Rabbi, educator, intellectual, and community leader, Leo Baeck
(1873-1956) was one of the most important Jewish figures of prewar
Germany. The publication of his 1905 Das Wesen des Judentums (The
Essence of Judaism) established him as a major voice for liberal
Judaism. He served as a chaplain to the German army during the
First World War and in the years following, resisting the call of
political Zionism, he expressed his commitment to the belief in a
vibrant place for Jews in a new Germany. This hope was dashed with
the rise of Nazism, and from 1933 on, and continuing even after his
deportation to Theresienstadt, he worked tirelessly in his capacity
as a leader of the German Jewish community to offer his
coreligionists whatever practical, intellectual, and spiritual
support remained possible. While others after the war worked to
rebuild German Jewish life from the ashes, a disillusioned Baeck
pronounced the effort misguided and spent the rest of his life in
England. Yet his name is perhaps best-known today from the Leo
Baeck Institutes in New York, London, Berlin, and Jerusalem
dedicated to the preservation of the cultural heritage of
German-speaking Jewry. Michael A. Meyer has written a biography
that gives equal consideration to Leo Baeck's place as a courageous
community leader and as one of the most significant Jewish
religious thinkers of the twentieth century, comparable to such
better-known figures as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Abraham
Joshua Heschel. According to Meyer, to understand Baeck fully, one
must probe not only his thought and public activity but also his
personality. Generally described as gentle and kind, he could also
be combative when necessary, and a streak of puritanism and an
outsized veneration for martyrdom ran through his psychological
makeup. Drawing on a broad variety of sources, some coming to light
only in recent years, but especially turning to Baeck's own
writings, Meyer presents a complex and nuanced image of one of the
most noteworthy personalities in the Jewish history of our age.
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