Today, the 25th of Kislev, is the 133rd yahrzeit of Rabbi Jacob Ettlinger, who was born in Karlsruhe in 1798 and died in Altona in 1871. The last of the great Talmud expositors of Germany, Ettlinger is known as the “Aruch la’Ner”, after his standard work on the Talmud. He studied in yeshiva in Wurzburg, where he also attended university, until anti-Semitic decrees curtailed his secular studies. Among his pupils were Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer. In 1837, he was appointed Chief Rabbi of Altona and the province of Scheswing-Holstein, which was first part of the Danish kingdom, and then part of Prussia. He was head of the Altona Beth Din, the last of the Jewish Law Courts in Western Europe, which was abolished by the King of Denmark in 1863. Rabbi Ettlinger, because of his great love for the Holy Land, was very active on behalf of the residents of Eretz Yisrael. Because of that, in 1850, the Rabbis of Jerusalem awarded him with an official document, bestowing upon him the title of “Nassi” of Eretz Israel.
To repudiate the decisions of the Reform rabbis at Brunswick in 1844, Ettlinger, together with 77 others, published a pamphlet called “Shlomei Emune Yisrael”. In a joint declaration they condemned the proposals put forth by the representatives of Progressive Judaism. Beyond that, however, it was realized that an effort had to be made to rally Orthodox Jewry to the flag of the Torah.
To that end, in 1845, Rabbi Ettlinger spearheaded the publication of the first Jewish Orthodox bi-weekly newspaper, “Der Getreue Zionswaechter” (Faithful Guardian of Zion), with a Hebrew supplement “Shomer Zion Hane'eman”. This pioneering publication served as platform for a great number of German Rabbis to exchange views on current communal and halachic issues, as well as for the publication of their novellae on talmudical subjects. It was published for 10 years, with Dr. Samuel Enoch as publisher. This paper represented the first effort to use the new tools of journalism in the service of Torah. In the words of the sponsors, another aim was “to bridge the divisions caused in the tents of Yeshurun (Israel) by the developments of the time”. Because of Rabbi Ettlinger’s close ties with the Land of Israel, the “Shomer Zion” included many letters and contributions from the Holy Land, and Rabbi Ettlinger used the journal in his efforts to raise monies in support of the Yishuv. In each issue, he responded to Talmudic queries, and published his decisions on Torah law. “Shomer Zion” provided guidance and inspiration for its age, and was a crucial rallying point for the forces of tradition. True enough, it did not endeavor to develop a philosophy for Torah-living in the modern age, nor did it take as its target the whole range of modern scientific thought; these goals became the lifework of Rabbis Hirsch and Hildesheimer, both pupils of Rabbi Ettlinger.
[http://www.tzemachdovid.org/gedolim/jo/tworld/rettlinger.html] [http://www.jct.ac.il/judaica/ashkenaz/etlin.html] |
