The Chatam Sofer and the Orthodox Response to Reform

Rabbi Moshe Sofer (Schreiber) was born in Frankfurt in 1762, studied with R. Natan Adler and R. Pinchas Horowitz, and from 1806 led the community of Pressburg (Bratislava), the centre of Hungarian Jewry.

The first serious challenge came from Hamburg, where a Reform 'temple' opened in 1818 with partly German prayer, an organ, an abridged liturgy and no references to return to Zion. Europe's rabbis answered in the collection Eleh Divrei ha-Brit (1819), and the Chatam Sofer's voice was the loudest in it.

His position rested on a phrase drawn from the law of the new grain harvest: chadash asur min ha-Torah, 'the new is forbidden by the Torah'. He turned a technical halakhic term into a slogan: any innovation in custom, synagogue or liturgical language is suspect until proven otherwise. It was a deliberate defensive strategy — where Reform advanced step by step, the line had to be drawn at once.

Under him the Pressburg yeshiva became the largest since Babylonia, with several hundred students at a time, who fanned out as rabbis across Hungary and Moravia. His responsa remain a principal halakhic source of the modern era. Modern Orthodoxy's other path was charted in Germany by R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, whose Torah im Derech Eretz joined full fidelity to the law with European culture.