Pinchas Horowitz

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Pinchas Horowitz was a Rabbi and Talmudic author; born in Poland in 1731; died in Frankfurt am Main on July 1, 1805. The descendant of a long line of rabbinical ancestors and the son of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Horowitz of Chortkiv, he received a thorough Talmudic education, chiefly from his older brother, Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg. He married at an early age the daughter of the wealthy Joel Heilpern, who provided for him and enabled him to occupy himself exclusively with his studies. Adverse circumstances then forced him to accept a rabbinical position, and he became rabbi of Witkowo, from which place he was called later on to Lachovice. A decision rendered in a complicated divorce case attracted attention to him, and in 1771 he was elected chief rabbi of Frankfurt. Although a cabalist, he joined the agitation against Rabbi Nathan Adler, who held separate services in his house according to the cabalistic ritual. When Mendelssohn's Pentateuch appeared, Horowitz denounced it in unmeasured terms, admonishing his hearers to shun the work as unclean, and approving the action of those persons who had publicly burned it in Wilna (1782). Following the same principle, he opposed the establishment of a secular school in 1794. Toward the end of his life he became blind, and his son, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Horowitz, acted as his substitute in opposition to Reform Judaism and Secular Judaism.

[edit] Works

Horowitz's chief work is "Hafla'ah," novellae on the tractate Ketubot, with an appendix, "Kuntres Aharon," or "Shebet Achim," Offenbach, 1786. The second part, containing novellae on the tractate Kiddushin, also with an appendix, appeared under the title "Sefer ha-Mikneh," in 1800. Other-works are: "Nesivos la-Shavet," glosses on sections 1-24 of the Shulchan Aruch, Even HaEzer, Lemberg, 1837; "Giv'as Pinchas," a collection of eighty-four responsa, in 1837; and "Panim Yafos," a cabalistic commentary on the Pentateuch, printed with the Pentateuch, Ostrog, 1824 (separate ed. 1851, n.p.).

Rabbi Horowitz was one of the last pilpulists in Germany, and he therefore represents the most highly developed stage of rabbinical dialectics. It was in keeping with these views that he opposed secular education and even the slightest change of the traditional form of public worship (see his denunciation of a choir in the synagogue, in "Givas Pinchas," No. 45). The progress of modern civilization toward the end of the eighteenth century made him partly change his views, and in 1803 he indorsed Wolf Heidenheim's translation of the Machzor. Nonetheless, his work are still used in fierce opposition to Progressive Judaism.