Joseph Herman Hertz (25 September 1872 – 14 January 1946) was a British Rabbi and biblical scholar. He held the position of Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom from 1913 until his death in 1946, in a period encompassing both world wars and the Holocaust.
Early life
Hertz was born in Rebrín/Rebrény, Kingdom of Hungary (presently part of the village of Zemplínska Široká, Slovak Republic), in 1872 and emigrated to New York City in 1884. He was educated at New York City College (BA), Columbia University (PhD) and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Rabbi, 1894, the Seminary's first graduate). His first ministerial post was in Syracuse, New York at what is now Temple Adath Yeshurun.
South Africa
In 1898, he moved to Transvaal, South Africa, to the Witwatersrand Old Hebrew Congregation in Johannesburg. He stayed there until 1911, despite attempts by President Paul Kruger in 1899 to expel him for his pro-British sympathies and for advocating the removal of religious disabilities of Jews and Catholics in South Africa. He was Professor of Philosophy at Transvaal University College (later known as the University of the Witwatersrand), 1906–8.
In 1911, he returned to New York to the Orach Chayim Congregation.
Chief Rabbi
In 1913, Hertz was elected Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire; he received 298 votes against 39 for Dayan Moses Hyamson. His rival candidates had also included Lewis Daly, and Bernard Drachman. (Hyamson took the rabbi's post of Orach Chayim in New York, which Hertz had vacated for the British Chief Rabbi appointment.)
Hertz held the post until his death. His tenure was affected by arguments with a wide variety of people, mainly within the Jewish community; the Dictionary of National Biography describes him as a "combative Conservative". It was said that he was in favour of resolving disagreements by calm discussion – when all other methods had failed.
Despite his title, he was not universally recognised as the final rabbinical authority, even in Britain. While he was Chief Rabbi of the group of synagogues known as the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire, led by the United Synagogue, a minority of new immigrants who had arrived since the 1880s regarded it as insufficiently orthodox. Hertz tried both persuasion and such force as he could muster to influence them; he added to his credibility among these immigrants by persuading Rabbi Yehezkel Abramsky to become head of the London Beth Din.
Hertz antagonised others by his strong support for Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s, when many Jews were against it, fearing that it would lead to accusations against the Jewish community of divided loyalty. Hertz was strongly opposed to Reform and Liberal Judaism, though he did not allow this to create personal animosities, and had no objection in principle to attending the funerals of Reform Jews.
However, despite all this, his eloquent oratory, lucid writing, erudition and sincerity earned him the respect of the majority of British Jews and many outside the Jewish community. His commentary on the Torah is still to be found in most Orthodox synagogues and Jewish homes in Great Britain. Despite there being some Ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not look up to Hertz, prominent Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Nosson Scherman maintained that Hertz "was a great man," a courageous Rabbi, and that although he was affiliated with the Jewish Theological Seminary Hertz "was Orthodox, without any question."
Although Hertz vigorously denounced the horror of the Holocaust (at one point relating an eyewitness claim that "German soldiers in football attire entered [a] stadium [near Kiev]. They snatched the infants from their mothers' arms and used them as footballs, bouncing and kicking them around the arena."), Hertz was opposed to the Kindertransport if it meant Jewish refugee children would be raised in the homes of gentiles. Hertz saw the British war effort in the noblest of terms, wishing Prime Minister Winston Churchill a happy 70th birthday in late 1944 with the message, "But for your wisdom and courage there would have been a Vichy England lying prostrate before an all-powerful Satanism that spelled slavery to the western peoples, death to Israel, and night to the sacred heritage of man."