The need for modern-style seminaries to train rabbis emerged early in the 19th century as part of the movement for Jewish Emancipation in Central and Western Europe. Up to that time rabbis had come from Yeshivah frameworks geared to Torah study, where the professional training of rabbis was, at best, incidental. In the pre-Emancipation communities, the primary task of the Rabbi was to expound the law and to judge according to the law, for which he was equipped by schooling in Talmud and codes. However, with Emancipation, the Jewish communities began to live in the world of the host society, culturally as well as politically. In this situation the intense but narrow training provided by the yeshivot was largely irrelevant. The function of the rabbi became comparable to that of the Christian clergyman, and governments, which closely supervised religious bodies, often demanded that Jewish communities appoint spiritual leaders with a modern education.
In 1829 a Collego Rabbinico was established in Padua, then part of the Austrian empire. Support from Italian Jews was limited, and more than once it suspended operations. The latest reopening took place (in Rome) in 1955. Also in 1829, the French École Rabbinique opened it doors in Metz, moving to Paris in 1859.
Germany offered more fertile ground for the establishment of rabbinical seminaries. Some German Jews hoped that the status and needs of Judaism would be recognized through the establishment at a German university of a faculty of Jewish theology parallel to the faculties of Catholic and Protestant theology, but this concession was not granted by the governments concerned. The need for a Jewish institute was realized through the will of Jonas Fränckel, a wealthy Breslau merchant, by means of whose bequest the Judische-Theologisches Seminar was opened in Breslau in 1854. In the spirit of its first director, Zacharias Frankel (1801-1875), the advocate of "positive historical Judaism," the Breslau Seminary emphasized free scholarly inquiry combined with adherence to traditional Jewish practice. Ordination followed a prescribed seven-year course of study and candidates were expected to obtain a university doctorate. The curriculum included the traditional Jewish texts, but was far broader than that of a yeshivah: Wissenschaft Des Judentums ("Science of Judaism") was the key concept directing its program.
Graduates of the Breslau Seminary served a wide variety of congregations, principally those in Germany, usually denominationally Liberal and amenable to moderate changes in religious practice. It was the prototype of later institutions, although its philosophy satisfied the partisans of neither Orthodoxy nor Reform. The leading exponent of Reform in Germany was Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), and under his direction the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentum (College for the Science of Judaism) was opened in Berlin in 1872. (In an act of anti-Semitic malevolence the government in 1883 required that the name Lehranstalt [Institute] be substituted for Hochschule [College]). The founders underscored the need for the institution to be free from state, synagogue, or party ties. By this time Geiger's ardor for change in religious practice had waned, and those who had expected his seminary to become a torchbearer of Reform were disappointed. In 1873 the Rabbinerseminar für das Orthodoxe Judentum (Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary) was opened in Berlin under the leadership of Azriel Hildesheimer (1820-1899). Its approach was that of the Torah im derekh erets (Torah and secular knowledge) school of Samson Raphael Hirsch, but in the eyes of some of the Orthodox the synthesis diluted the purity of the faith with the heresy of secular study. This divergence came into focus in 1934 when a proposal that the Hildesheimer Seminary be transferred to Palestine was quashed immediately by the local rabbinate.
The bitterest opposition to the establishment of a rabbinical seminary came from the Orthodox Jews of Hungary. Nevertheless, with government help, a Seminary was opened by the Neology movement in Budapest in 1877. It attracted a distinguished staff of scholars and survived both World War II and the subsequent Communist regime. The Israelitische Theologische Lehranstalt (Jewish Theological Institute) of Vienna (1893) made less of an impact.
In 1855 Jews' College opened in London. With the Chief Rabbi as president ex officio, it has always been an Orthodox institution. To train Reform rabbis the Leo Baeck College was opened in London in 1956.
In Eastern Europe the world of pre-Emancipation Judaism remained substantially intact, and there was little support within the Jewish community for the training of rabbis outside the traditional yeshivah mode. However, the anti-Semitic czarist government sought to impose a modernized rabbinate, establishing seminaries at Vilna and Zhitomir in 1847. The Jews treated them with derision and for the most part ignored their graduates. They were closed in 1873.
With the exception of the Berlin Hochschule, which lingered on until 1942, the Nazis closed the institutions under their control in 1938.
In the United States rabbinical seminaries preceded yeshivot. The need for an English-speaking, locally trained rabbinate began to be argued for during the period of relatively large-scale immigration from Central Europe after 1820, and in 1867 Isaac Leeser (1800-1868) established Maimonides College in Philadelphia. However, it crumbled after his death. Credit for the first successful effort belongs to Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900). He had insisted on the need for such an institution from the time of his arrival in the United States in 1846, and became president of the Hebrew Union College rabbinical seminary when it opened in Cincinnati in 1875. The College, whose first graduates were ordained in 1883, was intended to accommodate all schools of thought within the American Jewish community, but events conspired to make it the standard bearer of radical Reform.
As a counter-thrust, a conservative group established the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (1886). This institute was reorganized in 1902 under the presidency of Solomon Schechter, who assembled a distinguished group of scholars. It was the Seminary that brought together the various elements constituting the Conservative movement. Ideologically, though not sociologically, the philosophy of the Jewish Theological Seminary could be likened to that of the Breslau Seminary. In 1922 the Jewish Institute of Religion, which sought to be inclusive but in practice was Reform, was founded in New York by R. Stephen S. Wise.
The yeshivot responded to the needs of the East European immigrants who transformed the American Jewish community at the end of the 19th century. The Isaac Elhanan Yeshiva, dating back to 1886, was expanded into the wide-ranging Yeshiva University, including a medical school, within which the Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary functions as a college for training rabbis. In 1968 the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation opened a rabbinical training college in Philadelphia. Most recently, the Union for Traditional Judaism, breaking away from the Conservative movement, established the Institute of Traditional Judaism (the Metivta), ordaining rabbis in a "trans-denominational" program incorporating critical methodologies.
Expansion has characterized the history of the American institutions; they reach out into many fields rather than nurture the aloof specialization of their European predecessors. For example, Hebrew Union College took over the New York Jewish Institute of Religion and established branches in Los Angeles, where it has a school of social work, and in Jerusalem, where it has a school of archeology. The Jewish Theological Seminary established the University of Judaism in Los Angeles as well as a Jerusalem branch; in New York it maintained the Jewish Museum and a radio program and a combined program in Judaic Studies with Columbia University.
In 1952 a Seminario Rabinico was established in Buenos Aires under Conservative auspices, intended to prepare candidates for admission to the New York institution.
