Zacharias Frankel זכריה פרנקל

He was born in Prague in 1801. He studied Talmud at home and in the yeshiva, then at university, and became the first rabbi in Bohemia with a university degree. From 1836 he was district rabbi of Dresden and of Saxony.

The Frankfurt conference, 1845. The Reform rabbis resolved that prayer in Hebrew was desirable but not obligatory. Frankel rose and walked out. The line was later drawn along that walkout: not "to change or not to change", but who has the right to change. His own position he called positive-historical Judaism: the law lives in time and changes in time, but it is changed by the community that lives by it, not by an assembly deciding on its behalf.

Breslau. From 1854 until his death he headed the Jewish Theological Seminary there—the first institution in Europe where the Talmud was studied together with history, philology and the reading of manuscripts. Twenty-one years. Breslau produced the teachers of a whole generation, and the Conservative movement traces its descent to that school, though it took shape later and in America.

The dispute that did not end. In 1859 Darkhei ha-Mishnah appeared, an examination of the Mishnah by generations of teachers. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and the rabbis of Hungary read it thus: the Oral Torah is described there as having grown in time rather than given at Sinai. They demanded of Frankel a plain statement that the Oral Torah is from Sinai. He answered that he wrote of the history of transmission and not of its source, and the statement demanded of him he did not make. From this came the breach, and it did not close.

We do not settle this dispute and do not finish Frankel's sentence for him. What was said on both sides is set down.

His second book is Mevo ha-Yerushalmi (1870), an introduction to the Jerusalem Talmud. It is used even by those who argued with him.