Moritz Güdemann

Born in Hildesheim and raised in a German Orthodox family, Moritz (Moshe) Güdemann received a traditional Jewish education before attending a Catholic gymnasium. In 1862 he earned his doctorate and received rabbinical ordination as part of the first class of the Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary. In 1869, he was appointed chief judge of the rabbinic court in Vienna and, in 1890, chief rabbi, a position he held with the reforming Adolf Jellinek for some years. Developing an interest in Jewish history in dialogue with the disparate approaches of the conservative Heinrich Graetz and the liberal Wissenschaft des Judentums school, Güdemann’s most significant historical works deal with Christian-Jewish relations in late medieval and early modern Europe, chiefly his Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Kultur der Abendländischen Juden (The History of European Jewish Education and Culture, 3 vols., 1880–1888). Güdemann was critical of Theodor Herzl’s political Zionism—he opposed the establishment of a Jewish state—but opposed erasure of “inconvenient” national dimensions of Judaism, famously protesting an 1871 proposal from the Viennese Jewish community to omit liturgical passages referencing a return to the land of Israel.