counter- reform 485
to persuade other rabbis to join him in a counter- synod. Like Hirsch,
then, Frankel in the 1850s had been close to the Reform movement as
he tried to steer his own ‘positivist historical’ reforms, even while main-
taining to Hirsch and others that he was not deviating from traditional
Judaism. When he eventually responded to Hirsch’s questioning on the
relation of rabbinic tradition to the revelation of Mount Sinai, in a brief
article published in 1861 in his journal, the Monatsschrift für Geschichte
und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, he reaffirmed the significance and
antiquity of the rabbinic tradition but asserted that the Mosaic origin of
some of the halakhah was yet to be resolved.^8
Hirschian orthodoxy had a continuous institutional history in Ger-
many down through the 1930s in the Austrittsgemeinde, and the
refugees from the Nazis who set up Adass Jeshurun (‘Congregation of
Jeshurun’) and Adass Jisroel (‘Congregation of Israel’) synagogues in
New York and Johannesburg respectively preserved his distinctive com-
bination of strict orthodoxy with openness to secular culture. Under the
leadership of Hirsch’s son- in- law, Salomon Breuer, who succeeded
Hirsch in 1888 as rabbi in Frankfurt, the Austrittsgemeinde took the
initiative of setting up in May 1912 in Kattowitz, in Upper Silesia, Agu-
dat Israel (‘Union of Israel’, also known simply as the Agudah), which
presented itself as a worldwide organization of the orthodox. The
embattled German orthodox hoped the Agudah would enlist the sup-
port of the great rabbis of the eastern Europe yeshivot in the struggle
against Reform, and also against Zionism, which they saw as a secular
nationalism inimical to real religion. The move was not supported by all
eastern European haredim, many of whom preferred to deal with the
threat of modernity by ignoring it, and both the east Europeans from
Poland and Lithuania and the Hungarian orthodox who joined the
organization looked askance at the willingness of the German Jews to
accept a great deal of general European culture and practices. However,
enough rabbinic leaders from the east participated in 1912, and in three
further Great Assemblies, in Vienna in 1923 and 1929, and in Marien-
bad in 1937, to turn the Agudah into a major lobbying group within
Jewish society.^9
German neo- orthodoxy had developed in so distinctive a fashion
that it was easier to see what members of the Agudah opposed than
where they agreed, except on the principle that decisions for Jewry
should be taken by the authority of rabbis like themselves. The central
institution to emerge within the Union was the Moetset Gedolei
haTorah, the ‘Council of Torah Sages’, chosen on the basis of their