The synagogue triangle in Erzsébetváros district, Budapest: within a walking distance from each other, the Orthodox, Status Quo and Neolog sanctuaries. The Schism in Hungarian Jewry (, "Orthodox-Neolog Schism"; , trans. Die Teilung in Ungarn, "The Division in Hungary") was the institutional division of the Jewish community in the Kingdom of Hungary between 1869 and 1871, following a failed attempt to establish a national, united representative organization. The founding congress of the new body was held during an ongoing conflict between the traditionalist Orthodox party and its modernist Neolog rivals, which had been raging for decades.
The traditionalists, fearing their opponents would dominate the new body, seceded and then lobbied the government to allow the formation of an independent Orthodox supracommunal organization with a policy of strict separation from the Neologs. When faced with the need to choose between the two, a third faction of "Status Quo" congregations emerged, refusing to join either and remaining fully autonomous, without a higher authority. While a large proportion of communities retained a cohesive affiliation to one group, some communities were affected by the schism, and formed two or even three new congregations, with separate affiliations. The threefold pattern remained a key feature of Hungarian Jewry for generations, even in the territories ceded under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.
Following the Holocaust, the division became less relevant inside the surviving Jewish communities; in 1950, the Hungarian communist government merged the three bodies, forming the National Deputation of Hungarian Jews (). After the fall of communism in 1989, the organization was disbanded, and the split between the different denominations became gradually reinstitutionalized.
Background
Modernization Moses Sofer and Aaron Chorin.
Until the late 18th Century, the Jewish communities in Europe and the world at large, possessed a corporate status as did any other group in society, having their own special privileges and obligations. They enjoyed a broad judicial autonomy, enabling rabbinic courts to enforce Jewish Law, or Halakha, while mundane affairs were regulated by the board of wardens, Parnasim, comprising the wealthiest. Interaction with the outside world was limited. Unlike their more open Sephardi brethren in the West, the Ashkenazi Jews of Central Europe were characterized by a strong emphasis on religious studies – while rabbis and others did acquire knowledge in other themes, they did so as autodidacts and not within communal institutions – and cultural and linguistic isolation: they spoke mainly Judaeo-German with poor if any command of the vernacular, and few could read Latin script in addition to Hebrew letters.David Jan Sorkin, Enlightenment and Emancipation: German Jewry’s Formative Age in Comparative Perspective, in: Comparing Jewish Societies, ed. Todd Endelman (Ann Arbor, 1997), pp. 89–96.
The rise of the modern, centralized state combined with the rationalist, secular understanding of the world radically altered traditional Jewish society. As the Catholic Church's authority was curtailed and the nobility forced to pay greater homage to its country of origin, so were the Jews' unique status no longer tolerated in the new order. In the Habsburg monarchy, Joseph II's 1781 Patent of Toleration curbed the rabbinical courts' authority, forced secular education and military conscription, and granted many new economic opportunities. Concurrently, the permeation of Enlightenment ideas severely shook the foundations upon which Jewish self-understanding rested, as a Chosen People predicated on a covenant with God, in exile and awaiting the arrival of the Messiah in Judaism. All this led to growing religious indifference, assimilation and demands to reform Jewish communal life and even Judaism itself.Silber, Roots of the Schism. This process, throughout Europe, had been widely dealt with in the works of Jacob Katz and others.
In the Kingdom of Hungary, the pace of change was slow. The rural character of Jewish settlement – in the 1780s, 60% of them were scattered in groups of a family or two in the countryside; only 15% resided in communities with over 500 members – the country's relative backwardness and the nobility's steadfast refusal to accommodate the Emperor's policies in general greatly delayed the formation of an urban, affluent Jewish class, the like of which embraced Enlightenment and Reform in the German states. While Rabbi Aaron Chorin of Arad was a vocal proponent of religious modifications already in the first decade of the 19th century, his influence in his own country was meager. He served mainly as a rallying point for Hungarian Orthodoxy, led by the uncompromising Moses Sofer of Pressburg, who was determined to forestall any deviation. The conservatives, facing a growing phenomenon of nonobservance, already entertained thoughts of forming separate communities; however, the laws stipulating the existence of only one Jewish congregation in each locality prevented any action towards this end.Silber, Historical Experience. pp. 108–113.
The Neologs
In 1827, a prayer quorum that instituted the rite practiced in the Vienna Stadttempel was opened in Pest, becoming an independent synagogue in 1830. The Viennese Rite was designated by Isaac Noah Mannheimer: among others, the cantor wore special vestments, the reader's table – from where the preacher delivered his sermon – was moved from the center and placed in front of the Torah ark, weddings were performed indoors rather than under the sky, and a specialized preacher delivered a sermon in vernacular and in modern style rather than the old Pilpul in Yiddish. Mannheimer also had the prayers shortened by dropping several medieval Piyyutim, though he refrained from any ideological changes in the liturgy; in general, he avoided any principled issue with theological implications and clung to the aesthetic aspect of the service. All these innovations resembled the conduct of a church, and were intended to satisfy the demand by the young and acculturated for decorum and aesthetics. They were also carefully crafted in order not to breach the Code of Jewish Law ("Shulchan Aruch"), thus satisfying also the conservative religious Jews in the Austrian capital.
It was the Viennese Rite, wrote Michael Silber, which chiefly shaped the movement later to be known as "Neology" in Hungary, though the name itself only came to be commonly used in the late 1860s. As opposed to the situation in the German states, the Neologs were not led by intellectual rabbis; the communities' lay leaders were those who introduced the new style, and they were content with changes condemned as merely "cosmetic" by German progressives. The decorous ritual spread rapidly in central Hungary, where the congregations were relatively new and comprised recent arrivals who were mostly assimilated. The north, where communities were much older, remained more strictly Orthodox.Silber, Historical Experience. pp. 121–125.
There were, albeit few, religious theoreticians who were identified with the modernized part of Hungarian Jewry. Of those, the most prominent and ideologically driven was Rabbi Leopold Löw. But even he regarded Zecharias Frankel, forerunner of Conservative Judaism, and the moderately enlightened Solomon Judah Loeb Rapoport as his mentors. The progressive Hungarian rabbis rejected the ideas of Abraham Geiger, founder of Reform Judaism, as too extreme. When disciples of the more radical Samuel Holdheim established several congregations during the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, Löw and his circle strongly condemned their members' religious practices and had the victorious Austrians close them in 1852.Katz, pp. 53–55. Michael Meyer wrote that even in the 1860s, "the burning 'reform' issues in Hungary" were aesthetic changes such as the location of the Bimah and of the wedding canopy, which have long since ceased to arouse dissent in Germany and were accepted there by most of the Orthodox.Meyer, p. 194. The Neolog rabbinate resisted any change in the laws pertaining to marriage, dietary regulations, the Sabbath and other fundamentals of religion, though they were more tolerant to the nonobservant.
A large proportion of Neolog rabbis identified with the "Positive-Historical School" of Frankel; many were graduates of his Breslau Seminary. When Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer came to Hungary from Prussia in 1851 to serve as chief rabbi of Eisenstadt and brought with him the ideas of enlightened Neo-Orthodoxy, Neolog-leaning publications launched constant tirades against this "pest", regarded by them as a graver threat than "Old Orthodoxy", which did not offer anything to the more educated Jews. In 1858, Löw published a cynical critique of the German rabbi, stating he was far inferior to Frankel in scholarship and merely an apologetic. In 1859, the tensions between the Positive-Historical and Orthodox in regards to the former's use of critical-scientific approach to the sacred texts exploded. Frankel published his Darkei ha-Mishna ("Ways of the Mishna"), writing – based on several specific examples by traditional sources, like Asher ben Jehiel – that when the Sages cited rulings of unknown origin described as Law given to Moses at Sinai, they meant merely ancient customs accepted as such. Enraged by this subversion of Orthodox dogma, Samson Raphael Hirsch denounced him as a heretic. Löw, Hildesheimer and their supporters participated in the public debate; the former recalled that "Hirsch was branded an Inquisitor, Frankel an apostate." In the 1863–64 Kompert Affair – another event that distinguished sharply between the two schools – that erupted after Heinrich Graetz wrote a treatise that contrasted the traditional concept of a personal Messiah, Löw and other Hungarian rabbis of his camp rallied behind the historian and attacked Hildesheimer, who organized a mass petition against Graetz. The most contentious and practical issue in the religious strife was the Neolog demand, voiced from the early 1850s, to establish a modern Rabbinical Seminary as the only institute that could train certified rabbis.Ellenson, pp. 38–41.
Orthodox reaction
The death of Moses Sofer in 1839 left his followers without a leader. This vacuum allowed the quick rise to prominence of Hildesheimer in the 1850s. The traditional Hungarian rabbis did not share his zeal for secular studies and modernization, albeit in conservative spirit, but he seemed to have the sole answer for the threat posed by the progressives.Silber, Invention, p. 32. The Oberlander Jews of northwestern Hungary – modern Burgenland and Slovakia west of the Tatra Mountains, descended of immigrants from Moravia and Austria – were mostly Orthodox, though thoroughly modernized. Many embraced Hildesheimer's views. The Unterlander Jews of the northeast – modern eastern Slovakia, Zakarpattia Oblast and Northern Transylvania – came from Galicia. They resided in the country's most backward regions, barely influenced by the government's modernization efforts, and almost all clung to the old ways. The authorities ordered the creation of Jewish public schools within the communities in 1850: in 1858, while there was a school for every 650 Jews in Oberland, the ratio in Unterland was 1:14,200. The latter was the only part of Hungary in which Hasidism, though frowned upon by many rabbis and laypeople for the changes it introduced, gained influence. It became the base of support for the more radical Orthodox rabbis.Silber, Invention, pp. 41–43.