reform 471
accepting Hegel’s notion of the religion of spirit and the possibility
of development but subjecting much else in Hegel’s philosophy to a
profound critique. He rejected Hegel’s view that modern German Chris-
tendom represented the culmination of the evolution of the perfect
absolute spirit, and its corollary that all other religions were mere sta-
tions along the way and should now fade into oblivion. Hirsch stressed
throughout his book the notion of freedom, arguing that anyone who
has discovered the truth of ethical freedom will want to spread it to
others, and that this is achieved within Judaism not by missionizing but
by Jews becoming witnesses to their faith. The impact of Hirsch’s ideas
was much enhanced by his public career and his commitment to social
justice. After serving as chief rabbi of Luxembourg from 1843 to 1866,
he moved to Philadelphia where he presided over the first American
conference of rabbis in 1869 and played an important role in the discus-
sions which produced the Pittsburg Platform in 1885 (see above).^19
The domination of specifically Kantian philosophers within twenti-
eth- century Reform Judaism was thus not inevitable. It owes a great
deal to the prestige of Hermann Cohen and to the adoption of his key
interpretation of Judaism as ‘ethical monotheism’ by the towering figure
within Reform Judaism in Germany in the first half of the twentieth
century, Leo Baeck. Baeck himself had combined study of rabbinics and
history with philosophical studies in the universities in Breslau and Ber-
lin before the start of his service as a rabbi (in Oppeln) in 1897. His
monumental Wesen des Judentums (‘The Essence of Judaism’), first
published in 1905, was triggered by his objections to Adolf von Har-
nack’s Wesen des Christentums, which he attacked in a polemical article
in 1901: Baeck argued that a ‘classic religion’ like Judaism is committed
through a ‘concrete spirit’ to moral action which brings freedom through
obeying the commandments, in contrast to the abstract spirit of the
‘romantic religion’ of Christianity, which brings freedom through grace.
As the head of all German Jewry from 1933 following the Nazi decrees
against the legal status of German Jews, he acquired unsurpassed moral
stature by declining all opportunities to escape until he was deported to
the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. In London after 1945,
and intermittently in Cincinnati until his death in 1956, he emphasized
more than ever that the religious role of the Jewish people is achieved
through the fulfilment of ethical duties between man and man.^20
In 1925, Leo Baeck had bestowed the title of rabbinical teacher on a
philosopher of very different temperament and background, the intense
theologian Franz Rosenzweig, who had already, in his mid- thirties, been