Progressive Judaism: the First Phase

In the ghetto, the closed Jewish community contained conservative and progressive thought, with much leeway given to the free-thinker and sceptic (even Spinoza was offered a generous living if he would only refrain from publishing).

Neglecting the links to Jewish nationhood which were to re-emerge later in the century, Western Judaism faced the danger of becoming more of a sect and less of a living faith. In France, Napoleon had convened a ‘Sanhedrin’ of Jewish notables programmed to give conformist answers, in accordance with the pattern of state-dominated Consistories into which he pressed both Church and Synagogue (1806).

Germany was the place for radical Reform, born out of political circumstances as much as out of the presence of a group of scholarly and progressive rabbis ready to storm the heavens. England, by contrast, moved slowly and cautiously. The beginning of its Reform move­ment was more a rebellion against an old autocracy than a radical shift in theology. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the West London Synagogue became a centre for a Reform movement which estab­lished its ideology along with its changes in ritual. And, with the turn of the century, the more radical Liberal movement, still building upon a radical, rational and optimistic pattern already crumbling in Europe, brought to the fore a group of new teachers such as Lily Montagu, Israel Mattuck and C.G. Montefiore. Traditional Judaism, centred upon the Chief Rabbinate and its Seminary (Jews’ College, founded 1855), maintained its leadership then as now. Yet the ‘progressive’ community became a dynamic and growing element in Anglo-Jewish life; and Liberal and Reform eventually joined in establishing the Leo Baeck College in 1956 (see below). The full development of Progressive Judaism can only be seen by examining the growth of Ameri­can Jewry, where all aspects of Jewish life have discovered new life for themselves over the past 150 years.