Wise, Isaac Mayer b. March 29, 1819; Steingrub (Bohemia), Austria-Hungary d. March 26, 1900; Cincinnati, Ohio
German American rabbi and “founder” of the American Reform movement. Wise received his education in Prague and Vienna at traditional Jewish yeshivot. Unlike most of the leading Reform thinkers, he did not attend a secular university nor did he obtain a doctoral degree, and neither did he learn Greek and Latin as required by the German Reform movement, which sought a critical scholarly approach to Judaism.
Although it is not known if Wise was ever ordained as a rabbi, he became a rabbinical officiant in Radnitz, Bohemia, in 1843. Irrespective of his educational background, during these years Wise became attracted to the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, and the Reform movement. This interest may have been supported by his frequent visits to Vienna and his friendship with the preacher Isaac Noah Mannheimer and the cantor Solomon Sulzer, or simply by the Zeitgeist and progressive mood of the “Vor- marz” era, which was also reflected in the debates of the Rabbinical Conferences (1844-1846), as well as the writings of Gabriel Riesser and Samuel Hirsch. Like many Germans and German-speaking Jews, Wise left central Europe in 1846 with his first wife Therese Bloch Wise and first child Emily, later claiming that he consciously sought a more liberal environment.He arrived in New York City in July 1846, quickly sensing the opportunities America offered for a break with religious tradition. Soon after his arrival he was elected rabbi at Temple Beth El in Albany,
New York. A strong advocate and supporter of the United States, he soon started introducing reforms in Jewish liturgy and religious services, such as organizing a mixed choir, introducing confirmation, singing German and English hymns, and eliminating piyutim, the sale of honors. Facing growing opposition, yet followed by his supporters, he founded one of America’s first Reform synagogues, Anshe Emeth in Albany in 1851.
Here Wise introduced an organ and, for the first time in America, mixed seating in a Jewish synagogue.In 1854 Wise left Albany for Cincinnati, Ohio, where he became rabbi of the German congregation Bene Yeshurun, which became the second-largest Reform congregation in the country after Temple Emanu-El in New York. With a strong congregational support and a continuously growing Jewish community in the United States through German immigration, Wise managed to take a leading position in the American Jewish community and realize his ideas of an American Judaism.
Not only committed to religious progress, as propelled by fellow German rabbis (David Einhorn, Bernhard Felsenthal, Samuel Hirsch, Samuel Adler), but also to the formation of an English-speaking and nationally organized Judaism, Wise sought to establish a national platform for the definition of a specifically American Judaism and the establishment of an American Jewish rabbinical seminary. His first attempt for a national consensus was launched in 1847 in New York City in a small rabbinical conference; however, this conference failed due to the opposition of the Jewish Lichtfreunde who rejected a binding religious authority beyond the local congregation. In 1855
Isaac Mayer Wise (1819—1900), rabbi who became the greatest organizer of American Reform Jewish institutions. (Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati Campus, Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion)
Wise, together with his orthodox friend Isaac Leeser, tried again to reach consensus on the definition of religious principles and the establishment of an American Judaism at a rabbinical conference in Cleveland. This effort to reach a consensus with the orthodox congregations for national unity in Judaism was unsuccessful largely due to the opposition of David Einhorn. Einhorn, a recent German immigrant rabbi and at the time the most important German Jewish thinker in American Judaism, never fully adapted to American life.
He considered German the only language to express theological philosophy and agitated fiercely against this “synod.” He rejected the attempts at compromise made by Wise and considered America the country where German Reform could and should materialize according to its theological principles, rather than suffer from theological compromise. Further, Einhorn favored congregational independence and liberty of conscience over a national religious platform. This conflict created two camps in American Reform Judaism and is generally referred to as a conflict among “germanizers” and “americanizers.” The growing periodical and newspaper culture in American Judaism, mainly in Einhorn’s Sinai and Wise’s The Israelite and Die Deborah, strongly exposed this debate to the public.However, Wise did not give up his plans for national union in American Judaism for a rabbinical college, although his first college project, Zion College in Cincinnati, failed and the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, which Wise imagined to be a perfect financier of such a project under the name of B’nai B’rith University, continued to reject such denominational involvement. While Wise could not organize national cooperation among Jewish theologians in America, by the early 1870s he found strong support for national cooperation in the congregations of the South and the West and was able to organize a Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) in Cincinnati in 1873. This union served as a national platform for the cooperation of congregations on educational and social projects, and they strongly supported the founding of a rabbinical college, the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati in 1875. Wise served as president of HUC until the end of his life; likewise he served as president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), founded in 1889. However, the CCAR did not adopt Wise’s prayer book, Minhag America, selfpublished in 1856, but Einhorn’s prayer book, Olat Tamid, as a model for the Union Prayer Book, which is still central for the American Reform movement in the twenty-first century.
Cornelia Wilhelmι
See also B’nai B’rith; Cincinnati; Einhorn, David; Judaism, Reform (North America)
References and Further Reading
Heller, James G. Isaac M. Wise: His Life, Work and Thought. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1965.
Meyer, Michael A. Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1990.
Temkin, Sefton. Isaac Mayer Wise: Shaping American Judaism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University, 1992.
Wise, Isaac M. Reminiscences. Translated and edited with an introduction by David Philippson. Cincinnati: Leo Wise, 1901.