Séminaire théologique juif de Breslau

In the heart of the nineteenth century, as the Jewish communities of Central Europe weathered the joint upheavals of civil emancipation and intellectual modernity, one institution emerged as the home of a third way between dogmatic orthodoxy and radical Reform. The Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau was the first modern rabbinical seminary in Central Europe, founded in 1854 thanks to the funds that Jonas Fraenkel, a prominent Breslau businessman, had bequeathed for that purpose. [Jewish Virtual Library]

This founding was not merely the creation of a school: it marked the advent of a theological current destined for a considerable posterity. The seminary became the model for similar colleges established in Europe and the United States; its first director was Zacharias Frankel, to the disappointment of Abraham Geiger, who had conceived the idea of the seminary and won the support of Jonas Fraenkel. [Jewish Virtual Library]

The present notice proposes to retrace, from the archives and scholarly works available, the history of an institution whose influence extends far beyond the walls of the Silesian city where it was born — today Wrocław, in Poland — and whose legacy still nourishes, through direct filiation, contemporary Conservative Judaism. The account that follows scrupulously distinguishes what the archive establishes from what Memory transmits, so as to do justice to the complexity of a project at once erudite, religious, and deeply rooted in its time.

The material origin of the seminary lies in a will. Being childless, Jonas Fraenkel bequeathed part of his fortune to a family foundation intended to provide dowries for the dowerless young women of the Fränkel family; but he devoted the greater part of his wealth to charitable institutions, and particularly to the establishment of a Jewish seminary that would bear his name — the "Jewish Theological Seminary Fraenkel'sche Stiftung" of Breslau, inaugurated in 1854, which became the largest Jewish institution of its kind, and in which most of the great Jewish scholars of the second half of the nineteenth century were educated. [Jewish Encyclopedia / Wikipedia]

But behind this bequest a quarrel of persons and orientations was at play. Fraenkel was president of the community of Breslau and an enthusiastic supporter of Abraham Geiger, who had no doubt inspired the bequest; and it was probably the founder's intention that Geiger should preside over the institution. [Wikipedia] Yet the executors of the will judged otherwise. The executors of the Fraenkel bequest considered that an institution presided over by a man of views as extreme as Geiger's would not earn the confidence of the communities; they therefore called Zacharias Frankel to the presidency, on 7 February 1853. [Wikipedia]

The actual start was delayed by legal obstacles. Owing to certain legal complications, the seminary could not open until 10 August 1854, although its constitution had been confirmed by royal order of 31 August 1847. [Wikipedia] This gap of seven years between authorization and opening testifies both to the caution of the Prussian authorities towards a Jewish confessional institution and to the slowness of the inheritance settlements. The choice of Frankel rather than Geiger was not a mere administrative arbitration: it sealed the doctrinal orientation of the establishment for the generations to come, setting aside the most advanced Reform in favor of a middle position.

The figure of Zacharias Frankel dominates the institution's first two decades. Born in Prague and trained both in the Talmud and in secular disciplines, he embodied a rare synthesis. Frankel studied the Talmud in his native Prague under Rabbi Bezalel Ronsberg, as well as philosophy, the natural sciences, and philology in Budapest; his combination of traditional and general learning prepared him to become one of the leading figures of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, in which the tools of modern historical criticism served to explore the development of Judaism's classical sources. [Oxford Reference]

His appointment enshrined a doctrine he had developed during his rabbinate in Dresden. Frankel was one of the founders of the Breslau school of "historical Judaism," which sought to harmonize the critical treatment of the religion's documents with fidelity to traditional beliefs and observances; he developed a theology he called positive-historical Judaism, which differed from Orthodoxy in its acceptance of scientific and historical inquiry and its willingness to make certain liturgical changes, and differed from Reform Judaism in that it sought to maintain traditional customs and to preserve the national aspects of Judaism. [Britannica]

The seminary's pedagogical program faithfully translated this doctrine. The fundamental aim of the seminary was to teach "positive-historical Judaism": the "positive" denoted a faithful adherence to the practical precepts of Judaism, while the "historical" allowed free inquiry into the Jewish past, including even biblical criticism, albeit with certain self-imposed limits. [Jewish Virtual Library] This assumed tension between observant fidelity and critical freedom constitutes the distinctive trait of the Breslau school and the source of both its fruitfulness and its controversies.

The historical reach of this position extends well beyond Germany. Through the faculty and students of the Breslau seminary, Frankel's viewpoint became highly influential in Central Europe; in the twentieth century it took root in the United States, where, under the name of Conservative Judaism, it achieved its greatest growth. [Britannica]

The seminary's intellectual greatness rested above all on the quality of its teaching body. Frankel chose Heinrich Graetz and Jacob Bernays as teachers, to whom were added Manuel Joël and Benedict Zuckermann as assistants, the latter two soon being promoted to the rank of regular teachers. [Wikipedia] Heinrich Graetz, in particular, produced a monumental body of work there. Graetz, appointed early in the seminary's history, taught Jewish history and biblical exegesis, and produced his major work, the Geschichte der Juden, in eleven volumes, which emphasized the causal connections of Jewish development grounded in primary sources. [Grokipedia]

The organization of studies reflected the ambition to train rabbis who were both learned and faithful. The institution comprised three divisions at the outset: the regular rabbinical department, which admitted only students qualified to enter university; the preparatory department, receiving students with insufficient secular education; and a section devoted to teacher training. [Wikipedia] This requirement of a dual competence — university access being demanded for the higher rabbinical curriculum — radically distinguished Breslau from the traditional yeshivot.

Training was not limited to the rabbinate. The seminary also trained teachers until 1887, and this training resumed in the 1920s and 1930s. [Jewish Virtual Library] The list of the masters who succeeded one another there forms a veritable pantheon of Jewish scholarship: among them are Jacob Bernays, classical philologist, Markus Brann, Zacharias Frankel, Jacob Freudenthal, Heinrich Graetz, Jacob Guttmann, Michael Guttmann, Isaak Heinemann, Manuel Joël, Guido Kisch, Albert Lewkowitz, Israel Lewy, Adolf Wolf Posnanski, Israel Rabin, David Rosin and Benedikt Zuckermann. [Jewiki]

The death of the intellectual founder opened a period of institutional transition. After his death in 1875, Frankel was succeeded by L. Lazarus; however, when the latter died in 1879, administrative functions were thereafter exercised collectively by the teachers. [Jewish Virtual Library] This shift from a personal presidency to collegial governance marks an important stage in the institution's maturation.

Within this collegiality, a certain primacy was nonetheless recognized as belonging to the talmudic chair. The one who taught the Talmud and rabbinic science held the post of "rabbi of the seminary" and was alone empowered to confer rabbinic ordination. [Jewish Virtual Library] This arrangement enshrined, even in the very architecture of academic authority, the central place of talmudic study in the Breslau conception of Judaism — faithful in this to Frankel's legacy, for whom critical science was never to break with practice.

During these decades, the seminary continued to be a leading center of scholarly production. The editorial project associated with the institution played a structuring role for the emerging discipline. In 1871, Frankel founded the scholarly journal Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, the principal organ of modern Jewish scholarship. [Oxford Reference] Historical research, however, recalls an earlier date: the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, founded by Zacharias Frankel in 1851, was one of the most important projects of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, linked — not only by Frankel — to the Jewish theological seminary and to Conservative Judaism. [EAJS] This divergence of dates among the sources deserves to be noted, the 1851 founding being the one most commonly accepted by academic research.

The ultimate measure of a seminary's success lies in its students. By this standard, Breslau holds a singular place. Until its closure in 1938, the seminary had well over 700 students, of whom about 250 received rabbinical ordination; among its students were Wilhelm Bacher, Leo Baeck, Philipp Bloch, Hermann Cohen, Ismar Elbogen, Ismar Freund, Max Grunwald, Moritz Güdemann and Jacob Guttmann. [Jewiki] The presence in this list of Leo Baeck, future spiritual leader of German Jewry under Nazism, and of Hermann Cohen, a major neo-Kantian philosopher, is enough to gauge the institution's influence.

The numerical record confirms this scope. The seminary trained about 250 rabbis between 1854 and 1938, and many of the college's students made a name for themselves in Jewish scholarship and/or public life. [Jewish Virtual Library] The school's scholarly fecundity manifested itself notably in the field of medieval philosophy. According to the work presented at the colloquium devoted to the institution, the interest of the "Breslau school of thought" in medieval Jewish philosophy and its influence on Christian scholasticism was illustrated by Manuel Joël and Jacob Guttmann, its most important representatives in this domain. [EAJS]

The role of Heinrich Graetz in Jewish historiography and in the very definition of the movement deserves to be emphasized. Heinrich Graetz was not only the most important Jewish historian of the nineteenth century, but also a curator and teacher at the Breslau seminary. [H-Net] Through its masters as well as its disciples, the seminary thus became the center of gravity of a modern Jewish scholarship concerned with reconciling philological rigor and religious commitment.

The end of the seminary was brutal and forms part of the general persecution of German Jews. The pogrom of November 1938 — Kristallnacht — struck the institution with full force. The November 1938 pogrom led to the sacking of the seminary and the destruction of most of its library; on police orders, all teaching activities had to cease and many students were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. [Jewish Virtual Library / Encyclopedia.com]

The loss of the library constitutes, on the cultural level, an irreparable disaster. Most of its library, which contained more than 30,000 volumes and over 400 Hebrew manuscripts, was destroyed. [WUSTL] Yet, amid the ruins, the spirit of the seminary did not die out immediately. Although the seminary received the order to close from the Nazis shortly thereafter, two further rabbinical students were ordained in secret on 21 February 1939. [WUSTL] This final act of quiet resistance sealed, through a gesture of fidelity, more than eight decades of teaching.

The posthumous fate of the surviving collections deserves to be remembered. According to the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, the partial destruction of the library during the November 1938 pogroms and a Nazi ban on teaching activities ultimately forced the Breslau rabbinical seminary to close; what remained of its contents, discovered after the war and known as the "Breslauer Schriften," reached Switzerland in 1950. [SIG] These remnants, now the subject of restoration projects, remain the material witnesses of an institution whose work was annihilated but whose memory endures.

The history of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau is one of exceptional intellectual achievement brought to a close by tragedy. Born of a bequest and a quarrel among its founders, it managed, under the impulse of Zacharias Frankel, to give institutional form to a theology of mediation — positive-historical Judaism — which refused to choose between fidelity to tradition and the demands of scholarly criticism. The seminary became a site of intense activity, and scholarship recognizes that it constituted the first modern rabbinical seminary in Central Europe. [SIG / Jewish Virtual Library]

Its legacy reaches far beyond the borders of Silesia and the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the perspective formed at Breslau took root in the United States, where, under the name Conservative Judaism, it attained its greatest growth. [Britannica] Thus the institution destroyed in 1938 paradoxically survives through its ideas: the middle path it charted continues to guide a major current of world Judaism. Between the memory of a vanished center of scholarship and the archive of a model foundation, the Breslau seminary remains one of the great sites of the encounter between modern science and religious fidelity — a heritage that neither the fire of Kristallnacht nor the exile of its books succeeded in erasing.