ISAAC BERNAYS - Geistlicher Beamter der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde in Hamburg

Isaac Bernays

Hamburg 1822

Lithograph by SIEGFRIED BENDIXEN. Half-length portrait

Chacham Isaac Bernays (1792-1849) was the leader of the Orthodox community of Hamburg, the mentor of Samson Raphael Hirsch, and arguably the founder of neo-Orthodoxy in Germany. A brilliant Talmudist, Bernays delivered sermons in the German language (as opposed to Yiddish), a novel accommodation for the times. A copy of this portrait hung in the studio of Sigmund Freud, who was married to Martha Bernays, grand-daughter of Chacham Bernays. (Communicated by Ernst Freud, eldest son of the famed psychiatrist, to William Aron. See Wm. Aron, Jews of Hamburg [1967], facs. between pp. 96-97 of Hebrew section.) Prof. Leiman notes that in his portrait, Bernays wears canonicals, not dissimilar from those worn by the Reform clergy of the day. See Shnayer Z. Leiman, "Rabbinic Responses to Modernity," Judaic Studies, No. 5 (Fall 2007), p. 42, n. 56; JE, Vol. III, pp. 90-91