Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

Pressed by Protestant theologians to accept a status for Jewish law as something merely private and ceremonial, they were being pressed to accept something more: that they belonged not to a nation, but to a religion. Many Jews had no problem with this concept. Some, indeed, found it liberating. In 1845, a group of Jewish intellectuals in Berlin issued a formal appeal for a Judaism that, transcending the written prescriptions of Torah, might be transformed into a religion ‘that corresponds with our age and the sentiments of our heart’.19 Already, even as Friedrich Wilhelm was attempting to re-erect the barriers between Jews and Christians, rabbis across the Lutheran heartlands of Germany had begun to proclaim the primacy of faith over law. Other Jews, meanwhile, appalled by any suggestion that the covenant revealed to Moses on Sinai might not have been definitive, condemned them as heretics. Two rival traditions – ‘Reform’ and ‘Orthodox’ – began to emerge.