Abolitionist Rabbis: Their Urgent Lessons for Today

As the first half of the nineteenth century ended, Americans faced an urgent matter of conscience. The enslavement of human beings, central to the U.S. economy, was tearing the country apart. The situation called for spiritual and moral leadership.

Most American Jews at the time were of European descent. And as a group, they were not strikingly different from their non-Jewish white neighbors in their attitudes toward slavery. Northern Jews tended to oppose the practice, and some, like August Bondi, fought pro-slavery militias in Kansas under the leadership of John Brown. Southern Jews tended to endorse slavery, and a few, like Judah Benjamin, would become part of the Confederate leadership (and, in defeat, move to England, where he died and was buried a Christian).

But Rabbi Sabato Morais, an Orthodox rabbi, and Rabbi David Einhorn, a Reform rabbi, felt compelled to issue full-throated denunciations of slavery. They turned to our foundational narrative, our Exodus story, for guidance and brought the story to life. In so doing, they showed us how to move from the seder table into action.

Each of them faced congregants who urged them not to make trouble for their people by engaging in this debate. Of the two, Morais kept his congregation. Einhorn was driven from his home in Baltimore by a mob and relocated north, where he found a congregation that embraced him.

During his Thanksgiving sermon in 1864, Rabbi Morais thundered, “Not the victories of the Union, but those of freedom [of] my friends, we do celebrate. What is Union with human degradation? Who would again affix his seal to the bond that consigned millions to [enslavement]? Not I, the enfranchised slave of Mizraim.”

In that same year, Rabbi Einhorn asked his Philadelphia congregation, “Is it anything else but a deed of Amalek, rebellion against God, to enslave beings created in His image, and to degrade them to a state of beasts having no will of their own? Is it anything else but an act of ruthless and wicked violence, to reduce defenseless human beings to a condition of merchandise and relentlessly tear them away from the hearts of husbands, wives, parents and children?”

Strikingly, each rabbi poskined (adjudicated) directly from our written Torah, rather than from halacha — something that, surely, the Orthodox rabbi was not eager to do. Their method was a tacit acknowledgement of a point made by the infamous anti-abolitionist, Rabbi Jacob Morris Raphall, who said in 1861, “How dare you denounce slaveholding as a sin? When you remember that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Job … were slaveholders, does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy?”

Even more problematically, the Rabbis and Sages of the Talmud who shaped Judaism as we know it today also tolerated slavery. As Gail Labovitz reminds us in her important article “More Slave Women, More Lewdness: Freedom and Honor in Rabbinic Constructions of Female Sexuality”( Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Fall 2012), “Rabbinic texts legislate for a slave society, biblical law incorporates slaveholding, slavery is well documented within the two primary cultures in which rabbinic Judaism took shape, and multiple sources of evidence demonstrate that Jews could be slaveholders or held as slaves.” She and Catherine Hezser, the author of “Jewish Slavery in Antiquity,” document that while our Rabbis and Sages found ways to limit and reform the institution of slavery — which was ubiquitous in their ancient world — they never condemned it unequivocally as evil.

For those rabbis, slaves were human beings and accorded some basic rights — but so were women and minors, and they too fell under patriarchal authority. Further, the rights accorded to Jewish slaves were much greater than those of non-Jewish slaves. However, no Jewish master was allowed to humiliate or injure, much less murder, a slave from any background.

In Mishneh Torah, Maimonides cautions Jews to treat non-Jewish slaves with compassion — to serve them food equal to one’s own and to not degrade them with brutal behavior or disrespectful speech. However, he also observes that the law does allow slaveowner to work a slave brutally, even if the community disapproved. (Mishneh Torah, Slaves 9:8)

Given that tradition, even Rabbi Raphall was forced to admit that “The slave is a person in whom the dignity of human nature is to be respected; he has rights. Whereas the heathen view of slavery which prevailed at Rome, and which, I am sorry to say is adopted in the South, reduces a slave to a thing, and a thing can have no rights.”

But Morais and Einhorn went much further. They each came to regard any system in which one human being owns title to another as simply evil. The halakhist and the reformer both returned to narrative, to our foundational story of Exodus, and in it they found a hidush — a new understanding.

The halakhist and the reformer both returned to narrative and in it they found a new understanding.

For example, Rabbi Einhorn said of slavery, “Scripture merely tolerates this institution as an evil not to be disregarded, and therefore infuses in its legislation a mild spirit gradually to lead to its dissolution”; he compared slavery to polygamy, allowed in the Talmud but forbidden to Ashkenazi Jews by Rabbeinu Gershom circa 1000 CE. And Rabbi Morais, speaking to the moral condition of the slaveholding United States, argued that “Degeneration fostered by luxury, corruption engendered by satiety, have conspired against thee.”

For these rabbis, and for generations of American Jews who followed, our Torah’s injunction to identify with the stranger based on our servitude in Egypt is a command to reject human trafficking in all its forms. This is not assimilation into liberal modernism but an application of Judaism to the burning questions of one’s day.

Midrash Rabbah 28:6 teaches that not only did the soul of every Jew who was or would ever come into the world stand at Sinai to receive Torah, but also that each soul was granted some particular Torah which they were uniquely constituted to comprehend. This is why our Torah is like a palimpsest with texts upon texts; new understandings come into the world with each Jewish soul.

The Jews of nineteenth-century America inhabited a world different from that of the rabbis and that which produced our great codes of law. Like the rabbis who imported dialectical methodology into their Talmudic practice and like Maimonides, who joined in the revival of philosophy in the Muslim world (which would give rise to the western Renaissance), abolitionist rabbis responded to their particular situation while keeping oriented to Torah as the center of gravity. The membrane that separates Jews from the dominant cultures in which we have lived has always been both permeable and unbreakable.

Jews like Rabbis Morais and Einhorn, were exposed to the challenges of Modernism. They understood that while God is the ultimate Owner of our person, no other human being can be, and that our Exodus story mandates a radical understanding of cavod ha briot, human dignity.

Their hidush continues to transform our communal institutions. In his tshuvah “Halakhic and Metahalakhic Arguments Concerning Judaism and Homosexuality,” Rabbi Gordon Tucker articulates a halakhic methodology that “would include the more conventional halakhic methods but would also appeal to aggadic (narrative) texts that have withstood the tests of time to become normative Jewish theology and ethics.” In her groundbreaking book “Engendering Judaism,” Rabbi Rachel Adler suggests that in place of a kinyan (acquisition) marriage, in which a man “takes” a wife, loving Jewish companions of any gender can sign a brit ahuvim, a lover’s contract affirming their equal status.

Jews can be open to the lessons of our time and still maintain Torah as our center of gravity, always refining, always moving toward justice. Our country is still coming to terms with our history of slavery and the systemic racism that upheld it and outlived it. We are called to do our part. Rabbis Morais and Einhorn can, with their example, show us a way.


Rabbi Robin Podolsky serves on the Board of Governors for the Sandra Caplan Community Bet Din, writes at shondaland.com and jewishjournal.com, advises the Jewish Student Union at Occidental College and serves as writing facilitator and dramaturg for Queerwise, a spoken word and writing group. She also serves on the National Ritual Committee for Bend the Arc.

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