Joseph Hirsch (Tzvi) Carlebach (January 30, 1883, Lübeck, German Empire – March 26, 1942, Biķerniecki forest, near Riga, Latvia) was a German Orthodox rabbi, natural scientist, and scholar of the history of the Jews in Germany.
Early life and family Joseph Carlebach was born in Lübeck on 30 January 1883, the eighth of the twelve children of Rabbi Salomon Carlebach (1845–1919), chief rabbi of Lübeck, and Esther Carlebach née Adler (1853–1920), a writer and poet.Andreas Brämer, "Dr. Joseph Carlebach", Stolpersteine Hamburg, Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden / University of Hamburg, 2016, .Naphtali Carlebach, Joseph Carlebach and His Generation: Biography of the Late Chief Rabbi of Altona and Hamburg, New York: Joseph Carlebach Memorial Foundation, 1959, p. 28. Esther was a daughter of Rabbi Alexander Sussmann Adler (1816–1869), Salomon's predecessor as rabbi of Lübeck. Joseph thus belonged to the wider intermarried Yoel–Adler–Carlebach rabbinical dynasty, descended on his father's side from his grandfather, Hirsch Joseph Carlebach. Sabine Niemann (ed.), Die Carlebachs, eine Rabbinerfamilie aus Deutschland, Ephraim-Carlebach-Stiftung, Dölling und Galitz, Hamburg 1995. Naftali Bar-Giora Bamberger and Alexander Carlebach (eds.), Mishpechot Yoel-Adler-Carlebach [The Yoel–Adler–Carlebach Families], 1997. Several of Joseph's brothers also became rabbis, among them Emanuel Carlebach (in Memel and Cologne), Ephraim Carlebach (in Leipzig) and Hartwig Naftali Carlebach, the father of the "singing rabbi" Shlomo Carlebach; his nephew Azriel Carlebach became founding editor of the Israeli newspapers Maariv and Yedioth Ahronoth.
He attended the Katharineum, a classical secondary school in Lübeck, and passed the Abitur (the German university-entrance examination) at Easter 1901. Hermann Genzken, Die Abiturienten des Katharineums zu Lübeck (Gymnasium und Realgymnasium) von Ostern 1807 bis 1907, Borchers, Lübeck 1907, no. 1133.
In 1919 Carlebach married his former pupil Charlotte ("Lotte") Preuss (1900–1942), a daughter of the physician Julius Preuss (1861–1913). They had nine children.
Education and scientific career From 1901 Carlebach studied mainly mathematics and the natural sciences at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, passing his state examination as a senior secondary-school teacher (Oberlehrer) in 1905. Stephanie Fleischer and Helge Schröder, with Beate Meyer, Oberrabbiner Dr. Joseph Zwi Carlebach: Ein Leben zwischen Religion, Entrechtung und Deportation (teaching dossier), Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, Behörde für Schule und Berufsbildung / Landesinstitut für Lehrerbildung und Schulentwicklung, Hamburg 2019. After a period teaching in Jerusalem from 1905 to 1907, he worked as a secondary-school teacher in Berlin while preparing his doctorate.
In 1909 Carlebach was awarded a doctorate at the University of Heidelberg for a dissertation on the medieval philosopher, exegete and astronomer Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides), published as Lewi ben Gerson als Mathematiker. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Mathematik bei den Juden (Berlin, 1910). Joseph Carlebach, Lewi ben Gerson als Mathematiker: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Mathematik bei den Juden, Berlin 1910, digitised by the University Library Frankfurt, . Alongside his university studies he attended the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin as a guest student, and was ordained a rabbi in 1914.
Teaching in Jerusalem (1905–1907) Having qualified to teach mathematics and the natural sciences, the 22-year-old Carlebach was offered a teaching post at the Lämel School in Jerusalem, an institution that aimed to give its pupils vocational training alongside religious studies. The offer was made in Berlin by the school's director, Ephraim Cohen-Reiss.Naphtali Carlebach, Joseph Carlebach and His Generation, 1959, pp. 41–42. Meir Seidler, "'Zion Seeks Her Children': Rabbi Joseph Zvi Carlebach's Relation to the Land of Israel and Zionism", Zion 84 (2019), p. 92.
Between 1905 and 1907 Carlebach lived in Jerusalem and taught at the Lämel School, years that coincided with the beginning of the Second Aliyah.Shnayer Z. Leiman, "Rabbi Joseph Carlebach – Wuerzburg and Jerusalem", Tradition 28:2 (Winter 1994), pp. 58–63.
His background and manner opened to him the homes of leaders of both the Old Yishuv and the New Yishuv. He met the aged Rabbi Shmuel Salant (1816–1909), the young Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), who had reached the country about a year earlier, and knew Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), David Yellin (1864–1941), with whom he kept up an extensive correspondence after returning to Germany, and Yehiel Michel Pines (1843–1913).Naphtali Carlebach, Joseph Carlebach and His Generation, 1959, pp. 42–47.
Leiman likewise records that Carlebach was befriended by the chief rabbi Shmuel Salant, who "left an indelible impression" on him. By his own later account the Jerusalem years were "the happiest years of my life ... such happy years will never return".
Because the Lämel School taught secular subjects, it was caught up in the dispute between the Old and New Yishuv over modern education, and the Haredi rabbis of Jerusalem signed a ban on such schools. After returning to Germany, Carlebach published a detailed essay defending his decision to teach there and arguing that the ban did not fit present circumstances.Naphtali Carlebach, Joseph Carlebach and His Generation, 1959, pp. 50–54.
He recorded his impressions of the country in lectures and in the German and English Jewish press. One lecture, Das heilige Land ("The Holy Land"), delivered to the Montefiore Society in Berlin, was published as a booklet in 1909. In the lecture, Carlebach praised the new Jewish agricultural colonies as the brightest sign of the country's revival. He argued that a Judaism cut off from the Land of Israel could not endure. He closed the address in Hebrew, with the traditional words "Next year in Jerusalem."
World War I and Kovno (1914–1918) On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Carlebach published the essay Moral als Politik ("Morality as Politics"), in which he related a call for morality in public life to the prophet Jeremiah. Joseph Carlebach, "Moral als Politik", Jeschurun 1, no. 11 (November 1914), pp. 410–413.
He served in the imperial German Army and, kept away from front-line fighting, was assigned to educational work. Under the German military administration of occupied Lithuania he settled in Kovno, where during the war he founded and directed a Hebrew secondary school (Realgymnasium)."Carlebach, Joseph", Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., Detroit: Macmillan Reference / Gale, 2007 (via encyclopedia.com). Meir Seidler, "'Zion Seeks Her Children': Rabbi Joseph Zvi Carlebach's Relation to the Land of Israel and Zionism", Zion 84 (2019), pp. 94–96. The school was modelled on the Torah im Derech Eretz outlook of Samson Raphael Hirsch, seeking to combine Torah study with modern science and a contemporary general education.
Carlebach's methods drew sharply differing assessments. Eliyahu Bils, a pupil at the school, criticised his harsh discipline, recalling that offending pupils were shut in a dark room and that corporal punishment was a daily occurrence. He eventually left over it. Eliyahu Bils, "Memoirs of a member of the first cohort", in Israel Yablokovsky (ed.), Heikhal she-shaka: ha-hinukh ha-ivri be-Kovna, Tel Aviv, 1962, pp. 104–105. In contrast, the writer Sammy Gronemann, who was in Kovno in the military administration in the same years, described Carlebach as "a brilliant schoolmaster" who treated his pupils not as a stern instructor but as an older friend and colleague. Sammy Gronemann, Hawdoloh und Zapfenstreich: Erinnerungen an die ostjüdische Etappe 1916–18, Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin 1924, p. 211.
The German military government was hostile to Zionism and to expressions of Jewish nationalism, the Hebrew language included, and it monitored Carlebach's activities. He repeatedly worked around its restrictions, and on one occasion the authorities suspended him from his post for a time.
That pressure, rather than a change in his own views, is the backdrop to an incident at the school. At a large public Hanukkah celebration attended by parents, community members, rabbis, and a representative of the German command, the pupils broke into "Hatikvah", the Jewish national anthem. The song was not on the approved program, and the army treated it as a political act that could have put the school's future in danger. Carlebach rebuked the pupils afterward.
At the next year's celebration he rose with his graduating class and led the whole hall in singing the anthem himself. Gronemann took this reversal as a sign of genuine ambivalence. Seidler argues it more likely reflected Carlebach's fear of the military authorities who monitored him and had once already suspended him.≠
Rabbinate in Lübeck, Altona and Hamburg
After the death of his father Salomon in 1919, Carlebach returned to his native Lübeck, where from 1920 he served as acting rabbi of the community until David Alexander Winter succeeded him in 1921. "Carlebach, Joseph Hirsch (Zwi)", Das Jüdische Hamburg, Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, .
In 1921 Carlebach was appointed head (Rektor) of the Talmud Tora school in Hamburg, which he led until 1926. In a reform-minded spirit he introduced independent study and experimentation, project work, and the use of art and movement in the classroom, aiming at a synthesis of Jewish and general education. Stephanie Kowitz-Harms, "Die Wiedereröffnung der Joseph-Carlebach-Schule", Hamburger Schlüsseldokumente zur deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte, Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, .
Carlebach combined an openness to the surrounding culture, unusual for an Orthodox rabbi, with strict observance of Jewish law. The Israeli jurist Haim Cohn, one of his pupils, recalled an episode that brought the two together: He spent a full day with the boys in the Cologne Cathedral, expertly explaining every detail of the statues, the glass windows, the ornaments, and the intricacies of the Catholic faith and ritual; but I was not allowed to participate, being a Cohen who may not be under the same roof with a corpse or with tombs, lest he become impure; and although, according to the letter of the Law, it is only the Jewish dead the contact with whom renders impure, and not the non-Jewish dead, still Carlebach held that the least possibility that among the dead buried in the cathedral may have been a person of Jewish origin (even though ultimately converted to Christianity), sufficed to make the place taboo to me.Haim H. Cohn, "Joseph Carlebach", Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 5 (1960), pp. 58–72 (here p. 66).
In 1925 he was elected chief rabbi (Oberrabbiner) of the Hochdeutsche Israeliten-Gemeinde (High German Israelite Community) in Altona, then still an independent Prussian city, in succession to Meir Lerner. "Biographie Rabbiner Carlebach", Joseph-Carlebach-Institut, . Altona's mayor Max Brauer admired him and regularly attended his lectures. Axel Schildt, Max Brauer, Hamburg 2002, pp. 63–65, and Christa Fladhammer and Michael Wildt (eds.), Max Brauer im Exil, "Einleitung", pp. 57–59. In 1935 Carlebach sailed to Haifa in Mandatory Palestine aboard the ship Tel Aviv on its maiden voyage. It was his second visit, nearly thirty years after the formative period he had spent teaching in Jerusalem, and though it came as the position of Germany's Jews was worsening, he chose to return to his Hamburg congregation rather than emigrate. "Schiffsreisen nach Palästina", Hamburger Schlüsseldokumente zur deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte, Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, . Björn Siegel, "Die Jungfernfahrt der 'Tel Aviv' nach Palästina im Jahre 1935: Eine 'Besinnliche Fahrt ins Land der Juden'?", in Ihre Wege sind liebliche Wege und alle ihre Pfade Frieden (Joseph Carlebach Conference volume), p. 119.