Conservative Judaism
CONSERVATIVE JUDAISM evolved out of the desire of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to find their way in the United States; it was one of a myriad of syntheses of Jewish identity and modernity invented by acculturating Jews. While its intellectual and institutional origins lie in the nineteenth century, the Conservative Jewish denomination rests on the confluence of modernizing rabbis trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, Americanizing Eastern European Jewish immigrant masses, and the national organizational infrastructure that emerged to inculcate Conservative Judaism to Jewish men, women, and children.
Ideological and Institutional Origins
Conservative Judaism considers European rabbi and scholar Zacharias Frankel (1801–1875) to be its ideological founder. In 1845, in Frankfurt am Main, at a conference of rabbis engaged in reforming Judaism, the men agreed to amend the traditional worship service to dispense with the Hebrew language in all but a handful of prayers. Although Frankel was open to adapting Judaism in response to the challenges posed by the encounter of Jews with modernity, such a drastic break with the Jewish past was an anathema. He seceded from the conference, advocating an alternative response to modernity: positive-historical Judaism. The response prioritized reason based on scholarship and a deep appreciation for conserving the traditions of the past, as opposed to the will of the laity, to guide the process of accommodating Judaism to the new realities of the nineteenth century.
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