Elkan D Levy, President of the United Synagogue 1996-99

Joseph Herman Hertz was born in Slovakia in 1872. His father, Simon Hertz was an accomplished Hebraist and Talmudist but life in Eastern Europe was hard and in 1884 the family emigrated to the Lower East Side in New York. In 1894 Hertz received his Rabbinical diploma from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, then the bastion of modern orthodoxy against the extreme tendencies of American reform, and at the same time obtained his doctorate from Columbia University.

The first four years of Hertz's rabbinate were spent in Syracuse, New York, but in 1898 he was called to become the Rabbi of a leading community in Johannesburg.

South Africa was then a bustling state in the midst of the gold rush, and tensions were rising between the Boers and the Uitlanders ("aliens") including religious minorities. Hertz's outspoken opposition to Boer discrimination resulted in his deportation in 1899 at the outbreak of the Boer war, although he returned to office when peace broke out. His outspoken support for the British government and for British ideals was to do him no harm.

At the end of 1911 Hertz became the Rabbi of Congregation Orach Chayim on Manhattan's Upper East Side. In his inaugural sermon there, he told his congregation "I will be no hesitating or stammering witness to the Truth" of Orthodox Judaism. This promise would be unequivocally fulfilled.

Chief Rabbi Herman Marcus Adler had died unexpectedly in June 1911, and although there were a number of candidates for the post Hertz emerged as the clear leader, and in February 1913 was duly elected.

Hertz's installation as Chief Rabbi took place in the Great Synagogue on 14th April 1913. At the climax of the service, Lord Rothschild, President of the United Synagogue, handed a Sefer Torah to the new Chief Rabbi with the words "I give into your care and safe custody our ancient law and our religious guidance".

In his sermon, Hertz quoted his predecessor's appeal to the community "to become fellow workers with G-d in securing the immortality of Judaism". Such became his ministry in the 33 years of his Chief Rabbinate.

The onset of the Great War in 1914 brought new challenges and a new prominence to the Chief Rabbinate. In 1915, at the invitation of Sir John French, Hertz made a tour of the Western Front visiting Jewish soldiers and a picture remains of him dressed ecclesiastically in a shovel hat of a type normally worn by a Bishop, being driven with the Commander in Chief.

The position of Jewish Chaplain to the Forces was very new, and Hertz reinforced the idea of specifically Jewish care by writing a small volume - the first of his great works - for the Jewish soldiers on the Western Front. Originally issued in small format, the "Book of Jewish Thoughts" has become a classic anthology of Jewish attitudes.

By 1917, the conquest of the Holy Land by the British army was a real possibility. The Zionist movement under Chaim Weitzman was actively seeking British government support, to the dismay of some older Anglo-Jewish figures for whom Zionism raised the terrible spectre of dual loyalty. In May 1917 the presidents of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo Jewish Association issued a statement which rejected the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland in Israel. The Chief Rabbi, in a thundering and courageous letter to The Times, declared that those were not the views of Anglo-Jewry.

The issue of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 was in part due to that decisive intervention.

The First World War had been fought with the active participation of troops from the Empire. The Jewish communities wanted to demonstrate their own sense of unity, and in October 1920 the Chief Rabbi, accompanied by a Vice President of the United Synagogue and one of the Assistant Secretaries, undertook the first pastoral tour of Empire communities. The tour lasted almost eleven months and encompassed South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Some 42 Jewish communities were visited, and the prestige that accrued both to Hertz and his office was immeasurable.

The establishment of the League of Nations in Geneva led to some unexpected spin-offs, one of them being a proposal to alter the calendar to make each week last eight days. The proposal for calendar reform was at first well received by the League, but Hertz led the opposition to it - "The Battle for the Sabbath at Geneva" - with the assistance of Cecil Roth. Memos between them on the subject used to be headed "CR to CR re CR"!

Very early on in his Rabbinate, Hertz realised the need for an English commentary on the Chumash, accessible to all and yet conveying Jewish traditional interpretations. It would also serve as a vehicle to oppose those biblical critics whose denial of the Bible's divine origin was "a perversion of history and a desecration of religion".

The Hertz Pentateuch remains his major contribution to Jewish scholarship and is his best known work. Much of the preparation was done for him by others, but he edited and recast their comments, and himself supplied most of the lengthy essays found in the commentary.

The Pentateuch was at first published in five volumes between 1929 and 1936 and sold very badly. Once the Soncino Press issued a one volume edition, sales took off and the work is now found in every English-speaking community.

Following the success of the Chumash, the Chief Rabbi undertook the preparation of a Siddur along similar lines. This has proved less popular but stands fair comparison with modern commentaries.

One of Hertz's preoccupations during the 1920's was Liberal Judaism, which he attacked strongly and repeatedly in a series of sermons entitled "The New Paths - Whither do they Lead?" His opposition to non-orthodox Judaism was implacable, but Hertz's conception of the essential unity of the Jewish people was sufficient to cause him in 1934 to attend the opening of the Stern Hall, attached to the West London Synagogue (Reform). He felt that the external threats to the Jewish people demanded internal unity at that time, and that "far more calamitous than religious difference in Jewry is religious indifference in Jewry".

The mood of tolerance was not to be permanent.

At the same time Hertz was not a reactionary. In a sermon to mark the 60th anniversary of the United Synagogue, he stated the Anglo Jewish position in theology as "progressive conservatism - i.e. religious advance without loss of traditional Jewish values and without estrangement from the collective consciousness of the House of Israel".

Hertz was a powerful preacher, with language carefully chosen and thoughts painstakingly arranged. He very rarely preached without a full manuscript, and the care that he took with his sermons shines through on reading them.

He was quite a dominating figure both in public and in private, and it was famously said of him (by one of his ministers and in his presence) that he never neglected the peaceful solution to any problem when all other means had failed!

Relations between him and the lay leaders of the United Synagogue, especially Sir Robert Waley-Cohen, were of legendary acrimony, although he was also capable of great friendship and touching kindness.

Hertz died in January 1946. He had been Chief Rabbi for the unusually long term of 33 years. He brought to his office the unshakeable orthodoxy and strong Zionism, together with great scholarship and much eloquence. He bestrode Anglo Jewry, the communities of the Empire and in a certain sense world Jewry like a Colossus and created a Chief Rabbinate that in its time was acceptable to all sections of the community, and influential throughout all sections of society.

© Copyright Office of the Chief Rabbi 2001 - all rights reserved. Reproduction of this Web site, in whole or in part, in any form or medium without express written permission from the Office of the Chief Rabbi is prohibited.