484 A History of Judaism
morning for selihot ?’ Unsurprisingly, the historian Heinrich Graetz,
who had expressed his devotion to Hirsch in the dedication of his Gnos‑
ticismus und Judentum in 1846 ‘with sentiments of love and gratitude,
to the inspiring defender of historic Judaism, to the unforgettable
teacher and loved friend’, had drifted away from him by the early 1850s.
For Hirsch, all that mattered was the Torah, which had been given to
the Jews in the wilderness to show that Jews are a nation even when
they lack a land. Exile can be a positive means for Israel to teach the
nations ‘that God is the source of blessing’. Such insistence during the
nineteenth century on the significance of the role of Jews as a nation
should seen against the backdrop of the universalist claim of some
reformers that Jews were no longer a nation at all (p. 467).^7
Hirsch’s opposition to historical scholarship was probably motivated
in part by suspicion that the Jüdisch- Theologische Seminar which
opened in 1854 in Breslau would undermine the Torah by training rab-
bis who would argue that the halakhah derived from rabbis rather than
from direct revelation from Mount Sinai. As soon as the Seminar
opened, Hirsch challenged its founding spirit and first director, Zacha-
rias Frankel, to state publicly the religious principles which would guide
instruction there. When Frankel failed to comply, Hirsch attacked him
tenaciously in print, particularly after the publication of Frankel’s
Darkhei haMishnah (‘Ways of the Mishnah’) in 1859 appeared to con-
firm his suspicions.
The bitterness of Hirsch’s attack on Frankel may be ascribed perhaps
to the similarity of their outlooks and the need to differentiate his own
orthodoxy from what was to become in Germany the Historical move-
ment and (in the twentieth century) a precedent for the ideology of
Conservative Judaism in the United States. Like Hirsch and Geiger,
Frankel, who was born in Prague, had studied secular subjects (in Buda-
pest, from 1825 to 1830) as well as the Talmud. As one of the first
Bohemian rabbis to preach in German, he was in the vanguard of the
modernizers in the 1830s, when he served as the local rabbi of Teplitz.
He was thus drawn into the debates of the reformers in the 1840s, but
from the start he took an independent line, insisting that the prayer
book should be changed only if it continued to reflect the spirit of trad-
itional ritual, including the ‘pious wish for the independence of the
Jewish people’ expressed in the messianic hope despite the loyalty of
German Jews to the fatherland. He attended the Reform Conference in
Frankfurt in 1845 but withdrew in protest against some of the propos-
als, notably the gradual phasing out of Hebrew in prayer, but he failed