Isaac Breuer

Isaac (Isaak) Breuer (1883-1946), lawyer and leader of the German Orthodoxy, born in Papa, Hungary (then part of Austria-Hungary), where his father, Solomon Breuer was rabbi. Breuer was taken as a child to Frankfurt am Main, where he studied in the yeshiva founded by his father. Breuer studied law and philosophy at the Universities of Strasbourg, France, and Marburg, Germany. He practiced as a lawyer and became involved in communal life, becoming a leader of Agudat Israel.

While rejecting secular Jewish nationalism, he advocated reconstruction activities in Eretz Israel. In 1936 he settled in Jerusalem where he headed the Poalei Agudat Israel movement. A prolific author, his writings developed the religious thought of his grandfather, Shimshon Rafael Hirsch. Breuer's early works were in German but after settling in the Land of Israel, wrote in Hebrew.

His publications include "Lehre, Gesetz und Nation" ("Teaching, Law, and Nation"); "Die Welt als Schoepfung und Natur" ("The World as Creation and Nature"); "Kampf um Gott" ("Fight for God"); "Das Judenproblem; Messiasspuren" ("The Jewish Problem", 1921), in opposition to political Zionism, and expressing his religious ideal of Jewish restoration. In 1939 he contributed a chapter, "Challenge to Israel," to Leo Jung's "Judaism in a Changing World".

Breuer was a member of the Kant Society