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The Kittsee Kehilla

To the south of the present-day Joseph Joachim Platz, a three-minute walk up a slight rise, past a row of old one-story dwellings, beside a garage and paved lot, stands a block of new buildings. No vestige remains there of the ancient building that once inhabited this site: a superannuated nunnery, consigned to Kittsee’ Jewish community of for its use as a synagogue. In 1927, Otto Abeles described the building as “well preserved […] with its bizarre bay window and the age-old bucket-well among the peasant houses, like a romantic piece of the middle-ages that one had forgotten to clear away […]. ” [i]

 

View of the old Synagogue (center) — Kittsee, ca. 1930 [ii]

 

The present-day site of the Kittsee Synagogue

In addition to the small Schul, accessed through a side door, it contained a number of apartments. Within this humble structure, torn down after the Second World War, the Jews of Kittsee lived, worked and worshiped as an autonomous, interdependent orthodox community (Kehilla).

The Kittsee Kehilla was one of the culturally prominent Sheva Kehillot, the “Seven Communities” of Deutschkreutz, Eisenstadt, Frauenkirchen, Kittsee, Kobersdorf, Lackenbach and Mattersburg, [1] that arose in the late 17th century, and stood under the protectorate of the powerful Esterházy family. The Esterházy dynasty’s rise under Count Nikolaus [Miklós] (1583-1645) and his son, Prince Paul [Pál] (1635-1713) was marked by the acquisition of vast tracts of land in Hungary, and cemented by a steadfast loyalty to the Habsburg Emperor. Though small Jewish communities existed in Burgenland since early times, [2] the modern inhabitants of the Sheva Kehillot were refugees, driven out of Vienna by Emperor Leopold I in the early 1670s. [iii] Prince Paul accepted the outcasts into his lands and granted them his protection. [3] Though he undoubtedly did so for economic reasons, or perhaps to curry favor with the Emperor, the Prince was nevertheless known for his exceptionally indulgent treatment of the Jews in his lands, many of whom accepted his protection in hopes of eventual repatriation to Vienna.

The Sheva Kehillot were among the wealthiest of the Hungarian Jewish communities, and their members were among the best educated of Hungary’s Jews. [4] Many were traders, who enjoyed considerably more privileges than the ghetto Jews of nearby Pressburg. As merchants, they travelled freely throughout the region, maintaining close contact with Vienna’s resurgent Jewish population, as well as with the large numbers of their co-religionists in Pressburg and Pest. In the early 1820’s Joachim’s maternal grandparents, Isaac and Anna Figdor, left Kittsee and settled in the Viennese Vorstadt of Leopoldstadt, the district along the Danube canal that was home to most of Vienna’s Jewish population. [5] That the Figdors, as Jews, were permitted to live in Vienna at that time, before the loosening of residential restrictions in 1848, is an indication of special status, and suggests affluence. [6]

Though the “Israelites” of Kittsee had lived under Esterházy protection since the late 17^th century, they did not possess their synagogue, or even their own homes. Prior to 1867, Hungarian Jews were forbidden to own real property or to claim the rights of Hungarian citizenship. In the eyes of the law, they remained a corpus separatum; ethnically, religiously, politically and culturally they existed largely as a people apart—a nation without a country — tenants without permanent status, their presence tolerated in proportion to their ability to make themselves useful. Like most European Jews, they were subject to comprehensive and meticulous restrictions on their numbers, practice of profession and other aspects of their daily lives. The rights and restrictions under which they lived were spelled out in “letters of protection” (Schutzbriefe), which had to be renewed at regular intervals, or upon the death of the ruler or a change of regime. [7]

Despite such restrictions, the members of the Kehilla were granted an exceptional degree of religious and civil autonomy in exchange for upholding the terms of their contract with the sovereign. As a community of faith, the Kehilla had control over religious observance and education. As a civil authority, it was responsible for the collection of taxes and protection fees as well as the maintenance of law and order. Many functions of the Kehilla, such as care for the sick, relief of the poor, and burial of the dead were both religious and civil in nature. In the Sheva Kehillot, community members were subject to the judgments of their own rabbinical courts, which settled cases according to halakah, the traditional Jewish law. If a Jew were to sue a Christian, however, he would be required to enter his complaint in a Christian court. Two-thirds of levied fines would revert to the Prince.

In an era marked by religious reform and the awakening of political emancipation, most Hungarian Jews espoused a conservative faith, largely resistant to the doctrinal innovations and social aspirations of the predominantly northern-German Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). [iv] In Pressburg, a stone’s throw from Kittsee, Rabbi Moshe ben Samuel Schreiber, known as the Chatam Sofer (1762-1839), fought vigorously against Enlightenment rationalism, assimilation, and religious reform. The leading halachic authority of his time, Rabbi Sofer is remembered today as one of the founders of Haredi Judaism, the most theologically conservative form of Orthodox Judaism [8]. The maxim for which he is best known, Hadash assur min ha-Torah (חדש אסור מן התורה), was a mishnaic text that he construed to mean: “innovation is forbidden by the Torah.” His general attitude toward reform and emancipation seems well encapsulated in Hans Tietze’s phrase: “Emancipating the Jews while sacrificing that which is Jewish — suicide out of fear of death.” [v] As Rabbi of Pressburg and founder of the large and active Pressburg Yeshiva (Talmudic seminary), Sofer exercised authority over the entire region, including many of the Sheva Kehillot, which persisted as strongly traditional communities until their dissolution in 1938.

This “instinct of self-preservation,” wrote David Philipson in his book on the Jewish reform movement, would eventually lead “the orthodox rabbis of Pressburg to prevail upon the Jewish community of that city to issue a petition calling upon the Jews of Hungary to refuse the gift of emancipation if offered to them; they characterized the desire of the Jews for civil emancipation as sinful and as inconsistent with Israel’s hopes for the future. […] In their view the Jews were a nation, exiled from their land; the countries of their sojourn were simply temporary dwelling-places; they were living under their own legislation. To become merged in the body politic of the land meant the surrender of all their hopes for the future restoration of Israel to the land of Palestine. They made no distinction between the political and religious elements in Judaism; they were in the land, but not of it; among the people, but not of them — nor did they wish to be. In no country, possibly, was the opposition to reforms of any kind more bitter and constant than in Hungary, and nowhere did the rabbis of the old school present more solid ranks to the onslaughts of the modern spirit.” [vi]

One of Leopold Kompert’s 1848 tales from the Pressburg ghetto evokes the dark, dream-like mysticism still current among Hungarian Jewry at the time of Joachim’s birth:

Across the river from Kittsee, the Pressburg ghetto was still locked at night. [viii] Nevertheless, Ellenberger claims that Burgenland’s Jews, who enjoyed generally good relations with the Christian population, “did not have the feeling of belonging to a persecuted minority.” [ix] Many, like Joachim and the psychologist Alfred Adler (whose father was born in Kittsee in 1835), eventually converted to Protestantism. Ellenberger observes: “Men of that background could keep their religion […], but when they lost their faith, the Jewish tradition no longer held any meaning for them. Not being sentimentally attached, they could easily shift to Protestantism or Catholicism without having the feeling of betraying their ancestors or being disloyal to their fellow Jews.” [x] This was not quite the case with Joachim, however. Like so many assimilated Jews in the nineteenth-century, his relationship to his Jewish heritage remained complex and ambivalent. Despite his mid-life conversion to Lutheranism, Joachim retained a life-long identification with what he called his “Stammesgenossen,” (“those who shared his lineage”), and he informed his parents of his conversion with a distinctly guilty conscience — and only after they had already read of it in the newspapers.

In many ways, it is difficult to imagine a more improbable or incongruous birthplace for an iconic representative of the nineteenth-century Prussian musical establishment than what the residents of the Sheva Kehillot referred to as the schäbige K’hilles — the “shabby Kehillas.” [xi] Before Jews were permitted to participate fully in European cultural life, the Sheva Kehillot produced great Talmudic scholars, skilled tradesmen and successful merchants, but few, if any, artists. Though the Esterházy lands had produced great musicians like Haydn and Liszt, Esterházy Jews had few opportunities to encounter classical music, and fewer still to study it. The experience of Joachim’s near-exact contemporary, the once-celebrated composer Karl [Károly] Goldmark (1830-1915), provides a case in point. For Goldmark, a life in music came as an almost miraculous stroke of fortune. Growing up in Kittsee’s affiliate Kehilla Deutschkreutz, he experienced a Huckleberry Finn youth, playing in the fields all day, and never attending a day of school. Though his father was a cantor, he claimed that, as a boy, he had “never heard music in the true sense of the word.” He was approaching his teens when:

  One beautiful, sunny day, I went out, lay on my back in the grass, stared into the blue sky and let the warm sun shine on my face. It was Sunday morning. A solemn stillness surrounded me — only bees and beetles droned — high in the air, the larks warbled their sweet melodies. Then, at once, the church bells sounded in the distance, and when they were silent, the powerful organ thundered forth. It grew soft, and four voices joined in triadic harmony to sing the holy mass. A euphonious stream of soft harmonies flooded over me. These immaterial, sweet tones, idealized by distance as they wafted in from afar — how deeply did they penetrate my musically responsive, youthful heart! [10] I had never heard anything like it, since we were never permitted to enter the church, and lived far from it. For the first time, I heard and felt the shattering power of harmony, indeed, of music. In my ignorance, I could not account for what I heard — but I had tears in my eyes, and even today I shudder when I think of this first, so powerful musical impression. My fate, my future was decided in this instant, and my life’s calling determined — I was a musician, and — strangely enough — through the Catholic Church. [xii]

Goldmark’s experience demonstrates how haphazard, and how discriminatory, the transmission of knowledge and culture was in those times, and what a radical change was brought about by the establishment of free and open cultural institutions. The nineteenth-century cultural project — the creation of public institutions of high art and learning — was intended to provide broad access to life-enhancing experiences that had previously been available only to the few, primarily through the agency of church and court. In the early nineteenth century, the breakdown of estate societies and the rise of capitalism brought on a great wave of public-spirited activity, as successful and forward-looking citizens co-operated and vied in the creation of schools, libraries, concert halls, museums, choral societies, lecture-associations, sporting clubs, hospitals, parks, and great public works of all kinds. Many of these new cultural associations were liberally subscribed by newly emancipated Jews. Haydn and Liszt grew up with access to cultural institutions that were in principle closed to young Goldmark, Joachim and others whose names we will never know. In the pre-March years of the nineteenth century, the relaxation of laws restricting residence, profession and association released the long-repressed talents and ambitions of this segregated and ostracized people. The gradual lifting of oppressive legal restrictions coincided with the growth of industrialization and improved transportation, providing Jews with previously unattainable opportunities. Within decades, Jews comprised one of the most dynamic segments of society, fueling the engine of capitalism, and entering into the heart of European cultural life. Many progressed from being a marginalized, rural population of merchants, peddlers and artisans to an upwardly mobile urban class of wholesalers, industrialists, financiers — and musicians. Within a generation, western Hungary gave birth to a host of eminent Jewish violinists, among them Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, Miska Hauser, Edmund Singer, Ludwig Straus, Adolph Pollitzer, Eduard Reményi, Karl Goldmark and Joseph Joachim. [11]

Joachim’s relatives, who had lived in comparative freedom and prosperity, were among the earliest of Hungarian Jews to escape the bounds, physical and spiritual, of ghetto and Kehilla. Jews had traditionally obtained their legal rights, including their right of residence, through membership in the community. That membership had never been a matter of choice, but a requisite of law. With the loosening of legal restrictions in the Royal Free Cities, new opportunities — new ways of living — began to present themselves to the adventurous and forward-looking. In 1833, his business flourishing and his family growing, Julius Joachim joined the rising numbers of Kittsee Jews who were leaving the Kehilla in search of an improved quality of life elsewhere. He relocated his family to Pest. [12]

© Robert W. Eshbach, 2013.

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