I. Early Years and Family Background
Alfred Jospe – rabbi, educator, author, and editor – was born in Berlin to Josef and Rosa Jospe; his father and both his grandfathers, Israel Jospe1, and Selmar Steifmann-Cerini2 were cantors. An active Zionist from his youth, Jospe received his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Breslau in 1932.3 In 1935 he was ordained at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar Fraenkelscher Stiftung in Breslau, and married Eva Scheyer (1913–2011), for two years (1934–1935) as district rabbi of the province of Grenzmark in Posen at Schneidemühl, along the border to Poland.4 She had attended university until, like other Jews, she was expelled from her university studies in 1935 by Nazi exclusionary legislation. In 1936, at the age of 27, Alfred Jospe was appointed to the rabbinate of the Berlin Gemeinde where he was based in the Neue Synagoge at Oranienburger Straße and served other synagogues on a rotating basis.
Following the pogrom in the night of November 9 to 10, 1938, Jospe was arrested and from November 11 to 30, 1938, held in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He, his wife and daughter had to leave Germany. As a Zionist, he wanted to emigrate to what was then British Mandatory Palestine, and received three numbered visas, without names under the “White Paper” policy limiting Jewish immigration. At the same time, he received three named visas to Britain (which Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz arranged for German rabbis, as a favor from King George VI outside of normal quotas), which only he could use. In order to permit other Jews to use the anonymous Palestine visas, they used the British visas, leaving on March 28, 1939, and arriving with his wife and daughter Susanne (b. 1935) on March 31, 1939.
II. Life and Career in the United States
The British visas were temporary. Subsequently, with the help of his older brother Erwin who had already settled in America, he was able to leave England for the United States with his wife and small daughter.
Jospe’s first American rabbinical position, and only congregational pulpit, was in Morgantown, West Virginia (1939–1944), where he was the first rabbi of the Tree of Life Congregation. In 1940 he also assumed responsibility for directing the Hillel program at the University of West Virginia. In 1944 he became Director of Hillel at Indiana University, and in 1949 joined the national leadership of Hillel in New York, becoming its Director of Program and Resources. Jospe and his family moved to Washington, DC in 1957, when B’nai B’rith (with the Hillel Foundations) moved its headquarters there. He did not accept occasional invitations to serve congregations (at higher salaries), out of his commitment to Jewish life on the campus.
Unlike his wife Eva, who had studied English and French in school, Jospe’s Gymnasium education focused on Latin and Greek. His first challenge in America was thus to learn English, without which he could not function, let alone be competent intellectually, professionally, or culturally.
In Germany, the semi-official Jewish Gemeinde (with the exception of S.R. Hirsch’s separatist and strictly Orthodox Austrittsgemeinde) was pluralistic. When Jospe, a Zionist and Liberal (equivalent to a USA Conservative) rabbi was appointed to the Berlin rabbinate, he was appointed together with Alexander Altmann (Orthodox; decades later a professor at Brandeis University) and Ignaz Maybaum (Reform, non-Zionist), and the three remained life-long friends. In his 1980 oral history interview with the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration and in his A Profession in Transition: The German Rabbinate 1910-19395 he observed that in Germany, the rabbinical seminaries – in the absence of university chairs or programs in Jewish Studies – emerged as their academic equivalents, and did not train rabbinic students for effective pastoral and communal functions. In Berlin, the rabbis served in synagogues in the Gemeinde, a local kehilla-style superstructure for “the community,” which united Jews of different religious backgrounds within this community. This means that the rabbis, who were in effect state employees and had greater authority, served different synagogues at different times on a rotating basis. Their education embraced a broader religious experience as they had to meet different religious expectations and could not always get to know the people they served. Jospe’s main base had been the Neue Synagogue at Oranienburgerstraße (set on fire on Kristallnacht and then largely destroyed in the war and partially restored by the German government and opened in 1995 as the Centrum Judaicum). In the 1980 oral interview, he remarked that in the Nazi period synagogue attendance grew larger the later it got, because it was only in the synagogue that Jews could still assemble. At least this was the case in Oppeln and in Berlin in the late thirties.6
All of this differs sharply from the congregational rabbinate in the United States, where the rabbi serves an individual “congregation” and is in fact its employee, which in turn is usually a member of a national “movement” in Judaism. His own personal pluralism was reflected in his following his mentor Leo Baeck into the Reform rabbinical movement and its rabbinical organization, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, for ideological reasons. In his private life, however, he was a member of Conservative synagogues, the Rego Park Jewish Center in New York and the Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, DC.
The institutional pluralism of the German communal rabbinate was thus not characteristic of the American congregational rabbinate. Pluralism was, however, a central feature of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. B’nai B’rith was founded in the nineteenth century by German immigrant Jews. The Hillel Foundations – for decades sponsored by B’nai B’rith until years after Jospe’s retirement – was probably the only Jewish institution in the USA with a religious component which embodied pluralism, versus the predominant religious denominationalism. Jospe reiterated the importance of Jewish pluralism and Jewish cohesion to which he was personally committed as a fundamental and necessary feature of Jewish life.
Here is your key word: pluralistic. The fundamental fact is that Jewish life is pluralistic. There is no single, monolithic definition of Judaism which would exhaust the varieties and possibilities of authentic and legitimate Jewish existence. All, in the many variations and orchestrations, are authentic ingredients of Kelal Yisrael […]. What I am really pleading for is not a change of arrangements but a change of attitude. What our community needs […] is the understanding that Judaism is pluralistic, that Judaism can be defined and lived not just in one but in many authentic ways, and that our loyalty to a particular conviction or definition should be associated with a concern for the totality of Jewish life.7
Although for years he preferred the intellectual challenges of his directorship of Hillel’s program and mission over financial and organizational administration, in 1971 he finally became Hillel’s International Director, until his retirement at the end of 1974.
III. Legacy
For most of his career Jospe was involved in educational administration, and in many respects he provided the intellectual leadership shaping Hillel during its years of great growth, seeking to formulate an evolving “philosophy of Hillel” that would enable Hillel to meet changing student needs (especially in the “turbulent years” of the 1960s and early 1970s), while remaining faithful to abiding underlying principles.
At the same time, Jospe retained an active academic interest in philosophy and Jewish thought. His English language publications include academic works on Moses Mendelssohn, on Wissenschaft des Judentums, on the history of the German rabbinate, and on the teaching of Jewish Studies at German universities and essays in Jewish thought; anthologies he edited of thematically arranged lectures by leading thinkers and scholars, based on programs at successive national summer institutes of Hillel; and professional guides relating to Hillel to add to the Jewish presence on the campus. With this English language scholarship and his leadership at the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations he paved the way for the late transmission of a knowledge of modern Judaism that was largely shaped in Europe but found an outlet in the United States.
The rapid expansion of academic programs and departments of Jewish Studies in many universities began to take place during the last few years of his career. Until then, on many campuses, Hillel, besides its other functions in offering religious, cultural, and chaplaincy services, provided an essential link for students with an academic (albeit extracurricular) presentation of Judaism, to combat what Jospe called the “pediatric Judaism” of many alienated young Jews, whose minimal childhood exposure to Jewish education could not compete with their advanced secular education for intellectual respectability and serious commitment. Jospe’s publications, reflect his diverse areas of interest and his efforts to raise a deeper intellectual understanding of Judaism and affective Jewish identity among young Jews. Jewish identity is an isolated theoretical construct, but the result of careful coordination of tradition and contemporary experience.
Another clear transition Jospe experienced in the United States had less to do with the communal structure than with its intellectual and spiritual life. In a 1984 lecture at the Foundation for Jewish Studies in Washington, DC, “The Frankfurt Lehrhaus: A Model for American Adult Education?”8 he criticized the Lehrhaus experience as overly intellectual and aimed at a small segment of the intelligentsia. He argued that the intellectual transmission of knowledge alone does not necessarily produce the committed Jew and does not by itself meet existential needs. Accordingly, he concluded that a person must not only know values and ideas, but also have an opportunity to experience, feel, and live them.9
However, in the American community, especially beginning with the youthful counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, there was the opposite danger of emphasizing emotion and experience at the expense of rational thought and “pediatric Judaism.”
We are not absolved from the task to state in rational terms why that which we cannot define still should be acknowledged as being “real.” And if one were to say that the experience of God is highly personal and not necessarily reproducible, nor valid for anyone else, one would come dangerously close to “psychologism,” the substitution of some state of consciousness for objective reality. One may reject Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum; but one cannot replace it with an equally questionable “I experience it, therefore it is.”10
Accordingly, a proper Jewish education should be both cognitive and affective, involving both mind and heart.
Alfred Jospe was fortunate in that his decades in Hillel offered him the opportunity to put his intellectual and educational ideas of an informed and well-educated pluralistic Jewish community into practice, while pursuing his academic interests, far more than had he remained in the congregational rabbinate. In his nearly 40 years in Hillel – most of them in national leadership – he helped shaped the ideals and careers of hundreds of Hillel directors, and thousands of Jewish students. During his tenure, Hillel underwent unparalleled growth on hundreds of campuses, and its program became more crystallized and established. As editor of Clearing House, a Professional Bulletin for Hillel Directors and Counselors (1949–1971), Hillel Little Books Series (five vols.), and Hillel Library Series (eight volumes) he spread these ideals within and beyond Hillel.
IV. Family
His wife Eva (1913–2011) was born in Oppeln, Germany (now Opole, Poland) and pursued graduate studies in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She taught modern Jewish thought at Georgetown and then at George Washington University until the age of 80.11
Eva and Alfred Jospe had three children: SUSANNE GREENBERG (1935– ), a retired teacher and rabbi in West Chester, Pennsylvania; NAOMI PISETZKY (1942– ), a retired teacher in Petah Tikvah; and RAPHAEL JOSPE (1947– ) a retired professor of Jewish Philosophy in Jerusalem.
Alfred Jospe’s brother, Erwin Jospe (1907–1983), was a musician, organist, choir director, and finally Professor of music and Dean of fine arts at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He edited with Joseph Jacobsen a collection of Jewish music,12 Hawa Naschira: Auf! Lasst uns Singen (1935; reissued 2001).
Cohen, Richard A., ed. Franz Rosenzweig’s Commentary to Ninety-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevi, translated by Tomas Kovach, Eva Jospe, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.
Glatzer, Nahum. ed., On Judaism by Martin Buber, 3-174, the early lectures translated by Eva Jospe. New York: Schocken, 1967.
Jacobsen, Josef and Erwin Jospe, Hawa Naschira: Auf! Lasst uns singen! Leipzig-Hamburg: Anton Benjamin A.G., 1935; reissued with a companion volume Lexikon, 2001. See digital copy at Deutsches Exilarchiv: https://portal.dnb.de/bookviewer/view/1032775610#page/n0/mode/2up.
Jospe, Alfred, English translation of Samuel Hugo Bergman, Faith and Reason: Modern Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken, 1961.
Jospe, Alfred. “A Profession in Transition: The German Rabbinate 1910-1939.” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 19, no. 1 (January 1974): 51–61 (reprinted in Jospe, Eva and Raphael Jospe, eds., To Leave Your Mark: Selections from the Writings of Alfred Jospe. Hoboken: Ktav, 2000.)
Jospe, Alfred. “Die Unterscheidung von Religion und Mythos bei Hermann Cohen und Ernst Cassierer in ihrer Bedeutung für die jüdische Religionsphilosophie.” Phil. Diss., Universität Breslau, 1932.
Jospe, Alfred. The Sabbath as Idea and Experience: An Introduction to the Meaning of Jewish Life in Our Time. Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, 1962.
Jospe, Eva and Raphael Jospe, eds. To Leave Your Mark: Selections from the Writings of Alfred Jospe. Hoboken: Ktav, 2000.
Jospe, Eva. “Encounter: The Thought of Martin Buber.” Judaism 27, no. 2 (1978): 135–147.
Jospe, Eva. “Hermann Cohen’s Judaism: A Reassessment.” Judaism 25, no. 4 (1976): 461–472.
Jospe, Eva, ed., and trans. (with an introduction by Alfred Jospe). Moses Mendelssohn: Selections from His Writings. New York: The Viking Press, 1975.
Jospe, Eva, ed., and trans. Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen. Detroit: HUC Press, 1971, reissued 1993.
Jospe, Eva. “Moses Mendelssohn: Some Reflections on His Thought.” Judaism 30, no. 2 (1981): 169–182.
Wikipedia. “Grenzmark Posen-Westpreussen”. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenzmark_Posen-Westpreu%C3%9Fen#/media/Datei:Grenzmark_PW.png.
Jospe, Alfred, ed., and trans. Jerusalem and Other Jewish Writings of Moses Mendelssohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Jospe, Alfred. A Guide to Hillel: The B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations: Purposes, Programs, Policies. Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, 1962. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bermanarchive/catalog/px307mb6533.
Jospe, Alfred. Die Unterscheidung von Mythos und Religion bei Hermann Cohen und Ernst Cassirer in ihrer Bedeutung für die jüdische Religionsphilosophie. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1932.
Jospe, Alfred. Judaism on Campus: Essays on Jewish Education in the University Community. Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, 1963. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bermanarchive/catalog/tt024tn0479.
Jospe, Alfred. The Legacy of Maurice Pekarsky. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965.
Jospe, Alfred. Tradition and Contemporary Experience: Essays on Jewish Life and Thought. New York: Schocken Books, 1970.
Jospe, Alfred, ed. Studies in Jewish Thought: An Anthology of German Jewish Scholarship. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981.
Jospe, Eva, and Raphael Jospe, eds. To Leave Your Mark: Selections from the Writings of Alfred Jospe. Hoboken: Ktav, 2000.
Jospe, Alfred, and Richard Levy, eds. Bridges to a Holy Time: New Worship for the Sabbath and Minor Festivals. New York: Ktav, 1973.
Jospe, Raphael and Samuel Z. Fishman. Go and Study: Essays and Studies in Honor of Alfred Jospe. Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations,1980. (Includes complete bibliography of Alfred Jospe’s works until 1980).
LBI. The oral history collection of the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, AR 25385, Oral History Interview Alfred Jospe by Joan Lessing, January 1980. https://digipres.cjh.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE9402900.