Still Running Off at the Keyboard

The Order of the Asiatic Brethren was a broad attempt to erect some type of Masonic framework within the borders of which both Jews and gentiles would be included. But it was not the only attempt. In 1790, even before the Order had finally ceased to exist, two Christians, Hirschfeld and Catter, had founded the Toleranzloge in Berlin with the avowed object of admitting both gentiles and Jews. These two men were by no means original thinkers. Their conceptions were a diluted solution of humanistic principles: belief in truth, brotherhood, and beauty, mixed with the vestiges of certain Christian doctrines: the fall of man and the necessity of his moral regeneration. ...

A second attempt occurred that very year (1791-92)--this time in Hamburg. The initiative was taken openly by a Jew named Israel. No details can be elicited from any other source, and the information on the lodge itself is meager. Israel, who had been initiated as a Mason in London, now wanted to bestow the benefit on his Jewish brethren of an education "by social contact with the Christians." His lodge was called Toleranz und Einigkeit, and among its members echoes of slogans of the French Revolution could be heard. He found Jews who wanted to belong to his lodge (we do not know whether they were former members of the Asiatic Order or not) and even obtained the support of gentile dignitaries. Yet he could not gain recognition from a Mother Lodge. In Hamburg, Berlin, and London his applications were refused....

Both the Berlin and Hamburg lodges represented a direct attempt to absorb Jews into the Masonic fraternity. (Source: Jacob Katz)

Rabbi Antelman writes:

“In the wake of Illuministic German-Jewish freemasonry Lodges, we find that the Rothschilds very adroitly steered their way into a position of control over these lodges in much the same manner as Friedrich, the Duke of Brunswick, member of the Illuminati was one of the main sponsors of the Vienna Asiatic Brethren Lodge until his death in 1792.

The Rothschilds utilized the services of Sigmund Geisenheimer, their head clerk, who in turn was aided by Itzig of Berlin, the Illuminati of the Toleranz Lodge and the Parisian Grand Orient Lodge. Geisenheimer was a member of the Mayence Masonic Illuminati Lodge, and was the founder of the Frankfurt Judenloge; for which attempt he was excommunicated by the Chief Rabbi of Frankfurt, Tzvi Hirsch Horowitz. At a later date the Rothschilds joined the Lodge. Solomon Mayer (or Meir) Rothschild (1774-1855) was a member for a short while before moving to Vienna. (Source: Marvin S. Antelman)

...the nihilism of the Sabbatian and Frankist movements, with its doctrine so profoundly shocking to the Jewish conception of things that the violation of the Torah could become its true fulfillment...was a dialectical outgrowth of the belief in the Messiahship of Sabbatai Zevi, and that this nihilism, in turn, helped pave the way for the Haskalah [enlightenment] and the reform movement of the nineteenth century, once its original religious impulse was exhausted. (Source: Gershom Scholem, THE MESSIANIC IDEA IN JUDAISM, p. 84)

...as long as Jewish historiography was dominated by a spirit of assimilation, no one so much as suspected that positivism and religious reform were the progeny not only of the rational mind, but of an entirely different sort of psychology as well, that of the Kabbalah and the Sabbatian crisis--in other words of the very "lawless heresy" which was so soundly excoriated in their name.

In the Sabbatian movement, which was the first clear manifestation (one might better say explosion) of spiritualistic sectarianism in Judaism since the days of the Second Temple, the type of the radical spiritualist found its perfect expression...the Sabbatians pressed on to the end, into the abyss of the mythical "gates of impurity", where the pure spiritual awareness of a world made new became a pitfall fraught with peril for the moral life. (Source: ibid., p. 90-91)

The hopes and beliefs of these last Sabbatians caused them to be particularly susceptible to the "millennial" winds of the times. Even while still "believers"--in fact, precisely because they were "believers"--they had been drawing closer to the spirit of the Haskalah [enlightenment] all along, so that when the flame of their faith finally flickered out they soon reappeared as leaders of Reform Judaism, secular intellectuals, or simply complete and indifferent skeptics. ...

A man such as Jonas Wehle, for example, the spiritual leader and educator of the Sabbatians in Prague after 1790, was equally appreciative of both Moses Mendelssohn and Sabbatai Zevi, and the fragments of his writings that have survived amply bear out the assertion of one of his opponents that "he took the teachings of the philosopher Kant and dressed them up in the costume of the Zohar and the Lurianic Kabbalah." (Source: ibid. p. 140-141)

The Sabbatians, including those who clung to their Messianic hopes and dreams of the great role of the sect in the past, became "new Jews," as several observers have remarked, i.e., supporters of the reform movement or indifferent to religion altogether. And this certainly happened to the Wehles. The son of Jonas Wehle was, in 1832, among the founders of the first Reform Congregation in Prague which invited Leopold Zunz as preacher. (Source: ibid. p. 170)

After the Emancipation and the emergence of the Jew into Western society, the need for a degree of adaptation of the traditional faith to the new conditions of life was keenly felt. The Haskalah movement of Enlightenment, of which Moses Mendelssohn was the leading figure, grappled with this very problem but tended to leave the traditional norms more or less intact. It was left to Reform to introduce various innovations in the synagogue service and in other areas of Jewish religious life. ...

The Hamburg rabbis enlisted a number of prominent Orthodox Rabbis to publish a stern prohibition against these reforms. Not very long afterwards, a number of Rabbis educated in German universities met in conferences in the years 1844-6; Reform ideas were put forward and a fully-fledged Reform movement became established. The leaders of Reform in Germany, Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim, tried to develop a Reform theology in which Jewish particularism, while never entirely rejected, yielded to a far greater degree of universalism than was envisaged at any time in the Jewish past.

The European Reform movement was centered in Germany, but Reform congregations were also established in Vienna, Hungary, Holland and Denmark. In England, the Reform Congregation, the West London Synagogue of British Jews, was established as early as 1840. At the beginning of the twentieth century a more typical type of Reform was established in England under the influence of Claude Montefiore. This took the name Liberal Judaism. (Source: My Jewish Learning

Rabbi Abraham Geiger suggested that observance might also be changed to appeal to modern people. Geiger, a skilled scholar in both Tanach and German studies, investigated Jewish history. He discovered that Jewish life had continually changed. Every now and then, old practices were changed and new ones introduced, resulting in a Jewish life that was quite different from that lived 4,000 or even 2,000 years before. He noticed these changes often made it easier for Jews to live in accordance with Judaism. Geiger concluded that this process of change needed to continue to make Judaism attractive to all Jews.

Between 1810 and 1820, congregations in Seesen, Hamburg and Berlin instituted fundamental changes in traditional Jewish practices and beliefs, such as mixed seating, single­day observance of festivals and the use of a cantor/choir. Many leaders of the Reform movement took a very "rejectionist" view of Jewish practice and discarded traditions and rituals. (Source: Jewish Virtual Library)