500 A History of Judaism
men, often express themselves satisfied with a role which leaves them
supreme in the domestic domain as their menfolk study or work,
although economic pressures are pushing an increasing number to seek
paid employment, particularly in Israel and the United States.^3
The haredim themselves characterize this way of observing Torah as
a preservation of tradition, but in fact it owes a great deal, like so much
else in contemporary Judaism, to the reaction to the Enlightenment in
the late eighteenth century. Moses Sofer, better known as the Hatam
Sofer, came originally from Frankfurt, but his enduring influence on the
development of a rigid orthodox response to modernity was the prod-
uct of his thirty- three years as rabbi of Pressburg, the most important
Jewish community of Hungary, a position to which he was appointed in
1806 when already in his mid- forties. Faced in Pressburg by a large
minority of enthusiasts for the new enlightened Jewish lifestyle, Sofer
threw himself into the conflict with both skill and vigour. He champ-
ioned a novel and uncompromising application of the talmudic tag that
‘that which is new is forbidden according to the Torah’, such that any
innovation whatsoever can be strictly forbidden just because it is an
innovation. It will be apparent from the story of Judaism over the previ-
ous centuries that this prohibition of anything new was itself ironically
an innovation, but the call to defend tradition had an attractive rhetori-
cal simplicity more often associated with fundamentalism. The Hatam
Sofer ensured the spread of his approach by ploughing great effort into
the encouragement of educational institutions for Torah study, includ-
ing his own yeshivah in Pressburg, which had more students than any
yeshivah since the time of the Babylonian geonim.^4
The form of Judaism which Moses Sofer thus pronounced as the
perfect expression of the Torah of Moses was his perception of the way
of life of the Jewish religious elite in Germany and Poland in the middle
of the eighteenth century (hence the dress codes of the haredim in the
modern world). The Hatam Sofer opposed everything to do with the
Enlightenment, urging his family in the testament which was to be pub-
lished after his death in 1839, ‘do not ever touch the books of Moses
Mendelssohn, and thus shall you never stumble.’^ The Pressburg yesh-
ivah was to retain its influence under the leadership of his descendants
down to the Second World War, and to be refounded in Jerusalem in
1950 by his great- grandson Akiva Sofer. It continues to flourish in the
largely haredi neighbourhood of Givat Shaul. In 1879 his second son,
Shimon, who headed the Mahzikey haDas (‘Upholders of the Faith’)
organization in Cracow, was elected to the Austrian parliament to