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An address to the religious workers in Erez Israel by Dr. Issac Breuer, (1883–1946), theoretician and leader of German Orthodoxy; son of Solomon Breuer. Born in Papa, Hungary, Breuer was brought as a child to Frankfort, where he studied at his father's yeshivah. He subsequently studied law, philosophy, and history at various universities and practiced as a lawyer in Frankfort. He soon took a leading part in various communal organizations. He defended the communal secession of the Orthodox in his Preussische Austrittsgesetzgebung und das Judentum (1913). When Agudat Israel was founded in 1912, Breuer became one of its ideologists and spokesmen. After the Nazis came to power, he settled in Jerusalem (1936), practicing as a lawyer, and devoting himself to organizing Po'alei Agudat Israel, of which he became the president. His appearance on behalf of the Agudah before the Peel Commission (1937) and the Anglo-American Commission (March 1946) made a great impression.
Breuer regarded himself as heir to the work of R. S. R. Hirsch, his grandfather. He developed Hirschian thought in his Messiasspuren (1918); Judenproblem (1922; also in a condensed English edition, 1947); Wegzeichen (a collection of articles, 1923; in expanded form in Hebrew, Ziyyunei Derekh, 1955); Das juedische Nationalheim (1925; English translation, 1926); Elijahu (1924); Die Welt als Schoepfung und Natur (1926); Elischa (1928); Der neue Kusari (1934), etc. While opposing Zionism as an attempt to secularize the Jewish nation, with time he saw in this movement, and in the Balfour Declaration and the Jewish National Home, the hand of Providence. To Zionism Breuer opposed his Agudism as the preparation of the Torah nation for renaissance in its ancestral home. After settling in Erez Israel, Breuer began to write in Hebrew (Moriyyah, 1944; Nahali'el, 1951), while selected articles appeared posthumously in English (People of the Torah, 1956). In the earlier period he had written some - not very successful - novels (Ein Kampf um Gott, 1920; Falk Nefts Heimkehr, 1923), also as vehicles for his religious concepts. He defended his conception, in the philosophical terms of the 19th century that God's eternal truths were revealed in and to His "Torah people." When historical reality forced itself on his thought, he met its demands with struggle and reluctance.
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