Wiener, Max (1882-1950)

I. Family and Background
Max Wiener was born and raised in Oppeln (Opole), Upper Silesia, as one of four children of Amalie (born Marcus) and Isidor Wiener, a dealer in leather goods. Wiener’s background can be described as a confluence between Orthodox (parts of the family), Conservative (the Breslau seminary) and Liberal Judaism (his Berlin alma mater), fused with German humanist Bildung and philosophy, until, in the 1920s and 1930s, he became a leading proponent of German Liberal Judaism in its capital city.

His grandfather Adolph Wiener was the rabbi of the liberal Oppeln synagogue, following the influential liberal rabbi and scholar Abraham Geiger in this position. Adolph Wiener’s granddaughter Natalie Hamburger married Leo Baeck, who succeeded her grandfather as the rabbi of Oppeln. Max Wiener married Toni Hamburger (1887–1971) the two stayed partners for life. They had one son, Theodore (1918–2006).¹

II. Education and Academic Career
Upon graduation from the Oppeln Gymnasium, in 1902, Wiener enrolled at the University of Breslau and simultaneously at the Jüdisch Theologisches Seminar Fraenkel’scher Stiftung in Breslau. The seminary pioneered a dual-track rabbinical education in combination with the University of Breslau. Wiener later transferred from the conservative Breslau seminary to the liberal Berlin Hochschule, which, like the Breslau seminary, operated in conjunction with the local university.² Upon graduation from the University of Breslau in 1906 with a doctoral thesis on Johan Gottlob Fichte’s theory of history, Wiener took further courses at the University of Berlin in 1906 and 1907. In the spring semester 1906, he studied under the philosopher Max Frischeisen-Köhler and the historian Eduard Meyer. In the winter semester 1907, he studied under the notable philosophers Georg Simmel and Ernst Cassirer.³ Among his mentors, the influence of Rabbi Leo Baeck was especially noteworthy. Baeck served first as his teacher in the Gymnasium, afterwards as his superior and senior rabbi in the Dusseldorf Jewish community, and later again as a Hochschule colleague and fellow liberal Berlin rabbi.

III. Profession before Emigration
After graduating from Breslau and spending another year with further studies in Berlin, Wiener became assistant to his former teacher Leo Baeck as the second rabbi of Dusseldorf from 1907 to 1912. From 1912 to 1926, Wiener served as full rabbi in Stettin where his son Theodore was born (1918), and then returned to Berlin (1926–1939). His tenure in Stettin was interrupted by World War One and a military chaplaincy in the German army as Feldseelsorger. In 1912, with virtually no publications in Jewish philosophy, Wiener applied for the professorship in Jewish religious philosophy at the Hochschule in Berlin. Hermann Cohen assessed Wiener’s track record as insufficient, criticizing his meager publication record and a small book on prophecy which heavily relied on Protestant theological discourse.⁴ In the end, the prominent idealist philosopher Hermann Cohen filled the long-vacant post of religious philosophy at the Hochschule himself (1912–1918). After Cohen’s death, Julius Guttmann assumed the chair. When Guttmann left for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Wiener finally filled the prestigious chair of religious philosophy at the Hochschule.⁵ On May 18, 1926, he held his first evening service as new rabbi in the synagogue on Fasanenstraße, which was paraphrased in a contemporary Jewish newspaper: “The fate of western European Jewry is mirrored in this biggest congregation in Germany, which comprises almost half of German Jewry […].”⁶

Wiener became a leading philosopher of religion and a prominent voice in German-speaking Liberal Judaism, with widely read scholarly publications and regular contributions to the German-Jewish press. Together with Julius Guttmann’s Philosophy of Judaism (1933), Max Wiener’s Jewish Religion in the Age of Emancipation (1933) marked the height of historical reflection in contemporary German-Jewish religious philosophy. Whereas Guttmann put a proper emphasis on the intellectual history and the Jewish Middle Ages, Wiener engaged more closely with the nineteenth-century history of Jewish thought:

In the 19^th century, the German branch of Judaism had been decisive for the development of Jewish religious life. Civil emancipation here took up the form of a spiritual movement [geistige Bewegung], which not only pointed beyond Judaism, but which made a serious attempt to renew the foundational core of its ideas and of its life.⁷

Within his intellectual formation, Wiener’s pro-Zionist stance is noteworthy as it stood out in the framework of German Liberal Judaism. He declared that Jewish liberalism had to consider Jüdisches Volkstum(‘peoplehood’) and supported a discussion of the Zionist question, which drew ire at the World Conference of Liberal Judaism in Berlin (1928) and similarly in London (1930). Wiener spoke of the “bending” (Umbiegung) of messianic belief within modern religious liberalism, noted important impulses from the religious tradition,⁸ and criticized the German and international Reform movement of the interwar period for shying away from seriously considering Zionism. Robert Schine, his biographer, spoke of a cultural and political Zionism rooted in firm theological convictions. Next to scholarly journals, Max Wiener regularly contributed to German-Jewish newspapers. Toni Wiener, his wive, put all his sermons and academic work on paper while working as a teacher of religion in Berlin schools.

IV. Arrival and Employment in the United States
Max and Toni Wiener came to the US as part of the contingent of 12 German-Jewish academics invited to Cincinnati via the Hebrew Union College refugee scholar program.⁹ Theodore Wiener, their son, had been sent to Syracuse, New York, in 1934, where he grew up with relatives. Theodore later graduated from the University of Cincinnati (1940) and became an HUC-trained rabbi (1943). In April 1939, Hebrew Union College sent an official invitation for Max Wiener to obtain a visa outside the regular immigration quota.¹⁰ The couple arrived in September, just before the outbreak of World War Two. Wiener first took up a position as rabbi in Syracuse (for visa purposes) and arrived in Cincinnati after the Jewish holidays. At Hebrew Union College, Wiener mainly taught preparatory classes in the rabbinical track–not advanced seminars or lectures.

The move from German Liberal Judaism to American Reform Judaism presented itself as an obvious choice to Wiener. His intellectual domicile in Germany, the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, cultivated strong ties with Hebrew Union College. However, Wiener never acquired a post deemed worthy of his standing. While the college had clarified that it wanted to secure a path for Jewish refugee scholars to escape Europe, it supplied only some with a stable career path. When Zevi Diesendruck, the college’s eminent philosopher of religion, passed away in 1940, Wiener wanted to fill the vacant post. He was neither asked to assume this position nor managed to obtain a similar posting elsewhere in American higher education. His former Berlin colleague and fellow Ohio emigrant, the late Alexander Guttmann, reported that Wiener’s English remained rusty. Guttmann depicted Wiener as a German rabbi-scholar, both in his personal style and habitus.¹¹ Disillusionment with his role in Cincinnati factored into Wiener’s decision to leave Ohio in 1941 for the post of rabbi in Fairmont, West Virginia. In personal letters, Wiener described the dissatisfaction with his new provincial congregation.¹² In 1943, he was invited to become rabbi in the congregation of Habonim in New York. Founded in 1939 by German immigrants, this Upper-Westside congregation finally became a homestead for Wiener. From 1949 to 1950, he acted as president of the Herzl Society of the Zionist Organization of America.

V. Intellectual Legacy
If it is at all possible to separate the legacy of Max Wiener from the broader intellectual currents and debates within German Judaism in the 1920s and 1930s, he is best remembered as a leading exponent of the contemporary philosophy of religion, an educator, and an active rabbi within the congregations of Stettin, Dusseldorf, and Berlin. Wiener’s range and activities narrowed significantly after migrating to the US. Here, Wiener only produced short journal articles and was mainly known to the members of his Manhattan congregation. If Wiener represents a major figure within German Liberal Judaism of the interwar period, he further signifies an unrealized potential, the “roads not taken” of mental-spiritual life: a historically minded philosophy of Judaism upended by realpolitik, persecution, and destruction.

Wiener generally maintained an openness towards conceptions of Judaism beyond the liberal canon. This was after abandoning some of the ideas he held in his youth, when he participated in debates surrounding German historicism and Protestant theology, where tradition and growth were considered synonymous with the essence of religion. The importance of historical thought is expressed in Wiener’s interest in traditions as a reminder of the fact of revelation. Historical thought forms the backdrop to his philosophical style, which disregarded other contemporary philosophical styles (existentialism, philosophy of language, phenomenology) and which held on to the notion of the unity of history. Wiener’s openness towards other forms of Judaism excluded secular Judaism, as secularization was seen as attempting to sever the ties which historically connected a people and a religion. Wiener highlighted the importance through three millennia of the Gesetz (‘law’) and criticized the idea of a merely this-worldly outlook on life.¹³

Wiener did not publish an autobiography or a reflection on the Holocaust, though he surely devoted sermons to the topic of exile and migration in a congregation shaped by European refugees. Between 1942 and 1948, Wiener acted an editor and published in The Reconstructionist, a journal of the reconstructionist movement, founded as a fourth strand of American Judaism (next to Neo-Orthodoxy, Conservatism and Reform). Wiener did not return to Germany after the war. Still, his intellectual legacy is tied to the book which appeared in Germany in 1933 and was banned immediately, thereby representing a scholarly discourse in the very moment of its enforced suppression.

“Amtseinführung des Herrn Rabbiners Dr. Max Wiener.” In Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 16, no. 7 (July 2, 1926): 145.
Guttmann, Julius. Die Philosophie des Judentums. Munich: Verlag Ernst Reinhart, 1933.
Wiener, Max. J. G. Fichtes Lehre vom Wesen und Inhalt der Geschichte. Kirchhain: Zahn & Baendel, 1906.
Wiener, Max. Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation. Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1933.
Wiener, Max. “Säkularisierte Religion.” Der Jude. Sonderheft Judentum und Christentum 4 (1927): 10–16.
Wiener, Theodore. “The German-Jewish Legacy: An Overstated Ideal.” In The German-Jewish Legacy in America 1938-1988, From Bildung to the Bill of Rights, edited by Abraham J. Peck, 151–155. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.

Liebeschütz, Hans. “Max Wiener’s Reinterpretation of Liberal Judaism.” Leo-Baeck-Institute Yearbook 5 (1960), 35–57.
“Max Wiener.” In Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, edited by Herbert A. Strauss and Werner Röder, 818. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1999.
“Max Wiener.” In BHR Biographisches Portal der Rabbiner. http://85.215.117.206/cgi-bin/bhr?gnd=119109220.
Schine, Robert. Jewish Thought Adrift: Max Wiener, 1882-1950. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992.
Weidner, Daniel. “Nachwort.” In Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation, Max Wiener, 283–296. Berlin: Jüdische Verlagsanstalt, 2002.
Wiese, Christian. “Max Wiener.” In Lexikon Jüdischer Philosophen, edited by Andreas Kilcher and Ottfried Fraise, 350–353. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2023.