counter- reform 481
age when the Hamburg Community elected as their chief rabbi Isaac
Bernays, himself still in his twenties, to combat what they saw as the
perils of Reform by modernizing Judaism without the more drastic
changes inaugurated by the reformers. It is significant that Reform had
been adopted by the Hamburg community sufficiently widely for Ber-
nays to feel the need to call himself not ‘rabbi’ but haham (‘sage’, in the
Sephardi fashion) to indicate the difference between himself and the
Reform rabbis. Bernays had combined yeshivah learning in Würzburg
with studies at the university, and his sermons in Hamburg, delivered in
German (an innovation), preached the need for good citizenship as well
as religious observance.^3
Torah im derekh erets, ‘Torah in harmony with secular culture’, even-
tually became the slogan of Hirsch’s communities and the ideal of the
modern orthodox Judaism which has based itself on his teachings down
to the present. In his early twenties, Hirsch (like Bernays before him)
went to university to study classical languages, history and philosophy.
He struck up a friendship with a slightly younger Jewish student, Abra-
ham Geiger, who, as we have seen, was to become the spiritual leader of
German Reform. The two jointly organized a student society in Bonn
for the study of Jewish homiletics, and it is salutary to recognize that in
the late 1820s the religious options for earnest young men such as these
could diverge so dramatically – the friendship cooled only after Geiger
published a strong criticism of Hirsch’s presentation (in 1836, in perfect
German) of the principles of Judaism. The presentation was found in
Neunzehn Briefe über Judentum, in which Hirsch laid down, in the
form of letters between two youths (the perplexed intellectual Benjamin
and the reassuring Naphtali), a defence of traditional Judaism within
world culture and appropriated the name ‘Reform’ for an appeal to pre-
serve the essence of tradition:
Therefore, may our motto be – Reform; let us strive with all our power,
with all the good and noble qualities of our character to reach this height
of ideal perfection – Reform. Its only object, however, must be the fulfill-
ment of Judaism by Jews in our time, fulfillment of the eternal idea in
harmony with the conditions of the time; education, progress to the Torah’s
height, not, however, lowering the Torah to the level of the age, cutting
down the towering summit to the sunken grade of our life. We Jews need to
be reformed through Judaism, newly comprehended by the spirit and ful-
filled with the utmost energy; but merely to seek greater ease and comfort
in life through the destruction of the eternal code set up for all ages by the