הרב שמשון רפאל הירש

Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch (24 Sivan 5568/1808–27 Tevet 5649/1888) was the rav of the Torah-true kehillah of Frankfurt am Main and the father of the derech of Torah im Derech Eretz, standing at the head of the battle for Torah Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany. He was born in Hamburg to Raphael Aryeh Hirsch, a merchant who gave his hours to Torah; his grandfather, Rav Mendel Frankfurter, a talmid of Rav Yehonatan Eibeschutz, founded the Talmud Torah of Hamburg and served as av beit din in Altona, and his great-uncle wrote the peirush HaRechasim LeVik’ah on the Torah. His rebbi in Hamburg was Chacham Yitzchak Bernays, and in 5588/1828 he went to Mannheim to learn under Rav Yaakov Ettlinger, from whom he received semichah, before a short spell at the University of Bonn.

In 5590/1830, at twenty-two, he was appointed Landesrabbiner of Oldenburg. There he wrote Chorev, his presentation of the mitzvot and the ideas that live in them — and when the publishers hesitated to print a defense of Torah in such times, he sent ahead the slimmer Igrot Tzafon, the “Nineteen Letters,” which appeared in Altona in 5596/1836 under the pen name Ben Uziel: an unyielding case for Torah Judaism and all its mitzvot, written in polished German for the generation of the emancipation. Chorev followed in 5598/1838. In 5601/1841 he moved to Emden as rav of the districts of Aurich and Osnabrück, where he founded a school joining limudei kodesh with general studies — the first placed under his motto, Torah im Derech Eretz. In 5606/1846 he was called to Nikolsburg, and the next year became chief rabbi of Moravia and Austrian Silesia, with fifty-two kehillot under his hand; as a member of the Moravian Landtag in the days of the revolution of 5608/1848 he fought for the civil rights of the Jews of the land.

In 5611/1851 he left that great rabbanut for a handful of households in Frankfurt am Main: eleven men who had won recognition for a separate kehillah of shomrei Torah — Adat Yeshurun, the Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft — in a city whose official community had gone over to the Reform. Under him it grew to some five hundred families, with its own shul, exacting shechitah, schools in which Torah stood beside general studies, and the monthly Jeschurun (from 5615/1855), most of whose pages he filled himself. In Frankfurt he wrote his peirush on the Chumash with a German translation (five volumes, 5627–5638/1867–1878), and peirushim on Tehillim and on the siddur. All his years he fought the Reform, and when Zacharias Frankel’s Darchei HaMishnah cast halachah leMoshe miSinai as ancient custom, Rav Hirsch demanded of him a plain declaration that the whole Torah, the written and the oral, is min HaShamayim — and when only a clouded answer came, he came out against him publicly.

In 5636/1876 he obtained, through the parliamentarian Edward Lasker, the law permitting a Jew to leave the official community without leaving Yiddishkeit, and he ruled that separation from the Reform-run community was an obligation; Rav Seligman Ber Bamberger of Würzburg held that where the community provided fully for the shomrei Torah one need not secede, and in the end only some eighty families followed Rav Hirsch out. In his last years he founded the Freie Vereinigung, a union of independent Torah kehillot that later served as the model for the founding of Agudas Yisrael. He was niftar in Frankfurt on 27 Tevet 5649 (31 December 1888) and is buried there; his Chumash, his Igrot Tzafon, and Chorev are learned and reprinted to this day.