22. Reform Judaism

Minhag America

John Wilkes Booth’s brother, Edwin Booth, also an actor, reportedly told Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819 – 1900), a member of the B’nai B’rith and the “Moses of America” as some called him, that his father was Jewish.[1] Fellow B’nai B’rith member Benjamin F. Peixotto also contributed to the establishment of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), which was founded by Wise which has since been renamed Union for Reform Judaism.[2] Wise was born in Bohemia, left when teachings came under suspicion by the Austrian authorities, and settled in the United States were his teachings followed no less controversy. Betraying a decidedly Sabbatean orientation, he said: “Religion is intended to make man happy, good, just, active, charitable, and intelligent. Whatever tends to this end must be retained or introduced. Whatever opposes it must be abolished.”[3] A Scottish Rite Freemason, Wise declared, “Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from the beginning to the end.”[4] Before settling in Cincinnati, a stronghold of some 30,000 Germany Forty-Eighters, Wise made an attempt to lead Beth Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, the same synagogue that produced many of the founding members of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.

In 1824, the Reformed Society of the Israelites was founded in Charleston by Portuguese Jews, led by Isaac Harby, who dissented from Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue. Harby and his fellow reformers thought that services at Beth Elohim had to become more like those services in surrounding Protestant churches. In response, the reformers created an independent society, which met in Seyle’s Hall, a facility also rented by the Grand Lodge, Ancient Free Masons of South Carolina.[5] Harby left Charleston for New York in 1827 Most members rejoined Beth Elohim. However, the spirit of reform in Charleston did not die with Harby. Gustavus Poznanski (1804 – 1879), who spent time in Hamburg and knew the rite of the Hamburg Temple and migrated to the United States in 1831, and was appointed was appointed minister in 1836.[6] Poznanski’s break with the orthodox tradition opened the way for other changes in the ritual, many of which had been requested a decade earlier by the Reformed Society. Beth Elohim thereafter evolved at the forefront of reform Judaism in America.[7] After retirement, Poznanski divided his time between Charleston and New York, where he was a member of Shearith Israel.

In 1850, when it came time to choose a successor to Poznanski at Beth Elohim, Wise applied for the position, but when he was asked by the congregants whether he believed in the coming of a Messiah and the resurrection of the body, Wise unhesitatingly answered, “No, the Talmud is no authority for me in the matter of doctrine.”[8] Wise returned to Albany, but he was again challenged for his views. His followers seceded from the synagogue and founded a Reform congregation called Anshe Emeth. Following a storm of controversy, Wise accepted a post at the Bene Yeshurun Congregation in Cincinnati.

In August 1855, Wise published a response in The Israelite to a letter which had been published in The Boston Morning Times from an anonymous Mason from Massachusetts, in which he had claimed: “… here in Massachusetts Masonry is a Christian, or rather Protestant institution; Christian, as it merely TOLERATES Jews; Protestant, as it abhors Catholics.” Wise countered:

We characterize the above principles as anti Masonic, because we know that not only Catholics but Israelites in this country and in Europe are prominent and bright Masons. We know still more, viz. that Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords and explanations (sic) are Jewish from the beginning to the end, with the exception of one by-degree and a few words in the obligation, which true to their origin in the middle ages, are Roman Catholic. (…) it is impossible to be well posted in Masonry without having a Jewish teacher.[9]

Two weeks later, Wise published a response from “A Young Mason” from Boston, Massachusetts, who asserted that Rev. Brother Randall insisted that Masonry “was once mainly Jewish but now it is mainly Christian.” Wise’s sarcastic response was:

It is a great favour, the Rev. R. believes that the Jews are admitted in the lodges etc. of which they must be sensible and grateful. Why does he not consider it a favor, that we have the privilege of living in our houses. Masonry was founded by Jews as a cosmopolitical institution, hence it is a favor for the Jew to be admitted in the lodges, viz. in our own house. How sapient!

We Jews have given birth to the masonic fraternity as a cosmopolitical institution; but we consider it no favor to admit you in the lodge, provided, however, you leave your sectarianism outside of the consecrated walls. We have given you Christianity to convert the heathens gradually to the pure deism and ethics of Moses and the Prophets; still, we consider it no special favor bestowed on you from our side, that you have the privilege of being a preacher in one of the churches.[10]

As early as 1848, Wise issued a call to the “ministers and other Israelites"” of the United States, urging them to form a union which might put an end to the Jewish anarchy in the United States. His call appeared in The Occident, whose editor was Isaac Leeser (1806 – 1868), a forerunner by both Modern Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism. At a meeting held in the spring of 1847, Wise submitted to the bet din, the rabbinical court, the manuscript of a prayer-book, to be titled the Minhag America, which was intended to address conflict between sides supporting and opposing traditionalism in early Reform Judaism in the United States. Wise’s use of the title Minhag America was deliberately intended to show that his prayer book was superseding the “Minhag Ashkenaz,” “Minhag Sefard” and “Minhag Polen” that immigrants to the United States arrived with. At the Cleveland Conference of 1855, a committee consisting of Wise and other Reform rabbis was appointed to edit such a prayer-book.  The result was a book under the title Minhag America, which was practically Wise’s work, and was adopted by most of the congregations of the Western and Southern states.

Wise’s efforts were challenged by the radical Reform rabbi Dr. David Einhorn (1809 – 1879) of Adath Yeshurun, who was a supporter of the principles of Abraham Geiger while he still in Germany. In 1851, before he moved to the United States, Einhorn was called to Pest, Hungary, where his views met with such opposition that the Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria (1830 – 1916) ordered his temple closed only two months after his arrival, as he suspected a connection between the Jewish reform movement and the Revolutions of 1848.[11] Although Einhorn gradually gained the upper hand, their conflict would lay the foundation of American Reform. The Philadelphia Conference of November 3–6, 1869, saw victory the radicals, and the adoption of a platform which summarized the theory developed in Germany. Priestly privileges were abolished, as the rebuilding of the Temple was no longer anticipated; belief in the Messiah and Resurrection was denied. Wise regarded the document as the denominational “declaration of independence.”

Free Religious Association (FRA)

Wise was a member of the Free Religious Association (FRA), which connected many reform rabbis to the Transcendentalist of the Democratic Review. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first person to join the association the FRA, which was formed in 1867 in part by American minister and Transcendentalist author David Atwood Wasson, with Lucretia Mott, and Reverend William J. Potter, to be, in Potter’s words, a “spiritual anti-slavery society” to “emancipate religion from the dogmatic traditions it had been previously bound to.”[12] The FRA was opposed not only to organized religion, but also to any supernaturalism in an attempt to affirm the supremacy of individual conscience and individual reason. The FRA carried a Masonic message of the perfectibility of humanity, democratic faith in the worth of each individual, the importance of natural rights and the affirmation of the efficacy of reason. The first public assembly was held in 1867 with an audience ranging from Progressive Quakers, liberal Jews, radical Unitarians, Universalists, agnostics, Spiritualists, and scientific theists.

Also a member of the FRA was Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882). The proponents of Reform Judaism had consistently claimed since the early nineteenth-century to aim to reconcile Jewish religion with advancements scientific thought, and the science of evolution was of particular interest. In a series of twelve sermons published as The Cosmic God (1876), Rabbi Wise offered an alternative theistic account of Darwinism. Other Reform rabbis who were more sympathetic to Darwinian included Kaufmann Kohler, Emil G. Hirsch, and Joseph Krauskopf. Hirsch, for example, wrote:

In notes clearer than ever were entoned by human tongue does the philosophy of evolution confirm essential verity of Judaism’s insistent protest and proclamation that God is one. This theory reads unity in all that is and has been. Stars and stones, planets and pebbles, sun and sod, rock and river, leaf and lichen are spun of the same thread. Thus the universe is one soul, One spelled large. If throughout all visible form one energy is manifest and in all material shape one substance is apparent, the conclusion is all the better assured which holds this essentially one world of life to be the thought of one all embracing and all underlying creative directive mind... I, for my part, believe to be justified in my assurance that Judaism rightly apprehended posits God not, as often it is said to do, as an absolutely transcendental One. Our God is the soul of the Universe… Spinozism and Judaism are by no means at opposite poles.[13]

The FRA included numerous American Jewish Reform rabbis, including Isaac Meyer Wise, Max Lilienthal the editor of The Israelite, Moritz Ellinger, Aaron Guinzburg, Raphael Lasker, S. H. Sonneschein, I. S. Nathans, Henry Gersoni, Judah Wechsler, Felix Adler, Bernhard Felsenthal, Edward Lauterbach, Solomon Schindler, Emil G. Hirsch and eventually the Sabbatean Stephen Wise, founder of the of the national Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), forerunner of the Zionist Organization of America.[14]

Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC)

Of 200 synagogues in the United States in 1860, only a handful of Reform, but twenty years later, almost all of the existing 275 were part of the movement. Wise made Cincinnati the center of his Reform movement for the continent, visiting all the chief cities in the country, from New York to San Francisco, to propagate his ideas for reform. In 1873, delegates of many reform congregations met in there and organized the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Hebrew Union College, which Wise founded in 1875.

On July 8, 1873, representatives from 34 congregations met in Melodeon Hall, Cincinnati, Ohio, and formed the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) under Wise’s auspices. A few American traditionalists, like Sabato Morais (1823 – 1897), a champion of American Reform who had succeeded Isaac Leeser as leader of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, remained outside the UAHC. In 1885, Rabbi Alexander Kohut (1842 – 1894)—a follower of Zecharias Frankel, founder of Conservative Judaism—attacked the UAHC for abandoning “traditional” Judaism. Following a series of heated exchanges between him and Reform’s chief ideologue, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler (1843 – 1926), Kohler was encouraged to convene an assembly which accepted the Pittsburgh Platform. Considered a pivotal document in the history of the American Reform Movement, the Pittsburgh Platform called for Jews to adopt a modern approach to the practice of their faith.

A small group of conservatives withdrew from the UAHC in protest, joining Kohut, Morais, and Henry Pereira Mendes (1852 – 1937) of Shearith Israel, in founding the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). At first unifying almost all non-Reform currents, it developed into the center of Conservative Judaism. The first graduate to be ordained, in 1894, was Joseph Hertz (1872 – 1946), who would go on to become the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. Many graduates of the JTS joined the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), founded by Wise in 1889, in fulfilment of his dream of uniting the American congregations, and which succeeded in publishing a uniform prayer book in use in most of the reform congregations. The CCAR is largest and oldest rabbinical organization in the world. CCAR became the principal organization of Reform rabbis in the United States and Canada. The CCAR primarily consists of rabbis also educated at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, New York City, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem. While Pittsburgh Platform was never formally adopted by the UAHC or the CCAR, the platform exerted great influence over the movement in the next fifty years, and still influences some Reform Jews who hold classicist views to this day.[15]


[1] Lenny Picker. “Was John Wilkes Booth Jewish?” Forward (April 3, 2015). Retrieved from https://forward.com/culture/217871/was-john-wilkes-booth-jewish/

[2] Cyrus Adler, E. A. Cardozo. “Peixotto.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11993-peixotto; Benjamin Peixotto. “Principality, now Kingdom, of Roumania.” Menorah Vol. I. JULY, 1886 No. 1. p. 212.

[3] “Career of Rabbi Wise.” New York Times (March 27, 1900).

[4]. Dr. Isaac Wise. The Israelite (August 3 and 17, 1855); quoted in Samuel Oppenheim. The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810. Reprint from Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 19 (1910), 1-2.

[5] “Reformed Society of Israelites.” Mapping Jewish Charleston. Retrieved from https://mappingjewishcharleston.cofc.edu/1833/map.php?id=1036

[6] Meyer. Response to Modernity, p. 233-234.

[7] Michael Feldberg. “Isaac Harby.” My Jewish Learning. Retrieved from https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/isaac-harby/

[8] Ibid.

[9] Rabbi Wise. The Israelite (August 3, 1855)

[10] Ibid.

[11] Staff. “Death of the Rev. David Einhorn.” New York Times (November 3, 1879). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1879/11/03/archives/death-of-the-rev-david-einhorn.html

[12] W. Potter. “The Free Religious Association: Its Twenty-five Years and Their Meaning” (1892), pp. 8-9.

[13] Emil G. Hirsch. “The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism,” in Some Modern Problems and Their Bearing on Judaism Reform Advocate Library (Chicago: Bloch & Newman, 1903), pp. 25-46.

[14] Benny Kraut. “Judaism Triumphant: Isaac Mayer Wise on Unitarianism and Liberal Christianity.” AJS Review, 7, pp. 179-230.

[15] Meyer. Response to Modernity, p. 270.

Zionism