LEO BAECK (1873-1956) was a 20th-century German Reform rabbi, scholar and theologian.  As president of the representative body of Jews in Germany after 1933, he was given many opportunities to escape.  He refused, insisting that he would stay so long as there was a minyan in Germany.  After being deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, he survived by helping others, teaching, and refusing to lose his sense of self or dignity.

Baeck made his mark as an intellectual and a modern theologian with the publication of THE ESSENCE OF JUDAISM (1905), which is a passionate argument for the enduring relevance of Judaism.   Rather than the cult based on outmoded rituals and laws, Baeck located the essence of Judaism in the intersection between rational ethics and a personal experience of the divine.  The commandment to search the scriptures for ethical principles, he argued, made Judaism an evolving, perpetually modern tradition of critical thought.

Traditional Jews disliked Baeck's early (1901) claim that Jesus was a profoundly Jewish figure and his view in "The Gospel as a Document of Jewish Religious History" (1938) that the Gospels belonged with the contemporary works of rabbinical literature.  Christians, on the other hand, felt challenged by his definition of Judaism as the "classic" rational faith confronting a "romantic" Christianity of emotion, in his essay "Romantic Religion" (1922).  The American philosopher Walter Kaufmann viewed the latter work as Baeck's greatest achievement next to The Essence of Judaism, collecting it and other essays in JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY (1958).

In 1955, a group of émigré German-Jewish intellectuals including Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem met in Jerusalem to found an institute that would preserve the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry.  The Institute was named in Baeck's honor and appointed him its first President.


The following books are in PDF format:

* Essence of Judaism (Macmillan, 1936).  Translated by Victor Grubwieser and Leonard Pearl.

* Judaism and Christianity (JPS, 1958).  Translated by Walter Kaufmann.

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