Reform Judaism, also called Liberal or Progressive Judaism, sets forth a Judaic religious system that takes as its critical task the accommodation of Judaism to political changes in the status of the Jews from the late eighteenth century onward. These changes, particularly in Western Europe and the U.S.A., accorded to Jews the status of citizens like other citizens of the nations in which they lived. But they denied the Jews the status of a separate, holy people, living under its own laws and awaiting the Messiah to lead it back to the Holy Land at the end of history. Reform Judaism insisted that change in the religion, Judaism, in response to new challenges represented a valid continuation of that religion’s long-term capacity to evolve. Reform Judaism thus denied that any version of the Torah enjoyed eternal validity. It affirmed that Jews should adopt the politics and culture of the countries in which they lived, preserving differences of only a religious character, narrowly construed.
The Reformers stated explicitly that theirs would be a Judaism built on the facts of history. These would guide Jews to the definition of what was essential and what could be dropped. History then formed the court of appeal. CONSERVATIVE JUDAISM, also called the Historical School, took the same position, but reached different conclusions. History would show how change could be effected, and the principles of historical change would then govern. Orthodoxy met the issue in a different way, maintaining that Judaism was above history, not a matter of mere historical fact at all.
Reform Judaism grew beginning in the nineteenth century out of changes, called reforms, in minor aspects of public worship in the synagogue.
Those who promoted these changes maintained that historical precedent legitimated change, and they rested their case on an appeal to the authoritative texts. Change, they thus argued, is legitimate, and their changes in particular wholly consonant with the law, or the tradition, or the inner dynamics of the faith, or the dictates of history, or whatever out of the past could justify their actions. The laymen who made the changes tried to demonstrate that the changes fit in with the law of Judaism. They took the trouble because Reform, even at the outset, claimed to restore, to continue, to persist in, the received pattern of the evolution of Judaism. The justification of change always invoked precedent. People who made changes had to show that the principle that guided what they did was not new, even though the specific things they did were. So to lay down a bridge between themselves and their past they laid out beams resting on deep-set piles. The foundation of change was formed of the bedrock of precedent. And more still: change restores, reverts to an unchanging ideal. So Reform claimed not to change at all but only to regain the correct state of affairs, one that others, in the interval, themselves have changed. That forms the fundamental attitude of mind of the people who make changes and call the changes Reform. The appeal to history, a common mode of justification in the politics and theology of the nineteenth century, therefore defined the principal justification for the new Judaism: it was new because it renewed the old and enduring, the golden Judaism of a mythic age of perfection. Arguments on precedent drew the Reformers to the work of critical scholarship as they settled all questions by appeal to the facts of history.
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