The Refugee Rabbis:Trials andTransmissions BY MICHAEL A. MEYER mameyer@huc.edu During the period of Nazi domination in Germany, well over 250 rabbis and cantors £ed their homeland; numerous young men who had not yet completed their rabbinical education, but would ¢nish it abroad, likewise left the land of their birth. 1 They scattered widely: to North and South America, to Great Britain and Ireland, to Palestine and Australia, and even to countries in Africa. Their story is both a moving personal tale of upheaval, uprooting, and reintegration, and an important chapter in the religious history of GermanJewry and of the countries to which they dispersed. Relying largely on the personal recollections of these men, I shall deal with the shift in the rabbinical role in Germany brought about by the rise of Nazism, the di⁄culties of the transition to a foreign culture and an unfamiliar Jewish community, the speci¢c conditions encountered in the major lands of dispersion, the special status of Rabbi Leo Baeck, and, ¢nally, the question of e¡ect and in£uence. But ¢rst, a few remarks about the rise of the modern German rabbinate. I The pre-modern German rabbinate did not di¡er greatly from its counterparts in other Ashkenazi communities, whether to the east or to the west. It was the rabbi’s task to decide matters of Jewish law, to teachTalmud and other rabbinic texts, and very occasionally to deliver a sermon on a subject relating to religious practice. The rabbi would be well versed in Aramaic, Hebrew and Yiddish, but would know little of the gentile vernacular. His secular education would be minimal or nonexistent. Study of non-Jewish literature was considered at the very least bitul zeman (a waste of time), if not actually destructive of a worldview that rested on the sacred character of received texts. However, with the centralization of legal functions within the apparatus of the state and the cultural integration of Jews in Central andWestern Europe, the old rabbinical role lost relevance and some began to think that the rabbinate as a profession had become an anachronism. The 1 The best source for their names, though incomplete, is the list of ‘clergy’contained inWerner Ro« der et al . (eds.), International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigre¤s 1933-1945 , vol. 3, Munich 1983, pp. 183-184. Leo Baeck InstituteYear Book Vol. 57, 87^103 doi:10.1093/leobaeck/ybs012 Advance Access publication 19 July 2012 ß The Author (2012). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Leo Baeck Institute. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com