Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism

by Michael A. Meyer

The movement for religious reform in modern Judaism represents one of the most significant phenomena in Jewish history during the last two hundred years. It introduced new theological conceptions and innovations in liturgy and religious practice that affected millions of Jews, first in central and Western Europe and later in the United States.
Today Reform Judaism is one of the three major branches of Jewish faith. Bringing to life the ideas, issues, and personalities that have helped to shape modern Jewry, Response to Modernity offers a comprehensive and balanced history of the Reform Movement, tracing its changing configuration and self-understanding from the beginnings of modernization in late 18th century Jewish thought and practice through Reform's American renewal in the 1970s.

Genres: Judaism, Religion, History

512 pages, Paperback

First published July 14, 1988

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

To call this a light read would be a far cry from the truth. . . it was definitely an intense, somewhat dense book to get through, but I’m glad I read it. It offered very useful insight into the origin, history, and nature of the modern Reform movement. I wouldn’t recommend it for the faint of heart. . . it definitely doesn’t summarize. . . but if you think you have what it takes to get through roughly 400 pages of small-type details on the nuance of the Reform movement in all its facets, you’ll learn a lot and probably be glad you made it to the end.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meyer is a member of the faculty of HUC, and therefore his book is understandably a sympathetic portrayal of the subject matter. That said, it is not too overtly biased and is a very comprehensive and readable account of the history of Reform Judaism as a denomination. It starts with precursors, and goes through Mendelssohn’s Berlin and the Haskalah, the Beer temple, the Westphalian consistory and the Seesen temple, the Hamburg temple, the emergence of the Vienna Rite and its spread, the Tiktin-Geiger controversy, the rabbinical conferences (going beyond aesthetic reform and into abrogation of established practices), the consolidation and stabilization of the movement, other modern Jewish movements (Wissenschaft, positive-historical, Neo-Orthodox), controversies and responses to synagogue reforms, and Reform in America, and reform in response to nationalism and Zionism and increased interest in Jewish traditionalism. It’s all a familiar story, but it’s told well and this book is DENSE and comprehensive.
Meyer does not have a very strong argument, but one argument that does emerge is that the first reforms were far more moderate than most people like to portray them. In the conference in 1844, while return to Zion references were expunged from the liturgy and more, the rabbis ruled to permit piped water in the mikvah, implicitly suggesting that the practice of mikvah was to remain. Meyer suggests that Reform--a religious modern Jewish movement--was far less radical than the social and political Jewish movements to follow in their attempts to reconcile Jews to modernity. At least Reform tried to do so using religion, the synagogue, prayer, etc.