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| R. Avraham Kohn 1807-1848 |
Introduction
This article examines the contested history surrounding the murder of R. Avraham Kohn on September 6, 1848. He was a student of the Chief Rabbi of Prague, Shmuel Landau, who ordained him in 1831. He was also a graduate of Charles University of Prague. R. Kohn, himself, later became the Chief Rabbi of Lemberg (Lviv).
The story
Jewish Encyclopedia
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, we are left with more questions than answers concerning the murder of R. Kohn:
“[W]hile the better element [of Jewish society] rallied about him, the enemies of culture and progress [i.e. the radical Orthodox] were actively engaged in embittering his life and in undermining his growing popularity. Impelled by unbounded fanaticism, and encouraged by the lawless conditions [during the civil unrest] prevailing in 1848, they finally concocted a plan to take Kohn's life. On Sept. 6, 1848, a man, hired by the fanatical clique, entered Kohn's kitchen and poisoned the dinner. While the other members of his family recovered, Kohn and his youngest child died the following day. A wearisome trial ensued; but for some unknown reasons it was suppressed” (Jewish Encyclopedia 1906:534).
Stanislawski and Shanes
A more expanded version of the story—framed as an Orthodox attack against Reform—is presented by Professor Michael Stanislawski (and reviewed positively by Professor Joshua Shanes). This version is suggested as the most accurate version until now, because Stanislawski managed to obtain state records of the court case, which had been obscured during the previous Soviet era.
In 1848, a young Orthodox Jew, Avraham
Pilpel, managed to enter the kitchen of R. Kohn and poured arsenic into the
soup as it was being prepared for dinner. Some accounts have Pilpel pretending
to light his pipe on the fire of the stove while poisoning the soup pot. By
three in the morning, the forty-one-year-old R. Kohn and his baby daughter were
dead. Pilpel and his apparent collaborators from the Orthodox establishment
were all acquitted.
Kohn’s contested religious affiliation
It is important to establish his religious affiliation because this may provide clues as to the motives for his murder by alleged radical Orthodox factions. R. Avraham Kohn was born in 1807 in Austria and murdered in Lemberg in 1848. Besides the disputed accounts of the court proceedings, suspects and motives for the murder, his status as Orthodox or enlightened Orthodox, Reform or conservative Reform, is also highly contested.
According to Stanislawski (2007), Kohn was the rabbi of the “Reform Temple” of Lemberg. This seems to be confirmed by Shanes (2009:465), who refers to Kohn as the “liberal district rabbi of Lemberg.”
However, Professor Rachel Manekin (2008:216) argues that R. Kohn may simply have been a moderate or enlightened Orthodox rabbi, although “[t]he Orthodox leadership in Lemberg opposed Kohn’s tenure from the start, and made efforts to remove him from office” (The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 1407).[1]
Dr Anastasia Simferovska (2015) labels him a somewhat conservative reformer as well as a nascent Zionist.
According to Philip Rubenstein (2022-), R. Kohn tends towards the enlightened Orthodox option:
“[R. Kohn] studies with a respected local Talmudist called Rabbi Izak Spitz. He supports himself as a Hebrew tutor, but one day, his employer catches him while he’s still wearing his tefillin and his tallit from morning prayers. He’s reading a book by the French philosopher Montesquieu. And his employer is outraged and thinks this is absolute heresy, and wants to sack him, but Rabbi Spitz intervenes and says, ‘No, no, no. This is a pious young man. He’s not a heretic, he’s Orthodox.’”
Orthodox, Reform or somewhere in between?
Manekin is bothered by Stanislawski’s insistence on referring to R. Kohn as belonging to “Reform.” For example, Stanislawski maintains that R. Kohn abolished the requirement for women to cover their hair in the synagogue. Manekin, however, takes issue with that, because in the nineteenth century, middle- to upper-class women never generally left their houses without a fashionable hat. This means that there would not likely have been a problem, in the first place, with women attending important social events such as synagogue services without their usual headcoverings. What R. Kohn did object to, though, was the wearing of the ostentatious stirnbinde, which was a scarf with expensive jewellery appended to it. This would have placed an extra financial burden on the families who would not want to be identified as belonging to a lower class.
Manekin further argues that R. Kohn did not advocate the abolishment of headcoverings for women, as Stanislawski suggests, nor did he maintain that headcoverings were “insulting to the dignity of…Jewish women.” Instead, he opposed the custom of women shaving their hair before marriage, which he regarded as “insulting.” According to Philip Rubenstein (2022-), R. Kohn objected to the custom of women shaving their hair because it was an “imitation of German mediaeval practise.” In fact, Manekin maintains that R. Kohn actually writes that he does not oppose headcovering for women, as long as no extra stringencies are added to the literal intention of Halacha.
It does seem, however, that even Manekin agrees that R. Kohn did indeed write about some religious innovations but that he stopped this activity some years before he became the Chief Rabbi of Lemberg. It is important to note that if R. Kohn was a Reform Rabbi, it is highly unlikely for him to have been appointed as Chief Rabbi of Lemberg, which was a prestigious position presumably reserved for the distinguished rabbinic scholars and the Orthodox elite.
It must also be noted that even Shanes (2009:466), who does refer to R. Kohn as a Reform rabbi, emphasises that his synagogue was far more traditional than what was usually defined as Reform in contemporaneous Germany or even America. Manekin (2008:216), however, observes that far from a Reform Temple, R. Kohn’s synagogue followed the traditional customs of Vienna and Prague. There was order and decorum in the synagogue, but sermons were in German, and there was a choir. Many contemporary Orthodox synagogues, to this day, have sermons in the vernacular and have choirs. R. Kohn referred to his synagogue as a “Normalschule” (Jewish Encyclopedia 1906:533-34). R. Zvi Hirsh Chajes, in his 1849 Minchat haKinaot, states that the synagogues in Vienna, Prague and Lemberg did not deviate from Halachic practice (Kol Sifrei Macharitz Chayut II, 1958:900-93).
There is also evidence that R. Kohn, while serving earlier as rabbi of Hohenems, Austria, lodged a complaint against a wealthy congregant, who, after repeated warnings, continued to conduct noisy home renovations on Shabbat. In Austria, public disturbance of any religious activity was a criminal offence! This, too, indicates an Orthodox approach.
According to Simferovska, who considers R. Kohn to be the “Reform (Progressive) rabbi of Lemberg/Lviv,” he was just a “marginal reformer among the traditionalist majority” (Simferovska 2015:53). Furthermore, he assumed the (Orthodox-sounding) position of “mara de-atra, the teacher of the town/the head of the Talmudic academy” (Simferovska 2015:55).
Rubenstein (2022-) perhaps best solves the dilemma over R. Kohn’s religious identification by reminding us that the terms ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Reform’ are used anachronistically since these labels “don’t really take common hold until quite a bit later.”
Ultimately, it seems R. Avraham Kohn occupied an unusual liminal
space somewhere between conservative Reform, enlightened Orthodoxy, and also
Zionism:
“Historians have advanced different answers trying to understand the realities of the Galician Jewish community in the 19th century and the religious life of Lemberg, the center of the eastern province of the Habsburg Austrian Empire, in which Abraham Kohn appeared so vibrantly and disappeared so suddenly” (Simferovska 2015:53).
Lemberg in 1848
Lemberg was the capital of Galicia, and two-thirds of Austrian Jews resided there, making it the largest Jewish community in the Austrian Empire. Stanislawski notes that two simultaneous internal revolutions within Judaism were sweeping over Galician Jewish society in the early nineteenth century, namely Chassidism and Haskalah (Enlightenment). Chassidism opposed what they viewed as a secular threat presented by the Haskalah, bringing alien ideas into traditional Judaism, while the Haskalah considered Chassidism to be intellectually backwards and a regression of Jewish thought.
However we choose to understand the religious affiliations of R. Kohn, his synagogue and school were more traditional than those of Germany and America. His project must have been extremely successful because he ran a large school with 750 students in Lemberg. The community comprised about 150,000 Jews and had 97 synagogues. R. Kohn must have made a considerable impression on his hometown of Lemberg because, after his demise, Benedictine Street, where he had lived, was renamed Kohn Street (Simferovska 2015:56).
Nevertheless, according to Stanislawski, R. Kohn’s Orthodox opposition regarded him with disdain and as a reformer who, in their view, rejected important markers like head coverings for women and distinctive Jewish traditional dress.
The plot thickens
External and internal revolution
To make matters worse, besides the internal revolutions of Chassidism
and Haskalah, in 1848, waves of external political upheaval swept over
many parts of Europe, including the Austrian Empire. There were calls for
freedom of the press, constitutional government and an end to the feudal
system. The Polish nationalists sought national revival after decades of
partition, and R. Kohn sided with these Polish nationalists in the name of
emancipation. This allegiance added to the divisions already apparent within
the Jewish community of Lemberg. The traditional Orthodox viewed this as
liberalisation, which threatened their old ways and particularly their
established channels of authority. The assassination of R. Kohn in 1848
symbolised how violent all these conflicts could become.
Taxes
But there was another factor too, an economic component. R. Kohn opposed the “oppressive kosher meat and candle taxes, which made a small group of Jewish tax farmers fabulously wealthy” (Shanes 2009:466). This introduces another entirely different factor and dynamic into the equation that goes way beyond theology. There was now a confluence of economic, political and religious factional influences. As the prestigious Chief Rabbi of such an important community, R. Kohn had authority to pronounce on taxes, because his position gave him control of the “metrical books” which determined rules of taxation. This position placed R. Kohn as a Jewish member of the Austrian imperial bureaucracy (Simferovska 2015:55). His official control over taxes was perceived as a threat to the former wealthy Jewish tax contractors involved in Kosher slaughtering and candle sales. They had grown rich while ordinary Jews bore the burden. These contractors, monopolised by a few powerful families, were known as “tax farmers,” and the bigger their tax collection, the more money they made.
The assassination of R. Kohn in 1848
There were “several failed attempts at Kohn’s life,” culminating in a successful attempt in 1848, when an “Orthodox Jew slipped into his household and succeeded in poisoning the family” (Shanes 2009:466). By consulting state records, Stanislawski argues—although by his own admission, not conclusively—that Avraham Pilpel was the murderer who was “almost certainly under the orders and financial support of the tax farmers Jacob Bernstein and Hirsch Orenstein” (Shanes 2009:466). Interestingly, the latter, R. Tzvi Hirsch Orenstein, became the next Chief Rabbi of Lemberg, assuming R. Kohn’s position! Known as Ratzah, R. Orenstein authored the Halachic Responsa, titled Milchamot (Lemberg 1889) and Birkat Ratzah (Jewish Encyclopedia 1906:438).
All the accused were finally acquitted by the highest
appeals court in Vienna. Stanislawski “proves” (Shanes 2009:467) that
there was political interference in this trial. He notes that Kohn’s
assassination was the first political murder of a Jewish leader by another Jew
since antiquity [See: Kotzk
Blog: 165) DID BEIT SHAMAI MURDER SOME OF THE STUDENTS OF HILLEL?]. R. Kohn’s
assassination thus becomes a significant development in modern Jewish history,
indicating that politics and religion can be dangerously intertwined. It also foreshadowed
the political-religious assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in 1995,
indicating that the dangerous entanglement of politics and religion was not only
confined to the nineteenth century.
Manekin’s challenge to Stanislawski
Rachel Manekin robustly challenges some of the assertions by Stanislawski and Shanes. Manekin also studied the court file and claims Stanislawski chose to “weave a tale of conspiracy and intrigue that is unsupported by the historical evidence and rests on questionable readings of the sources, including the court file” (Manekin 2008:214). She notes that Orenstein and Bernstein were never charged with conspiracy to commit murder. They were arrested and jailed for about six weeks and then released due to a lack of evidence. There is also no evidence in the documentation that Orenstein and Bernstein were even “tax farmers.” According to Manekin, it was the “progressives”—not the radical Orthodox—who were aggressive. They smashed the windows of the prosecutor’s home and played loud music outside to protest against the release of Orenstein and Bernstein. The prosecutor was so hounded that he resigned his position, fearing for his safety.
Stanislawski writes that “all the adult witnesses immediately and without hesitation” identified the alleged murderer Avraham Pilpel in a lineup. Manekin refutes that argument and notes that, according to the court file, no one at all was able to identify Pilpel in the lineup.
Interestingly, there are two Rabbi Or[e]nsteins in this story. R. Kohn was appointed Chief Rabbi of Lemberg after the 1839 death of R. Jacub Meshullam Ornstein, the conservative and traditionalist rabbi who vociferously opposed any religious innovations, and was then followed by R. Tzvi Hirsch Orenstein. Significantly, the earlier R. Jacub Meshullam Ornstein was a staunch opponent of the Haskalah and used his money and power to persecute them. By the same token, he “had to endure much scorn and insult at the hands of the Progressivists, especially from Isaac Erter, who ridiculed him in a witty satire in his ‘Ha-Ẓofeh’” (Jewish Encyclopedia 1906:437). R. Jacub Meshullam Ornstein served as the rabbi of Lemberg for over thirty years and authored Yeshuot Yaakov, and collections of responsa like Yad Yosef, and Mayim Chaim.
Since R. Jacub Meshullam Ornstein immediately preceded R. Kohn as rabbi in Lemberg, this may support the notion (with Manekin) of an Orthodox persecution of the enlightened/progressives in the period immediately before the appointment of R. Kohn. According to the title page of Yeshuot Yaakov, it seems that R. Tzvi Hirsh Orenstein was the grandson of R. Jacub Meshullam Ornstein.
Analysis
Besides the contested history of the murder of R. Avraham Kohn, what is also intriguing is his disputed religious affiliation. Was he Orthodox, moderate Orthodox or conservatively Reform? His disputed status seems to have given rise to the variant and competing accounts of his assassination. Those who say that R. Kohn tended towards Reform incriminate the Orthodox, and those who maintain he tended towards Orthodox incriminate the enlightened/progressives.
But there is another factor that has been somewhat neglected in scholarship, and that is R. Kohn’s association with, and support of, Zionism (Simferovska 2015:53). The Zionist component deepens the mystery even further because during the late nineteenth century, the Reform movement was at odds with Zionism (Simferovska 2015:53). Reform Temples called for the blessing in the Amidah for the return to Zion to be omitted. The Reform Temple replaced the ancient Temple, and the expected messianism was now represented by enlightenment and emancipation (Simferovska 2015:53). While the Zionist component challenges the notion that R. Kohn was Reform, it thickens the plot because it introduces potential enemies from both the Orthodox and Reform camps. Were his enemies opposed to his moderate Orthodoxy, conservative Reform or nascent Zionist leanings?
We have examined vastly different and divergent recent
studies of R. Kohn and have not reached a definitive conclusion about his life
or the motives behind his death. Ironically, R. Kohn’s own son, Gotthilf—perhaps
plagued by similar uncertainties about his father—wrote a book titled “Abraham
Kohn in the Light of a Historical Research.” Over a century and a half
later, current historical research has not yet brought us any closer to solving
the mystery. Unless new documentary evidence emerges, it seems that we shall
never really know the actual religious identity of R. Avraham Kohn, or the
religious persuasion and motives of his assassins.
Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906, KOHN, ABRAHAM, by Isadore Singer, Adolf Guttman, 533-34.
Jewish Encyclopedia,
1906, ORNSTEIN, ẒEBI HIRSCH, by M.W. Rapoport, vol. 9, 437-38.
Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906, ORNSTEIN, JACOB MESHULLAM,
by Isadore Singer, Jacob Zallel Lauterbach, vol. 9, 437.
Manekin, R., 2008, ‘Review of A Murder in Lemberg:
Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History by Michael
Stanislawski’, AJS Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 214-217.
Rubenstein, P., 2022, Who Killed Rabbi Kohn? Online
source: https://www.lockdownuniversity.org/lectures/608-who-killed-rabbi-kohn/transcript. Retrieved 24 June 2026.
Shanes, J., 2009, ‘Review of A Murder in Lemberg:
Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History by Michael
Stanislawski’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 81, no. 2, 465-467.
Simferovska, A.O., 2015, ‘A Jewish Painter between Reform, Judaism, and Zionism: Wachtel’s Portrait of
Abraham Kohn’, Judaica Ukrainica, vol. 4, 53-56.
Stanislawski, M., 2007, A Murder in Lemberg:
Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ.
I thank Dr Avi Harel for the following sources:
אברהם כהן, על כיסוי ראש האישה; על הצורך בספרות דת ונוער;
על הימנעות מנעלי עור ביום הכיפורים; על מנהגי האבלות היהודיים; על נגינה בשבתות
וימים טובים. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie (בגרמנית)
אברהם כהן, Rabbinische gutachten über die Verträglichkeit der freien
Forschung mit dem rabbineramte (מכתבו
מתחיל בעמ' 95)
יונתן מאיר ביקורת על הספר 'רצח בלבוב' מאת מיכאל
סטניסלבסקי, גלעד 24 (2015), עמ' 173–176
רחל מנקין, "דייטשן", פולנים או אוסטרים? דילמת
הזהות של יהודי גליציה (1848-1851), ציון סח, תשס"ג
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