True Crime, Religion-Style

by David Klinghoffer, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 1/10/2007

For such a slim book, Michael Stanislawski's A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History (Feb.) has a lot of surprises in it. A true crime story published by Princeton University Press? That's surprising in itself.

The text itself covers only 130 pages, in which Stanislavski, who teaches Jewish history at Columbia, tells the true story of a liberal Reform rabbi murdered in 1848 in Lemberg, today's Lvov, in the Ukraine. The apparent murderer was a disgruntled Orthodox Jew. Most Jewish readers will assume that the Reform movement, which rejects much of traditional Jewish teaching on theology and practical behavior alike, grew heartily in urbane, genteel Germany but—in Eastern Europe?

Actually, yes, there too. The murder victim at the heart of the story, Rabbi Abraham Kohn, ran a thriving liberal temple in Lemberg.

Stanislawski told RBL how, while drawing on obscure archival material, he was eager to try a new kind of writing, more accessible and popular than his previous books: "Even my wife said, 'This doesn't sound like you. It's understandable!' I think my other books were understandable too, but they were more technical."

"It's so well written," said his editor at Princeton, Brigitta van Rheinberg, who also confessed to a weakness for "microhistories."

"You take one little story, one incident, and put it under the microscope, and by detailing that incident you tell a much bigger story," she explained. Van Rheinberg has published other microhistories, including The Hanged Man (2004), by Robert Bartlett, about a medieval Welsh rebel who mysteriously—it would seem miraculously—survived his own execution. Princeton also brought out A Poisoned Chalice (2002), by Jeffrey Freedman, another true mystery—this one about the poisoning of the Communion wine at Zurich's cathedral in 1776.

Rabbi Kohn, too, was poisoned (arsenic in the soup) in an incident that likewise claimed the life of his infant daughter. While the murderer's motives remain somewhat murky, they had to do with tensions simmering between Orthodox and Reform Jews.

Jewish readers, aware of such tensions in today's Jewish community, will be startled at how serious and vicious the dispute could get in 1848. Both sides sought to involve the government (the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in suppressing their religious rivals. Orthodox Jews petitioned to shut down Reform temples, while Reform Jews sought to have Orthodox practices banned by force of secular law. Rabbi Kohn himself had traveled to Vienna to request the emperor to forbid Jews from wearing traditional Orthodox garb. The emperor, Joseph II, agreed. Before his death, Kohn urged the local governor to help stop married Jewish women from covering their hair as Jewish law requires. You can see why Kohn was not popular with the local Orthodox believers.

What's the bigger lesson of this microhistory? Professor Stanislawski pointed to the present Jewish community. "Jews don't stand together," he remarked. "That's one of the nice myths that we have."