''Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism'': Rabbi Gustav Gottheil and The Jewish-American Religious Future, 1873-1903

Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism: Rabbi Gustav Gottheil and the Jewish-American Religious Future, 18731903
Caleb J. D. Maskell
On April 17, 1903, the American Hebrew, the pre-eminent New York Jewish weekly newspaper, printed a soaring obituary for Rabbi Gustav Gottheil. With the removal by death from our midst of the personality of Rev. Dr. Gustav Gottheil, New York Judaism loses its most prominent official figure. For thirty yearsa whole generation the Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El has been a striking and dominating figure in metropolitan Judaism, and by consequence, in American Judaism at large.1 Kaufmann Kohler, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and primary author of the foundational statement of American Reform theology, the Pittsburgh Platform, placed Gottheil at the head of the New York rabbinate, the hakham2 par excellence among the rabbis, the wise, thoughtful, circumspect, and dignified leader.3 Noted Jewish intellectual Jacob Voorsanger commented that, by the 1880s, Gottheil was easily the best known Jewish minister in America.4 It was to just this type of public presence in American culture that Gustav Gottheil aspired. An American Reform rabbi, Gottheil wrote, should be a public teacher whose discourse did not confine itself to religious topics, strictly speaking, but [drew] into the sphere of its discussions every vital topic that occupies the public mind.5 He regularly and self-consciously addressed matters of national political significance, both in print articles and in his spoken sermons, which were reported weekly in the New York Herald and often syndicated to other newspapers around the country. He was also concerned about the climate of piety in America, composing or translating distinctively Jewish devotional materials for private use by Americans of all faiths, as well as a variety of hymns, prayers, and other liturgical materials designed for public use in Reform Jewish services. His most famous
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 139184, ISSN: 1052-1151, electronic ISSN: 1533-8568. 2013 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rac.2013.23.2.139.
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hymn setting, Rock of Ages, Let Our Song, is a classic of American Jewish liturgy that positions its singers as at once quintessentially Jewish and quintessentially American.6 Both in politics and in piety, Gottheil deliberately intended not just to speak to Jews but, rather, to offer a Jewish interpretation of American life to the widest possible American audience. Locating Gottheil among his peers in the leadership of American Reform Judaism in the late nineteenth century is not a simple matter. In many ways, his theological and political sensibilities occupied typical, even archetypal, Reform positions.7 His goal, as I will argue at length below, was to represent the wholeto act as an ambassador for Reform Judaism in the American context. Naomi Wiener Cohen observes that Gottheil was a stand-out among the pantheon of Reform leaders at the 1893 Worlds Parliament of Religions, noting that his theological lecture played up the principles and agenda of Reform Judaism more than any other paper.8 He argued for Reforms status as the modern American consensus Judaism unifying, wise, and future-oriented. His archived correspondence and his published obituaries attest that Gottheil was not only one of the most well-connected and well-respected leaders in national Jewish life but also an important community leader among the local New York rabbinate as well.9 He was a founder and board president of the New York-based Board of Jewish Ministers, and he spoke and wrote regularly about issues concerning Jewish congregational leadership.10 Acknowledgment of the value of his work in this arena transgressed the boundaries of the Reform community, drawing support and appreciation from local Orthodox leaders as well.11 Gottheil also proved to be a strong advocate for the importance of historic Jewish religious distinctiveness in the face of both the marginalization of Jews by Christians and their abandonment by radical Jewish liberals. One of the most dramatic examples of this advocacy took place within months of his arrival in New York City. When Felix Adler gave his incendiary address, The Judaism of the Future, at Temple Emanu-El in 1873, Gottheil had just been hired as a junior rabbi and was seated on the platform with Samuel Adler, Felixs father and Gottheils head rabbi.12 Gottheil was horrified by Felix Adlers willingness to proclaim that Judaism had functionally come to an end, rejecting Jewish theology in favor of what amounted to a universal religion of ethics. Assuming that, as the son of the head rabbi, Felix Adler would be hired, Gottheil immediately tendered his resignation to Temple Emanu-Els Board of Trustees, explaining that he and Adler were preaching different religions.13 As it happened, the board had similar concernsGottheil kept his job as junior rabbi and
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rebuffed Adler, who went on to found the Society for Ethical Culture in 1877. This memorable episode marked the very beginning of Gottheils career as an American rabbi and set the course for his future as an apologist for the significance of historic Judaism to the American religious future. Despite his popularity and influence, however, Gottheil was also a controversial figure, heavily criticized by some in the Reform movement because of his perceived openness to the ideals, institutions, and elites of American liberal Christianity. He was frequently accused, wrote one editorialist in the American Hebrew, of ogling with Christianity, of servilely fawning upon it.14 For example, Emil Hirsch, rabbi of the Reform Chicago Sinai Congregation, attacked Gottheils 1896 devotional book, Sun and Shield, calling it a a Christian Unitarian spiritual apothecary that had abandoned Jewish distinctiveness.15 Jacob Voorsanger predicted that, when the history of Reform Judaism was written, ill-disposed critics will deny Gottheil his legitimate place in the narrative, based on their judgment that Gottheil was dragging the congregation into unwonted, hence unJewish paths having to do with Gottheils broad liberality in his relations with non-Jews, especially Unitarians.16 Even members of Gottheils inner circle occasionally objected; an 1882 letter to Gottheil from his friend and pupil, Emma Lazarus, includes an indignant postscript: P.S. Did you really say as you were reported in yesterdays Times that the Christian Church in America is a noble and vital institution? I hope not!17 This essay is a study of the complex dynamics of Gustav Gottheils relationship to Christianity in the United States. Gottheil believed that the nation to which he immigrated in 1873 was caught in the throes of a profound religious tension. On the one hand, he thought the structure of American society was the most advanced and progressive in the worlddemocratic, liberative, redolent of the spirit of the God of Abraham and Moses. On the other hand, America was also a nation whose identity was fundamentally conditioned by a phenomenon I will call normative nationalist Christianity.18 By this, I mean that Christianity was, in Gottheils view, the de facto public religion of the nation; its morality, language, and customs thoroughly informed the practices, habits, and norms of public life, political rhetoric, racial discourse, and popular self-interpretation. It was not something that could be avoided.19 While Gottheil registered discomfort with this phenomenon, given the way that it located Jews, by definition, at the margins of American national life, he did not prosecute a public fight against it as many of his peers and predecessors in the leadership of American Judaism did. Instead, to some peoples
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dismay, he became a messenger of peace to the representatives of other creeds and churches, reaching out to scores of liberal American Christians during his thirty years in New York City with personal friendship, private correspondence, and publication in journals that they read.20 He positioned himself to them both as a Jewish dialogue partner and as a co-laborer in the development of the religious future of American civilization. Gottheils engagement with these liberal Christians was rooted neither in a vision of democratic religious pluralism nor a new cosmopolitan universal religion with the gospel of fellowship as its message and religious sympathy at its heart.21 On the contrary, he referred to himself as a religious exclusivist, arguing that Judaism was the only possible religion of the [American] future.22 Instead, Gottheil engaged this wide swath of liberal Christians because he believed that they were, quite literally, becoming Reform Jews. Under the critiques of modernity, they were abandoning traditional Christian doctrines that no longer seemed rational and simultaneously turning toward a biblically rooted, nondogmatic religion of divine Fatherhood and universal brotherhood with a strong emphasis on justice, ethics, civilization, and the importance of religious feeling.23 As they discarded the doctrinal accretions of their institutionalized Christian faith, they were discovering that at the heart of what they already believed was Judaism. Modern Christianity, he said in 1885, is ancient Judaism.24 Gottheil was convinced that all of American Christianity was in a world-historical process that would carry it in this direction: the wider culture of American Christianity would eventually be caught up in the ideological trajectory of the liberal drift, and, when it was, Judaism would become the foundational religion that would undergird Americas divinely inspired political structures in the modern age. It was in an attempt to advance this messianic end that Gottheil established a broad network of friendships with liberal Christian ministers, each an occasion for dialogue about the true nature of religion.25 Whenever he believed that a representative of normative nationalist Christianity might be listening, he was prone to adopt the signature rhetoric of normative nationalist Christianity, speaking of popular theopolitical conceptsthe Kingdom of God, the Prince of Peace, the millennium, and so onin ways that affirmed their support for American national priorities, praised their universal ethical objectives, and reinterpreted them on Jewish foundations. Always selfconsciously a public teacher, Gottheil engaged liberal Christians on their own terms, meeting their desire for an optimistic, softly messianic religion of divinely ordered civilizational advancement with a narrative
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of hopeful yet acutely critical countersupersessionism.26 He sought to relocate Jewish ethics and spirituality at the religious heart of the civilization of the American future in a manner not only that liberal Christians could understand from a distance but that they also would eventually, he believed, recognize as their own.
The Kingdom of God, In Spite of Christianitys Practical Dominance Gottheil was an immigrant patriot; when he arrived in New York City in 1873 from a sojourn in Manchester, England, after emigrating from his native Prussia, he fully embraced the United States of America as his home, both physically and spiritually.27 He consciously opted into the American project, believing in earnest that there was an exceptional phenomenon working out in American civilization that bore within it the future of global culture. In a strong but not atypical statement, he concluded a Sunday lecture at Temple Emanu-El on November 4, 1888, with a rousing flourish: We have the Kingdom of God in the spirit of the American government, and when other nations come to our way of thinking the dreams of the prophet will be realized.28 America was not neutral groundit was playing host to the divinely ordered emergence of the spiritual and political culture of the future. Americas free air . . . buoyant, hopeful spirit, and . . . sense of security enabled the best, most civilized ideaswhich, for Gottheil, were captured by the intellectual rigor and the prophetic ethics of the German Jewish Reformationto come to fruition without the hindrance and persecution that they experienced in the European cultures where they emerged.29 In this land, modern Jews could do what they were called by God to do, namely win the war . . . of ideas and live as apostles of freedom, and advocates of an unfettered reason and unobstructed science.30 This was the mission of Israel in the modern age, promoting freedom, righteousness, charity, compassion, equality of all men, and the Kingdom of God on earth. . . . Shall we not then preach this God to the world?31 America was fertile ground for the birth of a universal Judaic spiritual culture for the modern age. Once America had achieved it, world evangelism was the next step. Gottheil was also keenly aware from his very earliest days in the United States that Christianity, although not legally dominant [in America] is yet practically so. [Popular religious] dogmas . . . the laws of morality, the motives of kindness, and the graces of conduct are also marked with the device of the Church.32 Gottheil explicitly acknowledged the good outcomes of this ecclesial marking of American societyhis goal
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was not to demonize Christianity wholesale. Nonetheless, the effect of this ecclesial influence on the norms of American society, even unto what he took to be good social ends, was, he argued, the cause of much alienation and isolation among Jews in America. Because of it, agencies of public social improvementi.e., agencies that expressed the aspirations of American societyhad become indelibly associated in the American imagination with Christianity, a common ground that Jews could not share. Jews, therefore, created a variety of privately run social institutionsreligious relief agencies, social agencies, labor organizations, fraternal societies, and so onto sustain their distinctiveness in the face of latent cultural chauvinism. Gottheil argued that this move toward self-preservation in turn made the Jewish community seem more insular and marginal, and so the cycle of Jewish alienation and majority American bigotry proceeded.33 In light of this, it was ironic, Gottheil noted, that American Jews were, statistically speaking, better Americans than their Christian counterparts. In one essay, he offered a vast flotilla of quotations and statistics about American Jewish benevolent societies, which he distilled with a quote from New York City mayor Smith Ely, Jr., who said that the Jews form ten percent of our population and contribute less than one percent to our criminal classes.34 The heart of Gottheils claim here, a claim to which he would return numerous times over the years, was that there was a correlation between Judaism and good citizenshipAmerican Jews were, from a New York mayors statistical point of view, far better Americans, on average, than their Christian compatriots. In an age of religious desire for objective truth, this was rhetorical gold.35 Something about Judaism, he averred, is both deeply consonant with the desires and goals of normatively Christian America and more effective at achieving those goals. It was most unfortunate, then, that Jews found themselves in a cycle of alienation from the mainstream of American culture, as it seemed that the mainstream might have been able to learn something from Judaism as each advanced toward shared goals. Something ought to change for the good of the whole, but the burden of redressing this cultural stalemate lay with the majority culture: It certainly is for the dominant religion, rather than for that of a small minority, to lead the way in this very desirable reform.36 Isaac Leeser and the Road Gottheil Did Not Take The question of the right approach to the dominant religion had long been a major priority for American Jewish leadership. To many, the normative nationalist Christianity that haunted the culture
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of the United States, ostensibly a land of religious freedom, was nothing less than a dangerous threatsomething to be attacked head on. The great pioneer of this mode of engagement was Isaac Leeser, a preeminent figure in antebellum American Judaism and a formative influence on Isaac Mayer Wise, Gottheils peer and correspondent not to mention the most widely read voice of Reform Judaism in Gottheils day.37 A brief look at the dynamics and legacy of Leesers approach will helpfully characterize an approach that Gottheil did not take but against the backdrop of which he continually acted. Isaac Leeser frequently inveighed in his newspaper, the Occident, against American laws and customs that revealed obvious discrimination and preference by government officials for Christian believers.38 For Leeser, the issue was one of civil rights. As early as 1845, he regularly sounded the alarm about numerous manifestations of normative nationalist Christian hegemony, such as Sabbath legislation that prohibited businesses from being open on Sundays, public fast days called in the name of Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the world, the infamous proposed Christian nation amendment to the Constitution of 1864, legal opinions that referred to a normative Christian us versus a minority Jewish them, and enforced readings in public schools of the theologically Christian King James Version of the Bible, to name a few of the more prominent examples.39 In each of these instances, Leeser was factually accurateProtestant hegemony was the order of the day. He critiqued these events with fiery rhetoric coupled with common sense arguments from the logic of the Constitution that clarified the limits of the will of the majority. For example, he wrote in 1845 that
a majority cannot do every thing; and among the prohibited things is the abridgement of any ones rights for opinions sake. It matters not in this respect whether the majority be Christian or Jewish; the constitution knows nothing of either . . . both therefore were placed upon such an equality that a preference was given to neither.40
Leeser was bold for his time in his assertion of the constitutional rights of American Jews. He even encouraged civil disobedience if and when these rights were overridden, exhorting his Jewish readers to remember that no special privileges should be asked, no special disqualifications should be voluntarily submitted to.41 Such persecutions were illegal, andat least as importantun-American. Liberty of conscience was, for Leeser, at the heart of the promise of American political life and needed to be actively protected against the encroachments of the Christian majority who found it inconvenient.
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This vigorous resistance to Protestant legal hegemony was, for Leeser, part and parcel of a resistance to Christianity on religious grounds as wellhe took the two to be fundamentally intertwined. In his theological writings, Leeser often used Hebrew scripture and Jewish tradition in an attempt to show the fanciful falsehood of Christian biblical interpretationsparticularly those associated with the King James Version that found Christ hidden in the pages of Hebrew prophecy.42 Beginning in the mid-1830s, in direct response to aggressive evangelizing of his Philadelphia congregation by representatives of the American Tract Society, he began to preach and write earnestly against the Christian doctrine of the Messiah, assessing the entirety of the Christian project as a theological house of cards.43 This is just one example of many occasions in which Leeser portrayed popular American Christianity as an irrational misappropriation of Jewish religion that traded heavily on intellectual laxity, groupthink, and an acquired social power that enabled Christians to behave with an enervating cruelty toward Jews, towards our bodies and spirits both.44 Hegemonic Christianityboth political and religiouswas, for Leeser, a major cultural enemy, requiring active resistance. Under its influence, Judaism would always be under attack, and America could never make good on its political promises of religious pluralism without discrimination. In the postbellum period, as the numbers of Jewish Americans rose exponentially, Leesers tenacious brand of theopolitics became an inspirational model for major leaders of the Reform movement for how to engage normative nationalist Christianity. Lance Sussman, Leesers biographer, characterizes Leeser as a pioneer in choosing boldness over timidity, outrage over silence, in the face of American cultural chauvinism.45 Isaac Mayer Wise, rabbi, prolific author, and editor of the influential Reform newspaper The American Israelite, expressed his debt to Leeser and followed his lead in these matters. 46 Historian Benny Kraut writes that Wise countered [American] Christian triumphalism with a Jewish triumphalism of his own. . . . He never failed to underscore the irrationality of Christian theological dogmas, the lack of any novel contributions on Christianitys part, and its historic opposition to reason, human freedom, and scientific progress.47 This posture was a direct retort to Christian eschatological expectations, especially as concerned the entanglement of Christian narratives with American national narratives. Any Christian critique of Wises positions was met with ferocious attackhis outrage knew no bounds.48 By the end of his life, Wise had become famous for his declamations about the imminent evaporation of American Christian faith and its certain replacement with rational Judaism.49
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In a more rhetorically moderate but nonetheless certain mode, Reform theologian Kaufman Kohler undertook what Arnold Eisen calls a pronounced . . . anti-Christian crusade throughout his career as an interpreter of American Judaism.50 Kohler vehemently rejected the theological claims of Christianity, embarking in the years after Gottheils death on a vigorous program of missionary Judaism that sought to export progressive Jewish doctrinal claims to the outside world.51 America could never become what it promised until the giant of normative nationalist Christianity had been slain, and the way to do thataccording to Leeser, Wise, and Kohlerwas at once to vigilantly expose the un-Americanness of political anti-Judaism wherever it was found and also to intellectually cudgel Christian faith on its weaknesses as a religious system until it shrank back in embarrassment. This approach would, in the long run, strengthen the position of Judaism in American culture, not only silenc[ing] Judaisms perceived foes, but also . . . instill[ing] pride and self-respect among Jews as well as a renewed respect for their Judaism.52 While Gustav Gottheil was not content to be living in a normatively Christian America, he declined to attack it as an ideological enemy. To him, Americas normative nationalist Christianity was an ambivalent fact. Though its effect was often unfairly marginalizing to Jews, Gottheil acknowledged that the same Christianity that claimed it had superseded Judaism as Gods chosen religion ironically sustained the memory of Moses and a national covenant relationship with God in the American imagination.53 In spite of Christianitys latent supersessionism, its normative status meant that many of the core ideas of Judaism were fundamentally enshrined in the habits of Americas Christian heart. What was necessary, thought Gottheil, was not the destruction of Christianity but, rather, its progressive transformation from a dogmatic, doctrinal religion to a modern, rational one in the model of Reform Judaism. As Gottheil saw it, the relationship between the two religions was familial, based on a shared inheritance of history, narratives, and ideasthe chief distinction he wished to make was that Judaism was the older, wiser sibling, the more mature one who had blazed the developmental trail for Christianity to follow. The highly liberal Unitarian Christians to whom he was most drawn had advanced furthest in this direction, but, over time, the rest of Christianity would eventually follow suit. As a public teacher, Gottheil was driven by his teleological imagination of what America was becomingAmericas future required a religious tradition to sustain it. He believed that his brand of Reform Judaism offered the most intellectually reasonable and theologically universal tradition that America could hope for. The heart of Gottheils approach to the question of the
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dominant religion, then, was to expose the ideological debt that normative nationalist Christianity owed to Judaism while simultaneously provoking, through every available venue, liberal Christian development toward the ethics and spirituality of Reform Judaism. The American Exception Is Not Christian but Mosaic Considering Gottheils approach first through his religious interpretation of American politics, one can put his position succinctly: the American exception was not Christian but Mosaic.54 Jews, he had argued, were instinctively better American citizens than Christians, and, thus, at the level of metanarrative, Judaism had a better religious interpretation of American national aspirations than Christians did. Gottheil believed that what he perceived as a fertile climate for freedom in the United States owed its existence primarily to the political system, which depended on popular sovereignty and the rule of law as opposed to the will of a sovereign monarch. This, he argued, was an inheritance from Judaism, filtered through the political theology of the Christians and deists who established the nation. Where a noted Christian commentator like Lyman Abbott would argue that America was a new experiment in government . . . trying to realize the ideal which Christ held before the world eighteen centuries ago, Gottheil framed the experiment as fundamentally tied to the values of ancient Judaism.55 The lecture in which Gottheil located the Kingdom of God in the spirit of the American government was entitled Government by the People and What It Owes to Judaism. It is a prime example of Gottheils dual rhetoric that at once praised virtues that all American patriots would recognize as their own and framed them exclusively in the context of Judaic valuesrendering them irreconcilable with the logic of Christianity. Preached almost literally on the eve of the presidential election of 1888, Gottheil argued that government by the consent of the governed was a fundamentally Jewish principle. The framers, he argued, decided to put manhood on the throne in America, a liberating move that aligned them with the spirit of the kingdom of Godpopular sovereignty was the form of government most in line with the will of God and the advancement of spiritual freedom and spiritual responsibility that the Hebrew prophets had advocated.56 In a particularly astonishing passage, Gottheil argued that, when the Jews in the old days rejected the republic of Moses and asked Samuel to put a king at their head so that they would be like other nations, Jehovah recognized the sovereignty of the popular will and said to Samuel, Listen to the people. Me they have rejected.57 For Gottheil,
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not only is the Jewish God Jehovah the author of the political doctrine of popular sovereignty, but he is subject to it as well! What is moreand this should not be passed over quicklyto reject the doctrine of popular sovereignty is to be like other nations, but to embrace it is to be nothing less than Gods exceptional nation. Gottheils strong Americanism is rooted in a Jewish biblical argument for American exceptionalism, based on popular sovereignty. Fullthroated American patriotism was, for Gottheil, best aligned with serious, faithful Judaismfar more naturally so, in fact, than a serious, faithful Christianity. In advancing self-government, the founders were inspired by the Old Testament accounts of the one God, not the Trinitarian New Testament accounts of Christ the King. It is a fact, he averred, that kings have always pointed to the New [Testament] and the people and liberty to the Old Testament for justification for their deeds.58 While Gottheils rhetorical momentum may have gotten the better of his facts in this particular instance, his point is clear. In his second lecture at the Worlds Parliament of Religions in 1893, he adopted a similar rhetorical strategy. First, he praised the divine destiny of America in patriotic biblical language that both Jews and Christians would recognizeto this free country it was given to show that the word of God is true, and that not one of his promises shall fall to the ground.59 Then, he went on to speak of Moses as Americas unacknowledged political saint and suggest every Christian church on earth . . . is his monument. There was deliberate ambiguity in Gottheils treatment of this matterhe sincerely complimented the greatness of the churches but nonetheless rendered them as a monument to Moses, the great legislator who made them possible. The Christianity dominant on the American national scene was, he implied, totally contingent on the genius of the originary Judaism of Moses. Here again, Judaism, with compliments to regnant normative national Christianity, took its place as the most fundamental American religious ideology.60 For Gottheil, the emergence of the American system of government was the ultimate triumph of a long legacy of Jewish influence in Western culture. Belief in the influence of Moses over American ideology was not unique to Gottheilin fact, versions of it were common among American Jews for whom American belonging was both a contested issue and a desirable outcome. In his article The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture, Jonathan Sarna shows a plethora of evidence, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, of both popular and intellectual Jewish texts that affirmed that being a good Jew and a patriotic American were not only compatible but also mutually reinforcing.61 Michael Meyer, a pre-eminent historian of Reform Judaism,
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suggests that the significance of this affirmation for Reform Jews was twofold: first, that Judaism was a universal religion unconstrained by transient, time-bound forms, a spiritual engine for the advance of modernity, and, second, that ideal Jewish identity fully realized brooked no tension with ideal American identity fully realized.62 Gottheil goes further than this, however, arguing that American identity is best undergirded by Jewish identityas noted above, he was not a pluralist but a Jewish exclusivist who saw his brand of Judaism as the only possible religion of the American future. That said, he does not rail against the weaknesses of the positions of those normative Christian nationalists who would argue positions different from his. Rather, he irenically inhabits their vocabulary, using the rhetoric of the normative Christian culture to offer a distinctively Jewish interpretation of the advancement of American culture that at once affirms the basic impetus of the Christian nationalist vision and then attempts to outnarrate it. A Case in Point: Gottheil and the Millennium One of the richest examples of Gottheils rhetorical strategy in the renarration of American identity involves his striking interpretation of the doctrine of the millenniumlong a favorite of normative nationalist Christians. In a Sunday morning lecture on December 4, 1898, originally reported by the New York Herald and reprinted in a wide variety of secular and Jewish newspapers, Gottheil posed the following question about the recently prosecuted Spanish-American War: Why is the war to be considered only as a weapon in the hands of a tyrant; and why cannot war be considered as a firebrand of civilization, as it has proven in this instance?63 With this question, Gottheil was revealing his position as a centrist and a patriot, aligning himself with the majority of Americans who were pro-war, believing that it was advancing the cause of civilization worldwide.64 Jackson Lears drily remarks that war was a popular idea in 1898,65 and it was so not because of a utilitarian Realpolitik calculus about American national interests. Rather, a majority of Americans had great enthusiasm for the war because they saw it as a kind of humanitarian interventionit provided an opportunity for the export of Americas priceless principles on an international stage.66 Put bluntly, it was an occasion for chest-thumping, Americanist self-congratulation. On the individual level, the war afforded the opportunity for vigorous demonstrations of what many saw as the best of American characterdisciplined courage, pioneering manliness, and individual responsibility.67 What was more, manifestations of this character were contagiousthey would result, through the
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irresistible force of their compelling example, in the widespread embrace of American social, political, and religious values among the nations and, ultimately, to the regeneration of the world.68 The imperial war was, thus, justified as being of world-historical importance; the battleships in the bay were to be widely understood to be the most effective means of delivering the American gospel of individual liberty and social hope for future progress. Given these winds of prevailing cultural opinion, Gottheil was uniting his readers, not dividing them, with his opening question. Gottheil went on, offering another uncontroversial, proAmerican opinion that the spreading out of American territory is the spreading out of the true American policy guaranteeing the right of all religions under the law. He followed it up with a story explaining that Spanish policies had excluded Jews, infidels, and unmarried women from legal protection in the Philippines, but now that Americans had taken power, this had all changed.69 As Gottheil proceeded, it became clear that, for him, the expansion of religious liberty in the Philippines was not just a positive effect circumscribed by an otherwise agnostic shift toward American political cultureto the contrary, it had important implications for the religious interpretation of his contemporary cultural moment. He illustrated this to his congregation with another anecdote from Manila:
During the holidays of our faith which we have just passed through, Father Doherty, chaplain on the staff of General Merritt, Roman Catholic priest of the Paulist order, preached a sermon to the Jewish soldiers in Manila. That is good news, and is alike creditable to the young priest who thus recognizes the catholicity of creed and the democracy of sects. Such as Father Doherty bring the millennium, or the kingdom of God.70
This last statement would have raised eyebrows among his readers. The millennium and the Kingdom of God were two of the most freighted concepts for normative Christian nationalismtheological rubrics under which many Christians in America believed that they could see the hand of God moving in history, usually with some aspect of American cultural life playing a starring role.71 The concept of the millennium was a particularly Christian ideaand more resonant with the theologically conservative wing of Christianity at that. To bring the millennium, as Gottheil averred that one Father Doherty was doing, was to advance the reformation of society in such a way that good has triumphed over evil enough to make way for what many considered to be the literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth.
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Even among those nineteenth-century Republican boosters who secularized the discourse of the millennium as a program for American social improvement, Jesus Christ remained the ethical reference point of the metaphor.72 Yet Gottheil chose this language to describe the occasion of a Catholic priest preaching to Jewish soldiers in the American service over the Hanukkah holiday. Gottheil no doubt relished the cognitive dissonance created by his choice of theological metaphor. He certainly intended to be asked for an explanation; in an article commissioned by the Sunday World, Rabbi Gottheil Discusses Jewish Faith in the Millennium, one gets the sense that Gottheil was positioning himself somewhere between prophet and provocateur as he explained what he meant by its usage.73 He began his explanation with an historical argument. The millennium, he said, captures the goal that was the dearest hope of the Israelite following the exile, namely,
the coming of the Messiah . . . who would rebuild the fallen temple of David and restore his throne to greater than its pristine glory! This was the same throne on which the Christian expected Jesus to sit. . . . Jew and Christian hoped that Jerusalem would rise from her ruins and . . . become the desire of all nations.74
In the early days of Christianity, he claimed that the conditions for the fulfillment of the millennium would have been equally pleasing to Christians and to Jews, namely the restoration of Jerusalem as the city from which right worship of God was understood by all the nations to emanate. The cityand the religious civilization that would emanate from itwere at least as important as the identity of the divine king who presided over it.
The question of who that chosen vessel of God would be, whether the one who in his own person shared the fate of Jerusalem, or one who had not yet been seen on the earth could that be of greater weight than the common belief that he would unfailingly appear? A scion of the house of David he would be, an Israelite after the flesh, a ruler of his own people. If he should reveal himself as the man of sorrow who was nailed to the cross, the Jews would be the first to do him homage. Here was a clear point of contact, strong enough to keep the two faiths together until the day of his coming.75
Alas, it was not to be. According to Gottheil, the early Christians became obsessed with the second advent of Christas time wore on without bringing the looked-for appearance of the Messiah, impatient, triumphalist Christians inscribed the literal second coming of
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Christ as a chief aspect of the first dogma of the Church and, in so doing, seriously damaged their natural affinity for their Jewish brethren. No longer could Christianity be viewed merely as a reformed Judaism; the desire for dogmatic certainty had caused the early Christians inexorably and uniquely to deify Christ. Thus, Trinitarian religion was born, the unity of the One God that was the clarion call of Judaic monotheism was theologically fractured, and, most ironically of all, amid these ever-growing conflicts, Christianity was lost.76 Christs living words had congealed into creeds and systems, replacing the spiritual impulses of a great Jewish Reformer with a morass of divisive, dogmatic religion.77 Among the greatest tragedies to come out of this religious fracturing was forgetfulness of the fact that Jewish people were also waiting for the final redemption of the world in the consummation of the messianic age.78 Of course Gottheils historical analysis is utterly laden with the kind of presentism that makes his rhetoric so vibrant and so important to understand as an American religious phenomenon. His ideological and theological target is dogmatism. Apart from it, there would be a clear and present sense of fellow-feeling among Christians and Jewsor, perhaps more precisely, both religions would have understood themselves as proceeding from the same spirit that animated ancient Judaism and, by extension, the temple worship in Jerusalem. This bond was wrecked by nervous Christians who needed certainty in the wake of the non-return of Christ (who can but think of the Millerites here!) and so developed dogmas like the Trinity, the ecclesiology of the new covenant, salvation by grace through faith in Christ, and so on to provide that certainty for them. This dogma, he contends, is, in fact, epiphenomenal to the religious feeling and religious ethics modeled by Christ and, thus, should be radically questioned not only by Jews but also by Christians. In one rather ingenious bit of sweeping rhetorical reinterpretation, he has validated the Christian desire for the millennium, located it as a shared desire with Judaism, and called into doubt the necessity of the ugly division between the two religions on this point. Gottheils unusual invocation of the language of the millennium was not coincidental. It did not merely function as a proxy for ideas of the Kingdom of God. Rather, he called on a theopolitical trope that has deep resonance in the normative nationalist Christian imaginary and deployed it to demonstrate a distinctively Jewish, distinctively American solution. He argued that the resolution to the problem of the age-old division between Christians and Jews was presenting itself to Americans in precisely their blessed, crucial present historical moment. The unity of purpose that was lost to the
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ages because of vain disputes over dogma had now come around as a possibility once again.
The idea of a millennium has not been lost to usnay . . . its kernel of truth is better understood now than ever before. For what it has failed to do in olden times, and must fail to do as long as it remains covered with dogmatic shells, it has begun to achieve in its liberated state. There is abroad now a new spirit of fraternity and community of sacred interests among the various religions; a desire for cooperation in these things good and true and helpful which are the very beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth. If the Christian thinks he must do that service in the name of his redeemer, that need not hinder his neighbor of a different belief from grasping his hand and becoming his fellow-laborer. If the Jew is seen to do millennial work why should the Christian keep aloof?79
Gottheil here aligned the coming of the millennium with ethical achievementsthings good, true, and helpfulin a manner very similar to the way that normative nationalist Christian social reformers did in their narration of American millennial goals. For Gottheil, however, this was a Jewish logic that Christians had impeded with exclusionary doctrinal disputes. Jews have always been ready, he contended, to co-labor for the good with Christians based upon their shared desire for the fulfillment of millennial goals. But heretofore they have been hindered by Christians who wanted to keep them at the margins, insisting that millennial advancement was contingent upon Christianizing the social order. If American Christians are now ready, in their present historical moment, to lay aside these differences of doctrinal disputeparticularly those relating to the unique divinity of Christand embrace the universal ethical possibilities of their faith, Gottheil suggested, they will immediately find themselves undertaking the labor warranted by the Jewish millennial hope. Such Christians, freed from divisive dogma, would return to their most fundamental religious roots and discover that Reform Jews were waiting there for them. The Jew, he said stands at his post and defends his old flag. . . . Firm in his old-time tried and fireproof faith in the coming of the millennial Messiah, he labors on; where that is made impossible by the iron hand of the oppressor, he practices the art no one has learned better than heto stand and wait.80 Thus, Gottheil achieved his rhetorical objective; he took all of the social momentum surrounding the Christian doctrine of the millennium and framed it as a cherished value of Judaism from which Christians had sadly strayed. All that remained for him to
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do was fill out his picture of the substance of millennial work, i.e., what must be done to turn the wheels of Gods providential and redemptive purposes for the world.
It is not in the will of man to direct his steps, says Scripture; nor in that of mankind either. Civilization, and it alone, is soughtand behold millennial fulfillment comes with it, unsought and inevitably. The spirit cannot be restrained nor put behind prison doors; it moves where it listeth.81
In language laden with allusion to the King James Version of the New Testament, Gottheil proceeded to describe a variety of ways that American civilization was being pursued, linking them to millennial progress. Of course, he spoke of civilization in the manner that advocates of the Spanish-American War liked to understand it namely, as the cultivation of favorite aspects of American character and culture by the amplification of national political values. From freedom of speech to an untrammeled press to scientific developments such as electricity [which] quickens thought as well as muscle and the telephone [which] sharpens the mental as well as the bodily ear to manhood resulting from manual labor to public schools to organized labor and, finally, to pulpits on all sides in which the religion of truth is taught, the America of his present day was carrying forth a millennial mission that had been at the heart of Jewish hope since ancient times. Returning at last to the millennium-bringing chaplain in Manila, Father Francis B. Doherty, Gottheil read the fact that he preached to the Jewish troops during Hanukkah as a recognition from one of the most active agents of American civilization, the United States military, of the catholicity of creed and the democracy of sects.82 Under American rule, Jews were not only afforded freedom of religion but, in fact, were also included once again in the spiritual community that Christians share. Thus, the disunity between Jews and Christians born out of angst over the return of Christ that was reified into doctrine by the early church was being overcome by regular Americans on the battlefields of the Pacific theater. The splendid little war that was ostensibly being waged for the sake of the civilization of the world was, in fact, accomplishing religious ends of world-historical scope. The advancement of American civilization was facilitating the healing of ancient divisions between Christianity and Judaismthe millennial destiny of America was coming to pass, a destiny that was, at base, Judaic. Here, again, the American exception was not Christian but Mosaic, and the ones with eyes to see it were those whose religious perspective did not drag them into the morass of dogmatic division but
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rather filled them with ethical sentiment perfectly aligned with the highest hopes of American civilization.
The Drift of Modern Christian Thought It should be clear by now that Gottheil in no sense desired a hard distinction between political and religious matters in modern American life. Thus, he rejected the strict constitutionalism of Isaac Leeser and, instead, followed the lead of the very normative nationalist Christianity whose influence he intended to subvert. His was a project of the renarration of American identity in toto through the lens of a normative nationalist Judaism. Having said that, the political renarration for which he argued would have been sorely lacking had he not believed it to be underwritten by concrete transitions in the practice of American Christianity. On January 19, 1885, in his address to the inaugural conference of the New York Area Jewish Ministers Association, Gottheil laid out an interpretation of the trajectory of New York liberal Christianity in relation to Reform Judaism. After acknowledging the great influence of Christian thought on New York Reform Jews, mediated to them weekly as news in the religion pages of the New York Herald, he argued that American Christianity had been, for some time, in the throes of a radical ideological transition, a disintegration in the area of doctrine that was attacking the vitals of her faith.83 He believed that doctrinal Christianity, as he and his peers had known it, was dying.
Who now contends for the trinityfor the pre-existence of the founder of Christianity,for original sin,for salvation by faith,for predestination,for everlasting punishment, and so forth? If they are mentioned at all, it is either to deny them outright, or to polish and grind them down into mere conceptions at which no one can take serious offence.84
Gottheil named prominent New York ministers Henry Ward Beecher and R. Heber Newton, both of whom he counted as personal friends, as having recently embodied this decline from their pulpits, calling them heretics and theologically wayward.85 This accusation was tonguein-cheek, but it was dead serious. Their Christianity, he thought, was adrift on the tides of modernity and was dismantling that which had distinguished it, piece by piece. As we shall see below, dialogue about the disintegration of historic Christian orthodoxies, particularly those concerning the divinity and uniquely salvific mission of Jesus Christ, was precisely the ground upon which his relationship with such liberal
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Christian ministers began. In such conversations, Reform Jewish thought had something important to offer; pedagogically, it could help liberalizing Christians to reimagine their theological dogmatics in a modern, post-trinitarian context. Gottheil interpreted this as nothing less than the gradual vindication of the primacy of the religious claims of his Judaism in the American context, coming to pass in real time before his very eyes.
[These days] I find nothing to say against the Christians; they have become such good Jews. . . . [Christian thought] is turning back to its source, back to the simpler and purer faith underlying our Bible; back through the mists and clouds and darknesses and upward to the clearer light! What drove the formers of the Christian creed away from their kinship . . . is now crumbling away under the influence of modern thought. We may sum it up in the sentence: Modern Christianity is ancient Judaism.86
Traditional Christian theological self-definition, which used to undergird normative Christian nationalism, was quickly decaying under the refining pressures of modern life and being replaced by the priorities of ancient Judaism, by which he meant the Judaism that the Reform movement intended to hold upspirit over formalism, free thought over dogma, reason over tradition, prophecy over priestly ritual.87 Lest his hearers think that he drew these parallels between religious development in form only, he closed his speech by plainly stating that the particularity of Reform Judaism was the telos of modern Christianity.
[Scholars] whose opinions carry the greatest weight have openly declared that the foundation truths of our Bible contain the elements of all religionsof the only possible religion of the future. . . . The drift of Christian thought has carried Jewish thought into the foreground, and thus given us a glimpse of that time which we call by the Hebrew original of the Christian nameMessianic.88
Here we see clearly, through Gottheils heady rhetoric, that, for him, this drift was part of a world-historical process, a religious transition in which the fundamental primacy of Jewish particularity, albeit in its modernized Reform mode, was taking its place as the only possible religion of the future. He did not elaborate on the concrete form that this Judaism would takeperhaps he did not feel sure, given his conviction that this transition was, at base, evolutionary. What is critically important to see is that he identified Judaism as the end point of the religious and cultural future of American Christianity
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and, thus, of the nation as a whole. This, he said, is characteristic of the messianic age, which, as we have seen above, was not, for him, about being rescued by a messiah but, rather, about the full flourishing of humanity as it was meant to be. Just as Judaism offered a better account of American political priorities, and better examples of American citizens, so also did Judaism offer a better religious account of the nature of human beings than Christianity did. As Christian dogma passed gradually from the scene, Christians were becoming consonant, whether they knew it or not, with the Jewish account of humanness. The fundamental future trajectory of normative nationalist Christian America was characterized by its theological drift backward toward its Jewish past. Citizenship, Christology, Conversionism, Civilization Gottheils unusual version of religious triumphalism encouraged him to establish an extensive network of friendships with New York liberal Christian clergy. He counted such prominent Unitarians as Robert Collyer, John Chadwick, and Stephen H. Camp among his closest intimates.89 He preached in Henry Ward Beechers pulpit at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and, in turn, Beecher feted him at Temple Emanu-El on the occasion of his twenty-fifth anniversary in ministry there.90 He was invited to collaborate with the Episcopal priest R. Heber Newton, another close friend, on A Book of Common Worship, a prayerbook developed by the New York State Conference on Religion in the aftermath of the Worlds Parliament of Religions.91 He also carried on an extensive correspondence with scores of Christian ministers, mostly liberals, from all over the United States. In light of this plethora of high-profile relations, one can understand the critics who doubted his allegiance to Judaism. However, these relationships were crucial sites that allowed Gottheil, first, to establish that he shared many instincts and concerns with liberal Christian clergy and, subsequently, to advance his claims that Judaism offered a better way forward for America than its normative nationalist Christianity. Where he perceived that some of these men were already disposing of their distinctive Christian dogma and drifting toward the clearer light of Judaism, these relationships allowed him the opportunity to encourage them to continue to move in that direction. The foundation of these relationships, the reason so many ministers responded to his advances, was rooted in a shared desire to describe the religious identity of American citizens. Many of his correspondents expressed heartfelt concern to develop their religion so that it would most suitably address the promises and perils that
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American civilization faced in the modern age, appealing to the common concerns of American citizens as the foundation of their dialogue.92 This rings out in an 1876 letter from Henry Whitney Bellows, famed Unitarian minister, intellectual liberal, and booster of Americas civilizing mission. Gottheil had initiated correspondence (as he almost always did with prominent Christian figures), sending Bellows a manuscript of his poetic translations of psalms, hymns, and prayers for review. Bellows responded with a cordial and extensive engagement with Gottheils work, at the end of which he signed off as an open-hearted friend, who has no Christian arrogance and no anti-Jewish prejudice; as long as I am your fellow citizen [I am] ready to interchange at all times, intellectual, social, and religious experiences and affections.93 No doubt, Bellows believed that his heart was free of Christian arrogance and anti-Jewish prejudice (and, perhaps, it was), but the naming of these dynamics as being in subjection to the higher call of citizenship speaks volumes about the ground on which their relationship stood. Bellows spoke selfconsciously as a representative of Americas dominant religious culture, and he sought to extend the reach of that religious culture by offering a hand to Gottheil on the basis of shared experiences and affections. Difference in doctrine, he believed, could be deemphasized in light of a sense of common religious feeling, shared ethical interests, and a mutual desire as citizens to advance the development of American civilization. From Bellowss point of view, the goal was a pluralistic future in which dominant Christianity and minority Judaism worked side by side for the advancement of American civilization. Though Gottheil did not have this precise end in mind, attention to the religious nature of citizenship was close to his heart as well. Alongside these shared interests in the ethics of citizenship, it was also increasingly the case that Gottheil and his liberal Christian friends were drawing closer to a common understanding of the person of Jesus. As we have already seen, Gottheil was keenly attuned to the significance of the liberal Christian drift away from belief in the unique divinity of Christ and the justifying power of faith in Christ for the advancement of Reform Judaism in American culture. Gottheil was by no means alone in his attention to these matters. George L. Berlin has shown that, in the late nineteenth century, there was widespread interest in the historical and theological reinterpretation of Jesus as a Palestinian Jew among American Reform leaders. The thrust of much of their scholarship was to argue that Jesus was a product of his Palestinian religious contexthis ethical teaching may have been exceptionally wise, but it was basically an appropriation of
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Jewish prophetic and pharisaic traditions. Thus, Jesus was neither divine nor even spiritually unique but, rather, a great Jewish religious teacher.94 The emergence of belief in divinity and salvific uniqueness of Jesus was by and large ascribed to Paul the apostle, who they read as a misguided Jew influenced by pagan religions. Emil Hirsch argued that Pauls theology of the vicarious atonement of Christ was not Jewish but Semitica spurious interpolation that disrupted the continuity of Jesus-followers with Judaism.95 Kaufmann Kohler suggested that Paul was a hellenized Jewish Gnostic whose writing contained no trace of rabbinic teaching.96 Isaac Mayer Wise contended that Paul was an Orthodox Pharisee who, in attempting to create a means for Gentiles to enter into Jewish faith, made up a noble lie, a salvation myth that he himself did not believe about the triunity of God and the divine nature of Jesus. Wise admired Paul for this universalist impulse but blamed Pauls followers for reifying these mythic fictions into theology, creating a massive rift between Judaism and Christianity.97 These were just three prominent readings among many others. In step with his broader strategy for engaging normative nationalist Christianity, Gottheil was characteristically modest and generous in his claims about these matters. He said little about Paul, the great organizer, though he did believe that Paul had codified Christianity and intentionally repudiated . . . communion with his Jewish brethren.98 He spoke of Jesusand, generally, of the religion of those who followed himin glowing terms. He believed that everyone, Jews and Gentiles alike, had much to learn from Jesus. He left open the possibility that the Master of Nazareth had embodied and taught new religious truths, which, though emergent from a Judaic context, were truths that the Jews of Jesus day had not properly understood.99 Unlike many of his Reform contemporaries, he was willing to bracket the controversial question of whether Jesus was killed by Jewish authorities solely for his new teachings, arguing that the more important thing was that Jews and Christians today emulate Christ by identifying with the persecutedand, thus, avoid being persecutors.100 While he categorically refused the notion that Christians were ethically superior to other religious groups, he did not spend any time arguing from Christian ethical inferiority, as some of his Reform contemporaries did. On rare occasions, as we shall see below, he did directly attack Christian theology, but he generally remained quiet in public about his belief that Trinitarian Christology was intellectually incoherent. Rather than making bold arguments against Trinitarians, as Isaac Mayer Wise and others did, he instead invested in relationships with Unitarians and other liberal Christians, who he believed were the vanguard of the coming
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transformation of modern American religion. Furthermore, he did not press these friends to articulate the precise nature of their lowering Christologieshe knew that altering tradition was often a slow and ambivalent process. Rather, he engaged in dialogue while seeking to amplify the already existing religious common purpose between them, believing that engagement in shared purposes would reveal that their common ground as religious citizens had an essentially Judaic nature. One important, practical location of such common ground between Gottheil and his liberal Christian friends was found in their shared opposition to Christian conversionism. Like many of his peers in the rabbinate, Gottheil wrote openly and angrily against Christian evangelism of Jewish people.101 In 1876, in response to the establishment of an Episcopal Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, Gottheil challenged conversionists to prove to him that Christianity offered religious and ethical possibilities not already present in Judaism: Are [Christianitys] morals purer, its doctrines clearer, its adherents more honest, truthful, and consistent livers? This was so patently false, he believed, that he offered a reward of twenty-five dollars to any conversionist who could bring him a rabbi that converted to Christian faith!102 In 1893, the subject came up again, this time in response to evangelistic campaigns purporting to explain the true (i.e., Christian) significance of Passover to Jews, suggesting that unconverted Jewish souls were lost . . . cursed of God.103 In this case, Gottheil took particular exception to the fact that these campaigns were targeted at poor and uneducated Jewish people by unscrupulous, uncultured Christians.
I have met many Christian clergymen, and enjoy their friendship. They are broad-minded, cultured, refined men. Not one of them ever tried to convert me. If the conversion of the Jews is so important that collections are taken up to carry on the work, why is it not tried on us? Why is it that only the poor are approached?104
Gottheil here used his friendship with liberal, nonconversionist ministers to imply a link between being broad-minded, cultured, and refined and rejecting the religious claims of conversionism. Echoing earlier themes, he framed the issue as a matter of religious bigotry and uncultured cruelty that ignored the obligations incumbent upon all participants in American civilization.
We must insist that our Christian neighbors treat us with equality. We must insist that they cease to treat us as if we were African barbarians. We must insist that they treat us as
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if we were their fellow citizens. We ask simply that they treat us with such dignity as we are entitled to.105
To be a conversionist was, to some extent, to be undemocratic, denying the cultural and religious equality of ones fellow citizens. Gottheil averred that traditional, Trinitarian, conversionist Christianity required an inherently deficient account of the responsibilities of American citizenship. Here again, in a subtle but deliberate way, Gottheil deployed arguments that suggested universalist instincts instincts that he took to be Judaicas the best, if not, indeed, the only, suitable foundation for American life. By and large, Gottheils liberal Christian friends shared his antipathy for the style and substance of Christian conversionism. This seems to have been especially true of his Unitarian correspondents. In response to Gottheils article about the 1893 campaign, the Reverend Stephen H. Camp immediately wrote him a letter of support on the letterhead of the national Unitarian conference, inviting him to come and take a stand in our sacred place against this miserable business of Christian proselytizing among the Jews at a timely and sacred service.106 Other the years, Gottheil received several other letters that more or less directly repudiated conversionist efforts, affirming instead a commitment to the religious sufficiency of Judaism in and of itself. This often seemed to emerge not only out of an expression of theological conviction but also from a desire to disclaim what they took to be the small-mindedness and antiliberality of their more traditional coreligionists. One senses a measure of shame among them about Christian conversionism and an eager desire to distance themselves from such practices. For example, in an 1887 letter to Gottheil, Massachusetts Unitarian minister Nathan Seaver wrote a long, impassioned letter elucidating his conviction, established by reading one of Gottheils articles about Judaism in the Unitarian Review, that Jewish stability was not a rejection of Christianity but, rather, a necessary element for religious progress in the modern age: The very stability of Jewish feeling which we [Christians] have been too ready to call obstinacy was and is a necessary factor to all progress. Fortunate indeed that the Weltgeschichte is slow in its verdicts.107 An intact Judaism was necessary, in Seavers view, for the world-historical development of progressive religion. On this, he and Gottheil could completely agree. Gottheils targeted advocacy for Judaism in Christian contexts had hit its mark. What Seaver grandly framed in world-historical terms, Nathan S. Hill, the pastor of Third Universalist Church of Brooklyn, New York, framed theologically. He wrote to Gottheil in 1879:
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I am very glad that the old partition walls are growing thinner and thinner. It is an indication of true progress when ecclesial comity is fostered. The longer I study Christian theology (trinitarianism excluded) the more I am led to contemplate the position and influence of Judaism on the life and thought of the world.108
Hills insider assessment of Christian theological progress, marked as it was by a freewheeling bracketing of Trinitarianism, as well as his correlation of the erasure of division between the two religions with true progress, strongly suggests his conviction that there was more that united Reform Jews and liberal Christians than divided them. Where progress was being made, where American civilization was advancing, Judaism and Christianity would work hand in hand. Both of these men, typical of Gottheils Christian correspondents, envisioned a pluralistic future in which Christianity and Judaism would work side by side for the advancement of American civilization against the uncivilized, regressive forces of conversionist Christianity that saw Judaism as incomplete without Christ. For his part, Gottheil envisioned a very similar future, but one in which the religious development of these liberal Christians advanced to the point that they would run forward into the welcoming embrace of ancient Judaism. It is legitimate to ask, given his enthusiastic proclamations about the drift of modern Christian thought, whether Gottheil himself might not be read as a sort of conversionist. Though he would never have seen himself as such, the suggestion is not unreasonable. He was no pluralist, committed as he was to the particularity of Judaism, believing firmly in the importance of its being an exclusive church, and convinced, as we have seen, that it would rise to dominance as dogmatic Christianity declined.109 Gottheils posture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century certainly prefigured the missional, even conversionist, priority that Lila Corwin Berman shows Reform Jews like Kaufmann Kohler taking up in the first quarter of the twentieth century.110 However, Gottheil understood himself more than anything as an educator, who, as one of his ministry associates put it, did not wish to convert [Gentiles] to Judaism but to instruct [them] in the higher ideals of religion.111 This is a helpful way to understand his complicated posture toward his liberal Christian friends. He saw himself as a public teacher who would teach the particularity of Judaism as he understood it, regularly offer an interpretation and a vision of American civilization through its lens, and leave the conversion to the Weltgeschichte. History, he wrote in 1887, is the great revealer of truth . . . [and] Israel is master in the art of waiting and patience.112
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Jewish Liturgy, American Liturgy One of the most interesting ways that Gottheil engaged with the concrete religious claims of normative nationalist Christianity was through his liturgical works. Gottheil warmly embraced versified hymnody as an expression of modern Jewish worshiphe was a prolific hymn writer and translator in his own right. He enthusiastically took up a form that had been classically shaped by Protestant Christianity and rendered it in a Jewish mode. Sometimes, he drew explicit connections between Christian and Jewish hymnody, taking the opportunity to assert Jewish particularity and anteriority to Christian religion. One of the best examples of this is found in his most famous translation, the Chanukah hymn Rock of Ages, Let Our Song. Writing in the first person plural, Gottheil highlighted Gods salvation of his chosen Jewish people over many generations. This is a song about group identity and the purposes of God:
Rock of Ages, let our song / Praise Thy saving power; Thou, amidst the raging foes, / Wast our sheltering tower. Furious they assailed us, / But Thine arm availed us, And Thy Word / Broke (stayd) the sword When our own strength failed us.
Under Gods protection, the priests of Israel kindl[ed] new the holy lamps and purified the nations shrine amid happy throngs singing Zions songs. In the context of an American Reform service, Gottheil was inviting the singers in the temple to imagine themselves in this scenewith the further implication that the purifying priests should be analogized with their Reform religious leaders. While it invoked the history of Jerusalem temple, this song was intended to invoke the American Jewish present.113 Gottheils lyrics also resonate deeply with American political values, overlaying purified Jewish identity onto the deep-seated American antipathy to tyranny.
Children of the martyr race, / Whether free or fettered, Wake the echoes of those songs / Whither ye are scattered. Yours be gospel cheering / That the day is nearing Which will see / All men free, Tyrants disappearing.114
Here is a classic distillation of Gottheils strategy of inhabiting the rhetoric and then shifting the religious foundation of normative Christian nationalism. The end of tyranny, a vaunted American value, is here presented by Gottheil as the gospel of Judaism, nothing less than
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an echo of ancient Jewish worship. Ancient Judaism, he tells us, named the agenda for the modern future, one free of tyranny. While Gottheils hymn does not share the melody or meter of Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me, the famous Christian hymn by Augustus Toplady, its invocation of Topladys canonical phrase is an appropriation of Christianitys liturgical rhetoric and a repurposing of it to tell a Jewish story. As if to drive the point home, in the draft manuscript version of Rock of Ages, Let Our Song, Gottheil toyed with the idea of setting his words to the famous Lutheran tune, Eine Feste Burg ist unser Gott. He settled instead on the more traditional Mordecai, noting in the margin, it strikes me Luther had our old tune in mind.115 Even here, Judaism had prefigured the best of Christianity. The most imaginative and most popular liturgical project that Gottheil undertook was his book Sun and Shield: A Book of Devout Thoughts for Every-day Use. It was designed as a devotional reader for the modern personan aid to devotional self-exercise that would offer a few moments of daily introspection, of retirement from the exhausting din and rush around us, so that we may listen to the still, small voice within us . . . a way of religious and ethical self-culture . . . congenial to the taste and temper of our time.116 The book consisted of brief daily readings, framed by Jewish scripture, from a wide variety of religious and philosophical traditions, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Greco-Roman, Romantic, Hindu, Buddhist, and beyond. Jewish writers featured most prominently, followed by liberal Christians, many of them Gottheils correspondents.117 Also, Gottheil himself wrote a great deal of the material in the book; in the tradition of the biblical Hebrew scribes whose work he loved so much, his authorship involved more than compilation.118 The whole book was organized as an introduction to the Jewish liturgical calendar and Jewish ways of worship; Gottheil intended, through its choice of subject matter, to present to the reader a concise, yet comprehensive, view of modern Judaism which, I trust, will be as welcome to the Jewish as the non-Jewish reader.119 Here was a deliberately Jewish intervention into the spiritual self-improvement literature of the late nineteenth centurya public liturgical text predicated on the notion that Judaism had solutions to the turbulent spiritual condition of Gottheils modern citizen. The preface said that the book was intended for Jews, and it remained unabashedly Jewish. However, Gottheil was careful to note that the book contained nothing at which any candid reader of another creed could justly take umbrage. . . . They only who look for offense may discover such.120 In Sun and Shield, he self-consciously marshaled representatives of all of the great world religions to provide a coherent, modern, useful, attractive apologia for
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modern Judaism. Gottheil was neither trying to explain Religion-ingeneral nor offering a pluralistic pastiche of world religions. Rather, he was presenting Reform Judaism as both inclusive of all the great traditions and providing a coherent form to contain them all. Gottheils Judaism was the ur-religious rubric that could make sense of the whole of modern spiritual striving. Gottheil was very proud of this work and understood its potential to advance the cause of Judaism among liberal Christians. More than with any of his other works, he sent scores of inscribed copies of Sun and Shield to friends in Christian ministry.121 John White Chadwick, a Unitarian minister and friend of Gottheil, called the book superb and suggested that the quotations from such a diversity of traditions all blend together in a harmony of ethical and spiritual ideas, and show how much more we all have in common than we have in distinction from one another.122 The Reverend J. H. Mitchell, a Catholic priest in Brooklyn, wrote to thank Gottheil, saying that, since receiving the book, he had often lingered in [its] little sanctuary and while there . . . breathed with grateful recognition its soothing atmosphere of piety and peace.123 Such responses are representative and typical of the liberal Christian response. Far more interesting is the cooler response of the Reverend Robert Stuart MacArthur. The pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in midtown Manhattan and vigorous booster for American civilizational progress, MacArthur wrote a fascinating letteraffirming yet ambivalent and even slightly defensive.
Accept my warmest thanks for this rare gift. Mrs. MacArthur and I have examined it with special interest. We appreciate it much for its own sake, and because it so admirably reflects your own literary taste and religious feeling. It introduces to our notice quotations from some writers with whom comparatively few Christians are familiar. I greatly esteem our friendship, and I hope and pray that the spiritual comfort which this book will give to many readers will be richly enjoyed in your own personal experience.124
While MacArthur appreciated the book, he located all of its good in a camp distinctly other than his own. He did not speak of the effect it had on him but, rather, the effect that it would have on others who read it, presumably those who were more open to what amounts to a program for Jewish spiritual life. The texts contained in it were unusual; he appreciated them, but he could not own them. Instead, they belong to Gottheils literary taste and religious feeling. This is
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a very different letter from those Gottheil typically received from his liberal Christian correspondents. It reads as if MacArthur has seen the writing on the wallGottheil is not advancing universal, generic spiritual resources but distinctively Jewish ones, packaged for general consumption by American spiritual seekers. MacArthur seems eager to contain the effectiveness of this package to those who share Gottheils religious beliefs. It is a book to be enjoyed for its own sake, but not, he implies, for the sake of the normatively Christian civilization to which it is directed. MacArthurs guarded praise was, of course, quite perceptive. His letter points up the fundamental tension that lay below the surface in many of Gottheils relationships with liberal Christian ministers. There was a tacit assumption, present even among pluralist Unitarians like Henry Bellows, that normative nationalist Christianity would necessarily be the dominant religion of the American future with other religions making a significant but lesser contribution. A text like Sun and Shield, in contrast, deliberately sought to position Reform Judaism as a viable, attractive alternative to this pluralist Christian vision. All Real Christianity Dead On some occasions, though they were rare, Gottheil employed the rhetoric of normative nationalist Christianity to attack Christianity in a fairly transparent fashion, underscoring his conviction of the need for an alternative religious foundation of American life. This was as close as he ever came to adopting the rhetorical strategies of Leeser and Wise. One of the best examples of this, notable for its unguardedness, was a sermon delivered just after Christmas entitled The Prince of Peace, reported with the subheading, Dr. Gottheil Says the Title Belongs to All Who Do Good.125 It was a deliberate engagement with Christian theological claims about the nature of Jesus Christ. He invoked the recent passing of the Christmas season in which Jesus Christ had been persistently liturgically heralded as the Prince of Peace but then stated, on the contrary, that the Prince of Peace was not a living mortal or an infinite person. Rather, he was the embodiment of such virtues as morality, charity, and godliness. . . . Who is that being? . . . We cannot believe that the title of Prince of Peace belongs to any one [individual]. I say the Jewish Messiah is the Prince of Peace. To us the Messiah means humanity.126 He went on to suggest a variety of people who deserved such a title: godly schoolteachers, those who ministered to the poor, industrious servantsin short, anyone who
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tends to uplift [humanity] with his or her actions. Gottheils belief that this was so was not remarkable. What was remarkable, however, was the way in which he adopted Christian language to make a point that fundamentally cut against the claims of Christian particularity by arguing that the weight of the messianic traditions of Judaism had both prefigured it and outreasoned it. Here, Gottheil was doing on the foundational theological level what he did on the political level with his analysis of Jewish millennialism. He was using Christian rhetoric to undermine the fundamental Christian belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, especially claims about his divinity. As his coup de grace, Gottheil turned his congregations attention to the violence in the headlines, stating with no small irony that the Christmas message of peace on earth and goodwill to men had quickly passed away, judging by current events.127 It was a pleasant sentiment but nothing more. As a doctrine, it was irrational and powerless, even an evasion of the need for concrete peacemaking action. In a similar vein, on February 19, 1899, just weeks after flagging the Spanish-American War as a millennial event, Gottheil preached a sermon entitled Was Christ a Christian? which was given an attention-grabbing headline in the New York Times: All Real Christianity Dead.128 In it, Gottheil argued for the inspired status of Jesus Christ as one who had profound religious feeling and the highest ethical standardshe was after all a Jewish religious genius. However, he went on to argue that it would be an impossible task to range [Christ] among the Christians, except those few who belong to Gods invisible church, and who are not separated by any conventional name. Jesus Christs Jewish religious genius was in no way commensurable with the religion that Christianity became as soon as it began to establish itself through dogma and doctrine. What followed this development was not Christianity but denominationalism and the tyranny that attends it. So-called Christian churches, he argued, had, thus, made themselves inhospitable to their founder, most especially through historical Christian antisemitism. In the context of Gottheils whole oeuvre, this might resonate as a familiar argument, but as a sermon report in the newspaper, it has the ring of an Emersonian attack on Christianity. Perhaps it is not coincidental that this sermon was delivered at the end of his career, on the eve of his retirement from public ministry. Perhaps, after years of diplomacy, Gottheil was beginning, on occasion, to show his hand. As ever with Gottheil, though, all was not lost; hope remained in the possibility of a reconciliation between those whom God joined together originallythe final reconciliation of the church then
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properly called Christian and the synagogue.129 This turn distills precisely the intention of Gottheils theological engagement with liberal Christians about Christianity, namely, the transmutation of Jesus Christ into a hero of Jewish godliness. Were he still on the earth, Gottheil argued, Christ would align himself with his persecuted peoplethe Jewsrather than with the dominant, violent Christians who have used his name virtually since his death. What was required for Christianity to become hospitable to the spirit of Christ again was for it to reject its dogmas and return to the foundational Judaic sympathies of its founder. This was, in the long run, the only possible future for American religion.
Conclusion For all of Gottheils various modes of engagement with normative nationalist Christianity, one thing was abundantly clear. There was a long distance between where things stood in his present and where he believed they were going. The wheels of messianic history had further to turn, and, for that reason, he spent much of his public life engaging liberal Christians with rhetorical visions of American political and religious identity, friendly engagement on shared social priorities, substantive dialogue about theological issues, and vigorous pushback when the significance of Jewish particularity was called into question. In his article The Social Gospel and the Jews, historian Egal Feldman argued that the determining reason liberal Christians and Reform Jews did not merge into a universal church at the turn of the twentieth century, as some historians predicted that they could have, was a latent antisemitism in Christianity rooted in ideas about supersessionism and Jewish legalism.130 To whatever extent that this was the case, the life and work of Gustav Gottheil shows another side of the picture, namely, that some Reform Jews in the late nineteenth century were very concerned about Jewish particularity, believing, in fact, that it was a key to the future of religion in America, even to the emergence of the messianic age. It was not merely antisemitism that kept Reform Jews distinct from their liberal Christian counterpartsit was that their liberal Christian counterparts were not (yet) Jews. Notes
Special thanks are due to Kathryn Gin, Elesha Coffman, April Armstrong, Rachel Gross, Lauren Winner, Judith Weisenfeld, Ryan
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Harper, and Benjamin Tievsky for their assistance with the development of this project. 1. Obituary, American Hebrew, April 17, 1903. The editors took Gottheil to be mark[ed] . . . out over and above many of his peers in the Reform movement because of his role as an ambassador for Judaism in a normatively Christian America. Lawrence Charaps analysis of the antiReform sentiments of the American Hebrew makes the tone of the obituary all the more noteworthy. See Charaps unpublished dissertation, Imperceptibly We Convert One Another: Jewish-Protestant Dialogue in America, 18831915 (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2000), 21, and chap. 1, passim. 2. A hakham was a sagacious Talmudic rabbi. Kohlers word choice associates Gottheil with a noble and ancient tradition of rabbinic wisdom. Thanks are due to Benjamin Tievsky for helping me to situate this reference in Kohlers speech. 3. Kaufman Kohler, cited in I. S. Moses, Eulogy on Dr. Gustav Gottheil, Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook, vol. 13 (1903), in Richard Gottheil and Gustav Gottheil, The Life of Gustav Gottheil (Williamsport, Pa.: Bayard Press, 1936), 508 [hereafter LOGG ]. On Kohlers authorship of the Pittsburgh Platform, see Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 268. The Life of Gustav Gottheil is a biography cum lightly redacted compendium of most of the primary source materials preserved in the Gustav Gottheil papers at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. It is, by and large, quite useful, as it preserves a great many letters and articles in a transcribed published form that is easy to access. It is also reasonably academically rigorous in its form, as it was prepared by Richard Gottheil, Gustav Gottheils son, who was a professor of Semitics at Columbia University. 4. Jacob Voorsanger, Obituary, in Emanu-El (April 1903), in LOGG, 276. 5. Gottheil, in Meyer, Response to Modernity, 281. 6. More on the specifics of all of this below. 7. One important exception here is his turn to Zionism in 1897, which he embraced during the last five years of his life and ministry. Gottheils emergence as one of the first Americans to hold together Reform Judaism and a robust political Zionism is important and worthy of further study but is beyond the scope of the present essay. See LOGG, 19095, 261.
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8. Naomi Wiener Cohen, What the Rabbis Said: The Public Discourse of Nineteenth-Century American Rabbis (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 187. 9. See Gustav Gottheil Papers, Box 441, Jewish Theological Seminary Library Archives, New York [hereafter GGP]. Much of his correspondence is transcribed and reproduced in LOGG. 10. See, for example, LOGG, 97114, 24347, and 46771. 11. Ibid., 26263. 12. See Benny Kraut, The Temple Sermon, From Reform Judaism To Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1979). 13. LOGG, 4042. 14. Obituary, American Hebrew, in LOGG, 505. Jacob Voorsanger also uses this language of ogling, though he says Gottheil was accused of ogling with Unitarianism. This must have been a concrete accusation made in a public forum against Gottheil. The shared language can hardly be coincidental. However, I have not been able to locate the accusation, and Gottheils personal papers make no mention of it. If I had to speculate, I suspect that it came from Isaac Mayer Wise, who often used the language of ogling in the American Israelite to describe what he takes to be illicit relations with Unitarians. However, the reference is not to be found in the American Israelite or in the papers of Wise or Gottheil. 15. Editorial Notes, Reform Advocate 12 (December 12, 1896), 259. I am indebted to Charap, Imperceptibly We Convert One Another, 214, for the citation. 16. Voorsanger, editorial, Emanu-El (San Francisco, 1903), in LOGG, 27576. While I do not wish to judge contemporary historians of American Judaism as in any way ill-disposed to Gottheils approach, it is fascinating to see the way that Voorsangers prophecy about Gottheils marginalization was fulfilled, as he is barely mentioned in most standard histories. See, for example Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity; and Marc Lee Raphael, Profiles in American Judaism: The Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist Traditions in Historical Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984). One wonders if this relative absence indicates something about the broader structure of how the story of Reform Judaism is usually told. 17. Emma Lazarus to Gustav Gottheil, October 3, 1882, in LOGG, 65.
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18. Gustav Gottheil, Benjamin, Levi, Abram, New York Herald, November 5, 1888, 9; Gustav Gottheil, The Mission of Israel, New York Herald, September 12, 1875, 6; Gustav Gottheil, The Position of the Jews in America. Second Article, North American Review 127 (1878): 87. The idea of normative nationalist Christianity is akin to Catherine Albaneses category of public Protestantism in America: Religion and Religions (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992), 39598. However, in the case of Gottheil, Albaneses category is not sufficient for a couple of reasons. First and most simply, Gottheil explicitly included Catholicism in his characterization of a normative nationalist Christianity in the midst of which Jews had to locate themselves. To him, there was a cultural unity established by shared Christian faithin spite of well-documented Protestant/Catholic tensionthat formed a locus of Jewish exclusion in American national identity. This was an intellectual as much as cultural problem; Gottheil understood normative nationalist Christianity to draw strength from a fundamental theological unity. Much rested in Gottheils mind on the extent to which Christians of all sorts understood Jesus Christ to be the unique savior of the world. As we shall see below, this belief threw American Christian discourse into a particular relation to time and progress with regard to the second coming of the Messiah. In spite of intra-Christian difference, he believed that this Christian discourse all but wrote nonconverting, practicing Jews out of the conversation. As Gottheil tracked the transformation of normative nationalist Christianity, he paid close attention to the way that doctrines of the uniqueness of Christ began to give way to lower-boundary beliefs in Christs exemplary human life and Christ as a signpost to the ways of God. He saw this transition to what some scholars have called liberalism happening among Catholics and Protestants alike. To be sure, as shall be made clear below, Gottheils chief interlocutors were Unitarians, some of whom were self-consciously on their way out of the liberal Protestant community. This does not change the fact, however, that Gottheil was concerned with what he took to be Christianity in relation to Judaism and not a Protestant establishment in relation to those on its margins. 19. The structures and iterations of normative nationalist Christianity in the nineteenth century have been the focus of much recent scholarly attention. The most provocative, generative works include David Sehat, The Myth Of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); and John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). In what
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follows, I will note significant intersections with each of these works. Surprisingly, though, there is little in these accounts that deals with American Judaism, though venturing into that arena would bolster the arguments of each, showing the ways in which the presence of Jews in America was working to complicate and indeed weaken the hegemony of normative nationalist Christianity over the construction of Americanness from the mid-nineteenth century onward. An excellent work that attends to this phenomenon is Lila Corwin Bermans Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), but her argument is rendered almost exclusively in the context of twentieth-century history. Another important study that maps the reshaping and pluralization of the normative nationalist Christianity that Gottheil worked to renarrate is Kevin Schultzs Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). However, Schultzs book is also a twentieth-century story. Eran Shalevs American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) is an excellent intervention into nineteenth-century American intellectual history, though it is mostly a story of the appropriation of Old Testament themes by the Protestant majority who then wove them into Christian American self-consciousness. The present essay attempts to occupy space between these discourses, situating Gottheil as a nineteenth-century American Jewish religious figure thoroughly concerned both with the problem of normative nationalist Christianity and with the construction of a Jewish religious response that could entirely reorient American religious culture toward not just the Old Testament but a national Judaism. 20. Moses, Eulogy, 508. 21. See Emily Mace, Cosmopolitan Communions: Practices of Religious Liberalism in America, 18751930 (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2010), 27, chap. 1, passim. Many of his friends were preoccupied with this search, but Gottheil fundamentally disagreed with their aims. See, for example, Gottheils 1894 speech in honor of Harlem Unitarian minister the Reverend Merle St. Croix Wright, The Broader Brotherhood, in LOGG, 24042. 22. Gottheil, The Broader Brotherhood, 240; Gustav Gottheil, The Drift of Modern Christian Thought, Conference Papers, Essays and Addresses Delivered at the First Conference of the Jewish Ministers Association Held in New York, Jan. 1920, 1885 (New York: American Hebrew, 1885), 107. Isaac Mayer Wise said similar things about the future of Reform
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Judaism but for different reasons. See Benny Kraut, Judaism Triumphant: Isaac Mayer Wise on Unitarianism and Liberal Christianity, American Jewish Studies Review 7 (1982): 179230. 23. There is a vast array of scholarship that touches on the nature of modernity in this period. However, the most salient to what Gottheil meant by modernity is Meyer, Response to Modernity. Some key themes he highlights include a positive outlook toward science, biblical criticism, technical innovation, liturgical innovation, and the progress of Western especially Americancivilization, as well as a pronounced ambivalence toward the authority of tradition. 24. Gottheil, The Drift of Modern Christian Thought, 107. 25. Ibid., 109110. 26. Countersupersessionism is the theological opponent of supersessionism, the Christian theological idea that, after the Christ event, the special status once given by God to Israel and Judaism through the Mosaic covenant is instead given to the church and Christianity through Christ. As this essay shows, Gottheil consistently argued against this logic, proposing that it was not Judaism but orthodox Christianity that would be left behind as the sun rose upon the American future. A concise account of the theological stakes of supersessionism in contemporary Jewish-Christian relations can be found in David Novaks 2005 article, The Covenant in Rabbinic Thought, in Two Faiths, One Covenant? Jewish and Christian Identity in the Presence of the Other, ed. Eugene B. Korn and John Pawlikowski (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 27. For details on Gottheils early life, education, and ministry in Berlin and Manchester, see LOGG, 132. 28. Gottheil, Benjamin, Levi, Abram, 9. 29. See Gustav Gottheil, Syllabus of a Treatise on the Development of Religious Ideas in Judaism since Moses Mendelsohn, in Judaism at the Worlds Parliament of Religions Comprising Papers on Judaism Read at the Parliament, at the Jewish Denominational Congress, and at the Jewish Presentation (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke and Co., 1894), 2634. 30. The Mission of Israel, New York Herald, September 12, 1875, 6. 31. Ibid. This is an example of Gottheils elision of the priorities of a modern democratic ideal with the priorities of the biblical prophets. 32. Gottheil, The Position of the Jews in America. Second Article, 87.
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33. Ibid., 8688. 34. Gustav Gottheil, The Position of the Jews in America. First Article, North American Review 126 (1878): 302, 300308. 35. This use of social-scientific statistical analysis can be viewed as a prefiguration of what Lila Corwin Berman describes as the SocialScientific turn in Jewish self-narration. This approach rose to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s with such books as The Ghetto by Louis ge of Robert Park at the University of Chicago. Wirth, she Wirth, a prote argues, was preaching from the altar of sociology when he posited his thesis that American Jews in a free society would, by virtue of their cultural intelligence, seek out the isolation of a ghetto to occupy in order to preserve their cultural intelligence and self-awareness. This ghettoization enabled them to look upon their world, in Robert Parks words, as marginal man . . . with the detachment of a stranger. Wirth and Parks sociological analysis argued for a strong correlation between cultural difference and a certain kind of cultural superiority. While Gottheil would have taken issue with the language of ghettoization, as well as the incipient universal pluralism (or, at least, scholarly agnosticism) of their argument, the larger point is quite similar. See Berman, Speaking of Jews, 39. 36. Gottheil, The Position of the Jews in America. Second Article, 88. Emphasis in the original. 37. The relationship between Isaac Leeser and Isaac Mayer Wise was contentious, even, at times, antagonistic. They differed strongly on matters of theology and the proper formulation of Jewish religious identity in the American context. See Sarna, American Judaism, 10310, for an overview of the tensions between them. However, in their approach to the political issues raised by normative nationalist Christianity, they were allies. See Lance Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 24344, for an exposition of Wises admiration of Leesers political tenacity. 38. Sussman, Isaac Leeser, 147. 39. Ibid.; Mark Noll, The Bible, Minority Faiths, and the Protestant Mainstream, in Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream, ed. Jonathan Sarna (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998), 199. David Sehats The Myth of American Religious Freedom marshals a great deal of evidence to show the ways in which an explicit Protestant normativity conditioned virtually every area of American public life, especially legal and political, from the colonial era well into the twentieth century. While Sehats book is mostly an account of outrageous violations of the
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religious freedom taken today to be guaranteed by the First Amendment, it is also a chronicle of resistance to this hegemonic Protestantism by those who took it to be their ideological enemy (see 20340, passim). Sehats story follows David Hollinger in the assessment that the chief nonJewish allies of American Jews in their struggle for public religious freedom and nondiscrimination were twentieth-century postChristian intellectuals. See Hollinger, Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century, in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Surprisingly, Sehat has little to say about Jewish attention to these issues in the post-bellum nineteenth century; he makes no mention of such figures as Isaac Mayer Wise, Isaac Leeser, and Kaufman Kohler, all of whom seminally addressed the central concern of his book in precisely the manner that he frames itas resistance to and reinterpretation of the Christian-inflected moral norms that the Protestant majority took to be commonsensical, self-evident, and necessary for the construction of a Republican government. Sehat tells most of the Jewish part of this story in the twentieth century in interactions with post-Christians who took the intellectual inheritance of their forbears but abandoned their faith. Attention to the figures treated in this essay would show that very similar conversations were happening in the last three decades of the nineteenth century between Reform Jews and liberal Protestants, many of whom were intent on retaining precisely the faith that postChristians gave up. Gottheil affirms the countersupersessionist aims of Leeser, Wise, et al. but rejects their rhetorical approach. 40. Sussman, Isaac Leeser, 148. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 149; Noll, The Bible, Minority Faiths, and the Protestant Mainstream, 199. 43. Sussman, Isaac Leeser, 87. This episode would seem to give further credence to John Lardas Moderns argument about the distribution of evangelical literature and its effect on the sense of the normative secular in the antebellum era. 44. Sussman, Isaac Leeser, 134. 45. Ibid., 14849. 46. Ibid., Leeser, 24344. 47. Kraut, Judaism Triumphant, 183.
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48. Ibid., 18485. 49. For more crystalline examples of Isaac Mayer Wises triumphalism, see ibid., passim. 50. See Arnold Eisen, The Chosen People in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 2022, 5356. 51. For a fine account of this, see Berman, Speaking of Jews, 11, chap. 1, passim. 52. Kraut, Judaism Triumphant, 183. 53. See, for example, Gottheils second speech at the Worlds Parliament of Religions, The Greatness and Influence of Moses, in Judaism at the Worlds Parliament of Religions, 15963. 54. This proposal interacts in two fascinating ways with Tracy Fessendens subtle and brilliant Culture and Redemption. First, it adds a dimension to her emphasis on the complex and problematic racialized elements of American religious self-narration. Where Fessenden (89) rightly locates Jews on the margins of the American secular proposed by the likes of Stowe, Whitman, and Emerson, Gottheil is proposing an alternative Jewish center for the construction. His proposal is both racialized and universalized, in the manner of Fessendens Protestants, with a key differencehe is not proposing the establishment of a new race but, rather, the incorporation of all Americans into the ideology of an ancient one, whose particularized, distinctive foundation truths he finds to contain the elements of all religions (Gottheil, The Drift of Modern Christian Thought, 109). It may be that Fessenden (191) would mark Gottheils move as yet another reiteration of the ideology of the Protestant secular in a Jewish mode. This would be a very interesting reading, but it would raise more questions than it answered, particularly ` -vis the influence of Germanic and Romantic thought on American vis-a Protestant notions of the secular. Gottheils Judaic vision of America is not, at base, one of pluralistic tolerance but, rather, of Jewish triumphalism, gently delivered. Fessenden asks all sorts of suggestive questions that gesture toward this complexity issue in her chapter on Mark Twains discomfort with American Christian/secular self-narration (14243), but she does not much pursue them through the lens of Judaism. Such a study would be most productive. 55. Lyman Abbott, The Meaning of It All, The Christian Union, October 22, 1892, 721. For recent historical work on this theme, see Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010),
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and Shalev, American Zion. Eric Nelsons forthcoming book, The Royalist Revolution, will be especially relevant, as it will consider Hebraic ideas of political authority in the context of the American founding. 56. Gottheil, Benjamin, Levi, Abram, 9. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Gottheil, The Greatness and Influence of Moses, 159. 60. Ibid., 15961. 61. Jonathan D. Sarna, The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 5, nos. 12 (1998): 5279. 62. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 227. 63. Gustav Gottheil, Jews in the Philippines, New York Herald, December 5, 1898, 9. 64. See Jeanne Abrams, Remembering the Maine: The Jewish Attitude Toward the Spanish-American War as Reflected in The American Israelite , American Jewish History 76, no. 4 (June 1987): 43955. Significantly, there was some intramural debate over the question of support for the war among the members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR). Gottheils position of unequivocating support was, by far, the majority opinion, though there was some dissent, notably from Jacob Voorsanger and Emil Hirsch. According to historian David Strassler, the Spanish-American war was a high-water mark for fervent patriotism among Reform leaders. Rabbi Henry Berkowitz of Philadelphia argued that the war was enabling American Jewish soldiers to fight back against the Catholic Spanish who had so persecuted them in the late Middle Ages: Never did Israel prevail against Spain, save now. In the years after the war, this posture was taken to have been a bit shortsighted; the CCAR affiliated itself with the National Peace Movement in atonement for its patriotic bellicosity during the war. For all of this and more, see David Strassler, The Changing Definitions of the Jewish People Concept in American Judaism (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1980), 5358. 65. T. J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 18771920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 207. 66. Anders Stephenson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 77; the priceless
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principles quote is from President William McKinley, cited in Lears, Rebirth, 210. 67. On the idea of character in this period, see Richard Wightman Fox, The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 18751925, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 63960. 68. Lears, Rebirth, 20721. 69. Gottheil, Jews in the Philippines, 9. 70. Ibid. 71. Historian Daniel Rodgers suggests that the motif of millennialism was perhaps the crucial ideological engine driving the national Protestant mythology of America as Gods chosen nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Daniel Rodgers, Exceptionalism, in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 2324. 72. Ibid., 23. See also Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), parts III and IV, esp. 15396 and 30737. 73. Gustav Gottheil, Rabbi Gottheil Discusses Jewish Faith in the Millennium, Sunday World, pamphlet in GGP. The piece is reprinted almost exactly in LOGG, 38287. Frustratingly, I cannot trace a date for the article in the Sunday Worldbecause I could not find any publication information about the Sunday World. The Sunday World may well have been a Christian publication. I do not know if Gottheil wrote the article in response to his piece on Father Doherty, but there is no reason to assume that he did. However, it seems likely that the article was written after 1890 for two reasons. First, it discusses an endemic rise in national antisemitism, and, second, Zionism is latent in the text, which was not a priority for Gottheil until after 1897 (see LOGG, 190 95). In any case, the question of the precise date of the essay is immaterial to the larger point about Gottheils approach to normative Christian nationalism. 74. Gottheil, Jewish Faith in the Millennium, in LOGG, 383. 75. Ibid., 384. 76. Ibid., 38384. Emphasis mine. 77. This point was a theme to which Gottheil returned regularly. See his sermon preached just a few months after the sermon on the
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Spanish-American War and the coming of the millennium, Christ and His Religion, New York Times, February 20, 1899. 78. Gottheil was certainly not alone in trying to articulate a Reform Jewish vision of the messianic age in this era. Since the articulation of the anti-Zionist Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, this had become a standard trope of Reform eschatology, though precisely how the messianic age should be understood remained a contested point. One interesting comparison piece, appearing shortly after Gottheils essay was written, is Harris Weinstocks Is the Messiah Yet To Come? in his popular book of essays, Jesus the Jew and Other Addresses (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902), 7791. In the main, it makes similar arguments with which Gottheil would have likely had no quarrel. However, in contrast to Gottheil, Weinstocks essay on messianism does not mention Jesus or the millennium, in spite of the fact that, as George Berlin has shown, Weinstockand many other American Reform leaders at the timewas very interested in amplifying the Jewishness of Jesus. Rather, Weinstocks essay rejects traditional historical messianism, denying wholesale the concept of disruptive divine intervention into history and arguing that all modern people should become personal messiahs to hasten the day of universal peace and good fellowship (90). His articulation was typical of the Reform position in that eraprogressive, ethical, anti-Zionist, and dismissive of supernatural divine interventionism on behalf of a chosen people. Gottheils extensive rhetorical engagement with more historical, supernaturalist messianism stands in sharp contrast. To Gottheil, the superior rhetorical strategy was to find common American religious ground with such discourse (if only to outnarrate it), rather than simply to reject it as outmoded and antimodern. 79. Gottheil, Jewish Faith in the Millennium, in LOGG, 384. 80. Ibid., 385. 81. Ibid. 82. Gottheil, Jews in the Philippines, 9. 83. Gottheil, The Drift of Modern Christian Thought, 104. 84. Ibid., 105. Gottheils characterization of Christianity should make it very clear to the historian that he was speaking about liberal Christians in New York City, not American Christianity as a whole. His is clearly not a synoptic view of American Christian doctrine in 1885. It was immaterial to his argument that he was not describing American Christianity as a whole. It is significant to note, however, that this is the view of Christianity that Gottheil took from his reading of the Herald and
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his relationships with a wide variety of New Yorks liberal Christian elite. Most important, this was the view that undergirded his public interventions into the rhetoric of normative nationalist Christianity, of which he took these ministers to be representatives. 85. Ibid., 106. 86. Ibid., 107. Gottheils invocation of ancient Judaism has interesting resonances with the deployment of Christian primitivism that Matthew Bowman identifies in the Protestant Social Gospel movement. See Matthew Bowman, Sin, Spirituality, and Primitivism: The Theologies of the American Social Gospel, 18851917, Religion and American Culture 17, no. 1 (Winter 2007): esp. 11319. 87. Gottheil, The Drift of Modern Christian Thought, 108. 88. Ibid., 10910. 89. LOGG, 11922. 90. Letter to the Editor, New York Times, April 30, 1899. 91. R. Heber Newton, Gustav Gottheil, and Thomas R. Slicer, eds., A Book of Common Worship (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1900). It was intended to be an object-lesson in the Possibilities of Common Worship, opening with a long quote from St. Thomas Mores Utopia on the divine origin of all religion and using the famous Latin of St. Ambrose as its epigraph, Vox Quidem Dissona, Sed Una Religio (Certainly voices dissent, but there is one religion). 92. This picture of Gottheils correspondence is drawn chiefly from extant letters in the GGP as well as his biography and reports on his life in contemporary newspapers. In studying Gottheils relationships to Christian ministers, the historian is faced with a familiar problem of epistolary technology, namely, that the letters in Gottheils archive are the ones that were sent to him. None of the letters that he sent to his Christian correspondents are preserved. Inference must therefore be made, conservatively but surefootedly, about the quality of the relationships that these one-sided communications represent. 93. Henry Whitney Bellows to Gustav Gottheil, November 14, 1876, GGP. 94. George L. Berlin, Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writings on Christianity and Jesus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 4578. 95. Ibid., 6162.
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96. Ibid., 61. 97. Ibid., 6263. 98. See, for example, LOGG, 234. 99. Berlin, Defending the Faith, 172. Gottheils definitive statement on the relationship of first-century Jews to the teaching of Jesus is found in The Great Refusal, Unitarian Review 27, no. 1 (January 1887): 112. It was a rebuttal to Unitarian minister S. R. Calthrops article, Israels Last Word, an argument that the Jews of Jesus day and beyond were blameworthy for not recogniz[ing their] grandest inspiration in Jesus (3). 100. Berlin, Defending the Faith, 172. 101. Some of his unusually vituperative energy for this cause may have come from the fact that, when Gottheil was a young man, German missionaries converted his older brother Edward to Christianity, causing a rift between Edward Gottheil and his father that Gustav tried unsuccessfully to heal. LOGG, 45. 102. Jewish Conversionists, New York Herald, April 16, 1876, 15. 103. Rabbi Gottheils Protest, New York Times, April 10, 1893. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. Gottheils reference to African barbarians is very striking here, calling to mind the racial dimensions present in Fessendens account of the secular. It seems that citizenship for Gottheil is, in some sense, a racial category, differentiating cultured/ uncultured, rich/poor, civilized/uncivilized, and, perhaps most important, Jewish-Christian/barbarian. Here is an area in which her use of race in the construction of a religious account of the nineteenth-century American secular would benefit from a broader accounting for Jewish sources. 106. Stephen H. Camp to Gustav Gottheil, April 18, 1893, GGP. 107. Nathan Seaver to Gustav Gottheil, January 24, 1887, GGP. 108. Nathan S. Hill to Gustav Gottheil, January 24, 1879, GGP. 109. Gottheil, The Broader Brotherhood, 240. 110. Berman, Speaking of Jews, chap. 1. 111. Joseph Silverman, A Rabbi in Israel, 255. 112. Gottheil, The Great Refusal, 2.
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113. Gustav Gottheil, Poetry Notebook (GGP), reproduced in LOGG, 413. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. Gustav Gottheil, Sun and Shield: A Book of Devout Thoughts for Every-day Use (New York: Bloch Publishers, 1896), ii. 117. For an interesting perspective on the production of Sun and Shield and its history in the context of Jewish womens devotional literature, see Eric L. Friedland, Meditation in Progressive Judaism, in Platforms and Prayerbooks: Theological and Liturgical Perspectives on Reform Judaism, ed. Dana Evan Kaplan (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 13941. 118. See Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), chap. 2, passim. 119. Gottheil, Sun and Shield, iv. 120. Ibid., i. 121. See Richard Gottheils wry comment about Sun and Shield not making any money because so many copies were given away. LOGG, 177. 122. John W. Chadwick to Gustav Gottheil, November 17, 1896, GGP. 123. J. H. Mitchell to Gustav Gottheil, December 18, 1896, GGP. 124. Robert Stuart MacArthur to Gustav Gottheil, November 10, 1896, in LOGG, 174. Emphasis mine. 125. Gustav Gottheil, The Prince of Peace, New York Times, January 13, 1896. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Gustav Gottheil, Christ and His Religion, New York Times, February 20, 1899. 129. Ibid. 130. Egal Feldman, The Social Gospel and the Jews, American Jewish Historical Quarterly 58, no. 3 (March 1969): 31522. Feldman revisits
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this argument in his Dual Destinies (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Gustav Gottheil was a person of great influence in the development of American Reform Judaism, but his story has been largely forgotten. From 1873 to 1903, he was rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, the largest and wealthiest Reform Congregation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A prolific author and public teacher, he was a striking and dominating figure . . . in American Judaism at large. He was also controversial, criticized by some for his perceived openness to the ideals, institutions, and elites of American liberal Christianity. One editorialist wrote that he was frequently accused of . . . ogling with Christianity, of servilely fawning upon it. Another suggested that, when the history of American Reform Judaism was written, ill-disposed critics [would] deny Gottheil his legitimate place, judging that he was dragging the congregation into . . . un-Jewish paths based on his warm relations with urban Christian elites. This essay is a study of the complex dynamics of Gustav Gottheils relationship to American Christianity. It argues that Gottheil believed America was in profound religious transition. In spite of the fact that American culture was dominated by Christian normativity, liberal Christians who were giving up their Trinitarian dogmas were actually becoming Reform JewsModern Christianity, he said in 1885, is ancient Judaism. This trajectory left him in no doubt that Reform Judaism was the only possible religion of the American future. Throughout his ministry, Gottheil sought to advance the process of the conversion of American Christianity to Judaism. He entered into extensive dialogue and friendship with scores of liberal Christian leadersthe ogling and fawning for which he was criticized. His strategy was rarely to debate but, rather, to inhabit their vocabulary. He spoke the religious language of the normatively Christian American culture, affirming the cultural impulses of the Christian nationalist vision while creatively renarrating them on Jewish foundations.
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Gustav Gottheil, Reform Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, religious nationalism, civil religion

''Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism'': Rabbi Gustav Gottheil and The Jewish-American Religious Future, 1873-1903

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''Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism'': Rabbi Gustav Gottheil and The Jewish-American Religious Future, 1873-1903

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Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism: Rabbi Gustav Gottheil and the Jewish-American Religious Future, 18731903

Religion and American Culture