At the end of 2010 it was officially announced at a United Synagogue Council meeting that Jonathan Sacks would be retiring from the office of chief rabbi in September 2013. In the weeks that followed this spurred a multitude of newspaper articles considering the nature of his Chief Rabbinate and assessing likely candidates who could replace him in the post. The future of the office itself was also subjected to some scrutiny. This discussion has spanned both the national and the Jewish press in Britain and filtered through to international publications as well. It seems the Chief Rabbinate, a somewhat strange and contrived post in Anglo-Jewish history whose formal authority is in fact rather limited, manages to attract broad attention.
It is worth noting that this is not merely a feature of the Chief Rabbinate of Jonathan Sacks, despite the fact that he has succeeded in acquiring a significant following outside the Jewish community in Britain and among many Jews worldwide. Through much of the twentieth century the British Chief Rabbinate has repeatedly found itself caught up either in controversy or at the very least attracting attention beyond British shores. Some notable examples include Joseph H. Hertz’s inaugural Pastoral Tour of the communities associated with his Chief Rabbinate across the then British Empire, the events of the infamous Jacobs Affair during Israel Brodie’s tenure, and the crises provoked by Immanuel Jakobovits’s pronouncements on Israeli policy.
Israeli readers will probably find it unsurprising that a Chief Rabbinate should sometimes be associated with controversy. Meir Persoff’s new book suggests that the Sacks Chief Rabbinate that is drawing to a close has seen more than its fair share. Persoff’s call that Sacks be the last chief rabbi to fill the post is by no means the first. This is something he notes in both this work and in his previous book, Faith against Reason: Religious Reform and the British Chief Rabbinate 1840-1990, [1] which is to be seen as a prequel to the current publication. However, Persoff backs up his argument against the Chief Rabbinate with a highly detailed account of just how difficult Sacks has found it to implement the agenda with which he entered office.
Persoff examines the multitude of backward steps the chief rabbi has felt compelled to take as he has battled to try and subdue the critics who have attacked him from both the religious Left and Right. Chronicling the support that Sacks enjoyed at the time of his appointment, Persoff also highlights the warnings expressed by his predecessor, Jakobovits, to Sacks’s main backer Stanley, now Lord, Kalms about his lack of preparedness for the post (26). Sacks entered office on a platform of inclusivism, a theological model he subsequently explained in his One People?: Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity. [2] Persoff argues that this inclusivism has not been successfully implemented by the chief rabbi and details the variety of ways in which it has failed even to be applied.
Persoff’s work is presented in a broadly objective, scholarly manner. His quotations from sources are immense. In truth, this can at times be distracting. While this work represents an essential new resource for the study of Judaism in Britain and offers the first detailed examination of the Sacks Chief Rabbinate, there is a tendency to quote material in the manner of a sourcebook rather than a scholarly work. However, putting this criticism aside, it is clear that Persoff’s research has been extensive. His access to archives and interviews with key personalities are extremely wide-ranging, consonant with someone who has spent many years as a journalist intimately involved in many of the events under discussion.
It is difficult to come away from this book without a sense of the inadequacies of the British Chief Rabbinate in general and Sacks’s incumbency in particular. In certain respects the assessment of Sacks is rather harsh. Given the forces stacked up against him, the lack of sufficient political savvy to deal with his opponents, [3] and most significantly the difficulties inherent in the post itself, Sacks’s chances of success were always limited. Persoff’s study notes these limitations of the post, which leads to the author’s call for the abolition of the Chief Rabbinate. Future study could focus on why significant hopes were invested in the Sacks Chief Rabbinate at the outset.
It is clear, however, that in a number of quarters Sacks’s reputation remains extremely high. The thoughtfulness of many of his popular pronouncements and published works have enabled him often to be viewed as an authoritative and influential religious thinker both in British society as a whole and in Jewish communities outside Britain. In an age seeking religious guidance, it is often Sacks’s comments that are seen as authoritative. The erudition he has brought to the Chief Rabbinate in the imagination of many non-Jewish Britons has perhaps also contributed to the sense that, in certain respects, it is becoming easier to be more proudly Jewish in twenty-first-century Britain. The last twenty years have certainly seen a strengthening of Jewish identity among many British Jews.
Yet, as Persoff notes, from the chief rabbi’s perspective it is perhaps unfortunate that much of this strengthening Jewish identity focuses on cultural rather than religious features. This process serves further to undermine the Chief Rabbinate’s authority by strengthening the voices of those who do not wish to have their Jewishness defined in primarily religious terms.
Persoff’s work highlights the rather less positive perception of the current chief rabbi that is held by certain sectors of the British Jewish community. His detailed account of the controversies in which the chief rabbi has been caught up with different elements of the community suggests this is more than just a case of familiarity breeding contempt. Persoff does not claim that it is Sacks’s responsibility that the Chief Rabbinate has outlived its value. It is an outcome of the office that, for all Sacks’s lofty statements, he has been unable to reverse. Either way, Persoff’s conclusion is that a new chief rabbi should not be appointed. Rather than continue efforts to try and impose what he calls in one chapter a “mirage of unity,” the time has come to celebrate the increasing diversity of Jews in Britain, whatever the consequences.
MIRI FREUD-KANDEL is lecturer in Modern Judaism at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford.
[1] Meir Persoff, Faith against Reason: Religious Reform and the British Chief Rabbinate 1840-1990 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008).
[2] Jonathan Sacks, One People?: Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity (London and Washington: Littman, 1993).
[3] This was highlighted in the rather naïve private letter that Sacks wrote to Dayan Chanoch Padwa, head of the ultra-Ortnhodox Bet Din of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, about the late Hugo Gryn, rabbi of the Reform West London Synagogue. In this letter Sacks made a number of derogatory and inflammatory comments about Gryn despite having publicly agreed to attend a memorial service in his honor. Sacks’s attendance at the memorial had been intended to appease those who had complained about the chief rabbi’s absence from the funeral of Gryn, a Holocaust survivor who had acquired a reputation as a highly popular and respected Jewish spokesman in Britain. An opportunity for implementing inclusivism was undermined here by Sacks’s perceived need to defend his actions to the ultra-Orthodox. His presumption that the letter would not be leaked was shown to be badly misguided.