Abraham Geiger (1810–1874)

Abraham Geiger was born Avraham Gayger to a Jewish family in Frankfurt, in the German state of Hesse. As a child, he received a traditional Jewish education and at age 17, began writing his first work, a comparison between the legal styles of the Mishnah (Rabbinic) and Biblical and Talmudic laws. After learning Greek and Latin, Geiger yearned for a secular education. Friends gave him financial assistance that enabled him to attend the University of Heidelberg, to the great disappointment of his family. There he studied philology, Syriac, Hebrew, and classics, but also attended lectures in philosophy and archaeology. He transferred to the University of Bonn, where he was a classmate of Samson Raphael Hirsch. They later became opponents as the leaders of two opposing Jewish movements. Geiger earned a doctorate at the University of Marburg. In 1832, he was ordained a rabbi and accepted a post in Wiesbaden, where he married Emilie Oppenheim. In 1835, he helped found the Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie (Scientific Journal of Jewish Theology), which he then edited. It became an important outlet for Jewish scholarship, mainly historical and theological studies, but also discussions of contemporary events. In 1838, he became a junior rabbi in Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland), rose to senior rabbi in 1843, and remained there until 1863. During this time, Geiger organized the Jewish Reform movement and wrote his magnum opus, Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der innern Entwicklung des Judentums (The Original Text and the Translations of the Bible: Their Dependence on the Inner Development of Judaism, 1857). Among his other publications were Judaism and Islam (1833), An Appeal to My Community (1842), and an 1851 translation into German of the Divan of Judah Halevi, the great medieval Hebrew poet and physician. He also edited prayer books in 1854 and 1870 that became influential models for Reform Jews worldwide. Geiger did not want to create a separate community; his goal was to change Judaism from within. He was a more moderate and scholarly reformer than his fellow pioneers of Reform Judaism, Israel Jacobson, Samuel Holdheim, and Leopold Zunz. Geiger spent his last years as a rabbi at Frankfurt and in Berlin, where he also lectured at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Institute of Jewish Science), a liberal seminary.