JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ernheim, Gilles
sented Hamlet and herself played the title role. A neglected
knee injury resulted in complications, and in 1914 Bernhardt
was obliged to have her right leg amputated. She continued
to appear in roles which permitted her to sit, such as Racine’s
Athalie. The “Divine Sarah,” as she was called by Victor Hugo,
died while at work on a film. Her autobiography Ma Double
Vie was published in 1907.
Bibliography: L. Verneuil, Fabulous Life of Sarah Bernhardt
(1942); J. Agate, Madame Sarah (Eng., 1945); J. Richardson, Sarah Bernhardt
(Eng., 1959); C.O. Skinner, Madame Sarah (Eng., 1967).
[Linda Gutstein]
BERNHEIM, GILLES (1952– ), French Orthodox rabbi and
philosopher. Bernheim simultaneously completed rabbinical
studies at the Seminaire Israelite de France and higher studies
in philosophy. As a rabbi, he was first appointed chaplain for
students (from 1978) and academics (until 1996). He gained
recognition in the Jewish as well as the non-Jewish world
through his effort to combine Jewish tradition and Western
philosophy, an endeavor that he tried to convey through
numerous articles, conferences, and books. From 1996 he
headed the Torah Committee at the Consistory of Paris, and
was appointed in 1997 chief rabbi of Paris’ main synagogue,
the Grande Synagogue de la Victoire. Committed to interfaith
dialogue, Bernheim was deputy president of the Amitie
Judeo-Chretienne de France, an association founded in the
aftermath of World War II following in the footsteps of Jules
Isaac’s work. Ethics and social problems were also central to
Bernheim’s commitment, and he developed expertise on problems
of medical ethics which led him to be chosen as an honorary
member of the Conseil National du Sida, a government
body dedicated to fighting the AIDS epidemic and helping its
victims. Bernheim was also deputy president of the Medical
Ethics Committee at the Consistory of Paris. According to
him, “in the philosophy of Israel, there is neither dissociation
nor a gap between ethics and religion. Concern and care for
the other is the way to meet the divine.” Such a vision of Judaism
has deep implications for the life of the city (as clearly
developed in his book Un rabbin dans la cite). Hence Bernheim’s
dedication to meeting the face of the other, in the sense
defined by Emmanuel *Levinas, and his attitude of openness
and dialogue towards Gentiles as well as Jews, with emphasis
on reception and transmission, mutual teaching and enrichment.
This commitment ran counter to ultra-Orthodox tendencies
in modern-day French Jewry, which may explain his
failure to be elected as France’s chief rabbi in 1994.
[Dror Franck Sullaper (2nd ed.)]
BERNHEIM, HIPPOLYTE (1840–1919), French neurologist.
Born in Alsace, he was appointed professor of internal medicine
at Nancy University in 1878. In 1884 he began to devote
himself to nervous and mental disease and was one of the first
to concentrate systematically on the problems of psychotherapy.
His methods included suggestion and hypnosis. He was
regarded as head of the Nancy school of psychiatry, as opposed
to the Paris school headed by Charcot, which saw hypnosis
as an investigative method and not as a method of treatment.
Bernheim based treatment on persuasion – the doctor’s psychological
influence on the course of the neurosis. His methods
became outdated but his activities were instrumental in
winning acceptance for psychotherapy by the medical profession.
Bernheim’s most important work was De la suggestion et
de ses applications à la thérapeutique (1886). His other works
include Hypnotisme, suggestion et psychothérapie (1890). His
work laid the foundation for an understanding of the human
personality in the light of psychopathology rather than of philosophy.
Bernheim recognized “automatisms” which were not
under conscious control. He absolved the will as being the origin
of mental disease and crime – thus attacking the stigma
attaching to insanity and opening the road to the principle of
“irresistible impulse” in the penal code.
Bibliography: S.R. Kagan, Jewish Medicine (1952), 375–6;
Zilbourg, A History of Medical Psychology (1941), 367–9.
[Joshua O. Leibowitz]
BERNHEIM, ISAAC WOLFE (1848–1945), U.S. distiller and
philanthropist. Bernheim was born in Schmieheim, Baden. He
emigrated to the U.S. in 1867 and settled in Paducah, Kentucky,
where he worked as a salesman and bookkeeper. In 1872 Bernheim,
together with a brother, established a distillery. The
business was moved to Louisville, Ky., in 1882, and became one
of the most important in the country. Bernheim made several
gifts to public causes. In 1889 he organized the first YMHA in
Louisville and contributed its first home. He contributed to
Hebrew Union College its first library building (1912), and
later helped subsidize its second. Other benefactions included
an addition to the Louisville Jewish Hospital (1916), sculpture
for Louisville and the Statuary Hall in Washington, a 13,000acre
nature reserve near Louisville, and gifts to the village
of his birth. Bernheim was rigid and autocratic in temperament.
Particularly hostile to Zionism, in 1918 he addressed a
letter to the Central Conference of American Rabbis urging
the founding of a “Reform Church of American Israelites” to
consist of “100 percent Americans.” In a 1921 address to the
Union of American Hebrew Congregations, of which he was
a vice president and for over 40 years member of the executive
board, he called for a Sunday Sabbath and argued that
the terms “Jew and Judaism” were a “reservoir from which
is fed the perennial spring of hatred, malice, and contempt.”
Likewise he urged that foreign terms such as “temple” and
“synagogue” strengthened the accusation that the Jews were
a “foreign and indigestible element.” From 1906 to 1921 Bernheim
was treasurer of the American Jewish Committee. He
wrote two autobiographical works, Bernheim Family (1910)
and Closing Chapters of a Busy Life (1929). He also wrote History
of the Settlement of the Jews in Paducah and the Lower
Ohio Valley (1912).
[Sefton D. Temkin]
474 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3