Philip Rubenstein
Who Killed Rabbi Kohn?

Philip Rubenstein - Who Killed Rabbi Kohn?

- So welcome back everyone. Hopefully everyone was, or many of you were listening to Trudy earlier on racial madness in Vienna. So this continues the Habsburg theme, and we are going back to the 6th of September, 1848, in the Galician town of Lemberg. A man enters the kitchen of the Kohn family, and he pretends to light his cigar over the stove. He bends over in such a way that the family cook can’t see that he’s actually putting a vial of arsenic into the soup pot that’s boiling over the stove. That evening, the Kohn family, Rabbi Kohn, Rabbi Abraham Kohn, his wife, Magdalena, and their five children sit down to dinner and eat the soup. Soon, they all fall ill, doctors are summoned, and they manage to save Magdalena and four of the children. But the next day, despite best medical efforts, the 41 year old Abraham Kohn and his youngest daughter, Teresa, are dead of poisoning. This is the story of their murder, but it’s also the story of a kind of every man of the Haskalah, the Jewish version of the Enlightenment. And this is an individual, Abraham Kohn, who lives through a maelstrom of competing ideologies that raged through Europe, and particularly the Habsburg Empire in the first ½ of the 19th century. Conservatism versus liberalism, tradition versus modernity, rationalism versus romanticism and reaction versus revolution. And in the Jewish world, the maelstrom is no less. Misnagdim, those who oppose, versus the Hasidism. Orthodoxy versus reform. and the old traditions versus the new ways. Abraham Kohn plays an active part in all of these, and it’s going to be through his eyes that we’ll experience these 50 years. And it’s with his life that ultimately he will pay the price. So let me just get up the slides, and then we’ll start with who he is.

Just bear with me. Okay, so hopefully everyone can see the map here. Whoops, that’s good. So Abraham Kohn is born in 1807. He’s born on New Year’s Day, auspicious, in the small town of Bohemia, Zaluzani, which you can see just next to the number one on this map. He’s born into a poor family, and he’s a brilliant young student. He quickly outpaces his tutor both in Talmudic studies and in secular studies. And when he’s 12, his family save up enough money, they scrape it together, and they have enough funds to send him to the local gymnasium, the high school, in a nearby town called gymnasium. He studies what would be kind of a typical curriculum for a provincial gymnasium in the Austrian Empire of the day. So he studies New Testament, Biblical history, German grammar and literature, Latin, calligraphy, maths, geography, natural history, biology, and it seems that in practically all these subjects, he’s a brilliant student and he excels. He graduates, and he moves to a larger town called Jungbunzlau. I hope I pronounced that right. And it’s here where he studies for a degree. And at the same time, he studies with a respected local Talmudist called Rabbi Izak Spitz. He supports himself as a Hebrew tutor, but one day, his employer catches him while he’s still wearing his to tefillin and his tallit from morning prayers. He’s reading a book by the French philosopher Montesquieu. And his employer is outraged and thinks this is absolute heresy, and wants to sack him, but Rabbi Spitz intervenes and says, “No, no, no. "This is a pious young man. "He’s not a heretic, he’s orthodox.” And so he manages to save the day, but it’s an early indicator in what’s going to be the intellectual development of Abraham Kohn.

He goes to the big city. He arrives in Prague in 1828, and it’s there that he studies philosophy in the prestigious Charles University, while simultaneously he’s studying with the Chief Rabbi of Prague, Shemu'el Landau. And he’s studying to be a rabbi. He’s taking his smicha. A lack of family funds means he has to drop out of his university course, but he can still continue with his rabbinical ordination. And he’s ordained in 1831 by Rabbi Landau. So let’s just pause for a moment on Abraham Kohn and let’s consider what’s the Europe that he’s actually graduating into? It’s a Europe whose map, as we well know from all of these lectures, has been rapidly redrawn ever since 1815. The Napoleonic Wars had ended and the great powers of course met in Vienna in 1814. And you can see in this marvellous cartoon, “Le Gateau Des Rois,” here they all are carving the cake of Europe. And we see from left to right, got Austria, Prussia, Russia, Britain. And then right at the end on the right, there’s the spectre, the ghost of Napoleon. And under the table is the wily chief minister of France, Talleyrand, who’s clutching a portrait of the Bourbon King, who he’s managed to instal on the throne of France. So the four great powers, they sign the treaty in 1815. And what do they do? They turn France into a relatively stable but weak monarchy. They create a loose confederation of German states, which 40 years later is going to be the path to unification. And they carve up what was the old Commonwealth of Poland, Lithuania into three. And it’s Russia, Prussia and Austria who are going to benefit. And Austria also gets a chunk of northern Italy. So Austria is really one of the big winners of this settlement. What these statesmen have negotiated is what becomes known later as the balance of power. But they’ve done this by bartering away territories without any reference at all to the rights and wishes of the inhabitants of those lands. And this is what’s going to come and bite them later on in 30 years time.

So meanwhile, if we come back to our hero, he tries out for a job, he fails it, he realises it’s not going to be so easy. So a year later in 1832, he’s invited to be the rabbi of a small alpine community in the Tyrol, in the Austrian Tyrol, which is is, you can see, it’s kind of the westernmost part of the empire, a small alpine town called Hohenems. Again, I hope I pronounced that one right as well. So he’s a fully fledged rabbi. Here’s what the synagogue looked like. This is a watercolour. And as you can see, this was built and consecrated in the 1770s. And this is a job for a new starter, for a new rabbinical starter. The town only has 90 Jewish families or thereabouts, but this is where he’s going to cut his teeth, and this is where he’s going to serve for the next decade. Two years later, he meets the woman who is going to become his wife, Magdalena Kohn. They marry in 1835, and they have three children in rapid succession, and a fourth got not ‘til a little later. Now, Magdalena brings a substantial dowry to the marriage. Her father is a wealthy merchant from Bavaria. Her mother was born in Hohenems, which accounts for her connection. And her brother has moved back to Hohenems to work in the family business. However, her father decides that he’s not going to gift the dowry to Abraham and Magdalena. Instead, he’s going to reinvest the money in the family business. I have to tell you, I work for a day job in the world of family business consulting. And this is not an entirely unknown phenomenon, but what it means, of course, is that Abraham and family have to live on the meagre salary of a small town rabbi. So they need a bigger place to live. They’ve got a tiny apartment, which is part of the synagogue.

But there’s a benefactor who comes to their rescue and he provides larger quarters for the growing family. So who exactly is this Abraham Kohn? Now, this is a portrait that was done in 1902. So this is already 50 years after his death. He’s got an interesting face. It’s worth looking at it and studying it for a while. He seems to have been rather an earnest character. He’s shy, he’s socially awkward, reserved, but he’s decent. He’s energetic, he’s ambitious, he’s highly diligent. And as we’re going to see, he has a very strong sense of moral purpose. By way of context, it’s just, it’s important to note that the role of the communal rabbi is changing a great deal at this period across the empire. Traditionally, the rabbi was the figure who was seen as the community’s Halakhic authority, and who might make a sermon maybe two or three times a year, but otherwise is a teacher. And now what’s happening is what you might call the professionalisation of the role of the rabbi. Now the rabbi is expected to take on a much more active role in the community. They take on a pastoral role, they take on an educational role. So they’re expected to be running a local school for Jewish children. And they also have a regular preaching role. So that means every Shabbat, every Saturday and every festival, they’re expected to deliver an uplifting sermon to their congregants. Kohn rises to the occasion while he’s at Hohenems. He reorganises the local burial society. He founds a society to train young Jews to learn artisanship and crafts. He revitalises the Hebrew school. Teaching in Hebrew language is a big thing for the Maskilim, the propagators of the Haskalah. And he’s hugely enthusiastic and he makes a great success of the role. As I said, he’s a devotee of both the European Enlightenment and it’s Jewish cousin, the Haskalah. And he takes every opportunity to promote it almost with I would say a missionary zeal, as we’re going to see. He becomes a prolific sermonizer and a writer, and he’s published.

At the age of 27, he gets published. So he’s, as I said earlier, he’s shy. He’s awkward on a one-to-one basis, but give him a pulpit or a pen and he comes to life. Here’s a quote from one of the sermons that’s published in 1834 in a pamphlet called “Six Sermons,” which is six sermons. And this is what he says in one of the sermons. “Our co-religionists sorely lack any knowledge "of the essence of our religion, "since their education "has either been neglected or perverted "so that the Judaism of so many Jews "have become nothing more "than a collection of prohibitions, demands and habits "inherited from their fathers, "which they obey unselfconsciously and in an unholy manner. "They therefore desperately need religious enlightenment "so that they can both observe and understand "the Judaism they practise or ought to practise. I mean, this is more, this is preaching us, right? There are two themes that come out of these sermons. The first one is this idea of Jewish renewal. He’s criticising Jews, as you can see, for engaging in what he sees as these meaningless old ceremonies and rituals which have got no basis in fact and they only do them out of sheer habit. And instead, he’s saying embrace education and that will lead you back to a path of a renewed Judaism. And his other theme in these sermons is the theme of the new Jew in the Enlightenment. Jews have to become, as he says, normalised. This is a real Haskalah theme that he’s parroting here. And to do this, they have to move away from their traditional roles of money lending, and they have to embrace artisan crafts and agriculture.

And he expresses deep gratitude to the emperor, who’s removed economic restrictions on what the Jews are able to do and commercial practises that they can engage in. Now, so far, his themes have all been modernist, but broadly within the spectrum of what you would call orthodoxy. Now, I should just add at this moment, I’m going to use terms like reform and orthodoxy and traditional and modernist. And these are anachronisms. And the terms orthodoxy and reform don’t really take common hold until quite a bit later. But I’m just going to use them as a form of shorthand because we all know what they mean. So pretty soon, he starts to move outside of this spectrum, and he starts to denounce certain rituals and customs which he says have no basis in the Torah, nor in the missioner. So examples he gives in his sermons are wearing leather on Yom Kippur, playing music on Shabbat, which he says there’s no prohibition of, the rituals of mourning, such as tearing clothes at the funeral or sitting on a low stool on a shiva. But the custom that he reserves his true ire for, his real scorn for is the tradition that women should shave their heads before marriage and should wear a head covering. This, he says, is an imitation of German mediaeval practise. It has no basis in Judaism, and it insults the dignity of the modern Jewish woman. So he’s been in Hohenems for 12 years now. He’s been a success in the role. It’s a cultured and educated community, but it’s also a tiny community and he’s started to get itchy feet. It’s time to move to a bigger stage. At this point, the leading Maskilim, the Enlightenment leaders in Lemberg in Galicia are starting to look for a new rabbi who will lead their community in what’s going to be their new progressive synagogue.

It’s a tempting position for the young Abraham Kohn, but he shares the prejudices of many of the Westerners in the empire because as far as he’s concerned, it would mean leaving the cultured Germanized west for a move 800 miles, 1,200 kilometres out to what he and many like him see as the uncivilised benighted east of Galicia. Here’s one of the articles where he berates Polish Jews, for which read Galician Jews, for observing the old customs and rituals that he wants to ditch. He dismisses them. He calls them, quote, "Backward and fanatic, "just like,” he says, “The oriental Jews of the mediaeval ages.” And he says, “We who are entirely European and German, "we find their customs alien and repulsive.” So he has to think very carefully about whether or not he’s going to go to the Wild East, as he sees it. So what was the Galicia of his day? Well, Galicia was created, this term, Galicia, this place is created in 1772 when the Russians and the Prussians and the Austrians all conspire to destroy the old Commonwealth of Poland, Lithuania. And they carve it up unceremoniously among the three of them. Prussia takes the northeast. So that becomes what’s later known as Congress Poland or Kingdom of Poland. Russia takes the northeast, which is largely the Lithuanian lands. And the south and southeastern parts go to Austria. So this is, it’s southern Poland, and it’s what today would be the western parts of the Ukraine. So obviously highly, highly topical at the moment. And the Austrians decide they’re going to rebrand these lands and they’re going to call them the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. And this is a kind of a convenient myth, that they’re claiming to restore some ancient kingdom, which has got some basis in truth, but more in myth. Galicia suddenly is now the poorest province across the whole of the Habsburg Empire, but it’s ruled with an extremely tight authority from Vienna. The economic situation for the vast majority of people who live in Galicia is dire, especially in the eastern ½ of Galicia. And as the 19th century progresses, if anything, it’s only going to get worse.

One British historian who visits Galicia says that poverty in Galicia is worse than anything he’s ever seen in Ireland during the potato famine, just to give you a sense of it. The two largest populations in Galicia are the ethnic Poles and the so-called Ruthenians, who we would today call western Ukrainians. And most of them are serfs. They’re owned by Polish landlords, Polish nobles, but even the Polish nobles are themselves pretty poor. And third in size in terms of population are the Jews, who represent somewhere in the region of 10% of the population of Galicia. So how about the Jews? Well, by far and away, most of the Jews who live in the empire, the Austrian empire, are living in Galicia. By this time, by the 1840s, around 300,000 Jews were in Galicia. And when you think that there’s only probably about 500, 600,000 in the whole of the empire, it’s probably well over a ½ of the total. The vast majority of Jews living in Galicia, like everyone else, live in abject poverty. But there is a tiny German speaking middle class that starts to emerge in the 1810s and '20s. And it’s these Jews who are going to bring German style reform Judaism into Galicia. Now, when we think of what’s going on, this time, there’s two new and opposing movements that are starting to spread throughout Galicia. The first has been spreading like wildfire, and it’s Hasidut. And the rebbes, the Hasidic leaders, they establish what are going to become major dynasties in places like Belz and . And these groups, they tend to be a bit more hardcore than the Hasidim to the north. They utterly reject what they see as the dry Talmudism of old, and they ascribe to their rebbe mystical, almost magical powers. At the same time is emerging the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement. Now, this movement, of course, it starts much earlier in the 19th century in Berlin with figures like Moses Mendelssohn, and it’s the attempt to meld Jewish theology, Jewish practise with the ideas of the European Enlightenment. The Maskilim by this stage are adopting the language of German.

And they do this because one of the big ideologies that’s growing at this time in Austria and Prussia is the idea of the nation, das volk. And so they promote the German language, but they also aspire to these kind of great high German ideals that Trudy’s spoken about a lot, such as bildung, which doesn’t translate to anything in English, but roughly as culture, and wissenschaft, which is the pursuit of knowledge and learning. And the Maskilim believe in propagating their ideas primarily through education. So it’s very important to them to establish their own journals, their own schools, their own synagogues. And the schools in particular become hugely popular, not only among the Maskilim themselves, but also among many others because many Jewish parents see them as a passport for their children to future upward social mobility. As you would imagine, there is no love lost between the Hasidim and the Maskilim. For their part, the Hasidim utterly reject and despise the Maskilim. The Maskilim reply in kind. They publish anti-Hasidic polemics, some in Hebrew, which they revere, and some in Yiddish, which they disdain as tainted and an impure jargon. But they do so for practical reasons because they know that this is the best way to actually reach the Yiddish speaking Jewish masses across Galicia. So let’s localise now, and let’s now turn to Lemberg itself. So this is a rough map of Lemberg at the time. Lemberg was Lwow under the Polish Commonwealth. It’s now been Germanized to Lemberg. When the Russians come in many years later, it’s going to be Lvov.

And the Polish are going to continue to call it Lwow. And today of course, it’s part of Ukraine and it’s known as Lviv. There’s been a small Jewish presence in Lwow, Lemberg for 500 years before this time. So the Jews were first established as early as the 14th century, a small number of them. And over the centuries, Jewish relations with their Catholic neighbours, they have their ups and downs, but by and large they’re functional and peaceful, mainly because, of course, over the long history of Poland, the Jews tend to be protected by successive Polish kings. And over time, particularly over the previous two centuries, Lemberg has become a major site of rabbinic learning. It’s known as one of the great mother cities of Judaism, and it’s been home to many rabbinic giants over past years. So by the 1840s, Lemberg’s population is split between the Poles, the Ruthenians and the Jews. It’s a city of roughly 67,000 inhabitants. And of those, 20,000, so that’s a good 30%, are Jews. Let’s have a look at Lemberg’s Jewish community. And now, at this point, I have to express my extreme gratitude to Michael Stanislawski because the key book that I used for this lecture, it’s a great book, it’s a thin book, it’s only about 120 pages and it’s a great read, it’s “A Murder in Lemberg by Stanislawski. Here it is. And he’s a professor of Jewish history at Columbia. And very helpfully, he’s described Lemberg’s Jewish community in terms of these six groupings. So let’s just go through them quickly just one by one. So let’s start at seven o'clock with the Hasidim. So the Hasidim are very broadly themselves split into two groups. There are the more hardcore ones, and then there are the ones who are a little bit more like Lubavitch, who would’ve lived to the north of Galicia, who are more kind of compromising in the fact that they’re more willing to meld traditional Talmudic learning with Hasidic mysticism.

Then, and their number one concern, the Hasidic community, their number one concern is for themselves to be legitimised and to spread their influence and grow their numbers in Lemberg. But suffice to say, they abhor the Orthodox masses and they abhor the Maskilim. Then we have what Stanislawski calls the extreme traditionalists. So this is a core within the Orthodox community. They’re traditionally led by Rabbi Jacob Ornstein. They oppose both the Hasidim and the Maskilim. One of the traditionalist leaders, who were going to meet in few minutes again, is called Herz Bernstein. And he’s got this wonderful quote. He says, "A Hasid might be contemptible, "but the Deutsche,” by which he means the Maskilim, the German speakers, “but the Deutsche are inevitably contemptible.” So that that gives you a sense of where he stands. Ornstein has, Rabbi Ornstein has previous form against the Maskilim. In 1816, he issues a herem, a decree of ex-communication, against a group of Maskilim. They complain to the local Austrian authorities, and Ornstein is forced, he’s humiliated by the authorities. He’s forced to rescind the ban in public in a sermon on Shabbat in front of a packed synagogue, and, horror of horrors, to do so using the German language. So he was humiliated, and he’s not going to forget easily. Now, this group is a small minority, but it contains some of the richest members of the community so it’s disproportionate in its influence. Second, we have the modern traditionalists, or, sorry, the moderate traditionalists.

So these are people who are, they’re members of Orthodox synagogues. They speak Yiddish home. They might speak German in business. They want to get on. And they probably form the majority of the community. And they’re not so different from the so-called modernists who are kind of broadly sympathetic to the aims of the Haskalah. And they disapprove of the Hasidim, and they support the building of a modern Jewish day school. But they’re not that interested in significant revolutionary change to Jewish practises or rituals in the synagogue. And then finally we have a, sorry, not finally, we have another small group here who are the extreme modernists. So these are the real leaders of the vanguard of the Haskalah in Lemberg. They want total reform of Jewish religious practises, and they want the organisation of the Jewish community to be democratised. They want to ban what they see as traditional Jewish garb, the long black coat and the special fur hat, the shtreimel, that’s worn by Hasidim. Most controversially though, they want to ban head coverings that Jewish women are required to wear. Not only do they want a modern Jewish school, but they also want a new style of synagogue. They’re a small number, but because they are seen by the Austrian authorities as pro-German allies, again, they have influence beyond their numbers. And finally, down at the bottom is people who really don’t subscribe to any of the above. They’re mainly poor. They are not interested. They just want to survive and do the best they can for their families. There is a tense but uneasy piece between or among all of these groups, but it’s only going to take the slightest of provocations for things to turn nasty very quickly. Now, at this point, we need to talk about tax, why? Because if there’s one issue that unites almost the entire community bar one part of it, it’s their visceral hatred of religious taxes which have been imposed on them by Vienna. These are taxes on kosher meat and on Shabbat and festival candles.

So it means that you have to pay for every animal slaughtered and every candle that’s lit. They’re collected not by the government, but by so-called Jewish tax farmers. They forward on the taxes to Vienna, but not before they cream off a healthy commission for themselves. So these individuals, tax farmers, they become extremely rich, disproportionately rich based on the taxes they’re collecting and the commissions they draw. The basis on which the taxes are collected are what’s known as the metrical books. These are the books that record all of the hatches, matches and dispatches. The Jewish births, marriages and deaths in the community. And crucially, these are supervised, they’re controlled by the , the district rabbi of Lemberg, who of course is Orthodox. So the taxes are very much in the hands of a small cadre of Orthodox leaders. And of course, these leaders are the only ones who steadfastly oppose any reform to the tax system of the Jews of Lemberg. This is how things stand in 1843 in August when Abraham Kohn arrives in Lemberg, and he’s going to make his trial sermon in an Orthodox synagogue because the soon to be completed progressive synagogue has not yet been completed. So they borrow an Orthodox synagogue on a Shabbat for the occasion. And the leaders of the Maskil community, the modernist community, are these two gentlemen here, Emanuel Blumenfeld and Jacob Rappoport. They’re planning to open their synagogue, and they need a rabbi who’s going to lead it. So it’s a trial sermon to see what he’s like. During the sermon, Abraham Kohn repeats his favourite themes. He criticises the false religion of backward ceremonies and customs, followed blindly by rote, and he envisions a new enlightened Judaism. He gets a mixed reaction from the congregation. The Orthodox who were in the congregation are fairly nonplussed by his garb.

He seems to be wearing the clothes of a Christian minister. And they’re also nonplussed by his use of standard German because some of them are Yiddish speakers. And one witness reports to overhearing whispers from a few members, saying , “What’s he saying?” But Rappoport and Blumenfeld are thrilled by this young enlightened rabbi. He’s exactly what they’re looking for. And so they seal the deal on the spot. And a year later after he’s cleared up a few of his affairs, Kohn and his young family move to Lemberg. They move in May of 1844. While waiting for the synagogue to be built, Kohn takes up his role with energy and enthusiasm. He throws himself into organising the new school for young Jewish children, which proves hugely popular. It starts with 400 boys and girls enrolled. And two years later, the enrollment figures for the next academic year are 700. So it’s almost doubled in its intake. Then, in September, 1846, the new progressive Synagogue is finally ready for its grand opening. The Temple of the Enlightenment, as it’s colloquially known in Lemberg. As you can see, I mean, this is something of a statement building. It’s built in the centre of the city and it’s topped with this hugely impressive dome. And the Austrian authorities decide for the consecration, they’re going to put on a big show of support. So they lay on a squadron in full military regalia who line the route. And at four PM precisely, the military commander of Galicia enters the temple and an army band strikes up the national anthem of the Habsburg Empire. Why do they do this? Because the authorities see in the Maskilim, pro-German allies. And quite frankly, right now, they feel in need of friends. Two years earlier in 1846, a group of Polish nobles had led an uprising. They took Krakow and they proclaimed a Polish National Government, with its mission being to liberate all Polish lands, to free the serfs, to emancipate all the serfs, and to give equal rights to all minorities, including the Jews. But the uprising is swiftly defeated, largely because the serfs, whose landlords are these same polish nobles, violently oppose them.

And the Imperial troops soon regain control of the city, and they quash the rebellion. So the forces of empire have won. But quite frankly, they’ve been spooked, and loyal allies are now especially appreciated. Hence the reason why they lay on the great triumph at the opening of the synagogue. And so much do they value their friends that in May, 1847, they appoint none other than Abraham Kohn as the new , the district rabbi of Lemberg. Now, you can imagine, the Orthodox see this as a huge provocation. I mean, this is an outrage to them. It throws them into an absolute frenzy. This is a slap in the face, as they see it, to the memory of all those great Orthodox rabbinim of Lemberg’s past, and one of those leaders is Hirsch Orenstein, who’s pictured here. I have to say, this is a portrait of him as a much, much older man, so he would’ve been probably 30 years younger at the time. And for Orenstein and Bernstein, Herz Bernstein, this is a real problem because not only are they outraged by a reform rabbi being given this role, but they see this as a direct economic threat to their income because they’re both tax farmers. And suddenly, control of the metrical books, which is the key to the whole operation, control is now in the hands of a religious opponent who has publicly committed himself to the cause of the abolition of the religious tax. So what do they do? They swing into action and they orchestrate a campaign against Abraham Kohn. They start to circulate rumours and organise posters to go up in the town. And they claim he desecrates the Shabbat, the Sabbath, that he eats non-kosher food, that Kohn is demanding a ban on traditional religious garb.

And they say that during his initial sermon, he tore off the curtain of the arc and started stomping all over it. Now, Kohn could respond as the new in many ways, okay? I mean, he’s now the chief rabbi, okay? He could choose to be a unifier. He could choose to build relationships, to be a bridge with the Jewish, with the Orthodox community. But he doesn’t do that because he’s on a mission. So instead, he throws fuel on the fire. He advocates for full emancipation of coalition jury, the abolition of religious taxes and a ban on traditional Jewish garb. And he and his fellow Maskilim take their demands straight to the emperor. They petition the emperor. And one request, the ban on traditional Jewish garb, is granted. That’s the only one that’s granted, of course, to the fury of the Orthodox community in Lemberg. So the Jewish community of Lemberg now descends into this bitter, bitter war of words. The governor of Galicia receives petition and counter petition, accusation and counter accusation. He’s scratching his head. And it leaves him and his Viennese masters at a total loss as to how they’re going to deal with this fractured Jewish community. Things start to get ugly. Kohn is offered money to resign, and when he refuses, he’s physically set upon, attacked and beaten up by a group of Orthodox Jews, and he then starts to receive death threats.

And if that’s not enough mayhem and excitement, it’s now February, 1848, and the whole of Europe is about to erupt into mass rebellion. In short, the regimes that were restored in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, that negotiated the Congress of Vienna, these are all absolutist regimes, okay? These are regimes that believe in the absolute power of the monarch. They generally offer no constitution. And in terms of policing, they are, to say the least, heavy handed. But by the 1840s, these repressive regimes are starting to falter, why? Because liberalism is on the march, nationalism is on the march, cities are starting to be uncontrollable because they’re overcrowded. Many of them are full of cholera. And these governments have got no idea what to do with cholera. They don’t even know it’s cholera. And this culminates in a period of severe economic crisis throughout Europe, which results from a series of catastrophic harvests in the mid 1840s. For those of you who listened to William’s great lecture on 1848, you’ll remember that it’s in February, 1848 that Paris falls first. The monarchy goes down in flames in just three days. So where the king of France, Louis Felipe, flees and ends up in England. And this lights the tinderbox. Revolutionary zeal spreads throughout the capitals of Europe. And within weeks, it’s swept across the whole of Europe like a wildfire. If it took three days in Paris for the revolution to succeed, in Vienna, it seems only to take one day. On the 13th of March, what begins as a street demonstration suddenly morphs into a violent confrontation at the barricades. And in a panic, having seen what’s happening in, or what’s happened in France and what’s happening now in Prussia, the emperor decides to cave in.

He removes Metternich from the office, Metternich, who’s been chancellor of Austria for 30 years, who was seen by the demonstrators as a personification of everything that’s rotten in these regimes, tired, old and repressive. And in Lemberg, well, the revolution spreads to Lemberg, where Kohn, alongside other Jewish leaders, agitates for political and civil rights. There’s a moment, and there’s an extraordinary demonstration in front of the governor of Galicia’s mansion where Poles, Ruthenians and Jews all stand arm in arm in front of the mansion and they demand liberty and equality for all. Revolutionary fervour in Lemberg has a strong tinge of Polish nationalism. It’s really being led by Polish nationalist leaders. And their demands are for autonomy for Galicia, for the abolition of serfdom, for the equal rights of citizens, regardless of religion, and for Polish as the language of instruction in schools. Most in the Orthodox Jewish community side with the Austrian state. This accords with the traditional kind of survival principle adopted by Jewish communities of displaying loyalty to whichever regime is in power at the time. But the Maskilim, the modernists, they find themselves in a terrible quandary because fundamentally they support the demands, they support the liberal platform that’s being advanced by the Polish nationalists. But at the same time, they’re also loyal to the Austrian state and they’re emotionally connected to German culture. And so this is torture for them, and particularly for Abraham Kohn. But they decide to do a 180 degree turn and they side with the liberalism of the Polish nationalist movement. So they sign their petition and they add one clause to it, which is a demand for the abolition of the religious taxes. It’s at this point that the opponents of Abraham Kohn step up their animosity towards him. First during April, a mob descends on his office demanding that he resigns. Magdalena begs her husband to consider moving. She just thinks it’s too dangerous. Kohn’s response naively is he says, “I am after all among Jews, "what will they do to me?”

But the threats to Kohn continue to escalate. And in early September, placards appear on the streets and in the synagogues declaring him to be a , a kind of a willful sinner who needs to be removed from office. The matters finally come to a head on that fateful day on the 6th of September, 1848, when a man slips into the rabbi’s kitchen, drops poison into the pot of soup that will feed the family that evening. The next day, Abraham Kohn, age 41, is dead, and his daughter, Teresa, aged one year old, is also dead. Who killed Kohn? One of the speakers at Kohn’s funeral the next day was in absolutely no doubt that the killer was an Orthodox Jew. He indicts what he calls the wild cannibal lust of a poisoner in a Jewish kaftan. The shade of suspicion immediately falls on one Abraham Ber Pilpel. He’s a goldsmith who’s brought himself to attention because immediately after the murder, he leaves town very suddenly. And on his return a few days later, he enters a barbershop and he asks for his sidelocks and his beard to be shaven off, which is an extremely unusual request for an Orthodox Jew. As it turns out, the evidence of Pilpel’s guilt is overwhelming. Several witnesses identify him as having been in the building at the time of the murder, and the family cook who was with him in the kitchen positively identifies him. Pilpel is found guilty by the Lemberg Criminal Court, and he’s sentenced to 20 years hard labour. But now the case is transferred to the District Appellate Court. Pilpel had been arrested, but he’d been arrested with two co-conspirators, alleged co-conspirators, none other than Hirsch Orenstein and Herz Bernstein. And by now, the revolutions in Lemberg and Vienna and elsewhere in Europe have all been quashed.

And so the atmosphere is very different. The judge in the appeals court deems that there is insufficient evidence in the entire case, and so he releases Orenstein and Bernstein and Abraham Ber Pilpel. Magdalena, the widow of Abraham Kohn, is incensed. She launches an appeal, and she takes her appeal to the highest court in Vienna. And it takes three years for the judgement to be made, for the decision to be announced. But she finds she’s unsuccessful, she appeals to no avail, and her appeal is thoroughly rejected on every count. So this leaves us with the question, who really did kill Abraham Kohn? Most historians are pretty convinced by the evidence that Pilpel was the killer, that he was the assassin. But the question remains, was he a lone gun or was he hired by Bernstein, Orenstein and others, both for religious reasons, but also to protect their income. There is definitely a good deal of circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction, but quite frankly, there’s nothing conclusive. And Michael Stanislawski went to the archives, he looked at all of the evidence. And unless any more documentation comes out, the likelihood I think is that we’ll never truly know who was behind the murder. So a few postscripts now to the story of this murder. First of all, the 1848 rebellions, almost all of them fail in the short term, and they leave most of the countries with these regimes even more oppressive and repressive than when they were briefly shaken off. In the long term, however, 1848 does make its mark, and it creates a model of mass political participation that’s still with us today, mass demonstrations, public demands and the power of the free press.

As to the Jews of Galicia, they, along with their co-religionists throughout the empire, they were subsequently emancipated and they were granted full civil and religious rights for a time. Magdalena, Magdalena Kohn died of cholera in 1855. So that’s only seven years after the murder of her husband and daughter. And as for Hirsch Orenstein, he left Lemberg for a number of years, but 30 years later, 30 years after the murder, he returns to the city to take up his appointment. Guess what? As the , the district rabbi of Lemberg. So let me just conclude just with a few thoughts. It’s easy to look at all these bitter, bitter divisions and ask, why is it that we can’t just all get along? But I don’t think it’s that simple and I don’t think it ever has been simple. This clash among the Jews between tradition and modernity, this has been playing out since Temple times. It starts with a civil war during the second Temple era, when the battleground then was Hellenism, either the lure of Hellenism or the fear of its extreme danger. Now, Abraham Kohn believed that the Jews could only survive and flourish if they cast off the old and embraced maternity and reimagined Judaism. The Orthodox of the day believed, as Trudy told us last week in her lecture, that it was impossible to walk these two worlds. And she quoted Zalman of Liadi, who said that, “The Enlightenment would only lead "to the death of the Jews.” So this debate is heated, and it gets heated I think because it’s much more than just about religious practise. Ultimately, this is an argument about the survival and the continuity of Judaism over future generations. And it’s a debate we’ve been having for more than 2000 years, and I suspect its one we’ll continue to have for many more years to come, thank you. So if anyone’s left, let me stop sharing.

• [Host] We have plenty of people left still. do you have time for any questions?

• Okay.

• [Host] Up to you.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: - Great. “Please comment about the Shabbat Shuvah "and its evolution. "Did it become of less importance "during generations subsequent to Rabbi Kohn?” This is from Elliott Zinner.

A: Elliot, my reply is I don’t know, but I’m determined to find out. So after this lecture is finished, I’m going to look it up, and hopefully we can all find out together.

Apparently, says, “Louis Jacobs and his family had a very tough time "by their fellow Jews after he published his book.” He did indeed. And the so-called Jacobs Affair, which people watching from Britain will be familiar with, many others may be less familiar with, it certainly had some familiar strains to this one.

And another one, “My late husband came from a Haskalah background. "His mother went to a Zionist school in Poland, "and they spoke modern Hebrew at home in Liverpool.” Yes, the Maskilim were great believers in teaching the Hebrew language. And again, they saw this as in opposition to Yiddish. Hebrew was to displace Yiddish.

Reeva Foreman says, “Horrific mirror of Rabin’s assassination in our era.” I mean, absolutely, Reeva. And funnily enough, it’s funny you should say that because Stanislawski wrote his book in response to Rabin’s assassination. It was the assassination that really moved him to explore this story.

Q: Okay, “Where is the rabbi buried?”

A: He’s buried in Lemberg. The gravestone that I showed was an old photo. Like pretty much every remnant of Lwow, Lemberg, it was utterly destroyed by the Nazis, who took a population in 1941 that was 120,000 Jews and reduced it by the end of the war to 200, 300. Okay, well, thank you, everyone.

Q: Oh, this is Pauline, who says, “In her noble prizewinning novel, ”'Books of Joseph,’ “Olga Tokarczuk describes the of the Frankists, "the proponents of Jacob Frank, "this was at the end of the 18th century, "were Lemberg’s Jews, Lwow, particularly belligerent, "or were other centres of Judaism similarly bellicose?”

A: So it’s a great question, by the way, this book, if anyone’s interested, I mean, it’s absolutely huge. I’ve got it on my bedside table guiltily staring at me, and I’m going to start it anytime soon. So this is about, it’s the story of Jacob Frank, who was the 17th century false messiah. And of course one of the reasons why the Misnagdim, the Orthodox opponents of the Hasidim, feared Hasidism so much is they thought it was going to be a repeat of the turmoil of another false messiah, particularly in the way that they felt many of the real kind of hardcore Hasidim revered their rebbes in a kind of a demigod like way. So it’s seven minutes past, so I think we’ll stop there. Thank you everyone for all your wonderful comments.

Final comment has to go to Sylvia Clark, who says, “It’s the history of my father’s birthplace in Galicia.” So thank you Sylvia, and this is for you. Thank you, everyone.

• [Wendy] And Phil, thank you for brilliant presentation as always. Thank you, thanks everybody for joining us, take care. Enjoy the rest of your day or evening, thanks, bye-bye.