Judaism. American Judaism began with the arrival in New Netherland of twenty‐four Sephardic Jews from Recife, Brazil in 1654. To fulfill the requirements of Jewish law, a Jewish communal governing authority (kehillah) was formed. Among its early actions was to petition the authorities for a separate Jewish burial ground.
Fifteen years later, after New Amsterdam became
New York City, bringing a more tolerant English governance, cemetery land was purchased. A permanent synagogue, Shearith Israel, including a school and a mikveh (ritual bath), was completed in 1731. By 1815 it boasted 855 members and a spiritual leader, Gershon Seixas (1746–1816). Similar patterns prevailed in the four other large colonial towns where Jews had settled in numbers (
Philadelphia, Newport,
Boston, and Charleston). Philadelphia's Jewish community, for example, purchased cemetery land in 1740 and built its first synagogue, Mikveh Israel, in 1747. Architecturally, the most noteworthy was Newport's Touro synagogue (1759).
Early Adaptations to American Culture.
From the outset, American Judaism endured communal strife rooted partly in divisions between comparatively well‐established Jews of Sephardic (Iberian) origin, usually called “Portuguese,” and Ashkenazim from central and eastern Europe. Although equally committed to their religion's monotheistic tenets, the congregations differed in social status and disagreed over variations in rituals. In addition, exilic Judaism is inherently congregational. Unlike many Christian denominations, it has no official priesthood or single head. Any ten adult Jewish males can establish a congregation; the rabbi is merely recognized as the most learned in Jewish texts. Until the late nineteenth century, with few rabbis to offer spiritual leadership, the rabbinate in England resolved questions of Jewish law.
Historic Judaism was a command religion with laws covering every detail of life. Community leaders exercised sanctions ranging from fines to the denial of Jewish burial and even, in drastic cases, excommunication. But in colonial America's comparatively free atmosphere, enforcing religious regulations, especially those pertaining to Sabbath observance, proved difficult.
Eventually, America's secularism, free atmosphere, separation of
church and state, and comparatively open economy profoundly altered the traditional cohesiveness of Jewish communities. Communal adherence became voluntary. As congregations became more democratic, the desires of the laity took precedence over Jewish law. The quest for economic well‐being both released new energies and undermined traditional piety. Jews experienced growing prosperity, especially in merchandising, in relatively open areas of the economy such as the
tobacco industry and
fur trade, and in traditional crafts like wig and soap making, leather tanning, and cutting precious stones. After 1820, the arrival of many German‐speaking Jews from central Europe further diminished prospects for establishing a single religious authority. Usually young, widely dispersed, poorly grounded in Judaism, and virtually bereft of spiritual leaders, these peddlers and merchants were poor prospects for strict religious observance. Unbound by communal fiat, the free Jews of America could no longer be commanded; they had to be persuaded.
Reform Judaism.
The two principal religious leaders in this era were Isaac Leeser (1806–1868) and Isaac Mayer
Wise. Although not ordained, Leeser became the spiritual leader of Philadelphia's congregation Mikveh Israel and worked indefatigably to protect American Judaism from both external threats and what he saw as an internal one: a reform movement whose accommodationist approach he considered incompatible with traditional Judaism. His views found expression in
The Occident, a monthly publication he founded in 1843.
Despite Leeser's efforts, Reform Judaism became dominant among the German‐Jewish immigrants. Rooted in the spirit of science and enlightenment influential among German‐Jewish scholars who sought to replace Judaism's obsession with rabbinic law with the social‐justice vision of the Hebrew prophets, American Reform Judaism was also influenced by developments in Charleston's Beth Elohim congregation in the 1820s. The Charleston reformers, embracing a new aesthetic decorum for their services, introduced choral reading of prayer and family pews rather than separate seating for men and women, and ended the sale of privileges such as reading from the Torah. Their model naturally reflected the aesthetics of the surrounding Protestant churches.
The establishment of Hebrew Union College (HUC) in 1875 and the codification of Reformist principles and practices in the so‐called Pittsburgh Platform ten years later, followed by the organization of the CCAR (Central Conference of American Rabbis) in 1889, was welcomed by CCAR's president Isaac Mayer Wise as evidence that an institutional structure for American Judaism was taking shape under Reform auspices. But Wise's vision proved premature. Rather than being one unified faith, American Judaism ultimately spawned four branches, developing a denominationalism not unlike that of Protestantism. The serving of unkosher clams at HUC's first graduation ceremony in 1883 aroused a storm of controversy that contributed to the founding of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) five years later as an Orthodox response to the Reform movement. JTS languished for more than a decade until two Reform leaders, Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall, and Cyrus Adler, a native‐born Orthodox Jew linked to the leadership group of Philadelphia, set out to reenergize it.
Conservative Judaism.
Convinced that some intermediary position between Reform and Orthodoxy could help stem the alarming religious indifference of Jewish immigrants, Schiff and Marshall in 1902 recruited Solomon Schechter, a Romanian‐born scholar and reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University, to head JTS. Schechter shaped what came to be known as Conservatism, a half‐way house between Reform and Orthodox Judaism. He advocated cultural Zionism, an ideology of Jewish “peoplehood” that would permit newly secularized Jews, especially the children of immigrants, to preserve their cultural Jewishness without necessarily adhering to religious law.
In 1913, the United Synagogue, an umbrella organization for Conservative congregations, was founded. A professional organization for its Conservative rabbis, the Rabbinic Assembly, established in 1919, coopted the powerful Committee on Jewish Law ten years later. The Conservative movement, fully in place by 1930, valued tradition and religious law while also accommodating the social environment of modern America. As Conservative spokesmen seeking to balance tradition and change sometimes put it, the past should have “a voice, but not a veto.”
Orthodox Judaism.
Predictably, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis (Agudat Harabonim), established in 1902, opposed the Conservative accommodation. It gave high priority to establishing yeshivas, religious academies devoted to the study of Judaic texts and law. The Orthodox organizational structure, which began with the establishment of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Yeshiva in New York City in 1897 and the Union of Orthodox Congregations a year later, was completed in 1927 when the two existing yehivas, Isaac Elchanan and Etz Chaim, merged to form the nucleus of Yeshiva University. It contained Yeshiva College (1928), the first liberal arts college established under Orthodox auspices. By 1930, the three‐way religious division of American Judaism was complete.
Of the three branches, the Orthodox proved the least cohesive and the least willing to adopt “American” patterns of governance. Assuming that its decisions were fiat for the committed Jewish laity, the Union named Jacob Josef chief rabbi in 1901. Steeped in the ways of Polish Orthodoxy and unable to master English, Josef failed to gain acceptance, highlighting the powerlessness of those who claimed spiritual leadership without first winning a mandate from the laity. The overextended power claims of a group of Orthodox rabbis in New York City, who imposed a tax on the sale of kosher meat and poultry, coupled with the unclear lines of Orthodox authority, set the stage for several bitter “kosher meat wars” in the early years of the twentieth century. Ultimately the civil courts arbitrated the conflict.
The Reconstruction Movement.
The Orthodox branch experienced further attrition after
World War I, as part of a larger postwar “crisis of faith.” Among the earliest to recognize the impact of the crisis was Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1993), who became head of the Jewish Theological Seminary's Teacher's Institute in 1909. Kaplan understood the appeal for Jewish immigrants and their children of secularism's claims of individual autonomy and freedom. Yet he also realized that
secularization posed a grave challenge to Judaism's corporate character. If its influence was not neutralized and reshaped, Kaplan believed, American Judaism faced an uncertain future. This fear led to the founding of the Reconstruction movement, which he envisioned as a fourth branch of Judaism, situated between the Conservative and Reform movements.
Judaism, Kaplan believed, was not merely a religion but an “evolving religious civilization,” the sum of what Jews actually did culturally and religiously. The umbrella institution for such combined cultural and religious activities would be the Jewish Center. Like Solomon Schechter, Kaplan emphasized the strong sense of Jewish peoplehood inherent in Zionism. To put his strategy into effect, Kaplan organized the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in 1922, but his strategy remained largely in the realm of ideas. A 1926 religious census found only one Reconstructionist congregation among America's 3,118 Jewish congregations. Only after 1968, when the Reconstructionist Rabbinic College was established in Philadelphia, did the movement make significant advances.
American Judaism, 1950–2000.
By 1950, the three major branches of American Judaism broke down approximately as follows: 2 million Conservatives Jews, 1.3 million Reform Jews, and 1 million Orthodox Jews. Orthodoxy burgeoned after
World War II—a resurgence hardly presaged by its condition in the early part of the century, when it had been confined mostly to eastern European immigrants gathered in small congregations with few and poorly paid rabbis, and when Orthodoxy had failed to develop a way to allow its followers to combine piety with social mobility. Yet Orthodoxy's deep commitment to religious law and tradition, combined with the infusion of new leadership and energy from the remnants of European Orthodoxy that survived the Holocaust, belied the once widespread assumption that American Orthodoxy would not survive the immigrant generation. Included in the Holocaust remnant was Agudath Israel of America, part of the worldwide Agudath movement, which established its American headquarters in 1939 in New York City. Among the refugees from Nazism to reach America were Rabbi Moses Feinstein, a renowned authority on Jewish law; Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe; and Rabbi Aaron Kutler, a well‐known Talmudic scholar.
Wracked by such issues as ordination of women, patrilineal descent, and other facets of the perennial “who is a Jew” question, late twentieth‐century American Judaism was more divided than ever. The intensity of the struggle between its several branches was deepened by the Orthodox rabbinate's control of the religious establishment in Israel. By recognizing only marriages, divorces, and conversions conducted under its auspices, Orthodoxy could delegitimize the Reform and Conservative movements to which most affiliated American Jews belonged. Simultaneously, the perennial “crisis of faith” continued to weaken all branches of Judaism. Late twentieth‐century Jews were America's most avid secularists. Less than 40 percent belonged to a congregation, and many members attended only on the high holy days. None of the branches had yet discovered a way to rejoin the normative Jewishness—the cuisine, the humor, the emphasis on education, the cultural interests, the middle‐class lifestyle—that shaped Jews' daily lives, with the historic Judaism of faith and piety. Finding a way to reunite Judaism, the faith, and Jewishness, the ethnic culture, loomed large on the Jewish agenda in the twenty‐first century.
See also
Anti‐Semitism;
Immigration;
Protestantism;
Religion;
Roman Catholicism;
Wise, Stephen S.Bibliography
Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed, 1987.
Henry L. Feingold, ed., The Jewish People in America, 5 vols., 1992.
Sefton D. Temkin , Isaac Mayer Wise: Shaping American Judaism, 1992.
Samuel G. Freedman , Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry, 2000.
Henry L. Feingold
