Scotland: Local Leaders, Local Communities

Focusing on the specifics of the Scottish context, the analysis centres on the work of Salis Daiches in relation to the discussion about the relationship between London and the provinces. The Chief Rabbi’s authority was not so tangible in this northernmost nation and the need to keep alive his hegemony in all halakhic matters was a prominent concern in Hertz’s dealings with Daiches and Jewish religious leaders in Glasgow. Daiches was the best educated rabbi in Scotland at the time, was trusted by the Chief Rabbi, which, alongside his public profile as a representative of Jews and Judaism to non-Jewish society, placed him in a prominent position in the Scottish Jewish communities. The chapter argues that Daiches’s ambition for leadership in Scotland was useful to the Chief Rabbi whose authority was upheld through Daiches, while it resulted in tension with Jewish leaders in Glasgow. Daiches’s own clashes with the Chief Rabbi meant that his career did not flourish the way in which he had hoped. Daiches died in Edinburgh in 1945, broken by the murder of his fellow Jews in Europe, and the impossibility of the synthesis of Jewish and secular culture he had championed all his life.

Portrait and Ideology

This chapter introduces Rabbi Dr Salis Daiches and maps his migration from the Lithuanian part of the Russian Empire to East Prussia, Berlin and then Britain, arriving in Edinburgh in early 1919. His educational, linguistic and cultural voyage across Europe presents the context in which to analyse his religious ideology and outlook on life in a secular society. Daiches presented both an opportunity and a challenge for the Chief Rabbis under whose authority he served in various congregations across the United Kingdom. Daiches possessed the learning of an Eastern European rabbi and the eloquence of an English clergyman, and used these advantages at once to forge a bridge between residents and immigrants and to challenge the hegemony of the Chief Rabbi which he saw as ineffective outwith London’s United Synagogue. Thus, Daiches emerges as a case study that illustrates well the key issues in the debates about the bundling of religious authority in the Chief Rabbi and his court, the frustrations of immigrant rabbis whose religious training far surpassed that of the English Jewish ministers who excelled in preaching, and knowledge of civil law, but were embarrassed by their lack of halakhic competence.

Epilogue

The book concludes by articulating the significance of the attention to local history for our study of national and international themes of migration. Complementing works which address the lives of individuals and congregations across the Anglophone world, the conclusion demonstrates that there is scope for further investigation of migrant rabbis, in particular. Jewish religious functionaries have, as yet, rarely been understood as a group of people whose migration westwards might shed light on transnational networks of authority. Adam Mendelsohn’s work on the middle of the nineteenth century and rabbis who migrated to various parts of the Anglophone world is pioneering in this regard. It is hoped that Jewish Orthodoxy in Scotland may give rise to other studies investigating the careers of others who graduated from the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary before World War I and made their lives in the West.

Traces and Spaces: Jews and/in the City of Edinburgh

This chapter relates the discussions of the previous three chapters to the present-day geography of the city of Edinburgh. Memories of early- to mid-twentieth century Jewish life in the Scottish capital form the basis for the exploration of the urban geography of Jewish Edinburgh. The memoirs of David Daiches, the second son of Salis Daiches and prominent literary scholar, take centre stage in this journey into the city’s Jewish past and its markers in the present cityscape. Additional evidence is drawn from published memoirs such as Howard Denton’s The Happy Land, anecdotal articles from the community newspaper The Edinburgh Jewish Star, and observations during the recently piloted walking tours ‘Jewish Edinburgh on Foot’. Thus the city of Edinburgh emerges as a space filled with traces of Jewish life, actively recalled by residents and increasingly physically marked in the landscape as landmarks and related stories are narrated and re-narrated.

The Chief Rabbi, the London Beth Din and the Battle for Leadership in the ‘Provinces’

Chapter 2 examines the context in which the discussions about religious leadership and the authority of the Chief Rabbi took place in pre-World War I Britain. Centre stage is taken by the Conference of Anglo-Jewish Ministers which at their first two meetings in 1909 and 1911 suggested a radical overhaul of the authority structure of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire, proposing the devolution of religious authority to regional batei din. The death of Hermann Adler in 1911 and the election of Joseph Hertz as his successor as Chief Rabbi in 1913 changed the course of events, and the scheme was dropped from discussions. However, the scheme remained prominent in Salis Daiches’s mind and he pursued it actively in Scotland from 1919 onwards. While his religious politics ran counter to that of Chief Rabbi Hertz, his voice had traction in the communities he served. Though futile in the end, the repeated articulation of a plan of decentralisation of rabbinic authority is a helpful barometer for the mood in Jewish congregations in the early twentieth century whose long-term members were massively outnumbered by recently immigrated co-religionists.

Introduction

The introduction places the book in the context of migration research, including that of the expanding field of transnationalism research. Britain, as a desired or accidental destination of Jewish migrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, then takes centre stage for an investigation of the religious history of British Jews. The focus is sharpened again with the introduction of Scotland as a specific British context of migration and the locus of the case study in chapters 1, 3 and 4, with chapter 2 providing the wider national context of the discussion about Jewish leadership and authority. The contribution this book seeks to make is the exploration of international trends and themes in Jewish migration and migration research in a specific, local context. The aim is to observe local consequences of wider – national and international – issues of Jewish migration at the time.