Judaism: The Jews of Britain

Thanks to Hitler, England can now boast of having the largest Jewish community in Europe. Currently 450,000 strong, it is a proud, placid and curiously mixed branch of Judaism. Some of its members are descendants of Sephardic Jews who fled the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions for the safety of Cromwell’s England in the 17th century. Others belong to the wealthy, literate Anglo-Jewish families, such as the banking Rothschilds, who began to leave the ghettos of Europe 100 years later and came to exert great economic and political power in Britain. Liberal in outlook, sometimes casual in religious observance, traditional Anglo-Jewry is oddly yoked with more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe—rigidly Orthodox Jews, fearful that their traditional beliefs will be corrupted by the alien world of the goyim.

Abrogating Laws. Last week British Judaism was split by its worst schism ever—over whether it should adapt to modern life or reject it for the sake of Israel’s carefully nourished beliefs. Cause of the schism is the modern-minded theological outlook of Dr. Louis Jacobs, 43, a Biblical scholar who between 1954 and 1960 was rabbi of the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater, a traditional center of worship for many Anglo-Jewish families. Although he is Orthodox in practice, Jacobs has long shocked his bearded rabbinical colleagues in the Orthodox-controlled United Synagogue, Britain’s largest Jewish organization, by arguing that the Torah contains human as well as divine elements. Jacobs believes that the sacred first five books of the Bible should be interpreted in the light of historical and archaeological evidence. For example, he believes that some dietary laws stem from ancient Hebrew hygienic practice rather than divine command, and therefore might be abrogated.

Jacobs’ modernism might be Chillul Hashem (desecration of God’s name) to the United Synagogue, but his views were just right for New West End, which last January asked him to return as its rabbi. Dr. Israel Brodie, the ailing Orthodox chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, refused to approve the appointment. Eventually the United Synagogue Council, composed exclusively of laymen, voted to expel the New West End board of lay managers.

Standing by the Truth. To Dr. Brodie, the issue was clear-cut: British Judaism must stand by the divine inspiration and literal truth of the Torah. “An attitude to the Torah which denies the divine source and unity,” he said, “is directly opposed to Orthodox Jewish teaching.” A number of Jews felt that Brodie was defending not Orthodoxy but fundamentalism; when nearly half of the New West End congregation set up an independent synagogue with Jacobs as rabbi, they received membership applications and offers of help from many Jews outside of London. Last week, in the influential Jewish Chronicle, Jacobs answered the chief rabbi and defended the rebels’ liberal approach to the Torah. “If by ‘Orthodox’ Dr. Brodie means fundamentalist, then indeed I am not Orthodox,” he wrote. “But since when has Orthodoxy in Anglo-Jewry been equated with fundamentalism?”