Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present)
Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present)
The new situation
The criteria used to identify dividing points in the history of the Jews and Judaism are especially notable when it comes to the start of the modern period. Historians of thought traditionally place this point in the late 17th century, with the appearance of those who abandoned, in part or in toto, their inherited Jewish faith but continued to regard themselves—and to be regarded by others—as Jews. Some Israeli scholars prefer a date of about 1700, with the first stirrings of the emigration from the Diaspora to the Holy Land, which culminated in the mid-20th century in the creation of the State of Israel. Political and social historians put the start of the modern period in the second half of the 18th century, when the American and French revolutions eventually resulted in the emancipation of Jews from discriminatory and segregative laws and customs, their attainment of legal status as citizens, and the freedom of individual Jews to pursue careers appropriate to their talents. These varying approaches have one thing in common: the view that the start of the modern period is marked by the end of the doctrine of the exile, whereby Jews saw themselves as a people waiting out centuries of woe in alien lands until the moment of divine redemption. Jewish modernity for most scholars is characterized by the end of a passive waiting for the messiah and the beginning of an active pursuit of personal or national fulfillment on this earth and preferably in one’s own lifetime.
Although the 18th century Haskala (Enlightenment) among the Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe is often taken as the starting point of Jewish modernity, the process of Westernization had begun a good deal earlier among the Sephardim in western Europe and in Italy. The Marranos who went to the Jewish communities of Amsterdam and Venice in the 17th century to declare themselves Jews carried with them the Western education that they had acquired while living as Christians in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the habits of criticism that had kept them from assimilating into the majority during their Marrano years. Some, such as Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632–77), a son of Marranos, applied these skills to all of the biblical tradition, including especially their own religion. In Italy there was an older Jewish community that had never been sealed off culturally from the influence of its environment; some of its figures were influenced by, and participated in, the main currents of the Renaissance.
Increased contact with Western languages, manners, and customs came to the Ashkenazim only in the 18th century, when new economic opportunities created such possibilities. Jewish bankers and brokers in various German principalities, army provisioners in most European countries, capitalists who were permitted to live in places such as Berlin because they opened new factories or were otherwise helpful to the expansion of the economy—all were in increasing contact with Gentile society, and most of them began to strive for full acceptance. Around this wealthy element there arose a number of intellectuals who agitated for the end of ghettoization as a necessary preamble to the emancipation of the Jews.
The Haskala, or Enlightenment
In central Europe
The most outstanding figure of the 18th-century Jewish Enlightenment was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), a devoted adherent of traditional Judaism who turned away from the historic Jewish preoccupation with the Talmud and its literature to the intellectual world of the European Enlightenment. Mendelssohn did not attempt a philosophical defense of Judaism until pressed to do so by Christians who questioned how he could remain faithful to what they saw as an unenlightened religion. In his response, Jerusalem, published in 1783, Mendelssohn defended the validity of Judaism as the inherited faith of the Jews by defining it as revealed divine legislation, and he declared himself at the same time to be a believer in the universal religion of reason, of which Judaism was but one historical manifestation. Aware that he was accepted by Gentile society as an “exceptional Jew” who had embraced Western culture, Mendelssohn’s message to his own community was to become Westerners, to seek out the culture of the Enlightenment. To that end he joined with a poet, Naphtali Herz (Hartwig) Wessely (1725–1805), in translating the Torah into German, combining Hebrew characters with modern German phonetics in an effort to displace Yiddish, and wrote a modern biblical commentary in Hebrew, the Beʾur (“Commentary”). Within a generation, Mendelssohn’s Bible was to be found in almost every literate Jewish home in central Europe, serving to introduce its readers to German culture. Through his personal example and his life’s work, Mendelssohn made it possible for his fellow Jews to join the Western world without sacrificing their Judaism; indeed, he convinced them that Judaism is compatible with an intellectual commitment to universal reason.
Mendelssohn’s work was carried on by the Berlin Haskala, a group of Jewish intellectuals who had gathered around Mendelssohn during his lifetime; the Haskala was most active in the 20 years following his death. In the pages of their Hebrew-language periodical, Ha-Meʾassef (“The Collector”), they preached the virtues of secular culture and publicized the need for secular education. In response to the Edict of Toleration promulgated in 1781 by the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II (reigned 1765–90), Naphtali Wessely issued an urgent call for the reform of Jewish education as a prelude to full emancipation. Secular subjects—mathematics, German, and world history and literature—were to take precedence over traditional Jewish studies. The study of the Bible, because it was generally acknowledged to be a fundamental part of Western culture, was to be emphasized at the expense of the customary focus on the Talmud. Following this model, modern Jewish schools were established by Jewish intellectuals and businessmen in several German cities, among them Frankfurt and Hamburg. As its educational activities began to bear fruit in the wide dissemination of secular culture, the Berlin Haskala abandoned the use of Hebrew for German and gradually disintegrated. Unlike Mendelssohn himself, his immediate intellectual descendants, including his own children, were unable to strike a balance between Jewish and secular culture; their Western education undermined their religious faith, and they saw themselves as Europeans rather than as Jews.
One of Mendelssohn’s disciples, David Friedlaender, offered to convert to Christianity without accepting Christian dogma or Christian rites; he felt that both Judaism and Christianity shared the same religious truth but that there was no relation at all between that truth and Judaism’s ceremonial law. The offer was refused because Friedlaender would not acknowledge the superiority of Christianity and make an unconditional commitment to it. Unlike Friedlaender, many other followers of Mendelssohn chose to leave the Jewish faith as the only way to win full acceptance in European society.
In eastern Europe
Thus, the Haskala was quickly played out in central Europe; as an idea, its further career was to continue in eastern Europe, particularly in the Russian Empire, where it flourished in the middle third of the 19th century until, as a result of the pogroms of 1881, Jews lost faith in the willingness of Russians to accept “enlightened” Jews. It was a tenet of the Russian Haskala that the tsar was a benevolent leader who would bestow emancipation upon his Jewish subjects as soon as they proved themselves worthy of it. A goal of the Russian Haskala, therefore, was for the Jews to transform themselves into model citizens—enlightened, unsuperstitious, devoted to secular learning and productive occupations. Following the example of the Berlin Haskala, a Russian Hebrew-language writer, Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–1860), published a pamphlet, TeÊ¿uda be-Yisrael (“Testimony in Israel”), extolling the benefits of secular education. At the same time, writers such as Joseph Perl (1774–1839) and Isaac Erter (1792–1851), though traditional Jews themselves, attacked in virulent satire the superstitious folk customs of the masses, thereby opening the way to the anticlericalism that became characteristic of the Russian Haskala.
In the 1840s and ’50s the group’s emphasis shifted from satirical attacks on the cultural parochialism of the Pale of Settlement (the regions to which the Jews were restricted) to romanticization of life outside the Pale, including periods of the Jewish past. Thus, Hebrew poets and novelists in Russia, such as Micah Judah Lebensohn (1828–52) and Abraham Mapu (1808–67), contributed to the creation of a modern Hebrew literature. In the 1860s the Russian Haskala, reflecting the larger political climate, entered a “positivist” phase, calling for practical social and economic reforms. Hebrew-language journals were established, and the Hebrew essay and didactic poetry, calling for religious and cultural reforms, came into their own, particularly in the hands of the poet Judah Leib Gordon (1830–92) and the essayist Moses Leib Lilienblum (1843–1910). Abandoning the original Hebrew and German orientation of the Russian Haskala, a number of Jewish intellectuals—the most prominent of whom were Yoachim Tarnopol (1810–1900), Osip Rabinovich (1817–69), and Lev Levanda (1835–88)—became Russifiers, founding Russian-language Jewish weeklies devoted to “patriotism, emancipation, modernism.” Like their contemporary fellow Jews in western Europe, they declared themselves to be Russians by nationality and Jews by religious belief alone. In 1863 a group of wealthy Jews in St. Petersburg and Odessa created the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia for the purpose of educating Russian Jewry into “readiness for citizenship.” The goal of all segments of the Russian Haskala in the 1860s and ’70s was to turn Jews into good Russians and to make their Jewishness a matter of personal choice. But the hopes of the Haskala were upset by the reaction of Russians following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Several Jewish communities were destroyed in pogroms, which often received the tacit approval of the governing authorities. Jewish economic life was severely curtailed, and quotas for Jewish students were put in place in secular educational institutions. The bright optimism of Russian-Jewish intellectuals faded.
Religious reform movements
One element of Westernization that the Haskala championed was the reform of religion. This movement began in western Europe during the Napoleonic period (1800–15), when certain aspects of Jewish belief and observance were seen as incompatible with the new position of the Jew in Western society. Napoleon convoked a Sanhedrin in 1807 to create a modern definition of Judaism that renounced Jewish nationhood and national aspirations, asserted that rabbinic authority was purely spiritual, and recognized the priority of civil over religious authority even in matters of intermarriage. In countries other than France, the rationale for reform, at least in its early years, was more aesthetic than doctrinal. The external aspects of Jewish worship—i.e., the form of the service—was unacceptable to the newly Westernized members of the Jewish bourgeoisie in both Germany and the United States, whose cultural standards had been shaped by the surrounding society and who desired above all to resemble their Gentile peers. Thus, the short-lived Reform temple established in Seesen in 1810 by the pioneer German reformer Israel Jacobson (1768–1828) introduced organ and choir music, allowed men and women to sit together during worship, delivered the sermon in German instead of Hebrew, and omitted liturgical references to a personal messiah and the restoration of Israel. A more radical temple established in Hamburg in 1818 adopted all of Jacobson’s reforms and published its own much-abridged prayer book, which deleted almost all references to the long-awaited restoration of Zion. Reformers in Charleston, South Carolina, introduced similar changes in the synagogue ritual in 1824. It was apparent to the reformers that in Western society Judaism would have to divest itself of its alien customs and conform to the cultural and intellectual standards of the new “age of reason.”
German Reform in the 1840s became institutionalized, a matter of organized formal belief and practice. At a series of synods held at Brunswick (1844), Frankfurt (1845), and Breslau (1846), it created the first theological rationalization for changes introduced to the faith in the previous generation. Judaism, it was declared, had always been a developmental religion that conformed to the demands of the times. Moreover, the reformers maintained, the Jews were no longer a nation and therefore were bound not by their religious and political code of law but only by the dictates of moral law. Rituals that impeded full Jewish participation in German social and political life were no longer considered valid expressions of Jewish religious truth. The use of Hebrew in religious services was limited; practices such as circumcision and the dietary laws and all national messianic hopes were questioned in light of the “spirit of the times.” Messianism in Reform Judaism was transformed into active concern for social welfare in the present, and the Jewish role in history became Diaspora-centred; some even thought of it as constituting a mission to the Gentiles.
Although Reform Judaism was initiated in Europe, its success was limited there because many central European governments would not recognize more than one form of Judaism in any one locale. Even in areas where it had taken root, by the middle of the 19th century, European Reform (now usually called “Liberal Judaism”) lost much of its early radicalism. Reform was much more successful in the United States, where it was carried by massive numbers of German Jewish immigrants in the 1840s and where it coalesced with existing American reform movements. By 1880 almost all of the 200 synagogues in the United States (amalgamated in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873) were Reform. In 1885 a conference of Reform rabbis formulated what was then the most comprehensive statement of Reform philosophy in the so-called Pittsburgh Platform. This manifesto announced that Judaism was an evolutionary faith and no longer a national one, and it declared that the Mosaic and rabbinical laws regulating diet, purity, and dress were “entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state.” While the preservation of historical identity was considered beneficial, the maintenance of tradition was not; the Talmud was to be treated merely as religious literature, not as legislation. The principles of the Pittsburgh Platform remained the official philosophy of the American Reform movement until 1937, when a later generation, seeking to meet different emotional and intellectual needs, reintroduced the concept of Jewish personhood into the Columbus Platform; this document also reemphasized Hebrew and traditional liturgy and practices. After World War II, Reform in the United States developed along two tracks. It departed in new ways from traditional Judaism in ordaining women (1972), allowing patrilineal descent (1983), and sanctifying same-sex marriage (2000). On the other hand, some Reform Jews began reintegrating long-discarded rituals into worship services. This neo-ritualism stimulated greater use of Hebrew in prayer books and a more dynamic Zionism.
If Reform was a child of Enlightenment rationalism, Conservative Judaism was a child of historical romanticism. It began in 1845, when Zacharias Frankel (1801–75) and a group of followers seceded from a second Reform synod at Frankfurt over the issue of limiting the use of Hebrew to a small core of prayers. For Frankel, Hebrew represented the spirit of Judaism and the Jewish people, and Judaism itself was not merely a theology of ethics but the historical expression of the Jewish experience; this definition he called “positive-historical Judaism.” Although Conservative Judaism conceived of Judaism as a developmental religion, it charted its course through close study of tradition and the will of the people and thus came to largely traditional conclusions about religious observance.
Orthodox developments
In western and central Europe
Although affected by the efforts at religious reform, the bulk of the official Jewish establishment in western and central Europe remained Orthodox (a term first used by Reform leaders to designate their traditionalist opponents). Under the leadership of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) in Frankfurt, a more modern and militant form of Judaism arose. Known as Neo-Orthodoxy, the new movement asserted its right to break with any Jewish community that contained Reform elements. The teachings of Neo-Orthodoxy were profoundly influential, for they indicated the possibility of living a ritually and religiously full life while being totally integrated into Western society. This was accomplished by positing a theoretical division between religion and culture: in religion the Jews were to remain Orthodox (though deferring their messianic aspirations to the unforeseeable future), while in manners and culture they were to become Western. This form of Orthodoxy, which became the intellectual model for Western Orthodoxy, continued into the 21st century in the United States in a variety of religious and academic institutions (such as the Yeshiva University in New York City and the bulk of English-speaking Orthodox synagogues), coexisting in substantial tension with a number of Orthodox groups, most notably the Lubavitcher and Satmar Hasidim (see Hasidism) and some Talmudic academies that viewed the Western world as the enemy and chose to re-create the ghetto.
In eastern Europe
By the mid-18th century, Orthodoxy in eastern Europe, having been convulsed by frantic messianism and stifled by the sterility of legalistic scholarship, was ripe for revival. In the mid-17th century the experience of Shabbetaianism, the first messianic movement to excite virtually all of world Jewry, had revealed the pervasiveness of Jewish exhaustion with the Exile and fervent longing for messianic redemption. Later, in the 18th century, the nihilistic sect of Frankists (the followers of Jacob Frank) transformed that longing into a this-worldly hysteria. Talmudic piety and study, sunk in excessive pilpul (acute logical distinctions that often became mere hairsplitting), was refreshed by the new critical methods of Elijah ben Solomon (1720–97), the gaon of Vilna. Although essentially a legal rigorist, he was open to more-scientific methods of textual analysis insofar as they helped him to elucidate Talmudic texts. Orthodox religious expression also was raised to a new level with the development of Hasidism (pietism) by Israel BaÊ¿al Shem Tov (c. 1700–60) in the mid-18th century. Hasidism contained elements of social protest, being at least in part a movement of the poor against the wealthy communal leadership and of the unlearned against the learned—though many of its leaders, among them Rabbi Dov Baer (1710–72), who was the maggid (“preacher”) of Mezhirich, and Rabbi Levi Isaac of Berdichev (1740–1810), were well-versed in Talmudic learning. Nevertheless, it was essentially a non-messianic outcry in the name of piety, emphasizing prayer and personal religious devotion here and now. The major innovation that Hasidism introduced into Jewish religious life was the charismatic leader, the rebbe, who served as teacher, confessor, wonder-worker, God’s vicar on earth, and, occasionally, atoning sacrifice. The earliest rebbes were democratically chosen, but spiritual dynasties formed as the position of leadership passed to the descendants of the first rebbes on the presumption that they had inherited their fathers’ charisma. Hasidism spread throughout eastern Europe and was most successful in Poland.
Hasidism made little headway in Lithuania, where the traditional rabbinic class, under the leadership of Elijah ben Solomon, was able to stave off its influence by issuing a ban of excommunication (ḥerem, “anathema”) against the new movement. The tactic, which involved a complete boycott and cutting off of communication, was widely embraced by non-Hasidic rabbis, who were given the title of Mitnaggedim (“Opponents”) by the Hasidim. In areas where the rabbis had lost the respect of the masses, however, the ḥerem proved largely ineffective, and it called forth a round of counter-excommunications by the Hasidic rebbes. With the passage of time, Hasidim and Mitnaggedim abandoned their conflict and came to see each other as allies against the threat to all Orthodox Jewish religion posed by Haskala and secularization. The impact of Hasidism on eastern European Jewry cannot be overemphasized; even in Lithuania, where it did not take firm hold, it stimulated the growth of a homegrown pietism in the Musar (ethicist) movement of the mid-19th century, and it renewed the Talmudic energies of its opponents.
Developments in scholarship
As the Jews of central Europe moved into mainstream society, a group of young Jewish intellectuals devoted themselves to Jewish scholarship of a type far different from traditional Talmudic learning or medieval philosophy. In 1819 Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) and Moses Moser (1796–1838) founded the Society for Jewish Culture and Learning. The original group quickly dissolved, however, and Zunz became the unofficial leader of a generation of scholars dedicated to the Wissenschaft des Judentums (“science of Judaism”).
The Wissenschaft movement sought to prove that the Jewish past was intellectually respectable and worthy of study, and hence that the Jews deserved an equal place within European societies. Jewish scholarship was enlisted as a weapon in the battles for change. Thus, Isaac M. Jost (1793–1860) wrote a general history of the Jews to promote Reform, Zunz’s Gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (1832; “The Worship Sermons of the Jews, Historically Developed”) served to legitimize the modern innovation of the sermon in the vernacular, and Abraham Geiger (1810–74), the outstanding leader of German Reform in the 1840s and ’50s, interpreted the Pharisees as the forerunners of the reformers of his own day. In their work, these intellectuals presented archetypes of what modern Jews should become. To support their claims of academic respectability, the Wissenschaft figures highlighted those aspects of the Jewish past that were closely integrated with general fields of study. In particular, Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), who owes his fame to towering achievements in bibliography, was concerned above all with the contribution of Jews to science, medicine, and mathematics. These scholars set out to praise Judaism as one of the cofounders of the Western tradition; they argued that, because the Jews produced great culture whenever they were not excluded from European society, they would repeat such accomplishments under conditions of social and political equality.
The Wissenschaft movement stimulated the critical study of the Jewish past, and great works of synthesis written from a variety of perspectives began to appear: the multivolume Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1853–76; History of the Jews), written from a romantic-national point of view by Heinrich Graetz (1817–91); Dorot ha-rishonim (1897–1932; “The First Generations”), by Isaac Halevy (1847–1914); Toldot Yisrael (1894; “History of Israel”), written from an orthodox standpoint by Zeʾev Jawitz; and Die Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (1925–30; “The World History of the Jewish People”) by Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), reflecting his belief in secular, nationalistic communal autonomy. After the 1920s this tradition of great synthesis was carried on in the United States by Salo W. Baron (1895–1989), who by the early 1980s had produced 18 volumes of his Social and Religious History of the Jews (1952–83), and in Israel by Ben-Zion Dinur (1884–1973), whose chief work was Yisrael ba-gola (3rd ed., 5 vol., 1961–66; “Israel in the Exile”). Many other first-rank scholars in Europe, Israel, and the United States have made notable contributions to the study of Jewish history, rabbinics, and mysticism.
Jewish-Christian relations
Jewish-Christian relations in the 19th century were strained at best and often broke down during periods of open conflict. The established Christian churches, particularly Roman Catholicism, were staunch upholders of the old order; they identified the Jews as the major beneficiaries of the French Revolution and as the carriers of liberal, secular, anticlerical, and often revolutionary doctrines. Clerical anti-Semitism allied itself with the anti-Semitism of the traditional right in France, and both forms contended with movements that supported the results of the French Revolution in the great convulsion of the Dreyfus Affair in the last years of the 19th century. In Russia the conflict between the Jews and the Orthodox Church released the most open and virulent manifestation of religious anti-Semitism. In the view of the church, the Jews were seeking to undermine Russian Orthodoxy and the tsar, the very foundations of Russian society. The church and the tsarist authorities condoned—and even encouraged—violent pogroms against the Jews in 1881–82 and again in 1905.
Russian Orthodoxy was also active in spreading the blood libel, a superstitious belief in Jewish ritual murder of Christian children whose blood would be used to make unleavened bread at Passover. The blood libel first emerged in the 12th century and often led to the persecution of Jews; it reemerged in Damascus in 1840 (in which instance the French consul in Syria initiated the accusation) and in Tiszaeszlár, Hungary, in 1882. In both cases, torture was used to obtain false confessions, though the accused were ultimately cleared. The most infamous occurrence of the blood libel in modern times was the case of Mendel Beilis, a Jewish bookkeeper in Odessa who was accused of ritual murder by the tsarist government in 1911. Imprisoned for more than two years, he was eventually acquitted by an all-Christian jury.
From Russian Orthodox circles too arose the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent documentation of an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world by subverting the social order through liberalism, Freemasonry, and other modern movements. The concoction appeared about the turn of the 20th century and was proved to be a forgery by 1921. Despite this demonstration, the Protocols was widely used in anti-Semitic propaganda in Europe, the United States, and the Arab world into the 21st century.
In the 20th century, Jews and Christians moved toward mutual understanding. Although many Christians continued to hold irrational and hostile attitudes toward Jews, some liberal Christian voices were raised against anti-Semitism in the early decades of the century. In the United States the National Conference of Christians and Jews was founded in 1928 in response to the virulent anti-Semitism propagated in Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Some Christian leaders spoke out during the 1930s against the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but the majority of Christian leaders in Europe remained silent, even during the Holocaust. In 1946, however, the World Council of Churches denounced anti-Semitism, and in 1965 the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church adopted the schema on the Jews and other non-Christian religions, which formally revised the church’s traditional attitude toward the Jews as the killers of Christ. A growing feeling of ecumenism was shared between Jews and Christians; indeed, Pope John Paul II made improved relations between Catholics and Jews a hallmark of his papacy. Although there remain many difficulties related to the question of the place that Zionism and the State of Israel hold within Judaism, the older forms of official church anti-Semitism have been radically diminished.
Zionism
The most striking of the new phenomena in Jewish life was Zionism, which, insofar as it focused on the return to Zion (the poetic term for the Holy Land), recalled older religious themes. Because it stressed the establishment of a secular state, however, Zionism was yet another example of the secularization of Jewish life and of Jewish messianism. In its secular aspects, Zionism attempted to complete the emancipation of the Jews by transforming them into a nation like all other nations. Although it drew upon the general currents of 19th-century European nationalism, its major impetus came from the revival of a virulent form of racist anti-Semitism in the last decades of the 19th century, as noted above. Zionism reacted to anti-Semitic contentions that the Jews were aliens in European society and could never hope to be integrated into it in significant numbers; it transformed this charge into a basic premise of a program of national regeneration and resettlement. Zionism has come to occupy roughly the same place in Jewish life as the Social Gospel did in Christian life. Involvement in Israel as the new centre of Jewish energies, creativity, and renewal served as a kind of secular religion for many Diaspora Jews.
American Judaism
The history of Judaism in the United States is the story of several fresh beginnings. In the colonial period the character of the tiny American Jewish community was shaped by the earliest Sephardic immigrants. The community was officially Orthodox but, unlike European Jewish communities, was voluntaristic, and by the early 19th century much of the younger generation had moved away from the faith. By the mid-19th century a new wave of central European immigrants revived the declining community and remade it to serve their own needs. Primarily small shopkeepers and traders, the new immigrants migrated westward, founding new Jewish centres that were almost entirely controlled by laymen.
Temple Emmanuel synagogue, New York City, 1896.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Life on the frontier in an open society created a predisposition for religious reform, and it is significant that the greatest American Reform Jewish leader of the 19th century, Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900), was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Wise sought to unite all of American Jewry in the new nontraditional institutions that he founded: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), Hebrew Union College (1875), and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1889); but his ever more radical reforming spirit ultimately drove traditionalist elements into opposition.
The head of the traditionalists was Isaac Leeser (1806–68), a native of Germany, who had attempted to create an indigenous American community along the lines of a modernized traditionalism. After his death, Conservative forces became disorganized, but, in reaction to Reform, they defined themselves by their attachment to the Sabbath, the dietary laws, and especially to Hebrew as the language of prayer. Under the leadership of Sabato Morais (1823–97), a traditional Sephardic Jew of Italian birth, Conservative circles in 1886 founded a rabbinic seminary of their own, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
The eastern European immigrants who moved in large numbers to American shores from 1881 to 1914 were profoundly different in culture and manners from the older elements of the American Jewish community, and they and their descendants have made American Judaism what it is today. The bridge between the existing Jewish community led by German Jews of Reform persuasion and the new immigrant masses was the traditionalist element among the older settlers. A traditionalist, Cyrus Adler (1863–1940), cooperated with the German Reform circle of Jacob Schiff (1847–1920) in reorganizing the Jewish Theological Seminary (1902) and other institutions for the purpose of Americanizing the eastern European immigrants. Enough eastern European rabbis and scholars had immigrated, however, to create their own synagogues, which reproduced the customs of the Old World. In 1880 almost all of the 200 Jewish congregations in the United States were Reform, but by 1890 there were 533 synagogues, and most of the new ones founded by immigrant groups were Orthodox. The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, which was established in 1898 by elements associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary, was soon taken over by Yiddish-speaking recent immigrants for whom the seminary was much too liberal. In 1902 immigrant rabbis also formed their own body, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada (the Agudath ha-Rabbanim), which fostered the creation of yeshivas (rabbinic academies) of the old type. In 1915 two small yeshivas, Etz Chaim and Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary, merged and undertook a program of further growth, adding Yeshiva College of secular studies in 1928 and becoming Yeshiva University in 1945. The eastern European Orthodox elements concentrated primarily on Jewish education, and it was they who introduced the movement for Jewish day schools, analogous to Christian parochial schools. Gradually, an American version of Orthodoxy developed on the Neo-Orthodox model of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), which combined institutional separatism with a certain openness to general culture.
The immigrants and their children had three desires: to advance socially by joining older congregations or forming their own in an Americanized image, to affirm an unideological commitment to Jewish life, and to maintain their ties to the overseas Jewish communities of their origin. With their strong sense of Jewish personhood, they introduced Zionism into American Jewish life and accepted the basic ideas of the Reconstructionism of Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), which was committed to Zionism. A small group of anti-Zionists remained a significant force in the 1930s and ’40s, but their central organization, the American Council for Judaism, represented the descendants of earlier German Jewish immigrants. The later immigrants took over all the earlier institutions of the Jewish community and imbued them with their own spirit.
American Jewish religious life is a continuum, from the most traditional Orthodoxy to the most radical Reconstructionism. In theory, all Orthodox groups agree on the revealed nature of all of Jewish law. For Reform groups, the moral doctrine of Judaism is divine and its ritual law is man-made; Conservatives see Judaism as the working out in both areas of a divine revelation that is incarnate in a slowly changing human history; and the Reconstructionists (who also include some Conservative and Reform Jews) view Judaism as the evolving civilization created by the Jewish people in the light of its highest conscience. The role of the rabbi is substantially the same in all three groups: no longer a Talmudic scholar but a preacher, pastor, and administrator, a cross between a parish priest and the leader of an ethnic group. Religious life for the three major Jewish denominations—Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative—revolves around the individual synagogue and the denomination to which it belongs. As religious identification has become increasingly respectable in American life, the Jews have followed the American norm, affiliating in greater numbers with synagogues, though often for ethnic or social rather than religious reasons.
Judaism in other lands
Modernity came first to the Jewish people of Europe. It was therefore within the European context that representatives of important non-Ashkenazi communities—such as the proto-Zionist Sephardi Judah ben Solomon Ḥai Alkalai (1798–1878) of Sarajevo and the Luzzatto family and Elijah Benamozegh (1822–1900) in Italy—participated in variations of Jewish modernity. In England and France more so than in Germany or Russia, the central focus of Jewish experience was Wissenschaft des Judentums, with its Enlightenment ideology; there the “republic of scholarship” became the synagogue of the Jewish intelligentsia. In neither country did Reform Judaism gain a major foothold, for the Orthodox establishment liberalized its synagogue practice while retaining its essentially conservative outlook. In Anglo-Jewish life in the last decades of the 19th century, the two most pronounced modernist tendencies were the moderate, romantic traditionalism of Solomon Schechter (1847–1915) and the “renewed Karaism” of Claude Joseph Goldsmid Montefiore (1858–1938), whose version of religious reform was “back to the Bible.”
In South America and Canada, Jewish modernity appeared late, for European Jewry arrived in those places even later than in the United States, attaining significant numbers only in the 20th century. These communities were dependent on immigrant scholars and intellectuals for serious Jewish thought. Jews in the Arab lands in North Africa and the Middle East, living in traditional societies, entered modernity even later than those on the peripheries of Europe. Many of them received their first introduction to the Western world in schools set up by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (a Jewish defense organization centred in Paris), which combined Jewish education with the language and values of French civilization. Yet most of these communities remained traditionalist almost up to the moment when they were expelled or felt compelled to relocate, beginning in 1948, when the State of Israel was created. The ferment of modernity in all its forms is now being felt in their ranks. In Israel, which has received a large segment of Sephardic Jewry, the attention of these communities has turned to gaining equality with the more advanced Ashkenazim rather than to developing forms of modern Jewish thought.
Other groups that may be described as regional or ethnic include the Bene Israel, descendants of Jewish settlers in the Bombay region (now Mumbai) of India, whose deviation in some Halakhic matters from the present Orthodox consensus has raised problems for those among them who have migrated to Israel; the Falashas of Ethiopia, whose development has been almost entirely outside the mainstream described in this article; and the Black Jews of the United States, whose place in and relation to the rest of the community remains unclear.
Contemporary Judaism
As a result of the Holocaust, Judaism has become a non-European religion; its three major centres, which together include more than three-fourths of world Jewry, are Israel, the Slavic region of the former Soviet Union, and the United States. Although Jews constitute only a small fraction of the population of the United States, Judaism plays an important role in American life; with Roman Catholicism and Protestantism it is regarded as one of the major American faiths. Similarly, in the international realm of Western religion, Judaism has been welcomed as a partner able to deal with other major religions as an equal on issues such as anti-Semitism, human rights, and world peace.
Within its own community, Jewry is faced with the increasing secularization of Jewish identity in its three major centres, each in its own way. In the United States the open society and the “melting pot” ideologies of past generations have fostered among many Jews a sense of Jewish identity increasingly devoid of concrete religious, national, or historical content; in the former Soviet Union, government policy from the 1930s had banned the teaching of Judaism and Jewish culture to the young and had severely discouraged any manifestation of Jewish identity as a sign of the political disloyalty of “rootless cosmopolitans”; and in Israel a secular nationalism has taken root, raising questions about the role that Judaism plays in the identity of the average Israeli.
Nonetheless, underneath the external secularization there are signs of a deep and persisting religious fervour, in which the sense of history, community, and personal authenticity figure as the intertwined strands of Jewish religious life, especially as it has been affected by the State of Israel. Some of the rituals of the Jewish tradition, especially the rites of passage at the crucial stages of individual existence, are almost universally observed; in the United States, for example, more than 80 percent of Jewish children receive some formal religious training. Among Jewish youth there is, in some circles, a quest for tradition. In the United States, Jewish communes have been established that seek new forms of Jewish expression; in Israel, groups such as Mevaqshe Derekh (“Seekers of the Way”) have tried to bridge secular Israeli culture and Jewish tradition and to maintain traditional Jewish ethical standards even in wartime; in Russia, thousands of young people gather on several occasions of the year to dance and sing and express solidarity in front of the synagogues in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, signs of major weaknesses persist. The rate of intermarriage among Jews in the Diaspora has increased, while regular synagogue attendance, at the very highest 20 percent in the United States, remains far below church attendance.
Despite their lack of traditional piety, there is a general sense among Jews that they remain Jews not because of the force of anti-Semitism but because of the attractiveness of their tradition and their sense of a common history and destiny. Although in 1945 the world Jewish community, decimated and horrified by the Holocaust, felt in danger of disappearing, there appeared to be no such despair in the last quarter of the century, when there was an expectation that Jewish communal feeling would remain strong—especially, for many or most Jews, in light of the existence of the State of Israel. Judaism enjoyed a heightened dignity in the eyes of the world, not only because of the creation of the State of Israel but also because of Judaism’s close relations with other world religions. Although the recurring phenomenon of the alienation of young Jews from their tradition was troubling, it was no more so than in recent past generations. Along with other major religions, Judaism’s most disturbing problem was how to deal with secular ideologies and the growth of secularism within its own ranks. Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, it appeared that Judaism would have to contend with as many problems as the other major religions did, but it would face them with no less confidence—and with more confidence than it had felt at the start of the previous century.
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