Jonathan Sarna, "What Really Happened at the Original Trefa Banquet "
David Shasha
Jonathan Sarna Defends Isaac Mayer Wise – Again!
We have learned all too well just how much contempt Jonathan Sarna has for Sephardim:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/MHgnDVhLqqY
He has been very cunning and crafty when it comes to how he presents American Jewish history, but it has become clear over time that his aim is to marginalize and suppress the Sephardic element and reify the Ashkenazi one.
What is not so well-known is how the putatively Orthodox Sarna has vigorously defended Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), the first leader of Reform Judaism in America:
https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/sarna/The%20Touro%20Monument%20Controversy.pdf
In his discussion of what has become known as the Touro Monument Controversy, Sarna emphatically takes the side of Reform Jews against the Sephardim and the establishment Ashkenazim who defended the iconic monument.
It is a very complicated piece of history which paradoxically pitted Wise and Reform Judaism against 19th century American Jewish orthodoxy.
Sarna has just published an article on the infamous 1883 “Trefa Banquet” led by Wise that continues this disturbing pattern.
Sarna claims that the Banquet is much ado about nothing, and that Wise kept a kosher home!
He contrasts the shocking 1883 event with current iterations of the Trefa Banquet:
The many non-kosher foods that did appear on the menu of the lavish nine-course banquet — clams, crabs, shrimp, frogs’ legs and so forth — were not, like Trefa Banquet 2.0, the product of careful planning and prearranged advertising. They resulted instead from carelessness and lack of proper oversight. The well-known Jewish caterer who planned the dinner took no account of the fact that traditionalists had been invited to the celebration and created a banquet like so many other lavish Jewish banquets held in his club — akin to non-Jewish banquets, minus the pork.
It was all just “carelessness and lack of proper oversight.”
Nothing to see here.
More than this, I would like to highlight how Sarna, in typical fashion, presents the founding the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1887:
The Trefa Banquet helped pave the way for the creation of a more traditional Jewish rabbinical seminary, New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary. Once Wise abandoned the goal of “union” and cast his lot with more radical Reform Jews who repudiated Jewish dietary laws, those favoring a conservative approach to Jewish life moved to establish a more religiously traditional seminary to compete with Hebrew Union College. The Reform movement’s Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, which among other things dismissed the Jewish dietary laws as “entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state,” strengthened conservative-minded Jews in their resolve, and the Jewish Theological Seminary opened on January 2, 1887.
We will of course notice that the word “Sephardic” never appears in the discussion. Neither does the name of Sabato Morais, the visionary founder of the JTS.
It is critical to recall that Morais was a devoted opponent of Isaac Mayer Wise, as Arthur Kiron notes in his introduction to the on-line Morais Ledger database:
http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/morais/introduction.cfm
Here is the relevant portion of the introduction that references Wise:
The most significant fact about the scrapbook is that it contains hundreds of articles Morais published anonymously or pseudonymously [see for example, item ##003, which Morais published under the pseudonym "Veritas."]. Davis, consequently, when compiling his bibliography did not have access to the full scope of Morais' output, particularly in the non-Jewish press. Morais' authorship of these anonymous or pseudonymously published pieces is evident by the fact that either he (or occasionally his son Henry, after his father's death) affixed his signature to these clippings. Moreover, as Davis suspected, Morais' copious handwritten marginal annotations offer a window into his private reflections and views on such matters as the American Civil War, Capital Punishment, the creation of a uniform, abbreviated American Jewish prayer service, his differences with Isaac Mayer Wise, the leader of the American Jewish Reform movement, his reactions to Christian missionaries, ethnic intolerance, mass migration, as well as his negative attitude towards political Zionism.
For those unfamiliar with the bifurcated Sephardi-Ashkenazi history of the Seminary, Kiron has written the definitive study of how our heritage fits into the big picture of American Jewish history:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXTVBTWXFtZmtsVGc/view?ths=true
Tellingly, we do not hear anything from the great historian Sarna about how the JTS was transformed into the flagship institution of Conservative Judaism after the death of Morais in 1897 with the hiring of Solomon Schechter as chancellor in 1902:
http://www.jtsa.edu/former-chancellors
Sarna the historian is very selective when it comes to what he reports, how he reports it, and whose side he is ultimately on.
It has become all too clear that this selectivity is directed at suppressing Sephardim, Sephardic culture, and Sephardic history in the context of the contemporary Jewish discussion.
Sarna’s implicit anti-Sephardi racism serves to obscure the larger issues of the JTS and Reform Judaism, which are firmly rooted in the Morais-Wise battle and reflect specific issues in the Sephardi-Ashkenazi binary split.
And so it is that Sarna’s racism does not allow the reader to get the full historical picture necessary to properly understand and process the so-called “Trefa Banquet” and its current application a hopelessly divided American Jewish community that is dominated by White Jewish voices.
David Shasha
What Really Happened at the Original Trefa Banquet
By: Jonathan D. Sarna
JTA — In an article written for J: The Jewish News of Northern California and republished via JTA, David A.M. Wilensky describes with gusto the supposedly mouthwatering delicacies, including Peanut Butter Pie with Bacon and Pulled Pork Potato Kugel, consumed this month by “rabbis and foodies” at the Trefa Banquet 2.0 in San Francisco — complete with a communal blessing and a historical lecture justifying these juicy transgressions on the basis of American Jewish history and Reform Jewish tradition.
According to the article, “the original Trefa Banquet was an 1883 event at which leaders of the early American Reform movement made a bold, antagonistic statement by serving non-kosher dishes to commemorate the ordination of the first graduating class of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.”
Actually, the historical record tells a different story. The original Trefa Banquet, on July 11, 1883, in Cincinnati, capped ceremonies aimed, ironically, at unifying American Jews. Earlier in the day, 100 rabbinic and lay leaders, representing 76 congregations from across America, celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (today known as the Union for Reform Judaism, but then a much broader union of congregations) as well as the ordination of Hebrew Union College’s initial class of four rabbis — the first such ordination ever held on American soil.
The broadly inclusive gathering in Cincinnati marked the high point of Jewish religious unity in America. It symbolized the longstanding goal of HUC’s president, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, to lead a broad, ideologically diverse coalition committed to strengthening American Judaism.
Unlike this month’s re-enactment, the infamous Cincinnati banquet prepared for the 100 Jewish leaders served no pork at all. Many Reform Jews of that time believed that abstaining from pork sufficiently distinguished them from their non-Jewish neighbors, especially in a pork-producing city like Cincinnati, popularly known as “porkopolis.” So Jews avoided pork products, even if they consumed seafood with impunity.
The many non-kosher foods that did appear on the menu of the lavish nine-course banquet — clams, crabs, shrimp, frogs’ legs and so forth — were not, like Trefa Banquet 2.0, the product of careful planning and prearranged advertising. They resulted instead from carelessness and lack of proper oversight. The well-known Jewish caterer who planned the dinner took no account of the fact that traditionalists had been invited to the celebration and created a banquet like so many other lavish Jewish banquets held in his club — akin to non-Jewish banquets, minus the pork.
One of those who attended the banquet, the eminent Reform Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, later Wise’s successor as president of Hebrew Union College, admitted in a private letter that the banquet was a “big blunder.” It shows, he wrote, “how little judgement laymen have in religious matters.”
Rabbi Wise also knew the banquet was a blunder. After all, he himself kept a kosher home — his second wife, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, insisted upon it. But he was not the kind of leader who believed in making apologies. Instead, he lashed out against his critics, insisting that the dietary laws had lost all validity, and ridiculed them for advocating “kitchen Judaism.”
Why does any of this remain important today? Symbolically, the Trefa Banquet — “transgression as religion” in Wilensky’s terms — separated American Jews into two opposing camps that could no longer even break bread together. The incident anticipated and stimulated further divisions.
Let’s hope that Trefa Banquet 2.0 will not produce similar results.
Jonathan D. Sarna is University Professor and Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History.
From The Times of Israel, January 17, 2018