The Idea Remains

The German Reform rabbi Leo Baeck was trained at the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary and the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, as well as the Universities of Breslau and Berlin. He served as a rabbi in Germany and, from 1933, as head of the representative body of German Jewry. Despite entreaties to leave, he remained in the country, believing it was his duty to offer spiritual support to his fellow Jews during the horrors of the Nazi years. In 1943, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He survived and settled in London after the war. He originally wrote The Essence of Judaism as a response to the Christian theologian Adolf von Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity.