It was a different matter for the Jews, especially in Germany and other ‘advanced’ countries. Enlightened Jews were ashamed of their traditional services: the dead weight of the past, the lack of intellectual content, the noisy and unseemly manner in which Orthodox Jews prayed. In Protestant countries, for Christians to visit a synagogue was quite fashionable, and provoked contempt and pity. Hence Reform Judaism was, in the first place, an attempt to remove the taint of ridicule from Jewish forms of worship.
