Narratives of Enlightenment 97

authorities therefore had to develop new strategies for dealing with their non-observant brethren, who in many communities formed the majority of the Jewish population.

The most uncompromisingly rigid of these strategies, championed by such luminaries as R. Moshe Sofer(the Hatam Sofer ), was to assume a stance of cultural and religious separation from the non-observant. If the rabbis no longer enjoyed the power to excommunicate transgressors from the Jewish polity, they would form their own exclusively Orthodox communities to accomplish the same goal in reverse.'® Other halakhists, however, adopted a more accommodating position. One of these was Rabbi Yaakov Ettlinger of Altona," a leading posek(halakhic decisor) who, despite his reputation for piety and his opposition to modernization and religious reform, declared that the non-observant Jews of his day— the second or third generation following Emancipation— should be distinguished from the mumar who consciously and purposefully rejects the authority of the Torah . They should instead be regarded as“infants taken captive by Gentiles.” That is, just as a Jewish child kidnaped and raised by Gentiles cannot be blamed for sins he commits as a result of his ignorance of the Torah , so the non-observant Jews of post-Emancipation Europe, who were deprived as children of training in the“true” Jewish path, are not fully responsible for their sinful behavior.

Ettlinger’s ruling opened the door to a more positive relationship between the squabbling factions of the Jewish community. By holding that the non-observant Jews of his day were not true apostates, he provided the necessary halakhic warrant for Orthodox Jews to maintain social, familial, and relationships with their non-Orthodox brethren. I stress the adjective“halakhic.” The tesponsum in which Ettlinger puts forth his theory presents itself in every way as a serious, sincere exercise in halakhic thinking and decision-making. It touches upon subject matters that are classically