In the early 1800’s in Germany,
most big cities had an all-powerful chief Rabbi,
appointed by the government and charged with making all Jewish decisions,
even acting as a Judge in Jewish matters.
If you were Jewish, you were supposed to listen to the guy.
In each city there was just one synagogue and one chief Rabbi.
This didn’t sit well with a bunch of Jews influenced by enlightenment ideas.
They wanted to apply scientific study to Judaism,
which was known as the Wissenschaft des Yubentums
- their main goal was to promote morality rather than a religion mostly based
on supernatural claims.
A “reform” of Judaism, if you will.
And in modernizing their traditions, they hoped it would prove they could be treated
as equal citizens with equal rights – as talked about in the previous video on Emancipation.
Some of their first changes were in the prayer book.
They took out references to Jerusalem being their true home because they felt at home
in Germany and weren’t dreaming of returning to Jerusalem.
They heard sermons in German rather than drashes in Yiddish.
They stopped wearing kippahs, added organ music, and had shorter services.
Traditional Rabbis rejected all of these changes, but eventually in some cities an event would
occur causing a shift.
For instance, in Berlin, the city’s synagogue needed renovations so for a while Jews gathered
in smaller spaces instead.
In the smaller groups – these new rulings became popular.
In the late 1830s a young liberal group of Rabbis, drawn to these reform movements, gathered
together by Rabbi Abraham Geiger, began having conferences.
It was a small group.
These weren’t traditional Rabbis – in fact, some were so liberal they couldn’t get jobs.
They started saying what should and shouldn’t be done in Judaism.
They talked about which rituals they wanted to continue and which didn’t have meaning
any more to them.
They mostly got rid of the laws that you could put in the category of
“Judaism is strange because..."
– namely, ritual laws whose purposes were not only unclear, they sometimes
made it difficult to be a part of German culture.
Kashrut (kosher), for instance, made it impossible for a Jew to eat with a non-Jew.
The reformers said the purpose of the religion was to feel holy, to feel spiritual, and to
be moral.
And a lot of these ritual laws
– maybe they worked when they were first set up but
they no longer worked that way.
And in the 1840’s, between the the small communities, the conferences, the ideology,
it’s the start of what we’d now call a movement.
The ideology said that Judaism needs to continue evolving, as humans have always shaped it.
They rejected the idea that the Talmud was revelation – Oral Torah.
It’s a human product.
Until the Reform movement, there was no such thing as ‘Orthodoxy.’
There was just Judaism.
The label Orthodoxy emerged as the voice
that rejected the Reform movement on behalf of tradition
It said “Nope!
The Oral Torah was revealed at Sinai!
You can’t just reject huge portions of it.
You can’t deny the authority of the Torah as interpreted by the Rabbis.
And what you’re doing is invalid for that reason.”
There was a further splinter movement called neo-Orthodoxy,
what we’d now call Modern Orthodoxy, which allowed some very small concessions.
For instance, Samson Raphael Hirsch, a leader of that movement, allowed men to shave their breads.
Part of the reason modern Orthodoxy was so important, was that Hirsch said, “Listen
we’re not going to all agree.
We’re going to have multiple organizations.
Multiple synagogues.”
He insisted that the Jewish community of Frankfurt formally split.
So whereas before everyone was unified under one official way of being Jewish and there
were these little pop ups of other ways of being Jewish, Hirsh is the one who said, “I’m
tired of fighting – You go do your thing.
And I’ll do my thing.
We don’t even want to talk to you.
Go do something separate.”
It was a really important transition, and it’s a piece of beginning to think about
distinct movements of Judaism, rather than everyone arguing about the one way all Jews
should be Jewish in the modern world.
Another critic of Reform, Zecharia Frankel split from the Reformers over whether to pray
in German instead of Hebrew.
Was it more important for people to understand what they were saying or for people to pray
the same way their grandparents prayed?
He accepted the scientific study of Judaism but remained commited to tradition.
He went on to form what ultimately became Conservative Judaism.
He formed the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau
which inspired the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
which became the heart of the Conservative movement as we know it today
By the second half of the nineteenth century the Liberal Jewish movement in Germany was
by far the majority.
Around this time more and more Jews started moving to America.
There, the Reform and Conservative movements reached new heights.
So…how did Judaism spread in America?
Well that's a story for another time.