Jacob eccentric

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Jacob Nerd (right) at a 1964 tree-planting ceremony in Simi Valley

Jacob Sonderling (born October 19, 1878 in Lipine , Upper Silesia ; died September 30, 1964 in Los Angeles ) was a German and American rabbi , field rabbi and author . He came from a Hasidic family and made the rare attempt to harmonize Zionism and Reform Judaism . Another focus of his work was the connection between art, music and religion.

At the end of his studies , Sonderling did his doctorate on the logic lectures of Kant . He was a preacher at the Hamburg Temple , was chief clergyman of the 8th Army in World War I and emigrated to the USA in 1923. He appeared there as a Zionist speaker and was active as a liberal rabbi in New York and Chicago. In Los Angeles he founded the so-called Fairfax Temple and, as a paternal member of the German-speaking migrant scene, helped composers to get commissions for pieces of music, for which he also wrote the lyrics in part.

Family, studies and doctorate

Nerd's father came from a Galician Hasid family, the mother's family had produced Moshe Teitelbaum (1759–1841), known as Yismach Mosheh , the founder of Hungarian Hasidism . Nerd had been a Zionist since 1897 and soon became involved in Theodor Herzl's spirit, who called him “my fighting rabbi”. Jacob attended the Jewish seminars in Vienna, Breslau (with his teacher Markus Brann ) and Berlin and also the universities in Vienna and Breslau where he studied philosophy, art, history and aesthetics.

In 1904 he married Emma Klemann. The marriage had three children: Egmont, Fred and Paul.

Sonderling received his doctorate from Heinrich Maier at the University of Tübingen in 1904 . The dissertation (1903) is a comparative work on the logic of the school of Christian Wolff : Kant used in his logic lectures the logic book excerpt from the doctrine of reason of Meier . The Kant student Jasche later published Kant's logic lectures as a manual. Sonderling compares the two books and uses the catchphrase from Kant's "double life": Kant's teaching activity using foreign writings differs significantly from his own writings.

Hamburg temple and field sermon

From 1906 onwards he was a teacher and rabbi in Göttingen, then from 1908 at the Hamburg Reform Temple . Nerd was a member of the B'nai B'rith Lodge and from 1910 to 1912 a member of the Steinthal Lodge. In 1912 he was one of the first to sign the reform guidelines, the founding document of liberal Judaism.

The temple had become known as the birthplace or cradle of Reform Judaism in Germany and the USA , but it was itself in a crisis. The majority of the members of the temple association no longer lived within the city wall ring in which the temple stood, which was released (after the gate was lifted) , but outside near the Alster and on the Grindel . As a result, the Sabbath service was very poorly attended. There was also a tendency to withdraw from the temple association, caused by Christian and atheistic currents.

If the style of worship in the temple began in 1818 with Sephardic musical elements, 90 years later, nerd found a German-Jewish tradition. The reform that emanated from the Hamburg Temple had meanwhile developed further in America; in Hamburg, on the other hand, many reforms had been withdrawn. The rich American banker Henry Budge , who moved back to Hamburg from the USA after the death of his father, offered the temple association one million marks for a new temple building. The condition, however, was that women and men sit together, as in the New York reform church Emanu-El. Jacob Nerd was shocked and strictly refused the offer.

In 1914, Sonderling took part in a competition at the Cologne Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, in collaboration with the artist Friedrich Adler . They made a pewter seder plate and won first prize. The plate was given to Sonderling and is still owned by the Sonderling family today. As early as 1911, Adler had produced bulbous torah crowns for the Hamburg temple , which linked the formal elements of the 19th century with Art Nouveau .

From 1914 to 1916 served nerd in the First World War as a field rabbi on the Eastern Front . He was a handsome, bearded rabbi who held a field service on Yom Kippur in 1914 on the orders of Kaiser Wilhelm's army . - The relationship between soldiers who believed in Jews and soldiers who did not believe in Jews changed during the war. First of all, there was talk of the unity of the national community after the Battle of Tannenberg in the spirit of 1914. Nerd was a chaplain in Paul von Hindenburg's army, which was successful in the east in 1914.

In 1916, however, a census of Jews was carried out out of an anti-Jewish mood . Sonderling made formative experiences from the encounter with Judaism in Lithuania: “The seminar made me a rabbi, the university a doctorate and the East made me a Jew.” It is reported that Sonderling saved a shame from the German troops by exempted him as rabbi from the duty to watch over his synagogue and the scroll of the prophets .

Klal Yisrael and Emigration

Tile relief. Detail from the stone inscription in the apse of the Hamburg Temple in Poolstrasse today.

Eccentric believed the divisions caused by the sensational Hamburg prayer book in the 19th century were wrong and tried to use the term Klal Jisrael (Jewish sense of solidarity) to combine the national unity of all Jews with liberalism.

Up until now, Reform Judaism had emphasized the liberal in opposition to the Orthodox. The Hamburg temple movement in particular was interested in German acculturation and a reform of the Israelite cult based on the model of Protestant Christianity. - The eccentric, on the other hand, strove to emphasize the general Jewish aspect and the unity of the Jews. He strived for the "compatibility of liberal thought with national consciousness" in order to maintain the viability of Judaism, knowing full well that the reform movement "almost always appeared as an opponent of nationalism".

As expected, these views met with opposition. To mark the centenary of the temple in 1918, Sonderling was not allowed to have these thoughts printed in the festschrift edited by David Leimdörfer, but published them in the Neue Jüdische Monatshefte.

With his official brother David Leimdörfer, Nerd gave alternating religious and scientific lectures in the temple without regalia every month. These well-attended events were intended as a measure to counteract the atheist and Christian motivated withdrawals through a bond with the temple. Although this was occasionally denounced by Orthodox Judaism as a Sunday service , the criticism was no longer as emotional as it was in the early 19th century, because the Orthodox rabbis no longer saw a strong opponent in the temple community and the preachers became more moderate. The successor of the two preachers, Schlomo Friedrich Rülf, judged that the eccentric had put Leimdörfer in the shade with his "brilliant speaking talent and his urbane demeanor".

Jacob Sonderling also preached in the New Dammtor Synagogue . It was reported that this otherwise sparsely visited synagogue was full on the feast days, as many believers attended the excellent preachers Dr. Leimdörfer and Dr. Nerd would have wanted to hear. Eccentric liked the undogmatic approach in the Dammtor Synagogue, which sought a middle ground between Reform Judaism and Orthodox Judaism.

In 1922 the nerd suddenly left the temple and emigrated to America in 1923. One of the reasons for emigrating to the USA was probably the termination of the management of the temple, presumably due to an extramarital affair. He saw more opportunities in the US to achieve his plans.

New York, Chicago and five goals

Emanu-El reform temple in New York, the Hamburg-style temple of which Henry Budge was a member.

Nerd arrived in New York on an emigrant ship in 1923. In 1924, after giving a speech for the Zionist movement, he was asked if he wanted to become a rabbi at the Agudas Achim Synagogue in Chicago. The community belonged to Orthodox Judaism and an eccentric was an avowed reformer. Nevertheless, an agreement was reached. Nerd brought Torah scrolls with him from Hungary, which he had kept for many decades. He became a rabbi in Manhattan Beach, New York, in the Temple Israel of Washington Heights and in the early 1930s in the Temple Beth-Israel in Providence Rhode Island.

Then Nerd took a year off, a sabbatical. He visited many synagogues of different faiths and was looking for the truth: he wanted to know what religion actually is. The Hear O Israel was too one-dimensional to him, while only the sense of hearing, only the ear am approached. In the end, the eccentric was convinced that religion, as love, was the connection of all five senses and was looking for evidence of this.

According to an autobiographical anecdote, he accidentally took a book off the shelf to find evidence of his convictions. Disappointed, he was about to put the book down again when he read the sentence: The temple in Jerusalem was surrounded by a wall and the wall had five gates, corresponding to the five senses.

At conferences, eccentric tried to identify and represent a critique of rationality as a trend, and thus also set himself apart from the first liberal-Jewish efforts in Germany (e.g. Abraham Geiger in Berlin and Eduard Kley in Hamburg).

Fairfax Temple and the new tune

Nerd designed the design for an ark used there for the film Der Jazzsänger (1927) . In 1935 he founded the Society for Jewish Culture in Los Angeles, which was called Fairfax Temple. The film was partly shot in the community building and a model of the ark can still be seen there today.

Nerd became professor of Judaism (jewish thought) and homiletics at the California School of the Hebrew Union College .

In the German-speaking migrant scene, he helped the Jewish composers who fled the National Socialists by giving them commissions for pieces of music. This resulted in several important works, some of which Sonderling also wrote the texts for:

In the summer of 1934 the musician and composer Arnold Schönberg found himself in a creative crisis . In this situation Nerd asked him for a new version of the traditional Jewish prayer Kol Nidre . Schönberg set the prayer to music using the most important groups of motifs from the original liturgical melody and also created a new, updated text version with Sonderling. In the past, the Kol Nidre had often been the target of anti-Semitic slander because it was assumed that Jews did not need to keep contracts because all vows were invalid and oaths were no longer oaths. The prayer was also missing in the prayer book of the Hamburg Temple. - Schönberg interpreted the prayer in accordance with tradition in such a way that Jews who were compulsorily baptized by Christianity are not bound to this baptism. The piece was premiered on October 4, 1938, the evening before Yom Kippur, with choir and orchestra in a hotel room.

  • Arnold Schoenberg

  • Erich Zeisl

In 1937 the choral work Cantata of the Bitter Herbs by Ernst Toch was completed on behalf of Sonderling. It is a ten-part cantata based on the theme Exodus from Egypt . A year later, Sonderling wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine with the title: "the Jews are changing their music": Arnold Schönberg and Ernst Toch are portrayed as pioneers of a new Jewish melody. In the magazine, Sonderling describes how he studied the Hebrew text of the Passover Haggadah with the theater man Leopold Jessner , the spy and filmmaker Boris Morros and the composer Ernst Toch and experienced a combination of study and composition.

Nerd colleague Max Nussbaum - the rabbi of Hollywood - writes that Nerd introduced music to church services in Los Angeles. A dramaturgization of the Bible was perceived particularly in the Friday evening celebrations that were held in German for those who had fled Germany in the 1930s. The eccentric itself was a fusion of religion and art.

Passover with bitter herbs

Maria Jeritza sang Zeisl's Requiem Ebraico in 1945 at the initiative of Sonderling

Toch's bitter herbs were an allusion to the maror, a bitter herb that was placed on the Seder plate with lettuce or horseradish as a sign of the bitterness of bondage in Egypt on the eve of Passover . Toch was and remained aloof from religion, but the fact that his daughter was involved in Sonderling's congregation also made him open to religious issues. He found an adequate interlocutor and friend in Sonderling.

In 1941 the composer for film music Erich Wolfgang Korngold created the Passover Psalm , Opus 30, a hymn based on Hebrew prayers for soprano solo, mixed choir and orchestra on behalf of Sonderling . Nerd wrote the text for it based on templates from the Passover Haggadah . Again the theme is the memory of the exodus from Egypt. Passover became the name for the Passover festival through a play on words and literally means transition. The world premiere took place on April 12, 1941 in Los Angeles under the direction of Korngold. In the autumn of the same year, Korngold wrote a hymn for Yom Kippur, which he conducted in a ceremony as part of a series of sermons, Sonderling, after a speech by Franz Werfel .

At the end of 1944, Erich Zeisl von Sonderling was commissioned to write music for the service in the synagogue when he was completely unprepared when the news of his father's cruel death in the Treblinka extermination camp reached him. Zeisl then decided to set the new composition to music as a requiem and dedicate it to the memory of those whose fate he himself had escaped. The Requiem Ebraico (Psalm 92) was premiered in Los Angeles in the spring of 1945 with Maria Jeritza in front of an audience of over 2000 with great success. Zeisl dedicated the work to his father and other victims of the Jewish tragedy in Europe.

In 1951 Thomas Mann read two chapters from his new novel The Chosen One at the Fairfax Temple . Initially, the nerd paid tribute to the novel Joseph and his brothers . - By the way, there had been a falling out between Thomas Mann and Arnold Schönberg since Thomas Mann - without agreeing this with Schönberg - had presented Schönberg's twelve-tone music as the work of the ambivalent, tragic figure of Adrian Leverkühn in his novel Doctor Faustus .

Nerd died of a heart attack in 1964. The day after his death, October 1st, an obituary appeared in the US-wide New York Times .

Jacob Nerd was born at Simchat Torah and died at Simchat Torah. His colleagues called him the teacher of teachers, a rabbi for rabbis.

Works

  • The relationship of the Kant-Jäschean logic to George Friedrich Meier's "Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason". (1903) Dissertation Tübingen.
  • The Newer Aspirations of the Hamburg Temple. , in: Neue Jüdische Monatshefte , Vol. 3, 1918, Issue 1, October 10, 1918, pp. 12-18.
  • Ceremonial address on August 29, 1920 with: Lorenz, Ina: The Hamburg Jews during the Weimar Republic. A documentation , 2 vol., Hamburg 1987, pp. 696-733
  • The JEWS are changing their music. in: Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, 1938
  • (with Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Arnold Schönberg) Dramatized Seder Services. 1943
  • Kind in religion. 1943
  • Five Gates: Casual Notes for an Autobiography. (PDF; 614 kB) in: American Jewish Archives 16/2 (Nov 1964), pp. 107–123.

literature

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ At that time as a Prussian-Silesian town part of the German Empire, today as the Lipiny district of the southern Polish industrial city of Świętochłowice .
  2. ↑ Michael Berenbaum:  SONDERLING, JACOB. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica . 2nd Edition. Volume 19, Detroit / New York a. a. 2007, ISBN 978-0-02-865947-3 , p. 13 (English).
  3. ↑ Title: The Relationship of the Kant-Jäschesche Logic to George Friedrich Meier's "Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason".
  4. ↑ Compare also: Werner Stark: Neue Kant-Logiken. in: Reinhard Brandt, Werner Stark: New autographs and documents on Kant's life, writings and lectures, pp. 138–140.
  5. ↑ The Encyclopedia Judaica speaks in the article Jacob Sonderling of birthplace , Jonatan D. Sarna speaks of cradle (The Debate over Mixed Seating in the American Synagogue. P. 364)
  6. ↑ Compare: Jeffrey Verhey: The "Spirit of 1914" and the invention of the Volksgemeinschaft, Hamburg, 2000
  7. ^ Bay Ridge Jewish Center, forum contributions with a postcard showing the nerd as a field preacher September 1914. Web links and detailed information. and Alfred Gottschalk: Talk with Sondeling quotes. ( Memento of the original from May 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 19 kB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.huc.edu
  8. ↑ Quotations from a letter printed in the newspaper accompanying the essay: The New Aspirations of the Hamburg Temple (1918)
  9. ↑ David Leimdörfer (Ed.): Festschrift for the centenary of the Israelite Temple in Hamburg 1818–1918, Hamburg 1918
  10. ^ Andreas Brämer: Judaism and religious reform. P. 77 Abridged reprint of the New Endeavors ibid pp. 235–241
  11. ↑ Schlomo Rülf: Rivers in the arid land. 1964 p. 50
  12. ↑ Christiane Pritzlaff: Synagogues in the Grindelviertel and their destruction in: Ursula Wamser / Wilfried Weinke Formerly at home in Hamburg. Jewish life at Grindel , VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-87975-526-4
  13. ^ Ruben Malachi: The synagogues in Hamburg . In: Association of Former Wroclaw and Silesians in Israel (ed.): Announcements of the Association of Former Wroclaw and Silesians in Israel eV No. 45 . Ramat Gan 1979, p. 19 ( sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de [accessed on November 12, 2018]).
  14. ^ Five Gates. Casual Notes for an Autobiography (1964) p. 107
  15. ^ Five Gates. Casual Notes for an Autobiography (1964) p. 120
  16. ^ The Trend Towards the Irrational; Five Gates. Casual Notes for an Autobiography (1964) , last page
  17. ↑ Eberhard Freitag: Schönberg (1973) p. 145
  18. ^ "Nerd initiated the Seder in drama and music and the dramatization of the Bible at Friday evening services. Basically, Sonderling himself was a fusion of religion and art. "Max Nussbaum: Jacob Sonderling, in: Proceedings of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1965)
  19. ↑ Newspaper The West Coast September 19, 1941. German National Library.
  20. ↑ Michael Berenbaum:  SONDERLING, JACOB. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica . 2nd Edition. Volume 19, Detroit / New York a. a. 2007, ISBN 978-0-02-865947-3 , p. 13 (English).
  21. ^ Jasche, Gottlob Benjamin (ed.): Immanuel Kant's logic. A handbook for lectures, Königsberg 1800.
personal data
SURNAME Nerd, Jacob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German and American rabbis
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Lipins
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 1964
Place of death los Angeles