Press, 2003). Olga Litvak, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), challenges many of Feiner’s claims about the Haskalah and focuses on its flourishing in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. She argues that, as opposed to the rational frame in which it is usually understood, the Haskalah, especially but not exclusively in Eastern Europe, was much closer to the Romantic movement and far less antagonistic to tradition than normally thought.
75 See W. Bruce Lincoln, Alexander’s Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990).
76 See Israel Bartal, “British Missionaries in the Environs of Chabad” [in Hebrew], unpublished manuscript. I want to thank Professor Bartal for making this available to me in advance of its publication. Cf. Agnieszka Jagodzinska, “English Missionaries Look at Polish Jews,” Polin 27 (2015): 89–116.
77 Hayyim Heilman, Beit Rebbe (Berditchev, 1902), 93, 94, cited in Bartal, “British Missionaries,” 1.
78 See, e.g., John Klier, “State Politics and the Conversion of the Jews in Imperial Russia,” in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Rovert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 92–112. As it happened, Shneur Zalman of Liady’s son Moshe converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. See David Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 29–95. For two important studies of conversion to Christianity in an earlier period, see Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany 1500–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Todd Endelman, Leaving the Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
79 Bartal, “British Missionaries,” 17 (my translation).
80 See Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim, 29–95.
81 See William Thomas Gidney, The History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews from 1809–1908 (London, 1908); and Agnieszka Jagodzinska, “Reformers, Missionaries, and Converts: Interactions Between the London Society and Jews in Warsaw in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Converts of Conviction, ed. D. Ruderman (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 9–26.
82 The stewardship of Nicholas I, who ruled 1894–1917, limited the work of the London Society and did not support the project of converting the Jews.
83 See Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 6–10. Endelman does, of course, treat important cases of conversion from conviction. See ibid., 225–276. Responding to Endelman, Litvak writes: “Trained in the Anglo-American school of social history, Endelman was more interested in Jewish ‘peddlers and hawkers, pickpockets and pugilists’ than in rabbis, reformers, and their middle-class patrons.” See Litvak, Haskalah, 51. On the project of the Russian government’s programto convert the Jews and more about educating them to be good Europeans, see Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 66–69.
84 Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 117.
85 I have checked a series of databases of English, Hebrew, and Yiddish periodicals in England during Soloveitchik’s lifetime, and his name does not appear either as an author or as a subject. This suggests that he was not an active participant in these debates, although the extent to which he knew about them remains unknown.
86 Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 362.
87 Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism, first published in 1905, was a direct response to Adolf Harnack’s attack on Judaism titled The Essence of Christianity (German title was Was ist Christentum?), published in 1902. In a later essay, “Romantic Religion,” Baeck takes aim at Pauline Christianity and argues for Judaism’s superiority as a rational religion. For another example of a Jewish thinker who tried to argue for the utter incompatibility of Judaism and Christianity, see Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Judaism and Christianity: The Differences (New York: Jewish Book Club, 1943).
88 On McCaul, see David Ruderman, “Towards a Preliminary Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews: The Many Faces of Alexander McCaul (1799–1863),” Jewish Historical Studies 47 (2015): 48–69; and E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism.
89 McCaul served as a missionary for the London Society in Warsaw, 1821–1830. On the London Society in Warsaw, see Jagodzinska, “Reformers, Missionaries and Converts,” 14–21. Philosemitism was not uncommon among Protestant missionaries. Franz Delitzsch also cultivated many friendships with Jews, even learning Yiddish, and defended Jews against anti-Semitic accusations. The same was true of Hermann Strack, who published two works of his defense of Jews in German: May Jews Be Called “Criminals” on Account of Their Religion, court proceedings of his 1893 defense of Jews in Berlin; and The Jews and Human Sacrifice, based on 1891 court testimonies he gave in the trial of Esther Solymosi.
90 See William Ayerst, “The Rev. Dr. McCaul and the Jewish Mission,” Jewish Intelligence and Monthly Account of the Proceedings of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, n.s. 4 (1864): 31–34, cited in Ruderman, “Towards a Preliminary Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews,” 51, 52. Cf. Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 246.
91 McCaul, The Old Paths, 24–32; and E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism,” 491.
92 Alexander McCaul, Sketches of Judaism and Jews (London, 1838), 2.
93 See McCaul, The Old Paths, 652.
94 See David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 54, 55.
95 Even before coming to England, Soloveitchik likely had at least heard of McCaul’s work. In a letter from Isaac ber Levenson to David Luria in 1872, reflecting back on the late 1830s, Levenson writes: “McCaul’s work was read widely. Circulating in Vilna and St. Petersburg.” Cited in E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism,” p. 8 in typescript and n. 31.
96 On this, see E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism.”
97 See ibid., 485–486.
98 Houston Stuart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Elibron Classics, 2005). The Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile of the 1911 Munich edition.
99 E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism,” 498. Others, such as Franz Delitzsch, argued similarly. Delitzsch favored Reform Judaism precisely because it diminished the Talmud in favor of prophetic Judaism, thus coming closer to the Jesus movement. See A. Levenson, “Missionary Protestants,” 410.
100 E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism,” 501–503.
101 Ibid., 504.
102 On Hoga, see Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, “Stanislaus Hoga—Apostate and Penitent,” Transactions: Jewish Historical Society of England 15 (1939–1945): 121–149; and David Ruderman, “The Intellectual and Spiritual Journey of Stanislaus Hoga: From Judaism to Christianity to Hebrew Christianity,” in idem, Converts of Conviction, 41–53. I want to thank Professor Ruderman for making this text available to me before its publication.
103 See Lask Abrahams, “Stanislaus Hoga,” 139.
104 See Ruderman, “The
