The Formation of a Modern Rabbi:

The Life and Times of the Viennese Scholar and Preacher Adolf Jellinek

(Brown Judaic Studies, 2022)

One hundred tongues speak one language: namely, the Science of Judaism is bound up with faith. Wherefore the latter lives actively in the hearts of the Jews, literature finds support and encouragement, and thus we can infer the warmth of faith among the Jews based on the favorable or unfavorable conditions [they] afford to science.

  Adolf Jellinek, “Eine Wanderung durch jüdische Bibliotheken” (1853)

Summary

The Formation of a Modern Rabbi traces the pathways one man travelled through the various dynamics of nineteenth-century Central European Jewish modernity to become the sort of modern liberal rabbi as we understand that role today. 

Adolf Jellinek (1821-1893), the Moravian-born, Leipzig-educated chief rabbi of Vienna was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second-half of the nineteenth century. This book traces the various ways in which Jellinek, owing to his scholarly credentials, rhetorical skills, and influential post as head of the Viennese community, was emblematic of a new synagogue-based model of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher. Over the course of his career, Jellinek made groundbreaking scholarly contributions to the study of Jewish mysticism, and was an innovative rhetorician, helping mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values in a new era.

This book is the first intellectual biography of this seminal figure in almost a century. It grounds Jellinek’s scholarship and communal leadership within the broader history of the development of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and the modern liberal rabbinate, contextualizing his life within the economic, intellectual, political, and demographic transformations taking place in mid-nineteenth-century Central Europe. 

By focusing on Jellinek’s formation into a modern rabbi, this book offer a narrative that takes readers through the broader intellectual and social components that formed today’s liberal rabbinate, including the impact of the intellectual culture of the Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums, the urbanization of Jewish communities, the centralization of the synagogue as the primary location of Jewish worship and theological experience in new urban neighborhoods, and the establishment of the weekly sermon and an evaluation of its contents. The book also trace how a number of Jellinek’s specific insights—that midrash was the best narrative genre suited to melding historic Judaism with the ideals of Enlightenment and bildung; that political liberalism was the key to the future of European Jewry; that the development of a vernacular vocabulary of Jewish nationhood meant Jews could seek to retain their separate practices while being accepted among the diversity of Western peoples—have become essential, even foundational assumptions among nearly all leading liberal rabbinical figured in the Anglo-American world. 

The Formation of a Modern Rabbi demonstrate how the practical religious changes Jellinek devised or promoted in the mid-nineteenth century, along with his mostly-forgotten scholarship on Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, were exemplary of the dramatic evolution in the role and idea of the rabbi, the synagogue, and of Jewish Studies in the modern era.