Reform Judaism

Emancipation in Europe

Legal emancipation occurred at different times for European Jews, depending on a variety of factors within each nation-state. French Jews obtained the rights of citizenship in 1791, but Jews in the Russian Empire did not gain the same rights until 1917. Prior to emancipation, European Jews lived in semiautonomous communities in which they observed Halakha (Jewish law) and were beholden to the decisions of their local rabbis. The government of the state in which they resided imposed laws as well, including taxes, fines, and restrictions in terms of where Jews could live and what occupations they could hold. Jews exercised some “group rights,” in that their own leaders governed their daily lives, but they could not exercise many of the individual rights granted to their fellow non-Jewish citizens. Emancipation provided for the same individual rights accorded to non-Jews but [Page 1057]eliminated group rights. State governments intended that Jews would assimilate into the larger national culture. Many Jews converted to Christianity to obtain the social benefits associated with Christian identity. Reformers, however, struggled to counter these conversions by offering a form of Judaism that would retain Jewish tradition and some practices but allow for social adaptation and mobility.

Catalysts for European Reform

The beginnings of the reform movement were interwoven with the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). The proponents of the Haskalah, called maskilim, advocated the adoption among Jews of Enlightenment values, such as rights and liberties based on common law, as well as Jewish interaction with the wider society. The Haskalah, like the reform movement, emerged first in western Europe and only gradually moved to the east.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), a founding figure of the Haskalah, did not support the broader institutional reforms later advanced by the Reformers, but his translation of the Hebrew Bible into High German allowed Jews with waning knowledge of Hebrew to read the text and encouraged the use of German. Knowledge of Hebrew had decreased as German Jews increasingly emphasized secular education at the expense of Jewish learning. The translation provided a resource for Jews who desired to know the Bible and to live as modern Germans.

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