Halakhic Flexibility and Communal Unity: R. Marcus Horovitz and the Schächtfrage

Abstract

Unlike his mentor, R. Esriel Hildesheimer, and his chief antagonist, R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, R. Marcus Horovitz, the “communal Orthodox rabbi” (orthodoxer Gemeinderabbiner) of Frankfurt am Main at the end of the nineteenth century, has received relatively little scholarly attention. Horovitz was both a creative halakhic mind and a passionate communal leader devoted to Jewish unity at a time of intense ideological and political division. This article considers Horovitz’s analysis of the halakhic permissibility of stunning an animal with a blow to the head after slaughter, a practice that was being advanced by animal protection groups in Switzerland and Germany at the time. In a lengthy responsum on the topic, after a thorough reading of halakhic sources, Horovitz argued that the practice was permissible and called for a united Jewish response. The responsum illuminates both the virtuosity of its under-studied author and the complex social and political forces faced by Orthodox rabbis at the time of the Schächtfrage (the controversy over the legality of kosher animal slaughter in German-speaking lands).