I reproduce the whole piece below:
Here is a picture of Jakob Rosanes (1842-1922), the mathemetician and chess master grandson of Rabbi Akiva Eger referred to whose children converted:
Here's a notice from the same newspaper, 1884, about Rabbi Akiva Eger's great-grandson graduating from a Russian university (read carefully for a cool reference to Tolstoy):
I am reminded of Rabbi Avi Shafran's 1986 words (The Enigma of Moses Mendelssohn, The Jewish Observer 12/86):
". . . as it is often noted, [Moses Mendelssohn's] children converted to Catholicism or Protestantism -- all but one, his oldest son, Joseph. With the security of hindsight we often tend to hastily indict the man on the mere evidence of his children's choices, yet me must remember that thousands of Jews of that era, beckoned by the sirens of justice and egalitarianism, made similar choices, choices of convenience of confusion, and many of them can, disturbingly, be traced to parents of blemishless reputation. Siyata d'Shmaya -- Divine assistance -- in one's children is not just a factor, but the overwhelming one. Furthermore, to see the child as the invariable outcome and reflection of the parent would yield to the suspicious slandering of Avraham Avinu as Yishmael's progenitor, and Yitzchak as Eisav's. " The following paragraph essentially backtracks and reverts to the typical trope, but at least admits that it's essentially symbolism. "On the other hand, there is without doubt, something nebulous but distinctly disturbing about the end of Mendelssohn's family's identification with the Jewish people."In the mea culpa (on the part of Dr. Ernst Bodenheimer, Chairman of the JO Editorial Board) and smackdown (on the part of Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, Novominsker Rebbe) in the next issue we find the statement that "The search for hidden flaws and for clues to the apostasy of his children wrongly dignifies the man and ignores the main lessons to be learned from the Mendelssohn era." Essentially, they are that Mendelssohn's life was "the centerpiece in a sea of spiritual corruption," and he too reiterates that Mendelssohn is basically just a symbol, and therefore a מסית ומדיח whether willingly or not, which is the "harsh sentence that the Judge of history -- and Torah Jews -- imposed upon him.
Its sort of ironic Salis Daiches's own son did not remain Orthodox (and married a non-jew) , he describes his experience in his memoirs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Daiches
ReplyDeleteI guess that's GD's point, although he know way of predicting ing that about S-D's then-9 year old son.
ReplyDeleteJust noticed the post know. I believe all of Daiches's children married out, and Daiches mentions that in his memoirs. Several German correspondents responded in the JC to Daiches's accusation and denied it in no uncertain terms. One has to search the JC to find those letters.
ReplyDeleteWhich Daiches?
ReplyDelete