"History is not made by general trends but by people", Rabbi Wein began: this established his methodology for the evening, looking at the lives of some of the most prominent Jews of that era.
Starting with the United Kingdom (which at that time included what is now the Republic of Ireland), Rabbi Wein described the rise to power of Benjamin Disraeli -- novelist, apostate, pro-Jewish campaigner and ultimately Prime Minister during the lengthy reign of Queen Victoria. Regarding himself as an Englishman of Jewish birth, he faced down his critics and opponents by unapologetically asserting the nobility of his Jewish origins. Rabbi Wein referred briefly to one of the most famous examples of Disraeli's bold stance, which goes like this:
Daniel O’Connell, the Irish Roman Catholic leader, attacked Disraeli in the House of Commons. In the course of his unrestrained invective, he referred to Disraeli’s Jewish ancestry. Disraeli replied, ‘Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.
Turning to matters religious, Rabbi Wein then gave a fascinating account of the development of the institution of the Chief Rabbi, which spread to several countries that were under British rule (South Africa has a Chief Rabbi to this day). The very Britishness of this institution made it anathema to later generations of immigrants from Eastern Europe, who rejected this Germn-influenced office and became the charedi community of the United Kingdom today.
Rabbi Wein next turned his attention to France, a country that was known for its inherent antisemitism and for the institutional hostility of the French Catholic Church. Here Rabbi Wein went into some detail in explaining not only the legal background to the famous Dreyfuss trial but also its pivotal role in reminding French Jews that assimilation -- despite its huge attraction -- was not a viable option in the hostile social environment in which they lived. The role of author and journalist Emile Zola in exposing the fraudulent nature of the trial and the reasons in his article, J'Accuse!, was also emphasised. So here in France, as in the United Kingdom in the case of Disraeli, it was someone from outside the Jewish community who made a vital contribution to Jewish survival.
At this point, we meet Moses Mendelssohn -- an orthodox and practising Jew but a man who was convinced that Judaism was in need of an uplift in order to bring it more into line with modern Jewish life. Being the centre of intellectual fervour, Germany was unsurprisingly the place where many scholars -- Jewish and otherwise -- exchanged ideas, arguments and their views on religious doctrine. This is where we also learned of Rabbi S. R. Hirsch, his orthodox ally-cum-rival Rabbi Y. D. Bamberger, as well as Abraham Geiger and the Reform movement, which was seen as a bulwark against conversion to Christianity. Rabbi Wein concluded by pointing out the fallacy of this reasoning: it simply offered a way to assimilate into German society without commitment and without the inconvenience of becoming a Christian.
