How Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism Began
Below is a script I wrote for BimBam, a Jewish Educational Media Company.
To understand the Jewish movements today, you have to go back to the early 19th Century in Germany where it all began. Every city 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 a religion that seemed rational rather than having supernatural claims and whose main goal was to promote morality. 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.
So how did they modernize the traditions?
Some of their first changes were in the prayer book. They took out references to Jerusalem being their true home, for two reasons A) It was under the Ottoman empire at this point and so the idea that anyone would pray to go back there, didn’t make sense. Also, international travel? Not quite a thing back then as much. And B)So other Germans wouldn’t think they were loyal to elsewhere.
In Synagogues in Berlin, some Jews wanted to have men and women singing together. God forbid. And a sermon in German rather than a D’var Torah in Yiddish. A shorter service, even.
The chief Rabbis rejected all of these changes, but eventually in some cities something would happen. For instance, the city’s synagogue would need renovation so for a while Jews gathered in smaller spaces instead. In the smaller groups, these new rulings became popular.
In the 1840’s a young liberal group of Rabbis, drawn to these Reform movements, began having conferences. It was a small group. These weren’t the chief Rabbis. In fact, some were so liberal they couldn’t get a job. They formed a seminary, started training more like-minded Rabbis and they started saying what should and shouldn’t be done in Judaism. One debate, that caused a major split, was on whether they could 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?
Zechariah Frankel split from the Reformers over using Hebrew in the prayer service and went on to form what ultimately became Conservative Judaism. While he understood that Judaism had evolved over history and so should continue evolving, he also believed that the written Torah was given by God on Sinai and its ideas are eternal. 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.
Those that stayed with Reform 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. 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 that way when they were created, but they no longer worked that way.
And in the 1840’s, between the seminary, 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 is revelation – is Oral Torah. It’s a human product.
Until the Reform movement, there was no such thing as ‘Orthodoxy.’ The label Orthodoxy emerged as the voice that rejected the Reform movement on behalf of tradition. It said “Nope! The Talmud was revealed at Sinai. It’s Oral Torah! 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.”
Now within Orthodoxy there was a splinter movement called neo-Orthodox, what we’d now call Modern Orthodoxy. It allowed for slight concessions like for men to shave their beards. This was important to reformers because a respected leader of the neo-Orthodox, Samson Raphael 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 Berlin 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. 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.
Now, in Germany the splinter movements remained small. It’s really in America that the movements truly flourished.
So…what happened when Jews got to America? Click to see the next video in this series.