he wrote to Sunz in 1835.
He also supported many reforms including the elimination of prayers
for the restoration of the sacrificial system of worship,
although he didn't introduce that in Vienna.
When Mannheimer first arrived in Vienna in 1825
as the religious teacher of the Jews, that was his official title,
the government wouldn't even let him be called preacher,
so he was called religious teacher.
He would have liked to introduce more reforms than many Viennese Jews
or the conservative Austrian government were willing to tolerate.
Writing to Leopold Sunz in October 1826, Mannheimer complained,
"I have had to give up all my views,
all my goals, all of my expectations."
While he wanted to restore pure worship here in Vienna,
and again I quote, "We say everything, they do all the prayers.
We say everything.
We call people up to the Torah, we [Hebrew] and perform Aliyot."
That is the traditional custom of auctioning off synagogue honors,
that is [Hebrew] the honor of being called
up to the Torah was traditionally auctioned.
People didn't actually hand over the money,
it was Sabbath they can't handle money, but it would be announced,
a hundred dollars or something and that was considered very disgusting
by these early reformers.
It smacked of the kind of commercial concerns
that Jews weren't supposed to have, but anyway.
So that's what he wrote to Sunz, but in creating a liturgy
for the beautifully renovated temple in 1826 and drawing
up a detailed set of synagogue statutes in 1829, Mannheimer managed
to satisfy his reform goals while remaining proudly devoted
to Jewish religious tradition.
In writing to Rabbi Wolfe, another rabbi in Copenhagen in 1829,
Mannheimer noted that the new Vienna Rite
in no way contradicted the strictures of the Shulhan Arukh,
the 16th century code of Jewish law.
So it's very interesting; he wanted reforms, and then yet,
just a few years later he was very proud that he created a service
that was traditional and that even conformed to the Shulhan Arukh.
A look at the 1829 synagogue statutes, which are here
if you can read [Hebrew].
It's not the printed [Hebrew], it's shrift;
it's the gothic handwriting so it's hard.
But anyway you can read it.
A look at the 1829 synagogue statutes clearly reveals the extent
to which Mannheimer and Vienna's Jews wanted a dignified, orderly,
decorous worship service, order and decorum.
Replete with excellent preacher and masterful cantor and without customs
that newly modernizing Jews deemed unworthy, including such practices
as selling Aliyot, as auctioning off synagogue honors.
The statutes advised Jews to take their seats silently
and not go in and out of services.
They were to remain quiet at all times
and avoid any offensive conduct, which would disturb devotion.
In particular, they were not to pray aloud except during times
of communal singing and then to follow the lead of the choir.
Even mourners were instructed to intone the Kaddish,
the mourners prayer softly, so as not to detract
from the cantorial performance of the mourners' prayer.
If the congregants had complaints they had
to present them in writing to the board.
Can you just imagine people would just get up and complain?
Actually it was traditional to get up and clap, to bang on the table
in which the Torah was read to make a complaint,
so this was an order and decorum issue.
Viennese concern for decorum
and a beautiful uplifting service revealed itself most clearly
in the rules of the 1829 statutes specified for the cantor,
who was to be chosen primarily for his musical ability.
The statutes charged the cantor with the responsibility
of infusing the prayers with beauty and worthiness.
He had to pronounce all the Hebrew words clearly and correctly,
and he had to know German well.
Only the cantor could chant the Mishaberach, the special prayer
for those who receive synagogue honors, so they got kept,
which they had obviously retained.
He had to sing not only on Sabbath and holy days, but also at weddings
and circumcisions, and he had to train
and lead the all-male choir whose singing would add solemnity
and beauty to all services.
Indeed in his 60-year long career in Vienna,
Cantor Salomon Zulzer composed music for Sabbath and holiday services,
which contributed immeasurably to the beauty
and the orderliness of public worship.
One of the major complaints of the early reformers in general had been
that traditional Jewish services where chaotic and disorderly,
filled with the screams, actually schreiend, the yelling of people
who did not pray in unison,
and led by a prayer leader totally unfamiliar
with the concept of good singing.
[laughter] Everybody's laughing, that's the laugh of familiarity.
By hiring a cantor with a mangificant voice
who could lead the congregation in prayer
and compose impressive musical pieces for the synagogue,
Vienna's Jews announced that their religious services would be
as beautiful and as inspiring as those in any church.
Remember this is Vienna with the Vienna's Boys' Choir
and lots of= good church singing.
In so doing, they expressed their commitment to a Judaism
that they could wear with pride
as they sought integration into the modern world.
In his preface to Scherzion [spelled phonetically], the collection
of his liturgical compositions, which he published in 1840,
Zulzer -- I didn't use that as my Hebrew book because it's in German,
its title is Scherzion, and the prayers are in Hebrew,
but written in German in Latin letters, not in Hebrew letters,
because it has to follow the music and go from left to right
because that's the way western music is written.
So it must be very disconcerting to read Hebrew backwards that way
but anyway, that's how they did it.
So in his preface, Zulzer described how he had cleared away centuries
of unnecessary [unintelligible] to the Jewish worship service
and restored it to its original beauty.
He wrote, "I have made it my duty to return as much as possible
to the melodies handed down from ancient times," how does he know,
but anyway, "to free and purify the ancient honorably worthy models
from later arbitrary and tasteless flourishes,
and to expose the original purity both in terms of the text
and in terms of the laws of harmony."
Decades later, Zulzer felt satisfied that he had rescued synagogue music
from the barbarity of the middle ages, ending the "incivility
and the dissonances which had discredited the Judenschule,"
the Jewish synagogue, "and arranging all national melodies according
to the rules of art."
Above all, the 1829 statutes called for the modernization
of the role of the rabbi.
The religious teacher who later took the title preacher would serve
as pastor, teacher, and spiritual leader, [unintelligible],
a moral exemplar for the whole community.
Early Jewish reformers often rejected the title rabbi
because to them it reeked of the excessive legalism
of the Judaism they were trying to avoid.
Rabbis made legal decisions;
reformers wanted a new style religious leader who would function
like a Protestant pastor, the model
of a proper European religious leader, even in Catholic Vienna.
The Viennese Jewish synagogue statutes followed this model,
no doubt influenced by Mannheimer himself.
Thus, instead of traditional Talmudic learning the religious
teacher needed an education with a solid grounding
in philosophy, theology, and bible.
Since his main role was to give sermons
and other religious instruction, he had to speak German well
and possess a strong moral character.
His sermons should teach "pure original Judaism,"
and not be pedantic exercises concerned with forms and ceremonies.
They should "radiate religiosity, morality, brotherly love,
love of fatherland, and domestic virtue."
This was not a traditional [Hebrew].
In addition to an hour-long sermon every other Saturday
on the first day of all holidays,
the religious teachers' pastoral functions included officiating
at rites of passage.
In its zeal for a new-style rabbi, Vienna was in the forefront
of change in central Europe,
spelling out the modern rabbinical functions more thoroughly
than anywhere else.
Mannheimer did not disappoint those that attended the services
in the beautiful Seitenstettengasse Temple dedicated in 1826.
Indeed, Mannheimer earned a well-deserved reputation
as a great modern Jewish preacher.
One concerned with inculcating the ethical verities
of the Jewish tradition.
In his study of modern Jewish preaching, Alexander Altman,
who was a professor at Brandeis, called Mannheimer "the most vigorous
and most endearing of the early preachers,
and undoubtedly the outstanding figure of the 19th century pulpit."
Unlike so many Jewish preachers who felt compelled
to follow rigidly the explicit rules developed by Protestant clergy
for the edifying sermon, Mannheimer remained closer to the warmth
of the Jewish homiletical tradition, and quoted liberally
from rabbinic literature in his moralizing sermons.
Everything about the Seitenstettengasse Temple reflected
both the desire to be modern and worthy and the desire
to uphold Jewish religious tradition.
The synagogue itself, inside the shell of an apartment building
because Jews could not yet build a synagogue noticeable
on the street, was very impressive.
Designed by the famous Viennese architect Yosef Kornhoisal
[phonetically spelled], the synagogue took the form
of a large rotunda with dome,
and it contained 12 ionic columns and a double gallery.
The gallery, covered
with latticework served as the women's section.
The most notable break with European synagogue architecture was the
placement of the lecterns for preacher and cantor on a stage
in front of the congregation, rather than in the middle.
The religious services held in that synagogue, Mannheimer's Vienna Rite,
conformed to the newly emerging modern style sought by reformers.
But it remained traditional in content
with only some minor changes.
Thus decorum and dignity pervaded a worship service conducted entirely
in Hebrew, by an excellent cantor, some male singers, a boy's choir,
and unaccompanied by an organ.
In Vienna a modern concern for beautiful music prevailed,
but there were no female voices or instrumental music
to upset the traditionalists.
Mannheimer may have come to Vienna thinking an organ was a good idea,
but he changed his mind and blocked all later attempts
to introduce an organ in Vienna,
either at the Seitenstettengasse Temple
or in the new Leopold [unintelligible] Temple build
in 1858.   The organ, he declared,
would represent a "Christian intrusion" into Judaism.
The central feature of the Vienna service may have been Mannheimer's
lengthy edifying German sermon, but despite the reformers desire
for a shorter service, Jews in Vienna continued
to do virtually all the prayers sanctioned by tradition,
and of course they did them all in Hebrew.
Mannheimer did excise, get rid of a few prayers,
which offended reform sensibilities, the peuteem,
the medieval liturgical poem, except on the High Holidays,
the vengeful prayer of [Hebrew], and some of the Talmudic passages
at the end of the Sabbath service, which dealt in great detail
with incense in the ancient temple in Jerusalem.
Despite Mannheimer's desire to introduce some German prayers,
the only German prayers in the Vienna Rite were the prayer
for the government, and special prayers before and after the sermon.
But these German prayers were intoned by Mannheimer alone
and did not form part of the communal liturgy.
In addition, the Vienna Rite included confirmation for boys
and girls, although I think they dropped confirmation for boys.
I think it was just for girls.
I think boys continue to have bar mitzvah.
The reformers didn't like bar mitzvah in the 19th century,
it was legalistic; it wasn't about faith,
so they instituted confirmation, but I know bar mitzvah continued
and confirmation was for girls.
None of these things that I just described represented a significant
break with the Jewish religious tradition.
To best understand Mannheimer's Vienna Rite it is now time, finally,
to turn to his prayer book [Hebrew], The Prayers of Israel
or Gebete der Israelitin.
There is no question; there is no question
that this prayer book is a traditional sedor,
a traditional prayer book.
It opens like a Hebrew book from right to left.
I don't have a copy but I have a Xerox copy.
Of course the Xerox copy doesn't open so, it's just pages
and it's not the whole thing.   I just Xeroxed important sections,
but if you want to look at it you can.
I have the Xerox copy here.
So it opens like a Hebrew book from left to right,
it contains virtually the entire traditional weekday
and Sabbath liturgy like modern [Hebrew],
like modern prayer books it also contains a translation
of the prayers, that wasn't a traditional, right?
To translate.
It was not something that medieval or early modern Jews did
but here's a translation.
Like modern [Hebrew] it contained a translation
of the prayers into German of course.
In order to appreciate fully Mannheimer's
and Vienna's Jewish religious posture, one has to look carefully
at the Hebrew prayers, their placement on the page,
and at the German translation.
Such was always the case with modern Jewish prayer books
in the 19th century.
A lot of the reform was in the translation, not in Hebrew.
Nobody understood the Hebrew anyway so you could keep the Hebrew prayers
to make the traditionalists happy and then change the translation.
This, by the way, was not a trick only of Mannheimer,
it was a trick used by reformers in Germany.
There's a wonderful book by Jacob [unintelligible]
about prayer book reform in Europe that goes in detail
through all these prayer books, not Mannheimer's but the others,
but it's true in America too.   It's true for reform
and conservative prayer books in this country.
So one has to look at this.
[Hebrew] Israel retained all of the prayers
that most offended the Jewish religious reformists,
that is it kept all the things that the reformers hated especially
in the 1840s when a new generation of reformers succeeded
in introducing ideological and not just the stylistic changes
of the 1810s and 1820s, in general.
Thus Mannheimer kept all the prayers requesting God
to return the Jewish people to Zion, to the land of Israel,
to restore them to sovereignty there under a descendant of King David
and to reinstate there the ancient sacrificial system of worship.
Those were the central prayers of the liturgy that the reform movement
in Europe in the 19th century removed
because it offended their ideological positions.
Reformers disliked the prayers about sacrifices
because they offended modern notions of proper religious worship,
which focused on prayer and not killing animals.
Bloody sacrifices they always said,
why do need prayers for bloody sacrifices?
Reformers especially disliked the prayers for Zion
because such prayers seemed to contradict their fervent desire
for emancipation under serious political discussion all
over the German states in the 1840s.
How could Jews request citizenship if they prayed three times a day
and four times on Saturday and holidays,
for their own national sovereignty in the land of Israel?
Moreover, opponents of the Jewish emancipation argued
that the Jews did not deserve citizenship
if they sought a national home elsewhere.
They actually said it, Jews don't deserve citizenship.
They prayed for a national home elsewhere.
Even the liberal proponents of Jewish emancipation felt
that prayers for Zion were a problem for Jewish citizenship.
Reformers all over the German states eagerly seeking emancipation
and convinced that indeed their desire for political
and social integration in Europe meant
that in fact they no longer yearned for return to Zion,
declared that Jews no longer formed a nation,
and they therefore removed all prayers for Zion from the liturgy.
But Isaac Noah Mannheimer, an early reform rabbi, who also lobbied
for a Jewish emancipation in Austria,
in fact he was a representative
in the Frankfurt parliament during the Revolution of 1848 from Galicia,
and he lobbied for Jewish emancipation then and afterwards,
but nevertheless Mannheimer did not remove the prayers
for Zion nor did he even want to do so.
Mannheimer was neither an Orthodox Jew committed
to the traditional liturgy for its own sake nor proto-Zionist.
Like reformers rabbis everywhere in the 19th century,
he understood Jewish identity
in religious terms not in national ones, right?
The Jews formed a religious group, a confession, not a nation.
Yet unlike reform rabbis in the German states, he was comfortable
with a more capacious, with a more expansive understanding
of Jewish people-hood.
He did not feel compelled as they did to deny the national
or the ethnic dimension of Jewish identity.
He did not shy away from describing the Jews as a people, a folk,
to use the German rule, a people, an Am [spelled phonetically],
an ethnos, right, as a folk?
Although he understood that the central issue for this folk,
for the Jewish folk was God and religion,
he nevertheless saw the Jews in more
than simple confessional or religious terms.
He saw them as a people.
In a rabbinic opinion he wrote on circumcision in 1844
in which he declared that not circumcising one's son was an act
of separation from the Jewish people --
there was a whole debate about whether you were still a Jew
if you didn't circumcise your children, your sons --
and he said you separated yourself from the Jewish people
if you didn't circumcise your sons.
In that rabbinic opinion he argued that Judaism was not a set
of philosophical doctrines, which is what the reformers were
mostly saying.
He argued that Judaism was not a set of philosophical doctrines
and beliefs, but "a historically transmitted, strongly constructed
and interconnected whole, made wholly through divine revolution,
established through paternal tradition
and filial piety and sense of belonging."
"What bound you together was not monotheism or metaphysics," he said,
"but the Jews attachment to tradition and each other."
Of course the function of the Jewish people was to be the bearer
of God's holiness, so it's intimately connected with religion,
but it's not just religious faith as the reformers were saying.
"The spirit of Israel," Mannheimer declared
in an 1836 Yom Kippur ceremony, "as long as it is, was,
and will be a folk, is its Torah."
So, Israel is a folk and its spirit is the Torah,
the five books of Moses.
Mannheimer felt no need to remove prayers for Zion from the liturgy,
frankly, because he understood such prayers symbolically as a promise
from God for human perfection.
The Jews could therefore be good citizens and also pray for a return
in some future perfect messianic age to Zion.
Mannheimer also felt no need to remove prayers for Zion
because to him they were simply part of the fabric
of traditional Judaism, and removing them would be far too wrenching.
His commitment to retaining Hebrew prayer was similar.
Some reformers wanted to replace most of the Hebrew liturgy
with German prayer because no one understood Hebrew,
and they wanted prayer to be a meaningful experience.
They also regarded Hebrew as foreign, oriental,
and they wanted Jews to pray in German as a sign
of their integration in their German homeland,
but Mannheimer felt enormous affection for Hebrew
as the primary language of Jewish prayer; much would be lost, he said,
from the "Volkstumliche side of Judaism, the ethnic side of Judaism,
the ethnic side of Jewish identity, by the abandonment of Hebrew,"
he wrote to Wolf in 1829.
Mannheimer's attachment to the Hebrew language and his retention
of prayers for Zion reflect not just his traditionalism,
but his attachment to a sense of Jewish people-hood.
The Austrian political environment, as we will see later,
was also far more hospitable to such notions
than was the case in the German states.
What else do we notice in Mannheimer's siddur?
Like most modern prayer book editors in Germany,
and also in the United States,
Mannheimer often used the German translation to modify
or mollify some features of the traditional liturgy
that might have upset modern Jews.
Thus, in the preliminary blessings of the daily Sabbath
and holiday service, Mannheimer retained the blessings
which the Jew recites, thanking God for not making me a gentile,
[Hebrew] in Hebrew, but he translated it
into German positively, thanking God "for making me an Israelite" --
this has been done in other prayer books, of course --
"for making me an Israelite:
Der mich zu eine Israelitin hab gemachten.
Modern Jews did not think it proper to make the anti-gentile remarks,
but since few understood Hebrew,
they could pray the traditional prayer and read a kinder,
gentler version in the translation.
Interestingly, though, in the 1867 version of the prayer book,
which was published after Mannheimer's death and on the eve
of Jewish emancipation in Austria -- the Jews were emancipated in 1867 --
the editors changed the Hebrew text to read she'asani Yisroel, that is,
for making me a Jew which is the positive version of this in Hebrew.
But then in 1888, they changed it again to [Hebrew],
who did not make me a Christian, for not making me a Christian.
I don't know exactly what that means but there it is.
More interestingly, in the daily Amidah, in the standing prayer,
the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy, the 18 benedictions,
in the daily Amidah, Mannheimer retained all the traditional
language in Hebrew, it's a completely traditional Amidah,
but he plays a little game in the German translation.
Instead of translating [Hebrew], instead of translating that as
"return to Jerusalem your city and mercy," talking about God returning
to Jerusalem in mercy, he translated it as "let your mercy rule
over Jerusalem your city," slightly different,
it's a little less concrete, actually --
God is not really returning, you know,
he's just wafting over the place.
Instead of translating the [Hebrew], instead of translating that as
"quickly reestablish in it in Jerusalem the throne of David,"
he translated it as "arrange in it, once more,
the throne on which David once sat."
I don't even know what to make of that, actually.
[German]. These are minor differences,
but they do somehow make the return
and restoration a little less concrete, a little more symbolic.
Similarly on the Sabbath in the prayers on the conclusion
of the reading of the hav Torah [spelled phonetically],
Mannheimer softens some of the national restoration language
in the German translation.
Instead of translating [Hebrew], the reign of David your anointed,
the rule, I guess, of David your anointed,
he translated through the rule of the royal house of David.
The whole line an in English translation is "...make us rejoice,
oh God, in Elijah the Prophet your servant and the rule
of David your anointed..."   and his translation reads --
I'm translating from the German into English --
"...rejoice us, oh Lord our God
through Elijah the Prophet your servant and through the royal house
of David, your anointed."   It's slightly less concrete.
It's not about the restoration
of Davidic rule; it's just wafting again.
I don't want to make too much of the significance of these changes
in the translation, however.
After all, Mannheimer changed the translation of the Amidah
in the daily prayer when few people attended synagogue,
but during the shavat moussa [spelled phonetically],
during the shavat hasari [spelled phonetically],
in the morning service and in the moussa service,
the time of greatest synagogue attendance,
the translation was absolutely literal.
So I don't understand why he bothers, you know,
modifying one place and not another.
He literally translated the words about David's offspring flourishing,
restoring sacrifices, and, most importantly,
bring us in joy back to our land.
On the other hand, in the morning Amidah, he didn't translate, at all,
the final part of the Amidah which mentions rebuilding the Temple
and restoring the burnt offerings.
He was obviously inconsistent and I don't know why.
Maybe he was just careless?   No, I don't think so, but.
Mannheimer's siddur sometimes included prayers he didn't
especially like, but then he doesn't usually translate those prayers
at all.
Right? The prayers that he doesn't like are there,
but he doesn't translate them.
The best example of that is the ukum prokan [spelled phonetically]
at the end of the Torah service.
This is a prayer which prays for the health
of exolarc [spelled phonetically],
the rosh hegola [spelled phonetically],
the heads of the academies in Palestine and Babylonia.
The last exolarc was in the 13th century, and the academies closed
at various points in the Middle Ages.
Modern Jews often felt this was a silly prayer.
Mannheimer retained it, but he didn't translate it,
like Silverman [spelled phonetically],
like the conservative prayer book in the United States --
the older one, not the new ones.
He also did not translate some of the Talmudic passages at the end
of the Sabbath service on the necessity of studying the law,
on the psalms that the Levites sung in the Temple, and so forth.
In other words, prayers that were considered a little embarrassing,
he just didn't bother translating.
One of the most interesting changes that Mannheimer effected was not
in the siddur, not in the prayer book, but in the machzor,
the High Holiday prayer book.
Like all reformers, Mannheimer eliminated the Kol Nidrei prayer.
That was universal in 19th century reformer modern circles.
He eliminated the Kol Nidrei prayer, the introductory prayer
on the eve of Yom Kippur.
Kol Nidrei was a real problem for modernizing Jews who aspired
to citizenship in the countries in which they lived.
Opponents of Jewish emancipation charged
that the Jews were utterly unworthy of citizenship,
because on the holiest day of the year -- on their holiest day --
they went to the synagogue and the first thing that they did was swear
that all their vows and all their promises were null and void.
Jews, therefore, were deceitful and untrustworthy.
Kol Nidrei, a relatively late addition to the liturgy
from the Gaionic [spelled phonetically] period
of the 9th century or so, was therefore dispensable
and most modern synagogues in Europe did not recite it.
The problem was, of course, that everyone loved the melody
and they did not want to dispense with it.
In his machzor, Mannheimer begins the service on Yom Kippur eve
with an alternative prayer, which he wrote I assume,
which expresses all the themes of the Day of Atonement
and which is also sang to his revised version
of the traditional Kol Nidrei melody.
People probably even called it Kol Nidrei.
The Kol Nidrei formula itself was printed in the prayer book, too,
in small print below a line on the page.
So it was relegated to a corner.
It was in small print below the line and without translation,
presumably for those who felt an attachment
to the traditional prayer.
They could say it to themselves even though Sulzer
and the choir would not sing it.
The Jewish community of Vienna remained utterly devoted
to the Vienna Rite from the time that Mannheimer first articulated it
through the Second World War and beyond.
All attempts to further reform the service by other rabbis
or by the lay leaders of the community foundered,
foundered on the opposition of Viennese Jews who remained attached
to Mannheimer's reforms but refused to go any further.
Mannheimer's rabbinical colleague, Adolph Jelinik, first hired in 1858
to preach at the second Viennese synagogue, the Leopoldster Temple
and who succeeded Mannheimer at Seitenstettengasse
when Mannheimer died in 1865 and Jelinik preached there
until his own death in 1893, Jelinik wanted an organ
and for further reform but his wishes were ignored by the men
who led the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde,
the Jewish religious community that was finally created in the 1850s.
In 1870, three years after the Jews of Hapsburg,
Austria were emancipated, a group
of Viennese Jews petitioned the community
for thoroughgoing ideological reforms including removing the
prayers for Zion and sacrifices, installing an organ,
eliminating the second day of the festivals,
and changing the Torah reading on Yom Kippur afternoon
from achrei mot [spelled phonetically]
to kodoshim [spelled phonetically], from one section
which is very ritualistic to much more lovely passages about holiness.
This was essentially adopting most of the reforms advocated
by the 1869 reform synod in Leipzig.
Opposition to these proposed reforms was fierce.
It was led by the new rabbi at the Leopoldster Temple,
Mauritz Gutterman [spelled phonetically],
a graduate of the Breslau theological seminary
and a traditionalist, and also by many rich leaders
of the Jewish community who simply saw no reason
to adopt any radical reforms
because they loved the Mannheimer-Sulzer service.
These two sides reached a compromise which was no compromise at all --
no organ, no two days of the festivals,
no changes to the Torah readings, but the prayers for Zion,
while they would remain in the liturgy, would not be recited
in the readers repetition of the Amidah because he would only go
through the Kedusha, only through the first blessings in the Kedusha,
and so he wouldn't sing it out loud.
So it was there, you could say it to yourself, it wasn't below the line,
it was translated, it just wasn't said out loud.
It came back in the early 20th century.
So the question remains: Why were Vienna's Jews at the forefront
of early aesthetic reform in the 1820s and why did they refuse
to reform further in the 1840s and '50s or even
in the late 19th century?
Why did they then clearly place themselves outside the orbit
of the reform movement?
The answer can be found in demography, that is,
in the actual composition of the Jewish community of Vienna.
In the early 19th century, Vienna's Jews were small
in number and very rich.
They wanted to create a modern-style service, have order and decorum,
hear a good sermon, listen to good music, and thus demonstrate
to themselves and to the Viennese and to the Austrian authorities
that they were worthy men, ready for integration and acculturation.
They had internalized European aesthetic standards
and they wanted a Judaism which conformed to those standards.
As the community grew, however, in the wake of the revolution of 1848
and subsequent liberal legislation, which ended the restrictions
under which Jews had long lived, the demographic basis
of the community changed.
Lots of Jews migrated to Vienna in the 1850s and '60s and thereafter,
at first from the Bohemian lands -- Bohemia and Moravia,
now the Czech Republic -- and then mostly from Hungary,
especially from Western Hungary and Western Slovakia,
the area around what Germans and Jews called Presburg
and Hungarians called Pozsony but the Slovaks now --
they didn't live there then --
but now they call Bratislava, very close to Vienna.
Bratislava was practically just a few steps beyond the Viennese
streetcar lines before the Iron Curtain was established
in the late 1940s.   It's 20 kilometers from Vienna.
In any case, they came from that area
where many Jews were very religious, non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox Jews,
followers of the anti-modern Hatam Sofer, Moses Schreiber.
They certainly didn't want reform and they did not even want to pray
at the Seitenstettengasse Temple, preferring instead a small,
private synagogue, the Schiffschule.
But they were members of the Jewish community,
that is of the organized Jewish community,
and numerically strong enough to prevent reforms anywhere,
threatening even to secede even
from the unified Jewish community if reforms were adopted.
Their sheer numbers forced the leaders
of the Jewish community to compromise.
Moreover, many Hungarian Jews who wanted to modernize,
not everybody was anti-modern, many Hungarian Jews who wanted
to modernize and acculturate were still quite wedded
to religious tradition, and were content with Mannheimer's reform.
So as the community grew, it became more traditional, in fact.
But yet there was a desire for assimilation or acculturation,
and so Mannheimer's compromise between reform and tradition --
you know, reform in style and traditional in content,
essentially -- appealed to them and so it stayed.
Finally, the very nature
of Hapsburg-Austria made reform less pressing.
Jews, too, wanted and won emancipation,
but Austria was not a nation-state like Germany,
which demanded national as well as cultural loyalty.
Austria was a multi-national, multi-lingual,
old-fashioned dynastic state, which gave the Jews plenty of room
to be ethnically as Jewish as they pleased.
In Germany, one had to become a German.
In Austria, there was no such thing as being an Austrian,
so Jews could be as Jewish as they wanted.
The sheer number of different national, ethnic, linguistic groups,
all expressing themselves, certainly enabled the Jews to feel comfortable
with their own ethnicity, with the fact that they were a folk,
one folk among many felka [spelled phonetically],
a people among many peoples.
Prayers for Zion were less a problem here than they would be in Germany.
So Isak Noa Mannheimer could forge a modernization of Judaism
which remained utterly traditional.
It was not Orthodox, but it was Jewish.
In fact, in 1976, the first time I was in Vienna and I went
to the Seitenstettengasse Temple, I couldn't find the street --
it's a little street and I couldn't find it --
and I asked two obviously very religious women
where the street was.
They looked me up and down and said, "So, you want to go
to the Orthodox Shul or the Assimilated Shul?
[laughter] I didn't think fast enough.
I knew that from my perspective, Seitenstettengasse was Orthodox,
men and women were separate, there was a traditional liturgy, right?
So I didn't think and I said the Orthodox shul so they took me
to a Hasidic schtivo [spelled phonetically] because, to them,
Seitenstettengasse was assimilated, but to other Jews in Vienna,
in the 19th and 20th century, it was just Jewish.
That was what Jewish was, and so it was in Vienna.
The Jews in Vienna remained utterly devoted to it,
that is to Mannheimer's Vienna rite and, indeed, even today the services
in the Seitenstettengasse Temple are the same as Mannheimer
and Sulzer created in the 1820's and beautiful they are, indeed.
[applause] Peggy Pearlstein: Thank you.
That was wonderful.
If you have any questions, Marsha will be happy to answer them.
Marsha Rozenblit: Peggy will restore the slides.
Does anybody have a question?
Yes. Female Speaker: Dr. Rozenblit, you've told us that Jews,
the Reform Jews of Austria and Germany opposed the prayer
for the return to Zion because this would indicate
that they weren't willing to be good, loyal Germans and Austrians.
What happened once Theodore Herzl came on the scene?
How did they cope with him and how did they cope with the pogroms
that were happening to the East of them?
Marsha Rozenblit: Okay.   Those are two good questions.
I guess everyone heard.
You normally have to repeat questions 'cause there's no mike
so I guess you heard it.   How did they cope with Herzl?
Well, Herzl was a Viennese Jew.
I assume the Seitenstettengasse Temple was the synagogue he didn't
go to, right, 'cause he was not
at all a religiously observant Jew although he did have a bar mitzvah.
He's not quite as unobservant as the myth of Herzl is.
Of course, he was from Budapest so he had his bar mitzvah
at Dohny Street Synagogue, which was neolog [spelled phonetically]
which was the Budapest version of this sort of thing which is --
they had an organ but a traditional service.
In any case, how did they cope with Herzl?
Well, to be honest, Zionism was a minority movement everywhere,
and it was a minority movement in Vienna, too.
Herzl may have lived in Vienna,
and many of his early followers were Viennese,
but Zionism did not attract most Jews in Vienna at the time.
It attracted some, but just a small number.
The chief rabbi in Vienna at the time
that Herzl wrote The Jewish State
in 1896 was Mauritz Gutterman [spelled phonetically]
who was a traditionalist.
He was not Orthodox but he had been educated at the Breslau Seminary,
which a modern rabbinical seminary very much
like the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York
which was modeled after it.
That is, the New York Seminary is modeled after Breslau.
He was very excited when Herzl first wrote The Jewish State.
He thought, oh my God, this fabulous journalist cares about the Jews
and he has this wonderful plan and this is very exciting,
and he went running over to Theodore Herzl's house --
you know, this is before everybody had a telephone
so you couldn't call first, he just went --
and he went over to Theodore Herzl's house, it was December of 1896,
and Herzl opened the door to Rabbi Gutterman
and Rabbi Gutterman looked beyond Herzl
into the living room and what did he see?
A Christmas tree.
[laughter] Gutterman was a little horrified and he turned around
and walked away, and Herzl never had a Christmas tree again.
He was embarrassed and he realized that the leader
of the Jewish people shouldn't have a Christmas tree.
Gutterman then proceeded to write an anti-Zionist pamphlet.
He was not a Zionist, he would have written that anyway.
The Christmas tree was just the spur.
But Gutterman, while a traditional Jew who believed in praying
for Zion, was not a Zionist.
So Zionism was not all that popular in Vienna,
at least not in the 1890's.
Later in the 1920' and '30's it was popular.
Zionism grew a lot in the 20th century.
In terms of the pogroms, all Jews in the world were horrified
by the pogroms, so they really did have a sense of needing
to help their fellow Jews.
They responded with enormous amounts of charity and help and concern.
That was universal.   Any other questions?
Female Speaker: I'm fascinated by the bi-lingual prayer book,
the notion of a bi-lingual prayer book.
I mean, I know that we have them now and they've been
around for a long time, but I never really thought about them in terms
of -- is it a kind of selection process --
in terms of what is on one-side of the page and what is on the other
and for whom are you selecting?
Is it for the person doing the prayer or is it for God or is it
for the censor reading in?
I mean that's really very interesting,
and I wonder if you could maybe expound a little more on that.
Marsha Rozenblit: Yep, that's a good question.
I mean, Miriam is a linguist.
She teaches Yiddish at the University of Maryland
but her training is as a linguist, so I'm not surprised
by this language question, which is a very interesting one.
The placement of the prayers, what you translate, what you don't,
I mean, this is conscious, of course, and it's to emphasize
that which is significant and to de-emphasize
that which you don't like.
I think that it's done for the prayer,
that is the person who's praying, certainly not for God,
and not for the censor, either.
Censorship certainly existed until the revolution of 1848,
but this is not the kind of thing that the government would have cared
about so it wouldn't have been a problem.
So the real issue is to make a statement about what the modern Jew,
in this case, what the modern Jew should want and should care about.
The translation is very important.
The 19th century is -- there may have been some earlier prayer books
translated in Renaissance Italy or something, I don't know --
but for most Jews, the 19th century is the beginning of the process
of prayer book translation, and the translation often is the vehicle
through which the ideology is expressed because --
especially in those prayer books that are traditional and don't want
to tamper with the Hebrew.
Right. Now some prayer books do take want to tamper with the Hebrew
but still want to look traditional.   It's extraordinarily interesting.
Petuchowski's book, it's called a history of Prayer Book Reform
in Europe, is wonderful because he goes through a whole series
of reform prayer books and they're all very different.
He's especially interested in the ones that appear traditional
like Abraham Geiger, who was kind of the leader
of middle-of-the-road reformers in Germany.
Geiger wrote probably the most popular of the reform prayer books
in Germany and, if you open it up casually
and you don't know Hebrew very well
and you don't know the traditional liturgy by heart and so forth,
you would think it's a siddur,
you would think it's a traditional prayer book.
It looks like one -- it has German translation --
but it looks like one, it follows the order of prayers,
it opens from right to left,
it's a traditional prayer book only there's not a prayer for Zion,
there's not a prayer for sacrifices, I mean a lot is missing and changed.
But it looks traditional because there's still a desire to do
that which looks traditional.
There were radical reformers, Holdheim, for example,
the most radical of the German reformers who was in Berlin.
Holdheim's prayer book for daily prayers, Saturday prayers,
Sabbath prayers, holiday prayers,
and High Holiday prayers was 48 pages.
Right? I mean normally this was all separate volumes 'cause there's a
lot of prayers but, you know, the Jewish liturgical principle is
when in doubt between two prayers,
do them both so there's a lot of prayers.
So this was 48 pages and this stripped-down thing,
bore no resemblance to a traditional siddur.
It had virtually no elements
from the traditional siddur except maybe Schmah [spelled phonetically]
and things like that.
But that's radical on one hand, but a lot of them,
they're trying to create something.
They're trying to take a Jewish tradition that they love
but which is not quite satisfying to them and they want to modify it
in some way and they're experimenting with different ways
to do it and language, that is the use of the vernacular,
is one of the ways to do it.
But many of them don't want to use too much vernacular
in the actual praying 'cause then it doesn't feel Jewish, right?
At these conferences in the 1840s they debated whether they really
needed to use Hebrew as the language of prayer.
Was it required by Jewish law?
And of course, many of these people, even if they were reformers,
had Yeshiva education so they knew what the law said and some
of them said well, the law doesn't require it but we still must do it.
It's so traditional we'll sever our attachments
to the Jewish people if we get rid of it.
Others said how can we pray in a meaningless way by rote,
reciting prayers that mean nothing.
So in between that, they're trying to create something
that does have meaning and Jews are still trying to figure that out.
Right? 'Cause there's still the reform movement,
the conservative movement in this Country are still experimenting.
There's new prayer books every few decades.
The conservative movement had the Silverman prayer book,
the United Synagogue Prayer Book in the 1940s, and then --
I forget even the names of this -- Sim Shalom, I think,
is that the name of it, in the 1970s and then a new version
and another new version and so forth.
The reform movement had, of course, the Union Prayer Book of the 1890s,
which was extremely radical.
And then the newer Wergaitze [spelled phonetically] prayer
and then the new gaitze [spelled phonetically] prayer --
I don't even know what it's called --
and all of these are trying
in different ways to cope with this issue.
Of course, reformers are now in the process of putting Hebrew back in --
they took it out in the 19th century and they're putting it back in.
You know, it's an interesting phenomenon,
and all of the things they hated back in the 19th century,
they now love, and back and forth it goes.
Female Speaker: Thanks for your wonderful talk.
Marsha Rozenblit: Thank you.
Female Speaker: I was wondering, in the course of your research,
did you find in any correspondence or other sources any evidence
that Mannheimer undertook consultation
with other reform rabbis or community leaders or congregants?
Marsha Rozenblit: Oh, sure.
They were all in touch with each other, you know.
I mean, people in the 19th century wrote letters all the time.
We don't have all of his letters, of course, you know,
they're not necessarily saved.
I quoted from some letters so he certainly corresponded
with other reform rabbis.
He really became outside of their group, though.
You know, he really had made his commitment to Jewish tradition
and really wasn't part of the reform circle by 1840.
He was outside of it in the traditional camp but not orthodox.
But of course, yes, they corresponded with each other
and with other Jewish leaders for sure.
Female Speaker: Would you comment on the specifics of the language,
the specific prayers that he was taking out
or translating in a certain way?
Marsha Rozenblit: It's a good question but I have no idea,
because we just don't have that correspondence.
The Jewish community records of Vienna are excellent.
You know, the Viennese Jewish community during World War II hid
its archives in various storerooms all over Vienna.
They survived, most of them, probably a quarter of them
or a third of them didn't, but most of them did.
After the War, they were languishing here and there in various buildings
in Vienna, and there's an archive in Israel, the central archives
of the history of the Jewish people,
and that archive asked the Viennese Jewish community,
which is a much smaller, paler reflection of its old self,
the Jewish community had grown to about 200,000 Jews by World War II
or by 1939, and now it's about 7,000, you know,
it's a much smaller Jewish community, but this archive asked
if it could house this collection.   So it's all in Israel, in Jerusalem.
It's 450 meters of shelf space, it's a very large collection,
very well catalogued, and I looked through it, you know.
But Mannheimer's letters to various people are just not there 'cause
those would have been his private correspondence,
not his official correspondence, and God knows what happened to it.
So we have some letters of his that are either there
or in various other archives but I don't have
that level of correspondence.   I wish I did.
It's a good question, but...I have a lot.
I have sermons.
I have -- preachers in the 19th century liked to publish sermons
so there are a lot of published sermons.
Right here, I used them all in the Library of Congress although not
in AMED [spelled phonetically] Division
because they're all in German.
One gets them through the general collection, but they're here:
Mannheimer's, Jelinik's, Gutterman's sermons, they're all here.
Female Speaker: [Inaudible] Marsha Rozenblit: Okay,
those are two good questions, one on the size of the Jewish community
and the other on reform and women's roles now, or even then.
In terms of size, the Jewish community of Vienna grew,
as I already indicated, it grew enormously in the second half
of the 19th century, from two to four thousand in 1848 to --
on the eve of World War I -- to a 175,000 and almost 200,000 or just
over 200,000 on the eve of World War II, actually, not on the eve
of World War II, in 1938, 'cause a lot of Jews left.
They weren't going to stay.   They were fortunate.
In any case, today the Jewish community is only seven
or eight thousand, but those are not descendants
of the former Viennese Jews.
The Viennese Jews either left in '38, '39, '40 to come to America
or Israel or England or they were killed during the Holocaust.
Maybe with some exceptions but basically they were killed.
The Jews who live there now are a combination of Holocaust survivors,
most of whom are Eastern European in origin,
or Soviet Jews who've come ever since Jews started
to leave the Soviet Union in the 1970s who, on their way to Israel
or America, stayed or Iranian Jews or Israeli Jews.
In other words, it's like the German Jewish community today.
So there's about seven or eight thousand Jews in Vienna today.
In terms of religious life, there is no reform movement in Vienna.
The only place reform exists is in America, maybe a little bit
in England, a little tiny bit in a reform synagogue in France, maybe,
Israel, but it's basically an American phenomenon.
The Seitenstettengasse Temple was restored after World War II.
There are a whole bunch of synagogues
in Vienna today besides it.
The Seitenstettengasse Temple was the way it was
because in the 19th century, it is a traditional synagogue.
If you walked in -- any American Jew walking
in would think it's a modern Orthodox synagogue, right?
It has order and decorum, it's very lovely, beautiful singing,
a male choir -- women are separate, the lattice work is gone
from the balconies, but, you know, it's still separate seating.
Everything is very traditional,
and so it's a very traditional synagogue although it doesn't call
itself Orthodox, it just calls itself Jewish.
There are Hasidic synagogues also in Vienna and --
actually there may be one reform --
small reform congregation -- but not a lot.
Reform is not here.
Now in the 19th century reformers thought they were liberalizing the
situation with women, but they did so in terms that made sense to them.
That meant, you know, encouraging women to attend services,
having confirmation for girls, things like that.
It never occurred to anyone
to let women play a leadership role in the 19th century.
So I guess that's basically my answer.
Thank you.   [applause] [end of transcription]